Explaining the anti-Semites’ psychology

Dan G. writes:

I was interested to see your item about the crazy spiral of the anti-Semites at the Majority Rights website accusing other anti-Semites of being Jewish agents. Really, there is a lot of material here for psychologists and sociologists to explore.

But the main thing that struck me is the present extremism of J. Richards, a name from my blogging past which I was somewhat amused and disgusted to mentally reactivate. During the time in which I followed MR (a few years ago), J. Richards was actually one of the more moderate anti-Semites there (if such a term can be used), occasionally admonishing the more extreme haters not to exaggerate and over-generalize about Jews. That he has now gone off the deep end with hatred and conspiracy obsessions would seem to illustrate a feature of anti-Semitism—that it tends to become more extreme over time, going from acute to chronic, as it were. Again, more material for psychologists to take up.

LA replies

The question your comment raises in my mind is, why do they accuse each other of being Jewish agents?

And the answer is, given the anti-Semitic ideology, which says that THE JEWS ARE THE SOURCE OF ALL EVIL, it follows that if anyone is doing something bad or objectionable, his bad behavior must be understood in terms of his being on the side of the Jews and against white gentiles.

The anti-Semites’ view of myself can serve as a window into understanding this issue. I haven’t written about this as much as I could have done, but anti-Semites are constantly attacking me as a secret promoter of a pro-Jewish, anti-white agenda. (Do a blog search for “lawrence auster” and “jew” and you’ll quickly see what I mean.) In their view, everything I say, everything I’ve written, is really for the purpose of advancing Jewish power over white gentiles. It doesn’t matter if the issue has nothing to do with Jews. For example, if I write against nonwhite immigration, or black on white crime, what I am “really” doing, according to the anti-Semites, is advancing a Jewish, anti-white agenda.

How can this be? Their reasoning goes like this. Since I am a Jew (more precisely, a person of Jewish ancestry, since I am a Christian by religion), and since everything a Jew does is to harm whites, therefore by the very fact of speaking in defense of white people and white society, what I am really doing is advancing the false and pernicious belief that Jews are on the side of whites. What I am really up to is helping Jews get accepted by whites as part of the white race. Thus my apparent, pro-white purpose—whether it’s to stop nonwhite immigration or wake up whites to the danger of black on white violence or encourage whites to reassert themselves as the majority people of America—is not my real purpose. It can’t be my real purpose, because I am a Jew. My real purpose is to fool whites into accepting Jews as fellow whites and as allies, which will lead whites to drop their guard against the Jews, which will enable the Jews to continue their program of subjugating and destroying the white race from within. In defending the white race, my real purpose is to destroy the white race.

Indeed, my very outspokenness and consistency over the years as a defender of the white West makes me uniquely dangerous and objectionable from the anti-Semites’ point of view. The more effective and influential I am in defending the white West, the more I am—by the very fact that I am a Jew—fooling whites into accepting Jews as part of the white West. The more pro-white I seem to be, the more anti-white I really am.

That the anti-Semites interpret my work in this light shows the thoroughness of their view of Jews as necessarily, always, and in every respect the enemy of whites. For anti-Semites, evil or badness is virtually identical with Jewishness. Therefore if anyone is doing something the anti-Semites regard as harmful, if, say, J. Richards’s over-the-top anti-Semitism makes other anti-Semites look bad, it must be part of a Jewish plot to harm whites. Just as the anti-Semites’ logic leads them inevitably to the conclusion that a person defending the white race is really seeking to destroy the white race, their logic leads them inevitably to the conclusion that the most extreme anti-Semite is a really a Jewish agent.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 03, 2009 07:37 AM | Send