The idiocy of Kevin MacDonald

In an article at Vdare about his first exposure to Jewish radicals at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s, Kevin MacDonald, the Darwinian anti-Semitic theoretician, writes:

I took [Professor George L.] Mosse’s course and later came to read several of Mosse’s books as background to my chapter on National Socialism in Separation and Its Discontents. In his book The Crisis of German Ideology, Mosse stressed that an important ingredient in the rise of Nazism was volkisch ideology—the ideology that Germans had a unique folk spirit as a result of their evolutionary past. Incidentally, although unmentioned by Mosse, such racially charged views found mirror images in the writings of 19th-century Jewish proto-Zionists like Moses Hess [PDF] and became a cornerstone of the racial Zionist movement that dominates the politics of Israel today.

The racial Zionist movement that dominates the politics of Israel today? The remark reveals in capsulated form the impenetrable ignorance of MacDonald and his fellow Israel haters—an ignorance necessitated by their hatred. They see Israel through the filter of their Darwinian anti-Semitic theory, in which Israel and the Jews are a racial movement seeking power for itself by systematically undermining from within the racial nationalism of white gentiles. The Israel-haters are stone blind to the reality of today’s Israel—that it is a country of soft-hearted liberals that not only lacks the will to use force effectively against those seeking its destruction (for example, instead of executing terrorists it puts them in prison, encouraging the Arabs to seize Israelis as hostages in the hope of exchanging one Israeli hostage for hundreds of Arab terrorists). MacDonald is not even aware that for the last 15 years the dominant belief in Israel has not been Zionism but post-Zionism. Like other Western countries, Israel has been canceling out its national identity in the name of diversity, inclusion, and a post-modern sense of human identity. Nor does MacDonald seem to be aware that such figures as Ehud Olmert and Tsipi Livni, both of whom came from Jabotinsky Zionist backgrounds, have moved to the left and seek to create a Palestinian state on the West Bank putting Israel in an untenable position.

These well-known facts do not fit with and would discredit MacDonald’s view of Israel as a country dominated by racial Zionism. So MacDonald and his Jew-hating followers don’t take these facts in. Instead, year after year, they keep repeating their lurid fantasy of the Jews (which, point by point, resembles the Muslims’ lurid fantasy of the Jews) as a predatory people seeking world domination. Such is the power of the anti-Semitic pathology, that no matter how liberal, cowardly, and appeasing the Israelis actually become, the anti-Semites see them as a colossus bestriding the world.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 19, 2009 01:12 PM | Send