Last week, I had the great pleasure of hosting Gerald Therrien who delivered an incredible lecture called ‘The Chronicles of Novgorod’.
This Sunday December 29 at 2pm ET, Dr. Quan Le will carry this story forward with a presentation on the early years of Russia, the formation of Russia’s intelligentsia and also the relationship between Kieven Rus and other cultural groups in Asia, Southwest Asia and Europe.
Quan writes: “In this presentation, I will integrate their princely & imperial adventure within the Eurasian framework under the overarching idea of Statecraft as the dialogue between an aristocratic oligarchy and the people ruled by them. I will also address one element related to the Tang dynasty (618-907) having a link with the Carolingians.”
So click on the zoom link below on December 29 at 2pm ET to participate in the live presentation:...
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For those who find themselves with excess time this holiday season which they would prefer not to squander with idleness or Netflix binges, then I’d like to offer this serving of Frank Capra films to uplift the soul.
Frank Capra (1897-1991) stands as one of the most brilliant directors/producers of the 20th Century, and sadly also one of the least understood- known at best for the film It’s a Wonderful Life played every year as a Christmas tradition, or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
Frank Capra
Unbeknownst to even many film connoisseurs today, Capra was not only a pre-eminent cultural warrior who took every opportunity to expose fascist movements during the 1930’s and 1940’s but also fought to provide a positive principled understanding of the divinity mankind’s higher nature in all his works. When asked to put into words what motivated him to create movies he said:
“My films must let every man, woman, and child know that God loves them, that I love them, and that peace and salvation will become a reality only when they all learn to love each other”
During World War II, Capra’s Why We Fight series was one of the most important educational tools used to shape the hearts and minds of the American population towards the strategic nature and purpose of the war against the fascist machine which had received much of its support from financiers in the Anglo-American establishment. In America, these groups were masquerading as “patriots” under the American Liberty League promoting America’s neutrality in that conflict. It was an open secret that these groups preferred to let Hitler and Mussolini usher in a new order which they saw as a wonderful opportunity to rule the world, and it was to these groups that FDR declared famously “they who seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order”. The President knew of what he spoke as he had declared open war on these American fascists from 1932 onward.
Capra not only struggled to revive Roosevelt’s mission to end poverty, hunger and war after the war ended, but also struggled against the CIA-run Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) which was created in 1949 to shape the new era of art, music and cinema in the post war age as weapons against communism. The CCF had spared no time in purging Hollywood of all “FDR patriots” under the FBI-steered witch hunt known as Mcarthyism on the one hand while promoting a new culture of banality on the other pouring millions of dollars into mind deadening film scripts conducive to an age of white collar consumerism. This CIA/CCF agenda was recognized by only a few leading film directors as a spiritual virus that had to be stopped at all costs.
Other film makers at the time that stood against this corruption included Robert Kennedy’s close friend John Frankenheimer (7 Days in May, The Manchurian Candidate), and Stanley Kramer, whose film Judgement at Nuremberg (1961) still stands alone as one of the most potent artistic exposures of the western support for eugenics and fascism.
Frankenheimer’s 7 Days in May (1964) showcased the real-life planned coup to overthrow JFK which had been arranged by the Military’s Joint Chiefs under the helm of Anglophile General Lyman Lemnitzer in 1962 after Kennedy rejected the General’s plans for Operations Northwoods.
Capra’s approach to combating this virus during the years of Cold War terror took a different path to that chosen by Frankenheimer and Kramer. Rather than exposing the rot directly, Capra focused on uplifting the image of mankind by channeling all his efforts on science documentaries for children which he felt would have the most long term benefit to humanity.
Capra had been a target of the House on Un-American Activities due to his friendship with many blacklisted film makers, and watched as Hollywood was purged of those key individuals who acted as it’s conscience when Hollwood’s role as a tool of patriotism or fascism was still undetermined. Just as the political world was being re-shaped to a new post-moral world order, so too was Hollywood, and as historian Micheal Medved stated, “Capra refused to adjust to the cynicism of the new order.”
Capra’s documentary The Strange Case of Cosmic Rays illustrates his powerful technique that sought to unite science and art through a reverence for God’s creation which is in many ways as cutting edge today as it was 60 years ago.
Capra’s Greatest Films for this Holiday Season
After watching the brilliant It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) which not only exposed the crushing schemes of Wall Street financiers who sought to ruin local productive businesses/commercial banks but also awoke a higher sentiment of transformative love in the hearts of the audience, I would highly recommend watching his lesser known, yet equally powerful pieces You Can’t Take it With You (1938), Meet John Doe (1941) and State of the Union (1949) . Taken alongsideMr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), these films act as incredible Schillerian masterpieces which express the best potential for the moral use of cinema as a tool to both spiritually and politically ennoble a nation’s citizenry.
Capra dedicated himself to John F. Kennedy’s challenge to embark upon a new age of “open-system” collaboration around un-ending discoveries in space, producing his last film “Rendez-vous in Space” in 1964. Spliced with Beethoven’s 9th Symphony which set Schiller’s immortal poem Ode to Joy to music celebrating humanity’s eventual emergence into an age of reason, Capra had his narrator end with the powerful words: “The Sun still lights up and gives life to our planet, but only the mind of man can light up, and give meaning to the light of the universe.”
Even though darkness clouds the path to that better future towards which world citizens like Frank Capra dedicated their lives, the light that they knew was there is getting stronger by the day. So take the time to welcome the year 2022 by adding some spiritual kindling onto your flame and let Capra’s intention come alive again.
Happy Holidays to all.
The Rising Tide Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Montreal, Canada, focused on facilitating greater bridges between east and west while also providing a service that includes geopolitical analysis, research in the arts, philosophy, sciences and history. Consider supporting our work by subscribing to our substack page and Telegram channel at t.me/RisingTideFoundation.
Rising Tide FoundationDec 25 · Rising Tide Foundation
A great poet once said that you can judge a nation by how it honors (or fails to honor) its artists. In many ways, the soul of a nation is entirely shaped by the artists which that society has produced.
A great poet once said that you can judge a nation by how it honors (or fails to honor) its artists. In many ways, the soul of a nation is entirely shaped by the artists which that society has produced. This makes perfectly good sense, as an artist is able to portray the better ideals which that society yearns to become and can convey concepts on a nearly subconscious level that may either uplift our self conception to the divine or inversely inflame our basest passions. An artist can also awaken truthful moral lessons and temper raw emotions of a people which mere lecturing/moralising could never accomplish.
In America, an artist arose in the 20th century whose passion, moral integrity and technical genius shaped and ennobled the hearts and minds of generations, and while this painter is loved in America, his works are often shrugged off as naive and sentimental devotions to a happier world that neither ever was nor could ever be. It is in the hopes of lifting this ignorant veil that the Rising Tide Foundation would like to present the life and work of Norman Rockwell (1894-1978).
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Born in New York in 1894, Norman Rockwell was inspired by the contemporary illustrations of Joseph Leyendecker and Howard Chandler Christie and especially the Dutch school of Vermeer and Rembrandt. After graduating from the National Academy of Design and Art Students’ League, Rockwell began illustrating children’s’ books and magazine covers for Boy Scouts of America. From an early age, Rockwell aspired to revive the renaissance tradition of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Raphael and DaVinci whose reproductions were always displayed across the walls of his studios as inspiration.
Serving in WWI as an artist, Norman returned to civilian life producing works for various magazines until he eventually found himself painting regularly for the Saturday Evening Post which established his role as the painter of America’s soul for the next five decades. With a passion for capturing universal sentiments even in the microcosm of life, Rockwell found himself pioneering the domain of storytelling by transforming the “fixed” medium of painting into a medium for storytelling.
This focus on painting “outside of the canvas” so to speak set Rockwell apart from all of his contemporaries who were far too fixated on sensual imagery of commercial art or random emotional tones prevalent in the newly emerging abstract art world. Describing his feelings about the schism between “illustration” and “fine art”, Rockwell had this to say:
“No man with a conscience can just bat out illustrations. He’s got to put all of his talent, all of his feeling into them. If illustration is not considered art, then that is something that we have brought upon ourselves by not considering ourselves artists. I believe that we should say, “I am not just an illustrator, I am an artist.”
The following gallery showcases samples of his works from his first Post cover in 1916 throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
During the course of WWII, Rockwell became passionately inspired by Franklin Roosevelt’s anti-colonial program for the post-war world enunciated in his Four Freedoms speech of 1941 (and which was later embedded into the Atlantic Charter and United Nations). Rockwell had lost many nights sleep trying desperately to conceptualize how such abstract ideas as freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom of speech and freedom of worship could be expressed visually on canvas.
Rockwell’s Four Freedoms masterpieces were run on the covers of four consecutive Saturday Evening Posts along with accompanying essays. When the paintings were showcased across America as part of a Victory Bonds campaign, Rockwell was overjoyed to learn that they had inspired citizens to invest over $130 million of war bonds (the equivalent of $2 billion in today’s dollars). These paintings were a major watershed for Rockwell’s personal evolution, as the artist had been searching for three decades in vain to find a higher meaning towards which his art could be devoted. FDR’s moral vision provided that higher meaning for the first time and the this flame came back repeatedly and with increasing intensity for the rest of his life.
Other famous WWII Rockwell paintings celebrated the role of women who broke all prejudices and expectations by filling the role conventionally held by men in the workforce. Most famous among these paintings are Rosie the Riveter and Liberty Girl both painted in 1943. Rosie the Riveter was directly modeled off of Michelangelo’s Prophet Isaiah on the Sistine Chapel.
It is interesting to note that not a single cover featured during the war years glorified militarization or violence but rather emphasized profoundly human moral sentiments, and layered stories that conveyed hope, somberness and beauty in the face of the ugliness and tragedy of war.
After the war, Rockwell continued to paint regularly for the Post, but gained a new power of moral patriotism which began animating his works. Throughout 1945-1959, many of Rockwell’s greatest pieces which destroyed the artificial barrier separating the worlds of “commercial illustration” and fine arts were accomplished. Paintings such as Shuffleton’s Barbershop (1951) and Saying Grace (1950) represented powerful works which the staunchest art critic would be hard pressed to distinguish from the greatest paintings of the Dutch Renaissance.
Describing his own admiration of Rembrandt as the ultimate ideal, Rockwell said:
“To me a Rembrandt painting, any of his paintings, they are like a beautiful symphony. They have these great deep notes. He understood humanity. He’s just the greatest.”
Other paintings of the 1945-1960 period are worth exploring for the maturation of technique and also subtlety of emotional tones, and irony which he excelled at expressing. Also of note, is that with the mysterious fire which destroyed Rockwell’s studio in 1944 (including ALL of his paintings and thousands of costumes and props collected over a lifetime), the artist chose not to wallow in tragedy but saw the disaster as an opportunity to become unshackled by the past. After the fire, Rockwell became more than a painter of quaint scenes or costume pieces and now adopted a more dynamic documentary style, perspectives and action. Many of following 1945-1960 selected pieces illustrate that change remarkably.
Rockwell did not hesitate to take a swipe at the Modernist movement that had taken over the “fine arts” world by this period with his famous ‘painting within a painting’ called The Connoisseur (1962). In this hilarious painting, an anonymous art connoisseur closely inspects a large modern painting executed in the style of “scatterist” Jackson Pollock. In this piece even art critics had to not only admit that Rockwell had perfectly executed Pollock’s style, but also that his method was of an untouchably higher power, as it gave him the capacity to replicate Pollock (but Pollock never had the capacity to replicate Rockwell.) In fact, when American abstract artist Willem de Kooning saw this for the first time in 1968, he said: “Square inch by square inch, it’s better than Jackson!”
By and large, 1960 was ushered in by both a personal tragedy with the death of his wife Mary in 1959, but also a hopeful transformation of the moral-political order dreamed of by President Roosevelt years earlier as a young President Kennedy arose to power. This new era of cautious optimism and peace was expressed by Rockwell’s powerful painting “The Golden Rule” of 1960.
Rockwell was a firm believer in Kennedy’s dream for America and was uplifted by JFK’s Peace Corps which inspired powerful artistic homilies both before and after Kennedy’s murder.
Under the dark clouds of the Cold War and mutually assured destruction, Kennedy challenged Americans to think what they could do for their country and inspired a powerful optimism that made young and old alike believe that hope for a better future was possible. But with the leader’s death on November 23, 1963, Rockwell took on for the first time the uglier side of America which his previous efforts had always avoided.
This break from portraying the purely optimistic America of his ideals took the form of a January 14, 1964 painting commissioned for Look Magazine entitled The Problem We All Live With featuring a young Ruby Bridges being escorted by four state marshals into a desegregated New Orleans elementary school in front of jeering tomato tossing crowds. This painting was complemented by Rockwell’s two other famous works which directly challenged the race problem in America with Murder in Mississippi (1965) and New Kids in the Neighborhood in 1967.
With the wave of assassinations of the 1960s, coinciding with the new war in Vietnam, Rockwell spoke to the inner moral anger and demands for truth felt deeply by the American people with his lesser known 1968 masterpiece “The Right to Know” published in Look Magazine featuring citizens of all ages (including Rockwell himself) looking powerfully upon the viewer, who is identified behind the desk of an anonymous elected official. The soulfull faces deeply troubled in this painting demanding their ultimate right to not be deceived could be seen as the fifth painting of Roosevelt’s Freedom series executed 25 years earlier. By the time Rockwell painted this piece, Americans had watched the murder and cover-up of John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bobby Kennedy. Meanwhile in Vietnam, 16 000 American soldiers had already perished.
The text accompanying The Right to Know reads: “We are the governed, but we govern too. Assume our love of country, for it is only the simplest of self-love. Worry little about our strength, for we have our history to show for it. And because we are strong, there are others who have hope. But watch closely from now on, for those of us who stand here mean to watch those we put in the seats of power. And listen to us, you who lead, for we are listening harder for the truth that you have not always offered us. Your voice must be ours, and ours speaks of cities that are not safe, and of wars we do not want, of poor in a land of plenty, and of a world that will not take the shape our arms would give it. We are not fierce, and the truth will not frighten us. Trust us, for we have given you our trust. We are the governed, remember, but we govern too.”
Although he had put his heart and soul into using his art towards victory in WWII, Rockwell took a stand against the irrational wars of empire that overtook America, turning down a lucrative offer to paint a U.S. Marine recruitment poster in 1966 saying “I just can’t paint a picture unless I have my heart in it.”
Rockwell recognized the absurdity of the Cold War logic of Mutually Assured Destruction and worked to remind Americans that Russians were just as human with hopes, emotions and children… a fact too often forgotten by traumatized America overfed by anti-communist propaganda. Rockwell was not only a founding member of the National Council of American Soviet Friendship in 1945, but happily took the opportunity to travel to Moscow in 1967 where he humanized the Russian people in his painting of “A School Room in Russia” published in Look Magazine in October 1967.
Rockwell won the ire of many western academics and art critics who had drank the CIA-funded kool aid which claimed that the “art of democracy and capitalism” was embodied in Abstract modernism while only communists and totalitarians believed in realism or purposefulness in art. Standing against the hegemony of abstraction Rockwell stated his preference for Russian aesthetics:
“I’m like the Russian artists. I believe in things… Our modern art is to a great extent decadent. But they communicate an idealism. Their art has a constructive viewpoint. At least in terms of their own country. Doesn’t the picture of a healthy woman worker do more good than a picture of a woman all broken into pieces or the disordered mind of the artist?”
Focusing much of his energy into the ideals of brotherhood and cooperation, Rockwell recognized that the means of actualizing that goal was made possible through the mission set forth by John F. Kennedy who challenged America to go to the Moon and beyond in his famous 1962 speech at Rice University. To this end, Rockwell’s NASA commissions are an immortal contribution to space art as the opening up of a new school of painting echoing the earlier Hudson River School that had found its artistic inspiration in the principle of Manifest Destiny beyond the horizons in the 19th century.
Today our society has been given yet another opportunity to take hold of the dream for an age of brotherhood, cooperation and space exploration which John F. Kennedy envisioned. Artists across the world have no choice but to confront that new possibility of an optimistic future and after confronting it, either find inspiration from it’s existence, or continue to adhere to the cynical, mis-anthropic view of humankind which the Cold War and CIA-funded abstract art created in the post WWII era.
Whether or not artists choose to acknowledge this reality does not change the objective fact that each of us has been endowed with certain creative powers and also the moral responsibility to use those powers for the good of ourselves, our nation and all of humankind- as Rockwell understood all too well.
The Rising Tide Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Montreal, Canada, focused on facilitating greater bridges between east and west while also providing a service that includes geopolitical analysis, research in the arts, philosophy, sciences and history. Consider supporting our work by subscribing to our substack page and Telegram channel at t.me/RisingTideFoundation.
