If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction and overview of the point of this blog. Older posts are in the archive on the right.
Other links: The Band on Gab; The Band on Oneway
Before jumping back into the avant-garde Modernism of the last post, we have to consider how the First World War shifted the direction of Western culture. And to do this, we have to take another look at how history is made. There was a string of earlier posts on historiography written from a broad theoretical perspective (links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, coda). But there are practical considerations that must be accounted for as well. The name gives it away – history is a form of storytelling. It differs from fiction in that is it supposed to be based on facts, but facts organized into a narrative structure of some sort. This means that we have to assess history on more then one level – the facts and the story.
The facts are what we can call the actual historical data.
Vatican Secret Archives
These can be uncertain due to unreliable source material but are at least based on efforts to determine what happened and when it did.
A history based only on facts is a chronicle, a list of dates and events.
The story tells the meaning behind the chronicle events by narrating the connections and larger implications that tie them together. This is not inherently foolish, since events do influence each other. Ttracing causal chains lets you understand why things happen. But with the vast amount of facts to choose from, the historian has the ability to direct the narrative whichever way they want.
The Histomap (1931) is fascinating as an attempt to graphically illustrate the relative power of different civilizations across time. It’s an impossible task – civilizations are left out and there is no quantitative metric by which relative power is measured. So what we get is a story of change from the perspective of a mainstream British historian of the 1930’s.
We can look at the process graphically:
Gerrit Dou, A Scholar Sharpening his Quill, 1633, 25.5 x 20.5 cm, The Leiden Collection
What you're getting isn't what happened, but it isn't exactly fiction either. You can already see the room for abuse.
Historiography fits in on the “story” level because it also has to do with how the facts are arranged. It is best described as how history is conceived - the belief system or ideology that determines the narrative direction. Marxist historiography arranges facts to tell stories that express class struggle, while nationalist historiography considers the development and achievements of peoples. But this is only the philosophical background – like the Existentialist themes in a Sartre novel. The actual story - or to be more Aristotelian, the plot - is the arrangement of facts into a recounting of what happened. For our purposes, we can any relevant historiographical issues can be taken up within the concept of story.
This situation is inevitable, given the amount of information surrounding an event. There are endless, cascading butterfly effects around every aspect of something like World War I. How could one possibly tell the complete story of all of it? Historians have to circumscribe their subjects to make them manageable. But it goes deeper. People expect history to unfold as a story. Why wouldn’t it? It's the account of what happened. Whether we are explaining why Genghis Khan was such an effective conqueror or how germ theory developed, we are causally linking a series of events in time like a novelist would. We even present them the same way a novelist would.
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| Telling stories... |
In ancient times, history, mythology, and fiction can be impossible to distinguish. The Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh is the tale of a legendary hero with gods, monsters, and fantastic deeds. But people also believed that he was part of the actual line of kings. Homer’s Iliad also features gods and legendary heroes, but set in the Bronze Age Aegean. There was no distinction between what we would call the mythical and the historical, since both were considered part of the real past. If the gods are real, why wouldn’t they be part of history?
Jules Lefebvre, The Death of Priam, 1861, oil on canvas, 114 x 146 cm, École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris
The Greeks thought the Trojan War was based on historical events. The place names were based on the civilization of Mycenae that predated Homeric Greece.
The idea of history as strictly material human activity first appeared with the Classical Greeks, but it wasn’t until after the Enlightenment that supernatural phenomena were ruled out completely. Modern history assumes that rational observers objectively weigh material evidence. Metaphysical subjects can’t be materially verified and are restricted to histories of belief rather than things that really happened. This is what separates history and fiction as categories, even though both are presented in narrative form with a introduction, chain of events, conclusion
There is even a category called historical fiction that muddies the waters further.
But people tend to overlook the difference between “history” as a fact-based story and what really happened. This builds the expectation that real events can be treated as if they follow the simplified structures of narrative plots.
This story is written from an imperialist British point of view. The picture is taken from a blog written by a solipsistic globalist who uses its presentation of the facts to blather out a different story.
Simple stories hide complex interactions and contexts behind fake clarity. This allows for easy scapegoating and misdirection.
Here's more globalist deception - the challenges of human biodiversity as something to be "fixed" with a song!?!?! But fake simplicity sticks, and children's books are particularly effective at shaping a fake world view.
Consider the First World War. One oft-told story narrates the build-up of the imperial nation-state system through the 19th century – a dangerous blend of steady industrial and empire-building competition and armed conflict with a complicated system of alliances based on balancing power. Huge military expenditures made this a powder keg that only needed a spark to set off. Once the mobilizations started, the alliances sucked everyone in and the momentum made it impossible to pull back until Germany bled out.
Domenica del Corriere vol. XVI, no. 27, 12 July 1914 with Achille Beltrame's drawing of Gavrilo Princip shooting Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo
Traditionally, the trigger is credited to the assassination of an Austrian Arch Duke, though given the political situation, most any spark would suffice. This story is factual in that it does reflect political activity leading up to the war and it is also true that events can have a dire momentum once they get started. But look more closely at the narrative. We jump seamlessly from a highly personalized incident - the assassination - to the impersonal movements of highly abstract political forces. It's Whig and Foucauldian historiography rolled into one!
The facts are correct, but their narrative arrangement is incoherent. Something is left out. In this case, the specific mechanisms of power needed to shift from a single shooting to a global catastrophe are obscured. Decision-makers escape blame when political events are presented as some inexorable chain that just happened. Lets look at some other facts.
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| Links for casualties, other stats, map, and images |
Look at these numbers. Offering something abstract like political “momentum” to account for sustained slaughter of this magnitude hides the actual reasons for this obscenity. Looking back, history may resemble the movement of inexorable forces, but that is because we are confusing historical plotting – the story – for what actually happened. In this case, momentum is another word for self-interested elites and their fake ideologies.
Histories are not "what happened". They’re stories built on facts as we know them.
The basement of the Ipatiev house where the Tsar Nicholas V and the Romanov family was killed, circa 1918-1919
Of course, blaming the war on nationalism also served globalist goals, as did the opportunity to replace a Christian Tsar with Bolshevism.
So how are facts spun into a fake story? Historiographic slant is part of it, but narrative conventions are at least as important. Think about the stories of World War One and ask who are the characters?
Russian 1914 poster. The upper inscription reads "concord". Shown are the female personifications of France, Russia, and Britain, the "Triple Entente" allies in the first World War
Accounts of the War often present combatant countries as if they were individual characters in a story. France did this, then Germany did this, because Austria wanted this, and so forth. This way, the patriotism of the individual soldiers can be combined with the agendas of the elite as if they were the same. Britannia is the tell. They aren’t.
This is the lie of the nation-state in visible form - a false conflation of an elitist political system and a people.
We saw in an earlier post that the imperial nation-states of the 19th century created the illusion of organic unity with personifications that masked real divisions within the polity. This included fake gods like Britannia and more folksy creations like Uncle Sam - but the purpose was the same. Presenting highly motivated elite political and economic decisions as some abstract will of the people creates the impression that the elites and people share the same aims. It can even trick the people into taking up dyscivic elite causes as their own.
Another post looked at the division hidden by the fiction of the nation-state: a globalist elite ruling over a national group by fiat. But here we focused on the similarity between the older aristocratic elites and the new money of the Industrial Revolution as a detached, self-serving oligarchy. There are also differences between imperial rule by hereditary monarchs and aristocrats and the one-world vision of the newer globalists. We can use the facts to tell a different story about World War One - one that looks a lot more like a bloodsoaked elite power shift than any sort of expression of national will.
John Bull and Uncle Sam, words by Wm. Allen, music by J.B. Herbert, published 1898
Fake mythology creates the illusion of unity between nations and their rulers. This is the myth of the nation-state, a meaningless composite something like classifying dogs by 'kennel-breed'.
This is how we get "England" and "America" as characters in simplistic historical stories.
But there is no sign of popular interest in war. Even the powder-keg igniting assassination of Franz Ferdinand was followed by a month of increasingly bellicose posturing in the imperial capitals. We also know that there were all out campaign of lies to push the war on every rhetorical level from the outset. The following are public domain World War One propaganda posters pulled from a duckduckgo search.
Fake Nationalism?
The appeal to pure unthinking patriotic allegiance to the nation state. Consider the raw demonic inhumanity needed to turn nationalist sentiment into bait for a meat grinder.
Sometimes the rhetoric is especially transparent - the elites don't always express the connection between their monstrous apatite for slaughter and the symbols of fake national identity so openly.
And look at the picture - a steadfast figure in a crisp uniform guarding a pleasant field from an approaching shadow. Nothing in this picture foreshadows the horrors of trench warfare or the deaths of millions.
A personal appeal?
More unintentional honesty: to the sociopathic global elites, the diverse people of a nation are fungible units to be marched to the abattoir on a whim.
Tugging the emotional heart strings?
Fight because Columbia is fainting, or daddy, or Belgium...
...or even ginned up imaginary threats if that's what's called for.
Kill monsters or improve your life skills.
The appeals are endless.
Just keep stuffing bodies into the thresher.
The correct answer for "Australia" would be what happened to the previous 50,000?
The only thing English or American or Australian about this conflict is the visual language of the deception.
We also know that the lies and misinformation extended to the real world. Details surrounding the sinking of the Lusitania show a pattern of elite duplicity and manipulation to expand the war.
Winston Churchill (left), First Lord of the Admiralty and Lord Fisher (right) after a meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence, 1913
Churchill was ruthless in advancing the war, and the British strategy rather than German savagery the most likely cause of the Lusitania tragedy.
That a man of his obvious intelligence could so thoroughly detach great power games from the deaths of millions shows how separate the worlds of the elite and the nation really were.
Of course the propagandists presented it differently. Nothing like a false flag to juice the fake nationalism.
Not that any of this was new...
Victor Gillam, Remember the Maine! And Don't Forget the Starving Cubans!, pub. in Judge, May 7, 1898, vol. 34, p. . 312, Historical Society of Pennsylvania
It's actually remarkable how consistent globalist false flags and emotionally manipulative propaganda can be. Murky but convenient tragedies and the decontextualized suffering of foreign children remain central to the no borders playbook.
Given the popular disinterest in war leading up to 1914, the complete lack of social benefit for the combatant nations, and the efforts made by the elites to drive the mind-blowing slaughter to its extremity rule out simple stories with nation-state characters. Historical narratives can be assessed empirically like any case - by their fruits. Who actually benefited from this?
Some advantages are obvious.
Domenico Tojeti, Progress of America, 1875, Oakland Museum of California
Remember the fundamental lie of Progress is that we can maintain steady or even increasing growth in a finite system.
But all the fake mythology in the world can't change mathematics.
Progress had to be an absolute to sell the endless growth required by the modern industrial system. But if we can see that it is fake, the actual elite narrative engineers can too. How does one maintain the illusion as the early promise of the Industrial Revolution devolved into societal upheaval, unprecedented income stratification and urban poverty, and Gilded Age oligarchy? War provides a way of “resetting” by ginning up social cohesion, burning off surplus young men, and creating enormous demand for materials and reconstruction. If Progress is a house of cards, intermittent war keeps knocking parts of it down, ensuring that you never reach the point where further progress runs into material limits. Without MAD, another such reset would have already happened.
Udo J. Keppler, Next! 1904, photomechanical print, Published J. Ottmann Lith. Co., Puck Bldg., New York, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC
It's not as if the growing power of the industrial elites was unnoticed. But behind them were the bankers and financiers - the Morgans, Rothschilds, and the like.
Financial power came into the open with the creation of the Federal Reserve by Congress to manage interbank transfers and monetary policy. The ownership of the Fed is surprisingly murky, but the reality is that it was the initiative of the banking elites and remains privately held. This site includes charts documenting the the complex webs connecting finance and government at the highest levels. These are the same global financial elites that kept the money flowing to both sides of the war while funding the Bolsheviks.
Meanwhile, it was the patriotic duty of American parents to take money away from their children and it them to fund a meat grinder to save said children from imaginary danger. Lives were still being shoveled into the furnace in 1918 to improve bargaining position at the armistice talks!
Remember the reality of the war - elite great game posturing fueled by endless reservoirs of Industrial Revolution capital masking historic slaughter beneath a web of propaganda. There is no deception that the elites will not stoop to to manufacture opinion - even lying outright when all else fails.
This hasn't changed.
American civic nationalism is an illusory land of opportunity over a reality of global elite rulership. The difference between the WWI era and today is that the twentieth century ramped up the narrative control with centralized communications and easy transportation.
So the first part of our story is that World War I was the product of murderously disconnected elites and not imaginary nation-state "actors". But the deception inherent in simplified narratives is present here too, because the War also cemented a change in the nature of the European elite. This can be assessed empirically as well.
Consider the larger picture: financiers kept the money flowing, the political elites cashed in every appeal they had to nation and heroism, and millions kept dying. Millions kept dying. There is no appeal to webs of alliances or momentum of events that can normalize that atrocity. So who gets the blame, the money men, or "patriotic" liars?
Charles Ernest Butler, Blood and Iron, 1916, oil on canvas, 191 x 144.2 cm, Imperial War Museum London
This is effective rhetoric, but unfairly ascribes blame to Germany alone for the apocalyptic destruction. Fake realities yield dyscivic outcomes that propagandists manipulate. The empirical way to assess the War is by observing the consequences.
The old Imperial aristocratic elites took a blow that they would never recover from. The German, Russian, and Ottoman Empires had been replaced with an impoverished, directionless, debauched "republic" overrun with Marxists, a massive totalitarian supporter of continuous anti-Western psychological pressure, and the first "secular" Muslim state. England, France, Italy, and the other nations were battered and depleted. Within the elite worlds of culture, nationalism became the scapegoat, for reasons that should have been predictable.
The Charge of the Light Brigade, 1854, photogravure after Caton Woodville, pub. Henry Greaves and Co, London, 1895
The imperial nation-state of the 19th century was driven by the false belief in Progress. War was needed to sustain the illusion with mini-resets to burn off surplus men, stimulate the economy, and secure resources.
All to benefit the elite. Fake nationalism - the whole self-contradictory identity of the nation-state - was the way of selling this to the people. Here's a selection of 19th century wars in Europe and in the wider world.
Paul Nash, The Menin Road, 1919, oil on canvas, 317.5 x 182.8 cm, Imperial War Museum, London
Sell a fake bill of goods and you get the blame. The reality was so utterly different that the pre-War system was discredited. Nationalism had been falsely chained to the nation-state, and got thrown out with the bathwater.
Looking at the aftermath, we see a spent, battered Europe with the old aristocracy swept away and social upheaval and disillusionment everywhere. Various metastases of Marxist “radicalism” sprung up like mushrooms as the answer.
The Frankfurt School or Institute for Social Research was set up by a well-funded Marxist and accredited by the state university system. Elites literally weaponized education against national culture.
Binary thinking leads to false dichotomies. Marx’ intellectual limitations are evident in his misconception of society as divisible into two classes – itself a variation on the cognitive ceiling indicated by belief in Hagel’s dialectic as historically meaningful – but an idea doesn’t have to be smart to be compelling. The binary simplicity is inane, but like a biological virus, simplicity is also advantageous for survival. Marxist groups were well organized and supported, so when the Industrial Revolution nation state-altered, they could step up with the alternative. Of course it was a false one, but post-war upheaval followed by Depression was the vector for the “socialism” that late 20th century Europe pretended was a natural trait.
That's the second part of our story. The War was an elite creation that baptized a change in the elite order. A blood sacrifice, metaphorically speaking of course... This is just a story - a generalization based on an overview. But consider today's unholy alliance of Luciferian power-seeking globalists, no-borders socialists, and quisling politicians against the West:
So what about the Arts?
Grand opening of the first Dada exhibition, Berlin, 5 June 1920, from Richard Huelsenbeck, Dada Almanach, Berlin: Erich Reiss Verlag, 1920.
Left to right: Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch (sitting), Otto Burchard, Johannes Baader, Wieland Herzfelde, Margarete Herzfelde, dr. Oz (Otto Schmalhausen), George Grosz and John Heartfield.
Note the German officer with the pig's head hanging in effigy.
The name Dada was chosen because it is meaningless - repeated syllables meant to recall a baby's babbling. The called themselves anti-Art, meaning that they opposed the 19th century Western concept of Art promoted through prestigious academies, well-heeled dealers, and aristocratic-minded collectors. But "popular" art - what Marxists dismissed as kitsch in the last post - was also rejected on the grounds that its traditional styles and cultural themes were reflections of false consciousness.
Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q, Mona Lisa with moustache, 1919, pencil, ready-made, 19.7 x 12.4 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art
French Dadaist Duchamp's version of anti-art was the "ready-made" - found objects placed in museums and other high culture venues to demonstrate the emptiness of Art as a category. Here, he scribbled a little beard and goatee on a commercial print of the Mona Lisa. The subject is a Renaissance masterpiece, the "work" a kitschy print, and the gesture an absurd childish doodle. It is clever in mocking Art as a concept, talent as a measure of quality, and traditional aesthetic values in a single image.
The title L.H.O.O.Q. is an abbreviation for a French colloquialism that translates to "she has a hot ass". More mockery and debasement of cultural values. Sound familiar?
The Dadaists were very good at self-promotion. Here's a cheap, easily disseminated Dada manifesto using Duchamp's piece as a symbolic icon.
Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., signed, titled and numbered '21/35 Marcel Duchamp L.H.O.O.Q.', graphite and gouache on color reproduction, 30.2 x 22.9 cm, 1964
In 2010, one of a set of thirty-five prints made after the original in 1964 sold in auction for $452,500. Anti-art or elite tool?
The avant-garde didn't "destroy" Art, they took it over and transformed it into a globalist weapon while moving huge sums of money.
Hannah Höch, Marlene, 1930, photomontage, 36.7 x 24.2 cm, Collection Dakis Joannou, Athens
Wiemar Germany is an excellent study in extreme income polarization, social trauma, and lack of moral and social boundaries proving untenable. The celebration of debasement is particularly relevant to the Postmodern West.
German Dadaist Höch used photomontage to make "statements" about culture. This is usually interpreted as a proto-feminist critique of objectivized femininity in mass media. But it works even better as a vision of Modernity where the Classical tradition is replaced with a cheap, ephemeral mass-marketed parody of sex.
The alternative path was the one eventually championed by Clement Greenberg and other formalist critics – doubling down on the notion of artistic autonomy to the point where representation itself is rejected. This is superficially opposite political avant-garde movements like Dadaism, but turning away from politics, nationalism, ideology, etc. was made more appealing by the trauma and fake narrative of the war.
Piet Mondrian, Composition A, 1920, oil on canvas, 90 x 91 cm, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome
This is the "essence" of Art version of Modernism that we looked at over the last few posts. On the theoretical level, the stripping Art down to its essentials is the opposite of Dada's anti-art. But ignore the squid ink and look at the fruits. Both visions are uncompromisingly hostile to the Western tradition, but willing to hijack its cultural institutions for globalist ends.
Greenberg and most of the other art critics were cultural Marxists and every bit as “political” as the radicals. The difference is that their politics were veiled and subversive – the subtle destruction of Western culture in the guise of rationalism. This is the context for the Rockefeller' establishment of the Museum of Modern Art in New York covered in an earlier post.
Richard Morris Hunt, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Main Wing (entrance façade, entrance hall and grand stairway), completed 1902, New York, shown here under construction in 1902.
Remember, the Gilded Age elites were internationalist, but still conceived of culture in terms of the Western tradition.
Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, Museum of Modern Art, opened 1939, renovated 1997 by Yoshio Taniguchi, New York
That wasn't the case with the post-War globalist elites.
Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Building, 1925-26, Dessau, Germany
This is the world of architectural Modernism. Architects had to produce functional products which ruled out Dada-style atavism. But formal purity was still on the table. Some "publicly" funded essence for a tradition-free future!
The thing about stories is that they wrap up. It seems like we are positioned jump back into Modern architecture and look at the anti-Western trajectory of post-War culture.
But stories aren't what actually happened and "the Western tradition" isn't a character...
John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood, Chicago Tribune Tower, 1923-25, Chicago
...and things were different in America
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