Month: February 2021

Categories
Ethics Identity Politics

The Unbearable Whiteness of Being.

How does one demolish the issue of racism? First of all, by not talking about it. You’re not white, black, red or yellow. You’re a human being. The level of pigmentation of your skin doesn’t matter, and constantly reaffirming your skin colour only sharpens the divide.

That’s what Morgan Freeman thinks. This black actor is tired about the endless debates surrounding race – and so are thousands of his black countrymen who don’t wish to dwell in black victimhood and who are happy to take responsiblity for their own fate instead of incessantly inflicting blame and guilt on others who happen to have a different skin colour.

Unsurpringly, five school principles in New York, the western capital of radical leftism, disagree. They have sent a letter to all Caucasian parents, asking them to reflect on their ‘white identity’, implying that being white is inherently problematic. Included in the letter was a list of seven identities:

1. White supremacist: white person (WP) who values and preserves white supremacy
2. White voyeurism: WP who consumes black culture without the ‘burden of blackness’
3. White privilege: WP who sometimes critiques white supremacy
4. White benefit: WP who sometimes is solidary with people of colour (POC), but not in public
5. White confessional: WP who speaks out against white supremacy, but only to be validated by POC
6. White critical: WP who calls out other white people
7. White traitor: WP who tells ‘the truth’ at whatever cost
8. White abolishionist: WP who actively dismantles ‘whiteness’

Note that ‘white person’ means someone who IDENTIFIES with whiteness. This includes all people of colour who openly claim they do not feel oppressed, like Morgan Freeman and every non-liberal person of colour in America.

So what exactly are those schools trying to teach their students? That all white people are racists? Well, … yes. Our white supremacist society with its deeply engrained institutional discrimination brainwashes white people from the day they’re born into thinking they’re superior. All eventually end up into one of the seven identities. Belonging to category nr. 1 is the worst, and striving to be nr. 7 is the goal. So there is still hope for all you crackers out there: you are ALL oppressors, but there are levels of oppressors, and vertical mobility is an option.

One does not need to be a brilliant psychologist to predict the effect of discriminatory teachings like these. Children will be given a free pass to intimidate, bully and demonise their classmates for their skin colour. Last time I checked, that was called racism.

Instead of truly uniting the country, as he said he would, the new American president fully supports the teaching of critical race theory in schools. This sets a dangerous precedent for the future of one of the least racist countries in the world – in no other dominantly white country did a black man become commander in chief, and in no other dominantly white country did masses of white people roam the streets to chant “Black Lives Matter” together. In America, any person of any colour can become successful. That’s why there are so many succesful black lawyers, doctors, writers, artists, sportsmen, and politicians live there and don’t plan moving out. Those people are not more privileged than others – they had a dream and worked hard enough to make it come true.

Black liberals need to see through the identity politics of the radical left and realise that, once again, they are being used as slaves for a bunch of wealthy, power-hungry politicians who need their votes. Let’s not forget it was the Democrat party who enabled the racist South. And it is the Democrat party perpetuating that racism today, while hypocritically pretending to fight it.

Categories
Fine Arts

The Piano and the Now.

All instruments sound beautiful. But the most beautiful sound emerges from the instrument of the instruments: the grand piano. With its pitch-black lacquered soundboard, snow white keys and the longest strings, she is majestic, imposing, breathtaking. The ultimate pleasure for the eye and the ear.

This heavenly instrument was invented by the Italian harpsichord maker Bartolomeo Francesco di Cristofori around 1700, the year Johan Sebastian Bach turned 15. Unsatisfied by the lack of touch sensitivity of the harpsichord, he replaced the plucking mechanism by little hammers. This wasn’t just an invention – it was a revolution of sound! He called the instrument ‘gravicembalo col piano e forte’, a harpsichord that can play softly and loudly.

To me, the piano is the most exciting instrument of all. It is a percussion and string instrument at the same time. When the pianist’s finger hits the key, three strings are eventually struck by a hammer. While other instruments require multiple fingers (and sometimes lungs or feet) to produce only one sound, the pianist’s ten fingers can produce 10 tones simultaneously. Or 20 tones, when two pianists play a duet on one piano. Just listen to Kahtia Buniatishvili and Yuya Wang, two contemporary piano icons who play Hungarian Dance No. 5 by Brahms on a Steinway & Sons grand piano together. You will be amazed at the tonal richness.

With her wide tonal and dynamic range and her multiple voices, the piano can replace an entire orchestra. Her tremendous touch sensitivity allows to reproduce the whole gamut of human emotion like no other instrument.

Playing the piano brings me into the present moment. Practicing pianistic technique, learning how to play a composition, improvising a melody and giving a recital to an audience are all moments in which I focus on the present. It is now that my eyes read read the score, that my brain deciphers the notation, that my finger hits a key. I feel emotions triggered by a musical story that resounds now, the only moment that really exists.

The past is gone and the future did not yet occur. Both are abstractions in which we human beings dwell often – but true awareness, and consequently happiness, are hidden in the now. The piano is thus not only an object that produces beautiful sounds, but a channel to transcend my perception of the artist into the only moment one should be.

When I watch a painting, I enjoy its beauty, but when I play the piano, I recreate the composer’s creation. By mixing my emotion with the emotion of the initial creator, I give the piece a new, unheard dimension, which I will never be able to replicate in exactly the same way again.

When I play the piano, she and I become one. Her keys become the extensions of my fingers. She becomes the mediator between me and eternity.

Categories
Philosophy

Unmasked Love.

Yesterday N. managed to summarise his philosophy of life in one concise sentence: “chicks and money, that’s what life is all about”. “What about love?” I sputtered indignantly. “Love,” he continued dryly, “is nothing else than a physiological phenomenon that seeks maximum reproduction and thus guarantees the survival of the human race.”

I shudder at hearing such theories, which N. did not work out on his own, but copied from Nietzsche. Nietzsche, father of Western doomsday thinking, who portrays man as a naturally power-hungry being incapable of performing a purely altruistic act. Hearing this makes me unwell.

Is love then a cunning trick of Mother Nature, a functional fake emotion that lures man to bed, horniness in a romantic wrapping? Can love be described merely as a chemical substance that activates the reproductive part of the brain? My whole being protests – love is more than the banality of instinctual copulation! If love could be defined like this, so much love would be spread in the red light district every day.

Nietzsche and N. overlook a number of crucial issues. The wrinkled widower’s love for his four-legged friend. The love of a grateful mother for her adopted Ethiopian orphan. The skier’s love for the power of snow-capped peaks. The violinist’s love for the vibrations emerging from the strings. The fallen officer’s love for his homeland. The mathematician’s love for the rationality of things, the believer’s love for their irrationality. The narcissist’s love for the reflection that stares back at him.

You see, love has many faces and does not always aim for procreation. It is something that transcends physical reality, yet is in the middle of it. It’s a feeling in the soul, a voice in the head. It’s something that can make you tremble with happiness or crunch with bitterness. It’s all-encompassing, but cannot be truly understood. It’s something everyone is looking for and will eventually find. Now, or ever.

Categories
Fine Arts

Wolfgang and I.

Wunderkind Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was my first musical obsession. Ever since I watched Milos Forman’s cinematographic masterpiece Amadeus as a little girl, I have listened to his music… his frivolous, ever-optimistic, genious music that filled the room with the innocent joy one can only feel as a child. I fell in love with it, and with the long-dead persona of this composer, whose music is more alive than ever.

I read several of his biographies and couldn’t help but notice the things we have in common. A high-pitched laugh, for example, and a dextrogyrous, ornamental handwriting. When I visited the Viennan house he and his wife Constanza lived in, I noticed a drawing of his pet attached to the wall. To my bewilderment, the white terrier with brown spots looked exactly like mine. Later, I discovered Mozart had an attention deficit disorder and exhibited motoric tics, just like me. We both looked for the etymological origin of words, and both had our fair share of nocturnal festivities. And just like me, Mozart believed in a divine Creator, as reflected in his name Theophilus, which he latinised into Amadeus, or He Who Loves God.

And then of course, we both adore the instrument of instruments, the piano, although our ways of canalising that love through the keyboard is obviously beyond comparison. I struggle playing the pieces he composed when he was eight. But my infatuation with music, the art of arts, is great nonetheless.

Wolfgang’s Chinese astrology sign was a rat, and so is mine. And because rats, and rat people, love being around each other, I like to believe we were friends in a previous incarnation on Earth, sharing the occasional bottle of fermented grape juice while he was showing off his latest sonata for me, in some nocturnal, candle-lit venue.

Wolfgang had a fragile health and easily fell prey to illness, like me. He had a problematic relationship with his emotionally absent father who he nonetheless loved, and at times, was guilty of a little excessiveness – things that sound very familiar. He despised rules, and quickly verbalised his thoughts in a politically incorrect way, lacking diplomacy and unafraid to offend. Like me.

So Maestro, if we ever meet again in the Hereafter, could I please request one brief moment of your tutorship? Even a selfie will do – you are most probably too busy composing heavenly concertos up there, for a public more appreciative than the current earthlings.
Your genious brought so much happiness into my life. Thank you.

I end this reflection with a phrase the Polish-French romantic mastodon Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin uttered on bis death bed to his friend Franchomme: “Vous jouerez du Mozart en mémoire de moi”.

Categories
Ethics

You Are Not a Lion.

If humans aren’t meant to eat meat, why do animals eat other animals? A question I often get asked. Although the question is bizarre (just replace the word humans by the word butterflies or koalas, and you’ll see why), this would be my answer:

Animals that eat other animals are carnivores that don’t have another choice than to follow their instinct – unlike free-willed humans. The lion instinctively hunts zebras to survive. It can’t peel bananas, nor can its digestive system process them.

As animal activist Gary Yourofsky once explained to a cliché-spewing i24 reporter who taught she pushed him into a corner with the predictable human-lion analogy: “I notice you have clothes on, and that you have a cell phone and a computer. It is unfair to pick one thing that lions do that you want to mimic, when you don’t want to mimic anything else they do. When lions walk up and greet each other, they sniff each other’s ass. When I came in this room, you did not kneel down and sniff my ass. Lions sometimes kill their young when they’re runts. If human beings killed their baby because they didn’t want him, we would arrest them and charge them with murder. Could you go to a courtroom and say “Hey but, your honour, lions kill their babies”?

The point is clear: you’re not a lion. You’re a herbivore – albeit a self-denying one. Our physiology, anatomy and even psychology clearly demonstrate this. There is no child in the world that would not be traumatised by the sight of slaughter. Unlike the lion, eating animal protein makes you ill. Sciencists have associated it with digestive and reproductive cancers, dementia, MS, and multiple other pathologies. If a species is carnivorous, all members are, without exception. There are no vegan lions, but there are millions of vegan, thriving humans.

If you are interested in more proofs that humans shoudn’t eat like lions, and aren’t afraid to have your deeply engrained beliefs challenged, I recommend watching ‘What The Health’ and ‘The Game Changers’, both oh which are available on Netflix.

Categories
Identity Politics

Faux Feminism.

I’m not fond of western social justice warriors, because they fight for causes that have long been accomplished. Black Lives started mattering a long time ago, when the Republican Party voted against the enslavement of black people.

If institutional racism was real, the highest office in America would’ve never been held by a black man for two consecutive terms. True racists would simply not have allowed that. In fact, America is the least racist country in the world. True SJW’s like Martin Luther King paved the way for that accomplishment. And black people who dare say they don’t feel oppressed, are silenced by the mainstream media.

Other warriors whose struggle is long overdue, are feminists. If women are truly oppressed in the west, they wouldn’t have the right to vote, obtain university degrees, open a banc account without their husband’s permission, and divorce him whenever she pleases.

“Woman is the Nigger of the World” – John Lennon lyrics that inspired the original feminists, who fought for rights that were factually denied to them. Breaking free from their second-rate role as cherry pie baking housewives, be financially independent, and have their voices heard was their goal – a goal they attained with great succes.

Western contemporary feminists are not feminists, but females who blame males for everything that’s dysfunctional in their lives. If you’re a feminist in Saudi Arabia and fight for your right to leave your house without a male companion, I salute you. If you live in Manhattan, brunch with the girls after an overpriced bikram yoga class and scapegoat people for having a penis, I urge you to self-reflect.

While you cry about imaginary wage gaps, women on the other side of the globe get acid thrown in their faces for wearing nail polish, get their clitoris cut off without sedation, and are forced to marry men who could be their grandfather. So, if you really care about oppressed women, please protest in front of the embassies of Yemen, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and the dozens of other countries where women are systemically and brutally oppressed.

Or go vegan, as veganism is the only true social justice war that needs to be waged in the west today, and the only credible form of feminism. The milk you poor on your kid’s cereal in the morning, comes from a female cow who was raped by a farmer who injected bull sperm into her vagina. That cow needs to be pregnant and deliver a calve to be able to lactate. Only then can humans attach machines to her udders and steal their milk. When her newborn is taken away from her, she cries for weeks.

A chicken is obliged to stand in her own feces in tiny cages that cut her feet. The pain and the smell of ammonia make her lose her mind, so she attacks other chickens.

A farmed female sturgeon is cut open alive for her black eggs and thrown back into the water, so socialites who call themselves feminists can stuff their mouth with caviar on parties where they discuss how horrible men are.

True feminism is about compassion for the females – human and animal females – that are denied all the rights. The right to a life without suffering, and the right to their own pursuit of happiness. These are not rights we should give them, but birthrights we have taken from them. They are the birthrights of all females.


And revolting against that, is what I call true feminism.

Categories
Identity Politics

The Pathology of Pride.

It is typical of millennials to say they are proud of an identity they didn’t do anything for. 

I’m proud to be Sicilian. 

I’m proud to be a woman. 

I’m proud to be a ginger. 

I’m proud to be gay. 

I’m proud of my big ass.

We all left our mother’s womb in a certain country, with certain genitalia, a certain hair color, certain bodily proportions and a tendency to like the same sex, the opposite sex, both sexes, or no sex at all. These characteristics are an expression of ancestral chromosome combinations endowed upon us – they are not achievements we worked hard for. We didn’t need to acquire any knowledge or savoir faire to receive them. Therefore, being a blonde Norwegian lesbian with freckles is not worthy of pride any more than being an asexual albino from China. 

This addiction of being proud for no valid reason is, along with pathological positivity and the ubiquitous political correctness, a quickly emerging psychological disorder of the new generation. These youth, who overwhelmingly adapt neo-Marxist thought patterns they hear in universities and on social media platforms, fall right into the trap of the divisive identity politics of the radical left. They don’t have liberties to fight for. They can vote, travel, study, and pursue happiness like never before in the history of mankind. The common enemies – men, nazis, capitalists, heterosexuals – have been defeated. So, they created a new one:

The white, western, heterosexual, healthy, successful, intelligent male.  

(Imagine claiming you’re proud of having that identity. You would likely risk social isolation and accusations of racism, misogynism, elitarianism, and other  -isms that now escape my mind.) 

They love ugliness instead of beauty and admire stupidity instead of intelligence. They despise symmetry, harmony and refinement, and worship ostentatiousness, insolence, and vulgarity. Their egos crave being caressed for having no talent. Individuals who do have talent and a remarkable mind have better occupations than to emphasize immutable parts of their identity and to venerate their reflection in the water, like the mythological hunter Narcissus. He drowned.  

I rarely hear people say,

I’m proud to be serving meals to the homeless in my free time, or

I’m proud to volunteer at an animal sanctuary on Sundays, or

I’m proud to have donated a thousand euros to an orphanage last month, or

I’m proud to have practiced four hours of violin every day for a decade and play Paganini like a virtuoso. 

That’s because those who actually do something to be proud of, give authenticity and meaning to their existence. They find joy in doing just that, without the need to prostitute themselves for likes of other proud people, popping up on their smartphone screens. 

Pride is an ugly thing – but if you want to be proud, you have to at least accomplish something. Being born the way you are is just too bloody easy. 

Categories
Ethics

You finally found me.

I am delighted you showed up. People who read are a rarity in this postmodern era, so your presence here is applauded.

I am Alexandra, also known among many by the anagram Xela. Etymologically, my name means ‘warrior against mankind’, and in a way, it defines me. I do wage a proverbial war against the status quo, the weapon I use is my inked feather (aka Macbook keyboard), and my battlefield is the worldwide web.

Writing is what I love doing most (besides playing the piano) and also what I do best. Subiteanous bursts of inspiration make words flow out of my pen. I used to publish my writings solely on social media, until a reader urged me to boost my lectorate and start a blog.

So here they are: my reflections about multiple issues faced by humanity in this new, post-pandemic world. I write about a myriad of subjects, including politics, the arts, theophilosophy, etymology, medicine, the environment, literature, and animal rights.

English is not my native language – Dutch and French are. But because of its beauty, richness, and international character, it is my language of choice to verbalise my thoughts.

Be welcome. Thoughtful comments are much appreciated.