“This business requires a certain amount of finesse,” is one of many memorable lines spoken by Jack Nicholson’s P.I. character, Jake Gittes, in Roman Polanski’s 1974 film noire, Chinatown.

This classic film was undoubtedly the pinnacle of Polanski’s cinematic career.  The “noire” epithet isn’t in the least disqualified by the film having been shot in colour.  Nor is it solely the product of skilful atmospherics, though Polanski’s vision of 1930’s Los Angeles does convince.  No, this is a film with the darkest of hearts.  It offers a detective yarn of Chandleresque style and power but, some distance beneath that, the gnawing, unanswerable comprehension that life is only the choice between a small, selfish, unknowing existence or … hopelessness.  Chinatown is a world in which evil has placed itself above public reproach and so does what it wants.  Chinatown is a state of being in which, however much or however little the good and the innocent resist their fate, no amelioration is possible.  One can investigate “fate” from without – for which a certain amount of finesse is required – but one cannot change it.

I confess that this reading of events holds a certain attraction for me.  My view of Man is essentially pessimistic.  He is not fallen in the traditional, Christian sense.  There is no moral universe in which he may rise merely through a life of good.

I am prepared to grant that Man is born with a certain potential (that may in some respect mysteriously exceed evolution’s apparent prescription).  But nowhere does he learn how he might come to own it and use it.  He has, instead, a fateful propensity to sleep, quite literally, through all the days of his life.  He does not know that consciousness is intentional, and so sleep characterises his ordinary waking state.  Most frustrating of all, he is fatally suggestible.  He has no compass-setting for Truth.  He can and does believe anything, any illusion, and worships all manner of false gods.  He has, therefore, the fullest likelihood of capture by the age in which he lives - even if that age is, like ours, directly destructive of his own interests.  He not does know it.  He is oblivious.

Certainly also, Man is a seeker of ease as much as of power or status.  It is an addiction with him.  That has just one blessing: in unexceptional times he is spared victimhood to great evil.  Life’s thief is more likely to be banality.  However, exceptional times do arise, as we all know, and great evil does sometimes rise up to confront him.  In our time it has invariably flowed from the political desire to make Man forever free, be it by the establishment of the Paris Commune or the Thousand Year Reich or the End of History or some other crime against Man’s imperfectible nature.

In Chinatown’s key confrontation between Nicholson’s PI, Jake Gittes, and John Huston’s murderously corrupt and corrupting Noah Cross it is expressed thus:-

Gittes: How much are you worth?
Cross: I’ve no idea.  How much do you want?
Gittes: I just want to know what you’re worth.  Over ten million?
Cross: Oh my, yes!
Gittes: Why are you doing it?  How much better can you eat?  What can you buy that you can’t already afford?
Cross: The future, Mr. Gits. The future!

As these things go, Cross’s was not a very grand ambition.  Outwardly, of course, he was merely building a happy, shining future for the self-absorbed, ordinary “little people” of Los Angeles – whose number he had expected to include Gittes.  It doesn’t.  Gittes has discovered what he set out to discover, but also that discovery alone changes nothing.  The terrible meaning of the film, at bottom, is that knowledge without power brings only disillusionment.

The terse and beautifully-crafted script was Robert Towne’s.  He based his plot on the 1904 Owens River Valley “Land Grab”.  William Mulholland, head of the newly formed Los Angeles Water Department, and Fred Eaton, mayor of LA, believed that the city had to have more water if it was to grow, and the distant Owens River was their chosen source.

However, the farmers and ranchers in the Owens Valley had their own needs but were dependent upon the completion of a Reclamation Service irrigation project.  To stop the project and take control of access to the water Mulholland and Eaton bribed a local Reclamation Service agent into showing them the plans.  Then they began buying up all the affected land and the water rights in the Valley.

Mulholland also manipulated LA residents by portraying acquisition of the river as being vitally important to the city, when in reality he was using much of the water to irrigate the nearby San Fernando Valley and increase the return on the land investments made there by several of his and Eaton’s friends. The scandal is a perfect portrait of corrupt authority manipulating the public under the pretence of the common good.  Eaton and Mulholland believed that their power placed them and their personal interests above the law.

Well, with that scene-setter in situe I want to turn to the purpose of this post, which is to reply to a question posed by our friend Kubilai on a recent thread.  He wrote:-

I would like to know why was there a global effort started around 1965 to allow immigration of all sorts of Third Worlders.  The pace has significantly picked up over the last 2 decades, however the nidus was around that time.  Why was this done?  Who came up with it?  I am aware of Jew’s involvement in this thing, however does anyone have a “unifying theory” that started back then and has ended up here?

Now, the word “nidus” means a nest or breeding place; a place where something originates, develops or is located.  Kubilai’s question, therefore, is about as fundamental as it gets.  He is looking to discover a root cause for all our woes, right there … there among, say, the rat-activists who left the sinking ship of the American Communist Party for the Democrat Party and for America’s colleges and unions … or there among the mysterious, behind-the-scenes operators who protected Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and company from the moment they arrived on American soil, and secured them influential and undeserved posts in the machinery of government … or there among the ethnically-motivated celluloid moghuls of Hollywood or the money interests of Jewish New York or the vast and secretive empire of the Red Shield.

These and many other sectional interests have, either singly or severally (more often, I think, severally), driven Western Man towards his dispossession.  But it isn’t that simple.  It isn’t enough to narrow one’s eyes and look hard at the margins of one momentous year in American history – even if it is 1965.  What about the rest of the Western world?  What about Britain that started down the racial-egalitarian path to destruction seventeen earlier?  Where’s the common thread?  Do we blame communism and Jewry again?  Or an elitist plot to establish a benign and paternalist One World Government?  Or our inherent, misplaced altruism?  Or the blind forces of economics?  Or the fateful conjunction of global travel and global poverty?

Frankly, when he comes to look upon the whitened face of the victim and contemplate motives and suspects, a Jake Gittes of the 22nd Century political right will be spoilt for choice.  He would be wise to look beyond them all, though.  We do not need a Noah Cross, or even a nidus of Noah Cross’s, for the purpose of answering Kubilai’s question.

Anyway, Robert Towne’s villain was primarily a function of the plot.  He was named after one biblical giant who rode the floodwaters to save himself and thence Man, and the wooden cross upon which another – Man’s saviour, the King of Love - was crucified.  Towne was playing games with us (and mostly water games, at that).  Yes, he made Cross a horribly powerful villain and one terminally beyond the law.  But the character was only filling the spaces available to him in a profoundly corrupt world.  It is Chinatown, where “you don’t always know what’s going on”, that is the real source and the parent of corruption, including Cross’s.  Without Chinatown and its Asiatic indifference in the face of commercial and political rapacity, Cross could not operate … indeed, could not exist.

Ergo, we have to contextualise the workings of organised Jewry, the vain and hate-filled left, the mega-capitalist globalisers and NWO actors and the rest.  All these self-serving, common-good hucksters owe their existence to and act within our endemic Chinatown: the prevailing, corrupt culture of liberalism which supplies our broadest and least examined political assumptions.  Without it our political and racial opponents would be as powerless as a baby.  For, which of them could survive in, never mind profit from, a traditional, conservative political culture granting Western Man his nature and tying him in perpetuity to his soil?

Possibly, the Enlightenment, with its values of reason, progress, equality and liberty, need not have led to the gradual dissolution of Western civilisation, even given the total nature of the triumph of liberal thought that followed industrialisation.  But the ideas of Locke and Spinoza have come down to our time through particularly unkind hands.  The line runs through Rousseau to Marx, Trotski and Gramsci and Marcuse and Adorno, Derrida and so on.  Their analyses of Mind and culture and hegemony are the political orthodoxy, their vision of human freedom the one internalised by the Western Establishment.  It is a vision founded on destruction as the bringer of equality, and equality as the bringer of freedom.

How did it happen that, some time between the late 1950’s and the early 1990’s the milieu became (to use a term unpopular with the modern left but apposite for all that) cultural marxist?  The answer is: the same way that our defences against aliens were removed between 1948 and 1965.  In such a corrupt political culture there is no “stop” in place, no brake on “progressive” thought and those with power, Jew and non-Jew alike - who privilege it.  Every old loyalty - or “prejudice” - must be challenged.  Every new stratagem to humble newly discovered oppressors must be taken up with enthusiasm.  It is a bidding process with “No enemy to the left”, as progressive activists used to say.  Anything that tends to the leftist, deconstructivist goal and interpretation of freedom is deemed good and admitted to the official phalanx of change agents.  Anything that tends to a nationalist or conservative defence of Man’s nature and of blood and soil is bad and excluded.  And since freedom does not, in fact, materialise from even the most determinedly deconstructive efforts, obviously “more” is required.  There is no critical capacity at work.  We are, for example, just now entering upon the age of transsexual rights … it’s got that grim!

One day that 22nd Century Jake Gittes - a really able and committed historian, btw – will dissect the left’s role in the Third World flood.  Smoking guns will be found.  But it doesn’t alter the real dynamic at work here.  It isn’t who did what behind which scenes.  It’s that they could do it.  No brake on them was present.  And so, of course, they did.  And even if for organised Jewry it was not actually about liberalism, for the great majority of political actors – including those of the ideologically dissolute, conventional right – it really was all bundled up in the pursuit of the ultimate modern freedom: the on-going bid to own “The future, Mr Gits.  The future!”