Gilad Atzmon Replies

Gilad Atzmon has responded to my review of his The Wandering Who? His comments say a lot about who he is and how he comes to his conclusions. First, he titles his comment “Supremacists on ‘The Wandering Who’“, the word ‘supremacist’  being the term of art used by by anti-White organizations like the SPLC and the ADL to vilify any White person with a sense of racial identity and interests. While the SPLC and the ADL are quite fond of other groups with strong identities (e.g., Blacks, Latinos, Jews, and Muslims), Atzmon is being consistent here: His real complaint is that a strong Jewish identity leads to the horrors of the brutal Zionist occupation, so it is not surprising that he opposes any sense of White racial identity as well.

In a way, I can sympathize with Atzmon’s sentiment. If America had remained 90% White and was not threatened by the massive invasion of strongly identified groups hostile to the traditional people and culture of America, there would be no reason for Whites to develop a strong racial identity. Individualism works well in homogeneous, implicitly White societies, but will break down under the current multi-cultural onslaught.  When people perceive themselves to be under threat from cohesive outgroups, psychological mechanisms of social identity kick in and they assume a group identity themselves—even people who are prone to individualism.

Atzmon loves the ideal of post-Enlightenment European individualism. I do too. The problem is that I think that it is very unlikely that Western individualism will survive the assault by the Jewish left. As mentioned in my review:

In the long run, I predict that the Diaspora strategy of the Jewish mainstream will lead to a resurgence of racial identity in the West as Whites realize that they and their culture are under assault by massive non-White immigration and multiculturalism. Judaism is indeed incompatible with Western culture, and as its influence grows, the West will inevitably be Balkanized into competing ethnic/racial groups—precisely the population structure that inevitably results from a powerful strategizing group in a Diaspora context, exacerbated now by the massive immigration and multiculturalism unleashed by Jewish intellectual and political movements.

In Separation and Its Discontents I provided several examples where Western individualism collapsed as a result of group-based competition from Jews as a strategizing outgroup. Indeed, the Zionists were quite aware of this. Late-19th-century Zionists commonly believed that an important source of opposition to liberalism among non-Jews stemmed from the perception that liberalism benefited Jews; thus Theodor Herzl believed that “emancipation had placed an intolerably heavy strain on Austrian liberals, who had to defend an economic system that eased the way for recent outsiders into positions of prominence” (see here, p. 171). Ultimately, liberalism did indeed fail with the rise of National Socialism.

Now one could suppose that in an ideal world everyone would give up his/her racial ethnic identities and individualism could flourish. Atzmon is indeed a misty-eyed idealist. He closes his blog with this:

Yesterday evening I stumbled across these beautiful lines by Indian Guru Satya Sai Baba. If you really want to know what I think about race, ethnicity and origin, let Satya Sai Baba speak on my behalf.

“There is only one RACE
The race of humankind
There is only one religion
The religion of LOVE
There is only ONE language
the language of the HEART”

That’s wonderful, but it’s just not going to happen, and believing that it will happen is simply to endanger Whites because they are the only people on the globe who are allowing themselves to be displaced by other peoples—none of whom are willing to renounce their identities or group interests and none of whom subscribe to these sentiments. Jews are Exhibit A in that regard. The fact is that Whites and a few Indian philosophers and renegade Jews like Atzmon are the only people in the world who really think like this.

Finally, Atzmon is unapologetic about ignoring the population genetic data showing that Jews are indeed an ethnic entity or the data showing that Jews have been deeply concerned about racial purity since the origins of the Diaspora. He simply disagrees that Judaism has any ethnic coherence while agreeing that “Jewish culture, politics and ideology are all racially oriented.”

This is the kind of stance that drives me crazy. People think they can develop adequate theories even though they simply avoid discussing all the relevant data. Notice that Atzmon doesn’t dispute the genetic data, but simply refuses to consider it. One is always free to do that, but it certainly removes one from the realm of science and honest scholarship to do so. In this regard, Atzmon, the self-described “proud, self-hating Jew” firmly situates himself in the long line of Jewish intellectual movements discussed in The Culture of Critique where the goal was to fashion theories that serve political and ethnic interests without regard for the truth.

If there is one thing we know at this point in our history, bad theories can be extremely dangerous—that they can indeed be lethal to the legitimate interests of Whites. The Kumbaya ideology that there are no races is just that: A lethal ideology for the only people who will ever in their majority take it seriously—White people.