My November 2007 response to Tanstaafl about the First Law and the Jews

A week or two ago the former anti-anti-Semitic blogger, and now anti-Semitic blogger, Cesar Tort (a.k.a. Chechar), who during his brief anti-anti-Semite phase treated me as his authority and quoted me extensively, copied a huge 2007 post by his new mentor, the anti-Semite Tanstaafl, under the title, “Tanstaafl on Auster.” It concerns the discovery by Tanstaafl, who had previously (so he said) thought highly of me, that I am a liar and a hypocrite and an agent of the Zionist takeover of America, because I do not apply Auster’s First Law of Majority-Minority Relations in Liberal Society to the Jews.

In Tanstaafl’s huge December 2007 entry, he links my response to him at John Savage’s Brave New World Watch in November 2007, in which I explained to him why the First Law does not apply to the Jews. The question he had posed to me was a legitimate one which had not occurred to me before, and I answered it seriously (also, I wrote the reply to him before I realized definitely that he was an anti-Semite). My response was as follows. The First Law refers to a liberal majority’s concealment of the negative truths about minorities who are visibly dysfunctional, alien, or threatening: the more dysfunctional or dangerous they are, the more their negative qualities are denied and are blamed on the majority. (For an extremely vivid example of the First Law in action, think of the Army’s and the media’s responses to the incompetent and openly jihadist—i.e., he was both dysfunctional and dangerous—Army psychatrist Nidal Hasan, both before and after his mass murder of fellow Army personnel.) By contrast, the Jews, far from being dysfunctional, are highly successful (financially they are the most successful group in America), and, far from being perceived outsiders, are, in today’s America, insiders. Therefore a different analytical approach is needed to understand the Jewish problem, from, say, the Muslim problem or the black problem, at least insofar as the First Law is concerned. But in the typical manner of the anti-Semitic obsessive, Tanstaafl (followed now by Cesar) saw my reasoned and serious response to his question as a dishonest cover up on behalf of the Jews; and thus began his campaign against me which has continued up to the present.

However, I see that John Savage’s site where my original reply to Tanstaafle was posted is no longer available to non-members, and without my reply to Tanstaafl that Tanstaafl links there, the copy of his article about me at Cesar Tort’s site is rather one-sided. Here then is my reply to Tanstaafl at Brave New World Watch, which I re-posted at VFR in November 2007 under the title, “Does the First Law of Majority-Minority Relations apply to the Jews?”

Also, here is my later article, “I am attacked for not being an anti-Semite,” posted in response to Tanstaafl’s big post about me in December 2007.

- end of initial entry -

March 8, 12:11 a.m.

James N. writes:

Boy, I’m reluctant to dip my toe into these waters, but I have a question.

First, my qualifications: I grew up on Long Island and went to medical school in Brooklyn. I’m not Jewish, but by accident of geography and profession, I’ve been in majority-Jewish environments from time to time.

Now, the question: Do you really think that American Jews perceive themselves, and self-identify, as “insiders”? My experience is quite the contrary. In fact, I’ve always observed (and found it curious) that American Jews, from their positions of wealth and achievement, practically cultivate and nourish a sense of outsiderness, which is often wielded as a grievance.

My medical school class had 226 freshmen. Of these, at least 190 were Jewish. At that, an orthodox Jewish professor complained more than once that the admissions committee discriminated against Jews, proving that America truly had it in for the Jews.

I think that a lot of the recent, and public, obsessive anti-Bush and anti-Palin sentiments made by prominent Jews arise from this same sense that ordinary, middle-American virtues and values are alien to them, SO alien, in fact, that sounding off in public, in a borderline-hysterical way, is a way of proving group solidarity AND outsiderness at the same time.

Perhaps I have misunderstood your views. Even if you don’t want to put this on the blog, I’d be interested in your reaction.

LA replies:

I agree with your observations about Jewish attitudes. But in my comment I did not mean that Jews perceive themselves as insiders. I meant (1) that the white gentile majority perceives the Jews as insiders, and (2) that in key respects the Jews are, in reality, insiders. And therefore that a First Law-type analysis doesn’t fit them.

Cesar Tort wrtes:

As to your most recent post on me, I don’t consider myself an anti-Semite. How could I be an “anti-Semite” if you are still mentioned as a “genius” in the masthead of my blog (just click on the black highlighted letters of the masthead)?

Tanstaafl is not my mentor, although he gave me quite a few good tips and I am thankful to him.

Now that I’m reading Kevin MacDonald, as you can see in my latest entry, “An Auster quote on the Jewish Problem” I could say that Prof. MacDonald could be a mentor in absentia of those who are looking for answers about the etiology of today’s suicidal liberalism. (I believe that MacDonald’s research together with my psycho-historical model might crack the annoying cipher.)

LA replies:

As for whether Tanstaafl is your mentor, you said that you instantly stopped being anti-anti-Semitic as a result of reading his anti-Semitic attack on me. Thus you are certainly treating him as your mentor in this major change of position you’ve just gone through.

As for whether you are anti-Semitic, let us first remember that “non-anti-Semitic white nationalism”—your coinage of a few months ago that you put in your masthead—clearly implies that white nationalism without the “non-anti-Semitic” qualifier is anti-Semitic. So, when you announced that you were changing your credo from “non-anti-Semitic white nationalism” to “white nationalism” as a direct result of reading the Tanstaafl, and, further, when you approvingly published Tanstaafl’s long attack on me and basically associated yourself with his position, you unambiguously announced to the world that you now support anti-Semitism. The fact that you still praise me doesn’t change that.

Cesar replies:

Have you read my blog? In the thread that attracted so many comments, “A lighting in the middle of the night,” I say clearly that a single phrase by Avery Bullard in GoV (marked in red: the only red-letters in my entire blogging) caused the “lighting.” Yes: only when the lighting struck me did I read the long Tanstaafl thread. But the change was already done because of Bullard.

And I don’t consider myself an anti-Semite. A couple of weeks ago I was still a philo-Semite. What happened in my mind when the lightening struck? Simple. I didn’t know (sorry about my ignorance) that the Jews were overrepresented in the Gulag. But what really shocked me was the discovery that they were also overrepresented in the American immigration reform. That little piece of info, when dully digested (Bullard’s quote), radically changed me. To those who call me anti-Semite for that I would tell:

“Yeah, kinda like how quickly you change your opinion of your best friend when you find out he’s been banging your wife for ten years; rapid descent into hatred.”

LA replies:

Cesar, I’m going to lay it on the line.

You recently said that this whole field of issues is new to you within the last year. So your ideas are constantly changing.

So you’re learning and exploring. You don’t know what you think. Your world view is changing all the time. You read a single phrase somewhere and it hits you like a lightning bolt and you alter your entire world view.

Therefore you should not be blogging on these issues at present. You should be reading and studying and thinking, not writing.

You should wait until you have a reasonably clearly formed view of things and are ready to stand by it. Then return to blogging.

What you’re doing now—such as switching on a dime from philo-Semitic to anti-Semitic or whatever the hell you want to call it—is an embarrassment. You’re making yourself look foolish. And just as quickly as you abandoned your previous view and dramatically announced your current view, a month or three months from now you’re likely to change again.

This is a growth process that should be going on in private, not in public.

Finally, I echo what Takuan Seiyo said in a recent comment at your blog: You have associated yourself with, and turned your blog into a forum for, a vicious anti-Semite—an anti-Semite whose special pathological theme is that I am a fifth columnist carrying out a Jewish agenda to destroy the white race. Therefore I will have nothing more to say to you. At least until you have your next change of mind, which I hope you do have,

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 07, 2010 03:58 PM | Send