Elvis Presley, Professor Quigley, & the Africanization of Youth
Kerry Bolton5,113 words
The recent movie on Elvis Presley[1] is exceptional in its acting, script, and production. For those interested in such matters, it is also excellent as cultural history.
The movie deals to a significant extent with the African influences on Presley’s music. As a little boy growing up in a poor, integrated neighborhood, he was fascinated by the rhythms and gyrations of the blacks, including black gospel music. This boyhood fascination developed into an adolescent identification with the “blues” of Negro musicians, and his frequenting of black nightclubs and bars.
With Presley’s distinctly Negro musical style and his equally Negro-influenced gyrations, the movie depicts the impact that he had on crowds of white female adolescents, which later spread to their initially appalled boyfriends. What the music and the gyrations were evoking were the atavistic impulses of the most primal elements common to the collective unconscious, as Jung might put it: that layer of the unconscious that predates racial differentiation.
Mass Marketing Negro Rhythms
Presley’s style was quickly seen as the means by which Negro music could be marketed to white adolescents; creating a vast new consumer market through the mainstreaming of previously marginalized Negro rhythms. Christopher Farley, writing for Time, refers to Samuel Phillips of Sun Records, where Presley got his start, as seeing the profits to be made in mass-marketing black music to white consumers via a white musician:
One of Presley’s most significant contributions was this: he was able to make more of a commercial impact in rock than the black performers who pioneered the field. In fact, before he signed Presley, Phillips famously declared that “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.”[2]
With the backing of RCA Victor in 1956, Presley was elevated to iconic status, displacing the popularity of white country musicians such as Hank Snow.
Indebted to Negro Rhythms and Dance
Presley acknowledged his debt to Negro music. In an interview in 1956, Presley explained:
The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin’ now, man for more years than I know. They played it like that in their shanties and in their juke joints and nobody paid it no mind ‘til I goosed it up. I got it from them. Down in Tupelo, Mississippi, I used to hear old Arthur Crudup bang his box the way I do now and I said if I ever got to a place I could feel all old Arthur felt, I’d be a music man like nobody ever saw.[3]
To Loui Robertson of the Negro magazine Jet, Presley ascribed his first influences as a child to black gospel:
A lot of people seem to think I started this business, but rock ‘n’ roll was here a long time before I came along. Nobody can sing that kind of music like colored people. Let’s face it: I can’t sing it like Fats Domino can. I know that. But I always liked that kind of music. I used to go to the colored churches when I was a kid — like Rev. Brewster’s church (Rev. W. Herbert Brewster of East Trigg Ave. Baptist Church in Memphis).[4]
Little Richard said of Presley that “[t]hey wouldn’t let black music through. He opened the door for black music.”[5]
Perhaps the most significant accolade comes from one of our epoch’s most eminent Culture-distorters, Leonard Bernstein, who said of Presley:
Elvis is the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century. He introduced the beat to everything and he changed everything — music, language, clothes, it’s a whole new social revolution — the 60’s comes from it. Because of him a man like me barely knows his musical grammar anymore.[6]
Bernstein hosted the “radical chic” fundraising dinner parties lampooned by Tom Wolfe, where New York’s socialites mingled with Black Panthers.[7] Bernstein, the maestro with a unique ability to turn high art into a cacophony, apparently regarded Presley as having made Beethoven and Wagner, Mozart and Gluck, redundant.
Breaking Down the Color Bar
In 1956 Presley “crossed the color line” by attending events designated for blacks only. In June he attended the Memphis Fairgrounds amusement park during what was designated as “colored night,” according to the newspaper Memphis World. On December 7 he attended the annual fundraiser held by black radio station WDIA at Memphis Stadium to raise funds for “needy Negro children.” Here he performed with B. B. King, Ray Charles, and Rufus Thomas. He returned to the same event the following year.
The movie Elvis and sundry television documentaries on him over the years have referred to the opposition Presley met from diehard Southern segregationists. This is intended to place Elvis in his role as an iconic “rebel with a cause” against the “Establishment” in an era where it was the South that was beleaguered by the “Establishment,” while black civil rioters received plaudits from the mass media and plentiful funding from Ford, Rockefeller, and other oligarchic wealth. The villain in the movie in this regard is James O. Eastland, Senator from Elvis’ home state of Mississippi. A review of the movie states of the Eastland character:
James “Jim” Eastland was an antagonist in the 2022 movie Elvis. He was based on the real life Senator Eastland, and was portrayed by the English actor Nicholas Bell. A virulent racist, Eastland was stridently opposed to racial equality and integration of minorities. In the 1950s he was a United States Senator from Mississippi. When young people heard and saw a new young singer named Elvis Presley Eastland also started opposing Elvis on the grounds that he was “corrupting” the youth of America with his physical performance artistry and his beliefs. He began leading efforts to have Elvis banned from both the airwaves and in person concerts.[8]
The white resistance is, as one might expect, portrayed invariably as regressive and ignorant. Television documentaries on Presley often show clips of a spokesman from the segregationist Citizens Councils, declaiming against Presley’s “immorality.” 65 years later, sophisticated viewers are supposed to react with reflexive mirth and/or disgust at such bigotry.
While country-music singer Hank Snow is portrayed, albeit in passing, as a regressive Christian bigot, not all Negroes were enamored with Presley’s style, just as not all were zealous about desegregation.[9] Criticism came especially from the jazz genre, one jazz music critic stating that whereas such music previously had a limited appeal, this music — referring to Presley — was now “intentionally cheapened to appeal to mass taste.”[10] The music critic had discerned precisely the meaning of it all. The jazz genre was elitist, despite the use the CIA and State Department were making of it during the “cultural Cold War” to showcase the wonders of American democracy to the world (along with Abstract Expressionism). Dr. Michael Bertrand states of this:
Dizzy Gillespie put many of the jazz community’s condemnations into perspective when he groused that “jazz was once on its way to becoming the real folk music of America, but now that’s almost gone. The folk music of America is [now] a mongrel made up of strains of Presley, Liberace, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and Sh’Boom.” Faced with media reports that “started churning up silly questions about whether rock ‘n roll had replaced bebop,” Gillespie’s response exemplified an elite viewpoint. “We never carried big crowds because jazz is strictly an art form,” he explained, “and so there was always a division between jazz and what other people were doing who were not really participating in a caritive art form. Those other things people were doing were not creative; they were like pretty, manufactured meaningless tinsel rolling off an assembly line.” As far as Dizzy Gillespie as was concerned, the fact that the country could fall for rock ‘n roll was proof that jazz was “too good for Americans.”[11]
Gillespie had discerned the destructive impact of democratization on the arts, while others had pointed to the manner by which this democratization is mass consumption and profit maximization. Here is the crux of the “inclusive economy,” as the global corporations now call the process, behind the façade of “equality,” whether in the United States or South Africa.
At the time, the Citizens Councils mobilized large numbers of Southerners to resist federally-imposed desegregation. The Citizens Councils had started in Memphis and soon reached 80,000 members throughout Tennessee, then proliferated throughout the South. Their leaders were well-educated and articulate. Their supporters included scientists such as biologist Wesley Critz George and the psychologist Henry E. Garrett, who questioned the wisdom of racial integration, particularly in the schools. At the time a Northern commentator, Frank Britton, editor of The American Nationalist, analyzed the issue in a manner fairly representative of the anti-integrationist outlook:
The aliens who control our radio and television networks, and our musical recording industry, have long recognized the Negro jazz musician as an ideal medium through which millions of impressionable school-age children could be introduced to the joys of racial “integration.” . . .
The stock in trade of the Afro-jungle musician (and their callow white imitators such as Elvis Presley) is sexually stimulating rhythm music which has its origin in the primitive sex orgies of central Africa, and which is an integral part of the obscene “Voodoo” rituals practiced by Negroes in the Caribbean area. Until the advent of modern technology this Negroidal contribution to U.S. musical culture was largely confined to the brothels of New Orleans and other Southern cities with large Negro populations. Gradually, however, jazz and dixieland music (and its recent derivations of “rhythm-in-blues” and “rock-and-roll”) emerged from the bawdy house and black belt district, and through radio, television and recordings has been brought right into the American living room.
It should be emphasized, however, that the recording industry is the principal vehicle for the African jazz musician, and he derives a substantial proportion of his income (and fame) from the sale of records, most of which are sold to teen-age school children. The Negroidal “rhythm-in-blues” and “rock-and-roll” musician and his promoters thus prey on, and in turn are sustained by, the adolescent — the so-called “juke-box” set.
The weird and often unintelligible “jive” talk and “hop-cat” antics of the modern juvenile provides visible and startling evidence of the impact the Negro jazz musician (and his imitators) has upon the adolescent mind. And lest any doubt remains that it is an unwholesome influence, the recent craze for “rhythm-in-blues” recordings should dispel it. Although the story has been largely suppressed by the radio and press, the burgeoning popularity of “rhythm-in-blues” records is a national scandal. The “rhythm-in-blues” singer makes a specialty of putting double meaning into his lyrics. Millions of these suggestive and obscene double-entendre “rhythm-in-blues” recordings have been openly sold in record shops catering to juveniles and played on juke boxes and even over the radio. Some radio stations, under pressure from outraged parents, have outlawed the playing of the more offensive recordings, but the fact that such a situation could exist at all illustrates the insidious influence now being exerted over our youth by our Africanized entertainment industry.
. . . The situation raises the very serious question as to whether our white Christian-American civilization can continue to survive or perpetuate itself under such conditions.[12]
If the alarm of those such as Frank Britton from the late 1950s now seems even to the most “conservative” to be quaintly puritanical and regressive, if not malicious, perhaps it is because we “moderns” have over decades gradually succumbed and psychologically integrated Culture-distortion to the extent that our instincts have atrophied and we are unable to realize the abysmal depths to which Western civilization has sunk? We are immersed in cultures that are alien, and it is difficult to have the detachment necessary to perceive what has happened.
Carl Jung had observed the same Africanization process three decades earlier, writing that
[a]nother thing that struck me was the great influence of the Negro, a psychological influence naturally, not due to the mixing of blood . . . the peculiar walk with loose joints, or the swinging of the hips so frequently observed in Americans, also comes from the American Negro. American music draws its main inspiration from the Negro, and so does the dance.[13]
Professor Carroll Quigley on Africanization of White Youth
Although Britton’s manner, at a time of racial tumult, is strident, an esteemed academic with impeccable liberal-Establishment credentials said the same in more refrained but just as unequivocal a manner.
Dr. Carroll Quigley of the Foreign Service School, Georgetown University, and Harvard University, a lecturer at the Brookings Institution and the State Department, and so on, is widely familiar especially among the “American patriot movement,” if one might call it that. His magnum opus, Tragedy & Hope,[14] has long been widely cited in that milieu. Quigley’s book is primarily of interest to populist elements of the “Right” because several dozen of its 1,300 pages refer to a “network” of oligarchs who aim to establish a world system of financial control, and often use Leftists for the purpose. It is particularly attractive to the traditional anti-British sentiments of the American patriot because Quigley erroneously thought that this was an “Anglophile network,”[15] which has obscured the many other interesting points in Quigley’s work. One of these is his discussion of the psychological differences between Europeans and Negroes; another is his discussion of the Africanization of white American youth.
In discussing Africa and Africans, Quigley described the outlook of “the ordinary African” as generally having “a preference for the present”:
The African has a fair recognition of the immediate past, a dominant concern for the present, and little concern for the future. Accordingly, his conception of time is totally different from that of the average Western man. The latter sees the present only as a moving point of no dimension that separates the past from the future. The African sees time as a wide gamut of the present with a moderate dimensional past and almost no future. This outlook is reflected in the structure of the Bantu languages, which do not emphasize the tense distinctions of past, present, and future, as we do . . .
In addition to his present preference, the Bantu has a list of priorities, in his conception of a higher standard of living, which contains many noneconomic goals. A fairly typical list of such priorities might run: food, sex dalliance, joking with one’s friends, a bicycle, music and dancing, a radio, leisure to go fishing . . .[16]
The “Bantu list of priorities” discerned by Quigley became as a tendency the priorities of Western youth: the satisfaction of immediate urges, devoid of consequences; a fixation on entertaining trinkets; and the satiation of the senses at the most primordial levels. At some deep atavistic level of the unconscious the primitive could be evoked, with the addition of expanding consumer demands that required neither quality nor performance. The “noneconomic priorities” of the traditional African could be commodified and repackaged for a white adolescent consumer market.
Quigley writes of the breakdown of the traditional American middle-class family, and particularly the rejection by youth of their parents’ values. This is not the place to consider the extent to which this “youth rebellion” that characterized the 1960s was seeded, cultivated, and propagated by the “Establishment” against which they thought they were revolting. What concerns us here is what Quigley said on the extent to which this youth rejectionism was influenced by Africanization.
Quigley states that behind the middle-class American family, “a new teenage culture has growing up”:[17]
In many ways this new culture is like that of African tribes: its tastes in music and the dance, its emphasis on sex play, its increasingly scant clothing, its emphasis on group solidarity, the high value it puts on interpersonal relations (especially talking and social drinking), its almost total rejection of future preference and its constant efforts to free itself from the tyranny of time. Teen-age solidarity and sociality and especially the solidarity of their groups and subgroups are amazingly African in attitudes, as they gather nightly, or at least on weekends, to drink “cokes,” talk interminably in the midst of throbbing music, preferably in semidarkness, with couples drifting off for sex play in the corners as a kind of social diversion, and a complete emancipation from time. Usually they have their own language, with vocabulary and constructions so strange that parents find them almost incomprehensible. This Africanization of American society is gradually spreading with the passing years to higher age levels in our culture and is having profound and damaging effects on the transfer of middle-class values to the rising generation. A myriad of symbolic acts, over the last twenty years, have served to demonstrate the solidarity of teen culture and its rejection of middle-class values. Many of these involved dress and “dating customs,” both major issues in the Adolescent-Parental Cold War.[18]
The “youth revolt,” including what Quigley described as the Africanization of the young, assisted in a paradigm shift in the United States, first culturally, as we have seen, and then politically. This “youth revolt,” which John D. Rockefeller III, for example, regarded as such a splendid example of “youthful idealism,”[19] helped to fracture the “middle class” which the “Establishment” oligarchy, described by Quigley, regarded with contempt. Quigley describes this “Eastern Establishment” as maintaining their strength in “their control of eastern financial endowments, operating from foundations, academic halls, and other tax-exempt refuges.” These oligarchs were repelled by what Quigley dismisses as the “Radical Right” of the “petty bourgeoisie,” represented by senators Taft[20] and Goldwater, the latter being considered as representing the “extremist elements” of the Republican Congressional Party in 1964.[21]
At another level, in regard to the fracture of middle America via the use of the young, the New Left had been radicalized by the experiences of white students in the early black “civil rights” protests that were also down South.[22]
Metapolitics
The cause of the South and of opposition to racial integration was lost as soon as Negro music imbued white youth via rock ‘n roll. White youth were Africanized en masse; the slang, lyrics, phrases, rhythms, and dance changed the collective psyche of white youth at the deepest levels, leading to a change in outlook, manner, and attitude to what Quigley called the “Bantu list of priorities.” These have remained dominant over the collective conscious of white youth, appealing to the infantile and the primordial.
White youths would no longer resist the despoilation of their neighborhoods and schools when their new icons and heroes were Negro, and they regarded black rhythms, dance, attire, and phrases as their own. Constance White, a black “style critic” for eBay, The New York Times, and so on enthused in Time: “Fashion has embedded itself in our popular culture, and Black style, fertile and innovative, is continuously multiplying like a reproducing amoeba, spinning off into sub-genres.”[23] Constance White traces this Africanization not only in the US but also in Europe to what was the moral fracture of the post-First World War years, where Negro musicians entered the clubs of Berlin, London, and Paris:
Stateside and in parts of Europe in the early twentieth century, bandleaders like Cab Calloway popularized the dramatically baggy zoot suit. Jazzmen and blueswomen started trends, as Billie Holiday did when she appeared with a flower in her hair. The ’20s flapper style is said to have risen in part from the need to allow for vigorous movement after Black youth introduced an energetic new dance called the Charleston, which was then popularized on Broadway. With dresses shortened to scandalously bare ankles and calves, corsets were flung aside, and dresses became loose and free, all the better to shimmy and shake.
As they do today, early entertainers of all colors found their style within the Black community, and in a back-and-forth exchange, the Black community in turn fed off and expanded upon the looks entertainers wore on stage, on screen, and at their public appearances. . . .[24]
Modernist Voodoo
What was achieved in the southern US — that is, even among the most resistant element of the white population then extant, the Southerners — was undertaken by evoking the most infantile stratum of a society, at the lowest denominator, that exists on a subliminal level: a primitive part of the unconscious that can be evoked through a return to primal rhythms and dance, tantamount to sorcery, or more specifically, to a Voodoo rite. A trance-like state is induced and the unconscious is opened to suggestibility. Here the modern houngan and mambo are the executives, promoters, and producers of the entertainment industry. As Constance White approvingly states, this Africanization of culture is “continuously multiplying like a reproducing amoeba, spinning off into sub-genres.” That is to say, it enables music, dance, and fashion to be commoditized and mass produced for a fast turnover and “planned obsolescence,” like automobiles, refrigerators, or televisions.
By the time that a robust white resistance was needed in the South, necessitating the loyalty of white youth, rock ‘n roll had Africanized that youth. The Presley movie depicts the true-life scenario that is described by Dr. Bertrand:
On the evening of July 4, 1956, the hottest day of the year thus far, Mississippi Senator James Eastland, a staunch segregationist, appeared in Memphis to make a speech on the evils of integration. Several, pro-segregation groups had invited the race-baiting Senator to a holiday rally. Thirty-five hundred people assembled at the Overton Park Shell to hear Eastland rail against the Supreme Court, school integration, and various similar topics. Toward the conclusion of his speech, he pledged that “proponents of desegregation rally are after racial amalgamation, and we in the South aren’t going to stand for it.”
Ironically, the loudest ovations in Memphis that night did not emanate from the Overton Park Shell. The truly thunderous noise was reserved for an event occurring roughly two miles further west towards the Mississippi River, at Russwood Park a baseball stadium. Although the diamond may have been devoid of ballplayers, “the roaring was so loud and long that extras rations for sleeping pills were passed out to the patients of four hospitals near the field.” At about the same time that Eastland was reaching his crescendo of hate politics, Elvis Presley, was performing before an audience of approximately fourteen thousand screaming teenagers, both black and white.[25]
Dr. Bertrand points out that the two sides symbolized by Eastland and by Presley would conflict until one was brought to extinction. But Ford, Rockefeller, Rosenwald, and other oligarchical fortunes had patronized Negro causes for decades, along with the support of the mass media and the federal government. Added to this was perhaps the most vital element in delivering a death-blow to white consciousness: the use of the entertainment industry to cause a shift in consciousness among an entire generation of white youth. It was the segregationists who were the underdogs fighting defensive action. While Bertrand waxes lyrical on the brave new world awaiting, he seems supremely satisfied that the process he is zealously describing focused on the programming and manipulation of youngsters, “oblivious” to the “clamor and disruption they were creating.” Apparently, this is something that should be celebrated. Bertrand writes:
Those steadfastly moored to the past would not go away quietly or without a fight; those who danced and cavorted to the new rhythms of rock ‘n’ roll seemed oblivious to the clamor and disruption they were creating. By applauding and honouring rhythm and blues and rock ‘n’ roll heroes they dissented from a past that no longer held a conclusive meaning for them. A generational collision was looming, and at least one alert white southerner foresaw the inevitable. The problem with rock ‘n’ roll he discerned, was that its message of equality transcended jukeboxes, radios and dancehalls. Too many whites and too many Negroes are hearing music the band isn’t playing.” Another frustrated Dixiecrat conceded that there were many people who thought such fears were exaggerated and that “we [are] reading something into the music that isn’t there.” Yet as he contemplated the swift and dramatic changes engulfing his society, he wondered, “Are we?”[26]
One might ask, how can one be in dissent when one is, as Bertrand mentioned, doing no more than reacting in an oblivious manner to dance and rhythms — “dancing and cavorting” — as if in Voodoo ritual, induced into a zombified trance that destroys rather than maintaining or enhancing free will and discernment? Bertrand acknowledges that the Dixiecrats perceived the subversive character of the dance and rhythms correctly. If the “past” no longer had “conclusive meaning” for white youth, with a heritage that truly was one of dissent and one that needed reviving, then it was surely because the South had failed to pass the full meaning of its heritage and a sense of destiny on to further generations.
A Southern mythos of blood and soil needed to be maintained and replenished, but it had been neglected perhaps out of hubris, and the most that was being defended were legalistic issues of “state’s rights” and segregation. Such degeneration could not have proliferated unless the custodians of that heritage had failed to imbue its spirit and ethos in new generations. Now, as if the oligarchy fears the vaguest possibility of a resurgence, the few remnants of that heritage are being systematically dismantled. The Rockefeller Foundation took credit for having initiated the process in New Orleans in 2017, according to the Foundation’s Director, Dr. Rajiv J. Shah.[27]
Again, the zombified dance to the drum of oligarchs and it is called “dissent,” with an additional gesture of humiliation: the bended knee.
Today, it is the use of Hip Hop, called “hip hop diplomacy” by the State Department, that is used as a strategy in the expansion of globalist hegemony under American auspices, and it is still youth that are targeted as the means of change[28] with the use of what is, to paraphrase Dizzy Gillespie, “manufactured meaningless tinsel rolling off an assembly line.”
The nexus of politics and commerce also sets its sights lower, literally, in using a similar process of Africanizing toddlers as another large consumer market that can be conditioned from the first years of life. For that purpose, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) has published a guide for manufacturers of toys, games, books, films, television, clothing, and accessories on how to promote “inclusivity” among children, including pre-schoolers, with the premise being the “power to influence” “through advertising and marketing.” The categories include gender, race/ethnicity/culture, disability, and family definitions.[29] Dolls have become the equivalent of African fetish figures and promote ghetto slang, dress, music, graffiti, and “attitude”[30] to the littlest consumers. Was the indoctrination by any totalitarian state ever as pervasive and perverse as that perpetrated under democracy?
Dixieland lost its cause the moment that its young started idolizing dance, rhythms, mannerisms, and idioms that were of African origin. The process started in the West with the ideologues of liberalism in the salons of the degenerated upper classes in eighteenth-century Europe where the mythical “Noble Savage” was theorized and fetishized. The moral and social fractures of the First World War accelerated the process of cultural bastardization. The aftermath of the Second World War made the very notion of European identity morally anathema to the point of an ongoing criminalization. The 1960s saw a “revolution from above” in morals and culture, where adolescents were targeted for cultural reconstruction. Now the process is proceeding among the ever younger to the point of being cultural-paedophilia. The foundation of all the rot was ultimately cultural and moral — that is to say, firstly, metapolitical.
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Notes
[1] “Elvis,” Warner Bros., 2022.
[2] Christopher John Farley, “Elvis Rocks. But He’s Not the First,” Time, July 6, 2004.
[3] Ibid.
[4] “Elvis Presley and the Black Community.”
[5] Ibid.
[6] “What they have said about Elvis.”
[7] Tom Wolfe, “Radical Chic. That Party at Lenny’s,” New York, June 8, 1970.
[8] “Jim Eastland,” Villains Wiki.
[9] During the 1930s, 2,000,000 blacks had signed the petition of the Ethiopia Pacific Movement for repatriation to an African homeland, either Liberia or Ethiopia. The strongest support for the movement came from the much-maligned Senator Theodore Bilbo, from Presley’s home state, who introduced the petition and restoration bill to the floor of the House every year until his death in 1947. The black separatists and their white supporters approached senators Storm Thurmond of South Carolina, John C. Stennis of Mississippi, and Richard Russell of Georgia to reintroduce the bill. Notably, these champions of segregation did not want to offend the interests of the Southern oligarchy that relied on Black labor. Further, the bill went against the concept of “state’s rights,” as it required federal backing — that is to say, the repatriation bill was opposed by the professed champions of “white supremacy.” The bill was later championed by Senator William Langer of North Dakota. Colonel Earnest Sevier Cox, one of the white backers of the black repatriation movement, stated that repatriation was opposed by Northern politicians who were after black voters and Southern oligarchs relying on Black labor.
[10] Cited by Michael T. Bertrand, Rock, Race and Elvis (University of Illinois Press, 2004), 146.
[11] Bertrand, 146, citing Dizzy Gillespie, To Be or Not to Bop (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 230.
[12] Frank L. Britton, “American Youth Corrupted by Negroidal Influence,” American Nationalist, Inglewood, California (leaflet, 1958).
[13] Carl Jung, “Mind and Earth” (1931).
[14] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1966).
[15] Unfortunately, Quigley was off-beam in calling this an “Anglophile network,” and assuming that there has been an alliance between diehard British imperialists via the Royal Institute on International Affairs (RIIA) and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The latter was created in the aftermath of the First World War as a think tank for Wilsonian democratic-internationalism. It was, to the contrary, a lead player in dismantling the British and other European empires. The proffered alliance between the RIIA and the CFR was stillborn, as explained by CFR historian Peter Grose in Continuing the Inquiry: The Council on Foreign Relations 1921 to 1996 (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1996, 2006).
[16] Quigley, 1185.
[17] Ibid., 1263.
[18] Ibid., 1263-1264.
[19] John D. Rockefeller III, “The Youthful Revolution: A Positive Response,” 1969, entered into the Congressional Record (Vol. 15, Part 3) by Hon. William H. Ayres (R-Ohio), February 17, 1969, 3595-3596.
[20] Quigley, 1244-1245.
[21] Ibid., 1248.
[22] This is discussed by a primary New Left leader and ideologue, Tom Hayden, in his autobiography Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1988). Hayden’s allusions to New Left origins in the CIA-sponsored US National Student Association are also of interest, as are the same associations of feminist icon Gloria Steinem.
[23] Constance C. R. White, “How African Americans Have Influenced Style and Culture,” Time, February 6, 2018.
[24] Constance White, ibid.
[25] Bertrand, 242.
[26] Bertrand, 244. Emphasis added.
[27] Remarks by Dr. Rajiv J. Shah at the University of Pennsylvania Perelmsan School of Medicine Commencement, May 16, 2021, Rockefeller Foundation.
[28] “Hip-Hop Diplomacy,” Council on Foreign Relations.
[29] Catherine Rutgers (ed.), Promoting Diversity and Inclusion in Advertising: A UNICEF Playbook (UNICEF, 2021).
[30] K. R. Bolton, The Tyranny of Human Rights (Quakertown, Pa.: Antelope Hill Publishing, 2022), 247-269.
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2 comments
The problem with much right-wing analysis is that it always leads to a dead-end as far as the ‘What is to be done?’ part of either politics or metapolitics.
Was Presley all bad? I doubt it. The ‘hillbilly’ – rock-a-billy – music he embraced was a White music and, over the long haul, it was this White music that changed American musical culture. The Jews of the music business promote the ‘Negro’ aspect of everything cultural. It doesn’t make it so. Bluegrass and Appalachian folk music (and dancing) are the roots of Dixieland, not ‘shimmy music’. The Jews have obscured the ways in which Whites did most of the heavy lifting in early jazz and how little, really, Mississippi blues had to do with the sounds and the instrumentation and style of jazz. As for jazz being centered around areas with high Negro populations, I’d love to see how the author came by that assessment other than the Jewish historians of jazz. The jazz ‘traveling bands’ were all over the North, South, Midwest and East, not just major population centers. Beiderbecke was every bit as good as Armstrong. He just didn’t live as long.
Could Whites not improvise music before the ‘Africanization’ of White cultures? Does the name ‘Franz Liszt’ ring a bell?
White culture is the product of distinct White intra-racial types: the hunter-gatherer, the agrarian, the chariot-warriors. Anyone who tries to make the case that the Irish are not almost identical to the Negro in attitude towards work and sociability are going to have a hard sell, at least with me.
Anyone who tries to make the case that at least some of the attitudes attributed to ‘Africanization’ were not already present in the White American Character is also going to have their work cut out for them. People forget that ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is specified in the early days of America because there were non-Anglo-Saxon Whites all over America. Most importantly, the French and the Scots-Irish. New Orleans is a French city. And it was a long time before New Orleans was not the most important city in the South. French musical culture as interpreted by the French Creole was a huge part of the creation of jazz and the culture of New Orleans. Are they White? No. Did the French Creole people embrace White French culture? Damned right they did. It was the Creole teaching the Negro how to play (and read) music that was seed for the Negro to take up jazz. To paraphrase Paul Whiteman, ‘Jazz was always White man’s music.’
Despite all the belly-aching by the Right about the ‘Africanization’ of White civilization, it’s possible that (a) our enemies may have done us a favor by allowing subterranean currents of Whiteness come into popular culture and thereby (b) unleashed reservoirs of creativity that will be our enemy’s undoing. So, instead of belly-aching about ‘the good old days’, perhaps a better approach would be to figure out how to make use of the resources in the situation as it actually is to defeat our enemies.
What Quigley’s analysis indicated was that one part of the White race is always happy to wage war on some other part. In the long run, the effects of the ‘Africanization’ of ‘American culture’ will result in a new, expanded central tendency of ‘Whiteness’ that will allow White civilization to endure and mature.
The first feathers ruffled by Elvis were those of white people resenting his rockabillied rendition of Bill Monroe’s hallowed Blue Moon Of Kentucky, the B-side of the first single.
Much has been made about white artists covering black records in the 50’s. The people concerned with this are the same people whom, if they didn’t cover black records, would today be saying, “How come they didn’t cover black records?”
Bobby Womack wrote the original It’s All Over Now which The Rolling Stones covered and had a hit with in 1964. In an interview in the 80’s Womack said he was initially miffed but “then I got my first check. I STILL get checks!”
“Race”- You can’t win. Then as now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJq3AZ4uXqE
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