'Siegfried'

'Siegfried', by Gustaf Tenggren

Gustaf Tenggren was actually one of Walt Disney's animators on Snow White. This was his illustration for the 1939 Gertrude Henderson book version of The Ring of the Nibelung.

[H/T: Siegfried by Gustaf Tenggren on artnet]

"Rightwing" Gays: The French Exception?

The Pink Swastika is one of those amusing little books that fails to convince with its central thesis (which is basically that fascism = poofterism) but which nonetheless constantly entertains - nay titillates! - with its wealth of little known facts and circumstantial evidence. As such, it is very easy to dip in and out of it. Like everything on the Internet, what it has to say has to be double- and triple-checked (in other words "googled to death"), but a surprising amount of it stands up.

As I say, what the authors have to say about Nazism wears somewhat thin at times. The National Socialist German Workers Party did indeed have it roots in the barmier imaginings of a group of shell-shocked Bavarian veterans of the Great War. And apart from the fact that they were all ex-soldiers there was nothing particularly "rightwing" about them - at least until they were infiltrated by the security forces (in the person of a former Austrian corporal by the name of Adolf Heidler) and had their ideology re-modelled along the lines of Prussian Imperialism. But the presence of the notorious pervert Ernst Röhm amongst the luminaries of the early Nazi Party does not imply that the Party was a "gay" political movement, nor do its early meetings in gay nightclubs. Nor, for that matter, does Heidler's (a.k.a. Hitler's) former sideline career as a Viennese rentboy!

Where the authors are on more solid ground is with the modern "Far Right", not to mention the modern "gay rights" movement. Although the "Gay Movement" has clearly drifted towards the Left in recent years, it has in its time had a significant following on the Far Right - and conversely there is hardly a single Far Right political party in Europe today that has not had more than its fair share of gay sex scandals.

As it happens, for a long time I had assumed that the honourable exception (if that is the right phrase) to this general rule was France. Whatever one may think of Jean-Marie Le Pen (and I'm not terribly keen, I have to say) he is at least a man's man - or rather a lady's man, if you see what I mean. Unfortunately the French Right, albeit less so than the French Left, is hilariously split: monarchists here (split into legitimists, Orleanists, and ooh-la-la!), nationalists there, Gaullists and republicans and who-knows-what, pro-Americans, anti-Americans, McDonald's-bombing farmers and cinema-bombing Roman Catholics - and even the odd integrist and traditionalist kicking around. It takes all sorts!

Where the really funny stuff happens, apparently, is on the Nouvelle Droit. David Irving, who is always good for a laugh, has an old news story about a young French student called Michael Caignet in his archive.

ON January 29, 1981, Michel (Miguel) Caignet, a 26 year old doctoral candidate in English-German linguistics, was just leaving his residence in Courbevoie to attend the university when he was accosted by four individuals in the vicinity of his apartment. He was at once knocked to the ground and held down while one of his four assailants poured sulphuric acid over his face and his right hand.

Mr. Caignet had once belonged to FANE (the Fédération d'action nationale et européene) and been a revisionist. He had been denounced by the daily VSD.

As a result of the acid attack his facial features were so hideously disfigured that only two newspapers dared to publish a photograph. The identity of the main participant in the attack, Yves Aziza, a medical student and son of Charles Aziza (a pharmaceutical company employee at Montreuil) was known to police within one hour of the assault. But the French police, and French justice, allowed Y. Aziza, in circumstances of which the outrageous details are well-known, sufficient time to flee to Germany and then Israel.

At the Justice Ministry, a Mr. Main, (a director attached to the Office of Criminal Investigations headed by Raoul Béteille), adopted a sarcastic tone as he explained why it took all of 14 days before a criminal investigation into the matter finally began. ... Among Y. Aziza's accomplices one noted the name of Daniel Ziskind, son of Michèle Ziskind and sister of Jean-Pierre Pierre-Bloch, and the son of Jean Pierre-Bloch himself.

[David Irving's Action Report]

OK, most of those Jewish names don't mean much to me. But Michel Caignet was to go on to further notoriety by becoming the founder-editor of Gaie France - which, as the title perhaps suggests, was a rightwing French nationalist gay magazine. Which promoted pederasty!

 

In 1998, a gay newspaper in Amsterdam reported on the sorry fate of Gaie France:

Last spring the case against French publisher Michel Caignet was finally brought to a close. A Paris court barred him for life from ever publishing again, and sentenced him to serve two-and-a-half years in prison for his role in selling gay videos that allegedly showed actors under the age of eighteen, but over the age of fifteen having sex. Caignet's license to distribute his magazine Gaie France was already revoked in 1993, but Caignet ignored the censors' warnings and continued publishing under new titles. The convictions brought to a close an investigation that began with nation-wide raids in April 1996 against people on Caignet's mailing list. The day the trials opened there were more raids, this time involving some 2500 French police, who conducted 710 searches around the country. Of the 673 persons whose home were searched, 210 were charged with a crime, and 20 were kept in jail. The involvement of Caignet with porn with minors doesn't surprise someone who's familiar with the history of Gaie France. The magazine has always been controversial because the editors used the philosophy of right-wing authors as Hans Blüher to sanction their own interest in very young boys. 

[Gay News Amsterdam, #77, January 1998; Martijn.org]

So what's the connexion? Alisdair Clarke on his Aryan Futurism blog explains:

The [Euro New Right]’s “paganism” entails a naturalism towards mores and sexuality. Unlike still traditionalists, ENR members have a relatively liberated attitude towards sexuality. Thus [Alain de] Benoist had no qualms about giving an interview to Gaie France, which features homoerotic images as well as cultural commentary. ENR members have no desire to impose what they consider the patently unnatural moralism of Judeo-Christianity on sexual relations.

Ummm, Okaaay! It's interesting to read that Judeo-Christian "moralism" is "unnatural" - whereas having it off with little boys is apparently just fine.

Who are we to disagree?

Heroes vs. Monsters - from Germany to America

The above picture got me thinking...

For a long time I've felt that comic-book superheroes were the natural successors of the heroes of legend and, to a lesser extent, myth. They inhabit the same imaginative space that St George or Siegfried or Hercules or Apollo once did. For whatever reason, we like stories about men (and sometimes women) who are like us only better and who fight terrifying monsters on our behalf.

And of course sometimes the heroic re-modelling has been quite conscious and deliberate. Was Superman unconsciously modelled on Jesus? (Or Merlin? Or Moses? Or Cyrus the Great?) Well, possibly! (He was invented by a couple of Jewish teenagers, who'd presumably heard of Nietzsche's original but hadn't read him.) But the comic-book character Wonder Woman is actually an Amazon. And the comic-book Thor is, well, Thor. It's easy to scoff at George Lucas for lifting Star Wars straight from the pages of Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (though it's not quite so easy to scoff when one remembers that Lucas became a multi-millionaire on the back of it). But it had all (more or less!) been done before.

But when was the actual point of crossover? Where was the cultural nexus between the old world and the new? More specifically, when did American comics stop being about detectives (like Dick Tracy or, for that matter, The World's Greatest Detective himself - basically Sherlock Holmes in an even sillier costume - in the pages of what were then still called Detective Comics) and start being about "enhanced individuals"?

I suspect it really was in the 1930s and '40s, and as with so much of America culture the source and inspiration came from the old country. And, as with everything "all American", from apple-pie to frankfurters to jelly doughnuts to hamburgers, not to mention marching bands and blond-haired, blue-eyed, lantern-jawed jock-boys, the "old country" in particular was, of course, Germany.

By the 1930s of course Germany's heroes were back in vogue partly thanks to Wagner (who dusted down Siegfried and Parsifal and gave them their own show-stoppers) and partly thanks to Fritz Lang (who first brought the medieval world's greatest dragon-slayer to the big screen). And, let's not beat about the bush, it was partly thanks to dear old Adolf.

It's hardly surprising then that, just as Nazi Germany produced a Third Reich version of Fanta, America produced authentically Yankee versions of Norse/Arthurian heroes - just as Walt Disney would get on a produce his own Americanised versions of the Grimms' fairy stories.

Nihil sub sole novum!

Bitter Fruits

A few years back, before the sun finally set on the great Bush Empire, a couple of blond twin munchkins from Carolina won a magazine's Best Lemonade Stand in America competition. The AP video is still on line here.

Sadly, it wasn't to last, as Iain Murray reported here. [H/T: Steyn]

Unlike Steyn and chums, I'm not an American. nor am I really on the same page as they with all the small-state, live-free-or-die stuff.

What does do my head in though is what sort of pervy weirdo gets his cheap thrills out of closing down a kid's lemonade stand?

(If I were feeling really nasty I might even suggest it had something to do with American policemen not being allowed to beat up n****rs any more.)

America's Most Dysfunctional Family?

Obviously by comparison with real American families the Simpsons are far from dysfunctional - and to a certain extent that was part of the joke, at least at one level. Or at least it was at some point, before The Simpsons eventually ditched politically detached post-modernism and embraced out-and-out cultural Marxism.

I can't even remember which episode this is from, but it's a joke nightmare vision that Homer has in which his children appear more "realistic"/"normal"-looking. What we're to make of the idea of "typical" American children being blond-haired and blue-eyed of course will to a certain extent depend on your attitude to blond-haired blue-eyed people. German Americans are still America's largest ethnic group, but of course if people like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have their way they won't be for much longer.

My point about The Simpsons is that once upon a time (when people still watched it in reasonably large numbers) it was just possible to see the humour of it as observational and perhaps even affectionate and heart-warming. In an America though where people like the Simpsons are barely tolerated, let alone celebrated for the contributions they have made to the country over the centuries, it's going to be increasingly difficult to see the programme as anything other than a nasty, unsubtle attack on family values and Nordic heritage.

Bear in mind the most famous (and potentially the most important) German American in America at the moment is Donald Trump, and that the American cultural Establishment will stop at nothing to prevent him becoming President!

Henry Cavill

"The Superman exists, and he's... British?"

I must admit, I'd be lying if I said I didn't admit to a certain wry pleasure at Robert Downey Jr's congratulatory declaration to Tom Holland 'Spider-Man is English again.' After all, not so long ago, deliciously (and however briefly!) all three of America's top three comic-book superheroes were played by Englishmen. (Christian Bale's Welsh, but who's arguing?)

Henry Cavil for his part comes across for all the world as just a really nice, normal, grounded, educated young man - and yes, he's rather handsome and seriously ripped with it. And personally I think he's also nailed Superman, but what do I know?

It also very hard to resist the charm of a blockbuster actor who likes to spend his spare time reading a good book. (It wasn't just the tight trunks that made me warm to Daniel Craig. And Ewan McGregor is on the record as having said the same about reading.)

And as for lines in interviews like 'My first acting role was in prep school, when I was about 11.'? Just toooooo cute, by half!

Franklin Richards

He's the only Marvel Comics character who has never grown up. (Over at DC Comics, by contrast, Batman's had his heart broken by a whole team of Robins who have either dropped off the perch or grown up and flown the nest.)

And so far he's the only blond-haired, blue-eyed character in Marvel Comics not to be evil -  now that Captain America has been revealed to have been a Nazi all along.*

Also (along with, presumably, his blond hair and blue eyes) he inherited his superpowers from his parents.

So if Franklin Richards ends up turning his back on the Yankee team and signing up as Victor Von Doom's very own little Hitlerjunge, we probably shouldn't be surprised.

*If he foresaw what was going to become of America, can one really blame him?

More Adidas

Shorts, this time - and very fetching too!

I think if I were President of the United States I'd have lads like this one smouldering away in every corner of the Oval Office.

Meanwhile, in the States...

Modern America is little more than a degraded and degenerate shadow of its former self, and now even the old elites such as the military and the Ivy League universities are starting to show it. But West Point presumably does still have some excellent young men who are proud to serve their country at each other's sides.