Guilt-tripping the Europeans

In May a high-level meeting of Muslim and Jewish leaders in Europe was held to express their concern about the rise of the European anti-Muslim right. The meeting was organized by three Jewish groups, two of them American: Rabbi Marc Schneier’s Foundation For Ethnic Understanding, an important organization aimed at cementing ties between Jews and non-White groups, and its close ally, philanthropist Ronald Lauder’s World Jewish Congress. (See also John Graham’s “American Rabbi: Europe must accept immigration swamping.”) The European Jewish Congress was also involved in organizing the event, but no Muslim groups were involved. This was therefore a Jewish project from beginning to end.

Their formal statement is yet another attempt to justify the death of the West as a moral imperative.  Europeans are urged to live up to their ideals:

We are troubled by the growth of racist and xenophobic movements. We believe that individuals and organizations espousing such malign and hateful ideologies represent a grave threat to the fundamental European values of pluralism, democracy, mutual respect and cooperation.

Such statements always remind me of Israel Zangwill’s statement during the 1920s immigration debate in America: “You must make a fight against this bill; tell them they are destroying American ideals. Most fortifications are of cardboard, and if you press against them, they give way” (see here, p. 266). Destroy them by appealing to their moral idealism.

Pluralism and democracy are wonderful, uniquely European inventions, and they are quite adaptive as institutions among Europeans. However, in the context of massive non-European immigration they are a prescription for cultural and eventual genetic suicide.

Incidentally, pluralism and democracy have no role in traditional Jewish society,  thus, I suppose, absolving Jews of any need to live up to such ideals. This is exemplified by a remarkable account of a recent assault on a dissident Jew in the Hasidic community of New Square, New York. Israel Shahak has described the authoritarian, anti-democratic structure of traditional Jewish communities in Europe and has noted that such incidents of intolerance toward other Jews were common.

The statement completely avoids talking about what the multicultural future will mean for Europeans, noting only that the problem is “complex”:

We recognise that the issues of identity, integration, multiculturalism and immigration are complex ones which need to be addressed properly and in consultation with the minority communities in Europe.

Translation: We are not going to spell out what the future multicultural Europe will be like because any reasonable vision of the future would be rejected out of hand by thinking Europeans. Europeans should embrace this future without questioning the likely consequences to themselves and their traditional culture. Trust us, it will all work out.

The statement appeals to “Europeans of conscience” to “put a stop to any group that espouses racist or xenophobic ideologies long before they are in a position to gain legislative or other power.” As usual, the Holocaust is the moral trump card, described as an event that is “unique in history.”

While there certainly are Jews who strongly oppose the Muslim invasion of Europe (see, e.g., Phyllis Chesler’s comment on the statement), the strong support by the most important mainstream Jewish organizations for massive Muslim immigration even in the face of Muslim anti-Semitism indicates the extent to which they value the destruction of Europe and its culture. My view is that they the organized Jewish community, including the ADL, believes that Muslim anti-Jewish attitudes can ultimately be managed without causing a disaster for the Jewish community.

By bringing up the Holocaust and referring to “people of conscience,” the statement is clearly an attempt to guilt-trip the Europeans. One can imagine all the groveling that will ensue as the statement is circulated among European elites and in the media. It’s no accident that all of the intellectual and political movements discussed in The Culture of Critique involve moral indictments of the West. Moral indictments are a prominent theme in the writings of political radicals and those opposing biological perspectives on individual and group differences in IQ. A sense of moral superiority was also prevalent in the psychoanalytic movement, and the Frankfurt School developed a moral perspective in which social science was to be judged by moral criteria rather than truth.

Recently, former Dutch politician Frits Bolkestein brought up the topic of European guilt in a Wall Street Journal op-ed (“The Roots of Europe’s Cultural Masochism: How did we come to lose confidence in our own civilization?”). Bolkestein suggests that “Christian guilt” is at the root of our cultural malaise. His theory is that when Europeans were truly Christian, they could atone for their guilt, but now the guilt remains “unsublimated” in the contemporary climate of unbelief.

This is all a bit too psychoanalytic for me, and it doesn’t explain why Europeans are so prone to guilt in the first place. But it is certainly a good sign to see public discussions of the source of the European lack of cultural confidence.

Bolkestein writes as if European guilt naturally welled up because of its Christian past and the memory of the horrific events of the 20th century, including the Holocaust. But historical memory is not a passive process in which events are simply remembered accurately. If the history of the rise of the left in the media and the academic world tells us anything, it is that there are very specific campaigns designed to take advantage of this European tendency for guilt.

The statement by Jewish and Muslim leaders is a case in point. And it’s quite clear where a very large part of the guilt comes from. As indicated above, moral indictments of the West have been central to Jewish intellectual and political movements that have been dominant among intellectual and political elites. All of these movements were vitally concerned with anti-Semitism and a common thread has been the development of theories of anti-Semitism in which the behavior of Jews was irrelevant, leaving the entire burden of guilt  for the history of  European anti-Semitism on the Europeans. These movements predate WWII and all, except perhaps psychoanalysis, remain influential. But beginning with the desire to rationalize of Israel in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, the centerpiece of the Jewish assault on the moral legitimacy of the West has been the Holocaust. The centrality of the Holocaust is apparent in the statement by Jewish and Muslim leaders discussed here:

On this Europe Day we remember together the horrors that took place on this continent in the 1940s – a campaign of mass murder, unique in history, which resulted in the annihilation of one third of world Jewry in the Holocaust.

To attack massive non-European immigration is to support the Holocaust. Opposing immigration places oneself outside the moral ingroup created by the culture of the Holocaust.

My view is that moral universalism and guilt are aspects of individualism as an ethnic trait of Europeans (See here, p. 23ff). These traits are profoundly maladaptive in the modern world where they have been used as swords by the historic enemies of Europeans and their civilization. European individualist culture creates morally defined ingroups rather than ingroups based on kinship, with high levels of altruistic punishment against violators. The Puritan-Yankee culture that was so influential in shaping America is a prominent example, as in the movement to abolish slavery in the 19th century and the Civil Rights movement in the 20th century.  These morally defined ingroups function to prevent defection in societies not based on biological relatedness. Guilt then functions as a negative emotion motivating people to adhere to group norms. The success of the culture of the Holocaust in manufacturing guilt is testimony to the continuing success of this strategy.

The strategy of Jewish intellectual movements for destroying Europeans and their culture has been to convince the Europeans of their own moral bankruptcy. Jewish intellectual movements have have presented Judaism as morally superior to European civilization and European civilization as morally bankrupt and the proper target of altruistic punishment. The consequence is that once Europeans are convinced of their own moral depravity, they will destroy their own people in a fit of altruistic punishment. Thus the intense effort among Jewish intellectuals to continue the ideology of the moral superiority of Judaism and its role as undeserving historical victim while at the same time continuing the onslaught on the moral legitimacy of the West.

A counter-strategy therefore is to convince Europeans that preserving themselves and their culture is profoundly moral. I suggest the following (see here for a discussion):

  • It is likely that racial oppression and violence against Whites will occur when Whites are in a relatively powerless situation and at the mercy of people with festering historical grudges. The Jewish historical memory of the Holocaust is the centerpiece of Jewish grievance against the West. In America, Jewish historical memory about the 1924 immigration law and anti-Jewish attitudes, especially prior to World War II, are also very salient. The historical memory of Blacks in America is also very hostile (Rev. Jeremiah Wright comes to mind), and Mexicans and Asians (see also here) have their own axes to grind.
  • It is immoral to create a situation in which White populations are trapped between affirmative action for low-intelligent groups (Blacks, Arabs, American Mestizos) and competition with hardworking, relatively intelligent Northeast Asians. For example, recently Blacks entering UCLA had SAT scores that were on average 300 points below White and Asian students. At the other end of the achievement curve, 46% of the undergraduates at the University of California’s flagship university, UC-Berkeley, are Asians despite the fact that Asians are only 12% of the state population.
  • It is immoral to require Whites to contribute to public goods like education and healthcare that disproportionately benefit non-Whites. From an evolutionary perspective, such concerns reflect evolved preferences and willingness to help people who look like them and have similar cultural proclivities. A major political fault line in the U.S. now is between White Republicans who do not want to pay higher taxes in states like California with a very large non-taxpaying population of non-White immigrants with a very high need for costly services like education and health care.. (Of course, the mainstream media sees this as a massive moral failing on the part of California voters.)
  • As noted by Robert Putnam, there are also other negative consequences of multiculturalism, including increased conflict, social isolation, and distrust of the political process. Civic mindedness and a strong concern about the society as a whole have been a hallmark of healthy Western societies but this will certainly decline with the rise of multiculturalism. Civic mindedness and public trust have been noted as unique features of Western culture, strikingly apparent in contrast to the culture of corruption and nepotism that commonly plagues non-Western societies. As I noted elsewhere, trust is really a way of emphasizing the importance of moral universalism as a trait of individualist societies. In collectivist, family-oriented societies, trust ends at the border of the family and kinship group.

To inflict Europeans with multiculturalism — especially when support for multiculturalism and support for their own demographic and political eclipse have never been supported by a majority of Europeans — is profoundly immoral. The interests and rights of Whites as a majority are no less morally legitimate than anyone else’s rights. We have to seek a world in which Whites attempting to atone for their personal transgressions seek moral legitimacy by working even harder on behalf of their own people.

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