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Channeling Steve
Sailer
Edmund Connelly
November 2, 2009
When I first started writing my
Steve Sailer
column two weeks ago, I
initially titled it “Channeling Steve Sailer.” Now I wish I had left it at that
because his Sunday VDARE piece that appeared just after my essay really did seem
like we were operating on the same wavelength. His essay was indeed perfectly
timed as far as I was concerned.
Sailer’s piece, called
Norman Podhoretz’s
Why Are Jews Liberal?
Not Good Enough, is a reflection on leading neocon
Podhoretz’s book of the above name. And throughout, though Sailer advances into
the no-go zone known as anti-Semitism, he is certainly right about what he
wrote. For instance, he commits a foul (according to the imposed rules of discourse
today) when he writes that Podhoretz’s book “is a combination of history of the
last 2,000 years of Jewish victimization, voting analysis of 20th Century
Presidential elections, and latest rendition of Podhoretz’s autobiography, all
from a single, relentless perspective: Is it good for the Jews?”
Whew, that’s pushing it. I thought that was a bit too cavalier a reference to
the suffering Jews have endured throughout their existence
—
all of it, of course, having nothing to do with any concrete Jewish behavior.
Worse, however, is his thoroughly nontheological estimation of Podhoretz’s
motivation: “Is it good for the Jews?”
Most of us know that even Jews sometimes point to this ethnic calculus
for determining actions, but non-Jews are not normally given such a prerogative. Sailer, though, may well qualify for limited rights to make such quips if having
one biological parent counts. As Sailer informs us, he was
adopted and is now Catholic. And so far
he hasn’t been arrested on hate crime charges.
What I really like, however, is a subtle amendment Sailer made to a claim by
conservative Jewish writer Michael Medved. In September,
Commentary magazine featured a
symposium based on Podhoretz’s book called
Why Are Jews Liberals? In it is
found the source material for a quote Sailer took where
Medved
admitted that Jews hate Christianity:
For most American Jews, the
core of their Jewish identity isn’t solidarity with Israel; it’s rejection of
Christianity. … Jewish voters don’t embrace candidates based on their support
for the state of Israel as much as they passionately oppose candidates based on
their identification with Christianity … This political pattern reflects the
fact that opposition to Christianity—not love for Judaism, Jews, or
Israel—remains the sole unifying element in an increasingly fractious and
secularized community. …
Sailer made the telling change to Jewish “hostility toward Christians
—
anti-Chritianism, you might say.” Now it’s the people rather than the religion.
That, of course, is far closer to the truth, for it is likely Jews would exhibit
the same hatred of Whites no matter what religious veil we might adopt. We are
not witnessing a fundamentally theological competition; rather, what we have is
old-fashioned ethnic animosity and struggle.
And here’s where Sailer hits the nail firmly on the head:
What America can’t continue to afford is the pervasive unrealism imposed
by the current code of silence about Jewish power and interests. Thus Jewish
demonization of immigration reform patriots . . . is the single most important
reason that America’s immigration disaster is still above criticism, long after
it has become obvious that it is a disaster, and despite the fact that an
overwhelming number of Americans are strongly opposed to it.
Absolutely. To remedy any of the problems American Whites face now
—
many of which involve Jewish activism over the last century (need I even refer
to Kevin MacDonald’s
The
Culture of Critique on this point?)
—
we indeed have to forthrightly discuss Jewish power. But good luck trying,
especially if you aren't a Jew.
This “discouragement” of open discussion of Jewish power can be found across the
gamut of mainstream life, from the well-funded offices of the ADL to editorial
rooms in all the major news organs, to the offices of mainstream publishers, to
the academics who staff our middling to great universities. The taboo is
enforced: Do not discuss Jewish power.
Consider, for instance, how this ban exists around discussion of Jews in
Hollywood, where the rule of thumb is simple, well-known, and vigorously
enforced: A Jew may make note of it or explore it at length, but a non-Jew must
remain silent on the issue. As Joe Sobran so succinctly put it in his
Sobran's Newsletter, ("The Buchanan
Frenzy,” March 1996):
The full story of [Pat Buchanan’s 1996 presidential] campaign is
impossible to tell as long as it’s taboo to discuss Jewish interests as freely
as we discuss those of the Christian Right. . . . Not that the Jews are
all-powerful, let alone all bad. But they are successful, and therefore powerful
enough: and their power is unique in being off-limits to normal criticism even
when it’s highly visible. They themselves behave as if their success were a
guilty secret, and they panic, and resort to accusations, as soon as the subject
is raised. Jewish control of the major media in the media age makes the enforced
silence both paradoxical and paralyzing. Survival in public life requires that
you know all about it, but never refer to it. A hypocritical etiquette forces us
to pretend that the Jews are powerless victims; and if you don’t respect their
victimhood, they’ll destroy you. It’s a phenomenal display not of wickedness,
really, but of fierce ethnocentrism, a sort of furtive racial superpatriotism.
William Cash, a young British journalist, ran head on into this barrier when in
1994
he wrote
about the then-new Spielberg-Katzenberg-Geffen "Dream Team"
that "in one respect at least this particular combination of talent, or
'talent combo' in the local argot, will start out on the right foot. Like the
old mogul founders
of the early studios—and unlike most other failed
build-your-own studio merchants—they are Jewish." Though he was
defended by his Jewish editor, Dominic Lawson, young Cash still bore the brunt
of a furious rebuke from American shores.
Marlon
Brando
made a similar mistake while appearing
on "Larry King Live" by bluntly asserting that Jews run Hollywood and exploit
stereotypes of minorities. "Hollywood is run by Jews, it is owned by Jews," he
began, and then went on to blame Jews for exploiting stereotypes of minorities,
"but we never saw the kike because they know perfectly well that's where you
draw the wagons around."
The topic of Jewish power in
Hollywood is one of my favorites, and I write about it often.
Last Christmas I wrote in TOO that “the Jewish dominance
of Hollywood is so obvious and undeniable that
Los Angeles Times’ columnist
Joel Stein recently made it official. What else can you
say when all eight major film studios are run by Jews.” I’ve written on this
theme extensively in The Occidental
Quarterly (here—an editorial mix-up gave me the
wrong name,
The Jews of
Prime Time, and the ongoing series “Understanding Hollywood”
1,
2 [Spring 2009], and 3 [Summer 2009]).
Or you could read
Jewtopia: The Chosen Book for the Chosen People, where the
authors mock Gentile concern about the concentration of Jewish power in
Hollywood. For instance,
Chapter 8 is titled “Conspiracy Theories: Do Jews
Control the World?” They then note that of the ten major Hollywood studios
discussed, nine were created by Jews (Walt Disney being a Gentile) and all ten
are run by Jews. “Conclusion: Yes, we do control the movie studios. All Jews
please report to the World Conspiracy Headquarters immediately (don’t forget to
bring your pass code).” They then do the same for TV networks, finding a
leadership figure of seventy-five percent. Discussing print media, they find
seven of ten major publications are run by Jews. “Conclusion: Jews have lots of
opinions that they love to write about and charge you money to read!
Cool.”)
Playwright David Mamet gets it just right,
however, writing, “For those who have not been paying attention, this group
[Ashkenazi Jews] constitutes, and has constituted since its earliest days, the
bulk of America’s movie directors and studio heads.”
To his credit, Sailer has been consistent in
focusing on Jewish power, as well as proffering reasons that Jews don’t want
non-Jews to notice it. At the end September, for example, he wrote about the
decline of the WASP (Last
Of The Nice WASP Progressives) and rise of the Jew in America,
and outlined the likely reason for Jewish insistence on not noticing differences
among various groups of people.
Then in last week’s column, he addressed Jewish
power again
— and how that power is used to enforce certain manners of
discourse:
Although political correctness is usually marketed on the grounds that
we must protect Non-Asian Minorities from learning facts about themselves, the
media figures actually doing most of the enforcing of political correctness tend
to be members of a high average IQ group that seems to believe that the peasant
majority will come for them with pitchforks if anybody smart ever clues them in
on the facts about IQ. For example, only one of the
Atlantic 50 ranking of most influential
pundits is NAM, while
half are Jewish. Jewish organizations have
striven tirelessly to make Americans more poorly informed and more naive.
Indeed they have. After all,
better to cloak the realities of power than discuss them openly.
In case writers need to be
reminded, polymath John Derbyshire explains the ground rules when it comes to
writing about Jews.
So far as the consequences of ticking off Jews are concerned: First, I
was making particular reference to respectable rightwing journalism, most
especially in the U.S. I can absolutely assure you that anyone who made general,
mildly negative, remarks about Jews would NOT — not ever again — be published in
the Wall Street Journal
opinion pages, The Weekly
Standard, National Review, The New York Sun, The New York Post,
or
The Washington Times. I know the actual people, the
editors, involved here, and I can assert this confidently.
No wonder one of his exchanges about Jewish power was titled
”Be Nice, or We’ll Crush You: Criticizing Jews is
professional suicide.”
In
any case, let me again say that I am grateful to have access to a writer like
Sailer, and I am pleased that his editor at VDARE, Peter Brimelow, as well as
the Takimag crowd, allow Steve to write such needed prose. As usual, I’m looking
forward to what next Sunday’s VDARE column will bring.
Edmund Connelly
(email him) is a freelance
writer, academic, and expert on the cinema arts. He has previously written for
The Occidental
Quarterly.
