American Renaissance Conference: The Eleventh Chair

Eds: The following item raises the interesting question of which other peoples, in particular Jews, ought to be regarded as allies, or even friends, in our quest for saving Euro-American people from on-going displacement and eventual destruction. It’s an incident that occurred at a recent public meeting organized by Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance magazine. How many individuals of an ethny need to behave in a way that hampers our cause before we simply write them all off as seriously unhelpful if not downright untrustworthy? Can we afford to waste time sifting the helpful from the harmful? Or do we try to avoid wasting much time on the sifting while accepting their help when offered, but not allowing them into any position in which undetected deleterious types could do us any harm?

This piece also illustrates cultural incompatibility, which, by itself, can pose severe problems for forming useful alliances.

Pulling the eleventh chair up to a table set for ten

All of the narrow rectangular meeting tables were immediately removed when the meeting broke Saturday afternoon. They were then replaced with large banquet rounds set with ten chairs: a place setting for each chair on the table for the evening’s banquet. I’d arrived early. I have to use a cane now, I walk slowly and feebly, and I hate being jostled in a crowd so I was already sitting comfortably in my seat when the crowd poured in through the ballroom entrances.

The rounds filled quickly. More than a few tardy dinner guests had to scramble to get a seat. The tables were close together. I had my back to the New York/New Jersey table. In a very few minutes, only a few stragglers were still milling about amid the matrix of banquet staff who had started to service their tables.

Suddenly, someone hit my chair with another chair. I was particularly nonplussed by the consequences of the impact. I had been in the process of leaning forward to pour myself a glass of water when I found myself up on the chair’s two front legs with my face practically in my salad.

I regained my balance and instinctively turned to see that it was a young man who had hit me and he was anxiously trying to jam an eleventh chair under the table next to mine. He had opportunistically exploited two empty chairs that had been briefly occupied but whose occupants had risen to talk to an acquaintance a few yards away.

I don’t remember anyone ever telling the young man that the entire table was already occupied but I do know that no one checked the intruder’s advance. The ten chairs were more loosely arranged to make room for the eleventh and the “bull in the China shop” sat down and began eating his salad.

I’d partially turned around to face my table but not completely. I am an elderly woman now, increasingly wary of angry young men at my back where I can’t see them and I kept as careful an eye as I could and my ears wide open to observe as best I could what was going on at that table behind me.

I was then able to overhear the fascinating exchange that soon took place as the two men who had been talking with an acquaintance returned to the table to claim their seats. There were now eleven guests on eleven chairs at the table.

The table itself had only been set for ten.

“Waiter, Waiter!”

“Yes sir?” the approaching waiter replied.

“I didn’t get a salad. I don’t have a salad.”

The problem registered on the waiter who was glancing around the table counting the place settings.

“Sir,” the waiter replied, after finishing his count. “There is no more salad.”

The disappointed guest replied in New Yawkese.

“Whaddya’ mean there is no more salad?”

The waiter understood that there was a single dinner allocated for each of those place settings. He left the table, consulted with the chief waiter and then delivered the salad but explained that there was simply no room on the table for an eleventh place setting and someone had to move.

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All eyes now turned to the intruder who had begun talking loudly from the very first moment he drew his chair up to the table. His behavior demanded that everyone at the table acknowledge him. I could not hear everything he said, but got the general tone when one of the young people corroborated my darkest observations by asking him directly: “When will the sarcasm end?”

The intruder continued to aggress, focusing his attention on one then another occupant of the table as I could tell from the movements of his head back and forth and the volume and staccato of his voice. The two young friends who had left the table for a few minutes to talk deferred to the intruder and withdrew to look for seats at another table, but they returned disappointed a few minutes later. There were no more seats and the wait staff at all the other tables had robotically refused to set an eleventh place setting at any table whose predetermined maximum comfortable limit was ten.

There was going to be a confrontation.

And there I was, just where I didn’t need to be; adjacent to a heated argument. It got so bad Jared Taylor was called to investigate the commotion. He leaned over the table, eloquent as always, and said a few words but soon withdrew without quelling the conflict which simply devolved into a telling low-intensity verbal joust driven by the aggressive manner of the intruder. This in turn provoked a defensive reaction by the rest of the table.

The intruder and the eleventh chair remained.

He stood his irrational ground and ruined the banquet for everyone at the table forcing them all (and me from my discrete distance of course) to suffer his outrageous behavior. Those at his table who were not engaged in the thread went mechanically through the meal resentful (I am certain) of the additional anxiety that they were forced to bear throughout the entire meal.

Some of the conversation I was unable to follow, but I heard two arguments that bear repeating that identified the intruder and why he conflicted with his hosts.

The intruder, who initially said he was an “agent of ZOG” (I understood the ‘Z’ to stand for Zionism), identified himself as Jewish. The protagonists in the thread, I was later able to conclude, were not Jewish. They were European American Christians. They differed on a few fundamental issues:

The intruder refused to acknowledge that he had indeed created a problem at all when he drew the eleventh chair up to a table that had been set for ten. All attempts to make him do so were repulsed. He would simply repeat the same things over and over. Regardless of the logic that was offered him, he continued to aggress. This was not a rational issue for him. He was fatefully engaged.

On the other hand, his protagonists were simply inconvenienced. They were not as forcefully engaged in the thread and seemed genuinely resentful of the intrusion rather than purposefully combative.

At one point the Jew loudly commented, “You can’t be self-hating. Everyone is selfish at the core. Nobody does an altruistic thing.” and one of the other men at the table asked him why he would raise such an argument.  His point was that the phrase “self hatred” as commonly used necessarily assumed an individual’s betrayal of his group. If “self hatred” did not exist, then group consciousness and perhaps even loyal groups did not exist; this obviously contradicted the Jew’s remarks.

The Jew was clever in defending his position of radical individualism, but one of the non-Jews in the thread responded:  “You are suggesting a total individualism that leaves no room for group consciousness. The people at this gathering cherish their group identity. Why foist that nonsense on us when you know we know better?”

The matter dropped like a rock.

The next argument I heard was over the phrase “Holocaust denial.” The Jew said there was a table full of “Holocaust Deniers” over there and one of the men asked him in response, “They call themselves Holocaust Revisionists. Why do you modify the phrase to polarize their position? That’s not how they see it.”

The Jew said, “What difference does it make whether it was four million or six million? It was murder!”

The non-Jew responded, “They’re historians. They’re supposed to get the details right. It’s what they do. I disagree that it is a yes or no question, as black and white as you suggest.” But he’d started his response without realizing the Jew had already dropped the matter completely, thereby avoiding having to deal with this response. They then drifted off into another thread I was unable to hear and I returned to my meal.

When dinner was over, the after dinner speaker was introduced, and most of the table occupants turned their chairs toward the speaker and away from the intruder. The conversation was over. Just before the speaker finished, the Jewish intruder got up from his eleventh chair and left without saying a word. When I sensed him withdrawing his chair from under the table behind me I braced myself for the inevitable impact. I don’t know that anyone cared to see where he had gone. The anxiety level surely dropped and there was perhaps even a sigh of relief.

I turned to finish my cheesecake.

The “Jewish question” surfaced in one guise or another in almost all of the speeches that were given at this year’s American Renaissance Conference. It is a source of increasing tension; and here was the entire problem, telescoped and enacted in front of me, in the clash over a place setting.

There are certain social rules one assumes everyone knows.

You do not pull the eleventh chair up to a table set for ten.