Because a lot of people who read the blog don’t read the main articles and because the main page doesn’t have room for comment, this is notice of Solzhenitsyn’s Chapter 21. See here. Kevin M
Archive for the ‘Jews and the Left’ Category
Solzhenitsyn’s “During the Soviet-German War,” Chapter 21 of 200 Years Together
Sunday, August 15th, 2010Kevin MacDonald: Another Attempt to Control Historical Writing on the Role of Jews in the USSR
Wednesday, August 11th, 2010Apropos the recent series on chapters from Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together (especially Chapter 18), a new textbook for university students in Russia emphasizes the elite status of Jews in the early decades of the USSR. (JTA, August 8, 2010: “Russian Textbook Seen as Anti-Semitic“) The Foreword states, “For the greater part of its 70-year history, the USSR was ruled by people of non-Russian nationality.” The book also states that, “By the 1930s, the Jewish nation was the leader among those represented in the Communist party and the state machinery, in Science and Art.”
At this point, the elite status of Soviet Jews during this period is common knowledge among scholars (e.g., Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century), but that doesn’t mean that scholars are free to draw attention to ethnicity in textbooks intended for university students. Predictably, any such effort is regarded as “anti-Semitic”: “some are calling [the book] anti-Semitic because it counts the number of Jews in Soviet governments.” As in the US, Jews are the elite that “cannot tell its name.”
Jewish activist organizations go ballistic over any mention that Jews are a disproportionate portion of American elites–truth is irrelevant. Those who stray into this forbidden territory soon learn that their lives have just gotten a lot more complicated. The result is that people behave like well-conditioned rats in a psychology experiment and keep their mouths shut no matter how obvious Jewish overrepresentation is. (”The New Elite Doesn’t Officially Exist“
The theme of the textbook is that the Russians were ruled by non-Russians. Rule by outsiders had predictably disastrous results for those without power: it was during this period that the most horrific mass murders of Russians occurred. The common sense of it is that Russians would not have murdered huge numbers of their own people in the name of international socialism. (It takes Puritans to do that.) This leads to an often-repeated theme on this website: It is the ultimate folly to allow non-Whites — especially non-Whites with powerful historic grudges — to become a majority and develop the power to rule over Whites.
Also predictably, the article uses guilt-by-association arguments. An author of the textbook was the advisor to a student who is now on trial for murdering two anti-fascists, and the university where the text is used is “tainted by anti-Semitism” because it invited a Holocaust dissident to speak.
Okay. But does that show that the USSR was not ruled by non-Russians during this period or that Jews were not an elite during the worst excesses of the Soviet regime? The same can be said about the comment from the Jewish apologist attacking the idea that deportation of the Crimean Tatars was caused by the necessity of clearing the territory for the proposed Jewish republic. Even if true, it doesn’t go to the heart of the matter. Here’s what Solzhenitsyn says in Chapter 18:
The settlement of the Jews in the Crimea provoked the hostility of the Tatars (“Are they giving Crimea to the Jews?”) and dissatisfaction of local landless peasants. Larin writes “evil and false rumors are circulating throughout the country about removal of land from non-Jews, the expulsion of non-Jews and the particularly strong support the authorities have given to the Jewish settlers”. It went so far that the chairman of the CIK of the Crimean ASSR, Veli Ibraimov published an interview in the Simferopol paper Red Crimea (Sept 26, 1926) which Larin does not quote from, but which he claims was a manifestation of “evil bourgeois chauvinism” and a call for a pogrom.
Solzhenitsyn seems to agree that the Jews were treated very well by the government (with the help of foreign Jewish organizations), and he amply documents the resentments this caused among non-Jews. But he does not state that the Tatars were expelled because of Jewish settlement.
Of course, for all I know, the textbook doesn’t say that either. The Tatars weren’t deported until 1944, long after the project for Jewish settlement had fizzled.
Edmund Connelly: American Government versus the People
Wednesday, August 4th, 2010Edmund Connelly: Five or six years ago, I saw some kind of film purportedly showing the mass execution of scores of Eastern Europeans by a cadre of cold-blooded murderers. I didn’t know about YouTube then, so I can’t say if that was the source.
In the film clip, lines of naked Whites, mostly blond haired, were brought into a cellar in pairs and threes, lined up against a wall, and given bullets to the back of the skull. The floor was, needless to say, awash in blood. It was a singularly chilling image, and I wish I had never seen it.
What was truly shocking was the fact that the victims behaved in such a sheep-like manner. It seemed obvious what their fate was, yet these young men and women meekly awaited their turn to die. Only one White, a young woman, even protested while being lined up against the wall in the cellar.
The way it was shown, the Whites were generally tall and lanky, while the dark-clad executioners were short, stocky, and looked stereotypically Jewish. One executioner seemed to find his job almost amusing.
The point of the film clip was to “prove” that Bolsheviks had without compunction systematically massacred untold numbers of Eastern Europeans. Again, I have no idea whatsoever of the veracity of the film, so I would never claim it proves anything.
Thus it was with the shock of recognition when I finally read Yuri Slezkine’s powerful 2004 book The Jewish Century. In it, Slezkine unabashedly paints a picture of Jewish killers nearly as vivid as in the above film.
We read that during the Red Terror in Russia, some expressed shock that seemingly pacifistic Jews changed almost overnight: “We were amazed by what we had least expected to encounter among the Jews: cruelty, sadism, and violence had seemed alien to a nation so far removed from physical, warlike activity; those who yesterday did not know how to use a gun are now found among the executioners and cutthroats.”
Slezkine also describes a “formerly oppressed lover of liberty [who] had turned into a tyrant of ‘unheard-of despotic arbitrariness.’” He had been “transformed outwardly into a leather-clad person with a revolver and, in fact, lost all human likeness.” He could now be pictured as “standing in a Cheka basement doing ‘bloody but honorable revolutionary work.’”
Most succinctly, Slezkine writes, “anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with and possibly shot by a Jewish investigator.” Estimates are that up to twenty million non-Jews died during that horrendous period.
It is with this as a background that I read a recent comment by an acquaintance whom I respect. In the course of discussing how even the even American military is pushing “diversity” at the expense of getting the absolute best recruits, she wrote, “Since one of my nightmares is that the US Army will one day be ordered to gun down Americans, I am not too distressed to learn that incompetence is selected.”
That took me by surprise because this person is not the excitable type and doesn’t relish hyperbole. Chillingly, it also resonated with a thread I found among last week’s VDARE columnists.
For example, Pat Buchanan wrote that “In communist countries in the Cold War, all understood that the government did not represent the people. The state was at war with the nation. That idea is taking root in America — the idea that our government no longer seeks to represent us.”
That’s probably putting it mildly. Paul Craig Roberts, back at the keyboard he had sworn to abandon, wrote more ominously about America’s likely future:
The Roman Empire lasted for centuries. The American one collapsed overnight. Rome’s corruption became the strength of her enemies, and the Western Empire was overrun. America’s collapse occurred when government ceased to represent the people and became the instrument of a private oligarchy. Decisions were made in behalf of short-term profits for the few at the expense of unmanageable liabilities for the many. Overwhelmed by liabilities, the government collapsed.
Robertson added elsewhere, “On July 12, Niall Ferguson, an historian of empire, warned that the American empire could collapse suddenly from weakness brought on by its massive debts and that such a collapse could be closer than we think.”
Finally, Pastor Chuck Baldwin, Ph.D., quoted this comment on VDARE:
Skousen also chides the Post report for failing “to show how connected certain companies are to the mercenary contractor explosion that is growing into a force that will eventually be used to threaten individual liberties at home. The Powers That Be don’t need to hire foreign armies to clamp down on American dissidents. They are training hundreds of thousands of mercenary Americans to do it and using foreign wars to sort out who is ruthless enough or unprincipled enough to take orders without questions—similar to the way the Nazis sorted and selected those who would form the Brownshirt and SS brigades.”
I mostly certainly hope all these observers are wrong and that life may continue in America without state-sponsored terror. Unfortunately, evidence is appearing that makes more than a few of us nervous.
Kevin MacDonald: Chapter 5 of 200 Years Together: “After the Murder of Alexander II”
Monday, August 2nd, 2010Chapter 5 of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together: “After the Murder of Alexander II” has now been translated and is the topic of the current TOO article. Again, the project is worthy of financial support for the translators. (I am not involved except as publicizing and commenting on the chapters.) This is an important background chapter for thinking about the Jewish role leading up to and after the Bolshevik Revolution. I encourage comments here. Kevin M
Kevin MacDonald: Chapter 22 of 200 Years Together: “From the End of the War to Stalin’s Death”
Monday, July 19th, 2010Kevin MacDonald: The English translation of Chapter 22 of 200 Years Together (“From the End of the War to Stalin’s Death”) is now available. (See here; donations are needed to complete the project.)
The main theme is the post-WWII purging of Jews from many of the powerful positions they held as an elite in Soviet society. Solzhenitsyn’s account is similar to other mainstream accounts, such as Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century. When Jewish intellectual activists write about the role of the Jews in the USSR, they generally focus on this period—Jews as the victims of anti-Jewish actions—rather than the status and role of Jews in previous decades. The following quote from a historian sums up the situation:
“‘Pushing’ Jews out of prestigious occupations that were crucial for the ruling elite in the spheres of manufacturing, administration, cultural and ideological activities, as well as limiting or completely barring the entrance of Jews into certain institutions of higher education gained enormous momentum in 1948-1953. … Positions of any importance in KGB, party apparatus, and military were closed to the Jews, and quotas were in place for admission into certain educational institutions and cultural and scientific establishments.”
Solzhenitsyn pointedly notes that Jews who had benefited from their nationality because they were officially classified as an oppressed minority under the Czar were now targeted on the basis of nationality:
Through its “fifth item” [i.e., the question about nationality] Soviet Jews were oppressed by the very same method used in the Proletarian Questionnaire, other items of which were so instrumental in crushing the Russian nobility, clergy, intellectuals and all the rest of the “former people” since the 1920’s.
Nevertheless, Jews were by no means eliminated from prestigious occupations. A historian comments that “Although the highest echelon of Jewish political elite suffered from administrative perturbations; but surprisingly it was not as bad as it seemed. … The main blow fell on the middle and the most numerous stratum of the Jewish elite — officials… and also journalists, professors and other members of creative intelligentsia.”
Anti-Jewish attitudes remained strong, fueled in large part because of the role of Jews as agents of oppression during the pre-war decades. For example, Solzhenitsyn notes that there were negative attitudes toward Jews returning to areas that the Germans had evacuated, particularly Ukraine. Anti-Jewish attitudes combined both traditional ideas (Jews as wealthy: demanding restoration of prime residential property they owned before the war) as well as the role of Jews as government officials during the pre-war Soviet oppression. A Jewish observer who claimed that Nikita Khrushchev had said, “In the past, the Jews committed many sins against the Ukrainian people. People hate them for that. We don’t need Jews in our Ukraine. It would be better if they didn’t return here.”
Jews complained about these attitudes as well as the fact that other groups were indifferent to Jewish suffering, but Solzhenitsyn notes the irony, quoting another Jewish observer who stated “that in the years of our terrible disasters, the Jewish intellectuals did not raise their voices in defense of the deported nations of Crimea and the Caucasus.” The example is a testimony to Jewish ethnocentrism–focused on their own suffering but never seeing, much less acknowledging, their indifference to the suffering of others or their role in causing it during the height of their power.
There was a similar scene throughout Eastern Europe as Jews returned from exile after the war.
A great overrepresentation of Jews occurred in the post-war puppet Polish government, among managerial elites and in the Polish KGB, which would again result in miserable consequences for the Jews of Poland. After the war, other countries of Eastern Europe saw similar conflicts: “the Jews had played a huge role in economic life of all these countries,” and though they lost their possessions under Hitler, after the war, when “the restitution laws were introduced… (they) affected very large numbers of new owners.” Upon their return Jews demanded the restoration of their property and enterprises that were not nationalized by Communists and this created a new wave of hostility towards them (22).)
Toward the end of Stalin’s life, he intensified the campaign against Jews, possibly resulting in his death in 1953. The main source of his hostility toward Jews was the age-old concern about loyalty: Jewish ties with Jews in other countries — in this case, Israel and the United States. During the Cold War there was a fear that Jewish sympathies would lie with Israel and the US as Israel’s main source of support. One result was that Stalin crushed the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (EAK), a Jewish organization that had been created to court support for the USSR among American Jews during WWII. During the Cold War, the ties between Soviet Jews and American Jews became a liability in the eyes of Soviet regime.
An indication of Jewish power is that the campaign against the EAK in 1952 was carried out “slowly and with great caution” because Stalin was “very well aware what kind of international storm would be triggered by using force.” It’s striking that the mass murders and deportations of the 1920s and 1930s were carried out without any international outcry, but the campaign against a rather small Jewish group was done very cautiously. Thirteen Jews were executed.
This is similar to what happened when Stalin ordered the murder of two Jewish leaders of the international socialist movement, Henryk Ehrlich and Victor Alter in 1942. These murders of two Jewish leftist activists created an international incident, and there were protests by leftists around the world — the same people who had previously ignored or rationalized mass murder during the 1920s and 1930s. Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt made appeals to Stalin, and American Jewish leaders, such as Nahum Goldmann of the World Jewish Congress and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of the American Jewish Congress (AJCongress), helped quell the uproar over the incident and shore up positive views of the Soviet Union among American Jews.
Another manifestation of Stalin’s anti-Jewish campaign was the trial of Rudolf Slansky, the Jewish First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. The trial was “openly anti-Jewish with naming ‘world leading’ Jews such as Ben Gurion and Morgenthau, and putting them into the same harness with American leaders Truman and Acheson.”
Stalin also arrested a large number of Jewish doctors —the “Doctors’ plot” — and “prominent Soviet Jews were forced to sign a letter to Pravda with the most severe condemnation of the wiles of the Jewish ‘bourgeois nationalists’ and their approval of Stalin’s government.” (The letter was preceded by an article in Pravda published on January 13, 1953 claiming “”The majority of the participants of the terrorist group… were bought by American intelligence. They were recruited by a branch-office of American intelligence — the international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization called ” Joint” [i.e., the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee]. The filthy face of this Zionist spy organization, covering up their vicious actions under the mask of charity, is now completely revealed.”)
In February, the Soviet Embassy in Tel Aviv was bombed. Solzhenitsyn accepts the idea that the “international anger” resulting from the Doctors’ plot “could possibly” have motivated “internal forces” to murder Stalin:
And then Stalin went wrong, and not for the first time, right? He did not understand how the thickening of the plot could threaten him personally, even within the secure quarters of his inaccessible political Olympus. The explosion of international anger coincided with the rapid action of internal forces, which could possibly have done away with Stalin. It could have happened through Beria (for example, according to [Abdurakhman] Avtorhanov’s version (66).)
The trimming of Jewish power in the USSR is important not just as a facet of Jewish history in the USSR but also because it had a major role in influencing some components of the American Jewish community to become less enamored with the left—notably Leo Strauss and the neoconservatives. Strauss believed that liberal, individualistic Western societies were best for Judaism. National Socialism was obviously bad for Jews, and Communism had become so. Despite their elite status, the events of 1948-1953 showed that Jews were vulnerable when the attitudes of an autocrat like Stalin turned against them. Liberal societies were best, but they had to be controlled against populist tendencies. After all, the working class had eventually opted to join the National Socialists.
Stephen Holmes describes Strauss’s solution to the Jewish dilemma as follows: “The good society … consists of the sedated masses, the gentlemen rulers, the promising puppies, and the philosophers who pursue knowledge, manipulate the gentlemen, anesthetize the people, and housebreak the most talented young” — a comment that sounds to me like an alarmingly accurate description of the present situation in the United States and elsewhere in the Western world. Given Strauss’s central concern that an acceptable political order be compatible with Jewish survival in the Diaspora and with the tendency for Jews to become an elite, it is reasonable to assume that Strauss believed that Jews would be a prominent part of the aristocracy and that the arrangement would serve Jewish interests–as indeed the current regime does.
Kevin MacDonald: Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The 1920s.” Chapter 18 of 200 Years Together
Monday, July 5th, 2010The English translation of Chapter 18 of 200 Years Together, “The 1920s,” is now available. (See here, and notice the link requesting donations.) It has a very different feel from Chapter 20, on the Gulag. Whereas Solzhenitsyn’s account of the Gulag stresses his own experiences, this chapter relies on a wide range of academic historical writing to paint his picture of the USSR during the critical decade of the 1920s. His account is therefore based on mainstream scholarship and overall is similar to other accounts, such as Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century. However, it goes beyond other accounts in several important ways and provides a great deal of new information for Western audiences. It is a very long chapter (>26000 words). In the current TOO article, I summarize some of the main points and draw analogies to the current situation in the West. I encourage comments on Solzhenitsyn’s chapter and my article here.
Kevin MacDonald: More on Peter Beinart
Saturday, May 29th, 2010Kevin MacDonald: The Peter Beinart event continues to reverberate within the Jewish community. (See here.) The whole thing is rather surreal. Critics focus a great deal on why American Jews might be excused for carving out a special place for ethnic nationalism while holding on to their liberal attitudes in the US. James Kirchick writing in Foreign Policy is among many who say it’s all the Palestinians’ fault.
There’s never any mention of the possibility that the liberalism of American Jews is a strategy that is well suited to Jewish ethnic aims in the Diaspora but is quite unsuited for Israel. Jewish liberalism in the Diaspora is a sign that Jews are morally superior people who have been forced by circumstances to accept a certain amount of illiberalism in order to have a Jewish state at all. As I noted previously, the reality is that the most prestigious and powerful Jewish communal organizations, such as the ADL, see no problem at all in supporting the most extreme forms of ethnonationalism in Israel while at the same time framing their advocacy of liberal policies in America as stemming from the very nature of Judaism as an ethically superior group — despite the fact that these liberal policies conform to Jewish group interests in the US and effectively undermine White identity and interests. Beinart is a bit more honest in at least feeling a tad of cognitive dissonance in this state of affairs.
In general, there is very little mention of one of Beinart’s main points–that the entire Jewish community in Israel and in the Diaspora is likely to become more religious and more nationalistic over time because of demographic trends. Simply put, the orthodox and nationalist elements are the ones having the babies. In his critique of Beinart, Steven M. Cohen writes that the main factor influencing the lack of involvement of young Jews is intermarriage — the “departure from all manner of Jewish ethnic ‘groupiness,’ of which Israel attachment is part.” Beyond that, secular Jews have fewer children than their religious/nationalist brethren, with the result that the Jewish community in general is moving in their direction.
As an evolutionist, I see this as natural selection for ethnocentrism within the Jewish community. In traditional societies, even the less ethnocentric Jews were more or less forced to marry within the community. Marrying a non-Jew effectively removed one from the community. It also carried huge penalties to the entire family that remained behind–a blot on their name for as long as communal memory remained. But since the Enlightenment, Jews have been able to marry outside the community, and many have done so. In the same way, traditional pressure to marry kept genes for homosexuality in the gene pool because people with homosexual tendencies got married and had children. There is doubtless strong selection pressure against homosexuality now — ironically, because gay activists have succeeded in making homosexuality an acceptable lifestyle in the West. Intermarriage was seen as a serious problem by the early Zionists who viewed the creation of a Jewish state as preventing intermarriage and allowing Jewish ethnic continuity. As Cohen implies, liberal, secular Jews cannot maintain Jewish group ties over the long haul. The demographic engines both in Israel and the US are the more Orthodox and conservative elements–precisely the people who have aggressive, nationalistic attitudes toward the Palestinians.
So Cohen agrees with Beinart that American Jewish activist organizations will be run by nationalist Jews and the entire American Jewish community will be increasingly nationalist. And I predict that American Jewish nationalists will continue to advocate liberal policies in America. Psychologically, greater ethnocentrism would be expected to be linked to seeing issues more in terms of what’s good for the Jews–and rationalizing whatever is good for the Jews in terms of whatever principles place them in a positive light. As Beinart notes, the Conference of Presidents continues to insist that “Israel and the United States share political, moral and intellectual values including democracy, freedom, security and peace” — despite the obvious reality that Israel is an apartheid ethnonationalist state. The more ethnocentric one is, the less cognitive dissonance one will feel for holding such attitudes.
Kevin MacDonald: Elena Kagan on the Jewish radical tradition in American politics
Sunday, May 23rd, 2010Kevin MacDonald: JudicialWatch.org has some important material on Elena Kagan. Judicial Watch President Thomas Fitton notes the “most disturbing” parts of her senior thesis at Princeton are the following:
...Through its own internal feuding, then, the SP [Socialist Party] exhausted itself forever and further reduced labor radicalism…to the position of marginality and insignificance from which it has never recovered. The story is a sad but also a chastening one for those who, more than half a century after socialism’s decline, still wish to change America.
…if the history of Local New York shows anything, it is that American radicals cannot afford to become their own worst enemies. In unity lies their only hope.
As Fitton says, “Do we really need a Supreme Court Justice who once lamented the lack of unity on the part of the Socialist Party?”
Judicial Watch had a link to Kagan’s thesis but it doesn’t work as of today. Her senior thesis is consistent with other historical studies in showing that the Socialist Party in New York in the early 20th century was a Jewish phenomenon. She notes that Jews were the backbone of the Socialist Party and that other ethnic groups, such as the Irish and Italians, could not be motivated to join even though they were in a similar economic situation.
Not only were Jews the backbone of the Socialist Party, socialism was very mainstream within the Jewish community. Her account parallels those of other historians who describe the Jewish community from 1890 to 1920 as “one big radical debating society” (see here, p. 71ff).
From [1886] on Jewish districts in New York and elsewhere were famous for their radical voting habits. The Lower East Side repeatedly picked as its congressman Meyer London, the only New York Socialist ever to be elected to Congress. And many Socialists went to the State Assembly in Albany from Jewish districts. In the 1917 mayoralty campaign in New York City, the Socialist and anti-war candidacy of Morris Hillquit was supported by the most authoritative voices of the Jewish Lower East Side: The United Hebrew Trades, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and most importantly, the very popular Yiddish Daily Forward. This was the period in which extreme radicals—like Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman—were giants in the Jewish community, and when almost all the Jewish giants—among them Abraham Cahan, Morris Hillquit, and the young Morris R. Cohen—were radicals. Even Samuel Gompers, when speaking before Jewish audiences, felt it necessary to use radical phrases.
The result was a radical mainstream Jewish culture that persisted in New York and elsewhere into the 1960s and beyond. With the success of the Bolshevik Revolution, many Jews opted out of the Socialist Party, resulting in a Jewish Communist subculture that was also entirely mainstream within the Jewish community.
Kagan’s comments in her thesis suggest a sympathy with this radical Jewish culture — even a desire to carry it to fruition. Everything we know about her indicates that she continues to be immersed in a Jewish culture whose attitudes are well to the left of the American mainstream–a subculture that was hostile to the traditional people and culture of the US and has now become a hostile elite.
This fits well with Kagan’s childhood in New York’s Upper West Side — described by Dan Freedman as “as conservative’s worst nightmare.” During her college years she wrote, “Where I grew up _ on Manhattan’s Upper West Side _ nobody ever admitted to voting for Republicans.”
Elena Kagan and many of this culture’s children emerged from the Upper West Side political cauldron as committed to making the world a better place for all, mindful that everyday people can affect change as teachers, doctors, lawyers _ and, yes, even journalists _ and make government work for the common good.
There is no indication that Kagan has changed her views, and there’s not much doubt that indeed she will be a judicial activist on the left. Fitton quotes from her Oxford thesis:
As men and as participants in American life, judges will have opinions, prejudices, values. Perhaps most important, judges will have goals. And because this is so, judges will often try to mold and steer the law in order to promote certain ethical values and achieve certain social ends. Such activity is not necessarily wrong or invalid.
Well, at least we know what we can expect when Kagan gets on the court.
Kevin MacDonald: Philip Weiss: “The American Jewish revolution is over”
Thursday, May 20th, 2010Kevin MacDonald: Philip Weiss is a unique American Jewish voice — a Jew without all the usual rationalizations and blind spots–at least most of them. A recent piece of his, titled “This is how the world now sees Jews,” consisted simply of this photo, with a note that it probably depicted Israeli settlers:
How the world now sees Jews
Below is a Palestinian woman whose house in East Jerusalem has been occupied by settlers. She is arguing with nationalist Jews.
Making the case for seizing Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem
The photo is from Weiss’s article, “Making the case for Zionism,” which quotes Peter Beinart in the NY Review of Books:
In the American Jewish establishment today, the language of liberal Zionism—with its idioms of human rights, equal citizenship, and territorial compromise—has been drained of meaning.
Weiss comments: “Why? Because the territorialist-nationalists have won, and from Deir Yassin to Al-Atatra to Sheikh Jarrah, they have uprooted and humiliated Palestinian women.”
The point is that Israelis are thugs with machine guns and ethnic cleansers. More importantly, all Jews, including the organized American Jewish community which supports Israel to the hilt, have lost the moral high ground.
This is familiar territory for Weiss, but his article “Lame Specter, Blumenthal, and Kagan show — the American Jewish revolution is over” extends his critique of Jews to their role in the contemporary American elite. The basic message is that Jews in America started out as morally aggrieved outsiders who have ultimately morphed into symbols of the worn out establishment (Arlen Specter), liars (Richard Blumenthal), and calculating achievers and hacks (Elena Kagan).
Although I am far less romantic about the Jewish left and its moral imperative of revolution against the traditional people and culture of America than Weiss is, he certainly does understand that the new Jewish elite is fundamentally corrupt. This Jewish elite consists of people like Adam Kirsch “who steps into the New Yorker and all the other magazines with an air of entitlement, and who can blame him, Jews run the important magazines, with all the passion of printing a train timetable.”
Notice that Kirsch “steps into” his job at the New Yorker – his position as the editor of an elite publication simply handed to him as part of his Jewish entitlement. No need for struggle or for particularly great qualifications. Jews have arrived.
Kagan too “stepped into” her position as Supreme Court nominee. Her only qualifications are being Jewish and knowing the right people. The entire passage bears quoting:
Kagan is the ultimate sign that our brand is finished. She is the best of breed, as they say at Westminster. According to this Times profile, she comes out of the same hothouse I came out of, in her case the Upper West Side. Achievement, liberalism, and no partying. Arguing at the dinner table. Presumably no physical life. [Interesting comment on what it means to be Jewish. On the other hand, there's that famous photo in the WSJ of her playing softball.] …
Kagan’s world is the Jewish success world, she stepped into it like Kirsch did. She loved the hothouse. She emulated Felix Frankfurter, who didn’t stand for much either, and is pals with Sarah Walzer,daughter of Michael Walzer, the political theorist and Jewish parochialist. She went to Jeffrey Toobin’s wedding, she was picked by Larry Summers at Harvard around the time he was saying that divestment was anti-semitic. Eliot Spitzer, Ted Weiss and Elizabeth Holtzman were among her backers. She clerked for Abner Mikva, a Chicago macher who backed Obama.
It’s a Jewish world — a world where being in the right circles counts far more than genuine talent. Kagan, the Harriet Miers of the Obama Administration, simply “steps into” her position in the top court in the land.
This reminds me of Jews as an elite in the Soviet Union, where a nascent Jewish elite motivated by moral fervor and hatred unleashed by their exclusion under the Czar morphed easily into a corrupt, nepotistic elite that was hostile to the traditional people and culture of Russia. A report to the Soviet Central Committee reminds me of Kagan’s route to success: “They gather around themselves people of the same nationality, impose the habit of praising one another (while making others erroneously believe that they are indispensable), and force their protégés through to high posts” (see here, p. 78). Another report, from 1942, noted that elite cultural institutions “turned out to be filled by non-Russian people (mainly by Jews)” (see here , p. 51, ff). For example, of the ten top executives of the Bolshoi Theater—the most prestigious Soviet cultural institution—there were eight Jews and one Russian. Similar disproportions were reported in prestigious musical conservatories, the Soviet Academy of Science Institute of Literature, and among art and music reviewers in elite publications. Ethnic nepotism, not IQ, is the only way to explain these disproportions.
So now we are looking at a Supreme Court that is one-third Jewish–another disproportion that can’t be explained by Jewish IQ but reeks of ethnic nepotism. The ADL will of course attempt to squelch anyone who talks about the new Jewish elite publicly. But as time goes on, it’s going to be more and more apparent who runs the US.
Fundamentally, White Americans have to wrap their minds around the fact that this new elite is corrupted by nepotism,that it supports policies like massive non-White immigration aimed at the racial dispossession of Whites, and that it has no moral standing, most obviously because of the gap between its moral posturings in the US versus the reality Israel as a an aggressive, ethnonationalist state.
Kevin MacDonald: Elena Kagan and the Decline of WASP America
Monday, May 17th, 2010Kevin MacDonald: Elena Kagan’s impending confirmation on the Supreme Court has produced several comments on the decline of WASP America. Writing in the Wall Street Journal (“That Bright, Dying Star, the American WASP”), Robert Frank’s article is an expression of Jewish triumphalism and contempt for WASPs. Discussing the New York banking elite, he points to the bad old days when “the strictly homogenous crowd of Protestant blue-bloods spent their mornings comparing golf scores and vacation homes.” Among several causes for the decline of the WASPs, Frank mentions the decline of family connections and the rise of a meritocracy.
This is a favorite aspect of contemporary Jewish self-conception — the idea that Jews replaced WASPs because they are smarter and work harder. But this leads to the ultimate irony: Kagan is remarkably unqualified to be a Supreme Court Justice in terms of the usual standards: judicial experience, academic publications, or even courtroom experience. Rather, all the evidence is that Kagan owes her impending confirmation to her Jewish ethnic connections (see also here).
So we are replacing one type of ethnic networking with another. At least the WASPs’ ethnic networking had a certain legitimacy given their percentage of the population and their role in founding the country and defining its culture for much of US history.
Frank also quotes a passage from E. Digby Baltzell’s The Protestant Establishment:
A crisis has developed in modern America largely because of the White-Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment’s unwillingness, or inability, to share and improve its upper-class traditions by continuously absorbing talented and distinguished members of minority groups into its privileged ranks.
Perhaps. But that wouldn’t explain the eclipse of the WASPs, only that they resisted the inroads of others — futilely, as it turns out. Mr. Frank, of course, finds the passage useful because he sees himself as a member of a certain upwardly mobile minority group that he feels was not greeted warmly enough by the WASPs.
Baltzell’s comment is quite consistent with my view that that the WASPs did not voluntarily cede control but were pushed out by a rising Jewish group whose base of influence was the academic world, finance, the legal profession, personal wealth, and the media (where anti-WASP movies became a staple at least by the 1960s; see also here).
Frank says that as a result of its downfall, “WASP culture has been left to live out its days as a fashion statement, on the shelves of Ralph Lauren stores, or as a social badge at defiantly old-world clubs like the Knickerbocker Club in New York or the Bath and Tennis Club in Palm Beach.” A triumphalist statement if ever there was one. The battle is over and we won.
Frank quotes an Episcopalian bishop who acknowledges defeat, but isn’t much concerned: “tracking the ups and downs of socioreligious groups like WASPs [is] no longer relevant: ‘That kind of calibration of ‘what members of my team are on the front lines’ seems to me to be an antique kind of thing to do.’”
That’s the kind of broad-minded, liberal thinking that got the WASPs into trouble in the first place. There was always a tension between the WASPs as a clubby, snobbish elite cemented by family connections and their very liberal, broad minded world view stemming from their New England base. Writing in the LA Times, Gregory Rodriguez credits Kagan’s nomination to “The triumph of WASP culture.” Whereas Frank is filled with contempt for his vanquished ethnic rivals, Rodriguez seems quite thankful that the liberalism of the WASP elite was triumphant, presumably so that his people can now swarm over the border and aspire to power while WASP principles still count for something. He summarizes Eric Kaufmann’s view of WASP culture:
The Yankee sense of ethnic superiority often competed with their belief in universalist liberal ideology — equality, liberty and human rights. One way that worked itself out is that non-Yankees could aspire and acculturate to the Yankee norm and ideal — by gaining entrance to their schools primarily, but also by joining their churches, appreciating their art forms and imbibing their ideas, adopting their aesthetic.
Rodriguez concludes:
Students don’t just strive to attend Harvard and Yale for their educational excellence. There is also the matter of absorbing those universities’ sense of authority, legitimacy and historical legacy that leads back to their Yankee founders. If Kagan is confirmed, as seems likely, don’t cry for the WASPs. The educational pedigree of the Supreme Court will be a powerful example that their culture abides and still anoints power. The only thing that has changed is that today’s “WASP elites” are just as likely to be Jews and Catholics as they are to be Yankees.
I do cry a bit for the WASPs because I think they were more public spirited than our current elite and less likely to welcome a radical change in the ethnic balance of the country that they built. After all, the WASP elite did make common cause with the rest of White America in fashioning the 1924 immigration law (the “period of ethnic defense”). But they ultimately fell to the rise of a new Jewish elite that has shown itself as intent on establishing alliances with non-White ethnic groups and has taken an oppositional stance toward the traditional people and culture of America — including the WASPs. The “Jews as a hostile elite” theme of much of my writing.
And to claim that it really doesn’t matter what people’s ethnic or religious identity are as long as they graduate from an Ivy League university is completely nutty. Ethnicity matters a great deal, no matter what university one graduates from. The fact that Elena Kagan is the product of New York’s Jewish leftist sub-culture makes a huge difference in what we can expect from her — particularly given her views on the First Amendment and executive power that are in line with the mainstream Jewish community.
The Jewish leftist subculture is light years away from traditional WASP culture. Indeed, in her article on Thurgood Marshall, Kagan completely rejects the WASP cultural influence:
The Constitution today … contains a great deal to be proud of. But the credit does not belong to the Framers. It belongs to those who refused to acquiesce in outdated notions of ‘liberty,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘equality.’
The fact that Kagan’s Jewish leftist subculture has become ensconced at Harvard and other elite academic institutions speaks volumes on the massive changes that have taken place in the academy and WASP America generally. Rodriguez is deluded (in a self-interested way) to suppose that changing the ethnicity of Supreme Court justices won’t change anything as long as they graduated from Ivy League colleges.
The WASPs had their faults certainly. But their main one was their failure to block the emergence of a non-WASP elite — to go down with their principles. I rather doubt that this new elite will be as willing to see itself eclipsed as the old one was. It will hang on to power with no regard at all for principles. Indeed, a good example of corruption and lack of principle among the new elite are the many defenses we now see of Kagan emanating from elite opinion makers despite her being the poster girl for ethnic nepotism and lack of real accomplishment.
Kevin MacDonald: Jewish groups oppose Arizona-type laws–except in Israel
Thursday, April 29th, 2010Kevin MacDonald: Finding examples of Jewish double standards and hypocrisy vis-à-vis their attitudes about Israel and the US is like shooting fish in a barrel. But their posturing on the Arizona immigration law is particularly egregious. Not surprisingly, the organized Jewish community has unanimously come out against the Arizona law (”New Arizona law brings renewed attention to immigration reform.“) We’re talking about all the major Jewish organizations:
The new law has been criticized by an array of Jewish groups, including the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, Simon Wiesenthal Center, National Council of Jewish Women and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a public policy umbrella group comprised of the synagogue movements, several national groups and scores of local Jewish communities across North America.
As usual, Gideon Aronoff , head of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, leads the moral posturing by stating,
“Are most of the Latinos who suffer from this law Jewish? The answer is no, but we look at this through the oral commandment of ‘welcome the stranger,’ ” … “We are all Americans, we are all our brothers’ keepers. We have an obligation not to stand by when legislation so harmful is put through.”
The reality is that Jewish support for legal and illegal immigration is hardball ethnic politics where Jews see themselves as part of the emerging non-White coalition. It is motivated by their fear and loathing of the traditional people and culture of America.
The photo accompanying the article likens the Arizona law to (what else?) National Socialist Germany:
The horrors!
But wait. It turns out that Israel enforces laws that allow police to ask people for their papers. Writing in Mondoweiss, Azaff Oron’s article is titled “Israel has been ‘Arizona’ all along.”
In Israel, laws like the Arizona one – and worse – have been in effect ever since independence. No, I’m not talking about the Occupation, but inside Israel proper.
Any resident sixteen years of age or older must at all times carry an Identity card, and present it upon demand to a senior police officer, head of Municipal or Regional Authority, or a policeman or member of the Armed forces on duty.
And guess against which ethnic group this requirement is enforced most often….
The answer would be: anyone looking like a Palestinian:
The vast majority of their effort is spent profiling, questioning and strip-searching a single target group: Palestinians. Most other security services have more “suspect” ethnic groups to deal with, or they must intercept risks not immediately evident from appearance or other profiling.
It’s a system that works well. Security, even at airports, is lax for people who are obviously Jewish, but is considerably tougher for anyone else.
Perhaps now that the word is out that their favorite country also requires everyone to carry papers, Jewish organizations will decide to back the Arizona law. On the other hand, maybe people like Gideon Aronoff and Abe Foxman will start to put pressure on Israel to change its laws.
And if you believe that, you are living in an alternate universe — one in which the mantra “Is it good for the Jews” has ceased to be the key to understanding Jewish ethics.
Kevin MacDonald: The SPLC’s “Jihad for Dollars” Is Fueled by Ethnic Conflict
Saturday, March 20th, 2010Kevin MacDonald: Having written an informative article on the SPLC, Jerry Kammer is now emphasizing that he is a liberal. I suppose that’s a good way to dodge criticism when one is going after a pillar of the left. A video clip on Kammer by Media Matters emphasizes his charge that the SPLC is mainly about raking in the money: Morris Dees “learned that he can take in more money by exaggerating the size and menace of the Klan” — “Jihad for dollars.”
As Kammer points out, many of the most trenchant critics of the SPLC have been on the left. But the interesting thing is not that the $PLC has gotten rich off the Klan. The interesting thing is why going after the Klan has such a strong appeal to its Jewish donor base. The menace of racially conscious White people is what motivates Jewish donors, not poor people. And that’s why the SPLC will lead the looming battle on immigration. The fact that there are millions of unemployed American citizens is completely irrelevant, as are the effects 0f immigration on destroying the labor market for American citizens — especially the among less educated. The massive public costs of immigrant health care and education are overlooked, as are the effects of overpopulation on the environment as amnestied immigrants import their relatives and swell the population to over 500 million by mid-century. This is because, despite all the lofty rhetoric, it’s really all about ethnic conflict in which White people, and especially working class White people, are the big losers and non-Whites are the big winners.
Forget about the Jewish donors to the SPLC. Surely no one would doubt that La Raza’s motivation is ethnic and that it has no concern at all if there are economic and political costs to the rest of America. For them, after all, it’s all about advancing the power and influence of la raza — just as for the SPLC donors, it’s all about Jewish fear and loathing of a White, Christian America. It’s an ethnic war that White people are supposed to graciously lose in the name of abstract virtues without calling it for what it is — racial dispossession.
Kevin MacDonald: Part 2 of Connelly on White Victimization
Thursday, March 4th, 2010Kevin 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: The Howard Zinn Cancer Spreads to Australia
Friday, February 12th, 2010Kevin MacDonald: I blogged recently on radical historian Howard Zinn and his lack of concern for historical truth. An article in Quadrant, an Australian journal, discusses Howard Zinn’s disastrous influence. It also discusses Zinn’s main disciple in Australia, Robert Manne — also Jewish. First, about Zinn’s most influential book:
Zinn’s radical (and radically unsound) tome, A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present, has gone through five editions and multiple printings since it was first published in 1980, selling almost two million copies, and is assigned in thousands of university and college courses in America, making it the best-selling work of history ever written by an American leftist. It also has a high profile in popular culture, being the basis of several documentaries, inspiring pop songs, serving as the basis for a highly successful graphic novel, being referenced in the Academy Award-winning film Good Will Hunting (1997), and even in an episode of The Simpsons, where Marge is shown reading the book at college. Its penetration into American popular consciousness is both unparalleled and insidious.
The Zinn cancer metastasized from America to Australia, spreading the culture of the left that has come to dominate the academic world in recent decades:
Zinn’s book had an immediate impact on the neo-Marxist, Foucaultian, and feminist academic clique that came to dominate the study, teaching, publishing, and grant-allocating activities of Australian history in the 1980s, giving rise to the four volume collectivist effort, A People’s History of Australia Since 1788. This was published in 1988 in order to promote the negative mythology of Australian history in time for the Bicentennial and to ensure that the nation had no illusions about the depths of its historical depravity.
Manne is a worthy acolyte to Zinn:
Manne [and] the many other Australian historians who follow his lead … make no attempt to champion the Australian people or recognize their efforts to build a nation. Instead, Australians emerge from their historical writings as unrepentant and non-reflective racists who support ignorant, oppressive, and racist policies, and deserve nothing but the unrelenting contempt of morally superior intellectuals like Manne and his colleagues — a contempt they are happy to provide.
Manne is a worthy disciple of Zinn for another reason. He has no scruples about falsifying history in order to advance the Jewish ethnic agenda of undermining a confident, homogeneous White Australia. It is well known that the Jewish community in Australia has been a strong supporter of non-White immigration and multiculturalism (summarized in CofC, where, e.g., I quote Miriam Faine, an editorial committee member of the Australian Jewish Democrat: “The strengthening of multicultural or diverse Australia is also our most effective insurance policy against anti-semitism. The day Australia has a Chinese Australian Governor General I would feel more confident of my freedom to live as a Jewish Australian.” [Sound familiar?] See also here.) Manne is also totally on board with multiculturalism. Here he is discussing his Jewish roots at a website dedicated to making Australia multicultural.
Keith Windshuttle has charged Manne with professional malfeasance in claiming that the Australian government during the 1930s supported a policy of “breeding out the colour” by encouraging White men to marry “half-caste” women in order to eventually make their descendants White. Because of Manne’s position as an elite academic, his word carried a great deal of weight with the government, resulting in an abject apology to appease the contemporary gods of multiculturalism. As Windshuttle notes,
In failing to mention these three critical responses, while pretending the government gave “full endorsement” to the very opposite approach, Manne falsified Australian political history on an issue that he, more than almost any other academic commentator in the country, had the opportunity, the interest and the ability to investigate thoroughly and report honestly. If Manne can get away with behaviour of this kind, it would mean Australian universities no longer demand any standard of truthfulness from their academic staff.
I rather doubt that anything will happen to Manne. Falsifying historical and scientific data is par for the course in all of the Jewish intellectual movements covered in The Culture of Critique. Boas, who shaped American anthropology, and the Frankfurt School are great examples. (This blog discusses Boas’s falsifying data in his notorious head shape study that was used by immigration advocates for decades to argue that the environment would shape everyone into good Americans.) Luminaries like Freud didn’t really falsify data, but he produced untestable theories that successfully masqueraded as science while being very useful in the assault on the traditional people and culture of the West.
The common denominator of all this intellectual work has been to undermine the confidence of Western societies and their willingness to remain racially and culturally homogeneous. The hypocrisy in all this is stunning. For example, Australian Jewish leader Rabbi Is Leibler, a staunch defender of multiculturalism as a model of Australia, was recently reported as saying that multiculturalism has no place in Israel. “[Israel] is a country which was set up and created as a Jewish country for the Jews.” In another context he stated “”There is a need to sit together and establish a way in which Australians can recapture that spirit of multiculturalism which I think we are all proud being part and parcel of, and which is really under threat.”
As usual, one needn’t bother to look for high principle to explain Jewish activism. The only common denominator is what is good for the Jews.
Kevin MacDonald: Jews and Other Minorities
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010Kevin MacDonald: In this video, Ann Schaffer, director of the American Jewish Committee’s Belfer Center for American Pluralism, states the basic philosophy of Jews in America:
The Jewish community has always worked on the premise that as a minority, our security, our strength, our well being in America is interdependent with those of other minorities. This is a Jewish issue. It’s very much a Jewish issue.
This is quite correct, but it’s nice to see it so explicitly and baldly expressed. This is from The Culture of Critique: The quote is from Jewish academic activist Earl Raab:
“The Census Bureau has just reported that about half of the American population will soon be non-white or non-European. And they will all be American citizens. We have tipped beyond the point where a Nazi-Aryan party will be able to prevail in this country.
We [Jews] have been nourishing the American climate of opposition to bigotry for about half a century. That climate has not yet been perfected, but the heterogeneous nature of our population tends to make it irreversible—and makes our constitutional constraints against bigotry more practical than ever (Raab 1993b, 23)”
Positive attitudes toward cultural diversity have also appeared in other statements on immigration by Jewish authors and leaders. Charles Silberman (1985, 350) notes, “American Jews are committed to cultural tolerance because of their belief—one firmly rooted in history—that Jews are safe only in a society acceptant of a wide range of attitudes and behaviors, as well as a diversity of religious and ethnic groups. It is this belief, for example, not approval of homosexuality, that leads an overwhelming majority of U.S. Jews to endorse ‘gay rights’ and to take a liberal stance on most other so-called ‘social’ issues.”
The footnote is as follows:
Moreover, a deep concern that an ethnically and culturally homogeneous America would compromise Jewish interests can be seen in Silberman’s (1985, 347–348) comments on the attraction of Jews to “the Democratic party . . . with its traditional hospitality to non-WASP ethnic groups. . . . A distinguished economist who strongly disagreed with Mondale’s economic policies voted for him nonetheless. ‘I watched the conventions on television,’ he explained, ‘and the Republicans did not look like my kind of people.’ That same reaction led many Jews to vote for Carter in 1980 despite their dislike of him; ‘I’d rather live in a country governed by the faces I saw at the Democratic convention than by those I saw at the Republican convention’ a well-known author told me.”
I recall reading that in the 1930s well-meaning Whites advised Jews not to ally themselves with Blacks — obviously to no avail. The Jewish-Black alliance, although a bit shaky at times, has been remarkably strong over the last century, and now the alliances are expanding to other non-White groups. Shaffer goes on to discuss current projects aimed at making alliances with non-Whites, claiming disingenuously that it’s good for “all Americans.”
I think this is going to result in huge management problems down the line for Jews — not the least of which is White anger at the role of Jews in these transformations when they find themselves as a minority surrounded by an alliance of hostile non-White minority groups.
Kevin MacDonald: Controlling Historical Memory
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010Kevin MacDonald: Dovid Katz’s article in The Guardian “Halting Holocaust Obfuscation” is yet another example of Jewish intellectual activists with access to the media attempting to control historical memory in a way that highlights Jewish suffering and presents Jewish behavior as nothing more than innocent victimhood. Katz is determined to disallow any equivalence between the horrors inflicted on the populations of Eastern Europe by the Germans and by the Soviets. He condemns Polish MEP Michal Kaminski, linking to this article, for bringing up Jewish behavior in the Jedwabne incident in which Jews were murdered during the German occupation of Poland during WWII:
One of the participants in the 2001 meeting, Maria Mazurczyk, told us: “I think that Mr Kaminski, like us, wanted everything to be revealed: the times before the war when things were good – and the time of the Soviet occupation when the Jews didn’t respect their Polish neighbours – and later the effect of all this.”
At the time Kaminski condemned Poles who’d killed Jews – though he suggested the massacre was principally carried out by Germans. But it appears his principal concern was with alleged Jewish guilt. Anna Bikont of the liberal Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, who spent much time in Jedwabne in 2001 while researching a book, says: “Mr Kaminski came to the place where an incredible crime was committed – and he told not about the women, children, old people who died in this horrible manner, but he told about Jews who collaborated with Soviets and who killed Poles.”
Would a British politician who’d behaved in a similar way survive in the mainstream of British politics?
Probably not. But that’s only because mentioning Jewish behavior as contributing in even the slightest way to anti-Jewish attitudes is off limits, even if they collaborated with the Soviets against the Poles or against the Baltic peoples. The following is from a review of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together (italicized quotes are translations of Solzhenitsyn):
“Everyone was listening intently to determine if the Germans were already on the way.”
In June and July of 1941 those living in the regions of eastern Poland occupied by the Red Army – Polish farmers, the bourgeoisie, the clergy, ex-soldiers, and intellectuals – all awaited the invasion of German troops. This quote is from the Polish Jewish historian J. Gross, author of the book Neighbors: The Murder of the Jews of Jedwabne.Solzhenitsyn explains why Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Estonians, Belorussians, Bukowina-, and Moldava-Romanians could hardly wait for the Germans to invade.
Pursuant to his central thesis, Solzhenitsyn writes that without the high Jewish presence among the leaders and executioners of the Bolshevik dictatorship, Lenin’s newly born Soviet state would have been at an end, at the latest, by the time of the Kronstadt Sailors Rebellion in 1921. Solzhenitsyn examines specific decisive questions, as for example: Why, in the period 1939-41, did such a large percentage of Jewry in eastern Poland, Galicia, and in the Baltic States collaborate with the Red Army, Stalin’s secret police, and Bolshevism in general? And why did the pogroms in these regions take place under the slogan “Revenge for the Soviet Occupation”? Solzhenitsyn:
“In eastern Poland, which had been incorporated in the Soviet Union in September 1939, the Jews, especially the younger generation, welcomed the invading Red Army with frenetic jubilation. Whether in Poland, Bessarabia, Lithuania, or Bukowina, the Jews were the main support of Soviet power. The newspapers report that the Jews are enthusiastically supporting the establishment of Communist rule.” (p. 329)
In that fateful year a Polish Jew who had emigrated to France prophesized that the non-Jews who had been subjugated to Bolshevism would one day exact a fearful war of vengeance. In 1939 Stanislav Ivanowich, a left socialist sympathetic to the Soviet Union, warned:
“Should the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks end one day, the collapse will be accompanied by the atavistic, barbaric passions of Jew hate and violence. The collapse of Soviet power would be a terrible catastrophe for Jewry; today Soviet rule equates to Judeophilia.” (p. 310)
See here for a comment on the distortions of Jan Gross’s Neighbors which attempts to blame the massacre solely on the irrational anti-Semitism of Poles. This compilation notes, among other things, that “There was significant collaboration on the part of some Jedwabne Jews with the Soviet invaders from 1939 to June 1941; the victims were primarily the town’s Polish population, several hundred of whom were deported to the Gulag.”
When a significant percentage of people from an alien ethnic group support an invader and collaborate in the deportation of people from one’s own ethnic group, it is not at all surprising that there would be reprisals when there is a shift of power; nor would be be surprising if the reprisals were directed all Jews, not just the ones known to collaborate or sympathize. That’s how our evolved psychology of ethnic competition works.
I notice in my notes that Checinski (1982, 9) writes that “even then [in 1943] there was an attempt to rationalize this blind hatred [of Jews] by recalling the ‘improper’ attitude of the Jewish population in eastern Poland towards the Bolsheviks in September 1939 when the Soviet army, in connivance with the Nazis, occupied their territories.” Checinski also notes that immediately after WWII Jews welcomed the Soviet army and the new regime “with favor if not with outright enthusiasm” and that “the small Jewish community was seen by friends and foes alike as one of the mainstays of the Soviet sponsored regime. This only further alienated it from the great majority of the Polish population” (p. 8). This comment is highly compatible with Jaff Schatz’s (1991) treatment which I discuss extensively in Ch. 3 of Culture of Critique. It is interesting that American Jewish representatives visiting Poland after the war presented the new Polish regime as “a paragon of liberalism and tolerance, unequaled in Eastern Europe” (Checinski, p. 11).
To conclude, anti-Jewish attitudes in Eastern Europe had a basis in the real behavior of Jews. No doubt the events of 1939 and thereafter were influenced by traditional grievances between Poles and Jews, but actual Jewish behavior during this period is also relevant. Jews were correctly perceived as more welcoming to the Soviets after the 1939 invasion and as more loyal to the Communist regime and as willing executioners of the remnants of Polish nationalism after 1945. (As I and others have noted, the common denominator of the behavior of Diaspora Jews in European countries has been to oppose nationalist movements; further, during this period, Jews throughout Europe and in America saw communism as good for the Jews at least partly because Jews had become an elite in the USSR and the USSR had outlawed anti-Semitism.)
The situation was exacerbated by the fact that Jews were also highly placed in the government and in the security forces. Under these circumstances, social identity theory predicts that Poles would develop the well-attested stereotype of “zydokomuna” (Judeo-Communism) and exaggerate the differences between themselves and all Jews in Poland. It simply reflects typical ethnic conflict that has gone on throughout the ages — nothing more than a reflection of our evolved psychology.
In the West, Jewish activists have had a relatively easy time erecting the image of innocent Jews and evil Nazis as a complete explanation of the events of World War II. This message is much more difficult in Eastern Europe where there is a collective memory of collaboration of Jews with the horrors of communism and in the extermination of nationalist elements of the non-Jewish population.
Kevin MacDonald: Jews and immigration policy — Again
Monday, January 11th, 2010Kevin MacDonald: A friend sent along Steve Sailer’s review of historian Otis L. Graham’s Immigration Reform and America’s Unchosen Future. Misleading title. American immigration policy was chosen. It just wasn’t chosen by the vast majority of the American people, and this is Graham’s point. As I have tried to show, it was chosen by the organized Jewish community and put into action as a result of Jewish political pressure and financial wherewithal. Graham notes that the successful immigration restriction of 1924 was seen by historians as one of the reforms of the Progressive Era’s campaign against the excesses of capitalism, since immigration lowered wages.
It’s fair to say, however, that Jews never saw it that way and there’s at least a fair amount of truth in the idea that the 1924 law was enacted to achieve an ethnic status quo that Jews saw as unfair to them. (Jewish immigrants were correctly seen by restrictionists as disproportionately involved in political radicalism, and it was generally a period of ethnic defense of White America.)
As Sailer’s review shows, Jews have not ceased seeing the 1924 law as exclusion of Jews. Graham points out that Jews live in the past when it comes to thinking about immigration: “the “filiopietistic” urge (“of or relating to an often excessive veneration of ancestors …”) is particularly strong among Jewish media figures. Italian-Americans, in contrast, tend to approach the immigration policy question by thinking about the future rather than by obsessing over the past. This anti-rational emotional reflex about immigration contributes to the kitschy quality of MSM discourse on the topic.”
In other words, Jews see the 1924 immigration law as part of their lachrymose history among Europeans, It’s just another example of irrational anti-Semitism — an example that warrants the evil nature of the people and culture who created it. Since, as Sailer notes, Jews constitute half of the most influential media figures, and since the other half are rigorously vetted to exclude anyone who opposes what amounts to the Jewish consensus on immigration, there really isn’t much real debate in the above-ground media.
Of course, there is a lot of self-censorship. Graham recounts the example of Theodore White, then the most influential journalist in America (and a Jew), refusing to publish his views on immigration. “‘My New York friends would never forgive me. No, you guys are right [on immigration], but I can’t go public on this.’ ” Sailer quotes Graham:
Hearing White’s agitated response, I had my first glimpse of the especially intense emotional Jewish version of that taboo [against immigration skepticism]. His whole heritage, and his standing with all his Jewish friends, was imperiled (he was certain) if he went public with his worries about the state of immigration. …
I did not suspect it then, but this would become an important subtheme of our experience as immigration reformers. American Jews were exceptionally irrational about immigration for well-known reasons. They were also formidable opponents, or allies, in any issue of public policy in America.
In a nutshell, that’s the problem with Jews: They get what they want and what they want is not necessarily what others want (leading to conflicts of interest) or what is good for the country as a whole. It really wouldn’t matter if the only group that wanted open borders was African Americans. But it matters greatly that Jews do.
Incidentally, Otis Graham’s brother Hugh Davis Graham, agrees with me on the forces behind the 1965 law. He wrote in his 2002 book Collision Course (pp. 56-57):
Most important for the content of immigration reform [i.e., loosening], the driving force at the core of the movement, reaching back to the 1920s, were Jewish organizations long active in opposing racial and ethnic quotas. These included the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and the American Federation of Jews from Eastern Europe. Jewish members of the Congress, particularly representatives from New York and Chicago, had maintained steady but largely ineffective pressure against the national origins quotas since the 1920s…. Following the shock of the Holocaust, Jewish leaders had been especially active in Washington in furthering immigration reform. To the public, the most visible evidence of the immigration reform drive was played by Jewish legislative leaders, such as Representative Celler and Senator Jacob Javits of New York. Less visible, but equally important, were the efforts of key advisers on presidential and agency staffs. These included senior policy advisers such as Julius Edelson and Harry Rosenfield in the Truman administration, Maxwell Rabb in the Eisenhower White House, and presidential aide Myer Feldman, assistant secretary of state Abba Schwartz, and deputy attorney general Norbert Schlei in the Kennedy-Johnson administration.
Kevin MacDonald: The Ilya Somin Conspiracy
Friday, January 8th, 2010Kevin MacDonald: Ilya Somin’s blog at the Volokh Conspiracy, “Confusing Overrepresentation with Domination” raises some interesting issues that are at the heart of my work. His purpose is to claim that Jews may be overrepresented in various movements, such as neoconservatism, without Jews dominating these movements. He also claims that Jews involved in various movements do not differ from non-Jews involved in these movements, so that the idea that Jews involved in these movements are pursuing Jewish interests is a non-starter. For example:
In the 1920s, Jews were indeed overrepresented (relative to their percentage of the general population) among both Bolshevik leaders and international capitalists [in Weimar Germany]. At the same time, non-Jews still greatly outnumbered Jews in both groups. A closely related fallacy was the assumption that overrepresentation in a field proved that the Jews involved in it were using it to promote some specifically Jewish interest. In reality, Jewish capitalists tended to behave much like gentile ones, focusing primarily on maximizing their profits. Jewish communists such as Leon Trotsky were brutal totalitarians. But their gentile counterparts, such as Lenin and Stalin, were much the same. There was no real evidence that either Jewish capitalists or Jewish communists were promoting specifically Jewish interests in any systematic way. Indeed, Jewish communists in the USSR actually supported the regime’s suppression of Jewish culture and religion.
I don’t dispute this argument when it comes to capitalists, although there is good evidence that the political attitudes of Jewish capitalists were not interchangeable with non-Jewish capitalists — the latter more inclined to liberal internationalism than their non-Jewish counterparts. But when it comes to leftist politics, one must deal with the data in Chapter 3 of The Culture of Critique — that Jewish Bolsheviks retained a Jewish identity and saw Communism as good for Jews — as indeed it was. As Yuri Slezkine exhaustively describes, Jews became an elite in the USSR, their influence declining only after WWII. As I concluded in CofC, “Clearly, Jews perceived communism as good for Jews: It was a movement that did not threaten Jewish group continuity, and it held the promise of power and influence for Jews and the end of state-sponsored anti-Semitism.”
Responding to Somin’s point about the suppression of Jewish culture and religion, I also show that Jewish communist activists produced a secular Jewish culture within the communist system, concluding:
Despite their complete lack of identification with Judaism as a religion and despite their battles against some of the more salient signs of Jewish group separatism, membership in the Soviet Communist Party by these Jewish activists was not incompatible with developing mechanisms designed to ensure Jewish group continuity as a secular entity. In the event, apart from the offspring of interethnic marriages, very few Jews lost their Jewish identity during the entire Soviet era (Gitelman 1991, 5), and the post–World War II years saw a powerful strengthening of Jewish culture and Zionism in the Soviet Union.
Somin goes on to dispute the importance of Jewish identity in the neoconservative movement (Mearsheimer and Walt to the contrary) and the recent financial crisis. Again, I don’t want to dispute this with respect to the financial crisis because I have not seen a good article showing differences between Jews and non-Jews in the financial industry. (On the other hand, there is evidence, soon to be presented in TOO, that Bernie Madoff’s scheme likely could not have happened apart from his Jewish connections.)
But in the case of neocons, it’s simply not enough to claim “that the views of Jewish neoconservatives differ little from those of gentile ones, that neocon hawkishness on the Arab-Israeli conflict is just one facet of their hawkishness on other foreign policy issues unrelated to Israel (and therefore not likely to be a specifically Jewish agenda), and that the overrepresentation of Jews among neocons is similar to that in many other intellectual movements (including plenty that were opposed to neoconservatism on most issues).”
I agree that non-Jewish neocons typically hold the same views as Jewish neocons (otherwise they wouldn’t be neocons!). The question is whether Jewish and non-Jewish neocons have different motivations, and there is overwhelming evidence that they do. In my article on neocons, it quite clear that Jewish neocons typically have close family connections to Israel (e.g., Douglas Feith’s father was a member of a Jabotinskyist terrorist group), are involved with Israeli think tanks, and are on personal terms with Israeli political and military leaders. Many have ties with Jewish activist organizations such as the Zionist Organization of America. Several have been credibly charged with spying on behalf of Israel (Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Bryen, Douglas Feith, and Michael Ledeen). When not working in the government, they often work for overtly pro-Israel organizations such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. It’s simply not credible that their Jewish identity is not a critical factor in explaining their behavior.
I also try to fathom the motives of non-Jews involved in neoconservatism, noting “Because neoconservative Jews constitute a tiny percentage of the electorate, they need to make alliances with non-Jews whose perceived interests dovetail with theirs. Non-Jews have a variety of reasons for being associated with Jewish interests, including career advancement, close personal relationships or admiration for individual Jews, and deeply held personal convictions.” But whatever these motives are, they are not the same as the motives of the Jewish neocons.
It’s also true that Jewish neocons are generally hawkish, but this certainly doesn’t imply that their attitudes about anything affecting Israel are not affected by their Jewish identifications. Again, neocons have to make alliances with non-Jews; one way to do this is to adopt a generally aggressive foreign policy stance that appeals to non-Jewish foreign policy hawks. Further, hawkish Jewish interests extend beyond directly aiding Israel. For example, the role of neocon Jews in the Cold War fit well not only Jewish interests in weaking an ally of the Arabs, but also with improving the status of Jews in the USSR.
And finally, it doesn’t follow from the fact that Jewish neocons are motivated by their attachment to Israel that Jews who are opposed to neoconservatism are not motivated by their own conception of Jewish interests. In the same way, before the establishment of Israel there was real debate within the Jewish community over whether Zionism was a good idea. The point is that both factions in the debate viewed their perspective as better for Jews. Right now we have the conflict between AIPAC and J Street. (Granted, the conflict may be more apparent than real). But in any case, both sides see their perspective as good for Jews. Even Mearsheimer and Walt argue that their approach to Israel policy is good for the Jews. But M&W are surely correct in seeing Jewish neocons as motivated by their perception of Jewish interests.
Kevin MacDonald: Nora Ephron makes an obvious choice
Sunday, December 13th, 2009Kevin MacDonald: I finally got around to watching Julie & Julia, directed by Nora Ephron who also wrote the screenplay. She is Jewish and a typical Hollywood liberal. She donated to Al Franken and Obama. Here’s an example of her prose (titled “White Men” from the liberal (and very mainstream) website Huffington Post, written just before the Pennsylvania primary in 2008:
This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women. And when I say people, I don’t mean people, I mean white men. How ironic is this? After all this time, after all these stupid articles about how powerless white men are and how they can’t even get into college because of overachieving women and affirmative action and mean lady teachers who expected them to sit still in the third grade even though they were all suffering from terminal attention deficit disorder — after all this, they turn out (surprise!) to have all the power. (As they always did, by the way; I hope you didn’t believe any of those articles.)
White men are nothing more than haters. Not even Bill Kristol is liberal enough for her.
Julie & Julia is basically about two women becoming famous cooks 50 years apart. But Ephron can’t resist an opportunity for a little propagandizing. The movie has a brief cameo appearance of Julia’s father, John McWilliams. The following is from a biography of Child:
Pasadena, where she was born in 1912, was a handsome city, known for its wealth and civic accomplishments; John McWilliams was a living symbol of the city’s prosperity. A Princeton graduate and devout Republican, he managed the Western landholdings and investments amassed by his own father and later became vice president of J. G. Boswell, one of California’s major landowners and developers. His personal and professional mission was to keep California booming, and he put a great deal of time into Pasadena community life. Julia was raised to admire his discipline and public spirit, which she did, but he also nurtured a set of rabidly right-wing convictions that she would come to abhor. The two of them split sharply during the 1950s, when John McWilliams became a strong supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy whom Julia found despicable. Her father was also outspoken about his contempt for Jews, artists, intellectuals, and foreigners; and for most of her adult life Julia viewed him with enormous dismay, though she managed to keep loving him.
In fact, McWilliams’ anti-Jewish views were well enough known that he was mentioned, along with well-known figures such as Gerald L. K. Smith and Methodist preacher Wesley Swift, as anti-Jewish supporters of McCarthy in Aviva Weingarten’s Jewish Organizations’ Response to Communism and Senator McCarthy (see my review here).
In Julie & Julia, McWilliams is presented as a cranky supporter of McCarthy who dislikes Julia’s husband Paul, a political liberal who had lived in Paris as a poet and artist — everything that McWilliams detested. In the movie, Paul is working as a librarian in the Foreign Service when he is called to Washington where he is grilled about possible communist associations and on his sexual orientation. Julia states that she knows many people who have been persecuted by McCarthy even though they have done nothing wrong. Paul returns to France dispirited by his experience.
The movie seems to be a reasonably accurate portrayal of McWilliams — a portrayal tailor made to hammer home one of Hollywood’s favority moral lessons about the evil 1950s.
However, Ephron could have taken another tack altogether. Although Julia renounced her father’s views on McCarthy, her views on homosexuality would certainly exclude her from the culture of the mainstream media today.
Homophobia was a socially acceptable form of bigotry in midcentury America, and Julia and Paul participated without shame for many years. She often used the term pedal or pedalo — French slang for a homosexual — draping it with condescension, pity, and disapproval. “I had my hair permanented at E. Arden’s, using the same pedalo I had before (I wish all the men in OUR profession in the USA were not pedals!),” she wrote to Simca. Fashion designers were “that little bunch of Pansies,” a cooking school was “a nest of homovipers,” a Boston dinner party was “peopled by 3 fags in an expensive house…. We felt hopelessly square and left when decently possible,” and San Francisco was beautiful but full of pedals—“It appears that SF is their favorite city! I’m tired of them, talented though they are.”
So Ephron had a choice if she wanted to bring up politically volatile issues. She could have played up the angle of Julia’s father as a cranky right-wing supporter of Sen. McCarthy, or she could have played up the angle of the Childs as homophobes.
But this was a feel-good movie, so it was a no-brainer. For Ephron, part of the feel-good message is to portray Julia’s character as an enlightened liberal, just like herself — and at the same time get in yet another dig at the retrogrades who supported McCarthy while avoiding any mention of McWilliams’ civic contributions or Julia’s homophobia.
Despite the fact that McCarthy was basically right about the people he hauled before his committee (see M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies), the cause of anti-McCarthyism remains a rallying cry for the Nora Ephrons of the world — at least partly because, as Weingarten shows, so many of them were Jews.
My only surprise is that we weren’t treated to a caricature of McWilliams’s anti-Jewish attitudes.
Tom Sunic: Reply to Stern
Saturday, December 12th, 2009Editorial note: Frequent TOO contributor Tom Sunic replies to Joel Stern’s letter to several writers associated with TOO and TOQ. (For Stern’s letter, see Alex Kurtagic’s “Narcissism” blog which also comments on Stern.)
Dear Mr. Stern:
Thank you for your comments. I appreciate your concern for the future of the Jewish people, and I’d also like to extend my condolences regarding the loss of your family .
Of course, I speak in my own name, not on behalf of my TOO colleagues, all of them being outstanding intellectuals and tolerant people. I hope you have read Prof. MacDonald’s work — in which you won’t find any Jew baiting, but rather serious analyses of this most important issue of our times.
Any lumping together of Christian identitarians and National Alliance hotheads with TOO is groundless.
I respect your concerns for the real or hypothetical attacks on your victimhood. But I also expect from you some respect for my own, including respect for the historical memory of my people and my race — wherever they may reside. It would be commendable on your part to extend sympathies to many of my relatives who perished anonymously in communist terror after 1945. While many Jews in America take for granted that non-Jews will constantly reminisce about Jewish victimology and hypothetical threats to the Jewry, few Jews seem to be concerned with the plight of non-Jews under communism in East Europe.
The fact that Jewish intellectuals played a formidable role on the eve and during the Bolshevik seizure of power — however good or bad their intentions may have been — remains a topic that needs to be addressed in detail. This might help us avoid future mass killings and pogroms and secure, more or less, some semblance of cohabitation.
Yet, something tells me that neither myself nor yourself seriously believe in this static scenario.
One of the reasons anti-Semitism occurs is due to the lack of open debate about mutual perceptions and self-perceptions of Jews vs. non-Jews. Hatred of Jews is prevalent among those who mimic Semitism, people who subconsciously try to be more Jewish than Jews themselves. This is part and parcel of ‘genealogical proximity’, between Christians and Jews, and which has historically resulted in mutual hatred. This is a neurotic dilemma of a person wishing to replace his Sameness by someone else’s, i.e. Jewish/Christian Otherness. The classic example of this neurotic mindset are Christian Zionists.
Your concerns reflect standard self-induced fears and self-fulfilling prophecies about anti-Semitic demons — who, as a rule, must sooner or later materialize. The demon architects are not those you suspect of anti-Semitism, but those who claim to be your friends now.
Sincerely,
Dr. Tom Sunic
Croatia
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