Monday, March 14, 2005
White supremacist dreamland
Okay, I'm really not sure what to make of this. I received the link in an Alert e-mail from Yahoo, and didn't know whether to laugh, cry, or run screaming down the street at the utter blind idiocy of some people. I wonder if they need an Ethnic Studies professor who's totally into hate speech--they could have ours for free.
The bit pasted below is edited for brevity, the entire article can be found at Rebuilding a pure Aryan home in the Paraguayan jungle
In the late 19th century, a handful of German families settled in a remote jungle of Paraguay, where they intended to create a racially pure utopian settlement called Nueva Germania.
The experiment was a colossal failure.
The settlers were unprepared for the devastating diseases and other hardships of jungle life, and their descendants -- some of whom intermarried with the darker-skinned locals -- are among the poorest people in one of the poorest countries in South America.
But now they have an unlikely champion: a Wagner-loving San Francisco composer who is mounting a determined crusade to rebuild the Aryan dream and has sought assistance from Vice President Dick Cheney, two U.S. philanthropic groups, a Southern California town council, Bay Area artists, and a U.S. filmmaker best known for the underground movie "Scorpio Rising" and the book "Hollywood Babylon."
"As an artist who is fed up with much of the pretentious nonsense that has come to define Western culture, I am drawn to the idea of an Aryan vacuum in the middle of the jungle," says David Woodard, who lives on Mount Davidson and studied musical composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
Woodard, who is also the musical director of the Los Angeles Chamber Group, a 14-member ensemble that specializes in playing at memorial services, insists he is not a white supremacist, but rather a man driven by a vision of his musical hero that happened to bear fruit in a patch of land located about 120 miles north of Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay.
"Nueva Germania represents an aesthetic sanctuary conceived by Wagner; a place where Aryans could peaceably go to experience life and pursue the advancement of Germanic culture," he said. The Germans currently populating Nueva Germania number about 100 families, most descended from the original colonists, who arrived in 1886.
Among the pioneers was Elisabeth Nietzsche-Foerster -- sister of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche -- who sailed to Paraguay with 14 German families to start a socialist, vegan utopia along the Aguaraya River. She got the idea after reading an 1880 essay by Richard Wagner called "Religion and Art," in which the composer ranted against Germany's 1871 emancipation of the Jews.
But the colonists were unable to get crops to grow, and many fell victim to malaria, tuberculosis, snakebites and sand fleas. After two years, Nietzsche-Foerster's husband, a notorious anti-Semitic propagandist named Bernhard Foerster, committed suicide by swallowing poison after a drinking binge. His widow returned to Germany in 1893.
Today, the Nietzsche-Foerster home in Nueva Germania lies in ruins, the original Lutheran church and the German school have been closed for more than a decade, while the German-speaking descendants barely eke out a living as subsistence farmers.
Woodard, born and raised in Santa Barbara, is a thin man with stooped shoulders who favors large, dark sunglasses. Now in his mid-30s, he also manufactures replicas of a psychedelic contraption called a Dreamachine, a motorized cylinder that spins and creates a strobe effect.
Invented in 1959 by the Beat writer Brion Gysin, it is supposed to paint pictures inside the viewer's head. Woodard says his clients have included rockers Kurt Cobain, Iggy Pop and Beck.
When Woodard first visited Nueva Germania last year, he found most of its residents living in tin-roofed adobe homes with no indoor plumbing, electricity or telephones. The children walk seven miles to the nearest Spanish-language school.
Still, Woodard found that some have not given up on the idea of a racially pure homeland and prefer to marry their cousins rather than non- German Paraguayans.
Compelled by what he had witnessed, Woodard, on his return to San Francisco, wrote a seven-minute anthem called "Our Jungle Holy Land" and managed to get several Bay Area artists to participate.
"I thought it was an intriguing project, a bizarre thing of a colony of Germanic people in the jungle," said Kimarie Torre, a San Francisco soprano who sings on the recording. "I know this colony was started as an Aryan nation, but I saw the music as an homage to their country."
Woodard says he first learned of Nueva Germania after reading "Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche," a 1992 book by a London Times journalist, Ben MacIntyre.
The bit pasted below is edited for brevity, the entire article can be found at Rebuilding a pure Aryan home in the Paraguayan jungle
In the late 19th century, a handful of German families settled in a remote jungle of Paraguay, where they intended to create a racially pure utopian settlement called Nueva Germania.
The experiment was a colossal failure.
The settlers were unprepared for the devastating diseases and other hardships of jungle life, and their descendants -- some of whom intermarried with the darker-skinned locals -- are among the poorest people in one of the poorest countries in South America.
But now they have an unlikely champion: a Wagner-loving San Francisco composer who is mounting a determined crusade to rebuild the Aryan dream and has sought assistance from Vice President Dick Cheney, two U.S. philanthropic groups, a Southern California town council, Bay Area artists, and a U.S. filmmaker best known for the underground movie "Scorpio Rising" and the book "Hollywood Babylon."
"As an artist who is fed up with much of the pretentious nonsense that has come to define Western culture, I am drawn to the idea of an Aryan vacuum in the middle of the jungle," says David Woodard, who lives on Mount Davidson and studied musical composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
Woodard, who is also the musical director of the Los Angeles Chamber Group, a 14-member ensemble that specializes in playing at memorial services, insists he is not a white supremacist, but rather a man driven by a vision of his musical hero that happened to bear fruit in a patch of land located about 120 miles north of Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay.
"Nueva Germania represents an aesthetic sanctuary conceived by Wagner; a place where Aryans could peaceably go to experience life and pursue the advancement of Germanic culture," he said. The Germans currently populating Nueva Germania number about 100 families, most descended from the original colonists, who arrived in 1886.
Among the pioneers was Elisabeth Nietzsche-Foerster -- sister of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche -- who sailed to Paraguay with 14 German families to start a socialist, vegan utopia along the Aguaraya River. She got the idea after reading an 1880 essay by Richard Wagner called "Religion and Art," in which the composer ranted against Germany's 1871 emancipation of the Jews.
But the colonists were unable to get crops to grow, and many fell victim to malaria, tuberculosis, snakebites and sand fleas. After two years, Nietzsche-Foerster's husband, a notorious anti-Semitic propagandist named Bernhard Foerster, committed suicide by swallowing poison after a drinking binge. His widow returned to Germany in 1893.
Today, the Nietzsche-Foerster home in Nueva Germania lies in ruins, the original Lutheran church and the German school have been closed for more than a decade, while the German-speaking descendants barely eke out a living as subsistence farmers.
Woodard, born and raised in Santa Barbara, is a thin man with stooped shoulders who favors large, dark sunglasses. Now in his mid-30s, he also manufactures replicas of a psychedelic contraption called a Dreamachine, a motorized cylinder that spins and creates a strobe effect.
Invented in 1959 by the Beat writer Brion Gysin, it is supposed to paint pictures inside the viewer's head. Woodard says his clients have included rockers Kurt Cobain, Iggy Pop and Beck.
When Woodard first visited Nueva Germania last year, he found most of its residents living in tin-roofed adobe homes with no indoor plumbing, electricity or telephones. The children walk seven miles to the nearest Spanish-language school.
Still, Woodard found that some have not given up on the idea of a racially pure homeland and prefer to marry their cousins rather than non- German Paraguayans.
Compelled by what he had witnessed, Woodard, on his return to San Francisco, wrote a seven-minute anthem called "Our Jungle Holy Land" and managed to get several Bay Area artists to participate.
"I thought it was an intriguing project, a bizarre thing of a colony of Germanic people in the jungle," said Kimarie Torre, a San Francisco soprano who sings on the recording. "I know this colony was started as an Aryan nation, but I saw the music as an homage to their country."
Woodard says he first learned of Nueva Germania after reading "Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche," a 1992 book by a London Times journalist, Ben MacIntyre.
