The Occidental Observer Blog

Kevin MacDonald: Any doubt about the real attitudes within Israel toward peace have been removed with the announcement of housing starts in East Jerusalem timed to coincide with Vice-President Joe Biden’s visit. For that, we should be thankful to Eli Yishai, the Israeli Minister of Internal Affairs, who, by most accounts is responsible for the timing of the announcement. As Gideon Levy noted in Haaretz, “the timing, which everyone is complaining about, was brilliant. It was exactly the time to call a spade a spade. As always, we need Yishai (and occasionally [Foreign Minister] Avigdor Lieberman) to expose our true face, without the mask and lies, and play the enfant terrible who shouts that the emperor has no clothes.”

Rather than the 1600 units that were announced originally, now we learn that there are 50,000 housing units planned for Jerusalem in various stages of the approval and construction process. And the “settlement freeze” turns out to be at best a slowing down. Even the settlers aren’t complaining about the policy any more because they are basically getting what they want.

So Yishai’s announcement saves everyone lots of time. The “proximity talks” will now be called off — a blessing because otherwise there would have been another charade of talking while construction continues. We would have had to hear endless hyping of the talks in the media and from governments. In the end, they would collapse anyway, and the US media would treat us to nuanced and articulate op-eds by Israel’s fifth column.

Because the problem is that the Israelis want the land — all of it. They want all of Jerusalem and they want the West Bank (for starters), and there is nothing to stop the slow motion, grinding process by which they are getting it. As a result, there really is nothing to negotiate. Negotiations are simply ways to entertain people who read newspapers and watch television and make them think something is really happening. Or might possibly be happening way off  in the future.

The Obama Administration is doubtless rather unhappy with what happened, but its acolytes in Congress will certainly not allow settlements and construction to stand in the way of total support for Israel. As noted here, perhaps the only potentially serious consequence is that the Obama Administration will be more reluctant to take the initiative in promoting Israel’s project of destroying Iran. That’s all to the good, but it won’t change the US’s bedrock fealty to Israel.

Nevertheless, like the horrific Gaza invasion, there will also be effects on perceptions of Israel. Despite increasingly desperate attempts at image management, it becomes even less possible (if that is conceivable) to argue that the Palestinians are the main impediment to peace. Slowly but surely people are getting the message that Israel is an aggressive, expansionist ethnostate committed to apartheid and fewer rights for Israeli Arabs, with a long term goal of ethnic cleansing. It is able to be all this while maintaining US fealty even as it sticks yet another finger in its eye.

Ultimately the behavior of Israel will also affect perceptions of Jews in the US and other Western countries. How long can the various positive narratives about Jews that have been so common in the West, especially since World War II, survive? The narratives of Jews as passive victims suffering at the hands of brutal and irrational enemies throughout history, of Judaism as representing a unique moral vision for all of humanity, of Judaism as a light unto the nations. People are increasingly realizing that there is a complete disconnect between these images and the actual behavior of Jews when they have power. The image of Israelis carrying out ethnic cleansing will be seen as far more congruent with the image of Jewish Bolsheviks engaged in political oppression and mass murder than with the self-images that Jews have managed establish for themselves throughout the West.

So the good news from all of this is that Israel is gradually revealing itself for what it really is — a very telling commentary on the real nature of Jews and Judaism that is supported to the hilt by the organized Jewish community throughout the Diaspora. The sooner people get that message, the sooner there will be real change away from the transformational public policy changes that have been so successfully advocated by Jewish activist organizations in the last 50 years in the West. All of these changes relied on a moral vision — the moral imperative of mass immigration, the moral superiority of multiculturalism, and especially the moral illegitimacy of White identity and interests. The Jewish community has been the most powerful voice preaching this vision, but it has no moral standing at all. Truly, the emperor truly has no clothes.

Kevin MacDonald:Someone sent me this quote from an article by Tim Wise, “Anti-Semitism, Real and Imagined: Judaism, Zionism and the Struggle for Palestine.”

Zionism’s problem is not that it is Jewish nationalism, per se, but rather a form of ethnic supremacy. And more than that: a form of European supremacy to boot. After all, there were Jews who had remained in and around Palestine for millennia, without substantial conflict withtheir Arab and Muslim neighbors. Likewise, many Jews lived under Muslim rule in the Ottoman Empire, where they received a generally warm or at least neutral reception–far better indeed than at the hands of Christian Europe, which expelled them from one place after another.

These Jews, unlike the European Jews who sought to displace said Arabs from their land, lived there peacefully and sought no grand designs for “Greater Israel.” They did not create Zionism, nor lead the charge for the development of a Jewish state. For that, it took a decidedly Western, European and frankly white Jewish community. The Jews who were most indigenous to the land of Israel, or those of Africa, or the rest of Asia Minor — in short those who were most directly Semitic language group peoples — were never the problem. Nor indeed was their faith. A decidedly colonial mentality, itself an outgrowth of European thought and culture from the late 1800s forward, was the fuel for the Zionist fire. Zionism’s problem is that it is a form of white supremacy and Western domination.

In short, Zionism as just another form of White evil. This certainly establishes Wise’s bona fides as an anti-Zionist Jew, but I am still suspicious that his attitudes are just another form of anti-White strategizing among Diaspora Jews. Self-deception?

It is certainly true that Zionism was the creation of European Jews and that at its beginnings it was closely tied intellectually to European racial nationalism. As I noted in Ch. 5 of Separation and Its Discontents:

Important Jewish intellectuals [in the late 19th century and well into the 20th century] developed Volkischeideologies as well as racialist, exclusivist views, which, like those of their adversaries, were no longer phrased in religious terms but rather in [the] … language of evolutionary biology. These intellectuals had a very clear conception of themselves as racially distinct and as a superior race (intellectually and especially morally), one that had a redemptive mission to the German people and other gentiles. As expected by social identity theory, while the Germans tended to emphasize negative traits of the Jewish outgroup, the Jewish intellectuals often conceptualized their continued separatism in moral and altruistic terms.

The result was that anti-Semites and zealous Jews, including Zionists, often had very similar racialist, nationalist views of Judaism toward the end of the 19th century and thereafter (Katz 1986b, 144). Zionism and anti-Semitism were mirror-images: “in the course of their histories up to the present day it has looked as if they might not only be reacting to one another but be capable of evolving identical objectives and even cooperating in their realization” (Katz 1979, 51). Nicosia (1985) provides a long list of German intellectuals and anti-Semitic leaders from the early 19th century through the Weimar period who accepted Zionism as a possible solution to the Jewish question in Germany, including Johann Gottleib Fichte, Konstantin Frantz, Wilhelm Marr, Adolf Stoecker. All conceptualized Judaism as a nation apart and as a separate “race.”

What had changed for Jews was not the reality that they were a closed racial and national group. The charge that Jews were a state within a state was common among Enlightenment intellectuals. What had changed was that the (temporary) triumph of Darwinism had changed the language of racial separatism so that Jews were no longer seen as a religious state within a state but as a racially exclusive strategizing group often in competition with the ethnic majority. Zionism then became a logical solution to the problem of chronic conflict between Jews and non-Jews. Jews would simply leave Europe. Indeed, Zionists cooperated with the National Socialist government in the 1930s to get Jews out of Germany to Palestine.

This strand of racial Zionism continues as a prominent ideology within Israel, particularly with the intellectual descendants of Vladimir Jabotinsky. And, as Geoffrey Wheatcroft has pointed out, at the present time Israel “is governed by [Jabotinsky’s] conscious heirs.”

The problem isn’t ethnic nationalism, and ethnic nationalism is certainly not restricted to White people. Ethnic conflict is apparent as well throughout the developing world, and will likely lead to more partitioning and nation-creation. As Jerry Z. Mullerhas noted, ethnostates are the norm, and “In areas where that separation has not yet occurred, politics is apt to remain ugly.” Ethnostates have a number of advantages besides the lack of chronic ethnically based conflict over everything from political power to affirmative action. As noted by Frank Salter, because of closer ties of kinship and culture, ethnically homogeneous societies are more likely to be open to redistributive policies such as social welfare and health care.  Sociologists such as Robert Putnam have also shown that ethnic homogeneity is associated with greater trust of others and greater political participation.

The problem is that Western societies have embarked on a public policy project in which the ethnonationalism of White people is officially proscribed as an unadulterated evil.  Everyone else’s ethnonationalism is just fine. And at the risk of repeating myself, the organized Jewish community has adopted a strategy of rationalizing and promoting even extreme forms of racial Zionism in Israel while being a pillar of multiculturalism and massive non-White immigration in the West. What’s good for the Jews and all that.

Kevin MacDonald: Mark Green’s current TOO article “My Smackdown with Anti-White Crusader Tim Wise” is a must read. The article is an email exchange between Green, the editor of Persecution Privilege And Power, and the notorious Tim Wise who makes a living laying guilt trips on Whites about how privileged they are. Wise turns out to be Jewish (Why am I always the last to find out?). The interesting thing then is how Wise deals with the fact that he has directed all his energies against White “racism” in America and against apartheid South Africa while pretty much avoiding the issue of Jewish ethnocentrism and apartheid in Israel.

Wise is typical of the vast majority of American Jews. 83% voted for Obama, and the Jewish community is a pillar of multiculturalism in America. At the same time the Jewish community strongly supports Israel even though it has become dominated by racial Zionists and religious fundamentalists dedicated to Israeli expansion and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

I think that Wise is better than most Jews in trying to be intellectually consistent. He desperately wants to feel like a good guy, but there’s a huge blind spot. When I brought these issues up on faculty email battles at CSU-Long Beach in responding to morally superior Jewish professors who accused me of racism, the response was a mild version of Wise’s — something like “I oppose some of Israel’s actions” — and then immediately go back to attacking me. They didn’t feel any need to oppose Israeli racism with the same energy and intensity as they oppose any manifestation of White ethnocentrism. And yet as members of the Jewish community they certainly bear a huge burden of responsibility for Israel’s actions, since US support for Israel continues to be critical to its ability to create an apartheid state and oppress the Palestinians.

As Green’s article makes clear, the only consistency is “What’s good for the Jews.” Wise and other Jewish leftists are consistently pursuing their ethnic interests — opposition to the White majority in the US motivated by fear, loathing, and a desire for power, while supporting at least implicitly the aggressively ethnonationalist state of Israel. Hard-nosed, aggressive ethnic politics all around. But Tim Wise will be the absolutely last person to see his own actions as the height of ethnocentrism.

Kevin MacDonald: Forward columnist J. J. Goldberg is distinguished among Jewish writers for acknowledging that yes, Jews are indeed powerful. The basic message of his 1996 book, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment,  was that American Judaism is well organized and lavishly funded. It has achieved a great deal of power, and it has been successful in achieving its interests.

Goldberg’s book is a good rejoinder to those who claim that the Jewish community is hopelessly divided on all issues and therefore doesn’t have any net effect on public policy. His book acknowledged that in fact there is a great deal of consensus on broad Jewish issues, particularly in the areas of Israel and the welfare of other foreign Jewries, immigration and refugee policy, church-state separation, abortion rights, and civil liberties. As I noted in CofC, the massive changes in public policy on these issues beginning with the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s coincide with the period of increasing Jewish power and influence in the United States.

Goldberg tackled Jewish power again in a recent Forward column, “Purim’s Lessons About Diaspora Power.” Again the point is that Jews are certainly not the weak, beset group typically presented by activist organizations like the ADL. He notes that since WWII, Jewish power increased while the enemies of Jews “declined in numbers and influence.” However, he sees a fundamental change:

Today, quite unexpectedly, we’re back where we started. Diaspora Jews still have resources to protect their interests and values, as they’ve had since World War II. But Jewish communities also face mounting threats from real enemies once again, thanks to the combined effects of the September 11 attacks, the Al-Aqsa Intifada and the Iraq War. Anti-Israel and anti-Jewish activists and ideologues have taken to claiming with unaccustomed boldness that organized Jewry controls and undermines whole governments and industries. Israel’s sworn enemies are broadening their focus and taking aim — with words and sometimes with bombs — at Israel’s closest overseas ally, the Jewish community. Perhaps most important, verbal attacks on organized American Jewish activity are no longer taboo. Diaspora Jewry hasn’t lost legitimacy, but its enemies have regained theirs.

Israel and Diaspora Jewish communities are indeed being criticized as never before. Right now, there is Israeli Apartheid Week aimed at boycotts, demonstrations, and divestment from Israel.  At this point, you would  have to be living under a rock to be unaware of the iron grip that the Israel Lobby has on US foreign policy and at its role in fomenting the Iraq war.

I would also  like to think that people are becoming more willing to openly and honestly discuss Jewish influence in the other areas mentioned in Goldberg’s 1996 book, especially on immigration policy and other areas related to multiculturalism. That is certainly what we at TOO are trying to do.

Goldberg makes two remarkable recommendations:

First, remember that [in the Purim story] Haman plotted to destroy the Jews because Mordecai insulted him. Sometimes your enemies hate you because of something you did, not just who you are. Sometimes a small concession now can save a lot of grief later.

Wouldn’t it be great if people like Abe Foxman, Heidi Beirich, and Mark Potok took that to heart? — that some criticisms of Jews are not just “canards” based on ancient prejudices but reflect real conflicts of interest in the contemporary world. But of course, it’s unrealistic. The organized Jewish community cannot acknowledge Jewish involvement in promoting the Iraq war any more than it can acknowledge its role in promoting and financing immigration and multiculturalism into Western societies. The changes unleashed by Jewish influence in America have been profound–literally transformational. Taking any responsibility would be dangerous indeed for Jews, especially as we see that American politics is increasing defined by racial identity.

Further, especially in Israel, Jewish behavior is on “feed forward” in the sense that the most committed Jews are in determining the direction of policy. It’s always been that way, and in the contemporary world, this means that the fundamentalists, the settlers, and the overtly racialist Zionists are in the driver’s seat, dominating the most right wing government in Israeli history.  The result is that Israeli expansionism, apartheid, and the oppression of the Palestinians will not be halted as a result of pressures within the Jewish community. The American Jewish community will continue to support all this — despite the glaring hypocrisy such behavior implies given the role of Jews as a pillar of multiculturalism in the Diaspora. There will be no concessions.

As a result, the ADL’s policy of condemning any discussion of Jewish influence will doubtless continue. Reasonable criticism must be completely suppressed because any leak in the dike is likely to lead to a deluge. And yet, as Goldberg seems to be admitting, Jewish influence can’t be ignored forever. I think he’s probably right. At least, I hope so.

Goldberg’s second bit of advice is: “Don’t abandon your intermarried relatives. They might save your life some day.” In other words, there is likely to be an anti-Jewish backlash at some point, and Jews had better be prepared. It’s an interesting suggestion to look to intermarried Jews for help. Goldberg’s implicit theory is that blood ties are critical in the end, and I couldn’t agree with him more.

Although intermarriage is often condemned in the Jewish community and there are high profile programs like Birthright Israel aimed at reducing it, several Jewish theorists have pointed out that intermarriage has certain strategic benefits for Judaism.  Chapter 9 of Separation and Its Discontents has the following quote from two Jewish scholars of the Diaspora:

The successful exercise of influence is best achieved in a community with a large subset of members interacting with politicians and opinion leaders. Through intermarried Jews themselves, and certainly through their social networks involving Jewish family and friends who may be closer to the core of the community, Jewish concerns, interests, and sensibilities can be articulated before a wider, more influential audience. In a recent interview, Presidential aide Robert Lipshutz traced the origin of Jimmy Carter’s concern for Israel to his close friendship with a first cousin, an Orthodox Jew (Carter’s aunt married a Jewish man, and their two children were raised as Jews). Intermarrying Jews, while perhaps diluting the community in one sense, perform compensating strategic functions in another. (Lieberman and Weinfeld, Demographic trends and Jewish survival. Midstream 24 (November), 1978, 16.)

Goldberg’s comment agrees with my conclusion:

The deepest layers of Jewish commitment [i.e., Orthodox, Conservative and other strongly ethnic forms of Judaism] constitute the long-term well spring of Judaism, with the outer layers acting as mere temporary appendages that will be cast off in the long run. This deep inner layer of very intense group commitment provides demographic vigor to replenish those in the outer layers [i.e., they're the ones having the babies] who are gradually moving away from Judaism while nevertheless performing political and social roles that are indispensable for the contemporary vitality of Judaism. Such a perspective essentially agrees with the views of political scientist Michael Walzer (1994, 5), who notes that without radical transformation, secular Judaism cannot reproduce itself; since the Enlightenment, “it [has] remained parasitic on an older religious Judaism that it didn’t and couldn’t pass on.”

Kevin MacDonald: Thomas Dalton’s current TOO article “Environment, Immigration, and Population Reduction“ reflects an intellectual movement that was for some time centered around the academic journal Population and Environment, especially when it was edited by Virginia Abernethy and later by me. The basic idea is that in the long run the human population will have to be scaled back in order to come into line with Earth’s carrying capacity.

An immediate implication of this perspective is that countries like the United States would have to institute an immigration moratorium. As things stand now, all predictions are for a massive increase in US population by 2050, almost entirely due to immigration. The figure accompanying the article, from a paper by two academics, David Pimentel of Cornell and Mario Giampiettro of the University of Rome, projects a US population of 520 million by 2050 if current increases of 1.1% per year are maintained.

Recently Lindsey Grant, another major figure in this movement, has distributed a new paper on this topic. He notes that the population restriction movement gained some traction in the 1970s but declined thereafter, and that recently the US State Department commented that “The U.S. does not endorse population ‘stabilization’ or ‘control.’” There is absolutely no discussion of reduction of legal immigration despite high levels of unemployment and wages that have been stagnant for a generation. Instead, as the LA Times reports today, the Obama administration and its Congressional allies are gearing up to legalize illegal immigrants, a policy that will hugely inflate US population as these people bring their relatives here.

Grant also points to economic realities: “The past 35 years have been a period of soaring incomes for the wealthy, stagnant hourly wages for most people, income differentials rising to levels that a humane observer would call obscene.” Rising commodity prices of the last few years are a harbinger of scarcity. Unemployment is increasing: “To keep up with population growth in those two years, we should have added about 1.2 million jobs, rather than losing nearly nine million. The “good” months are those when the job loss slows down. January was a ‘good’ month; only 22,000 jobs disappeared. What kind of recovery is that?” (For February, the loss was 36,000, a report that was greeted as encouraging by the Obama administration.) On the basis of US Labor Department statistics, he points out that the real unemployment level is 16.8 percent of the labor force, and much higher for minorities and youth.

One could say much else about the economic irrationality of current immigration policy.  In attempting to explain why there are no attempts to have a population policy, he points to five reasons:

First, the national addiction to growth and the dream of rising prosperity. Second, the political fears of alienating Hispanic voters, business, and their allies by tackling immigration levels. Third, the increased assertiveness of interest groups that oppose governmental population policies on principle (such as the Vatican) or, like the feminists at Cairo, do not want population policy advocates diverting attention from their priorities, or who oppose governmental involvement in women’s decisions about child bearing. Fourth, the defection of most of the U.S. environmental movement from population advocacy, for fear of losing support from the people I have just described, or from immigration advocates. Fifth, the present confrontational climate in Washington, which dictates that politicians avoid any positions that might lose votes.

I think this is basically right. A population policy that included an immigration moratorium flies in the face powerful ethnic and economic interests, as well as a deeply embedded view of perpetual expansion that is very common across the political spectrum.

Of course, I would add a prominent role for Jewish ethnic interests in leading and funding the pro-immigration movement as well as providing support for immigration among media and academic elites. (It’s amazing that it’s okay to mention Catholics, Latinos, feminists and business interests but would never mention the role of Jewish ethnic interests.) A notorious example related to environmental and population policy is David Gelbaum’s $100 million donation to the Sierra Club on condition that they not oppose immigration. As Gelbaum famously said to the president of the Sierra Club, “”I did tell [Sierra Club President] Carl Pope in 1994 or 1995 that if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me.”

It’s interesting that the global warming hysteria did manage to recruit the backing of elites in government and business without offending the coalition of interests promoting a head-in-the-sands policy on population. (Headline you won’t see: Al Gore Proposes Immigration Moratorium To Combat Global Warming.) After all, one could argue that a good way for the US to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would be to lower its population, especially since, as Dalton points out, the US has such a large ecological footprint. Immigrants coming to the US will typically have a larger footprint than if they had stayed at home, and, as Virginia Abernethy has point out many times, this increase in prosperity is typically accompanied by increased fertility — Life is good compared to what you grew up with. Have babies. At present, Latino fertility is 50% higher than White, non-Latino fertility.

Nevertheless, global warming became a pillar of the left — even though the data supporting it are iffy at best and even though dealing with global warming requires the same sort of long range planning and drastic social changes also entailed by taking carrying capacity seriously. All told, it’s a nice comment on where the power is.

As a result, as things stand now, in 2050, not only will the US have a minority White population, it will have a population that is well beyond sustainability. Ethnic conflict will increase in multicultural, White-minority America even in the absence of sustainability issues. But the conflict will be even more intense as resources diminish and humans are forced to find ways to reduce population. As always, conflict will center around ethnic identities. It’s not going to be pretty.

Kevin MacDonald: Part 2 of Edmund Connelly’s article on White victimization is posted. I was unaware of the following quote from Solzhenitsyn that Connelly found on Israel Shamir’s website:

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn summed up the process during the Bolshevik Revolution, when the

executed army officers were Russians, the noblemen, priests, monks, deputies were  Russians. . . . In 1920s, the pre-revolutionary engineers and scientists were exiled or killed. They were Russians, while their place was taken by Jews. The best Russian Psychiatric institute in Moscow, its Russian members were arrested or exiled, while their place was taken by the Jews. Important Jewish doctors blocked the advancement of Russian medical scientists. The best intellectual and artistic elites of Russian people were killed, while the Jews grew and flourished in these (deadly for Russians) years.

It’s passages like this that make an English translation of Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together essential. Americans must be made aware of the enormous risks that lie ahead when White political power diminishes and Jews continue to be a hostile elite.

Solzhenitsyn shows that the Bolshevik revolution meant the rise of Jews in psychiatry. The following passage from Ch. 4 of Culture of Critique shows that the result of Jewish domination of psychiatry in the USSR was that psychoanalysis became official dogma. It also shows the strong overlap among Jews, psychoanalysis, and political radicalism. As noted throughout CofC, psychoanalysis proved to be a very useful tool in constructing theories in which White identity and interests were analyzed as a sign of psychiatric disorder. To some extent, this revolution has already occurred bloodlessly in the West since WWII, given the influence of the Frankfurt School and other Jewish intellectual movements in the contemporary world. Psychoanalysis has died a well-deserved death and for that we should all be grateful. But the theoretical basis for rejecting White identity and interests has simply migrated to other pathologies of the academic left.�

This belief in the curative powers of sexual freedom coincided with a leftist political agenda common to the vast majority of Jewish intellectuals of the period and reviewed throughout this book. This leftist political agenda proved to be a recurrent theme throughout the history of psychoanalysis. Support of radical and Marxist ideals was common among Freud’s early followers, and leftist attitudes were common in later years among psychoanalysts (Hale 1995, 31; Kurzweil 1989, 36, 46–47, 284; Torrey 1992, 33, 93ff, 122–123), as well as in Freudian inspired offshoots such as Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich (see below) and Alfred Adler. (Kurzweil [1989, 287] terms Adler the leader of “far left” psychoanalysis, noting that Adler wanted to immediately politicize teachers as radicals rather than wait for the perfection of psychoanalysis to do so.) The apex of the association between Marxism and psychoanalysis came in the 1920s in the Soviet Union, where all the top psychoanalysts were Bolsheviks, Trotsky supporters, and among the most powerful political figures in the country (see Chamberlain 1995). (Trotsky himself was an ardent enthusiast of psychoanalysis.) This group organized a government-sponsored State Psychoanalytical Institute and developed a program of “pedology” aimed at producing the “new Soviet man” on the basis of psychoanalytic principles applied to the education of children. The program, which encouraged sexual precocity in children, was put into practice in state-run schools.

Kevin MacDonald: Edmund Connelly’s current TOO article (God Helps Those Who Help Themselves) is fittingly subtitled “The Beginnings of White Victimization in Multicultural America.” As he emphasizes, we can already see Whites being targeted by criminals because they are White, with little or no concern on the part of either the media or the government. But these trends are likely to increase in the future as Whites edge closer to becoming a minority with less political power. Anyone with common sense and an appreciation for the brutal history of ethnic conflict around the world must realize that voluntarily becoming an ethnic minority carries huge risks, especially when many of the groups who will collectively become a majority have historically conditioned grudges against the White population. Some of these historical grudges are real enough, while others are mainly the imaginings of ethnic activists intent on rewriting history to suit their current ethnic agendas. (My favorite is the lachrymose view of Jewish history in which for 2000 years Jews have been helpless, innocent victims of irrational hatred by Europeans.)

But in the end, it matters little.  Connelly makes an analogy to the Bolshevik revolution, quoting the Black Book of Communism, “The Bolshevik leaders encouraged anything that might promote this aspiration to ‘social revenge’ among the masses seeing it as a moral legitimization of the terror, or what Lenin called ‘the just civil war.’” Right now, the media ignores brutal Black on White crimes while fomenting moral panics when some college students at UC-San Diego failed to express officially sanctioned attitudes on Black History Month. (The LA Times has had 13 articles on this crisis, with no end in sight.) This demonization of Whites is the first step in large scale murderous revenge.

And yet the vast majority of White Americans would doubtless choose their own extinction rather than suffer the opprobrium of being called a racist for expressing their legitimate ethnic interests. The anti-White revolution has been internalized among Whites. It reminds me of a book by Jewish activist Alan Dershowitz. The plot of Just Revenge is that a Jew finds a German officer responsible for the death of his family and convinces the German to commit suicide in repentance for his crimes.  Decades of propaganda emanating from the most elite academic and media institutions has resulted in a White population that is overcome with guilt — guilt to the point of suicide. The first step is to change that. 

Kevin MacDonald: Matt Taibbi is at it again, this time with “Wall Street’s Bailout Hustle.” I can’t really comment on many of his substantive claims, but there is an awful lot of smoke at this point for one to suppose that there is no fire. Note especially the point that the financial system “assumes a certain minimal level of ethical behavior and civic instinct over and above what is spelled out by the regulations” (p. 7).

That’s the thing. We have not only replaced a manufacturing economy with a financial economy (see Kevin Phillips). We also have a financial elite is completely corrupt — with devastating consequences to the rest of the economy and the long term prospects of growth. As Taibbi notes, the system depends on a “true believer” syndrome in which people simply can’t believe they were conned. We desperately want to trust our elites — the people who come from the best schools and have close ties to the government. As Francis Fukuyama emphasizes, trust in elites and the assumption of civic mindedness are critical characteristics of individualist societies:   

To this set of traits, Francis Fukuyama also adds trust as a critical virtue of individualist societies. Trust is really a way of emphasizing the importance of moral universalism as a trait of individualist societies. In collectivist, family-oriented societies, trust ends at the border of the family and kinship group. Social organization, whether in political culture or in economic enterprise, tends to be a family affair. Morality is defi ned as what is good for the group—typically the kinship group (e.g., the notorious line, “Is it good for the Jews?”). This lack of ability to develop a civil society is the fundamental problem of societies in the Middle East and Africa, where divisions into opposing religious and ultimately kinship groups define the political landscape. The movement of the West toward multiculturalism really means the end of individualist Western culture. (See here, p. 27) 

We are entering an era where trust in political and cultural elites is fast becoming a thing of the past. Robert Putnam has shown that trust is lower in multi-ethnic societies. This decline in public trust will be accelerated when people really grasp the enormity of the disaster created by Wall Street and its close connections to the government. It’s really the end of a key feature of what made Western societies so successful. As Taibbi points out, there’s no change on the horizon–just a short pause for reloading.

Finally, I can’t help referring to today’s Doonesbury cartoon about the development of an ethical sense among bankers. The banker begins as a college grad who thinks “I hope to do something of value well and be fairly paid.” By middle age he is saying “I demand to be paid obscenely well for destroying value.” The cartoon illustrates the point that lack of trust in financial elites is very widespread and that they are reasonably portrayed as a predatory elite rather than an elite that helps create value. 

The only problem with the cartoon is that it’s at least doubtful that the people who make it to the top in this system ever thought much about creating social value. As Edmund Connelly’s recent blog recounts, there is a very long history of vastly disproportionate Jewish involvement in financial fraud. And rather than a long history of civic responsibility, there is a long history of Jews thinking of themselves as outsiders in Western societies – a hostile elite with a strong sense of historical grievance. The long term prosperity of the society is certainly not uppermost in their minds.

This is the relevant passage from page 7 of Taibbi’s article:

Con artists have a word for the inability of their victims to accept that they’ve been scammed. They call it the “True Believer Syndrome.” That’s sort of where we are, in a state of nagging disbelief about the real problem on Wall Street. It isn’t so much that we have inadequate rules or incompetent regulators, although both of these things are certainly true. The real problem is that it doesn’t matter what regulations are in place if the people running the economy are rip-off artists. The system assumes a certain minimum level of ethical behavior and civic instinct over and above what is spelled out by the regulations. If those ethics are absent — well, this thing isn’t going to work, no matter what we do. Sure, mugging old ladies is against the law, but it’s also easy. To prevent it, we depend, for the most part, not on cops but on people making the conscious decision not to do it.

That’s why the biggest gift the bankers got in the bailout was not fiscal but psychological. “The most valuable part of the bailout,” says Rep. Sherman, “was the implicit guarantee that they’re Too Big to Fail.” Instead of liquidating and prosecuting the insolvent institutions that took us all down with them in a giant Ponzi scheme, we have showered them with money and guarantees and all sorts of other enabling gestures. And what should really freak everyone out is the fact that Wall Street immediately started skimming off its own rescue money. If the bailouts validated anew the crooked psychology of the bubble, the recent profit and bonus numbers show that the same psychology is back, thriving, and looking for new disasters to create. “It’s evidence,” says Rep. Kanjorski, “that they still don’t get it.”

More to the point, the fact that we haven’t done much of anything to change the rules and behavior of Wall Street shows that we still don’t get it. Instituting a bailout policy that stressed recapitalizing bad banks was like the addict coming back to the con man to get his lost money back. Ask yourself how well that ever works out. And then get ready for the reload.

Kevin MacDonald: I agree with everything in Christopher Donovan’s blog on Bradlaugh’s take on the AmRen cancellation. But a couple of things Bradlaugh wrote stick in my craw. It used to be that Jews complained about genteel anti-Semites. Now we have people like Bradlaugh who spout genteel philo-Semitism: He complains about “the antisemitism of the AR followers, which rubs me the wrong way. I fall in line with the long tradition of British philosemitism (Cromwell, Victoria, Lloyd George, Maggie Thatcher), and just have no patience with the other thing.” He could have included Winston Churchill who was philo-Semitic to the point of corruption.

It seems to me that anyone writing on politics has a responsibility to write honestly about the various forces that influence public policy. For Bradlaugh, it’s simply not genteel to discuss embarrassing things like Jewish power. I suppose Mearshimer and Walt rub him the wrong way as well. I had this to say about John Derbyshire, Bradlaugh’s alter ego:

Derbyshire is, apart from some minor irritations, quite uncritical about Jewish motives and influence, even when they conflict with the interests of people like himself. He implies that non-Jews should understand Jewish motivation to break down the ethnic homogeneity of their own societies while advancing the interests of Israel as an ethnostate. … Derbyshire lives in a sort of childlike world in which Jewish interests are legitimate and where Jewish attempts to pursue their interests, though they may occasionally be irritating, are not really a cause for concern much less malice. It doesn’t require an evolutionary theory to realize that good, reasonable people can have conflicts of interest, and that the results of conflicts of interest can be devastating to the side that loses.

I think that Bradlaugh’s problem is that he sees himself as genteel and that being genteel is a very good thing. (Definition: 1. Refined in manner; well-bred and polite. 2. Free from vulgarity or rudeness. 3. Elegantly stylish: genteel manners and appearance. 4. a. Striving to convey a manner or appearance of refinement and respectability. See Synonyms at polite. b. Marked by affected and somewhat prudish refinement.)

He seems very impressed with good manners, a well-rounded education, and being polite. Genteel people simply don’t discuss Jewish power and influence for fear of offending the Jews. In the same way, genteel people would not want to offend others by calling attention to their garish clothes. To do so would make one impolite and vulgar and therefore consign one to a lower order of society. 

His gentility is probably also why he doesn’t resonate with AmRen’s “ethos of the South, which I don’t really … get. I wonder if a foreigner ever can get it. It’s as odd and particular, in its own way, as Tibetan Buddhism.” 

The reality is that White Southerners are by far the largest identifiable group of White Americans who have held onto their culture and identity in the face of the onslaughts of the last 50 years. The White vote for Obama was nearly in the single digits in three southern states, and lopsidedly Republican in the others. White Southerners understand, at least implicitly, that it’s about racial and ethnic conflict. As the racialization of American politics continues, all Whites will tend even more in this direction. (The recent election in Massachusetts certainly supports this). Conservatives who think they can take back the country without Southern Whites are seriously deluded. 

Bradlaugh’s gentility also leads him to entirely avoid framing the issue in ethnic or racial terms at all:

My own strong preference, as I argued in that debate with Jared, would be for everybody to shut up with the race business. There doesn’t seem to be much prospect of this happening, though, so it’s not hard to see the AR-ers point of view. In any case, I say again, whatever you think of that point of view, it’s a point of view. It shouldn’t be shut out of the public square; and if it is so shut out, by goons phoning in death threats to hotel employees, there ought to be a fuss made. Well, here I am on Secular Right, making a fuss as best I can. Freedom of speech! Freedom of assembly! Liberty! Liberty!

This is “proposition conservatism” at its finest. If only people would stop talking about racial and ethnic conflict, then we could frame everything in terms of principles like free speech without soiling ourselves like the AR crowd. For people like Bradlaugh, massive immigration would presumably be fine if the immigrants were all principled people like himself.

The reality, of course, is that whether or not we talk about it, racial and ethnic conflict will continue. There is no other possible outcome given that 100 million more non-Whites are to be added to the population of the US in the next few decades.

The bottom line is that no one has come up with a formula to get rid of ethnicity as a form of identity and as a vehicle of expressing interests. None seems on the horizon. And in the process of losing the ethnic battle, the society will be less and less committed to Bradlaugh’s cherished principles because, in the end, the principles of free speech, individual liberty, and the rest of the corpus of Western individualism are ethnic creations.  

But people like Bradlaugh are more willing to lose the ethnic battle than to become anything less than genteel by mentioning the ethnic conflict that is at the heart of the political divisions in the US. It just wouldn’t seem proper.

Kevin MacDonald: William Sheldon’s current TOO article (“Pro-White Conference 2.0”) offers suggestions on how to avoid the aggressive tactics typically used against any meeting that has overtones of White advocacy. The recent cancellation of the AmRen conference and the cancellation of three speeches in America by BNP leader Nick Griffin (including one scheduled for AmRen) indicate a need to come up with a counter strategy. As Sheldon notes, the face-to-face meetings that are enabled by conferences are a crucial ingredient in any organization. Quite a few people attend conferences not so much to hear the speakers but to be able to network with like-minded others. 

Sheldon’s strategy of using Webinar technology would probably work — provide the benefits of a pro-White conference without drawing the attention of their Leftist opponents. It is an excellent prescription for a group that must remain underground in order not to expose its members to the usual costs of being associated with White advocacy (job loss, etc.). 

The downside is that pro-White advocates would be implicitly accepting their status as an underground movement. Such meetings could essentially go on forever without effecting real change in the direction we all want. 

It seems to me that we have to get above-ground visibility. We have to make noise and have a public presence if we are going to make real progress. We have to get in people’s faces and have the courage of our convictions. Hence perhaps Nick Griffin’s “frequently voiced despair over U.S. politics, given its lack of white nationalist parties” (in the WSJ article).

This is one thing that attracted me to American Third Position. The young men who are the backbone of the party go out onto the streets with signs and pamphlets advocating deporting illegals and other issues related to pro-White advocacy. They are not afraid of people spewing in-your-face hostility at them. (Guess what? You may be called a “racist” or a “Nazi.”) They do not hide away in secret conferences or restrict themsleves to discussing issues among themselves on private email lists. 

Nick Griffin dealing with hostility. The caption in the MailOnline: Heavy with hatred: The BNP leader Nick Griffin, typically surrounded by his security men

Quite clearly, the left is well aware that public visibility would be the beginning of the end for their dominance of public discourse. That’s why the mainstream media has given almost no coverage to the cancellations of AmRen or Nick Griffin — the only exception I have come across is a brief mention in the Wall Street Journal. The article is noteworthy for not mentioning anything about the obvious implications for public discourse in America. The tone of the article is that some meetings of far right crazies got shut down — expressed in the same manner as a story on the cancellation of a meeting of the local school board because of a snow storm. Imagine the outrage if meetings of La Raza or the NAACP were shut down with similar tactics. 

Meetings at privately owned facilities are problematic because businesses are likely to cave under the pressure of the left and I suppose that is their right as property owners.  Some people have suggested using government-owned facilities because denial by such a facility would raise First Amendment issues. I think this is a good idea. And we should be ready with attorneys willing to argue on our side if there are attempts at disruptions or if the government attempts to cancel the event for reasons like “public safety.” And we need security forces; and ways to identify the people who are doing the disrupting. 

And it should all be out in the open.

Kevin MacDonald: Simon Krajsa’s current TOO article “Racial Diversity and Crime in Green Bay” hits home with me because I grew up in Oshkosh, 50 miles to the south. It’s sad to see the transformations of the area since I was a kid; it’s a lesson that the revolution is not confined to Southern California, Texas, and New York.  The whole Fox River Valley was completely White when I was growing up. People noticed it when a Black person came up from Milwaukee to go fishing. There were maybe one or two Jewish families in town. The only Mexicans were migrant workers who lived outside of town on the farms and left after the harvest.

The only mildly significant diversity was religious. There were various Protestant denominations and there were still ethnically Polish Catholic congregations that were separate from the other Catholic churches. I think we Catholics did feel a bit separate from the Protestants, especially the well-off Protestants. (They were more German than WASP.) But the divisions didn’t seem very important (ethnicity wasn’t an issue) and there was a certain amount of mobility among the groups. In any case, no one felt like an outsider. We certainly did not have the intense hostility toward the WASP elite that has been so typical of Jews.

I have gone back to Oshkosh regularly in recent years and at least on the surface nothing much has changed. The non-White population seems invisible, but, as in Green Bay, there is in fact a substantial non-White population there.  In Oshkosh the main non-White group is the Hmong, a clan-based group from Southeast Asia with very high fertility, originally brought in as refugees by high-minded Christians from Wausau. Women begin having children at an early age and  have as many children as possible. Oshkosh now has Hmong Service Centers, churches, advocacy groups, festivals, and student groups at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. They have a long history in Asia of retaining their culture and not assimilating.

It’s a very adaptive culture that has been given a strong boost by generous social service benefits provided by the state. Indeed, the Hmong population in Wisconsin is exploding. Based on state estimates, these are the increases in a 5-year period for the main counties settled by the Hmong in Wisconsin:

Winnebago (Oshkosh) 20%; Marathon (Wausau) 13%; Brown (Green Bay) 54%; Outagamie (Appleton) 80%; Dane (Madison) 130%; Milwaukee (34%); Manitowoc (43%); Sheboygan (69%)

This is a very high rate of population increase by any standard. Whatever else one might say, the Wisconsin I grew up in is on the way to oblivion.

Kevin MacDonald:  Writing on Jewish involvement in the ongoing financial disaster is not something I relish. It’s not really my cup of tea because financial issues are not my area of expertise. But I do think the issues should be discussed at TOO.

When the meltdown began, the Internet was full of angry comments blaming Jews, much to the chagrin of the ADL. This is because it is common knowledge that Jews are vastly overrepresented among Wall Street executives. In the 1990s, Benjamin Ginsberg noted that 50% of Wall Street executives were Jewish, and it’s doubtless at least that high now.

As Kevin Phillips has pointed out, since the 1990s, economic expansions have not benefited the middle class; rather, they have benefited the financial elite. Financial services and complex financial products have assumed an ever larger percentage of the American economy, while manufacturing has steadily declined to the point where their relative percentages of the American economy have reversed.

And the entire pyramid is erected on a house of cards. Phillips writes:

My summation is that American financial capitalism, at a pivotal period in the nation’s history, cavalierly ventured a multiple gamble: first, financializing a hitherto more diversified U.S. economy; second, using massive quantities of debt and leverage to do so; third, following up a stock market bubble with an even larger housing and mortgage credit bubble; fourth, roughly quadrupling U.S. credit-market debt between 1987 and 2007, a scale of excess that historically unwinds; and fifth, consummating these events with a mixed fireworks of dishonesty, incompetence and quantitative negligence.

In the public mind, the firm most closely associated with Jewish financial power is Goldman Sachs. Ever since the financial meltdown, GS has been defending itself (e.g., here) against an avalanche of charges focused not only on financial improprieties but also on its ties to the government (e.g., Matt Taibbi and a series of articles in the New York Times, e.g., here.)

A document placed into the Congressional Record by Rep. Darryl Issa (R-CA), described in an article on Bloomberg.com strongly suggests corruption at the pinnacle of the financial profession. GS underwrote $17.2 billion of the $62.1 billion in the Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO’s) that were insured by AIG — more than any other firm. Essentially, banks underwrote toxic securities and then bet against them. An observer notes, “It sounds to me a little bit like selling a car with faulty brakes and then buying an insurance policy on the buyer of those cars.”

Even worse, according to the article, they knew the car had faulty brakes. Managers of the CDO’s were substituting bundles of mortgages that they knew full well were deeply troubled. Unethical behavior is strongly implicated. An observer notes that the banks should have to explain how they managed to buy protection from AIG primarily on securities that fell so sharply in value. “If these banks had insight into the underlying loans because they had relationships with banks, originators or servicers, that’s at the least unethical.”

GS received $14 billion from the government when AIG was bailed out; the New York Times also reportedthat GS also received substantially more money from the AIG bailout as a result of a prior agreement with Societe Generale, a French bank that also received AIG bailout money from the US government. Finally, the New York Fed promoted a cover-up that prevented this information from coming out sooner.

The article makes clear that there are still many details that remain unknown about these transactions.

David Brooks noted in the NYTimes,

Fifty years ago, the financial world was dominated by well-connected blue bloods who drank at lunch and played golf in the afternoons. Now financial firms recruit from the cream of the Ivy League. In 2007, 47 percent of Harvard grads went into finance or consulting. Yet would we say that banks are performing more ably than they were a half-century ago?

Quite clearly they are not. The rise of a Jewish elite in the US is problematic for a great many reasons — most obviously because the Jewish elite remains motivated by ethnic paranoia and hostility toward Western cultural traditions, particularly Christianity. However, the behavior of the financial elite in the case of the recent meltdown is not something one would expect to see in a healthy society. Quite a few of the details remain unknown, so that it is difficult to get a clear image of how individual Jews and Jewish networking contributed to the meltdown. (By all accounts [e.g., here], Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Alan Greenspan were instrumental in getting rid of regulations on trading derivatives that would have prevented the meltdown.) The indications that Goldman Sachs was at the center of the meltdown strongly suggests that the Jewish role was important. GS has not commented on Issa’s document or the Bloomberg article.

Nevertheless, at this point there is a strong suggestion that the financial elite behaved much more like an organized crime syndicate than as an elite with a sense of civic responsibility or commitment to the long term viability of the society. Whereas organized crime stems from the lower levels of society, this meltdown was accomplished at the very pinnacle of society — the Ivy League grads mentioned by Brooks, the wealthy financial firms and investment rating agencies, the strong connections with government that facilitated the bailout and failed to provide scrutiny while it was happening. It seems highly doubtful that all this would have happened with the former elite — the people whom Brooks disdainfully describes as “well-connected blue bloods who drank at lunch and played golf in the afternoons.”

Phillips concludes with a quotation from British colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, made in 1904 to a gathering of his country’s financiers:

Granted that you are the clearinghouse of the world, [but] are you entirely beyond anxiety as to the permanence of your great position? . . . Banking is not the creator of our prosperity but is the creation of it. It is not the cause of our wealth, but it is the consequence of our wealth.

That is the problem going ahead. The US has sacrificed wealth-production in favor of finance, and this has doubtless resulted in huge financial rewards to a few people at the very top. But it’s really hard to see how most of us are going to benefit from this transformation in the long run. A society without a healthy, civic-minded elite is doomed.

Kevin MacDonald: The Daily 49er, the student newspaper at CSU-Long Beach, asked me write an op-ed giving my side of things. This was after a big push by radical students to my disrupt classes and get me fired, including quite a few letters and articles in the Daily 49er. My article is here. Whoever writes the headlines changed it from its original: “Academic left opposes free speech, academic freedom and the legitimate interests of White Americans” to “Academic ‘left’ opposes free speech, academic freedom.” ‘Left’ is now in quotes, suggesting, I guess, that it doesn’t really exist, and ignoring completely the main topic of the article: the legitimacy of White interests. The headline writer will go far in journalism.

Probably not a lot new about it, except I am trying to emphasize more how the left changed in the 1960s from being pro-working class to being pro-multicultural and pro-mass immigration. The deep structure there, although I don’t mention it in the article, is that the Jewish intellectual movements that became dominant had given up on the revolutionary potential of the White working class because they had supported fascism. The only solution was to import an entirely new people.

There are some interesting comments on the article. Two Mexican activists seem bent on getting rid of Whites as fast as possible. I should hope that would alert White students that their future is not too bright in Mexifornia if things continue as they are. Then there’s the one by Doug Kauffman. I think he’s the one who called me a Nazi in front of my students. He seems quite concerned about Jewish issues.