THE ALT RIGHT AND THE ARTS

Originally published at Counter Currents

Charles Krafft with one of his creations.

I. The Road to Alt Right Artistry

Since Hillary Clinton’s mention of the Alternative Right in one of her speeches, there have been countless discussions about what the Alt Right is and represents, with everyone and anyone, no matter how inappropriate, suddenly declaring they are part of the Alt Right. I think it is quite easy to define what the Alt Right is: it is the postmodern manifestation of what Julius Evola termed the True Right.

The True Right has been almost completely disprivileged from the mainstream arts scene in the present day. The political Left, meaning firstly the Whiggish Left and then the socialist Left, realized as early as the late eighteenth century the power art had to shape political discourse by altering the masses’ perceptions of the world. They thus sought to seize the artistic mainstream as a means towards political power.

The Right was quick to counteract this in Britain, and High Tory magazines like The Quarterly Review, Blackwood’s Magazine, and (initially) Fraser’s Magazine were founded to combat Whig influence on the literary scene. The ones founded later that were associated with Charles Dickens like Household Words, All the Year Round, and Bentley’s Miscellany not only continued the tradition, but really brought it into the mainstream, shaping the values of high Victorianism, even if those values were often broken by mean Whig mercantilism, which was heavily criticized or satirized in the works of Dickens, Gaskell, and Thackeray, who all also wrote lengthy novels.

Modernism was not invented by the Jews, as so many people seem to think, but by white Europeans. The first modernist painter was undoubtedly J. M. W. Turner, hence the misuse of his name on an infamous postmodernist prize for anti-art in the UK. The first modernist novel I would posit as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and it is perhaps quite appropriate that the first country formed under Western modernity should have this novel as its epic. Yet artistic modernism in its early attempt at a break with tradition was certainly of the Left and one notes Turner’s liberal worldview and Moby Dick’s multiculturalism.

This Leftist reaction was exacerbated by the First World War, the aftermath of which saw almost a transvaluation of values, as the surviving remnants of the flower of England and beyond resented what was seen as a generational betrayal by their elders. The two eminent one-time Fabians, George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, entertained and indoctrinated a willing audience in Britain, while Dadaism, cubism, and readymades, pushed by (often Jewish) Leftists that included the likes of the Frankfurt School, who saw the potential of modern art to literally revolutionize culture, gained currency over classical line and form on the continent.

A Rightist riposte came in the 1920s, as the politics of Italian fascism became intertwined with the aesthetics of futurism. In Britain, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound drifted ever Rightwards, just as they had drifted around the entire occidental world, influencing the arts scene wherever they went. Sadly, Hitler’s complete antipathy to modernism, no doubt influenced by his rejection by the Viennese Academy, meant not only the stunting of German Rightist art, as German artists became afraid of exploring new paradigms of expression, but also allowed the Left to tighten its grip on modernism.

It also meant that the Leftist version of modern art could be construed by the Extreme Left as an antidote to National Socialist neo-classicism. Deconstruction and Frankfurt School Critical Theory also pushed the idea that traditional forms of European culture had led to the gates of Auschwitz, regardless of the Soviet Union’s philo-Semitism and favoring of artistic realism. Sadly, too few in the arts attempted to combat this, with the likes of T. S. Eliot turning to writing poetry about cats. The lack of moral courage shown by the Right in politics since the Second World War has been reflected in the arts and has meant all cultural texts and their creators that could be construed in any way, even mildly, as Rightists have slowly been purged from mainstream culture.

With the Right’s cultural structures broken, the Left has continued its course towards complete nihilism in the arts, just as it has spiritually, politically, morally, and philosophically. The Left is the great negation. Yet this has left a vacuum, and Nature abhors a vacuum.

Ezra Pound by Wyndham Lewis

II. The Emergence of Alt Right Art

As everyone knows, the Alt Right has really emerged out of the internet. The invention of the internet has facilitated an ease of networking around the occidental world. This has enabled artists and writers to advertise their work without the need for exhibitions, university lectures or book reading events. Rightist publishing houses like Counter Currents and Arktos largely owe their success to the internet, their nucleus being their websites.

Writers that would be shunned by the mainstream publishing houses, not for any lack of ability, but for their lack of ideological congruency with the mainstream, like Juleigh Howard-Hobson, Ann Sterzinger, and Tito Perdue, are now able to get their work in print and advertised. Equally, the Leftist hegemony in cultural criticism, through its all but complete control of academic institutions, has been broken by websites like Alternative Right, Radix and Counter-Currents, where articles can be posted online and made available to everyone.

The freedom of the internet as a new public space for artists has also broken Leftist hegemony in the galleries. Make no mistake, when Charles Krafft’s exhibition was announced at Stolen Space in London in November 2015, the gallery was threatened with violence by Leftist activists. Whenever necessary, the Left enforces its hegemony through violence. It is easy to forget that among the street theater and happenings organized by the Left in the 1960s Cultural Revolution, there were explosions and gunfire delivered by groups like the Weather Underground.

Vig Schloma, Spirit Rebellious

Yet art has by no means been reduced merely to the virtual space of the internet. As stated, print books are issued by the aforementioned publishing houses, and I also created Mjolnir Magazine, a print magazine to showcase the talents of artists and writers from both the Alt Right and the Occidental Right in general. Equally, the general public are growing weary of the nihilism and vacuity of the Left, and art galleries are becoming more willing to exhibit alternatives. Stolen Space was willing before it was threatened, but Charles Krafft still managed to put on a very successful exhibition at Zoya Tommy earlier in 2016. The sculptor Vig Scholma has also found little difficulty in exhibiting his work.

Yet being deemed a Rightist artist is not without its dangers. The artists Dan Park and Jerzy Szumczyk, the former of Sweden, the latter of Poland, have both been arrested because the current ruling elite have disapproved of their art. Szumczyk erected the sculpture Komm Frau, which memorialized the rape of hundreds of thousands of German women by the Red Army during the latter part of the Second World War. He was fortunate and no charges were brought against him, although his sculpture, depicting a Red Army soldier threatening a prostrate German woman with his pistol, was carted away by authorities back in 2013.

Jerzy Szumczyk, Komm Frau

Dan Park was less fortunate. In addition to his works that had been on display at the Rönnquist & Rönnquist gallery in Malmö having been destroyed by the state, Park was also sentenced to six months’ imprisonment in 2014 for “defamation and inciting hatred against an ethnic group.” The gallery owner, Henrik Rönnquist was fined and received a suspended sentence. In May 2016, he was again arrested by police. Park’s works highlight the crimes committed against the native Swedish population by ethnic minorities. One must remember that until recently, Malmö was the rape capital of Europe, before Rotherham in Britain took its place. It is encouraging, however, that artists are still willing to suffer for their art, to suffer for Truth in the face of political correctness.

Dan Park

Politically, the Alt Right cultural movement is, to borrow an oft-abused word, diverse. It ranges from the most Left-leaning positions of Andy Nowicki and Ann Sterzinger to the stauncher Rightist worldviews of Tito Perdue and Colin Liddell. For all their online shitposting and memes, the National Socialists in the Alt Right have yet to make an impact in the arts, and this may be to do with their tendency to remain psychologically and spiritually stuck in a previous era of their imagining, rather than towards a willingness to create something anew.

Geographically, the artists are concentrated in the Anglosphere particularly America, but not exclusively so. The aforementioned Vig Scholma is Dutch, Park Swedish. Guillaume Faye provides a link between the Alt Right and the French New Right and is more known for his philosophy than his literary works. Also in France resides the musical ensemble Les Brigandes, whose lyrics are very much Alt Right, even if, as I revealed in my interview with them for Mjolnir Issue III, some of them are quite unsound as regards the racial question.

III. The Artistry of the Alt Right

As perhaps already remarked, the content, range and media are as diverse as the ideology. Of course, humor plays an important role, for the Alt Right is playing the Left’s old game and winning. As the Left has tied itself in knots with political correctness, it has created a quasi-religious puritanism of perversity that denies humor. It has therefore become a perfect target for mockery, and I, for one, delight in lampooning the Left through characters that are perhaps not as caricatured as real-life social justice warriors.

Leading the way is Charles Krafft, the artist who probably most embodies the Alt Right. His ceramics marry traditional form and technique to postmodernist irony, satire, and ridicule. Such are the levels of irony in the Leftist artworld that Charles was able to pass off his windmills with swastika sails and mock-National Socialist Bierkrüge as “darkly ironic,” and one of his Hitler teapots was even sold to a Jew! Yet Charles’ humor transcends mere politics and his Disasterware™ and Spone™ objets d’art display humor blacker than coal!

I once said in an interview that the Gesamtkunstwerk of film was probably beyond us for now, yet that has not entirely proven to be the case. The animation team known as Murdoch Murdoch have been creating the most cutting satire reminiscent of (ironically) the 2003 to 2005 BBC cartoon Monkey Dust, although the team themselves claim their influences as South Park, Akira, and Adult Swim. The collage-style animation has a deliberately self-deprecatory tone about its own quality, as per South Park, with images often containing the Shutterstock logo or the characters’ mouths suddenly changing to animated form during speech.

The Alt Right has even encroached on the music scene, largely concentrating on parodies, the best of which are probably those of The Right Stuff team. These cover versions see a replacement of the original lyrics with humorous ones about the White experience usually in relation to other races like the Jews and Negroes. As with the “dank memes,” the lyrics often mock the Left and false Right’s shibboleths, like the Holocaust™, “gender equality,” or “White privilege.” Take this opening from The Daily Shoah’s Summer of ’88, for example (to the tune of Bryan Adams’ Summer of ’69):

I got my standard pool t-shirtFrom those fucking Teespring kikes,Wore it on Memorial Day, ‘causeIt’s the summer of ’88.

Yet every movement cannot consist merely of a reaction against something. It must also represent something, and, amidst the laughter, there is serious consideration. The arts too reflect this. As with the original songs by Les Brigandes, Ann Sterzinger’s short stories and novels transcend the humorous and serious, the profound and profane, and her “loser lit.” could be seen as postmodern tragicomedy. If there is a flaw, it is that Ann is distinctly anti-human, and her anti-natalism comes out quite strongly in her writing. 

Andy Nowicki also writes within the genre of “loser lit.” and comes from the same religious background as Ann, both being Roman Catholics — more lapsed in Ann’s case — which to a greater or lesser degree, informs their morality. Andy’s novels are often much darker in tone, however, and there is often an element of horror in his critiques particularly of feminism — albeit dramatic horror, as opposed to the zombie fiction of K. Bartholomew, whose short stories and novels satirize everything from government to celebrity culture through schlock horror. 

Indeed, Ann and Andy share their flair for dramatic hyperrealism with Tito Perdue. Tito tends to have a more positive outlook on the world, and his chief protagonist Lee Pefley succeeds through his adherence to tradition. There is also an innate spirituality to his novels that transcends Christianity, just as Vig Scholma’s artwork transcends any fixed religion, yet is racially bound. Juleigh Howard-Hobson’s poetry is grounded in her Heathenism, and is therefore inherently racial. The spiritual dimension of culture is important, for one cannot have a spiritual revival without it. In negating the spirit, the Left has been left flogging readymades for over a century now and is unable to create a culture fresher and more radical than Bronyism — a plastic meaningless culture for a plastic meaningless age. 

There is, then, much promise for a flourishing in Alt Right art, and, certainly, I have been approached by many artists and writers wishing to showcase their work in future editions of Mjolnir Magazine, which is a good starting point for writers cutting their teeth in short fiction before attempting something longer for Counter-Currents or Arktos. It is also a vehicle for existing writers and artists to pass on their skills to the next generation, and I have here mentioned only the most well-known. I believe we are witnessing merely the first sparks of a cultural inferno. 

If I can offer two last pieces of advice for budding Alt Right artists, it is this: honor the tradition that has gone before, but do not copy it slavishly, for one must always renew and reinterpret tradition for each new age; remember that the love of your own people and culture should always come before your disdain for those who wish to destroy them. The future is a blank canvas waiting for our artists to fill with the images of their choosing.