The anti-Semites and me; and my solution to the Jewish problem

At the anti-Semitic website Majority Rights there is a response to my recent entry on how to speak about the white race. (In this connection see also my entry yesterday on how William Jennings Bryan spoke about the white race.) The low nature of the MR discussion removes any desire on my part to read it carefully. Overall it is the usual whacked-out anti-Semitic take on me that is seen in those quarters, namely that my real purpose is not to defend the white race and its civilization from mass non-Western immigration, but to undermine the white race in order to protect and empower the Jews. According to the anti-Semites, my entire work—everything I’ve written about immigration, race, culture, liberalism, and neoconservatism—has been motivated by, and is a cover for, my concern for the Jews. From the anti-Semitic perspective, it couldn’t be otherwise. Since I am of Jewish origin, everything I do must be determined by, and focused on advancing, the Jewish agenda.

However, having said all that, I think now that I will read the MR discussion and write about it. People often say that anti-Semites are so vile and stupid that they should be totally ignored. This misses the point that anti-Semitism—and I’m speaking here of serious anti-Semitism—is more than moronic bigotry and animus; it is a particular, though highly distorted, way of understanding the world. Namely, it is an ideology. An ideology takes one aspect of reality and turns it into the all-encompassing explanation for everything, the hidden, “real” truth that the conventional world, living in false consciousness, denies. And from the embrace of that explanation, so satisfying and empowering to its acolytes, an entire way of thinking, an entire set of attitudes and behaviors, shared by a community of believers, evolves. So anti-Semitism is not just, “I hate the Jews,” “the Jews are my enemy,” it is a belief system that includes its own unique mindset and way of analyzing things. As such, it needs to be understood, in the same way that various leftist ideologies need to be understood.

For example, as noted in the previous entry, Middle Eastern Studies professor Jennifer Loewenstein says that the Gaza conflict is not about the Israeli response to Hamas rockets being fired into Israel, but about “the naked desire for hegemony; for power over the weak and dominion over the world’s wealth.” From Loewenstein’s Marxist point of view, the apparent nature of the conflict, as a struggle over land, or as a stand-off between Israelis and Arabs over whether the Jewish state will continue to exist or not, is being deliberately used to conceal what is really happening, which is the greedy capitalist exploitation of the poor. In the same way, from the point of the anti-Semites, the apparent aim of my writings, which is to defend white Western civilization, conceals what I’m really up to, which is to elevate Jews over whites and destroy white civilization from within.

Beyond this general anti-Semitic view, there is a need to make sense of the particular brand of anti-Semitism at Majority Rights, which seems to be a combination of atheism, Darwinism, extreme racial and material reductionism, extreme white racism, Nazi-like anti-Semitism (Jews are the enemy of humanity and shouldn’t exist anywhere), and libertarianism. Today’s anti-Semitism is not just about hatred of the Jews or the portrayal of them as the enemy of the white race and of all humanity. It is an outgrowth of the hardening of atheist materialism into an all-purpose ideology seeking power over society, a movement that is occurring among the far-white contingent as well as on the left.

- end of initial entry -

Mark Jaws writes:

I don’t see how even the most rabidly insane anti-Semite could claim you are out to undermine the white race. I think you are right on the money when you refer to neo-Nazi anti-Semitism as being an outcrop of crass atheism.

However, as someone mindful of demographic trends and through whose veins flow the blood of Russian Jewish socialists and Polish Catholic nationalists, I can understand how easy it is to wade into the murky waters of anti-Semitism, because I frequently play down at that water’s edge myself. The big question is, where does concern over Jewish dominated leftism end and anti-Semitism begin? The problem for us Ashkenazi Jews (I count myself as a Catholic with a half-Jewish background) is that we are demonstrably smarter and far more liberal than the rest of the white population. As a result, the ranks of the anti-white, anti-Western, anti-American Left are disproportionately dominated by liberal Jews. Hence, it is easy for Gentiles to come to the conclusion that the “Jews have way too much power,” which they do—or worse, “the Jews are out to get us.”

As someone who has spent his entire adult life discussing politics with Jews, I know that the vast majority of Jews, even the most liberal ones, do not instinctively hate the white race. You become a liberal, because that is what American Jews do. It happened to me that way. The first time I entered a voting booth in 1973 I cast my ballot for John Emanuel of the Socialist Labor Party. As a Jew, you have sympathy for, and work to further the interests of blacks and Hispanics because the same people who hate non-whites, also tend to hate Jews. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these liberal Jews are affluent enough to have never seriously rubbed elbows with the rabble they are so adamant to defend. Why I did not stay a liberal is because I was DIRECTLY confronted with the vehement anti-Semitism and anti-white racism on the minority-dominated Lower East Side of New York and at City College in Harlem.

American anti-Semitism is a very complex issue and all I ever ask of my fellow white nationalists is to judge this semi-Semite—and all Jews—simply as individuals. I require nothing more.

LA replies:

Here in a nutshell is the approach I advocate to the Jewish problem:

1.To the extent that Jews as Jews pursue an anti-Western or anti-national agenda (for example, when Jews state that as Jews they are committed to open borders, or the advance of minorities at the expense of the majority, or the transformation of America into a universal nation, or the continued dismantlement of America’s Christian culture), they should be publicly confronted on that. It is legitimate to criticize and oppose the anti-majoritarian Jewish agenda as such, just as it is legitimate to oppose a harmful black agenda or a harmful Hispanic agenda as such.

2. Jews who make it clear that their primary identification and loyalty is to Jews or minorities, rather than to America and its historic majority culture, should be told that they have the right to live and prosper in America, but not to speak for America or to have an influential role in its culture and politics.

3. Peaceful and brotherly relations between the Jews and the white gentile majority is possible on the basis of the following quid pro quo: the Jews tolerate and respect the majority and do not seek to undermine it; and the majority tolerates and respects the Jews.

4. As I’ve said many times, the initiation of such an approach, like the solution to many other problems we face, depends on the restoration of a white gentile majority culture that believes in itself, and stands up for itself in a firm but civilized way, and asserts its natural leadership position in America.

Hannon writes:

I read the Majority Rights entry you referenced, including the comments. The participants dance around the same main points, seemingly unaware that their world view, the racial world they would see preserved, would in fact collapse outside the matrix of Western Civilization. At the same time their allegiance to their linchpin dogma of anti-Semitism shows that what they seek to promote is less important to them than that which they seek to destroy.

They go around and around arguing about what is the “white race,” and this prevents them seeing the larger picture that in part transcends race. What does it mean when you say that race is the cardinal factor in preserving Celtic or Nordic or Anglo-Saxon heritage? That race by itself trumps all other considerations? This is not a manageable or even a sensible concept among civilized men and is too provincial to sustain. By this means they are laying the foundation for a mutual alienation among all groups that may be considered white.

This is the idea that you alluded to and may ultimately underlie our failure to protect the Western world and the various ethnicities that built it and propel it forward.

When I read such anti-Semitic views and their erudite justifications, I often wonder why it is that they cannot see the Jews as an important catalytic force within the humanity of the West. When they level anti-Semitic charges they seem to hone in less often on real problems like modern liberalism or socialism that many American secular Jews pursue, and instead focus on secret cabals and hidden power structures. This is not Dungeons and Dragons.

Michael Jose writes:

I think the appeal of anti-Semitism comes from the fact that it offers an easy way to explain the political problems of modern liberal life and reduces puzzling, complex phenomena to something simple.

For example, I recall someone suggesting that Gloria Steinem and a bunch of other feminists (I forget the names, but they all sounded Jewish) had an ulterior motive for trying to drag down the white Gentile male.

When you consider how outside of reality much of feminism is, the anti-Semitic theory of feminism—the idea that feminism is the result of a bunch of Jews preventing any non-Jewish group from becoming too powerful by attacking the strength of the most dominant Gentile group—reduces feminism to terms that are easier to comprehend, and creates a much simpler emotional way to deal with it—namely, get angry at the Jews for their supposed crafty malevolence, rather than analyze the feminist claptrap and take seriously all of their weird ideas about culture.

You website has a lot of criticisms of liberalism. Reading it involves intellectual labor. There is a lot of analysis that goes into figuring out what makes the liberals tick in a given instance, how they resolve varying intraliberal conflicts, how liberalism contradicts itself, etc. Many people don’t like having to do this kind of work.

At the same time, the assumption that liberals are not really motivated by a belief in liberalism, but have a self-interested agenda as Jews that their liberalism is a cover for, renders the intellectual work unnecessary and makes liberalism easier to understand. It also makes the apparent solutions much easier—instead of battling a philosophy, one has a defined group of people to blame for it all, to hate for it all, and perhaps to fantasize about avenging oneself on.

In short, anti-Semitism is popular because it is an easy way out when dealing with the difficult issues of liberalism and race, liberalism and culture, etc.

January 12

LA writes:

Mark Richardson and I have further thoughts on the Darwinian anti-Semites here.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 10, 2009 11:48 AM | Send