Ethnocentrism

Lawrence Auster Gets Unhinged

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I made a resolution to not to waste time and energy on Internet squabbles with people like Lawrence Auster. Auster’s agenda is pretty clear. As I said in some previous comments on him, “Auster’s comments, posted on his website, are first and foremost an attempt to place me beyond the realm of legitimate discourse. By titling the article ‘The idiocy of Kevin MacDonald,’ Auster is saying, “Don’t go near MacDonald—he is off limits.” Auster continues to draw lines, now trying to anathematize anyone who is remotely associated with me.

For awhile, it seemed that Auster had decided not to bother with any arguments at all. His complaints about my review of Norman Podhoretz’s Why are Jews Liberals? referred to “MacDonald-style Jew-hatred” and then had long quotes from the article. Not exactly an overwhelming argument.

Now Auster has taken to calling me an “exterminationist anti-Semite,” again with the aim of drawing boundaries for acceptable discourse and again without much of an argument:

Since Kevin MacDonald sees the Jews as a group that are genetically determined by Darwinian evolution to subvert and destroy white gentile societies wherever they encounter them, in the same way that rattlesnakes are genetically determined to sink their venomous fangs into the flesh of mammals wherever they encounter them, we must conclude that he doesn’t want Jews to exist in America and Europe. Further, as I explain here with regard to MacDonald’s recent article at Alternative Right, it is clear that he doesn’t want Jews to exist in Israel either. So MacDonald doesn’t want Jews to exist anywhere.

If anyone has a reasonable interpretation of MacDonald other than that he is an exterminationist anti-Semite, I’d like to hear it.

There is a whole lot wrong with this, starting with interpreting me as saying that “Jews as a group … are genetically determined by Darwinian evolution to subvert and destroy white gentile societies wherever they encounter them.”

I certainly do think I have shown that Jews have a powerful sense of groupness. This is apparent throughout history and can be seen today in pretty much any statement put out by organizations like the ADL. And I do think that there are conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews in a wide range of areas — my writing has focused on immigration policy, policy toward Israel, and the construction of culture generally.  Whenever I discuss these issues I always qualify my remarks by noting that not all Jews hold the same opinions. Making a case for Jewish influence is a matter of looking at where the great mass of Jewish money and influence is being brought to bear and trying to determine if their efforts are effective. For example, in the case of immigration policy, it matters little if Auster and Stephen Steinlight oppose our anti-White immigration policy when the organized Jewish community and the vast majority of Jews (including a great number of Jews with influential positions in the media and in politics) are in favor of it. (Here‘s a recent example: the ADL condemning the Arizona law that attempts to rid the state of illegal immigrants.) My argument is that Jewish influence was a critically necessary condition for the passage of the disastrous 1965 immigration law.

But this is a far cry from saying that Jews are “genetically determined by Darwinian evolution to subvert and destroy white gentile societies wherever they encounter them.” Even a casual reading of my work would show that it’s all about culture–why else write a book titled The Culture of Critique. (This is a recent academic version of my theory of culture.) Genetic determinism plays no role in my theory.

When it comes to why the organized Jewish community and most Jews have supported policies that oppose the interests of people of  European descent, I implicate Jewish ethnocentrism combined with their lachrymose view of their own history among Europeans — summarized in my review of Podhoretz. Briefly stated, Jews have a historical grudge against Europeans and their culture.

Besides the historical grudge that has fueled so much Jewish hostility toward European-descended peoples and their culture, the rise of a Jewish elite in 20th-century America is a story of ethnic displacement. No evolutionist is surprised at the desire to achieve elite status and displace previously dominant elites, and Jews are certainly no exception. Jews are doing what pretty much any ethnic group would do if they could. In today’s column, Pat Buchanan writes, “The Chinese of 2010 call to mind 19th-century Americans who shoved aside Mexicans, Indians and Spanish to populate a continent, build a mighty nation, challenge the British Empire — superpower of the day — and swiftly move past her in manufacturing to become first nation on earth.”

Yeah, we shoved aside other peoples. And now it’s happening to us — mainly, in my opinion, because of the  power of the new Jewish elite. The Indians didn’t like it when  it happened to them. I don’t like it as it’s happening to me and people like me. The Palestinians don’t like it either.

The only thing is that I suspect that everyone would have assumed that a 19th-century American Indian complaining about what was happening was being entirely rational. But now someone like me is treated as a raving lunatic and moral reprobate — ignored by the  elite media and vilified by the lavishly funded Jewish activist organizations like the ADL and the SPLC. We are not supposed to put up a fight. We are supposed to simply accept our displacement and pledge fealty to our new elite.

But I am not an exterminationist. Since when is someone who calls attention to conflicts of interest between groups necessarily advocating the extermination of one of the groups? By that logic, a historian documenting the influence of, say, Christian Zionists  and noting how their interests conflict with those of others would necessarily be advocating their extermination. By that logic Mearsheimer and Walt are exterminationists. Auster’s comment is nothing but an attempt to have any discussion of Jewish interests and Jewish influence be completely off the table–unlike the interests and influence of any other group.

I am perfectly happy for Jews to live where they want. I just wish they would not continue to oppose the interests of people like me.  Obviously, in saying this, I am implying that  I don’t believe in genetic determinism in the area of political choices. It is within the power of Jews to change their political behavior. In fact, rather than behaving like mindless robots acting out of a genetic imperative, Jews have always been flexibly responsive to historical contingencies, and this agrees with everything we know about human psychology.

It really doesn’t matter if groups with little power and influence oppose the interests of White Americans. But it matters greatly if a substantial component of the elite in terms of wealth as well as political power and media influence opposes our interests and brings to economic ruin and political oblivion anyone (Jew or non-Jew) who comes to our defense.

Nor do I have any conceptual problem with Jews living in Israel. As I wrote in my previous comments on Auster, I would be willing to make a quid pro quo with the organized Jewish community: If you support white ethno-nationalism in the US and provide intensive, effective support for ending and reversing the immigration policy of recent decades (i.e., something approaching the support you presently provide Israel), I would be willing to go to the wall to support Jewish ethno-nationalism in Israel, even at substantial cost for the US. The fact that a minuscule number of Jews — none of them part of the main Jewish activist organizations that have been so destructive to White ethno-nationalism — are immigration patriots and see value in America as ethnically and culturally European is certainly not a reason for someone like me to support Jewish ethno-nationalism in Israel.

But I don’t see the organized Jewish community getting behind a White America any time soon — from which I infer that they continue to believe that it is their self-interest to oppose the interests of White Americans (not that they are the victims of some phantasmagorical genetic imperative). The fact is that Israel is costing the US dearly in terms of blood and treasure at the same time that the Jewish community in the US opposes the interests of White Americans. I really don’t see why I should support it.

However, that’s not the same as wishing Israel would be wiped off the map — only that they should fend for themselves. I do not believe that it is in my ethnic interests nor is in the interests of the United States to antagonize the Arab and Muslim world in the interests of an expansionist, apartheid, ethno-nationalist Israel. It’s simply not our fight.

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Philip Weiss on Philosemitism and Ethnocentrism

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Philip Weiss has yet another meditation on being a Jew married to a non-Jew (“Philosemitism’s threat to Zionism”). He and his wife live in a social world made up of mixed couples., and his wife prefers it that way.  I’d love to hear exactly what his wife means when she says that she prefers to socialize with mixed couples because some all-Jewish couples are too “strong” for her. Are we talking about the old stereotype of psychological aggressiveness, or is that an indelicate topic? Maybe it’s like the Jewtopia skit where a non-Jewish character says he loves Jewish girls because Jewish girls make all the decisions when they go out–where to eat, what friends to have, what to wear, etc., so that he doesn’t have to think any more. (Be sure to continue listening to see what happens when a Jew orders food at a restaurant; it’s the same psychological profile.) Maybe these Jews see life as a whole lot more peaceful with a non-Jewish spouse.

Weiss is the sort of Jew that most Americans think about when they think of Jews.  He is wonderfully liberal and open-minded, gushing at a marriage between a Jew and a Hindu. He does not have a sense of historical injustice, at least when he thinks of his own experience in America. As he acknowledges, in this regard, he is quite unlike most American Jews and certainly unlike the activists who staff the organized Jewish community — the Jews like Abe Foxman who use their sense of persecution as a badge and sword. Weiss notes that the Israel Lobby  “cannot trust [non-Jews] to act wisely without being politically coerced and bribed. The lobby has returned the incredible trust that Jews have been granted in the U.S. with suspicion.”

Indeed, he feels suffused by philosemitism, but then there’s the guilt at abandoning the tribe:

The objects of philo-semitism, myself included, feel some guilt about it. We know, or ought to, that we’re participating in an assimilatory process. We are hurting the tribe’s future as a tribe. And so for those who care about tribe, Israel gains a new significance: it is the bulwark of Jewishness, the place where Jews marry Jews.

Israel is indeed the bulwark of tribalistic Judaism. Weiss claims that the motive for Zionism was anti-Semitism in Europe. But in fact, a very large motive, especially for the racial Zionists, was retaining racial purity, and in that they have succeeded. Racial Zionists were part of the trend toward racial nationalism in Europe, and their descendants — the followers of Jabotinsky — are now in charge of Israeli politics. Here’s Arthur Ruppin, a prominent racial Zionist writing in the early 20th century:

Intermarriage marks the end of Judaism. Mixed marriage is regarded as destructive of Judaism even where the non-Jewish side adopts the Jewish religion, for it is understood, be it merely subconsciously, that Judaism is something more than a religion—a common descent and a common fate. Were it only a religious communion, assimilated Jews would actually have to welcome a mixed marriage which gains a proselyte for Judaism, but even among them this view is conspicuously absent. (Quoted in Separation and Its Discontents.)

An interesting recent example of Israeli racialism is Baruch Marzel, a former member of the Kach Party who would presumably still be a member except that Kach has been outlawed for its racist views. According to Haaretz, a Marzel has voiced his opposition to Leonardo DiCaprio marrying Bar Rafaeli, an Israeli model, because “it would dilute the Jewish race.”

Marzel is doubtless on the fringe of Jewish thinking — at least overtly. But the reality is that deep concerns about racial purity are always just below the surface in mainstream Israeli society. As reported in the Forward, a recent Knesset bill shows the continuing power of the Orthodox over conversion. The immediate concern was that foreign workers in Israel might convert to Judaism and therefore become eligible to be Israeli citizens via the Law of Return. As the bill moves forward, the trick is to write the legislation so that foreign workers would not be able to convert to Judaism while leaving intact the validity of conversions done by Reform and Conservative congregations in the Diaspora. The concern of Diaspora Jews is that ultimately the Orthodox will nullify all conversions except those performed by the Orthodox. Since the Orthodox already control marriage within Israel (so that Israelis who wish to marry people who can’t establish their Jewish ancestry must marry outside Israel), this would ensure the triumph of racialist Judaism in Israel.

Weiss understands that liberal forms of Judaism that exist in the Diaspora are dead ends. And he understands that therefore he will have “little influence over the body of Jewish life in the U.S. so long as I can’t imagine a corporate future.” So the tribe will endure without people like Weiss and his belief that “ethnocentric arrogance is unsustainable in a globalized environment.”

The problem that I have with this is that the racialists in Israel are firmly in charge and they have the overwhelming support of the organized Jewish community in the Diaspora. This isn’t going to change. Moreover, given the historical trends within Israel, Israeli racialism may well get even more extreme. People like Weiss and organizations like J Street function to give Judaism a softer veneer that is consistent with post-racial, multicultural America without having any effective influence on the “ethnocentric arrogance” at the heart of Judaism or even lessening the support of the Israel Lobby for Israel as an apartheid, racialist state. Intermarriage has many benefits for Diaspora Judaism as long as the racial core is not threatened, and the existence of Israel ensures that Jewish tribalism will remain long into the future.

Yet liberal Jews with many of the same beliefs as Weiss are the main bulwark of the left in America that has so successfully pathologized any sense of ethnocentrism by Whites — and only Whites. Pardon me if I refuse to disavow White ethnocentrism as I am sure Weiss advocates. I think we are going to need a very healthy dose of White ethnocentrism if Whites are to survive in a world that remains governed by the ethnocentric arrogance of others.

And pardon me if I predict that as Weiss gets older he will return to his Jewish ethnic roots. This is one of my working hypotheses about Jews and probably people in general. I discussed several examples in my books on Judaism, such as Heinrich Heine. Other examples (and counterexamples) are needed to make a good case, but the idea is that as we get older, our ethnocentrism tugs at us. We worry about the future of our people –what the world will be like in a hundred years, not just for our children and grandchildren, but for the wider group of people like ourselves. And right now, for people like me, it doesn’t look good.

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Trudie Pert on Birthright Israel

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Trudie Pert’s current TOO article “Birthright Israel: A Model Ethnic Charity” shows once again that, despite being pillars of multicultural righteousness, the laws of political correctness do not apply to the organized Jewish community. As noted in the article, Charles Bronfman, one of the largest funders of Birthright, obviously has a deep attachment to Jewish DNA. Birthright has successfully raised the percentage of Jews who marry Jews to 72%. Given that the program will reach one third of young Jews and given that a lot of Jews who don’t go are from the more conservative wings of Judaism who are not in need of a program like this or have already been to Israel, it suggests a major effect on retaining the ethnic basis of Judaism in the Diaspora. It reminds us that for the early Zionists, the main reason for establishing Israel was to preserve Jewish DNA:

[These] Jewish racial Zionists, such as Arthur Ruppin … were motivated by the fear that Diaspora Judaism would lose its biological uniqueness as a result of pressures for intermarriage and assimilation.

Among the Zionists, the racialists won the day. Ruppin’s ideas on the necessity of preserving Jewish racial purity have had a prominent place in the Jabotinsky wing of Zionism, including especially the Likud party in Israel and its leaders—people like Ariel Sharon, Menachem Begin, and Yitzhak Shamir. (Here’s a photo of Sharon speaking to a Likud Party convention in 2004 under a looming photo of Jabotinsky.) Jabotinsky believed that Jews were shaped by their long history as a desert people and that the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state would allow the natural genius of the Jewish race to flourish, stating, for example: “These natural and fundamental distinctions embedded in the race are impossible to eradicate, and are continually being nurtured by the differences in soil and climate.”  As Geoffrey Wheatcroft recently pointed out, at the present time Israel “is governed by [Jabotinsky’s] conscious heirs.”

Israel is obviously living up to its intended function of preserving Jewish DNA — not only in Israel, but via Birthright, in the Diaspora as well.

The other important point about Pert’s article is the complete lack of this sort of thinking by wealthy White philanthropists. Bill Gates gives billions to non-Whites and actually excludes Whites — even poor Whites — from applying for his aid programs. Gates and other wealthy Whites are behaving according to conventional attitudes of multicultural America, reaping the public acclaim in the media and doubtless feeling morally righteous. (Again, George Gilder’s sense of moral righteousness comes to mind.) We have to change all that.

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How Pro-Life Are White Evangelicals?

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Reginald Thompson: White Evangelicals talk a good game when it comes to being Pro-Life, which is here defined as words or actions that cause more children to have life, and less unborn children to be annihilated in the womb.

But are they just putting on a show to make themselves look righteous, with the possible motive of improving their own self-regard?

To find out I looked at the 2008 Presidential Exit Polls to determine the percentage of voters in the 39 states with the relevant data who described themselves as White Evangelicals.

Then I looked up the Abortion and White Total Fertility Rates for these 39 States.

Now hopefully there’s a positive correlation between White Evangelicals and White Babies, and a Negative Correlation between White Evangelicals and Abortions. For one thing, I really don’t want to be made more cynical than I already am.

Abortion         White TFR
White Evangelical              -.692              +.553

Churched                               -.517               +.399

As can be seen above, both the arrows of correlation are strong and in the predicted direction.

Moreover, we can see that though White Evangelicals are greatly outnumbered by the Churched (here defined as people who report visiting Church at least once a week), they nonetheless have a stronger influence on the Abortion and White Fertility Rates of a State.

And remarkably, even though the positive correlation between percent White Evangelical and the White Total Fertility Rate is smaller than the negative correlation found with Abortion, we find 31% of the State to State variation in White TFR is explained by the Percentage of White Evangelicals in a State.

And this is being accomplished by a group that was only 26% of the voters in the 2008 Election!

Recently on My Blog I reported the correlation I found between White Ethnocentrism, as measured by the capacity to elect Senators against giving Amnesty to Illegal Immigrants, and White Fertility.

Given this finding, I find it extremely notable in this context that Evangelical Protestants were found by a recent poll to have the most Ethnocentric Attitudes toward Immigration of any major American Religious Group:

% Supporting Enforcement over Amnesty

Evangelicals                                    +64%
Other Protestant.                         +41%
Catholics                                          +41%
Jews                                                    +3%

Like I said in my post about ethnocentrism and fertility: Love for one’s family and love for one’s race spring forth from the same roots.  And I think this is the best explanation for my finding that members of the most ethnocentric Major White Religious Group cause the White Birth Rate to go up simply by virtue of there being more of them in a state.

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Reginald Thompson is the Pen Name of an Advisor to an International Software Company. He lives on the American East Coast and is proprietor/manager of a recently created Blog called Statsaholic.

Edmund Connelly’s "Goyland"

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Edmund Connelly’s current TOO article “Goyland: Where the Wild Things Are” gets at an important aspect of Jewish psychology — the bunker mentality of imminent threat. The next Holocaust is always just around the corner. They see their own history in the West as one long vale of tears, beginning with the Romans sacking Jerusalem and destroying the temple, then suffering at the hands of Christian fanatics in the Middle Ages, then being accused of acting as a state within a state in emerging European nations, then the evil Czar, and then Hitler. (A good recent example of this mindset is Norman Podhoretz’s Why are Jews Liberals?) As Connelly notes, Jewish life in the Middle Ages was far better than the great majority of people, and this has generally been true throughout Jewish history. And they never consider the possibility that their own behavior has anything to do with whatever bad things happen to them.

Psychologically, these traits show that Jews are on the extreme high end of ethnocentrism — what I have termed Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism. We all have this trait, but there are individual differences in ethnocentrism, and Jews are at the extreme high end. Ethnocentric people see the world in terms of ingroups (morally upright, possessed of positive traits; always the innocent victim, never the perpetrator) and outgroups (evil, merciless, sub-human, always the aggressor). Every affront to the group is exaggerated. There is a sense of imminent danger from the evil outgroup. In the words of a Jewish writer, “Wherever we look, we see nothing but impending Jewish destruction. ”

This hyper-ethnocentrism is the most important aspect of Jewish psychology, leading them to be aggressive against their perceived enemies. As discussed in the above-referrenced article, in their minds, any criticism of Jews becomes a warrant for genocide. “Criticism of Jews indicates dislike of Jews; this leads to hostility toward Jews, which leads to Hitler and eventually to mass murder. Therefore all criticism of Jews must be suppressed. With this sort of logic, it is easy to dismiss arguments about Palestinian rights on the West Bank and Gaza because ‘the survival of Israel  is at stake.'”   Any sort of exclusionary thinking [such as opposing immigration of non-Whites] leads inexorably to a Holocaust. Recently several New York State legislators favoring same-sex marriage argued on the basis of their relatives being murdered in the Holocaust.

This hyper-ethnocentrism is a large part of why Jews are such formidable opponents. And it also implies that rational arguments are not going to be effective in swaying Jewish opinion. From their point of view, it’s a matter of survival.

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