Lawrence Auster Gets Unhinged

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.