Is my criticism of Jewish attitudes the same as Kevin MacDonald’s?

In response to my criticism of Kevin MacDonald’s anti-Semitic critique of the Jews, three readers told me that they saw a similarity between my analysis of Jewish attitudes in my article, “Why Jews Welcome Moslems,” and MacDonald’s argument. What follows is a selection from those exchanges.

Reader to LA:

In your FrontPage Magazine article, “Why Jews Welcome Muslims,” you state the following:

Given the wildly overwrought suspicions that some Jews harbor about the American Christian majority who are in fact the Jews’ best friends in the world, it is not surprising that these Jews look at mass Third-World and Moslem immigration, not as a danger to themselves, but as the ultimate guarantor of their own safety, hoping that in a racially diversified, de-Christianized America, the waning majority culture will lack the power, even if it still has the desire, to persecute Jews.

The self-protective instinct to divide and weaken a potentially oppressive majority population may have served Jews well at certain times and places in the past when they truly were threatened. Under current circumstances-in America, the most philo-Semitic nation in the history of the world-it both morally wrong and suicidal. Not only are the open-borders Jews urging policies harmful to America’s majority population, but, by doing so, they are surely triggering previously non-existent anti-Jewish feelings among them. The tragedy is that once a collective thought pattern gets deeply ingrained, as is the Jews’ historically understandable fear of gentiles, it takes on a life of its own and becomes immune to evidence and reason.

I am confused. This sounds like the basic thesis of MacDonald’s work.

LA to reader:

I guess what I’m saying has points of similarity with him, but the differences are basic.

For starters:

1. I’m speaking of an understandable fear, based on history, that leads some Jews to act in an irrational way today. MacDonald is speaking of a socio-biologically determined group strategy of the Jewish people qua the Jewish people to take advantage of gentiles and undermine their culture wherever they find them.

2. I’m speaking of something that would be reformable through reasoned confrontation. MacDonald is speaking of a primal group animus, driving the Jews to destroy Christians.

3. It is evident to anyone reading me that I am not feeling or invoking hostility to Jews as Jews. It is evident to anyone reading him that MacDonald feels and seeks to invoke profound hostility against Jews as Jews.

4. I see the Jewish issue as one issue among many others, and far from the most important. MacDonald literally sees the Jews the source of everything that has gone wrong with the West, to a transcendent degree. For him, the fact that gentiles are destroying their own cultures is purely the result of Jews having gotten control of the gentiles’ minds. This makes Jews not only the sole source of everything that is wrong with gentiles, it makes them demonic beings. The whole insanity of Western suicide that is now happening, it’s all because of the Jews. MacDonald’s “objective,” “scientific” argument leads to a picture of the Jews which equals Nazism in its total demonization of the Jews.

5. The differences between Jews and Muslims must be remembered. Interspersed with periods of persecution and conflict, Jews have functioned harmoniously and productively as a minority in Western societies for over 2,000 years and can do so again. All that’s needed for this to happen is a self-confident and morally sound majority that firmly stands for its own culture without retreating into resentment and hatred in order to do so. Muslims are inherently alien and hostile to the West and cannot function harmoniously as a minority in Western society.

If you think that Jews to Europeans is the equivalent of Muslims to Europeans, then you could accuse me of contradiction or hypocrisy in saying that Jews can be part of the West and Muslims can’t. But I know you don’t think that .

Reader to LA:

I do think that it asks a lot of Gentiles to read statements by Jewish leaders in which they openly talk about removing Christianity from the public square, importing non-whites to submerge the hated WASP majority, etc., and not react with any hostility. In an ideal world, perhaps we would all react with calm, civil discourse and try to persuade these Jewish leaders that their policies are mistaken. In the real world, when you read that someone wants to destroy your culture and your national heritage, how should you react?

LA replies:

How should you react? You stand up and identify what he’s doing and say that it’s wrong. It’s absolutely amazing that with every other left-wing or anti-American issue , conservatives figure ways to oppose it. But when it comes to the Jews, the only response people can think of is hostility.

Translate that into:

LOSER. VICTIM. RESENTMENT. USELESS.

When people become aware of negative Jewish agendas, this tends to be their response. Hostility. It never occurs to them to OPPOSE what Jews are doing, just as they would oppose any other negative or left-wing movement. Why? Because they think any opposition to Jews will be seen as anti-Semitic. So instead of arguing against and denouncing the liberal Jewish agenda to remove Christianity, they opt for nursing resentment.

Just imagine if gentile leaders began strongly criticizing things like Foxman’s speech, not just glancing off it, but saying with logic and indignation and passion, that this is absolutely wrong and off-base and offensive and you must stop this.

If they began doing that, if they began acting like leaders in this country instead of like victims and losers, if they acted like the majority instead of like a beaten minority, then the whole dynamic of this situation would change. People like Foxman would be brought up short and would alter their behavior. No one’s ever spoken to the left-wing Jewish leaders that way before so it’s never occurred to them that it’s wrong or offensive.

This is the paralysis or hypnosis from which gentiles must awake. They think the only way they can react to anti-Christian Jewish agendas is reactive and impotent “hostility,” instead of taking charge of the situation and acting like the majority that they are.

This is why it’s not enough for gentiles to let conservative Jews like Rabbi Lapin or Don Feder attack the Foxmans. In my view, it is imperative that gentiles do this as well. The implication of leaving this job to conservative Jews is that gentiles have no right to criticize Jews, because any such criticism is anti-Semitic. If that remains the assumption, then gentiles will (1) never be able to defend themselves as a group, and (2) never again be able to manifest as the cultural majority of this country.

Second reader to LA:

In your critique of MacDonald you write:

“If Jews, who have been a part of European civilization since before the time of Christ, are the source of all evil in our civilization, there is nothing for them to do but die.”

I believe you are posing a false choice here. The choice does not have to be either let the Jews live among us, or else they have to die. They could live in their own nation, just like we want a nation for ourselves free of Muslims, etc.

One doesn’t have to say that “Jews are the source of all evil in our civilization” in order to say that it may be true that their self-interest as a people sometimes conflicts with the interests of the white population of the country. It would be surprising if there wasn’t conflict, since that usually seems to be the result whenever two different cultures and peoples try to occupy the same nation-state. To my mind, this is just another argument for “good fences make good neighbors”. I don’t think the Jews are exempt from that any more than any other alien group is. (And I don’t mean “alien” in a pejorative sense here.)

LA replies:

No—because MacDonald hates Israel and sees it as the source of all problems in the world, along with Jewry generally. I don’t think he wants Jews to exist anywhere.

You are badly misstating KM’s position on the Jews when you characterize it as, “that their self-interest as a people sometimes conflicts with the interests of the white population of the country. “

Haven’t you read my quotes of him? He says that the Jewish people as Jewish people pursue a conscious agenda aimed at destroying European civilization.

Third reader to LA:

I don’t believe Macdonald is right but the only difference between what you wrote and what he wrote seems to be the use of hedge phrases and weasel words.

LA replies:

What you call hedge phrases and weasel words makes all the difference in the world.

Compare these two statements:

• The entire being of Group X is directed toward the total demoralization and dissolution of our group. In pursuit of this end, as superhumanly smart and infinitely devious creatures, they have gotten control over our minds and are making us destroy ourselves.

• Group X having been terribly harmed by groups related to our group in the past, there is an understandable but wrong-headed tendency among some people in group X to fear our group more than they fear their actual mortal enemies, and thus seek to weaken our group as a self-defensive measure. But since the members of Group X are by and large rational beings, and, moreover, have a long common history and many substantive commonalities with us, if we as the majority group in this society stand up against these wrong-headed attitudes instead of retreating from them and nursing resentments, we can correct Group X’s behavior.

What you deride dismissively as weasel words is the difference between hate speech and civilized speech.

Another reader writes:

Your criticisms are very far from Kevin MacDonald’s.

For him, there’s no history, no voluntary choice. Jews just have the culture they have always had, and it’s a Darwinian strategy to outbreed (that’s what Darwinism is about) the gentiles. They’re the Borg, robots, programmed to destroy. And equipped with magical powers to manipulate the minds of gentiles, to boot.

You have said that Jews do what they do because their history made them believe certain policies to be good for them, which are not now good for them, and may never have been. They can change, they are not pure instruments of destruction, and they mostly can’t do things to the gentiles unless the gentiles let them.

Yet another reader adds:

The previous comment is quite right.

You also note that certain behaviors that MacDonald deems to be a socio-biological survival strategy are actually highly damaging both to Israel and to diaspora populations.

The cult of victimization is not a survival strategy but a defective response to generational trauma.

Paul Gottfried writes:

The last two commenters are right on this. Why are pathologically anti-Christian Jews like Abe Foxman clever schemers reacting to Darwinian imperatives instead of mentally unstable victimologists, who can’t disguise their counterproductive hate based on fictitious enemies? It’s like arguing that Hitler was a wise German leader, who understood the need for Lebensraum and the evils of the Treaty of Versailles. Arguments like this try to ascribe rationality to tightly wired nut cases, who mistake Jewish doctors for the racial enemies of the Aryans or who go ballistic at the sight of Santa Claus. What MacDonald does is assume that nasty anti-Christian behavior engaged in by some Jews is something far more profitable than it is.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 17, 2005 11:55 AM | Send