EMILY DAWES' FAUX PAS & THE ROTHENSTEIN MURAL

The leader of Southampton University's student union Emily Dawes has come under fire for threatening to paint over the Rothenstein Mural which was given to the university by the artist William Rothenstein's son in 1959 and has been housed in the Senate Room since 2014 to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, the soldiers of which the mural commemorates. The mural depicts a line of scholars receiving their degrees, their academic gowns covering their khaki uniforms. Among those depicted are the then Chancellors and Vice Chancellors of Oxford University and the poet Robert Bridges. Dawes railed against the mural on Twitter because it only portrayed white men and in a fit of virtue signalling stated: 

 

"Mark my words - we're taking down the mural of white men in the uni senate room, even if I have to paint over it myself."

This is typical standard feminist hatred of which the establishment approves, yet Dawes has been reprimanded by both university and media, so what is the problem?

 

 

Emily is typical of today's feminist university student: she comes from a pampered middle-class background and leads a party girl lifestyle, yet projects her privilege onto white men. The white men commemorated in the mural in fact had the 'privilege' of dying in a pointless war whose aftermath hastened the decadent age that allows Emily her petulance. Indeed, were it not for the benignity of white men, she would not have the position of power and influence she has so coveted. All this would be totally lost on Emily, though, who would cling to her ignorance as though it were a bottle of Jack Daniels and not notice the irony of its masculine name. But to the point: why is what she said such a problem, given the anti-White and anti-male rhetoric endemic in Western academia?

 

 

The answer is in the name of the painter: Rothenstein, who described the inspiration for the mural thus:

 

I happened to be at Oxford where I witnessed the conferring of degrees...the sight of a number of youths, booted and spurred, with their gowns over their khaki, kneeling before the Chancellor to receive their degrees, put me in mind of the age of chivalry, so touching and beautiful were these young figures; and I thought what a fine subject for a memorial painting this would make...I therefore painted a group of representative figures, Vice-Chancellors, scholars and men of science surrounding a Chancellor conferring a degree upon a young soldier.

 

Rothenstein is, of course, a Jew. His father Moritz immigrated from Lower Saxony to Bradford to involve himself in the textile industry so exploitative of the White working class, with money obtained by marrying into the Jewish Dux banking and mercantile family of Hildesheim. William studied art at the famous Slade School and Académie Julian and went on to become principal of the Royal College of Art. Even though Rothenstein came from wealth and privilege, less well-off Jews at the time were also able to get ahead of their Gentile peers via loans from the Jewish Educational Aid Committee. Rothenstein himself, in spite of marrying a native Englishwoman, also used his influence and financially supported Jews attempting to venture into the arts and encouraged them to paint Jewish scenes. One such artist was Mark Gertler, the son of one of the many immigrant Jewish families who had been flooding into London's East End from Central and Eastern Europe since the 1880s. Rothenstein's own rise had been aided by Jewish artist and member of the Royal Academy Solomon J Solomon.

 

 

 

Just as Rothenstein aided Jews to take positions of influence in British society, so he also promoted Jewish culture in the arts. 'Carrying the Law' (above) gives a solemnity and majesty to its Jewish subjects, and conveys this impression of Jewry to the viewer, so that the viewer will be more amenable to Jews encountered in the future. It is indeed the reverse of how the German National Socialists portrayed Jews in art in order to achieve the reverse effect in the viewer. Rothenstein's and other Jews' art thus made British Gentiles more sympathetic to the Zionist cause without them realising it. Rothenstein became more Judaic as time wore on, turning away from the Unitarian Christianity he had adopted in Bradford and becoming a member of the Machzike Hadass Synagogue in London around 1906. Lytton Strachey described him as 'very Jewish and small and monkey-like'. His Semitism is seen thus:

People have asked me why I have not painted a particular service, or a scene in the synagogue. Those persons, I am afraid, do not understand my purpose. It is not the picturesque possibilities of Tallisim (sic) and phylacteries that appeal to me. I have even left them out where I should have painted them. What appeals to me is the devotion of the Jew. It is that that I have endeavoured to put on canvas - the spirit of Israel that animates the worshippers, not the outward trappings of the ritual.

 

 

 

Indeed, Rothenstein's flirtations with Zionism cannot be ignored. He joined the Jewish Territorialist Organisation, known as the ITO, when his friend Israel Zangwill became president of the British branch. The ITO proposed a Jewish homeland other than that of Palestine. Zangwill, we remember, was the playwright behind The Melting Pot, advocating racial and cultural miscegenation and dilution for all, while demanding a separate homeland for Jews. Rothenstein's chauvanistic attitude to his own people can be seen in the quotation below, in which he finishes by extolling the ennobling effect of Zionism on the Palestinian Jewish spirit.

Whitechapel has a vigorous life of its own. I haunted the Jewish quarter, where one observes astonishing types of men and women. The orthodox Jews from Russia and Galicia never shave, and some of the younger men put me in mind of portraits of Titian; for beards give breadth and radiance to a face. The old gray-bearded men, noble in mien if ignoble in dress, wear the pathetic look of Rembrandt's rabbis. It was the time of the Russian Pogroms and my heart went out to these men of a despised race, from which I too had sprung, though regarded as a stranger among them. The men, who sat to me, emigrants from Russian ghettos, were rigidly orthodox, extremely poor and feckless; but their children would, belike, get on in the world, for they in no wise follow the ways of their fathers. Though the men were small, some of their daughters were magnificent creatures. No wonder Sargent admired the women of the race; though when Sargent went to Palestine he was little impressed, a decadent generation he thought. But this was before the Zionist Colonies.

 

Emily Dawes' faux pas, then, has little to do with white men. They are fair game. Her mistake was her ignorance of the mural having been painted by a Zionist Jew. Organised Jewry is very suspicious of the extreme Left's sympathies for the Palestinian cause, even as Jewry guides the Left towards ever further extremes of racial masochism. The problem is that Jews are physically pale, and in promoting anti-White hatred among White Europeans, they run the risk of inadvertently snaring themselves in the same trap when the Left has a choice between peoples who are physically pale and physically dark; because make no mistake: the Left's racism is as superficial as mere skin colour, a rhetoric they then project onto the Right, whose calls for racial separatism is based on an understanding of much deeper biological, cultural and spiritual differences. Emily, of course, knows none of this. She is just some silly girl with a lust for power and the party lifestyle, and she would have thought that her comment would have garnered her more kudos with those higher up the social ladder than her. If she actually had a brain, she might realise that she can never win the game she is playing, for the rules are different for White Europeans and Jews. If she knew anything about the mural's painter, or even bothered to educate herself a bit, she might realise that the only way to win is to play for your own people's interests.