I think that guy had the balls to say what half the world is thinking.

The head of government of a major country, speaking at an international conference of Muslim countries, said in his speech: “Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.” He was saying that the Jews as Jews are a sinister force controlling and harming the world. Johnny R’s response is to congratulate the prime minister for his courage, using language that shows emphatic agreement with what he said.

After having had lengthy exchanges with Jew-haters in the past, this website no longer includes discussants who seek to create hatred of the Jewish people or who rationalize, excuse or support people who seek to create hatred of the Jewish people. Johnny R is out of here.

Mahathir’s speech is one more reflection of what would be an astonishing fact if we were not so used to it: the complete obsession of the Arab world, and indeed much of the Muslim world, with the Jews and with Israel. Neither the Jews nor Israel have anything to do with the enormous problems facing the Muslim world. The Jews are numerically insignificant. There are 5 million Jews in Israel, close to 285 million Arabs, and more than 1.2 billion muslims. Israel is a tiny strip of land of no geopolitical importance either in resources or location. One has to recognize that for the Arabs and Muslims, Jews have become the scapegoat to explain the failure and collapse of their own civilisation. When Jews made Israel prosper in the otherwise barren Middle East, its mere existence became a terrible reproach in Arab eyes. Consumed with envy, bolstered by an ideology that draws both from the intolerance of the Koran, which is believed to be the direct word of God, and from imported Western leftist ideology, the hatred of the Jews and of Israel serves the Arab and Muslim world as a consolatory phantasm. This is why all the “peace process” nonsense has always been doomed from the start. The adoption of the “two-state” solution is of zero appeal in the Arab world: it would only institutionalize the existence of Israel and the demonstrated inferiority of its new Muslim neighbor. Liberals with their essentially false view of human nature and of the human condition can not understand this.

Thucydides’ 11:13 post is of course one hundred percent right.

A few thoughts:

What to me was at first glance surprising about the prime minister’s words was that he is an oriental, and the yellow races have something that makes them avoid race-based or ethnicity-based attacks in public — I don’t know if it’s politeness, or wisdom, or such a solid, unalterable assurance on the part of their own people of their own racial-genetic superiority to all other races and ethnicities, but yellows never do it, not in public at any rate. (In private, of course, it is so ingrained in them and natural to view all other races, ESPECIALLY other yellows, even more so than Euro-whites, as inferior, that they scarcely need to mention it to one another in private either, since each yellow already understands the thinking of his fellow yellows on a pre-verbal level). ( * )

Yes, I know Malaysians aren’t totally yellow. Nevertheless, though brown they are yellow too — sort of a brown-yellow mix — and as such they partake of that yellow wisdom (that rightly fabled “Wisdom of the East”), or politeness, or whatever it is that makes that race not utter public remarks that are racially or ethnically disparaging like this.

BUT — Malaysia being a Muslim country, we have our explanation — this prime minister was making a politically expedient speech. That explains it. Who knows what he himself thinks? He probably agrees completely with Mr. Auster. But he does what he has to to survive politically, as politicians everywhere do.

About the Palestinian question which Thucydides also brings up, it’s an abnormal situation because it’s never been approached in anything but an abnormal way. Had it ever once been approached in a normal way it would today be a normal situation (and a very different one). Why has it only ever been approached in an abnormal way? There are a number of reasons, some of which seem to be:

1) It’s not every day that a nation which has for two thousand years held itself together cultural-religiously, at least partly ethno-genetically, and from a language point of view (Jews preserved Hebrew two millennia without benefit of a country that spoke it) gets its land back so it can make itself into a real nation again in every sense of the word, and since that doesn’t happen every day the community of nations didn’t know quite how to handle it, so kept making mistakes which they keep on making;

2) Israel’s reconstitution of itself as a country in 1947-8 happened not during a time in history when the nationalism of white people was viewed as natural and OK, but the opposite — the post-WW-II period saw the beginnings of political opposition brought to bear against the nationalism of any white group which of course today has grown into outright political hysteria; ( ** )

3) Israel’s reconstitution as a country happened in a place where there was double opposition to it — national AND religious (as contrasted, for example, with the annexation back and forth by France and Germany of Alsace-Lorraine, involving only *national* outrage every time it changed hands, not compounded by *religious* outrage as well);

4) The particular religion (actually, sort of a combined religio-nationalism rolled into one) which Israel had the misfortune of having to contend with as part of its birth pangs was an almost uniquely stubborn and fanaticism-prone one, not about to compromise;

5) Jews in general tend to be leftist, overly-intellectual, overly concerned with moral hair-splitting and with the way the rest of the world perceives them morally, guilt-prone, timid, and to have an atrophied sense of what makes a country work due to not having had their own in so long, and these are NOT characteristics that make for solid country-building.

There are other reasons too, of course. My view of the beginnings of a remedy is, in a nutshell, that Israel has to expand territorially first and foremost, and then do certain other things (which perhaps it takes a non-Jew like me to see clearly). They had better start learning quickly, because they are by no means certain to have a future at the rate they’re going. And by the way, people like Abe Foxman are not helping Israel with their incessant harping on the illegitimacy of ethno-cultural nationalism, an activity they misguidedly feel is “Good for the Jews.” In a very real sense, “what goes around comes around” — you spread (leftist) disease, you risk catching it yourself. The people who fund Foxman’s organization — one which I agree does important work in fighting genuine anti-Semitism — should start looking for a replacement. The world is changed drastically since many of these Jewish businessman types grew up in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Nassau County. They need to start opening their eyes.

( * Yes, liberals, this is the way the world is — better believe it. Did you think when your ethnic destruction of the West was complete the orientals were going to commit suicide along with you? Open thine eyes for once, liberal imbecile — travel, read books, get to know other races and peoples, go live among them, talk to them — and see how the world actually works. Know that you and all your ilk who think you are sooooo, soooooo worldly are the world’s most provincial, benighted political faction, bar none. Talk about “knuckle-draggers” and “mouth breathers” — you’re it, my friends.)

( ** Yes, I know Palestinians are white too, but the world-wide perception is that they are less white — or, at any rate, less “Euro-white” — than the Ashkenazi Jews who make up the bulk of Israel’s socially and politically dominant class and also the class of U.S. Jews who have organized themselves into the world’s most visible external “ethnic” backers of Israel.)

Unadorned’s point #1: “It’s not every day that a nation which has for two thousand years held itself together cultural-religiously … gets its land back … and since that doesn’t happen every day the community of nations didn’t know quite how to handle it … “

This reminds me of Arnold Toynbee’s unintentionally humorous annoyance at the persistence of the Jews in the modern world. According to his civilizational scheme, they were supposed to have disappeared two thousand years ago, as part of the “Syriac” civilization that came to an end then. But they didn’t, and it irritates him no end.

To expand a bit on my reference to liberal fatuousness in my earlier post to this thread, liberals with their “expansive” (Thomas Sowell, “A Conflict of Visions”) or utopian view of humanity, which embodies the “blank slate” and “noble savage” ideas, are prone to the idea that all people are at bottom reasonable, and therefore amenable to rationally devised solutions to any and all problems. It is only a failure of human institutions that is responsible for conflict, and this is remediable through negotiation, education, and improvement in understanding. The idea of deeply rooted psychological predilections which serve emotional needs and which may be in ineluctable conflict with other goals is incomprehensible to them. The peace process liberals ignored every evidence that the whole procedure was a con game, and finally were stunned when the Palestinians turned down the Clinton Barak offer that would have given them essentially everything the liberals thought they could possibly have wanted - if of course, they thought like the liberals imagined. They had ignored Arafat’s saying one thing in English, and saying and doing another in Arabic. They had ignored the institutionalization of hatred in the Palestinian education system. They had ignored the truthful words of the Hamas representative who said “We don’t want something from you, we want to kill you.” And so there was the shuttling, this plan and that plan, roadmaps, agonizing over settlements, the search for confidence building measures, etc., all of it utterly futile. Now some of the peace process liberals, like Thomas Friedman, have now called for a shift in tactics to another quixotic utopian project, bringing Madisonian constitutional democracy to the Middle East. Others attack him for not continuing with the same old failed policies. The Israeli Labor Party has much to answer for: they wanted to believe the peace process nonsense, but they also saw it as electorally very beneficial to position themselves as peace-makers, and the opposition as war-mongers. Anyone who understands much of human psychology need not attribute bad faith to them. Humans have a way of sincerely convincing themselves of what it is beneficial to themselves to believe, no matter how overwhelming the opposing evidence, and it was overwhelming. However, opposing sensible views were out there, and they chose to ignore them. The peace process liberals in Israel and their supporters in the US thereby unleashed the worst wave of terror killings ever seen. The peace process was nothing more than an institutionalization of terrorism in the pursuit of a chimaera, all based on a misguided understanding of human nature. If the Arabs have their consolatory phantasm in the form of an obsessive hatred of the Jews, then the peace process liberals in Israel and in the US State Department and at the NY Times have their own: an utterly utopian vision of human nature that rejects the tragic vision of man held by the ancients and by many conservatives today - a vision that would have precluded the peace process fatuousness and surely have saved many lives.

If I may compress Thucydides’s essay into a snippet from a popular movie:

James Bond (symbolizing here the liberal belief in negotiation and compromise) says to Goldfinger: “Do you want me to say something?” (I.e., Do you want some reasonable concession from me, in exchange for which you’ll release me from this table where a laser beam is about to split me in two?)

Goldfinger (the real enemy as distinct from the reasonable negotiator of liberal fantasies) replies: “No, Mr. Bond, I want you to DIE.”

Thucydides’ statements are an excellent thumbnail sketch of the dynamics of what is going on with the Arab and Islamic world. Unadorned has likewise given a fine insight into the liberal mind’s complete inability to comprehend the facts of life. The trouble with a karge percentage of Jews is the same as the trouble with a large percentage of white Westerners: they have abandoned their traditional beliefs and raised liberalism as an idol in their place. Is there anyone out there who is waking up? Until large numbers of Jews and white Gentiles alike repent, things are only going to continue on their present downward path.

I share the admiration for Thucydides’s two comments. I have not read Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions, but I derived similar insights from Ruth Wisse’s study of the liberal mind published about ten years ago, If I Am Not For Myself. Her main idea is that liberals believe everyone is reasonable, and that all problems can be solved by negotiation.

Now, WHY do liberals believe this, and how does this belief fit with the liberal belief in equality? If everyone is not reasonable, if some people are really unassuageable enemies or criminals or villains, then war is sometimes necessary, and war is the greatest expression of inequality. You are using force to impose your will on others, to kill them, to defeat them, to subjugate them, because you see them as not being civilized like yourself. Since war is the antithesis of equality, peace is an absolute requirement, and in order for there to be peace, everyone must be reasonable. That everyone—foreigners, enemies, criminals, terrorists—is believed to share a common reason is the liberals’ proof of the equality of mankind.

Now there is an element of truth in this idea. The belief in a common reason was the beginning of Greek philosophy. But liberals, as they do with everything, pervert this true idea into an ideology. They insist that everyone in the world _already_ shares in that common reason, or can be made to do so with enough effort, enough negotiations, enough concessions; and they will never accept a failure as final. They believe that if there is a common reason, it must be shared equally by everyone, otherwise it is a false idea. Of course, the Greeks understood that some men reject common reason, or are otherwise incapable of it. But liberals will have none of this.

In short, liberals must believe in the avoidability of war with the same absolute dogmatism with which they believe in an inherent racial equality of intelligence.

I would recommend “A Conflict of Visions” by Thomas Sowell to everyone on this board. He became interested in “the history of ideas” when he noticed that the division into what we now call left and right seemed to be pervasive throughout centuries of history in different nations. He set out to answer why it is that the left will invariably believe A and B, while the right will believe their opposite, even though A and B seem (superficially) to be unrelated issues (perhaps one domestic policy, the other foreign policy). It ends up being one of the more insightful books you will ever read.

We are still left with the question of why liberals cling so desperately to the discredited blank slate and noble savage theories of human nature in the face of terrible events that would seem to give them the lie, and recent extensive scientific evidence concerning the human mind (summarized in Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate”) that completely undermines the theories. I believe that with the decline of traditional religion and the loss of belief in any ultimate moral order in the universe, it is simply too frightening to many to accept the “tragic” view of man as deeply flawed, and containing great potentiality for evil. Yet how could anyone look back on the 20th century, in some ways the blackest in human history, in which tens of millions of people were murdered as a matter of deliberate policy of their governments, and conclude that it was all due to faulty social arrangements or lack of education or understanding, as liberals would? I remember when I was a boy listening after school to a radio detective serial “The Shadow.” The “bumper” or introduction for the show was the sound of a creaking door slowly swinging shut, with a voice over saying: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men…..The Shadow knows…” This was followed by a sardonic laugh, and an emphatic bang as the door slammed shut. I have sometimes wondered whether this youthful experience which I never gave a second thought to at the time didn’t nevertheless instill in me a receptivity to the tragic view of the human condition.

It seems to me that Thucydides has answered his own question. The loss of belief in an objective moral order means the loss of any larger framework within which human inadequacy and difference can be assimilated and transcended. If a person is inferior in some respect, he is absolutely inferior; if he is evil in some respect, he is absolutely evil; if he is Other, he is absolutely Other. And therefore there is nothing preventing us from killing and enslaving the inferior, the evil, and the Other. So, in the minds of people who have lost transcendence, the only alternative to genocide/slavery is dogmatic equalitarianism. And part of that dogmatic equalitarianism is the belief in man as a blank slate, without inherent qualities that make him inferior or unassimilably different.

Mr. Auster has posted a most interesting comment on the effects on the liberal mind of a loss of belief in any ultimate moral order in the universe, and a possible explanation of why liberals are so fearful of considering group differences. I plan to mull it over for a while.