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Strange Bedfellows
E. Michael Jones and Israel Shamir: “A Report from Planet Mammon”
Edmund Connelly
December 6, 2008
Anyone who has followed the writing career of Catholic iconoclast E. Michael
Jones will likely agree that his writings on Jews over the last half decade
have been little short of incendiary. Thus the Internet site
Fringe Watch claims that Jones “represents one of the
foremost proponents of ‘religious’ anti-Semitism in Catholic circles.”
Jones’s major vehicle for airing his views on Jews is his magazine
Culture Wars,
which in recent years has run cover stories such as "Judaizing: Then and
Now," "The Converso Problem: Then and Now," "Shylock Comes to Notre Dame,"
and “Too Many Yarmulkes: Abortion and the Ethnic Double Standard.” He then
packaged these arguments in a monumental book called
The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History,
which I began to read last month.
Viewed in isolation, some of Jones’s essays in his monthly magazine may
appear as rambling, disjointed streams of thought, but once you have read
enough of them, a central theme appears.
In essence, Jones’s view is that Jews, having rejected Logos (by rejecting Christ) were inevitably rendered revolutionaries. Jones’s treatment of various modern Jewish revolutionaries reads very much like Kevin MacDonald’s description of Jewish “movements” that undermined the West, movements such as Freudian psychology, Boasian anthropology, and so on. In effect, Jones is describing some of the subversive Jewish movements that MacDonald did not address in The Culture of Critique.
With respect to the Civil Rights movement, for instance, Jones notes that
“virtually every black leader in the 20th century had a Jewish mentor,
backer or controller who introduced him to revolutionary ideas or
organizations.” Jones sees the process as Jews “luring Blacks away from
Christianity into fantasies of heaven on earth, which could only be brought
about by the violence which flowed from Messianic politics.”
Other fascinating approaches include film critiques such as Jones's review
of Spielberg’s Munich. “We live,”
Jones begins, “in a culture which erects monuments to Jewish culture. We
also live in a culture which prohibits unauthorized interpretations of
Jewish monuments.”
Here Jones introduces his claim of Jewish control of discourse, proffering
such lines as “Munich is a movie
about the rules of Jewish discourse. It is also a movie about how giving the
wrong answer to a Jew will result in your death or the death of your
career.”
In an analysis sadly lacking in most modern discussions of modern American
culture, Jones illuminates the way in which “Jewish literary critics like
Stanley Fish and Jacques Derrida were changing the rules of discourse.”
“Discourse had become Jewish, which is to say, those who wanted to be heard
and taken seriously had to follow the new rules.”
At every turn Jones violates those new rules. Consider, for example, his
blunt assessment of abortion in America: “Support of abortion is a largely
Jewish phenomenon. Indeed, although no one is allowed to say this, if there
is a group responsible for the legalization of abortion in America, it is
Jews.” Ouch!
Jones also examines popular music and architecture. Bob Dylan, Jones argues, was a leading revolutionary — “the bard who made Jewish revolution plausible in a peculiarly American way.” Frank Gehry, according to Jones, designs ugly buildings because as a Jew, he rejects Logos. Throw in other such Jewish architects as Daniel Libeskind or Peter Eisenman and you end up with “grotesque buildings” which they have built as “monuments to their hatred of Logos.” The photos accompanying the essay support such a claim.
Daniel Libeskind's Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto
Now comes his November issue of
Culture Wars, with yet another provocative cover, this time showing the
tall, sandy-haired Jones standing with his arm around the diminutive Israel
Shamir. The Latin title “Ut Unum Sint” refers to the Catholic encyclical
“That They May Be One,” but it is the subtitle that is so delicious: “A
Report from Planet Mammon.”
Jones opens his essay by noting the power of the neocons to push America in
a warlike direction that benefits Israel. Soon, however, he warms to his
theme of the last half dozen years: Jews are a disruptive revolutionary
force because of their rejection of Logos. In November’s essay he allows
Shamir to carry the load in expounding upon this.
Peter Eisenman's City of Culture of Galicia in Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Shamir can do this because he is a Jewish convert to Christianity, a
conversion both he and Jones see as a rebirth away from “the Judaic cult of
Death.” Drawing from Shamir’s book
Cabbala of Power, Jones employs quotes that reinforce St. Paul’s ideas
on the Jews, namely that they are “the enemy of mankind.”
Earlier this year Shamir had written an article on Jimmy Carter and the
Jewish “swarm
attack” against him. In
Cabbala, Shamir returns to this
idea of a reflexive Jewish assault, arguing that Jews “have no king, but
they attack in formation and devastate whole countries as if by plan.” The
metaphor is apt.
Neither Jones nor Shamir buy the oft-heard Jewish explanation for
anti-Semitism, that “it is because of what we are, not what we do.” Jones
berates Jewish apologists who are “determined to ignore the toxic effect of
Jewish behavior on native populations and the inevitable reaction which it
brings forth from them,” a theme developed at length in Kevin MacDonald’s
second book in his Jewish trilogy,
Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of
Anti-Semitism.
One can understand Jones’s affection for Shamir by dint of the fact that
both reject a physical, essentialist identity for Jews based on DNA.
Instead, both men accept a theological basis for their definitions, with the
Catholic Church as the true path.
Through this lens, the current neocon takeover of American Middle East
policy becomes “The Jewish-American empire,” “the church of darkness” —
literally a church in competition with the True Church.
As developed in Shamir’s latest book,
Masters of Discourse, this idea of theological competition speaks
directly to today’s world events. Jones credits Shamir as being a “man of
his age precisely because . . . he can name the evil of this age without
hesitation or circumlocution.” Shamir sums up this evil situation:
When the Church is subjugated, Jews triumph and when Jews triumph, mankind
suffers. The Jewish universe is good for Jews. It is a curse for the others.
. . . In Eastern Europe, times of
Jewish dominance were the worst experienced by the ordinary people. . .
. A good time for the Jews is not a good time for mankind. . . . The
blessing of the Jews is a curse for others. . . . The regimes that are “good
for Jews” are rarely good for anybody else.
Shamir also touches on a number of points I too have addressed. For
instance, he claims that Jews, through the elevation of the Holocaust and
other efforts, have attempted to replace Christianity in America and Europe
with worship of Jews. In the American instance, belief in Jewish superiority
has become the official faith of Pax
Americana. I reached a
similar conclusion by examining Jewish predominance in 20th-century
American psychology.
Another theme Shamir and I share is that of “Judaic paranoia of hating and
being hated.” I wrote about that in my review of books by James Petras (here)
and in
columns which can be found on this blog, particularly my column “A
Hate with No Name.”
It is edifying to think that approached from two vastly different
perspectives, Jones’s theological account can so well mirror and add to
evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald’s scientific discussion of a
Jewish “group evolutionary strategy.” Whichever version you accept as
“getting to the root of the matter,” either will oblige you to take
seriously the effect Jews and their movements have had on the modern world.
Edmund Connelly is a freelance writer, academic, and expert on the cinema arts. He has previously written for The Occidental Quarterly.
Permanent link: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Connelly-JonesShamir.html
