On Jewish Privilege and the “Dictator Mentality”

It’s been noted previously at TOO that Jews are happy to be considered White when they benefit from it. Historically, Jewish efforts at crypsis and gaining acceptance among Whites were pursued in order to obtain significant political, social, educational, and economic benefits.[1] Efforts at being seen as White have varied over the course of millennia. Some of the earliest efforts involved abandoning phenotypic characteristics that marked them out as a very distinct population, and which provoked White hostility. Since the Enlightenment in particular, there has been a powerful trend towards abandoning special Jewish languages, modes of dress, styles of hair, and ways of dressing. Even in modern times, rhinoplasty, or nose reshaping, has been so common among Jewish female teens that Tablet argued it was at one point a Jewish “rite of passage” that fell “somewhere between their Bat Mitzvahs and their wedding.” Aside from alterations to outward appearance and behavior, prior to emancipation the Jews of Europe often saw conversion to Christianity as a meal-ticket to mass acceptance, and with it admission to the franchise, political office and commercial opportunities. These “conversions of convenience” were hardly sincere, but were sufficient for Whites to admit Jews into the ranks of their society. A major part of the Jewish evolutionary strategy is therefore the penetration of White society, assisted by the adoption of the outward appearance of conforming to White norms, thereby enabling the untroubled transfer of resources from Whites to the cryptic Jewish population.

The Jewish evolutionary strategy is also adaptive and responsive to cultural and demographic change, and humans more generally are “flexible strategizers” in pursuit of evolutionary goals.[2] Jews in particular have employed countless strategies involving crypsis in their bid to combat hostility from Whites and other ethnic groups. They have been assisted in this by their above-average IQ, and related talents in general purpose cognitive processes — enabling them to constantly adapt, shift and change posture in response to novel situations. One of the simplest and most basic of these strategies is what has been called the “shell game of Jewish identity.”[3] This is the game where Jews will describe themselves primarily as either an ethnic group or a religion, depending on the angle of the attacks, or the nature of the disabilities, they face. New contexts demand the need for new “games.” American demographics are shifting ever faster against Whites, and Leftist dogma has taken on a life of its own within some of the new minorities — on occasion quite apart from Jewish intellectual influence. In the new context, Jews are seen by minorities as too phenotypically and culturally similar to Whites to escape the accusation that, even if not White, they have enjoyed the fruits of that social unicorn, “White Privilege.”

The new context has thus demanded of Jews that they play a new game whereby they adopt and abandon ‘Whiteness’ on an ad hoc basis. An excellent example of this was the Jewish journalistic response to the hacks at Sony, which revealed that Jewish Hollywood executives harbored views considered by the Left to be racist and enjoyed salaries and power far in excess of others. Almost every piece of coverage on these leaks ignored the Jewish background of the people concerned, described them universally as ‘White,’ and drew instead on tropes about White privilege and White racism. In these contexts it was beneficial to Jews to throw a veil of Whiteness over clear-cut instances of Jewish power and influence, and to keep the story gravitating around the alleged innate evil of Whites. The tactic of representing a non-White as White in order to demonize those of European origin was also sufficiently flexible for it to be employed with mixed success in the Trayvon Martin fiasco, when some media outlets gave the impression that the ethnically diffuse George Zimmerman was a veritable pure-blood descendent of the Pilgrim Fathers.

With the “Whiteness” shell-game in mind, this week I’ve been observing a noticeable, but far from mainstream, debate that has broken out over the Jewish relationship to ‘White privilege.’ A very small number of liberal Jews have vocalized that they are indeed part of a privileged group, even employing the term “Jewish privilege.” They have been confronted by a vocal majority which resists even having the debate. The main argument of the majority is that conceding the existence of “Jewish privilege” will leave them open to “anti-Semites” who will “use the term as a way to claim that Jews control the world.” A noticeable trend within denunciations of efforts to acknowledge any privilege enjoyed by Jews is the employment of the Holocaust as an argument-ender. For example, Jewish blogger Taffy Brodesser-Akner has countered any notion of Jewish privilege with her retort that:

Privilege has two meanings: One is that those who are privileged are elevated somehow. The other is that they are different. I renounce the notion that Jews—Jews, being told to stay home from their synagogues for their safety, Jews being kept out of schools and ridiculed in the street, all this, right now in Europe—have the first kind of privilege. But the second, we have it in droves: It is my Jewish privilege to have very few blood relatives because the rest of them were murdered in the Holocaust. … It is my Jewish privilege that the word lampshade makes me cringe, that the word camp—camp!—makes me cringe. It is my privilege to always wonder what I should have been doing differently, how I am a disgrace to the martyrs of the Holocaust because my outrage and sadness is confined to my Direct Messages.

Examined in detail, Brodesser-Akner’s remarks contain a litany of Jewish anxieties, cultural relics, myths, self-pity, and self-deception. At bottom, the argument is that no such thing as ‘Jewish privilege’ can exist because Jews are the quintessential victim — and a blameless one at that. The comment unapologetically ignores the pre-eminent position of Jews in all reasonable contemporary assessments and scales of social, political, and economic success. The situation of Jews in Europe is presented spontaneously, with no explanation, and certainly no reference to the fact that Islamists are fuelled by what they see as a multitude of Israeli ‘privileges.’ Jews, and their putative suffering, are believed to be too unique for them to be seen as enjoying special benefits in modern society. It’s the means by which Jews pragmatically drop the White mask, and aim to position themselves as part of the coalition of victim minorities.

This adaptation to the new context, and specifically the invocation of the Holocaust as a facilitating device, has been employed before. Last year Jewish Princeton student Tal Fortgang responded to the campus minority emphasis on “checking privilege” with a lengthy reference to:

the privilege my grandfather and his brother had to flee their home as teenagers when the Nazis invaded Poland, leaving their mother and five younger siblings behind, running and running until they reached a Displaced Persons camp in Siberia, where they would do years of hard labor in the bitter cold until World War II ended. Maybe it was the privilege my grandfather had of taking on the local Rabbi’s work in that DP camp, telling him that the spiritual leader shouldn’t do hard work, but should save his energy to pass Jewish tradition along to those who might survive. Perhaps it was the privilege my great-grandmother and those five great-aunts and uncles I never knew had of being shot into an open grave outside their hometown. Maybe that’s my privilege.

This is evidence not only that young Jews continue to see persecution as the lynchpin of their identity and position in society, but also that this mind-set enables a stunning level of self-deception when it comes to acknowledging Jewish elite status in contemporary America. Samuel Freedman correctly pointed out that Fortgang “clutches the memory of loss and struggle. He does not seem to accept the existence of inherited advantage.” Even for some of those Jews who are convinced about the evils of White privilege, the invocation of past victimhood, real or imagined, is just too noticeably evasive. Phoebe Maltz Bovy states that:

It’s entirely possible for a Jew whose relatives were killed in the Holocaust to benefit from certain aspects of (for lack of a better term) white privilege. That the Nazis wouldn’t have considered you white doesn’t mean that store clerks, taxi drivers, prospective employers, and others in the contemporary United States won’t accord you the unearned advantages white people, Jewish and otherwise, enjoy. That your ancestors were victims of genocide in a different place and at a different time doesn’t mean you can’t be part of the victimizing caste in your own society, any more than having had impoverished forbears means that you can’t have been born into money.

This provoked a gut reaction from many Jews, among them the ever-eloquent Rosanne Barr who linked to the comment on Twitter with the refrain: “This is complete bullshit. Sickening bullshit.” Barr contributes a visceral example of what is the far from uncommon innate intestinal reaction Jews have to even remote recognitions of their power, wealth, and influence in the West. In some instances, efforts to avoid connections to ‘White privilege’ have been laughable to say the least. Take the comments of Seth Frantzman, who has argued, apparently with a straight face, that Jews cannot enjoy ‘White privilege’ because this makes the “racist assumption that all Jews are white. However, there are hundreds of thousands of black Jews and Jews of color in the U.S. and Israel.”

The pathetically small Ethiopian Jewish community is thus wheeled out for a lap of honor every time Ashkenazi Jews wish to play “religion” in the Jewish identity shell-game. The whole issue of privilege descends further into farce with Frantzman’s claim that Jews surely have less privilege than African-Americans because Blacks have failed to “acknowledge their very own privilege of having not been targeted for extermination.”

Of course, one of the reasons Jews fight so hard to deny complicity with White culture is that they genuinely see themselves as different, and resent White culture as fundamentally anathema to everything they are. Their desire to reap the rewards of being seen by us as ‘one of us,’ doesn’t obviate this hatred. The Holocaust-fixated Taffy Brodesser-Akner remarks:

We know inherently that we’re not part of the establishment, that we are surrounded by ourselves in certain enclaves, but mostly that this particular tradition comes from the fact that know we are believed to be disgusting, and we know we can calm everyone right down by letting them know we know that. That’s not a privilege. That’s a nightmare of self-loathing. And yet, it is somehow our birthright. We do not speak up now. We didn’t speak up then. We might have to look ourselves in the mirror and say, yes, we stand idly by, and we would have as our relatives were being sent off to the gas chambers back then.

Brodesser-Akner is being more than a little disingenuous here. I might agree with her insinuation that Jews are not a part of White society, but they are definitely a greatly and disproportionately influential part of “the establishment.” In fact, in spheres of public influence like Hollywood, and in terms of funding political parties, Jews are the establishment. Jews want to cling to victimized minority status while simultaneously disguising their own ethnic interests and masquerading as Whites when it suits them.

This display of identity gymnastics necessitates getting around the reality that Jews occupy astonishing levels of power and wealth, and are in many senses the most privileged ethnic group in America. Haaretz reports that Jews “are better off economically than other ethnic or religious groups. … A survey by the Jewish Federations of North America in 2001 found that 34 percent of Jewish households reported an annual income of more than $75,000, compared to only 17 percent of all U.S. households…A Pew survey in 2009 that compared incomes by religion illustrates these differences even further. According to that survey, 46 percent of American Jews had household incomes of more than $100,000, and 12 percent take in $75,000–$99,000 a year. Only 18 percent of U.S. households had incomes of more than $100,000, and an additional 13 percent showed incomes of $75,000–$99,000.” Jews have ensured the continuance of this privilege by, among other practices, discriminating against other ethnicities in Ivy League admissions. A quick survey of hits for “Jewish Privilege” reveals that the Holocaust, and an allegedly persistent anti-Semitic threat, is by some margin the favored option for Jews questioned about these facts. Jews want to derive benefits from Whites, but remain fundamentally suspicious of them. Benjy Cannon at Haaretz has argued that “our Jewish history should remind us every day that we’re perpetually at risk of being on the wrong side of white elitism.”

This balance between occupying so much power, and yet being so crippled by gut-wrenching paranoia, brings to mind the psychology of dictators. Indeed, in The Political Economy of Dictatorship Ronald Wintrobe argues that “the most likely personality characteristic of dictators is paranoia.”[4] The dictatorship model, seen in a group context, may also provide a suitable lens through which to examine Jewish privilege and political behavior. Wintrobe argues that successful dictators solve the balance between power and paranoia (“the Dictator’s Dilemma”) by discovering or institutionalizing programs or mechanisms that:

• Promote competition among other powerful groups in the country (divide and rule).
• ‘automatically’ reward their supporters and monitor their support.
• Fund these reward programs, sometimes via the systematic oppression of the opposition.

Jews have certainly been at the forefront of fomenting a spirit of competition between groups in societies they have occupied. Among ethnically homogenous societies, Jews have gravitated strongly towards, or pioneered, social movements which sought to fragment those societies along several lines, including class (Marxism) and gender (Feminism), and which sought to generate new conflicts. In the 1960s, 96 percent of American Jews backed President Kennedy’s steps to enforce the end of segregation in the South — a socio-political barrier which had reduced inter-ethnic conflict and competition in the region. More recently, Jews have been at the forefront of creating new fractures within nations by pushing for multiculturalism and the introduction of new ethnic groups that Whites have been forced to compete with, often with the newcomers having the benefit of affirmative action policies. Jews also do extremely well in terms of rewarding their supporters and monitoring both support and dissent. I’ve previously covered the rewards enjoyed by John Hagee, a seemingly inexhaustible supporter of Jews and Israel, and it’s a recurring TOO theme that the war on Whites is massively incentivized. Jews have also pioneered organizations of repression such as the ADL and the SPLC, and have been at the forefront of moves to limit free speech and place restrictions on the Internet.

Whites have been ‘privileged’ to suffer at the hands of all these measures. In conclusion, it might be worth stating, in the vein of Brodesser-Akner, that White privilege is:

• The privilege of witnessing the fast and probably irrecoverable numerical decline of your people, even in their ancient homelands.
• The privilege of having your ancestors, who essentially pushed (and in some cases dragged) mankind forward for centuries, slandered and their achievements demeaned.
• The privilege of being discriminated against in Ivy League admissions, and through various ‘Affirmative Action’ programs.
• The privilege of having your children indoctrinated with the belief that they are responsible for an endless and sometimes imagined list of historical evils.
• The privilege of being labelled a supremacist, or other pejoratives, should you choose to publicly object to the assault on the demographic health of your people, its safety, its traditions, its cultural treasures, and its community and family structure.
• The privilege of being one of the 400,000 poor White South Africans living in squatter camps because you have no hope of getting employment, or one of the 30,000 White South African farmers who were murdered, driven out, or expelled from the country during the last two decades.
• The privilege of being one of the 25% of Swedish women who will be raped by Muslim immigrants.

Of course, I could go on. But perhaps the most biting insult of all is simply that the term “White privilege” should even exist. By contrast, I suspect it won’t be long before asking a Jew to check his privilege will be declared a ‘hate crime.’

[1] K. MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Towards an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (1^st Books, 219).

[2] Ibid, 213.

[3] M. Neumann, ‘What is anti-Semitism?’ in The Politics of Anti-Semitism, 2003, 1.

[4] R. Wintrobe, The Political Economy of Dictatorship, 335.