Towards ‘Kosher Nationalism’? (3): Jewish Ideologies and the Myth of the Golem

Part 1.
Part 2.

I argued previously that individual Jewish intellectuals tend to adopt a personal ideology, generally in their younger years and for life, which is a conscious or unconscious rationalization of their ethnic interests. However, it is also true that particular Jewish intellectuals will often consistently pursue and enforce their ideology throughout their lifetime, either for reasons of personal prestige and interest or sheer pigheadedness, even to the point of self-destructiveness to Jews and Jewish interests. This, I believe, may explain the not uncommon phenomenon of liberal/leftist Jews that are relatively critical of Israel and open to miscegenation.

Jewish ideologies and evolutionary strategies recall the Jewish folk tale of the golem: A rabbi creates a anthromorphic being out of mud and magic to defend the community against anti-Semitism. However, eventually control of the being is lost and it backfires, possibly desecrating the Sabbath or going on a murderous rampage. Communism or individualism/multiculturalism, taken to their conclusion, are in this sense golems, because taken to their logical conclusion in a West populated by non-Western peoples, they end up undermining Jewish interests.

Civil libertarianism: The case of Glenn Greenwald

Greenwald is an interesting example, showcasing how extreme adherence to a particular ideology can hurt Jewish interests or indeed be exploited by White Nationalists. He rose from having a humble personal blog in the mid-2000s to blogging for Salon (a significantly Jewish progressive website), then Britain’s Guardian, before meteorically shooting to worldwide fame with Edward Snowden’s giving his National Security Agency documents to him. Greenwald was the only person Snowden trusted, thus getting a planetary scoop beating all mainstream journalists. Greenwald is known for his powerful and vicious critiques of overseas wars, wireless wiretapping, mass surveillance and other actions he considers illegal or unconstitutional. His supposed lodestar is the Constitution and has been equally critical of Republicans and Democrats, equally comfortable with libertarians and socialists.

Looking at America from Europe during the Bush II years, Greenwald was a breath of fresh air: he expressed all of the criticisms one needed to make of the needlessness of the War on Terror at home and abroad. I used to think his viciousness and free-spiritedness was linked to his homosexuality — one has to be fairly independent-minded and contemptuous of mainstream culture, I thought, to be a self-respecting gay in a society in which homosexual behavior is considered a deviancy. I now tend to think that this uncompromising, even vicious, criticism is also rather in line with Jewish culture.

Greenwald’s power network, it seems to me, consists of the kind of liberals (often Jewish) who are affiliated with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The ACLU was infamous for defending the right to freedom of assembly of American Neo-Nazis, including rallying in significantly Jewish town of Skokie, Illinois.[1] Obviously many Jewish groups were horrified by this, but Jews at the ACLU presumably justify it this way: the Constitution, civil rights and the rules of law are the best protection for Jews in the United States; therefore, they must also defend the rights of Judeophobes. Greenwald has explicitly made this point on numerous occasions and this would explain his enthusiastic defense of Muslims’ civil rights in the War on Terror. Indeed, Greenwald first appears in the New York Times for defending “white supremacist” Matthew Hale and other White Advocates, later saying: “I almost always did it pro bono. I was interested in defending political principles that I believed in.” He also served as a lawyer for a business partner’s gay pornography distribution company.

Greenwald’s legal defense of antisemites would seem to be a case a Jew consistently applying his ideology even when it clashes with immediate Jewish interests. Pushed to extreme, of course, this can backfire. Greenwald has also been extremely critical of neoconservatives and Israel. However, his criticism has limits: In 2011 the normally fearless blogger quietly backed away from using the term “Israel Firster” because, as one Tribalist critic put it, it is a “neo-Nazi-derived anti-Semitic slur.” (The truth of whether a particular Jew puts the interests of Israel ahead of his country of citizenship is of course irrelevant.) In addition, more recently Greenwald’s obsession with legal niceties has not stopped him and his publication, The Intercept, from strongly supporting Ferguson protesters (Michael Brown’s assaulting an officer and Black crime rates are apparently not relevant) or from ignoring President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty (Greenwald is normally the first one to viciously attack any suggestion of presidential overreach and unconstitutional action). Thus, while Greenwald is fiercely critical of Israel and of gentile society (often usefully so, as with his withering assessment of the democratic vacuity of a possible Jeb Bush vs. Hillary Clinton presidential campaign), he is not critical of Jewish dual loyalty or Jewish influence as such. (That said, credit where credit is due, Greenwald has denounced a prominent rabbi’s call for fellow Jews to support Alan Dershowitz against charges of pedophilia on grounds of tribal solidarity.)

The case of Communism

A stronger example would be Communism. Communism was a self-interested ideology for disenfranchised Central-Eastern European Jewry because it promised to replace the traditional regimes, which often had quotas to limit Jewish over-representation in various sectors and institutions, with a totalitarian “colorblind” dictatorship in which Jews would form a significant part of the elite. Jews were then not only able to predominate in a liberal country’s business and media establishment (as among the “assimilated” Jews of America, Britain, France and Germany), but were equally successful at organizing and rising to the top of various subversive movements aimed at toppling traditional regimes. This phenomenon was perhaps best described by none other than Winston Churchill in his insufficiently-famous 1920 article “Zionism vs. Bolshevism”. He wrote of “International Jews” (in contrast with patriotic “National Jews”):

The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. […] It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.

Jews were massively over-represented among the Soviet regime’s ruling elite and tyrannical enforcers (Jewish-Russian Princeton historian Yuri Slezkine called them “Stalin’s willing executioners” while one Jewish journalist noted recently that they were “the backbone of the NKVD [secret police]”).

However, a totalitarian State’s bureaucracy, in the end, could not tolerate a rival to its power in the form a cohesive, State-within-the-State ethnic network, and so in most (all?) Communist countries Jewish influence and over-representation were gradually reduced over time (under Stalin in the Soviet Union, in Poland and Hungary from the 1950s). Jews then enthusiastically collaborated in the creation of totalitarian police states which, while initially oppressing mostly the gentile masses, would eventually turn on them as well. (To paraphrase an anti-Nazi poem: “First they came for the Kulaks, and I put him in a gulag and starved his family, because I was not a Kulak…”)

The contemporary golem: multicultural individualism

The hegemonic ideology within Western Jewish communities today is multicultural individualism (or more broadly, modern “liberalism”). Jews have generally done so for two reasons:

  1. The protection of all minorities (gays, Blacks, etc.) is the protection of all, normlessness being the best guarantee of protection for Jews with their refusal to follow the majority’s norms.[2]
  2. Jews are safest in a multiethnic society where is no single group could form a majority, Judeo-critical ethno-nationalist movement.[3]

Jews have been remarkably successful in contributing to making these ideas hegemonic throughout the West, no doubt aided by “colorblind” corporate interests wanting low-wage immigration and European ethno-masochism. But today, liberalism, individualism and multiculturalism threaten Jewry in several ways:

  1. Miscegenating out of existence, with very high rates of intermarriage for American Jews in particular. (Although Jews do debate whether mixed marriages are good for Jewry as a whole, as suggested by the title of one Jewish editorial: “Mixed marriages: A danger or a springboard for Judaism?” Indeed, the existence of part-Jews like David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy at the head of major European states is likely highly adaptive for the Jewish community as a whole.)
  2. Opposition to Israel on grounds of the Jewish State’s racism, violation of international law and oppression of the Palestinians.
  3. Destruction of Western Jews’ host nations through displacement-level immigration.

It is point three that I would like to focus on. Multiculturalist arguments have formed the basis for Jewish support for the displacement of Western peoples in their own homelands through immigration. However, Jews are also faintly aware that they have only been able to prosper in the individualist, universalist and guilt-prone biocultures of the West. No other civilization has shown even remotely as much tolerance for the misanthropic and anti-gentilic aspects of their culture. This is true above all in the Islamic World, where, apart from cases where Jews made alliances with ruling elites hostile to the native population,[4] Jews have never been able to reach a position of power or prestige comparable to what they have repeatedly achieved in European(-derived) countries, such as medieval Spain, Britain, France, Weimar Germany, the United States, the Soviet Union, etc.

By supporting displacement-level immigration and multiculturalism, Jews then risk contributing to making ethnic Europeans minorities in their own countries, creating non-Western societies in which Jews would actually be far less likely to prosper. This begs the question: Will Jews continue to support an ideology which would ultimately be detrimental to their interests?

Go to Part 4.


[1]    This has also been amusing lampooned: “ACLU Defends Nazis’ Right To Burn Down ACLU Headquarters,” The Onion, October 14, 2003. http://www.theonion.com/articles/aclu-defends-nazis-right-to-burn-down-aclu-headqua,1648/

[2]    According to Charles Silberman: “American Jews are committed to cultural tolerance because of their belief—one firmly rooted in history—that Jews are safe only in a society acceptant of a wide range of attitudes and behaviors, as well as a diversity of religious and ethnic groups. It is this belief, for example, not approval of homosexuality, that leads an overwhelming majority of American Jews to endorse ‘gay rights’ and to take a liberal stance on most other so-called ‘social’ issues.” Charles Silberman, A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today (1985), p. 350. Quoted in MacDonald, Culture of Critique, p. 85.

[3]    As E. Raab wrote in the Febrarury 19, 1993 Jewish Bulletin: “The Census Bureau has just reported that about half of the American population will soon be non-white or non-European. And they will all be American citizens. We have tipped beyond the point where a Nazi-Aryan party will be able to prevail in this country.

 We [Jews] have been nourishing the American climate of opposition to bigotry for about half a century. That climate has not yet been perfected, but the heterogeneous nature of our population tends to make it irreversible—and makes our constitutional constraints against bigotry more practical than ever.” Quoted in MacDonald, Culture of Critique, Chapter 7, p. 243.

[4]    See MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents, Ch. 2.

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