Alternative Right’s anti-Semitic agenda

Two days ago, in an entry about the numerous fact-free misrepresentations of my views contained in numerous articles at Alternative Right, the new website created by Richard Spencer, I asked, “What the hell is Richard Spencer up to?”

Part of what he is up to is the promotion of serious anti-Israelism and serious anti-Semitism.

This is from a recent article at Alt-Right, “Remaking the Right Part II,” by Kevin MacDonald:

But the idea that the Jewish religion makes Jews into altruistic world-healers is an obvious non-starter, and not only because, as [Norman] Podhoretz notes, the highly religious Orthodox are less prone to liberal attitudes than the rest of the Jewish community. More decisively, even the most out of touch among us are now becoming aware that Israel is an apartheid state dominated by the most extreme religious and ethnocentric factions of the Jewish community. The Palestinians are treated brutally and are dependent on the largesse from the rest of the world.

The morally uplifting Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, and pretty much the entire organized Jewish community in the U.S., aid and abet Israel as an aggressive, racialist ethno-state, or at least they turn a blind eye to it. Whatever else one might say about it, the Jewish religion does not make Jews into moral paragons or champions of the oppressed. And it certainly doesn’t make Jews into champions of religious and ethnic diversity….

In America, both the Democratic and Republican parties are Israeli occupied territory.

MacDonald is of course the leading proponent of Darwinian anti-Semitism, the belief that Darwinian evolution has created the Jews as a people genetically determined to subvert and destroy white gentile societies wherever they encounter them, in the same way that Darwinian evolution has created lions as an animal species genetically determined to kill and eat gazelles wherever they encounter them. MacDonald doesn’t reference his Darwinian anti-Semitism in this article, but it is there in the background. Also, some of his criticism of Jewish liberalism are correct, and are the sort of thing that any rational critic of Jews, including myself, might say and have said. But in MacDonald’s hands these statements become, not mere criticisms, but ways of expressing an unceasing animus against the Jewish people as the Jewish people, an animus that underlies and drives every sentence he writes. For MacDonald, the Jews are simply the Enemy, the source of everything that has gone wrong with the West. (See my blog entry, “Is my criticism of Jewish attitudes the same as Kevin MacDonald’s?”)

Richard Spencer has said that Alternative Right is intended to represent a new conservatism. In reality, Spencer has simply carried over some of the worst aspects of paleoconservatism, including the vicious anti-Semitism of his former boss, Taki, and combined them with paganism. He envisions a big tent. And, as is made unmistakably clear by Spencer’s publication of MacDonald’s article, a respected part of that big tent will be MacDonald-style Jew-hatred and demonization of Israel. Apart from the badness and evil of these ideas, by what delusionary thought process did Spencer imagine that anti-Semitism could be a major basis of a viable right-wing movement in this country? To whom did he think his “new,” anti-Semitic, “alternative right” would appeal, other than anti-Israelites and their fellow travelers?

And I should add that there is another effect of Spencer’s inclusion of anti-Semitism. Even for those readers who are not anti-Jewish, not anti-Israel, and have no particular interest in those issues, but care about the other subjects that Alt-Right treats, the result of publishing articles by MacDonald and other Judeo-obsessives is to normalize anti-Semitism, to make it an accepted part of the conservative coalition, so that anti-Semitism cannot be opposed. To oppose it, is to “divide the conservative ranks.” By this device, anti-Semitism becomes the norm, and opposition to anti-Semitism becomes the problem. Sort of a revaluation of all values. But, after all, another component of Spencer’s new-right mix is Nietzscheanism, isn’t it?

Here are more excerpts from MacDonald’s article. They appear on the second web page on which the article appears:

Moreover, contra Podhoretz, liberalism seems awfully compatible with Jewish self-interest. In America, both the Democratic and Republican parties are Israeli occupied territory. So it’s hard to see that Jews are being “irrational,” as Podhoretz claims, in not voting for Republicans. For rational Jews concerned only about Israel, it’s pretty much a toss-up.

***

In other words, Jews have been opposed to the traditional culture of America and the West and are strong advocates for the displacement of Whites via immigration.

These negative perceptions are exacerbated by the lachrymose theory of Jewish history accepted by Podhoretz and the mainstream Jewish community: It is not simply that Christianity is evil, but that Western culture itself is poisonous to Jews.

***

Nevertheless, it is indeed the case that White Christians are an object of special Jewish hostility. In the Commentary symposium, Michael Medved describes Jewish atavistic phobia about Christianity as the religion of the outgroup: “Jews fear the GOP as the ‘Christian party.’” And Jewish hostility towards Christianity unites the most Orthodox and conservative Jews with the most secular and liberal.

It is the hostility of the outsider against the culture of the White majority. As a result, expressions of hostility toward Christianity have a special place of pride in the contemporary culture of the West. A good recent example is Larry David pissing on a picture of Jesus in HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm—an event which evoked yawns from the rest of the media.

***

This status of being an outsider with deep historical grudges has grave moral implications. As Benjamin Ginsberg notes, the social marginality of Eastern European Jews made them useful instruments for the imposition of Soviet rule over reluctant populations, not only in the first genocidal decades after the Bolshevik Revolution when they acted as Stalin’s “willing executioners,” but also during the post-WWII period in the USSR’s satellite states (Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, Hungary, and Romania). Throughout Eastern Europe after WWII, because Jews were outsiders and dependent upon Soviet power for their positions and even personal safety, they could be trusted to remain loyal to the Soviet Union.

This has been a pattern throughout Jewish history. Jews as outsiders in traditional societies allied themselves with elites—often oppressive alien ruling elites engaged in exploiting the people under their control. In the Commentary symposium, Sarna gives a rather tepid version of this, quoting historian Ben Halpern, “They depended for their lives on the authorities, on the persons and groups who exercised legitimate power.” Quite correct. Jews were protected by the government, but their outsider status also made them more willing to engage in unpopular activities, such as collecting taxes for rapacious elites with no allegiance to the people they ruled.

The self-conceptualization of Jews as outsiders certainly should not make the European-descended population of America confident about the Jewish role in future governments when they are a minority.

However, the Jews-as-outsider theory does not adequately get at the role of Jews as a nascent elite displacing previously dominant non-Jewish elites. The Jewish identification with the left should also be seen as a strategy designed to increase Jewish power as an elite hostile to the White European majority of America. As I have argued, Jewish intellectual and political movements have been a critically necessary condition for the decline of White America during a period in which Jews have attained elite status.

All of these movements have been aligned with the political left. As Democrats, Jews are an integral part of the emerging non-White coalition while being able to retain their core ethnic commitment to Israel. [LA replies: I have to jump in here and point out again that most American Jews are left-liberals and Democrats and are not pro-Israel and certainly not supporters of any ethnic based Israel but instead support the anti-Israel peace process.] Indeed, the organized Jewish community has not only been the most important force in ending the European bias of American immigration laws, it has assiduously courted alliances with non-White ethnic groups, including Blacks, Latinos, and Asians; and these groups are overwhelmingly aligned with the Democratic Party.

Whereas the Democratic Party is becoming increasingly non-White (the last Democratic president to get a majority of the White vote was Lyndon Johnson in 1964), 90 percent of the Republican vote comes from Whites. In the recent off-year elections, Democratic candidates for governor received only about a third of the White vote.

America will soon realize that it is at the edge of a racial abyss.

Because the Republican Party remains an important force in American politics, Jews are well advised to retain an influence there as well. Republican Jews retain their core liberalism on all the key issues like immigration and culture by aligning themselves with the “moderate” wing of the Party. Like Podhoretz, Republican Jews are motivated mainly to keep the Republican Party safe for Jews, in their estimation, and to promote pro-Israel forces within the party. In general, Republican Jews have acted to make the GOP as much as possible like the party they left behind and to influence it to eschew nationalistic attitudes, especially self-consciously White or Christian identities.

At the end of the day, Podhoretz’s enterprise is an exercise in deception. He erects an image of irrational Jewish liberals who cling to liberalism as a set of religious beliefs completely beyond the reach of logic or empirical data. In fact Jewish liberalism is quite clearly a Diaspora strategy designed to obtain power for Jews at least partly by building coalitions with non-White ethnic groups.

Moreover, he erects an image of principled, rational Jewish conservatives as true conservatives, while in fact they are leftists who have been a prominent force in elbowing out true conservatives within the Republican Party in order to pursue their pro-Israel agenda and make the Republican Party into something they deem safe for Jews.

Welcome to the Alice in Wonderland world of Jewish political thought.

[end of MacDonald article]

- end of initial entry -

Tovi A. writes:

I was checking out the second part of his article, which has gotten more comments.

Paul Gottfried shows up in the comments to defend the author, and promptly gets a pat on the head from one of the commenters who lovingly calls him “Hausjud”.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

LA replies:

How about that. More evidence of how lost Gottfried is. He will do anything, go along with anything, to remain in the paleocon swim of things.

April 17, 1:00 a.m.

Dimitri K. writes:

Here is another funny example: Ukrainian nationalists burned Russian, Polish and Israeli flags. I can understand why the first two—Ukraine was once a part of (or occupied by) Russia and Poland. But why Israel? Never ever has Israel occupied any part of Ukraine.

It seems that many right-wing nationalists perceive themselves as rebels against Israel, the mythical super-power, which is trying to subdue them to it’s rule.

April 17, 1 p.m.

Dan R. writes:

MacDonald writes:

“The morally uplifting Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, and pretty much the entire organized Jewish community in the U.S., aid and abet Israel as an aggressive, racialist ethno-state, or at least they turn a blind eye to it. Whatever else one might say about it, the Jewish religion does not make Jews into moral paragons or champions of the oppressed. And it certainly doesn’t make Jews into champions of religious and ethnic diversity….”

I’ve always been puzzled at the hostility toward Israel expressed by those on the right who recognize the importance of America remaining a predominantly-white country. In the end, are not the Israelis just trying to maintain what those of us on the “alternative right” (though after your post I’m more hesitant to use that term now) wish for America, i.e., preserve Israel as a majority-Jewish state for many of the same reasons we wish America to remain a majority-white country?

LA replies:

But the anti-Israelites of the right have always attacked Israel in those terms. Dan says he has always been puzzled by this. With respect for Dan, does he not understand that these people are consumed by hatred of Israel and the desire to harm Israel, and that they will pick up any argument they can that they think will advance that purpose, even if it is an argument that grossly contradicts their own supposed principles?

LA continues:

In order to harm Israel, the Israel haters of the right trash the very principle of majority self-preservation which they supposedly support in the case of America. They demonize Israel as racist, imperialistic, oppressive, as a criminal state, as a uniquely evil country, for (supposedly) doing the very things to its unassimilable and hostile minority that the Israel-haters want America to do to its unassimilable and hostile minorities.

What does this show? It shows that for the Israel-haters, hatred of Israel is the ruling principle. As I’ve said many times, they hate Israel more than they love America.

April 19

Carol Iannone writes:

You wrote:

In order to harm Israel, the Israel haters of the right trash the very principle of majority self-preservation which they supposedly support in the case of America. They demonize Israel as racist, imperialistic, oppressive, as a criminal state, as a uniquely evil country, for (supposedly) doing the very things to its unassimilable and hostile minority that the Israel-haters want America to do to its unassimilable and hostile minorities.

What does this show? It shows that for the Israel-haters, hatred of Israel is the ruling principle. As I’ve said many times, they hate Israel more than they love America.

And this should be the border where anti-Israel criticism is seen as passing over into anti-Semitism, not just that the critics use typical anti-Jewish tropes, like deviousness, as Joel Mowbray suggested in a recent talk I heard, where he said that the sign that enemies of Israel are anti-Semitic is that they use Jewish tropes in attacking her.

LA replies:

What is it that makes it anti-Semitic?

Carol Iannone replies:

Hatred of Israel is so intense it supersedes other considerations, things they would normally be positive about, such as self-preservation—this is a sign that something other than reasonable disagreement is afoot.

LA replies:

I agree with you. At the same time, the point is also correct that the use of a Jewish trope in attacking Israel is proof of anti-Semitism. Thus in January 2009 I said that Taki had clearly crossed the line from anti-Israelism to anti-Semitism when he wrote, “Israel is the Bernie Madoff of countries.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 16, 2010 02:32 PM | Send