An Introspective of White Ethnocentrism

“The fiendlike skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth.”
           Herman Melville, Typee, 1846

Inert in the face of mass migration, and entranced by the foreign policy objectives of hostile elites, today’s “white civilized man” appear far removed from the ferocious animal perceived by Herman Melville. While still capable of inventing all manner of war machines, and retaining the ability to engage in vindictive and devastating conflicts, we seem uniquely incapable of doing any of it in our own interests. Instead, the “ferocious animal” of today is tame, on a leash, and obedient to obscure masters. One of the biggest problems for the Dissident Right, and perhaps the most serious, is the seeming collapse of White ethnocentrism in the second half of the twentieth century. The “liquid” nature of modernity, economic developments, the mass dissemination of guilt propaganda, the assault on the family, and, in some cases, the criminalization of aspects of White advocacy have all conspired to undermine, stigmatize, and destroy both national-cultural White identities (English, French, German etc.) and confluent “New World” White identities (American, Canadian, Australian etc.). These assaults from multiple angles have been so profound that by far the most prominent focus of Dissident Right activism has been to identify these external threats and then to attempt forms of rhetorical counter-attack. As such, the broad trajectory of pro-White literature, my own included, involves material on the hostility of Jews, globalism, neocon wars, Black crime, the mechanics of White guilt, and how we are censored or otherwise exiled from the mainstream.

Discussion of these subjects is absolutely essential, even if the argument could be made that we too often neglect the great White elephant in the room  —  the problem that both surrounds us and confounds us: the majority of Whites who simply fail to act in their interests, and even collaborate with outsiders against their ethnic interests. Probably no thinker in our circles has done more to move beyond neglect of ethnically pathological behaviors among Whites than Kevin MacDonald who, in a number of essays (e.g. see here, here and here) and his 2019 Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future, has almost single-handedly attempted to improve our understanding of what’s happening and to suggest possible remedies. With the election of Donald Trump, and the evolution of European populism, White identity and political interests are also coming into increasing prominence as academic and media talking points, the work of Matthew Goodwin and Eric Kaufmann being the most obvious examples. The methodologies of such studies involve group psychology, voting patterns, and economic analyses; their findings deserve careful study.

In the following essay, however, I propose a different way of looking at White ethnocentrism. Rather than turning a lens towards elections, the economy, group psychology, or the impacts of globalism, I want to do something quintessentially European — to turn the lens inwards. By examining the origins and nature of my own sense of ethnocentrism, I hope to understand more about the ethnocentrism, or lack of ethnocentrism, in other Whites. I do so in the understanding that my sense of ethnic identity might be radically different from others. In fact, I suspect that there is a multiplicity of ethnocentrisms at work among Europeans, each as unique as a fingerprint, and that this is one of the reasons for our predicament. Nevertheless, the following essay has been written in the hope that, even given the differences of White ethnocentrisms, something valuable might be learned, or that an interesting and productive debate might be started.

*****

I honestly can’t remember a point at which I first regarded myself as possessing a heightened, or above average, ethnocentrism. I certainly can’t recall instances before the age of 18 where I was not only conscious of being White, but proud of that fact and conceiving of myself as having interests as a White man. Looking back on my childhood, it’s clear to me that I was raised in an overwhelmingly White environment, and ethnic outsiders, such as they existed in my world, were found almost exclusively on television or in the realm of pop music. In other words, I was raised in an environment where being White was simply the default state, and ethnics were merely presented at the fringes of that environment as something safe, entertaining, even attractive. One jarring exception to this state of affairs occurred in my late teens, when the 2001 Oldham Riots, and later riots in Bradford, Burnley, and Leeds, broke out in the north of England. These riots were explicitly racial in nature, and had been prompted to a large extent by an increase in violent crime by Pakistanis and other South Asians against Whites. The most savage, and most publicised, of these attacks was the assault of Walter Chamberlain, a 76-year-old war veteran who was so badly beaten by three Pakistanis on his way home from a rugby match that he required surgery to rebuild his face. He had walked through “their area.”

The assault on Mr Chamberlain lit the match in the racial tinderbox, and Oldham erupted in mutual petrol bomb attacks, assaults, and arsons. It was through the blanket coverage of these race riots that I learned not only that there were growing ethnic enclaves throughout the West, but also that these brought in their wake “no-go areas,” rampant crime, and vicious anti-White hostility. The riots in Oldham coincided with the fact I had begun to study politics at high school, part of which involved looking at race relations. In fact, just a few weeks prior to the Oldham Riots, I’d been asked to watch Mississippi Burning (1988), a crime thriller loosely based on the 1964 murder investigation concerning three civil rights workers (two Jews and a Black) by the Ku Klux Klan. Looking back on it from my current vantage point, the film is exceptional multicultural propaganda. It’s extremely well-made from a technical standpoint, boasts tremendous acting talent in the form of Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe, and is utterly relentless in demonising the population of the American South while eulogising Blacks. Nevertheless, if memory serves me right, it had only a middling effect on my opinion of race relations, and any embryonic feelings of White guilt were swiftly destroyed one afternoon by my first encounter with the face of Mr Chamberlain, adorning the front pages of multiple newspapers as I made my way to buy lunch.

Walter Chamberlain

I followed the Oldham Riots with great interest, and recall thinking of myself as White for the first time because of the violence. Looking back over some old news articles covering those events, it’s really stunning how open some Oldham residents were about the racial realities they were forced to live with. Take, for example, the following remark from the landlord of a local pub, the Fytton Arms: “The Asians make you racist. You’re not brought up to hate them, they make you hate them.” Another man told reporters: “They won’t live like us. They won’t work. I don’t believe for a minute they can’t get a job because they are discriminated against. They don’t want jobs.” On the assault on Walter Chamberlain, another added: “That’s how sick and low they are, three lads knocking 10 bells out of an old bloke. What’s he going to do back?” In retrospect, I believe the Oldham Riots woke up a lot of White people, both near the epicenter and far from it. The riots marked the beginning of what would eventually be a remarkable rise in support for the British National Party. For those of us further afield, even if we didn’t hate Asians, to paraphrase the landlord of the Fytton Arms, “we weren’t brought up ethnocentric, but the Asians made us ethnocentric.”

Once the riots were suppressed, the government invested millions in “race relations” measures designed to bribe the Asians and gag the Whites. The years since 2001 have witnessed endless official exhortations to “celebrate diversity” in the town, while clampdowns were announced “on anything which might be deemed offensive,” including the flying of St. George’s flag. The town is still largely segregated, and an uneasy peace prevails. White ethnocentrism probably remains strong in Oldham but, for now, it’s shackled and dormant. Reflecting back on those years, after the riots my own ethnocentrism entered a short period of dormancy until, prompted by a history class that required me to watch Schindler’s List (1993) — how strange the role films have played thus far!— I was sent down another, more convoluted, path to White ethnocentrism.

*****

Until doing a short high school course of study on the rise of National Socialist Germany, part of which required coursework on Schindler’s List, my knowledge of Jews was limited to the highly philo-Semitic teachings of a Presbyterian Sunday school I attended between the ages of 5 and 10. It’s quite a leap to go from purportedly heroic Israelites parting seas and surviving the dens of lions to yellow stars on clothing and, in the narrative I was given, mass death on an industrial scale. It was probably the sheer scale of this gap — the contradictory exposure to extremes of philosemitism and antisemitism — that sparked a greater than average curiosity about what exactly had happened in Europe between 1933 and 1945, and why. Truth be told, that same curiosity is still there, and I have to say that while readers sometimes write to me saying that my essays have helped them understand certain topics, the essays are primarily a method of improving my own understanding — a kind of “thinking on paper.”

I started examining Jewish interactions with European populations, on a serious and advanced level, in my early 20s, around the same time I became a father. In terms of my own life history, these two events are connected in more senses than mere timing, since both contributed to heightened ethnocentrism. I found Ed Dutton’s recent J. Philippe Rushton: A Life History Perspective (2018) fascinating not just because of the analysis of Rushton’s work but what Dutton had to say about Rushton’s early life, especially:

All the behaviors which Rushton has displayed—dropping out of school, marrying young, having a child young, having an affair—are predicted by low IQ. But he manifestly had a very high IQ, so, instead, these reflect a fast Life History Strategy, and specifically low Conscientiousness. Rushton was ‘living for the now’, following his impulses, with little regard for the future.

Like Rushton, by my early 20s I exhibited behavior reflective of a fast Life History Strategy — I hadn’t dropped out of school but had at times been very “disruptive.” Despite excelling academically, I was frequently in fights and spent many hours in detention, I married young (20), and had a child young (age 21 to Rushton’s 19). I never had an affair or touched drugs (or even alcohol), but I did “live for the now,” following my impulses, with little regard for the future. Even now, I have a higher than average number of children (4), something more typical today of lower-IQ, risk-prone populations. And yet I also, like Rushton, continued my education alongside being a father, and graduated from university (also like Rushton) with First Class Honours, later proceeding (again like Rushton) to a PhD. In some ways, I regard my own experience of fatherhood as slowing my Life History Strategy, something I’m sure I’m not alone in experiencing.

For me, becoming a father wasn’t just a fact of biology, but also something spiritual. I remember holding my first child for the first time, and hearing in my mind the final words of Dante’s Paradiso: “But my will now and my desire were turned, like a wheel rotated evenly, by a love that moves the sun and the other stars.” This dramatic shift in my personality and sense of responsibility contributed in the longer term to a slower Life History Strategy, more conscientiousness (especially regarding my children), more caution, more deliberation on risk, and greater awareness not only of my own mortality but of the threat of death more generally. I became very protective, and began to be concerned with things like finding safe places to raise children, and safe people they could associate with. As they grew older, I became interested in what my children were being taught, and by whom. I began to think of myself, and my children, as part of a biological and spiritual continuum. Fatherhood had fathered a sense of ethnocentrism.

Fatherhood had fathered a sense of ethnocentrism.

*****

This life-shift occurred around the same time I encountered troubling incongruities in historical and contemporary representations of Jewish-European relations. It also coincided with the fact I was travelling more with my young family, spending time not only in cities across Europe but also the United States. There were alarming instances of ethnic crime, like the sexual assault of a family friend by a Black in Florida, an attempted break-in by Blacks in North Carolina, street harassment by gangs of Africans (twice) and Arabs (once) in Paris and Spain, attempted thefts by gypsies in Rome, but more insidiously alarming was my general sense that the White world was shrinking, becoming tragically and despondently peppered with “Oldhams.”

As my investigations of Jewish-European interactions deepened and expanded, I began to confront the Jewish role in promoting notions of tolerance and ethnic pluralism in White countries, and then encountered the work of Kevin MacDonald. MacDonald’s own personal account of the journey to White ethnocentrism had quite a profound effect on me, since it mirrored mine (and maybe even the landlord of the Fytton Arms) in a small but important number of ways, the most important of which was that White ethnocentrism really wasn’t something we were raised with, but that environmentally impressed itself upon us. It seemed to me that White ethnocentrism can do this either in dramatic and inescapable ways, by taking the form of a surface-level, instinctive reaction to the open and immediate violent hostility of ethnic outsiders, or it can be the result of a very broad and deep reflection on one’s immediate environment, circumstances, and group history. The latter path would appear to require above average intelligence, as well as exposure to certain stimulating factors and an ability to assimilate a range of historical, philosophical issues. Of course, it can also result from a combination of both — a violent ethnic confrontation that prompts deeper reflection and more intensified feelings of ethnocentrism. Actually expressing this newfound sense of ethnocentrism would then require a new set of traits altogether, including low conscientiousness (worrying less about what others would think), a greater tendency to risk-taking behaviors, and perhaps even higher than average levels of aggression. In other words, in attempting to define an ideal type of ethnocentric White, we are back to what we might be termed the “Rushton combination” of r and K traits and strategies, with enough IQ to grasp the problem at hand, and enough recklessness to push through a wall of social stigma in order to do something about it. This combination is, in all probability, quite rare in the population at large which would go some way towards explaining the relatively stagnant nature of White ethnocentrism at present.

In any event, it occurs to me that high levels of ethnocentrism don’t appear natural to Europeans. I think we lack the innate and instinctive forms of ethnocentrism we perceive in others, like the Jews, Arabs, and South Asians. Even in my early exploration of Jewish matters, I think I was angered more by a sense that certain aspects of Jewish behavior (usury, nepotism, monopoly, cultural hostility) appeared, quite frankly, as “unfair” rather than being a direct attack on my interests as a White person, and those of my family or people. Even today, some critics of my essays have mentioned that I seem to be motivated by a sense of unfairness rather than something more coldly rational, and perhaps they aren’t completely wrong. I’m sure that, like most quintessentially European types, I haven’t entirely escaped from preoccupations with questions of fairness and morality, even if I think that to lose these traits entirely (as some Nietzscheans have advocated) would be to tragically lose something that makes us who we are. We are preoccupied with fairness. We are caught up with ideas of morality. We’ve evolved that way, and it will be the challenge of our time to adapt these traits in a way that helps rather than hinders the development of ethnocentrism — something that is necessary if we are to  survive as a group and remain dominant in our homelands and historically-held territories.

*****

What I find very difficult to understand and explain are those Whites who experience utterly catastrophic inter-ethnic encounters and yet fail to develop an ethnocentric response. Search the media and it won’t be long until you find stories of Whites who have been raped by non-Whites and find some way to blame White people for it. Similarly, it won’t take long to find stories about fathers of murdered daughters who urge tolerance for ethnic minorities and utter non-sequiturs about what the daughter “would have wanted.” Such stories should be compared and contrasted with John Derbyshire’s now infamous 2012 article “The Talk: Nonblack Version,” which more or less makes the case that every good White parent should educate their children about the dangers posed by non-Whites. The reaction to Derbyshire’s piece was ferocious, but I ask a single, simple question: How many kids getting Derbyshire’s talk would go on to die at the hands of violent ethnic minorities? I think it would rather drastically reduce the number of inter-ethnic deaths.

Every time I hear about a young White woman murdered by ethnics, either in her home country or while travelling in some remote part of the world, I think of Derbyshire’s piece and say to myself, “Well, I bet her parents aren’t ‘racists’.” It’s really very simple — the daughters of ‘racists’ don’t think it’s a great idea to go travelling in remote India or in Muslim countries, and as such, they don’t get raped and beheaded in places like Morocco. The standout moment of 2019’s Joker comes in the penultimate act when the punchline to Arthur Fleck’s only real joke of the film is: “You get what you fucking deserve,” and, in the cruelest of senses, this applies to those who fail to “evolve” into ethnocentrism despite the environment demanding it. Ethnocentric Whites will manage to avoid the worst of ethnic violence, by moving away from non-Whites, by keeping their children away from them, by imparting knowledge about them, and by planning for a future in which racial realities will play an important role. Ethnically blind Whites will continue to bear the brunt of multiculturalism. They will be used as pawns by hostile elites, their children will be murdered, and their future will be bleak and utterly without hope.

*****

How should I characterise my sense of ethnocentrism? This is more difficult than I initially thought. Our movement has adopted a few new labels of late, including White advocacy and even “White Wellbeing.” There’s something about the latter that makes me cringe, despite the obvious good intent behind it. I sometimes listen to podcasts and hear a lot about “our people” and their achievements, and things to that effect. Again, I think this is very well-meaning, and I think we should absolutely try to encourage a sense of group pride. But, ironically, and for me personally, despite all the demonization of the Dissident Right as a hotbed of racial supremacism and ethnic chauvinism, my sense of White ethnocentrism is quite frankly a lot more personal and humble than that. My sense of White ethnocentrism is rooted in a desire to protect my family and to, as Bob Matthews once put it, “continue the flow” of my lineage. In regards to how my ethnocentrism, and the ethnocentrism of other Whites, might impact ethnic minorities, it should suffice to state that the problem began with them. They’re in my homeland; I’m not in theirs. Their presence and “racism” (which is really just White existence forced into conflict with an opposing force) are a mutual or dependent arising. One does not exist without the other. The presence of outsiders will provoke White ethnocentrism, at least among the healthy and adaptive. If “anti-racist” ethnic aliens are sincere in their desire to end White racism they should take the only authentic measure guaranteed to achieve that end — they should leave, and leave quickly.

More than pride in being White, more than any sense of historical achievements by the European peoples, I simply thank whatever gods may be that I possess a sense of ethnic identity.

Dočkáme se v roce 2020 rozmachu nacionalistické levice?

Dočkáme se v roce 2020 rozmachu nacionalistické levice?

Dočkáme se v roce 2020 rozmachu nacionalistické levice?

Autor: Andrew Joyce

„Lidský život je nepřetržitým bojem, nikoliv pouze metaforickým; nejen s nouzí nebo nudou, ale také opravdovým bojem s ostatními lidmi. Člověk naráží na všech stranách na protivníky, žije v ustavičném konfliktu a umírá s mečem v ruce.“

Arthur Schopenhauer – Parerga und Paralipomena (kap. XII. „Dodatky k nauce o utrpení světa“)

Přestože pro lidi v prostředí pravicového disentu je mezi filozofy podle všeho favoritem Nietzsche, osobně mám značnou slabost pro Arthura Schopenhauera. Jeho popudlivý filozofický pesimismus byl vždy blízký mému vlastnímu temperamentu a během let jsem tak opakovaně a rád nacházel nečekanou útěchu v jeho kvazibuddhistické a vysoce soucitné konceptualizaci utrpení. Pojetí života coby nekončících střetů se soupeři je nedílnou součástí Schopenhauerovy filozofie – i mého osobního náhledu na politiku i filozofii. Asi nemusím nijak sáhodlouze prokazovat, že lidé zapojení do pravicového disentu si rozhodně nemohou stěžovat na nedostatek protivníků.

Jsou proti nám seřazeni ze všech stran politického spektra – a čas od času dokonce nějaký „vyraší“ také z našich vlastních řad. Politická filozofie pravicového disentu se tak dnes víc než kdy předtím zdá být předurčena k neustálému konfliktu a já se proto nemohu zbavit neradostného dojmu, že až jednoho dne zemřu s metaforickým mečem v rukou, všechny rozbojované bitvy budou zuřit dál, vidina konečného vítězství kdesi v nedostižné dálavě. Proto si čas od času dopřávám trochu uvolnění v podobě optimistického smýšlení (pro Schopenhauera se Spenglerem forma zbabělosti), jako třeba když se snažím hledat spojence tam, kde jsem dříve hleděl jen na pevné šiky nepřátel. Tím se konečně dostávám k samotnému tématu této eseje: nedávnému vývoji na levici, který jako by naznačoval možnost vzepětí antiglobalistické, antiimigrační a antisionistické/antisemitské politiky.

Švédští komunisté se probouzejí

Není to dávno, co web Sputnik přinesl informaci, že skoro polovina členů Komunistické strany ve švédském Malmö z rudé partaje vystoupila. Plánují totiž založit novou dělnickou stranu, která nebude mezi své hlavní cíle počítat mj. multikulturalismus, zájmy LBGT nebo boj se změnou klimatu. Jeden z přeběhlíků Nils Littorin místním novinám řekl, že dnešní levice se stala součástí elity a „postoje dělnické třídy se jí tak odcizily a staly v jejích očích problematickými“. Levice podle něj „prochází dlouhodobou krizí identity“ a jeho seskupení se hodlá soustředit na tradiční levicové hodnoty, tedy třídní politiku. Littorin dodává: „Levice nechápe, proč značná část dělníků nevidí v multikulturalismu, hnutí LGBT a Gretě Thunbergové něco úžasného a namísto snah o pochopení se chová, jako bychom se ocitli v Německu 30. let a dělníci, volící Švédské demokraty byli nenávratně prolezlí bacilem nacismu.“ Na poměry levice nevídaně prozíravě říká, že podpora pravicových voličů politikům jako Donald Trump nebo Boris Johnson je hlavně „následkem všeobecného zklamání liberálně ekonomickou migrací, která má za následek konkurenci na nízkopříjmových pozicích a ghettoizaci společenství, z nichž těží jedině velcí zaměstnavatelé“. „Chaotická“ imigrační politika bělošským dělnickým vrstvám nijak nepomohla, naopak vedla ke „střetu kultur, segregaci a vyloučení následkem nekontrolovaného přílivu z části světa, pro něž jsou typické kultura cti a klanové smýšlení“.

Littorin pokračuje ve svém rozumném zhodnocení situace i ohledně programu LGBT hnutí. To spolu s klimatickými tématy představují součást „státní ideologie“, kterou dnes „lidem tlačí do chřtánu“. Děje se tak podle něj na úkor skutečně palčivých problémů, jako jsou chudoba, bezdomovectví nebo příjmová nerovnost. „Tak se například pojem ‚hrdost‘ začal spojovat takřka výhradně se sexuální orientací. Podle nás je ale základem lidské důstojnosti práce nebo třeba penzijní pojištění, tak aby člověk ve stáří nemusel třít bídu s nouzí.“

Krom upřednostnění pracovních míst a penzí nad okázalými oslavami sodomie se Littorin a spol. také zapřísáhli nechat za sebou označení komunismus i jeho étosem, který popisují jako

…pošpiněné slovo s pejorativním nádechem, ostatně ne zcela neprávem. V komunistických stranách existuje riziko elitářství, nestřídmosti a přesvědčení, že určitá avantgarda má vést dělnickou třídu, která si není vědoma svých nejlepších zájmů. Jednodušší a správnější by ovšem bylo zeptat se lidí, co skutečně chtějí. Komunismus zemřel spolu se Sovětským svazem, nepovedlo se jej aktualizovat a přenést do 21. století. Ustrnul tak na stránkách sto let starých knih.

Události v Malmö ovšem mají paralelu i v celostátní švédské politice, když předák levicové strany Örebro Markus Allard vyjádřil podobné myšlenky ve svém komentáři „Socialisté nepatří na levici“, kde obviňuje mainstreamovou levici z naprostého opuštění své základny a přechodu od dělnické třídy k „parazitickým, granty živeným prvkům střední třídy“.

Britští socialisté v novém kabátě

Takřka současně dochází k podobnému vývoji také v Británii, kde levicový veterán George Galloway oznámil založení nové Britské dělnické strany (Workers Party of Britain), jejíž orientaci vymezil jako „tvrdě pro Brexit a tvrdě labouristickou“ a dodal, „pokud patříte k liberálům, kteří se považují za levičáky, protože ještě dnes smutně pokukují po Evropské unii a pokud podle vás vede cesta kupředu pokřikováním ‚rasista‘, ‚homofob“ nebo ‚transfob‘ na každého, kdo s vámi nesouhlasí, nejspíš nebudeme váš šálek čaje.“ Gallowayova podpora Brexitu vychází z jeho přesvědčení, že moderní britská levice „nenabízí žádnou alternativní vizi k agresivnímu neoliberalismu a jeho deindustrializované, finančním sektorem vedené ekonomice s mizernými mzdami a sází na to, že nejlépe to půjde i nadále udržovat v chodu jako součást Evropské unie.“ Zvlášť kosmopolitní elity Labouristické strany podle něj „mají za to, že jsme nějaký primitivní kmen, který si maluje obličeje namodro a jediné co dokáže, je volit jednu pravicovou vládu za druhou“, což považuje „nejen za nesmírně přezíravé, ale také kontraproduktivní – už vůbec pak nemluvě o nemístně optimistickém pohledu EU“. V problematice imigrace Galloway věří, že na „neregulované masové imigraci není zhola nic levicového. Připravuje země původu imigrantů o jejich potenciální elity a snižuje mzdy v cílových zemích. Prospěch z toho mají bohatí, kteří profitují jak z laciné pracovní síly pro své společnosti, tak přetlaku a tím pádem i nižších nákladů na služby jako au-pair, baristé nebo instalatéři. Pracující vrstvy ale trpí.“

Galloway také zopakoval, že jeho nová strana se bude držet jasně protiizraelské linie a naprosto odmítá definici antisemitismu z dílny IHRA.

George Galloway Britská dělnická strana IHRA
Galloway a jeho Dělnická strana se dokonce vymezují i proti extrémnějším formám LGBT indoktrinace, zejména glorifikaci transgenderismu. Galloway, který byl v minulosti mj. terčem útoku (vlastními slovy) „transanarchisty“ během jednoho ze svých projevů, v tomto následuje probrexitovou Komunistickou stranu Velké Británie (marxisticko-leninistickou), která v textu Politika identity a trend transgenderismu: Kam nás vede ideologie LBGT a proč na tom záleží?  (Identity Politics and the Transgender Trend: Where is LGBT ideology taking us and Why does it matter?i řadě dalších článků nebo tomto eminentně zajímavém projevu transgenderovou ideologii odsazuje coby antimaterialistickou a protivědeckou:

Biologické odlišnosti mezi pohlavími jsou skutečné. Neobjevují se jen u lidského druhu, ale napříč celou živočišnou říší. Sexuální reprodukce je přirozený biologický proces, v přírodním světě zachovaný díky rozmanitosti jím vytvářené. V přírodním světě je to všudypřítomný fenomén. Nezapomínejme ale ani na to, jaký má tato debata dopad na nás. Řídili jsme se tímto trendem a přinejmenším posledních čtyři nebo pět let se s politikou identity (idpol) hojně setkávali mezi příznivci i kandidáty naší strany. Idpol se totiž v tomto období stala módou. A jako každá móda podléhá trendům. Z ještě v 70. letech okrajových myšlenek některých akademických institucí se dnes stal globální mainstream, aktivně propagovaný. Sice ne komunisty nebo socialisty, ale mnozí z nich jej přijali a nechali se buržoazní společností ochotně zavést do této slepé uličky. Vznikla tak skupina za „socialisty“ se označujících lidí, kteří už nebojují proti některé z forem útlaku, ale proti realitě samotné!

Levice v krizi?

Nic z výše nastíněného není tak úplně překvapením a dost možná by se dokonce dalo hovořit o nevyhnutelných vedlejších efektech toho, co Nils Littorin nazval dlouhodobou „krizí identity“ levice. Přijetí a podpora multikulturalismu a jeho parafilických přívěsků nikdy nedávalo větší smysl v kontextu racionální kritiky kapitalismu a napětí mezi papírovou touhou po solidaritě dělnické třídy a rozbroje vyvolávajícími pseudomarxistickými doktrínami (jako studie „bělošství“), vytvořenými k mobilizaci importovaných nebělošských skupin proti nejpočetnější součásti dělnické třídy (tedy bělošských modrých límečků), nutně hrozilo vyhloubit hluboké trhliny a napětí ve chvíli, kdy by se štěstí obrátilo k levici zády.

A to se skutečně také stalo, byť bychom neměli zlehčovat ani zapomínat na masivní ideologické i kulturní úspěchy levice. Jednotlivci i skupiny zaštiťující se prapory sociální rovnosti a věčného pokroku totiž i nadále drží kontrolu nad vládami, akademickým světem i masmédii. Levice však v poslední době bez stínu pochybností zažívá politický sestup. Ztrácí hlasy, ale především srdce a mysl svých voličů. Rád bych také zdůraznil, že jim je nepřetahují skutečně pravicové ideje, ale jejich vyprázdněné schránky („Volný trh!“, „Postavte tu zeď!“) a charizmatičtí globalističtí herci, kteří tyto rádoby ideje prodávají podobně jako pochybní obchodníci ojetá auta nebo vodu po holení. Bílá dělnická třída ve volbách bezmyšlenkovitě hlasuje pro volný pohyb zboží a služeb, zatímco ji židovský supí kapitalismus vykořisťuje právě pod tímto praporem, likviduje její města, posílá její práci do ciziny a zabavuje jí její domovy. Titíž lidé také hlasují pro zeď, které se nikdy nedočkají – a která by beztak nevyřešila jejich problémy, neoddělitelně spjaté s kapitalismem, ani jim nezajistila většinově bělošskou budoucnost. Nečiní tak s myšlenkou otázky identity nebo rasy, ale ze stejných pohnutek, které vedou majitele večerky k instalaci kamerového systému: vždy jakoby na dosah stojící Zeď nebude nikdy postavena, dokud nebude symbolizovat o nic víc než přání ochránit pouhý majetek. Prázdné skořápky lidí na takzvané pravici sice nabízejí jen pochybná placeba – ale na politickou levici, alespoň historicky údajného vyznavače tvrdého materialismu, to momentálně bohatě stačí.

Někteří se snaží tento stav svádět na nepřítomnost charismatických vůdců, nejednotu nebo nedostatek přitažlivých programových bodů. Objevily se dokonce i úvahy, že se evropská levice dopustila smrtelného omylu, když se pokusila utkat s pravicí na jejím domácím hřišti „flirtováním s izolacionistickým nacionalismem nebo neoliberalismem“. Skutečnou příčinu ale hledejme ve vytrvalém odcizování a šikanování bělošských dělnických vrstev levicí, která se navíc postupně „odkopala“ jako elitářská kosmopolitní klika, která ze svých pohodlných postů básní o útlaku jen málokdy skutečném a často imaginárním, rozhodně však na vlastní kůži nepoznaném. Přičteme k tomu fakt, že levicová ideologie se stala čímsi beznadějně zamotaným a komplikovaným s tím, jak se její vyznavači neustále snaží nacpat „hranatou“ Marxovu doktrínu do nových a stále abstraktnějších „kulatých“ a „trojúhelníkových“ otvorů, z čehož vznikají marxistické výklady takových pomíjivostí jako graffiti, populární hudba a transvestité, pro průměrného dělníka nic než snůška zženštilých středostavovských blábolů. Do toho všeho pak mladí, ale přesto neschopní se rozhoupat aktivisté, bez práce i zdravého rozumu, hledají všude možně nové formy útlaku, podobní stařence trpící demencí, pátrající po kabelce, kterou vyhodila už před dvaceti lety. A tak zatímco komentátoři s chutí debatují, nemohu se při pohledu na celé dění ubránit dojmu, že pseudolevicoví lháři se momentálně prostě jen nedokáží vyrovnat těm pseudopravicovým.

Mohli by se z těchto rebelů stát spojenci?

Když mi bylo asi jedenáct, našla si má matka novou přítelkyni, Skotku něco přes třicet, která mi od začátku přišla velice zvláštní. Musely to být její oči. Tehdy jsem ještě o schizofrenii nic nevěděl, záhy jsem ji ale měl poznat dosti zblízka. Jednoho dne tato žena zazvonila u nás doma, a protože jsem ji znal, otevřel jsem a pozval ji dovnitř. Zavolal jsem na matku, která byla nahoře, a mezitím se bavil se Skotkou, která nehnutě stála, dívala se přímo na mě a působila jako naprosto normální, veselá a výřečná mladá žena. Ptala se mě na školu a trochu jsme se bavili o vědě, o které toho podle všeho dost věděla. Teprve po několika minutách jsem si uvědomil nevábný zápach linoucí se místností a domyslel si, že se žena pokálela. Když se konečně objevila matka, upadla žena do nesmyslného blábolení, které vyvrcholilo jejím pokusem zmocnit se v kuchyni nože a následným útěkem z našeho domu. Přestala prostě brát předepsané léky. Později jsme se dozvěděli, že ji pozdě večer našli policisté, jak freneticky a v slzách s bosýma, zakrvavenýma nohama tančí na nedalekém hřbitově, na sobě nic než noční košili a vysvětluje zesnulým, že je Bůh, zarmoucený smrtí ukřižovaného syna.

Na tento zážitek se ani po více než dvaceti letech nedá zapomenout. Otiskl se také do mého vnímání reality, vztahů i důvěry. Stačí na tomto místě jen zdůraznit, že i šílenci občas mluví souvisle a logicky, přestože se jejich psychika bortí jako domek z karet. A pokud se na prohlášení těchto přiměřeně „vidoucích“ levičáků podíváme z trochu větší blízkosti, nenalezneme i u nich také stopy šílenství? Opětovný pohled na výklad britských komunistů a trocha čtení mezi řádky cosi podezřelého naznačují rozhodně. Jistě, „biologické odlišnosti mezi pohlavími jsou skutečné“. Samozřejmě. Ale totéž platí i o biologických odlišnostech mezi rasami – a přesto se naši někdejší přesvědčení britští materialisté, momentálně vedení plnokrevným etnickým Indem Harpalem Brarem, rozhodli proti této skutečnosti bojovat. Měli bychom také zmínit, že Brarova dcera Joti se stala Gallowayovou místopředsedkyní v jeho „tvrdě probrexitové a labouristické“ Britské dělnické straně.  Galloway sám pak byl už čtyřikrát ženatý – a tři z jeho žen byly nebělošské (Palestinku Aminu Abu-Zayyadovou si vzal v roce 1994, Libanonku Rimu Husseiniovou v roce 2007 a etnickou Indonésanku Putri Gayatri Pertiwiovou v roce 2012). Přes všechna svá naoko protiimigrační prohlášení se tak člověk jen těžko zbavuje dojmu, že Galloway patří ke skalním zastáncům multikulturalismu a jeho strana se v případě volby vždy postaví do tábora internacionalismu v každém z možných výkladů tohoto slova.

George Galloway Britská dělnická strana
Jestliže tedy v táboře znechucených levičáků narážíme na ostrůvky zdravého rozumu, lze to připsat převážné absenci židovského vlivu v těchto nových enklávách a tedy i všemožných intelektuálních pokřiveních, jež s sebou přináší. Ve své eseji z roku 2018 „O ‚levicovém antisemitismu‘ v minulosti i současnosti“ (On “Leftist Anti-Semitism”: Past and Present)  jsem se zamýšlel nad možností postupného odklonu Židů od „tvrdé“ levice kvůli vzestupu antisionismu a jejich stále výraznějšímu přimknutí se k centristickému neoliberalismu:

Židovská slepota k vlastním výsadám, skutečná či předstíraná, samozřejmě patří k hlavním příčinám nepopiratelného napětí mezi Židy a moderní levicí. Nejspíš bylo nevyhnutelné, že si naivní, avšak upřímní levicoví rovnostáři pomalu uvědomili, že jejich „soudruzi židovského vyznání“ jsou nejen elitáři, ale také elita velice svébytného druhu. Souběžné hlásání otevřených hranic/společného majetku na jedné a „země pro židovský národ“ nutně musí vyvolat otazníky v mysli leckterého majitele propoceného trika s Che Guevarovou podobiznou – zvlášť když je doprovázeno kakofonií palby izraelských zbraní a nářkem zkrvavených palestinských dětí. Podobně problematickou se ukázala být také masová migrace, onen umně vyrobený toxin řinoucí se evropskými dálnicemi a železnicemi. Na západní břehy se valí jedna vlna za druhou zlomených lidí, kteří si s sebou přinášejí čerstvé a palčivé křivdy, často přímo z izraelského pomezí. Tito lidé nahlédli za oponu, takže jen velice neochotně sdílejí politické nástroje západní levice s příbuznými agresorů z IDF – jediným pojivem zde zůstává touha připravit nenáviděné bělochy o vše. Proto se může snadno stát, že levice přestane být pro Židy pohostinným místem, aniž by se však stala skutečně, autenticky nebo tradičně antisemitskou. Lze tedy očekávat přeskupení Židů mimo kruhy radikální levice, v politickém prostoru, který lze nejlépe označit jako radikálně centristický: centrismus koketující s levicí jen pro účely multikulturalismu a dalších škodlivých „rovnostářských“ výdobytků, ovšem pravicový, když přijde na ochranu a výsady elit (doma pro židovské společenství, mezinárodně pro Izrael) – tedy centrismus založené na starém osvědčeném pravidle „co je nejlepší pro Židy“.

Jak je patrné z nekonečného střetnutí Židů s britskou Labouristickou stranou v uplynulých letech, znamená politická relokace Židů směrem k jakémusi beztvarému a oportunistickému centrismu kolizní kurz s tou částí levice, která nejen že zastává pevně antisionistické pozice, ale také se ohrazuje proti nepokrytě silovým projevům židovské moci, jako všeobecné přijetí definice antisemitismu z dílny IHRA, nebo hospodářské zneužívání pravidel politicky nevyhraněnými (ani levicovými nebo pravicovými, ale židovskými) oligarchy jako Paul Singer. To – společně k jejich tradiční nechuti být součástí pravice – Židům ztíží hledání jakékoliv identifikace na politickém spektru, kromě té otevřeně židovské, což ovšem vrhá nevítanou pozornost okolí na jejich aktivity i zájmy. Bezprecedentní příklad tohoto vývoje jsme mohli vidět těsně před britskými parlamentními volbami, kdy vrchní rabín Ephraim Mirvis otevřeně vyzval britské Židy, aby se postavili Jeremymu Corbynovi. Něco takového by měli lidé znepokojení židovským vlivem, kteří dříve se značnou dávkou frustrace pozorovali, jak se Židé maskují svůj vliv pomocí různých politických kabátů, jen a jen přivítat.

Otevírá se tak potenciální, pochopitelně nedokonalá, ale snad do jisté míry reálná, příležitost hájit podprahově nebo dokonce víceméně otevřeně bělošské zájmy prostřednictví důvtipného, nominálně ostře levicového aktivismu proti masové migraci (z ekonomických, nikoliv rasových pohnutek), proti Izraeli a vlivu mezinárodního sionismu, proti některým výstřelkům kultury politické korektnosti nebo proti parazitickému kapitalismu židovských supích fondů. Nemusím asi dodávat, že levicoví aktivisté nemusejí čelit podobnému břemenu společenských, profesních nebo právních postihů za svou politickou činnost jako my na pravici, zejména té „tvrdé“, disidentské. Nejspíš se příliš nezmýlím ani v předpovědi, že člověk vystupující proti imigraci s účty na sociálních sítích křičícími do světa „Britská dělnická strana“, se musí bát vyhazovu pro svou politickou činnost mnohem méně než někdo, kdo se nijak netají svým členstvím v National Front. Proto pro mladé aktivisty jistě stojí přinejmenším za zvážení, jestli si pro obranu bělošských zájmů nevytvořit jakousi „levičáckou“ masku, podobně jako Židé v minulosti neváhali přebírat nejrůznější užitečné politické masky ke skrytí svých hlubších etnických zájmů. Osobně bych doporučoval spojení infiltrace a přetvářky. Nejdůležitější jsou totiž niterné motivace a možné výhody dosažení konečného cíle – tedy prosazení bělošských zájmů.

Podpora podobných hnutí ale pochopitelně skýtá nejrůznější úskalí. Rozhodně bych se tak vyhnul masivní investici času nebo peněz do těchto skupin, jelikož panuje značné riziko, že většina jejich členů vyznává politické pozice v ostrém rozporu a škodlivé našim ústředním cílů. V řadě otázek, v nichž bychom snad mohli najít společnou řeč – imigrace, LGBT šílenství nebo kultura politické korektnosti – také vidím bohaté příležitosti ke zradě a jen těžko se zbavuji dojmu, že tento vývoj je hlavně projevem dočasné bezradnosti a že hlavním záměrem je nějak „napálit“ bělošské modré límečky, aby znovu začaly hlasovat pro levici.

Nadcházející rok 2020 však nakonec přece jen může přinést otevření nové fronty v této válce, a tak s novým rokem na čas umlčím svého vnitřního Schopenhauera a připiji si na to.

Esej Andrewa Joyce Will 2020 See the Emergence of a Nationalist Left? vyšla na stránkách The Occidental Observer 29. prosince 2019.

“Modify the standards of the in-group”: On Jews and Mass Communications

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in September, 2018, in two parts. It is a classic, and an important addition to the research on Jewish involvement in creating the culture of critique—the anti-White culture that we live in today. A revision to The Culture of Critique would of necessity include a summary and discussion of this material. The above photo is a testament to the way we live now—viewing the world through lenses shaped by activist Jews.


“To be successful, mass propaganda on the behalf of out-groups would have to modify the standards of the in-group.
Samuel H. Flowerman, Mass Propaganda in the War Against Bigotry, 1947.
[1]

“The whole story is transparently barmy.” This is what Guardian journalist Jason Wilson had to say in a 2015 article discussing “conspiracy theories” about Cultural Marxism. Barmy, for the uninitiated, is a British informal adjective with the meanings “mad; crazy; extremely foolish.” Wilson continues by attempting to explain “the whole story”:

The vogue for the ideas of theorists like Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno in the 1960s counterculture culminated with their acolytes’ occupation of the commanding heights of the most important cultural institutions, from universities to Hollywood studios. There, the conspiracy says, they promoted and even enforced ideas which were intended to destroy traditional Christian values and overthrow free enterprise: feminism, multiculturalism, gay rights and atheism. And this, apparently, is where political correctness came from. I promise you: this is what they really think … The theory of cultural Marxism is also blatantly antisemitic, drawing on the idea of Jews as a fifth column bringing down western civilisation from within, a racist trope that has a longer history than Marxism.

Re-reading this article recently, I wondered what Mr Wilson would say if I told him I possessed a document wherein an influential Jew linked to Marcuse and Adorno unambiguously sets out a scheme for the capture of the media, the mass brainwashing of White populations with multicultural propaganda, the manipulation of in-group culture to make it hostile to its own sense of ethnocentrism, the spreading of a culture of political correctness, and, ultimately, the co-option of the West by small ethnic clique pursuing its own interests under the guise of “promoting tolerance.” I wonder what he’d say if I told him the same Jew operated a network of hundreds, if not thousands, of other Jewish intellectuals engaged in the same single task — unlocking a psychological “backdoor” to White culture in order to completely reorient it. I think I’m correct in assuming that Mr Wilson would call me “barmy,” and accuse me of regurgitating the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. I suspect he would believe I’m a fantasist and an anti-Jewish conspiracy theorist. I know he’d dismiss even the possibility that such a document might actually exist. And yet it does exist.

The Intellectual Context

It’s quite possible that none of you have heard the name Samuel H. Flowerman, but I can say with certainty that you all, in a sense, know him nonetheless. If you’re even remotely familiar with the Frankfurt School, then you’re familiar with one aspect of his work. And, as we will soon discuss, if you find yourself living in a culture brainwashed into self-hatred then you’re familiar with another, though related, aspect of his work. Flowerman, it must be conceded, has been largely forgotten by history. He lurks in larger shadows left by “the exiles.” But Flowerman was in some respects as crucial a member of the Frankfurt School circle as any other. Of course, he wasn’t German-born. Nor was he a member of the Frankfurt School for Social Research. Instead, he was born in Manhattan in 1912, the grandson of a jeweler who arrived by ship from Warsaw’s Jewish district in 1885. And yet he would later achieve enough influence within his own group, as both activist and psychologist, to act as Research Director for the American Jewish Committee, and, most famously of all, to direct and co-edit the Studies in Prejudice series with Max Horkheimer.

For most who have in fact heard of him, this is perhaps the greatest extent of their knowledge of Flowerman. But for an accident, it would certainly represent the limits of mine. Very recently, however, I was conducting some research on Jewish activism in the cultural background preceding Brown v. Board of Education, and found myself, as I have so many times before, tumbling down the proverbial rabbit hole. After initially focusing on the figures of Jonathan Kozol and Horace Kallen (whose influence extends well beyond the popularisation of what he coined “cultural pluralism”), I came across a 2004 article in the Journal of American History by Howard University’s Daryl Scott titled “Postwar Pluralism, Brown v. Board of Education, and the Origins of Multicultural Education.”[2] Scott mentioned Flowerman because of the latter’s desire (pre-Brown) to inject theories derived from Studies in Prejudice into the education system, believing that moulding children was one of the best methods to achieve long-term and sustained socio-cultural change [see here for evidence the policy is continued to this day by the ADL].

Flowerman, a fan of post-Freudian psychoanalysis, possessed a background in both the study of education and of mass communication, and this heavily informed his thinking and activism.[3] In particular, he was doubtful that mass propaganda could, by itself, directly affect significant change among the White masses and make them abandon their “prejudice and latent authoritarianism” [i.e. acknowledging their own ethnic interests]. He was fascinated instead by the way peer group pressure exerted influence on the individual school children he had studied, along with the potential influence of teachers as shapers of minds as well as mere educators. For example, in a 1950 article for New York Times Magazine titled “Portrait of the Authoritarian Man,” Flowerman argued that, in order to produce “personalities less susceptible to authoritarian ideas, we must learn how to select better teachers and to train them better; we must see them as engineers of human relations instead of instructors of arithmetic and spelling.”[4]

The combined result of his research and thinking in these areas was his argument that it should be desirable for people like him to obtain control over the means of mass communication. Not only, argued Flowerman, should this control be used for blanket “pro-tolerance” propaganda, but it should also actively reshape in-group standards — thus reforming peer group pressures to become antagonistic to in-group ethnocentrism. His (then) highly ambitious goal was a culture that policed itself: a politically correct culture in which Whites, via peer pressure, conformed to new values — values much more user-friendly to Jews. His views and goals were later summarized by Herbert Greenberg, a colleague and co-ethnic in the same field, in 1957:

Flowerman de-emphasized the value and effectiveness of propaganda as a technique for reducing prejudice. He also agrees with the conception that techniques based on group structure and inter-personal relationships are the most effective.[5]

Flowerman and Greenberg were just two members of what was effectively a series of interlinked battalions of Jewish psychologists and sociologists operating with a kind of religious fervour in the fields of “prejudice studies,” opinion-shaping, and mass communications between the 1930s and 1950s, all with the goal of “unlocking” the White mind and opening it to “tolerance.” In a remarkable invasion (and creation) of disciplines similar to the Jewish flood into the medical and race sciences in the 1920s and 1930s, Jews also flooded, and then dominated, the fields of opinion research and mass communications — areas of research that overlapped so often under Jewish scholars like Flowerman that they were practically indistinguishable.

Even a quick review of lists of Past Presidents reveals that Jews were vastly over-represented in, if not dominated, the membership and presidencies of both the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) and the World Association of Public Opinion Research (WAPOR). And of the four academics considered the “founding fathers” of mass communication research in America, two (Vienna-born Paul Lazarsfeld and Kurt Lewin) were Jews. Of the two European American founding fathers, most of Harold Lasswell’s graduate students were Jewish[6] (e.g., Daniel Lerner, Abraham Kaplan, Gabriel Almond, Morris Janowitz, and Nathan Leites) and he also sponsored the Institute for Social Research’s project on anti-Semitism.[7] The fourth, Carl Hoveland, had an equally Jewish coterie around him at Yale, where he operated a team of researchers along with Milton Rosenberg and Robert Abelson. Historian Hynek Jeřábek notes that Lazarsfeld’s influence in particular can’t be understated — by 1983, seven years after his death, “the directors of social research at the three largest media networks in the United States, CBS, ABC, and NBC were all his former students.”[8] Another Jew, Jay Blumler, has been called “a founding father of British media studies.”[9]

In fact, the Jewish dominance of the study of public opinion (and the potential for its manipulation) simply can’t be overstated. In addition to those already named, Joseph Klapper, Bernard Berelson, Fritz Heider, Leo Bogart, Elihu Katz, Marie Jahoda, Joseph Gittler, Morris Rosenberg, Ernest Dichter, Walter Weiss, Nathan Glazer, Bernard J. Fine, Bruno Bettelheim, Wallace Mandell, Hertha Hertzog, Dororthy Blumenstock, Stanley Schachter, David Caplovitz, Walter Lippmann, Sol Ginsburg, Harry Alpert, Leon Festinger, Michael Gurevitch, Edward Shils, Eugene Gaier, Joseph Goldsen, Julius Schreiber, Daniel Levinson, Herbert Blumer, I. M. A. Myers, Irving Janis, Miriam Reimann, Edward Sapir, Solomon Asch, and Gerald Wieder were just some of the hundreds of highly influential academics working in these fields that were born into Jewish families, associated heavily with other Jews, contributed work to Jewish organizations, married Jews, and yet concerned themselves with a degree of fanaticism with White opinion and ethnocentrism in America. This is to say nothing of their graduate students, who numbered in the thousands.

Despite some superficial differences in the titles of “opinion research,” “prejudice studies,” and “mass communications,” these academics all worked with each other to some degree, if not directly (in organisations or in co-written studies or papers) then via mutual associations. For example, it is a matter of historical fact that, in addition to three of the four founding fathers of mass communications research being Jews, all three were also very intimately involved with the Frankfurt School and the broader Jewish agenda to ‘adapt’ public opinion. Paul Lazarsfeld and Kurt Lewin, the two gurus of mass communication, together attended a 1944 conference on anti-Semitism organized by the research department of the American Jewish Committee (headed by Samuel H. Flowerman) and the Berkeley faction of the Frankfurt School in exile (headed by Theodor Adorno).[10] David Kettler and Gerhard Lauer also point out that Lazarsfeld was in regular communication with Max Horkheimer, was “strongly supportive of the Horkheimer Circle and its work,” and even furnished the latter with “notes and recommendations for the Horkheimer Circle’s unpublished ‘Anti-Semitism Among American Labor.’”[11] He was also a colleague at Columbia with and close confidante of, Leo Lowenthal.[12] By the late 1940s, Lazarsfeld’s ex-wife and mother of his child, Marie Jahoda, had even come to act as an American Jewish Committee liaison between Horkheimer and Samuel H. Flowerman, and co-wrote a number of articles on “prejudice” with Flowerman in Commentary.

One should by now begin to see clear connections forming between the American Jewish Committee, the Frankfurt School, “prejudice studies,” Jewish dominance of the academic field of “mass communications,” and, finally, the flow of influence from this field into the mass media (most clearly in the positions at CBS, ABC, and NBC quickly obtained by Lazarsfeld’s students). These connections will be important later.

A reasonable working hypothesis for such a sudden concentration of mutually networking Jews (often from different countries) in these areas of research would be that Jewish identity and Jewish interests played a significant part in their career choices, and that the trend was then accelerated by ethnic nepotism and promotion from within the group. Jeřábek appears to concur when he states that “Paul Lazarsfeld’s Jewish background, or the fact that many people around him in Vienna were Jewish, can help to explain his future affinities, friendships, or decisions.”[13] Setting aside the deep historical context of conflict between Jews and Europeans, a contingent and contemporary explanation might be that Jews were moved into fields involving mass opinion and perceptions of prejudice because they were deeply disturbed by the rise of National Socialism.

A more general, but, perhaps more convincing explanation considering their activities over time, is that these Jews were in fact disturbed by any form of ethnically defined and assertive White host culture. For example, some of the foreign-born academics listed above, such as Marie Jahoda and Ernest Dichter, had even been arrested and detained in pre-Anschluss, pre-National Socialist Vienna as cultural and political subversives in the early 1930s. They then made their way to the United States or the United Kingdom where they more or less continued the same behavior. It is highly likely that these individuals sought both to understand and change the mechanics of opinion and mass communications in their host populations in order to make it more amenable to Jewish interests. When they were effectively exiled from one host population they merely transplanted their ambitions to a new one. The only alternative hypothesis, long used in Jewish apologetics for any similar instance of Jewish over-representation, is that huge numbers of mutually networking Jews convened in these disciplines purely by accident. Nathan Cofnas and Jordan Peterson, for example, might argue that Jews accidentally entered these areas of study en masse simply because they possessed high IQs and liked living in cities.

The problem with such reasoning is that the work produced by these academics and activists was so highly focused against White American opinion, rather than appearing random or accidental, that it strongly indicates these scholars entered the field of mass communications with a clear and common agenda. For example, Jewish mass communications scholar Bernard Berelson was not just a researcher in public opinion, but also conducted a series of propaganda tests on how to make White Americans find their own ethnocentrism abhorrent. In 1945 he conducted a study in which a cartoon was shown to the public that made connections between Fascism and American culture. The cartoon, titled “The Ghosts Go West…,” showed ghosts leaving the graves of Hitler, Mussolini, and Goebbels, and flying to America carrying a banner that read: “Down with Labour Unions, Foreign Born, Jews, Catholics, Negroes.” The message was clearly that “intolerance” in America was basically the demonic ghost of fascism. Interestingly, however, the study found that Jews exposed to the cartoon were so fixated on the banner that they missed the underlying message altogether and believed the cartoon was a far right creation. The potentially confusing nature of the piece meant it was never deployed as a “pro-tolerance” propaganda weapon.[14]

Berelson was also later a colleague and friend of Frederick S. Jaffe, the Jewish then-Vice President of Planned Parenthood. Both Jaffe and Berelson later became somewhat notorious because of a memo (known in history as the Jaffe Memo) sent in 1969 from the former to the latter, in which anti-White sociopath Jaffe put forth his own series of protocols that included a table that summarized many proposals from various sources regarding population control. This table contained proposals such as compulsory abortions for out-of-wedlock births, sterilizations for women with more than two children, encouraging homosexuality, and encouraging women to work. Both would also later work together on the infamous 1972 Rockefeller Commission Report which incorporated many of Jaffe’s proposals. We thus see more links between Jewishness, “prejudice studies,” the discipline of mass communications studies, and anti-White Jewish activism more generally.

In reality, the work of all these scholars orbited the same themes, if not openly, then more secretively (as in the case of Lazarsfeld’s work with the Institute for Social Research). Marie Jahoda, the ex-Austrian subversive, produced a series of studies that were mere variations on the theme of White ethnocentrism, something she pathologized most famously in Antisemitism and Emotional Disorder (1950).[15] In the same year, Morris Janowitz and Bruno Bettelheim worked together to produce Dynamics of Prejudice.[16] Meanwhile Joseph Gittler produced such works as “Measuring the Awareness of the Problem of Group Hostility,”[17] and “Man and His Prejudices.”[18] Herbert Blumer produced “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position.”[19] Fritz Heider worked with Kurt Lewin and Solomon Asch on unlocking the ways in which conformity could alter group behavior and individual opinions.[20] Ernest Dichter believed his studies of the mass communications in marketing could lead to the development of persuasive techniques that could “stop the new wave of anti-Semitism.”[21] The work of Walter Weiss concerned “mass communication, public opinion, and social change as they bear on changing racial attitudes.”[22] And aside from his secretive work with the Institute for Social Research, Paul Lazarsfeld, while working at the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, introduced the notion of “social bookkeeping,” a systematic service that would note and evaluate “prejudice” in any material appearing in mass media of communications. I could go on.

Marie Jahoda

What we see here is the origins of an extensive Jewish joint enterprise in which the unlocking and alteration of White American public opinion is the goal. This is not conspiracy theory, but an established and provable fact. In a sense, the Frankfurt School, or Institute for Social Research, was the tip of an iceberg. The work of Horkheimer, Adorno et al, both drew from, and enthused, a large and growing army of Jewish academics working in the fields of public opinion and mass communications. This was a body of academics and activists keen to translate theories on “prejudice and the authoritarian personality” into action — to change the opinions and thinking of the host population. They would go on to develop forms of testing and analysis to further these goals, and their students would go on to take dominant positions in the fields of the mass media and mass communications. In many cases these academics speak openly of the need for control of the media and the mass dissemination of sophisticated propaganda (all of which could be tried and perfected at the expense of their universities in the name of ‘prejudice research’). Of all these activists, however, none produced a work more bluntly subversive than Samuel Flowerman’s 1947 essay “Mass Propaganda in the War on Bigotry.” It is to the protocols of Samuel H. Flowerman that we now turn our attention.


“Millions of leaflets, pamphlets, cartoons, comic books, articles
and more recently radio and movie scripts — have been produced and disseminated in the propaganda war.”  Samuel H. Flowerman, Mass Propaganda in the War Against Bigotry, 1947.[1]

The Protocols of Samuel H. Flowerman

Samuel H. Flowerman, as Research Director at the American Jewish Committee, as colleague of the Institute for Social Research, and as a kind of hub for the expansive Jewish clique of mass communications scholars, was at the center of the drive to put Jewish “opinion research” initiatives into practical action. The clearest articulation of what this practical action would look like was articulated in his 1947 essay, “Mass Propaganda in the War Against Bigotry.” Flowerman’s foremost concern was that, although millions of dollars were being spent by organisations like the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League on propaganda, propaganda may not by itself be sufficient for the mass transformation of values in the host population — in particular, for the weakening of its ethnocentrism.

Flowerman begins by explaining the format and extent of existing efforts: “Millions of leaflets, pamphlets, cartoons, comic books, articles — and more recently radio and movie scripts — have been produced and disseminated in the propaganda war (429).” Flowerman’s use of the language of warfare is of course interesting in itself and will be discussed further below. For now, we should focus on what Flowerman lists as the five aims of the “propaganda war”:

1. “The restructuring of the attitudes of prejudiced individuals, or at least their neutralization.”
2. “The restructuring of group values toward intolerance.”
3. “The reinforcement of attitudes of those already committed to a democratic ideology perhaps by creating an illusion of universality or victory.”
4. “The continued neutralisation of those whose attitudes are yet unstructured and who are deemed “safer” if they remain immune to symbols of bias.”
5. “Off-setting the counter-symbols of intolerance.” (429)

Flowerman concedes that the level of work and control required to achieve these aims would be extensive, and that the project was highly ambitious, seeking nothing less than “successful mass persuasion in the field of intergroup relations (429).” But he is equally clear in the conditions required for such success.

Flowerman’s first condition is “control by pro-tolerance groups or individuals of the channels of mass communication.” (430) Since Flowerman’s entire context of “pro-tolerance” activism was essentially Jewish, we may assume he is strongly implying that the channels of mass communication should fall into Jewish hands. Since “control” in Flowerman’s phrasing is not qualified, and since many newspapers, radio stations, and movie production companies were already in the hands of “pro-tolerance” Jews, the implication is also present that this control should be absolute. In addition, notes Flowerman, total control of these channels may still not be sufficient in itself. The host population will still need to be exposed to the productions of mass communications, and this was to be assured via “force, commercial monopoly, and/or crisis (designed or accidental).” (430) Only then would ‘pro-tolerance’ forces see “the persuasive devices and techniques of the elite playing upon the susceptibilities of the manipulated.” (430) Flowerman closes here with reference to Erich Fromm’s theory that people have “a desire
to be controlled.”

The second of Flowerman’s conditions for “successful mass persuasion in the field of intergroup relations” is saturation. This condition, like that of control and monopoly of the channels of mass communication, is intended as absolute. In other words, the message of “pro-tolerance” was to be ubiquitous and all-pervasive — beyond what was possible in 1947 and probably beyond what could even be conceptualized in 1947. In Flowerman’s words: “In addition to the large sums of money currently being expended on tolerance propaganda, significantly greater sums would probably be needed to achieve the degree of saturation — as yet hypothetical — required.” (430) The general idea here is to increase the “flow of pro-tolerance symbols” as a proportion of “the total stream of communications.”

In November 1946, a three-day convention, partly organized by Flowerman, was held in New York, bringing together “experts in the general field of public relations, including advertising, direct mail, film, radio, and press; professional workers on the staff of national and local agencies specifically concerned with fighting group discrimination; and social scientists from the universities and national defense agencies.”[2] Jews, of course, dominated all of these areas, and the list of attendees included the previously mentioned figures Bruno Bettelheim, Sol Ginsburg, Hertha Herzog (radio research director of McCann-Erickson, Inc.), Julius Schreiber, Paul Lazarsfeld, Joseph Goldsen, and Morris Janowitz. One of the findings of the mass communications scholars present at the convention was that even control and saturation may not be sufficient to ensure a transformation of opinions and values in the demographic majority. This was the case when the propaganda encountered particularly strong-minded individuals, or when the propaganda got lost in the overall stream of communications that one encounters in the course of everyday life. Flowerman thus writes with frustration that “we are developing a nation of individuals who work, worry, love, and play while news commentators, comedians, opera companies, symphony orchestras, and swing bands are broadcasting. This continuous onslaught for ‘something for everyone’ results in a kind of ‘radio deafness.’” (431) In order to overcome this obstacle, Flowerman returns to a key aspect of his first condition — the use of crisis (he writes that this can be “designed or accidental”) to focus attention on delivered propaganda. Flowerman writes:

As for overcoming the ‘radio deafness’ to commercial announcements and the general atmosphere of make-believe of radio entertainment, only symbols associated with acute crisis would seem to have a chance. For the great bulk of American people racial and religious intolerance is not regarded as a critical situation. … The absence of critical stress serves to diminish levels of attention to pro-tolerance symbols. (431)

Practical contemporary examples of what this tactic might look light would be the ubiquity of pro-diversity propaganda in the aftermath of Islamic attacks, Charlottesville, school shootings, moral panics about racism, ADL hype about the ever-present threat of anti-Semitism, murders by immigrants, and migrant drownings in the Mediterranean. The point here is that regardless of context, “crisis” is to be manufactured into almost every situation in order to focus attention on the real goal — the successful delivery of “pro-tolerance” messages, even (or especially) in circumstances in which tolerance has proven deadly, to the host population. Jews or, in the more ambiguous phrasing, “the agents of pro-tolerance,” would thus need to achieve (in Flowerman’s own words) the ambitious trifecta of “control, saturation, crisis.” (432) Crisis is therefore Flowerman’s third condition.

The fourth condition is the achievement of an alteration of predispositions in the individual via modification of their surroundings and peer pressure. Here Flowerman argues that “pro-tolerance” propaganda should not rely on intellectual means but instead on “social perception, which is affected by the predispositions of the audience. In turn, these dispositions are affect-laden attitudes which may have been produced by parents, teachers, playmates, etc.” (432)

The point here is that Flowerman and the mass communications clique believed that their propaganda would be better received by the masses if the psychological context of reception was itself changed. In other words, people raised in the demographic majority who are imbued with a sense of communal pride, social responsibility, cultural achievement, and national purpose are unlikely to be predisposed to be receptive to messages on behalf of outsiders. Some intervention in peer interactions and peer culture was thus necessary in order to break up such an obstacle to the reception of “pro-tolerance” propaganda. As just one example, we return here to Flowerman’s 1950 article for New York Times Magazine in which he argues for the training of teachers “as engineers of human relations instead of instructors of arithmetic and spelling.”[3] Children can thus “engineered” to be more receptive to “pro-tolerance” propaganda in adulthood.

This condition bleeds into the fifth — the manipulation of the basic instinct of humans to conform to group standards. Flowerman writes:

Consciously or unconsciously, individuals use group frames of reference in social situations even when they are physically separated from the group. … The strength of group sanctions is a potent force to reckon with even for an individual with a strong ego. … It would appear, then, that to be successful mass propaganda on behalf of out-groups would have to modify the standards of the in-group. … Mass pro-tolerance propaganda, to be successful, would have to change such values, which would be difficult to imagine without control, saturation, crisis, etc. (432)

What Flowerman is proposing here is essentially a revolution in values, after which a politically correct culture emerges where the demographic majority becomes self-policing and antagonistic to its own ethnic interests. In this environment — achieved via “control, saturation, crisis”— the strength of group sanctions among the White American in-group is directed towards manifestations of in-group ethnocentrism instead of outsiders. It’s nothing less than a proposal for the cultivation of White guilt and pathological altruism, and the diminishment of White ethnocentrism and cultural pride.

The sixth condition is the cultivation of influential figures on behalf of the “pro-tolerance” agenda. This required great subtlety. Flowerman writes that the research of his mass communications colleagues and co-ethics shows the targets of their propaganda:

are willing to assign to some individuals a stamp of approval which they deny to others … We know that many leaflets written and endorsed by popular heroes and accepted even by prejudiced individuals are often dismissed on the ground that they are being distributed by minority groups in their own self-interest. Many prejudiced individuals cannot conceive of such distribution by dominant groups. (433)

What Flowerman is here complaining of is the fact that some members of the demographic majority are perceptive enough to accurately point out the real origin of “pro-tolerance” propaganda, and to dismiss it on those grounds. By “minority groups,” the coy Mr Flowerman of course means Jews. He then cites a specific case:

In an experiment being conducted at the University of Chicago by Bettelheim, Shils, and Janowitz, veterans were exposed to pro-tolerance propaganda including a cartoon by Bill Mauldin. A prejudiced respondent, sharing the general esteem in which this popular soldier-cartoonist is held by ex-GI’s, said that he had regarded Mauldin as a “regular guy” but he supposed that if you paid a man enough you could get him to do anything; this respondent believed that the material he saw was being distributed by “a bunch of New York communists.” (433)

Thus we see the pathologisation of a veteran because he perceived with stunning accuracy the hand of subversion behind the use of a popular icon to promote an agenda entirely alien to his interests. Despite exceptions such as this veteran, the overall susceptibility of the masses was deemed sufficiently high for the strategy of “sponsorship” to be progressed. As a result, reports Flowerman,

propagandists, recognising the need for impeccable sources of authority, are producing material endorsed by popular heroes in sports, entertainment, and in the armed forces. Recently a plan has been developed to promote the insertion of full-page newspaper advertisements paid for and sponsored by “respectable” local business organizations. The effect of this campaign will have to be determined. (433)

Developed alongside his colleagues in the Institute for Social Research and the mass communications clique, these, then, are Flowerman’s six conditions for a radical transformation of values in the White American demographic majority:

1) Control of the channels of mass communications;
2) Saturation with Pro-tolerance messages;
3) Crisis, designed or accidental;
4) Diminishment of Cultural Pride and Self-esteem;
5) Cultivation of Self-Punishment and Group Self-Sanctioning;
6) Sponsorship of willing dupes or traitors.

Although these six conditions form most of the body of “Mass Propaganda in the War Against Bigotry,” Flowerman also spends some time discussing the ideal content of “pro-tolerance” propaganda. In this regard, he comments:

The most striking feature, the spearhead, of propaganda, is the slogan. … Current pro-tolerance or anti-intolerance slogans urge unity and amity, warn against being divided by differences of race and religion, describe our common origin as immigrants to these shores, remove myths about racial differences, and denounce bigots and bigotry. Some popular slogans are: Don’t be a Sucker!, Americans All – Immigrants All, All Races and All Creeds Working Together etc.

Don’t Be A Sucker! was the name of a wartime film produced by the Army Signals Corps at a time when it was working heavily alongside Jewish Hollywood executives and script writers; its film production center was headed by Col. Emmanuel ‘Manny’ Cohen.[4] According to Wikipedia, the film:

has anti-racist and anti-fascist themes, and was made to educate viewers about prejudice and discrimination. The film was also made to make the case for the desegregation of the United States armed forces. An American who has been listening to a racist and bigoted rabble-rouser, who is preaching hate speech against ethnic and religious minorities and immigrants, is warned off by a naturalized Hungarian immigrant, possibly a Holocaust survivor or escapee, who explains to him how such rhetoric and demagogy allowed the Nazis to rise to power in Weimar Germany, and warns Americans not to fall for similar demagogy propagated by American racists and bigots. In August 2017 the short film went viral on the internet in the aftermath of the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia and various copies have been uploaded to video sharing sites in the past year.

Flowerman was dissatisfied with the slogans of his time, however, believing them to be too “general in nature, vague as to goals, and unspecific as to methods.” (434) He believed that merely defining fascism as the enemy was insufficient because, at that time, the host population believed “fascism was strictly a foreign phenomenon characteristic particularly of Nazi Germany.” Propaganda depicting fascism as the enemy was therefore going to be ineffective in making the host population see its own values as oppositional and requiring destruction. Referring to works like The Authoritarian Personality, Flowerman writes: “Studies abound in which subjects subscribed to tenets of fascism although they rejected the fascist label itself. The pervasiveness of prejudice in so many individuals makes it difficult to set up a real enemy.” (434) He acknowledges that “in much anti-intolerance propaganda” the enemy is defined as “white, native-born Protestants,” but makes it clear that he wishes this to be expanded “for logical and psychological reasons.” One gets the impression that “Diversity is our Strength” and “Fight Hate” would have been much to his satisfaction.

*****

We now find ourselves returning to our point of departure. “The whole story is transparently barmy,” said the Guardian’s Jason Wilson when discussing “conspiracy theories” about Cultural Marxism. Consider again what he says this “conspiracy theory” amounts to:

The vogue for the ideas of theorists like Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno in the 1960s counterculture culminated with their acolytes’ occupation of the commanding heights of the most important cultural institutions, from universities to Hollywood studios. There, the conspiracy says, they promoted and even enforced ideas which were intended to destroy traditional Christian values and overthrow free enterprise: feminism, multiculturalism, gay rights and atheism. And this, apparently, is where political correctness came from. I promise you: this is what they really think … The theory of cultural Marxism is also blatantly antisemitic, drawing on the idea of Jews as a fifth column bringing down western civilisation from within, a racist trope that has a longer history than Marxism.

In light of the facts addressed in this essay, such a theory would seem thoroughly borne out, with the only required alterations being that the process started before the 1960s and involved many more figures than the staff of the Institute for Social Research. The problem with people like Wilson is that they are proof of the very ‘conspiracy theory’ they refute. Raised in a controlled media, saturated with pro-tolerance propaganda, psychologically blasted with crisis after crisis, stripped of cultural pride, consumed by White guilt, and influenced by purchased “sponsors,” he is the perfectly gullible product of the protocols of Samuel H. Flowerman and the mass communications clique.

Not barmy, but more or less ridiculous, Wilson becomes an intellectual pygmy biting at the heels of his betters — those who, like the veteran in the study of Bettelheim, Shils, and Janowitz, see the true origin of the propaganda and are pathologized for their perceptivity.


[1] Flowerman, S. H., “Mass propaganda in the war against bigotry,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 42(4), (1947) 429-439.

[2] S.H. Flowerman and M. Jahoda, “The study of man – can prejudice be fought scientifically?” Commentary, Dec., 1946.

[3] S. H. Flowerman, “Portrait of the Authoritarian Man,” New York Times Magazine, April 23 1950, 31.

[4] See for example, Richard Koszarski, “Subway Commandos: Hollywood Filmmakers at the Signal Corps Photographic Center,” Film History Vol. 14, No. 3/4, (2002), 296-315.


[1] Flowerman, S. H., “Mass propaganda in the war against bigotry,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 42(4), (1947) 429-439.

[2] D. M. Scott, “Postwar Pluralism, Brown v. Board of Education, and the Origins of Multicultural Education,” Journal of American History, Vol 91, No 1 (2004), 69–82.

[3] For an example of Flowerman’s thoughts on Freud and psychoanalysis see S. H. Flowerman, “Psychoanalytic Theory and Science,” American Journal of Psychotherapy, Vol. 8, No. 3, 415-441.

[4] S. H. Flowerman, “Portrait of the Authoritarian Man,” New York Times Magazine, April 23 1950, 31.

[5] Herbert Greenberg, “The Effects of Single-Session Education Techniques on Prejudice Attitudes,” The Journal of Educational Sociology, Vol. 31, No. 2 (1957), 82-86, 82.

[6] Ido Oren, Our Enemies and US: America’s Rivalries and the Making of Political Science, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, (2003), 13.

[7] Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 384.

[8] Hynek Jeřábek, Paul Lazarsfeld and the Origins of Communications Research, (New York: Routledge, 2017), 18.

[9] James Curran, “Jay Blumler: A Founding Father of British Media Studies,” in Stephen Coleman (ed) Can the media save democracy? Essays in honour of Jay G. Blumler (London: Palgrave, 2015).

[10] John P. Jackson and Nadine M. Weidman, Race, Racism, and Science: Social Impact and Interaction (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), 176.

[11] David Kettler and Gerhard Lauer, Exile, Science and Bildung: The Contested Legacies of German Emigre Intellectuals (New York: Palgrave, 2005),  184.

[12] James Schmidt, “The Eclipse of Reason and the End of the Frankfurt School in America,” New German Critique 100 (2007), 47-76, 47.

[13]Jeřábek, Paul Lazarsfeld and the Origins of Communications Research, 23.

[14] Bureau of Applied Social Research, “The Ghosts Go West”: A Study of Comprehension, (Unpublished), 1945, Directed by Bernard B. Berelson. Cited in Flowerman, S. H., “Mass propaganda in the war against bigotry,” 438.

[15] See for example, “The dynamic basis of anti-Semitic attitudes,” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 2, (1948); “The evasion of propaganda: How prejudiced people respond to anti-prejudice propaganda” The Journal of Psychology, 23 (1947), 15-25; Studies in the scope and method of “The authoritarian personality. (New York, NY, US: Free Press, 1954); “Race relations in Public Housing,” Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 7, No. 1-2 (1951).

[16] Morris Janowitz and Bruno Bettelheim, Dynamics of Prejudice (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950).

[17] Joseph Gittler, “Measuring the Awareness of the Problem of Group Hostility,” Social Forces, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Dec., 1955), 163-167.

[18] Joseph Gittler, ”Man and His Prejudices,” The Scientific Monthly, 69 (1949 ), 43-47.

[19] Herbert Blumer, ““Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position,” Pacific Sociological Review, 1 (Spring 1958), 3-7.

[20] Irvin Rock and Stephen Palmer, “The Legacy of Gestalt Psychology,” Scientific American, Dec 1990, 84-90, 89.

[21] Ernest Dichter, The Strategy of Desire (New York: Routledge, 2017), 15.

[22] Bert T. King and Elliott McGinnies, Attitudes, Conflict, and Social Change (New York: Academic Press, 1972), 124.

“Modificar los estándares del grupo propio”: Sobre los Judíos y la Comunicación de Masas — Parte II de II

“Millones de folletos, panfletos, dibujos animados,  historietas, artículos — y más recientemente guiones de radio y de películas — han sido producidos y diseminados en la guerra de propaganda.” Samuel H. Flowerman, Propaganda Masiva en la Guerra contra la Intolerancia, 1947.[1.

Los Protocolos de Samuel H. Flowerman

Samuel H. Flowerman, como Director de Investigación en el Comité Judío Estadounidense, como colega del Instituto de Investigación Social, y como una especie de núcleo para la expansiva camarilla judía de académicos de comunicación de masas, estuvo en el centro del proceso para poner en acción práctica iniciativas judías de “investigación de opinión”. La formulación más clara de cómo luciría esta acción práctica fue articulada en su ensayo de 1947, “Propaganda Masiva en la Guerra contra la Intolerancia.” La preocupación principal de Flowerman era que a pesar de que millones de dólares estaban siendo gastados en propaganda, por organizaciones como el Comité Judío Estadounidense y la Liga Antidifamación, la propaganda parecía no ser suficiente por sí misma para lograr la transformación masiva de valores en la población huésped — en particular, para el debilitamiento de su etnocentrismo.

Flowerman empieza por explicar el formato y el alcance de los esfuerzos existentes: “Millones de folletos, panfletos, dibujos animados,  historietas, artículos — y más recientemente guiones de radio y de películas — han sido producidos y diseminados en la guerra de propaganda (429).” El uso del lenguaje de guerra de Flowerman es interesante en sí mismo, por supuesto, y será discutido en detalle más abajo. Por ahora, deberíamos focalizarnos en lo que Flowerman enumera como los 5 objetivos de la “guerra de propaganda”:

  1. “La reestructuración de las actitudes de individuos prejuiciosos, o al menos su neutralización.”
  2. “La reestructuración de los valores de grupo hacia la intolerancia.”
  3. “La consolidación de las actitudes de aquellos ya comprometidos con una ideología democrática, quizá creando una ilusión de universalidad o victoria.”
  4. “La continua neutralización de aquellos cuyas actitudes aún están desestructuradas y que se consideran “más inocuos” si permanecen inmunes a instrumentos de parcialidad.”
  5. “Contrarrestar los símbolos de intolerancia.” (429)

Flowerman concede que el nivel de trabajo y control requerido para lograr estos objetivos habría de ser extensivo, y que el proyecto era altamente ambicioso, buscando nada menos que “una exitosa persuasión masiva en el campo de las relaciones intergrupales.” (429) Pero él es igualmente explícito en las condiciones requeridas para semejante éxito.

La primer condición de Flowerman es “control de parte de grupos pro-tolerancia o individuos de los canales de comunicación de masas.” (430) Dado que el contexto entero del activismo de “pro-tolerancia” de Flowerman fue esencialmente judío, podemos asumir que él está implicando fuertemente que los canales de comunicación de masas deberían caer en manos judías. Dado que “control,” en el fraseo de Flowerman, no está calificado, y dado que muchos periódicos, estaciones de radio, y compañías de producción cinematográfica ya estaban en manos de judíos “pro-tolerancia,” la implicación de que este control debería ser absoluto también está presente. Además, nota Flowerman, que el control total de estos canales puede no ser suficiente en sí mismo. La población huésped aún va a tener que ser expuesta a las producciones de la comunicación de masas, y esto habría de ser garantizado mediante el uso de “fuerza, monopolio comercial, y/o crisis (diseñada o accidental).” (430)  Sólo entonces las fuerzas pro-tolerancia verían “los persuasivos dispositivos y técnicas de la élite actuando sobre las susceptibilidades de los manipulados.” (430) Flowerman cierra aquí con una referencia a la teoría de Erich Fromm, de que la gente tiene un “deseo de ser controlada.”

La segunda condición de Flowerman para una “exitosa persuasión masiva en el campo de las relaciones intergrupales,” es la saturación. Esta condición, así como la del control y monopolio de los canales de comunicación masiva, aspira a ser absoluta. En otras palabras, el mensaje “pro-tolerancia” debía de ser ubicuo y extendido — más allá de lo que era posible en 1947 y probablemente más allá de lo que podría haber sido conceptualizado en aquel entonces. En palabras de Flowerman: “Además de las grandes sumas de dinero actualmente siendo gastadas en propaganda de tolerancia, sumas considerablemente más grandes probablemente serán necesarias para lograr el grado de saturación — aún todavía hipotético — requerido.” (430) La idea general aquí es incrementar la proporción del “flujo de símbolos pro-tolerancia” dentro del “torrente total de comunicaciones.”

En noviembre de 1946 se llevó a cabo en Nueva York una convención de tres días, parcialmente organizada por Flowerman, agrupando “expertos en los campos generales de relaciones públicas, incluyendo publicidad, correo directo, cine, radio, y prensa; trabajadores profesionales en el equipo de agencias locales y nacionales específicamente dedicadas a combatir discriminación grupal; y científicos sociales de las universidades y de las agencias de defensa nacional.”[2] Los judíos, por supuesto, dominaban todas estas áreas, y la lista de participantes incluía figuras ya mencionadas como Bruno Bettelheim, Sol Ginsburg, Hertha Herzog (Directora de investigación radial de McCann-Erickson, Inc.), Julius Schreiber, Paul Lazarsfeld, Joseph Goldsen, y Morris Janowitz. Uno de los hallazgos de los académicos de comunicación de masas presentes en la convención fue que incluso el control y la saturación podían no ser suficientes para asegurar una transformación de opiniones y valores en la mayoría demográfica. Éste era el caso cuando la propaganda se encontraba con individuos particularmente fuertes mentalmente, o cuando la propaganda se perdía dentro del torrente general de comunicaciones que uno encuentra en el curso de la vida cotidiana. Flowerman entonces escribe con frustración que “estamos desarrollando una nación de individuos que trabajan, se preocupan, aman, y juegan, mientras comentaristas, comediantes, compañías de ópera, orquestas sinfónicas, y bandas de swing están transmitiendo. Esta continua embestida por ‘algo para todos,’ resulta en una especie de ‘sordera radial.’ (431) Para poder superar este obstáculo, Flowerman retorna a un aspecto clave de su primera condición — el uso de crisis (él escribe que ésta puede ser “diseñada o accidental”) para focalizar la atención sobre la propaganda emitida. Flowerman escribe:

Para superar la ‘sordera radial’ a los anuncios comerciales y la atmósfera general de simulación del entretenimiento radial, sólo símbolos asociados con una crisis aguda parecerían tener una posibilidad. Porque el grueso de la intolerancia racial y religiosa estadounidense no está considerado como una situación crítica. … La ausencia de estrés crítico sirve para disminuir los niveles de atención a símbolos pro-tolerancia. (431)

Algunos ejemplos prácticos contemporáneos de cómo sería esta táctica, podrían ser: la ubicuidad de la propaganda pro-diversidad después de ataques islamistas; Charlottesville; tiroteos en las escuelas; pánicos morales acerca del racismo; exageraciones de parte de la ADL sobre la amenaza constante del antisemitismo; asesinatos de parte de migrantes; y migrantes ahogándose en el Mediterráneo.
El punto aquí es que sin importar el contexto, la “crisis” ha de manufacturarse en casi toda situación, para focalizar la atención sobre el verdadero objetivo — la entrega exitosa de mensajes “pro-tolerancia,” incluso (o especialmente) en circunstancias en las cuales la tolerancia se demostró fatal para la población huésped. Los judíos o, en el fraseo más ambiguo, los “agentes pro-tolerancia,” deberían lograr (en las propias palabras de Flowerman) la ambiciosa trifecta de “control, saturación, crisis.” (432) Crisis es, por lo tanto, la tercera condición de Flowerman.

La cuarta condición es el logro de una alteración de las predisposiciones en el individuo por vía de una modificación de su entorno y de presión de grupo. Aquí Flowerman argumenta que la propaganda “pro-tolerancia” no debería depender de medios intelectuales, sino de “la percepción social, la cual es afectada por las predisposiciones del público. A su vez, estas disposiciones son actitudes cargadas con afecto, que pueden haber sido producidas por padres, maestros, compañeros, etc.” (432)

El punto aquí es que Flowerman y la pandilla de las comunicaciones de masa, creen que su propaganda sería mejor recibida por las masas si el contexto psicológico de recepción fuera modificado. En otras palabras, la gente criada dentro de la mayoría demográfica, que está imbuida con un sentido de orgullo comunal, responsabilidad social, logros culturales, y propósito nacional, es poco probable que pueda ser predispuesta a ser receptiva hacia los mensajes en nombre de extraños. Por lo tanto, alguna intervención en la cultura y en la interacción entre pares era necesaria para romper semejante obstáculo a la recepción de propaganda “pro-tolerancia.” Como un ejemplo, retornamos ahora al artículo de 1950 de Flowerman para The New York Times Magazine, en el que argumenta a favor del entrenamiento de los maestros “como ingenieros de relaciones humanas en vez de instructores de aritmética y ortografía.”[3] Los niños pueden así ser “diseñados” para ser más receptivos a la propaganda “pro-tolerancia” en la adultez.

Esta condición se mezcla con la quinta — la manipulación del instinto básico de los humanos de conformarse a los estándares de grupo. Flowerman escribe:

Consciente o inconscientemente, los individuos usan marcos de referencia grupales en situaciones sociales, incluso cuando están físicamente separados del grupo… La fortaleza de las sanciones de grupo es una fuerza potente a tener en cuenta, incluso para un individuo con un ego poderoso… parecería entonces, que para que la propaganda masiva en beneficio de grupos ajenos sea exitosa,  ésta tendría que modificar los estándares del grupo propio… La propaganda masiva pro-tolerancia, para ser exitosa, tendría que cambiar dichos valores, lo que sería difícil de imaginar sin control, saturación, crisis, etc. (432)

Lo que Flowerman está proponiendo aquí es esencialmente una revolución de valores, después de la cual surge una cultura políticamente correcta, donde la mayoría demográfica se autocontrola y se vuelve antagonista hacia sus intereses étnicos propios. En este entorno — logrado por medio de “control, saturación, crisis” — la fortaleza de las sanciones dentro del grupo de los blancos estadounidenses es dirigida contra las manifestaciones de etnocentrismo propio del grupo, en vez de hacia los extranjeros. Es nada menos que una propuesta para la cultivación de culpa blanca y altruismo patológico, y la reducción del etnocentrismo blanco y del orgullo cultural.

La sexta condición es la cultivación de figuras influyentes en nombre de la agenda “pro-tolerancia.” Esto requirió mucha sutileza. Flowerman escribe que la investigación de sus colegas y co-étnicos de comunicaciones de masa, muestra que los blancos de su propaganda:

están dispuestos a asignarles a algunos individuos un sello de aprobación, el cual les niegan a otros…
Sabemos que muchos volantes escritos y avalados por héroes populares y aceptados incluso por individuos prejuiciosos, son rechazados frecuentemente con la excusa de que son distribuidos por grupos minoritarios en su propio interés. Varios individuos prejuiciosos no pueden concebir una distribución semejante de parte de grupos dominantes. (434)

Flowerman se está quejando aquí del hecho de que algunos miembros de la mayoría demográfica son lo suficientemente perceptivos como para indicar claramente el verdadero origen de la propaganda “pro-tolerancia,” y para rechazarla en base a eso. Por “grupos minoritarios,” el evasivo Sr. Flowerman se refiere por supuesto, a los judíos. Luego cita un caso específico:

En un experimento llevado a cabo en la Universidad de Chicago por Bettelheim, Shils, y Janowitz, veteranos fueron expuestos a propaganda pro-tolerancia, incluyendo unos dibujos animados de Bill Mauldin. Un encuestado prejuicioso, compartiendo la estima general en la que este soldado-dibujante es tenido por ex GIs, dijo que consideraba a Mauldin “un tipo normal,” pero que si le pagas lo suficiente a un hombre, puedes hacer que haga lo que sea; éste individuo creía que el material que vio estaba siendo distribuido por “un par de comunistas de Nueva York.” (433)

Entonces vemos la patologización de un veterano, a causa de que percibió con sorprendente exactitud la mano subversiva detrás del uso de un ícono popular, para promocionar una agenda totalmente extraña a sus intereses. A pesar de las excepciones como este veterano, la susceptibilidad general de las masas fue considerada lo suficientemente alta como para avanzar con la estrategia de “patrocinio.” Como resultado, responde Flowerman,

Propagandistas, reconociendo la necesidad de fuentes de autoridad impecables, están produciendo material patrocinado por héroes populares en deportes, entretenimiento, y en las fuerzas armadas. Recientemente ha sido desarrollado un plan para promover la inserción de publicidades de página completa en periódicos, pagadas y patrocinadas por organizaciones empresariales locales “respetables.” El efecto de esta campaña tendrá que ser determinado. (433)

Desarrolladas junto con sus colegas en el Instituto de Investigación Social y la pandilla de las comunicaciones de masa, éstas son entonces las 6 condiciones de Flowerman para una transformación radical de los valores en la mayoría demográfica blanca estadounidense:

  • Control de los canales de comunicación masiva;
  • Saturación con mensajes Pro-tolerancia;
  • Crisis, diseñada o accidental;
  • Disminución del orgullo cultural y de la autoestima;
  • Cultivación del autocastigo y de la auto-sanción del grupo;
  • Patrocinio de ilusos voluntarios o traidores

A pesar de que estas 6 condiciones conforman la mayor parte del cuerpo de “Propaganda Masiva en la Guerra contra la Intolerancia,” Flowerman además pasa algo de tiempo discutiendo el contenido ideal de la propaganda “pro-tolerancia.” A este respecto, comenta:

La característica más chocante, la punta de lanza de la propaganda, es el eslogan… Los eslóganes actuales pro-tolerancia o anti-intolerancia, impulsan la unidad y la amistad, advierten en contra de estar divididos en base a diferencias raciales o religiosas, describen nuestro origen común como inmigrantes hacia estas costas, remueven mitos sobre diferencias raciales, y denuncian a los intolerantes y la intolerancia. Algunos eslóganes populares son: No seas Imbécil!, Todos estadounidenses — Inmigrantes todos, Todas las Razas y Todos los Credos Trabajando Juntos, etc.

No Seas Imbécil! fue el nombre de una película de la época de la guerra producida por el Cuerpo de Señales del ejército en una época en la que colaboraba fuertemente con directivos y guionistas judíos de Hollywood; su centro de producción cinematográfica estaba siendo dirigido por el coronel Emmanuel ‘Manny’ Cohen.[4] Según Wikipedia, el film:

tiene temas antirracistas y antifascistas, y fue hecho para educar a los espectadores sobre prejuicio y discriminación. El film fue hecho además, para abogar por la desegregación en las fuerzas armadas de Estados Unidos.
Un estadounidense que estuvo escuchando a un demagogo racista e intolerante, el cual estaba predicando discurso de odio contra minorías étnico-religiosas e inmigrantes, es advertido por un inmigrante húngaro naturalizado, posiblemente un sobreviviente o fugado del Holocausto, quien le explica cómo esa retórica y esa demagogia les permitieron llegar al poder a los Nazis en la República de Weimar, y les advierte a los estadounidenses que no caigan por una demagogia similar, propagada por estadounidenses racistas.
En Agosto de 2017 el film corto se hizo viral en internet, luego de la violenta manifestación Unite the Right de Charlottesville, Virginia, y varias copias fueron subidas a plataformas de video el año pasado.

Sin embargo Flowerman estaba desconforme con los eslóganes de su tiempo, creyéndolos muy “generales en naturaleza, vagos como objetivos, e inespecíficos como métodos.” (434) Él creía que definiendo meramente al fascismo como el enemigo era insuficiente porque, en aquel entonces, la población huésped creía que “el fascismo era un fenómeno estrictamente extranjero, característico particularmente de Alemania.” La propaganda retratando al fascismo como el enemigo, por lo tanto, iba a ser inefectiva para hacer que la población huésped vea sus propios valores como oposicionales y requiriendo destrucción. Refiriéndose a trabajos como La Personalidad Autoritaria, Flowerman escribe: “Abundan estudios en los cuales los sujetos adhieren a postulados del fascismo, aunque rechazan la etiqueta de fascista. La omnipresencia del prejuicio en tanto individuos hace difícil establecer un enemigo real.” (434) Él reconoce que “en mucha propaganda anti-tolerancia” el enemigo es definido como “Protestantes nativos blancos,” pero deja en claro que él desea que esto sea expandido por “razones lógicas y psicológicas.” Uno recibe la impresión de que eslóganes como “La Diversidad es nuestra Fortaleza” y “La Lucha contra el Odio” les habrían resultado muy satisfactorios.

*****

Nos encontramos ahora volviendo a nuestro punto de partida. “La historia entera es claramente absurda,” decía Jason Wilson de The Guardian, cuando discutía “teorías de la conspiración” sobre Marxismo Cultural. Consideren nuevamente a lo que él dice que esta “teoría de la conspiración” equivale:

La moda por las ideas de teóricos como Herbert Marcuse y Theodor Adorno en la contracultura de los 1960s, culminó con la ocupación por parte de sus acólitos, de las cúspides dirigentes de las más importantes instituciones culturales, desde las universidades hasta los estudios de Hollywood. Allí, la conspiración dice, ellos promocionaron e incluso aplicaron ideas que tenían como intención destruir los valores cristianos tradicionales y derrocar la libre empresa: feminismo, multiculturalismo, derechos homosexuales y ateísmo. Y esto, aparentemente, es de donde viene la corrección política. Les juro: eso es lo que realmente piensan… La teoría del Marxismo Cultural es además flagrantemente antisemita, nutriéndose de la idea de los judíos como una quinta columna derribando la civilización occidental desde dentro, un tropo racista que tiene una historia más larga que el Marxismo.

Ante los hechos tratados en este ensayo, semejante teoría parecería estar totalmente corroborada, sólo requiriendo algunas alteraciones como que el proceso comenzó antes de los 1960s e involucró muchas más figuras que el staff del Instituto de Investigación Social. El problema con gente como Wilson es que ellos mismos son la prueba de la misma “teoría de la conspiración” que refutan. Criado bajo medios controlados, saturado con propaganda pro-tolerancia, bombardeado psicológicamente con crisis tras crisis, despojado de orgullo cultural, consumido por culpa blanca, e influenciado por “sponsors” vendidos, él es el producto perfectamente crédulo de los protocolos de Samuel H. Flowerman y la camarilla de las comunicaciones masivas.

No disparatado, pero sí más o menos ridículo, Wilson se vuelve un pigmeo intelectual pisándoles los talones a sus superiores — aquellos que como el veterano en el estudio de Bettelheim, Shils y Janowitz, ven el verdadero origen de la propaganda y son patologizados por su perspicacia.


[1] Flowerman, S. H., “Mass propaganda in the war against bigotry,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 42(4), (1947) 429-439.

[2] S.H. Flowerman and M. Jahoda, “The study of man – can prejudice be fought scientifically?” Commentary, Dec., 1946.

[3] S. H. Flowerman, “Portrait of the Authoritarian Man,” New York Times Magazine, April 23 1950, 31.

[4] See for example, Richard Koszarski, “Subway Commandos: Hollywood Filmmakers at the Signal Corps Photographic Center,” Film History Vol. 14, No. 3/4, (2002), 296-315.

“Modificar los estándares del grupo propio”: Sobre los Judíos y la Comunicación de Masas — Parte I de II

“Para que la propaganda masiva en beneficio de grupos ajenos sea exitosa,  tendría que modificar los estándares del grupo propio.”
Samuel H. Flowerman, Propaganda Masiva en la Guerra contra la Intolerancia, 1974
.[1]

“La historia entera es claramente absurda [barmy].” Esto es lo que el periodista de The Guardian, Jason Wilson, tuvo para decir en un artículo del 2015 discutiendo “teorías conspirativas” sobre el Marxismo Cultural. Barmy, para los no iniciados, es un adjetivo británico informal con los significados “disparatado; loco; extremadamente tonto.”
Wilson continúa, intentando explicar “la historia entera”:

La moda por las ideas de teóricos como Herbert Marcuse y Theodor Adorno en la contracultura de los 1960s, culminó con la ocupación por parte de sus acólitos, de las cúspides dirigentes de las más importantes instituciones culturales, desde las universidades hasta los estudios de Hollywood. Allí, la conspiración dice, ellos promocionaron e incluso aplicaron ideas que tenían como intención destruir los valores cristianos tradicionales y derrocar la libre empresa: feminismo, multiculturalismo, derechos homosexuales y ateísmo. Y esto, aparentemente, es de donde viene la corrección política. Les juro: eso es lo que realmente piensan… La teoría del Marxismo Cultural es además flagrantemente antisemita, nutriéndose de la idea de los judíos como una quinta columna derribando la civilización occidental desde dentro, un tropo racista que tiene una historia más larga que el Marxismo.

Releyendo este artículo recientemente, me pregunté qué diría el Sr. Wilson si le dijera que poseo un documento donde un judío influyente vinculado a Marcuse y a Adorno inequívocamente delinea un esquema para la captura de los medios, el lavado cerebral masivo de las poblaciones blancas con propaganda multicultural, la manipulación de la cultura del grupo propio, para hacerla hostil a su propio sentido de etnocentrismo, la difusión de una cultura de corrección política, y, por último, la cooptación de Occidente por parte de un pequeño clique étnico, persiguiendo sus propios intereses bajo el disfraz de la “promoción de tolerancia.” Me pregunto qué diría si le dijera que el mismo judío operaba una red de cientos, sino miles, de otros judíos intelectuales involucrados en la misma única tarea — desbloquear una puerta “trasera” psicológica hacia la cultura blanca, para reorientarla completamente. Pienso que estoy acertado en asumir que el Sr. Wilson me llamaría “barmy,” y me acusaría de regurgitar los Protocolos de los Sabios de Sion. Sospecho que él creería que soy un fantasioso y anti-judío teórico de la conspiración. Sé que él descartaría incluso la posibilidad de que tal documento existiese. Y sin embargo sí existe.

El Contexto Intelectual

Es bastante posible que ninguno de ustedes haya escuchado el nombre de Samuel H. Flowerman, pero puedo decir con certeza que todos ustedes sin embargo, lo conocen. Si están incluso remotamente familiarizados con la Escuela de Fráncfort, entonces están familiarizados con un aspecto de su trabajo. Y, como pronto discutiremos, si se encuentran viviendo en una cultura lobotomizada para odiarse a sí misma, entonces conocen otro —aunque relacionado, — aspecto de su trabajo. Flowerman, debe ser reconocido, ha sido en gran medida olvidado por la historia. Él acecha entre las sombras más grandes dejadas por “los destierros.” Pero Flowerman fue, en ciertos aspectos, un miembro del círculo de la Escuela de Fráncfort como cualquier otro. Por supuesto, él no nació en Alemania. Tampoco fue un miembro de la Escuela de Fráncfort de Investigación Social. Flowerman nació en Manhattan en 1912, el nieto de un joyero que llegó en barco desde el distrito judío de Varsovia en 1885. Y sin embargo él alcanzaría más tarde suficiente influencia dentro de su propio grupo — como activista y psicólogo —, como para ejercer de Director de Investigación para el Comité Judío Estadounidense, y más célebremente, como para dirigir y coeditar la serie Estudios sobre Prejuicio, con Max Horkheimer.

Para la mayoría de quienes de hecho han escuchado sobre él, éste es quizá el mayor grado de su conocimiento sobre Flowerman. Y de no ser por un accidente, ciertamente también representaría los límites del mío. Muy recientemente, sin embargo, estaba haciendo algo de investigación sobre activismo judío en el fondo cultural precedente al Caso Brown contra el Consejo de Educación [Brown v. Board of Education], y me encontré, como tantas otras veces antes, cayendo en el abismo. Luego de haberme focalizado inicialmente en las figuras de Jonathan Kozol  y Horace Kallen (cuya influencia se extiende mucho más allá de la popularización de lo que él acuñó como “pluralismo cultural”), me encontré con un artículo del 2004 en la Revista de Historia Estadounidense [Journal of American History], de Daryl Scott de la Universidad Howard, titulado “Pluralismo de Posguerra, Brown contra el Consejo de Educación, y los Orígenes de la Educación Multicultural.”[2] Scott mencionaba a Flowerman debido al deseo de éste (pre-Brown), de inyectar teorías derivadas de Estudios sobre Prejuicio en el sistema educativo, creyendo que moldear a los niños era uno de los mejores métodos para lograr un cambio socio-cultural duradero y a largo plazo [ver aquí  la evidencia de que esta política sigue vigente hoy en día, en manos de la Liga Antidifamación].

Flowerman, un fan del psicoanálisis post-freudiano, poseía formación tanto en el estudio de la educación como de la comunicación de masas, y esto orientó fuertemente su pensamiento y su activismo. En particular, él tenía dudas de que la propaganda masiva pueda, por sí misma, directamente efectuar un cambio significativo entre las masas de blancos, y hacerlos abandonar su “prejuicio y autoritarismo latente” [i.e. reconocer su propio interés étnico]. En cambio, estaba fascinado por la manera en que la presión de grupo de pares ejercía influencia sobre los niños escolares individuales que él había estudiado, junto con la influencia potencial de los maestros tanto como modeladores de mentes cuanto como meros educadores. Por ejemplo, en un artículo de 1950 de la The New York Times Magazine titulado “Retrato del Hombre Autoritario,” Flowerman argumentaba que, para producir “personalidades menos susceptibles a ideas autoritarias, tenemos que  aprender cómo elegir mejores maestros y entrenarlos mejor; debemos verlos como ingenieros de relaciones humanas en vez de instructores de aritmética y ortografía.”[4]

El resultado combinado de su investigación y pensamiento en estas áreas fue su argumento de que debería ser deseable que la gente como él lograra controlar los medios masivos de comunicación. No sólo —sostenía Flowerman —, debería este control ser usado como propaganda “pro-tolerancia” general, sino también debería reformar los estándares del grupo propio — de esa manera, reformando las presiones de grupo de pares para que se vuelvan antagónicas al etnocentrismo del grupo propio. Su (entonces) altamente ambicioso objetivo era una cultura que se vigilara a sí misma: una cultura políticamente correcta, en la cual los blancos, vía presión de pares, se conformasen a nuevos valores — valores mucho más accesibles para los judíos. Sus opiniones y objetivos fueron resumidos más tarde por Herbert Greenberg, un colega y         co-étnico en la misma área, en 1957:

Flowerman des-enfatizó el valor y la efectividad de la propaganda como técnica para reducir prejuicio. Él también está de acuerdo con la concepción de que las técnicas basadas en estructuras de grupo y relaciones interpersonales son las más efectivas.

Flowerman y Greenberg fueron sólo dos miembros de lo que fue efectivamente una serie de batallones interconectados de psicólogos y sociólogos judíos operando con un tipo de fervor religioso en los campos de “estudios de prejuicio,” formación de opiniones, y medios masivos de comunicación entre los años 1930s y 1950s, todo con el objetivo de “desbloquear” la mente del blanco y abrirla a la “tolerancia.” En una remarcable invasión (y creación) de disciplinas similar al diluvio judío, sobre las ciencias médicas y raciales en los 1920s y 1930s, los judíos también inundaron, y luego dominaron, los campos de investigaciones de opinión y de comunicaciones de masa — áreas de investigación que se solapaban tan frecuentemente bajo académicos judíos como Flowerman, que eran prácticamente indistinguibles.

Incluso una revisión rápida de la lista de los Presidentes anteriores  revela que los judíos estaban vastamente sobrerrepresentados, si no dominaban, la membresía y las presidencias tanto de la Asociación Norteamericana para la Investigación en Opinión Pública (AAPOR), como de la Asociación Mundial para la Investigación en Opinión Pública (WAPOR). Y de los 4 académicos considerados como los “padres fundadores” de la investigación en comunicaciones de masas en Estados Unidos, dos (el vienés Paul Lazarsfeld y Kurt Lewin) fueron judíos. De los dos padres fundadores euroamericanos, la mayoría de los estudiantes de posgrado de Harold Lasswell fueron judíos[6] (v. gr. Daniel Lerner, Abraham Kaplan, Gabriel Almond, Morris Janowitz, y Nathan Leites) y él además auspició el proyecto sobre antisemitismo del Instituto de Investigación Social. El cuarto, Carl Hoveland, tuvo un círculo igualmente judío a su alrededor en Yale, donde dirigió un equipo de investigadores junto con Milton Rosenberg y Robert Abelson. El historiador Hynek Jeřábek nota que la influencia de Lazarsfeld en particular, no puede subestimarse — para el año 1983, 7 años después de su muerte, “los directores de investigación social en las tres más grandes redes de medios de comunicación, CBS, ABS, y NBC, eran todos antiguos alumnos suyos.”[8] Otro judío, Jay Blumler, ha sido llamado “el padre fundador de los estudios británicos de medios de comunicación.[9]

De hecho, la dominancia judía en el estudio de la opinión pública (y el potencial para su manipulación) simplemente no puede ser sobrevalorada. Además de aquellos ya nombrados, Joseph Klapper, Bernard Berelson, Fritz Heider, Leo Bogart, Elihu Katz, Marie Jahoda, Joseph Gittler, Morris Rosenberg, Ernest Dichter, Walter Weiss, Nathan Glazer, Bernard J. Fine, Bruno Bettelheim, Wallace Mandell, Hertha Hertzog, Dororthy Blumenstock, Stanley Schachter, David Caplovitz, Walter Lippmann, Sol Ginsburg, Harry Alpert, Leon Festinger, Michael Gurevitch, Edward Shils, Eugene Gaier, Joseph Goldsen, Julius Schreiber, Daniel Levinson, Herbert Blumer, I. M. A. Myers, Irving Janis, Miriam Reimann, Edward Sapir, Solomon Asch, y Gerald Wieder fueron sólo algunos de los cientos de fuertemente influyentes académicos trabajando en estos campos, que nacieron en familias judías, se asociaron fuertemente con otros judíos, contribuyeron con trabajo para organizaciones judías, se casaron con co-étnicos, y sin embargo se interesaron con un cierto grado de fanatismo, en la opinión y el etnocentrismo de los blancos en Estados Unidos. Esto sin decir nada sobre sus estudiantes de posgrado, que se contaban por miles.

A pesar de algunas diferencias superficiales en los títulos de “investigación de opinión,” “estudios de prejuicio,” y “comunicación de masas,” todos estos académicos trabajaron conjuntamente en cierta medida, si no directamente (en organizaciones o en artículos coescritos), entonces vía asociaciones mutuas. Por ejemplo, es un hecho histórico que, además de que tres de los cuatro padres fundadores de la comunicación de masas fueron judíos, los tres estuvieron íntimamente involucrados con la Escuela de Fráncfort y la más amplia agenda judía de ‘adaptar’ la opinión pública. Paul Lazarsfeld y Kurt Lewin, los dos gurús de la comunicación de masas, asistieron juntos a una conferencia sobre antisemitismo organizada por el Departamento de Investigación del Comité Judío Norteamericano (dirigida por Samuel H. Flowerman) y la facción de Berkeley de la Escuela de Fráncfort en el exilio (dirigida por Theodor Adorno).[10] David Kettler y Gerhard Lauer también mencionan que Lazarsfeld estaba en comunicación regular con Max Horkheimer, era “fuertemente favorable al Círculo de Horkheimer y su trabajo,” e incluso le suministró a éste “notas y recomendaciones para el inédito ‘Antisemitismo entre Obreros Estadounidenses’ del círculo de Horkheimer.[11] Él también fue colega en Columbia y confidente cercano de Leo Lowenthal.[12] Para finales de los 1940s, la ex esposa y madre de los hijos de Lazarsfeld, Marie Jahoda, había incluso llegado a actuar como el nexo del Comité Judío Estadounidense entre Horkheimer y Flowerman, y además coescribió un número de artículos sobre “prejuicio” con comentarios de Flowerman.

Uno ya debería ahora empezar a ver conexiones claras formándose entre el Comité Judío Norteamericano, la Escuela de Fráncfort, “estudios de prejuicio,” dominación judía del campo académico de “comunicación de masas,” y finalmente, el flujo de influencia desde este campo hacia los medios masivos (más claramente en las posiciones obtenidas rápidamente en CBS, ABC, y NBC, por los alumnos de Lazersfeld). Estas conexiones serán importantes más adelante.

Una hipótesis de trabajo razonable para semejante concentración de judíos mutuamente interconectados (frecuentemente desde diferentes países) en estas áreas de investigación, podría ser que la identidad judía y los intereses judíos jugaron una parte significativa en sus elecciones de carrera, y que la tendencia fue luego acelerada mediante nepotismo étnico y promoción dentro del grupo. Jeřábek parece estar de acuerdo, cuando declara que “el origen judío de Paul Lazarsfeld, o el hecho de que mucha gente alrededor suyo en Viena fuera judía, puede ayudar a explicar sus futuras afinidades, amistades, o decisiones.”[13]

Dejando de lado el profundo contexto histórico de conflicto entre judíos y europeos, una explicación contingente y contemporánea podría consistir en que los judíos fueron movidos hacia campos tratando la opinión de masas y las percepciones de prejuicio, debido a que se sentían profundamente disturbados por el ascenso del Nacional Socialismo.

Una explicación más general, pero quizá más convincente, considerando sus actividades en el tiempo, es que estos judíos se sentían de hecho disturbados ante cualquier forma de cultura blanca huésped, étnicamente definida y asertiva. Por ejemplo, algunos de los académicos nacidos en el exterior arriba nombrados, tales como Marie Jahoda o Ernest Dichter, habían sido arrestados y detenidos en la Viena pre-Anschluss, pre-Nacional Socialista, como subversivos culturales y políticos a principios de los 1930s. Ellos entonces lograron llegar a los Estados Unidos o al Reino Unido, donde continuaron más o menos con la misma conducta. Es altamente probable que estos individuos hayan buscado tanto entender como cambiar los mecanismos de la opinión y de la comunicación de masas en sus poblaciones huéspedes, para hacerlas más dóciles a los intereses judíos. Cuando eran efectivamente exiliados de una población huésped, ellos meramente trasplantaban sus ambiciones a una nueva. La única hipótesis alternativa, durante largo tiempo utilizada en apologética judía para cualquier instancia similar de sobrerrepresentación judía, es que grandes números de judíos mutualmente interconectados se juntaron en estas disciplinas puramente por accidente. Nathan Cofnas y Jordan Peterson, por ejemplo, podrían argumentar que los judíos accidentalmente entraron en estas áreas en masse, simplemente debido a que poseen un alto coeficiente intelectual y gustan de vivir en ciudades. El problema con semejantes razonamientos es que el trabajo producido por estos académicos y activistas estuvo tan fuertemente focalizado contra la opinión de los Blancos estadounidenses — en vez de aparecer accidental o al azar —, que indica de manera consistente, que estos académicos entraron al campo de las comunicaciones de masas con una agenda clara y en común. Por ejemplo, el académico judío de medios masivos de comunicación Bernard Berelson no fue sólo un investigador en opinión pública, sino que también condujo una serie de tests de propaganda sobre cómo hacer que los blancos norteamericanos consideren su propio etnocentrismo como algo aborrecible. En 1945 condujo un estudio en el que un dibujo animado que establecía conexiones entre el fascismo y la cultura norteamericana, fue presentado ante el público. El dibujo animado, titulado “Los fantasmas van hacia Occidente…,” mostraba fantasmas abandonando las tumbas de Hitler, Mussolini, y Goebbels, y volando hacia Estados Unidos llevando consigo carteles que decían: “Abajo con los sindicatos, los extranjeros, los judíos, los católicos, y los negros.” El mensaje era claramente que la “intolerancia” en Estados Unidos era básicamente el fantasma demoniaco del fascismo. Interesantemente, sin embargo, el estudio encontró que los judíos expuestos a este dibujo animado estaban tan fijados en el cartel que perdieron el mensaje subyacente, y creyeron que dicho dibujo animado había sido una creación de la ultra derecha. La potencialmente confusa naturaleza de esta pieza significó que nunca fue implementada como arma de propaganda “pro-tolerancia.”[14]

Berelson fue además también colega y amigo de Frederick S. Jaffe, el entonces vicepresidente judío de Planned Parenthood. Tanto Jaffe como Berelson más tarde se volvieron algo famosos debido a un memo (conocido en historia como el Memo Jaffe) enviado en 1969 desde el primero hacia el último, en el cual el sociópata anti-blanco Jaffe expuso su propia serie de protocolos, incluyendo una tabla que resumía varias proposiciones de varias fuentes en relación a control poblacional. Esta tabla contenía propuestas tales como abortos obligatorios para nacimientos fuera del matrimonio, esterilización para mujeres con más de dos hijos, fomento de la homosexualidad, y el fomento del trabajo femenino. Ambos habrían de trabajar juntos más tarde en el infame Informe de la Comisión Rockefeller de 1972, el cual incorporó varias propuestas de Jaffe. Vemos por lo tanto, más nexos entre judeidad, “estudios de prejuicio,” disciplina de los estudios de comunicación de masas, y de manera más general, activismo judío anti-blanco.

En realidad, el trabajo de todos estos académicos orbitó sobre los mismos temas, si no abiertamente, entonces en secreto (como en el caso del trabajo de Lazarsfeld con el Instituo de Investigación Social). Marie Jahoda, la subversiva ex austríaca, produjo una serie de estudios que fueron meras variaciones sobre el tema del etnocentrismo blanco, algo que ella patologizó célebremente en Antisemitismo y Desorden Emocional (1950), [15]   En el mismo año, Morris Janowitz y Bruno Bettelheim trabajaron juntos para producir Dinámica del Prejuicio.[16] Herbert Blumer produjo “El Prejuicio de Raza como un Sentido de Posición de Grupo.” [19] Fritz Heider trabajó con Kurt Lewin y Solomon Asch para descubrir las maneras en que la conformidad podría alterar la conducta de grupo y las opiniones individuales. [20] Ernest Dichter creía que sus estudios sobre comunicación de masas en marketing podrían conducir al desarrollo de técnicas persuasivas que podrían “detener la nueva ola de antisemitismo.” [21] EL trabajo de Walter Weiss trató sobre “comunicación de masas, opinión pública, y cambio social, en cuanto se relacionan al cambio de actitudes raciales.” [22] Y además de su trabajo sigiloso con el Instituto de Investigación Social, Paul Lazarsfeld, mientras trabajaba en el Bureau de Investigación Social Aplicada en la Universidad de Columbia, introdujo la noción de “contabilidad social,” un servicio sistemático que habría de notar y evaluar “el prejuicio” en cualquier material que apareciera en los medios masivos de comunicación. Podría continuar. 

Marie Jahoda

Lo que vemos aquí es el origen de una gran empresa conjunta judía, cuyo objetivo consiste en el desciframiento y la alteración de la opinión pública de los blancos estadounidenses. Esto no es una teoría de la conspiración, sino un hecho establecido y demostrable. En cierto sentido, la Escuela de Fráncfort, o el Instituto para la Investigación Social, fueron sólo la punta del iceberg. Horkheimer, Adorno y otros, se basaron en, e inspiraron a un gran ejército de académicos judíos trabajando en los campos de opinión pública y comunicación de masas. Éste fue un cuerpo de académicos y activistas ávidos por traducir en acción las teorías sobre “el prejuicio y la personalidad autoritaria” — cambiar la opinión y el pensamiento de la población huésped. Ellos continuarían desarrollando formas para evaluar y analizar futuros objetivos, y sus estudiantes habrían de tomar posiciones dominantes en los campos de los medios masivos y la comunicación de masas. En muchos casos estos académicos hablan abiertamente de la necesidad de controlar los medios y de la diseminación masiva de propaganda sofisticada (todo lo que pudo ser evaluado y perfeccionado a costa de sus universidades, en nombre del ‘estudio de prejuicio’). De todos estos activistas, sin embargo, ninguno produjo un trabajo tan contundentemente subversivo como el ensayo de Samuel Flowerman de 1947 “Propaganda de Masas y la Guerra contra la Intolerancia.” Es sobre los protocolos de Samuel H. Flowerman, que dirigimos ahora nuestra atención.

Parte 2.


[1] Flowerman, S. H., “Mass propaganda in the war against bigotry,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 42(4), (1947) 429-439.

[2] D. M. Scott, “Postwar Pluralism, Brown v. Board of Education, and the Origins of Multicultural Education,” Journal of American History, Vol 91, No 1 (2004), 69–82.

[3] For an example of Flowerman’s thoughts on Freud and psychoanalysis see S. H. Flowerman, “Psychoanalytic Theory and Science,” American Journal of Psychotherapy, Vol. 8, No. 3, 415-441.

[4] S. H. Flowerman, “Portrait of the Authoritarian Man,” New York Times Magazine, April 23 1950, 31.

[5] Herbert Greenberg, “The Effects of Single-Session Education Techniques on Prejudice Attitudes,” The Journal of Educational Sociology, Vol. 31, No. 2 (1957), 82-86, 82.

[6] Ido Oren, Our Enemies and US: America’s Rivalries and the Making of Political Science, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, (2003), 13.

[7] Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 384.

[8] Hynek Jeřábek, Paul Lazarsfeld and the Origins of Communications Research, (New York: Routledge, 2017), 18.

[9] James Curran, “Jay Blumler: A Founding Father of British Media Studies,” in Stephen Coleman (ed) Can the media save democracy? Essays in honour of Jay G. Blumler (London: Palgrave, 2015).

[10] John P. Jackson and Nadine M. Weidman, Race, Racism, and Science: Social Impact and Interaction (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), 176.

[11] David Kettler and Gerhard Lauer, Exile, Science and Bildung: The Contested Legacies of German Emigre Intellectuals (New York: Palgrave, 2005),  184.

[12] James Schmidt, “The Eclipse of Reason and the End of the Frankfurt School in America,” New German Critique 100 (2007), 47-76, 47.

[13]Jeřábek, Paul Lazarsfeld and the Origins of Communications Research, 23.

[14] Bureau of Applied Social Research, “The Ghosts Go West”: A Study of Comprehension, (Unpublished), 1945, Directed by Bernard B. Berelson. Cited in Flowerman, S. H., “Mass propaganda in the war against bigotry,” 438.

[15] See for example, “The dynamic basis of anti-Semitic attitudes,” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 2, (1948); “The evasion of propaganda: How prejudiced people respond to anti-prejudice propaganda” The Journal of Psychology, 23 (1947), 15-25; Studies in the scope and method of “The authoritarian personality. (New York, NY, US: Free Press, 1954); “Race relations in Public Housing,” Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 7, No. 1-2 (1951).

[16] Morris Janowitz and Bruno Bettelheim, Dynamics of Prejudice (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950).

[17] Joseph Gittler, “Measuring the Awareness of the Problem of Group Hostility,” Social Forces, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Dec., 1955), 163-167.

[18] Joseph Gittler, ”Man and His Prejudices,” The Scientific Monthly, 69 (1949 ), 43-47.

[19] Herbert Blumer, ““Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position,” Pacific Sociological Review, 1 (Spring 1958), 3-7.

[20] Irvin Rock and Stephen Palmer, “The Legacy of Gestalt Psychology,” Scientific American, Dec 1990, 84-90, 89.

[21] Ernest Dichter, The Strategy of Desire (New York: Routledge, 2017), 15.

[22] Bert T. King and Elliott McGinnies, Attitudes, Conflict, and Social Change (New York: Academic Press, 1972), 124.

 

 

 

 

Hedging their Bets (Who Really Decides Elections)

If you like your healthcare provider/free speech/immigration policy/country you can keep it!

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics,” a quote often attributed to, appropriately enough, Benjamin Disraeli. The salad days of Joe Wilson yelling, “You lie!” at Barack Obama seem so long ago, but here we are with a steady diet of more Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi. Alas, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Or do they? Was the grass greener or was I? Certainly Emma Lazarus’s sonnet wasn’t a beacon for the world’s wretched refuse when the West was won and two fratricidal World Wars were still on the horizon. But the rough beast was already slouching toward Bethlehem, and by the time Donald J. Trump was clamoring to see Barack Hussein Obama’s birth certificate the beast had been born and grown to adulthood.

In any case, it was a republic and we couldn’t keep it; instead, Jewish hedge fund managers and plutocrats decide under what guise the neo-liberal machine will continue to operate, for it is in fact all window dressing. The reasons may vary—cheap labor, ready votes, “social justice,” climate change, anti-white animus, etc.—but the end result is no border and no representation, regardless of the rhetoric. The ruling class is beyond redemption, and nothing short of a replacement of the kind they envision for us will suffice to save any semblance of an America worth saving. Perhaps it is a Balkanized future or an entire Western Hemisphere that looks like Brazil, but prognostication is not the order of the day, nor is this a post-mortem, but rather an outlining of the kabuki theater that passes for politics in America and a look at its stage managers.

Using the figures for individual donors’ campaign contributions to federal candidates, parties, political action committees (PACs), 527 organizations, and Carey committees as reported by the Center for Responsive Politics for the 2018 election, we see that six of the top seven donors were Jews: Sheldon Adelson, Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, S. Donald Sussman, Jim Simons, and George Soros. The Jewish Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group was also in the top ten. Number ten on that list, Fred Eychaner, is not Jewish, but as The Times of Israel reported in late October 2012:

Eychaner has given $1.5 million to the Priorities USA Action super PAC. He’s also given more than $60,000 to the president’s re-election committees, and he’s listed as a major “bundler” for Obama, having raised at least $500,000 for the president. Eychaner, a gay-rights activist, also has donated millions to other nonprofit groups, including more than $1 million to the progressive EMILY’s List organization.[1]

The reader will be familiar with the Jewish character of EMILY’s List from my The Way Life Should Be? series.

More wealthy Jews abound in the top one hundred donors to political campaigns in 2018: Deborah Simon (#14), Bernie Marcus (#18), Dustin Moskovitz (#19), Joshua Bekenstein (#20), Jeff Yass (#21), Paul Singer ($25), Seth Klarman (#26), Amy Goldman-Fowler (#28), and Henry Laufer (#29). Sixteen of the top thirty donors to political campaigns in 2018 were Jewish. If you continue down the list, you’ll continue to see Jews well-represented, including Herbert Sandler, Haim Saban, Irwin Jacobs, Les Wexner, Alexander Soros, Steven A. Cohen, Bernard Schwartz, Sim Daniel Abraham, Richard Rosenthal, Stephen Mandel, Henry Goldberg, Irving Moskowitz, Steven Spielberg, Ronald Lauder, Michael Sacks, David Bonderman, Dan Loeb, and Andrea Soros-Colombel.

When Bernie Sanders talks about the 1%, this is who he’s talking about, and there are a whole lot of his co-ethno-religionists. Despite the tough talk, it appears Sanders doesn’t walk the walk—per the Center for Responsive Politics, we discover that he has received huge campaign contributions in this election cycle from the likes of PACs representing and/or individuals affiliated with: Alphabet Inc., Apple, Microsoft, AT&T, Amazon, Wal-Mart, Kaiser Permanente, UC Berkeley, Boeing, IBM, UPS, the City of New York, and the Army, Navy, Air Force, and the US Department of Defense. In fact, his donor list is pretty much interchangeable with the rest of his “competition.”

For billionaire Jews like Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, backing candidates is apparently not enough anymore, or maybe their grip on power is becoming more tenuous. Whatever the reason, the Wonderful Wizards are moving to center stage for all of America to see. Having made a killing as a hedge fund manager, Tom Steyer now has his sights on the presidency, and has spent nearly $48 million of his own money at press time on his bid. He doesn’t need much in the way of campaign donations, but his donors do prove illustrative: Bain Capital (Joshua Bekenstein from the above list is co-chair and the Jewish Jonathan Lavine is CIO), Hellman & Friedman (a San Francisco-based private equity firm where Steyer was a partner, founded by two Jews—Warren Hellman, former president of Lehman Brothers and Tully Friedman, former managing director of Salomon Brothers), Stanford University (where Steyer received his MBA), MRB Capital (the venture capital firm of Hellman & Friedman senior advisor Matthew R. Barger, who, like Steyer, also received his MBA from Stanford and who, like Hellman, also worked for Lehman Brothers prior to joining Hellman’s firm), Pisces, Inc. (described on their LinkedIn page as “an outsourcing/offshoring company” based out of San Francisco), and Twitter. Of particular note and showing what a ludicrous sham the whole thing is, Steyer’s second-largest donor is Farallon Capital, the very firm he founded. Steyer also worked as a risk arbitrage trader under the Jewish Robert Rubin at Goldman Sachs and in Morgan Stanley’s corporate mergers and acquisitions department, in addition to Hellman & Friedman, before founding Farallon Capital, named the largest hedge fund in the world in 2005. Rubin is on the advisory council of The Hamilton Project (along with Lawrence Summers, David M. Rubenstein, Penny Pritzker, Sheryl Sandberg, Peter Orszag of Lazard, Tom Steyer—all Jews—and other major Establishment figures), is Chairman Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, and is a member of the Africa Progress Panel (APP). Rubin is a real piece of work:

In January 1995, one year after the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and immediately after Rubin was sworn in as Secretary of Treasury, Mexico was suffering through a financial crisis that threatened to result in it defaulting on its foreign obligations. President Bill Clinton, with the advice of Secretary Rubin and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan,[2] provided $20 billion in US loan guarantees to the Mexican government through the Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF). In 1997 and 1998, Treasury Secretary Rubin, Deputy Secretary Lawrence Summers,[3] and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan worked with the International Monetary Fund and others to promote U.S. policy in response to financial crises in Russian, Asian, and Latin American financial markets…As Clinton’s two-term Secretary of the Treasury, Rubin sharply opposed any regulation of collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps and other so-called “derivative” financial instruments which—despite having already created havoc for companies such as Procter & Gamble and Gibson Greetings, and disastrous consequences in 1994 for Orange County, California with its $1.5 billion default and subsequent bankruptcy—were nevertheless becoming the chief engine of profitability for Rubin’s former employer Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms. Rubin sparked controversy in 2001 when he contacted an acquaintance at the U.S. Treasury Department and asked if the department could convince bond-rating agencies not to downgrade the corporate debt of Enron, a debtor of Citigroup…Journalist Robert Scheer claims that the repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act was a key factor in the 2008 financial crisis. Enacted just after the 1930s Great Depression, the Glass–Steagall Act separated commercial and investment banking…Rubin and his deputy Lawrence Summers steered through the 1999 repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act (1933)…It allowed the banks to develop and sell the mortgage-backed instruments that became a principal factor in the financial collapse. In September 2011, the UK Independent Commission on Banking released a report in which it recommended a separation of investment and retail banking to prevent a repeat of the 2008 crisis…In December 2008, investors filed a lawsuit contending that Citigroup executives, including Rubin, sold shares at inflated prices while concealing the firm’s risks….Writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb noted that Rubin “collected more than $120 million in compensation from Citibank in the decade preceding the banking crash of 2008. When the bank, literally insolvent, was rescued by the taxpayer, he didn’t write any check—he invoked uncertainty as an excuse.”…In January 2014, Secretary Rubin joined former Senator Olympia Snowe, former Education Secretary Donna Shalala, former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Housing and Urban Affairs Secretary Henry Cisneros, Gregory Page the Chair of Cargill, and Al Sommer, [4] the Dean Emeritus of the Bloomberg School of Public Health as members of the U.S. Climate Risk Committee.[5]

We know the purposes of this emphasis on “climate change.” What we are looking at is the “corporate stranglehold on democracy” that Steyer is supposedly fighting, a rich irony considering. Exemplified here is the neo-liberal establishment at work, operating with impunity, and with obvious and significant in-group preferential treatment and networking as regards Jews. It does not, unfortunately, end there.

George Shultz, who was Co-Chair with Tom Steyer on the No to Prop. 23 campaign and was close friends with former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, was honored at the opening of the Limmud FSU conference for Russian-speaking Jews in November 2017 “for never giving up on Soviet Jews” as Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State with “a leather-bound Book of Psalms from Julius Berman, president of the Claims Conference (which facilitates German government compensation to Holocaust survivors), and another on behalf of Limmud FSU.” In the face of declining support for Israel among Democrat voters, Henry Cisneros joined a number of other Democrat politicians and donors such as Kyrsten Sinema, Bob Menendez, and major party donor, Managing Director at JP Morgan Securities, and former AIPAC staffer Todd Richman in forming the group The Democratic Majority for Israel because if there’s one thing America needs, it’s more pro-Israel lobbying groups!

Michael Bloomberg was also a donor to long-time Maine Senator Olympia Snowe. Once again returning to the Center for Responsive Politics, we discover that Snowe’s other major donors included PACs representing and/or individuals affiliated with: Verrill Dana, Bernstein Shur, Goldman Sachs, Planned Parenthood, Women’s Pro-Israel National PAC, Sallie Mae, Pingree Associates, Northrop Grumman, Corning, WarnerMedia Group, Unum, the American Medical Association, Verizon, the Blackstone Group, MBNA Corp., AT&T, the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors, New York Life Insurance, ExxonMobil, International Paper, McDonald’s, United Technologies, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, American Airlines, Raytheon, Boston Capital, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, IDEXX, Aflac, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Aetna, AVI Foodsystems, TD Bank, Bank of America, MetLife, Comcast, Home Depot, FedEx, O’Hara Corporation, Deloitte, the Carlyle Group, Walmart, CVS, and iHeartCommunications, Inc.

Donna Shalala is described by Jackson Richman of the South Florida Sun Sentinel thusly:

Donna Shalala, 77, is no stranger to politics or the relationship between the United States and Israel. She served as Secretary of Health and Human Services under President Bill Clinton, where she traveled to Israel and helped researchers there obtain grants from the National Institutes of Health, in addition to assisting with other initiatives inside the Jewish state. She then went into the private sector: serving as University of Miami president for 14 years and president of the Clinton Foundation for two years. Shalala, endorsed by the Jewish Democratic Council of America, defeated Maria Elvira Salazar in the midterm elections to replace the retiring Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. [6]

Shalala herself states:

I’ve been a friend of Israel for a long time. I’ve been working with the universities within the health-care system for a long time. I first went to Israel to be on Mayor Teddy Kollek’s Jerusalem Committee to help plan the city of Jerusalem when I was a young urbanist, a young academic, teaching at Columbia [University]. And I have honorary degrees from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, the University of Haifa and from Ben-Gurion University [of the Negev]… I actually worked with Israeli health officials to guarantee the Weizmann Institute [of Science] scientists the opportunity to apply for NIH grants among other things. I worked with women leaders in Israel on health-care issues. I went in and out of Israel four times when I was secretary…Most recently, the University of Miami has helped develop the cancer centers in Israel. Our faculty worked closely with their counterparts in Israel, particularly on cancer interests…[People] should know there’s an Arab American with longstanding support of Israel who’s just been elected in South Florida. [7]

Lazard, Ltd., based out of Bermuda for tax reasons, naturally, is also a major donor to Steyer. Lazard’s Chairman and CEO is Kenneth M. Jacobs, another Stanford MBA who is on the Board for the Brookings Institution and is a former member of the Steering Committee for the Bilderberg Group. A number of influential people have worked for Lazard, including both Jews and their functionaries: Marcus AgiusRobert AgostinelliTim CollinsDisque DeaneMina GerowinSir Philip HamptonHugh Kindersley, Sebastian KulczykSteven LangmanJean-Marie MessierArchie NormanNelson ObusGary ParrMark PincusGerald RosenfeldNathaniel RothschildBernard SelzJohann RupertLars KroijerJaime Bermúdez MerizaldeRon BloomRobert Henry Brand, Robert Fred EllsworthVernon E. Jordan Jr.Paul KeatingRobert Kindersley, Anne LauvergeonLord MandelsonHenrique de Campos MeirellesAndrew MitchellPeter R. OrszagVincent S. PérezRodrigo de RatoJenny SanfordSimon Sebag MontefioreLindsay TannerAndrés VelascoAntonio WeissBill WhiteFrank G. ZarbBožidar ĐelićNgozi Okonjo-Iweala, and William D. Cohan. Lazard was founded as Lazard Freres & Co. by three Jewish brothers—Alexandre, Lazare, and Simon:

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the firm evolved into three “Houses of Lazard” in the United States, France, and England, separately managed but allied. The Lazard partners advised clients on financial matters and built a cross-border network of high-level relationships in business and government. Noted financial advisor George Blumenthal rose to prominence as the head of the U.S. branch of Lazard Frères and was a partner of Lazard Frères in France. In the economic boom following World War II, the American operations of Lazard expanded significantly under the leadership of the financier André Meyer. Meyer and Lazard partner Felix Rohatyn have been credited with virtually inventing the modern mergers and acquisitions (M&A) market…In 1977, as the health of Meyer began to deteriorate, the firm came to be controlled by Michel David-Weill. Under his leadership, the three houses of Lazard were formally united in 2000 as Lazard LLC. In 2002, David-Weill hired Bruce Wasserstein to be CEO…Following Wasserstein’s sudden death in 2009, Lazard’s Board of Directors elected Kenneth M. Jacobs Chairman and CEO.[8]

Blumenthal, Meyer, Rohatyn, David-Weill, Wasserstein, and Jacobs are all Jewish, by the way. Blumenthal first arrived in the United States on behalf of the dynastic Jewish banking family the Speyers, and “with J. P. Morgan the elder, he was one of five bankers whose $65,000,000 gold loans saved Grover Cleveland from giving up specie payments in 1896.”[9] At Lazard, André Meyer created SOVAC (Societé pour la Vente à Crédit d’Automobiles), a finance company that in the late-1920s introduced the concept of automobile financing for consumers, ensuring Lazard Frères would become a significant force in consumer credit as well as in product leasing. Meyer and two colleagues would also represent Lazard on the Board of Directors of Citroën.[10] He was also very close with former US President Lyndon B. Johnson, often serving in an unofficial advisory capacity during Johnson’s time in office. In addition to being on the Board of Overseers of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a major refugee re-settlement agency run by the Jewish David Miliband, son of Marxist sociologist Ralph Miliband, Rohatyn:

Joined the New York office of the investment bank Lazard Frères under André Meyer. He was made partner in the firm in 1961 and later became managing director. While at Lazard he brokered numerous, major mergers and acquisitions, notably on behalf of International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), where he became a director in 1966. He also served on the boards of the Englehard Mineral and Chemical Corporation, Howmet Turbine Component Corporation, Owens-Illinois Inc., and Pfizer Inc. He served on the Board of the New York Stock Exchange from 1968 to 1972…In 1996, the Clinton administration put forward his candidacy for the post of Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve…According to The New York Times, in the 1990s, Rohatyn described derivatives as “financial hydrogen bombs, built on personal computers by 26-year-olds with M.B.A.s.” In 2006 Rohatyn joined Lehman Brothers as a senior advisor to chairman, Dick Fuld.[11] On January 27, 2010, Rohatyn announced his return to Lazard as Special Advisor to the Chairman and CEO, after a short role at Rothschild. Rohatyn was United States Ambassador to France from 1997–2000 during the second Clinton Administration…As ambassador, he also organized the French-American Business Council (FABC), a 40-member council of U.S. and French corporate chief executives that met annually, with meetings held alternately in the United States and France. FABC meetings included President Clinton, President Chirac and Prime Minister Jospin, as well as U.S. cabinet secretaries and French government ministers and meetings continued during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Nicolas Sarkozy[12]…[His son] Nicolas Rohatyn is CEO and Chief Investment Officer at The Rohatyn Group, an investment firm specializing in emerging markets, following a 19-year career at J.P. Morgan.[13]

David-Weill’s father, Pierre, was a partner and former Chairman of Lazard Frères; his grandfather, David, was a partner, and his great-grandfather, Alexandre Weill also worked at Lazard Frères, founded by his cousins. David-Weill hired both Bruce Wasserstein and the Jewish “deal-maker” Steven Rattner, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and a previous member of the Brookings Institution’s Board. Wasserstein’s private equity firm Wasserstein & Co. specialized in the acquisitions of media. Wasserstein’s fourth wife was Angela Chao, sister of Mitch McConnell’s wife Elaine Chao. Rahm Emanuel[14] was hired on at Wasserstein’s firm Wasserstein Perella & Co. in the late 1990s despite not having an MBA or any prior experience working in finance before being appointed to the Freddie Mac Board of Directors in 2000, a brief tenure that was plagued by scandal. Rattner:

[Rattner] was hired in Washington, D.C., as a news clerk to James Reston, New York Times columnist and former executive editor. After a year, he moved to New York as a reporter to cover business, energy, and urban affairs; there he became friends with colleague Paul Goldberger[15]…At the unusually young age of 27, he became the paper’s chief Washington economic correspondent. He became close friends with Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.[16].…At the end of 1982, Rattner left The New York Times and was recruited by Roger Altman[17] to join the investment bank Lehman Brothers as an associate. After Lehman was sold to American Express in 1984, he followed his boss Eric Gleacher and several colleagues to Morgan Stanley, where he founded the firm’s communications group. In 1989, after Morgan Stanley filed for an initial public offering, he joined Lazard as a general partner and completed various deals for large media conglomerates such as Viacom and Comcast. Alongside Felix Rohatyn, Rattner became Lazard’s top rainmaker in the 1990s. Michel David-Weill named him the firm’s deputy chairman and deputy chief executive in 1997. In March 2000, Rattner and three Lazard partners, including Joshua Steiner,[18] left the firm and founded the Quadrangle Group. They initially focused on investing a $1 billion media-focused private equity fund. Early investors in Quadrangle included Sulzberger, Mort Zuckerman,[19] and Merrill Lynch. Headquartered in the Seagram Building,[20] Quadrangle grew to manage more than $6 billion across several business lines, including private equity, distressed securities, and hedge funds. The firm also hosted an annual gathering for media executives called Foursquare, where speakers included Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg.[21]…In 2005, Quadrangle made payments to private placement agent Hank Morris[22] to help Quadrangle raise money for its second buyout fund. Morris had come highly recommended to Rattner from U.S. Senator Charles Schumer.[23] Morris was also the chief political advisor to Alan Hevesi,[24] the New York State Comptroller and manager of the New York State Common Retirement Fund (CRF), which invests in many private equity funds. Morris told Rattner he could increase the size of the CRF investment in Quadrangle’s second buyout fund. Rattner agreed to pay Morris a placement fee of 1.1% of any investments greater than $25 million from the CRF…In 2009, Quadrangle and a dozen other investment firms, including the Carlyle Group, were investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for their hiring of Morris. The SEC viewed the payments as “kickbacks” in order to receive investments from the CRF since Morris was also a consultant to Hevesi. Quadrangle paid $7 million in April 2010 to settle the SEC investigation, and Rattner personally settled in November for $6.2 million without admitting or denying any wrongdoing…In 2008, the firm’s asset management division announced it had been selected to invest the personal assets of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg…Rattner’s close friend.[25]

Do you see how all this works? This is how a decadent ruling class operates—governing for its own benefit and, for the preponderance of Jews, that of its tribe. Political affiliation is basically irrelevant in such a context, as we will see with presidential candidate Johnny-come-lately Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, who may be running as a Democrat, but is bi-partisan in his support for his co-ethno-religionists and those who will do their bidding. Control is essential. As Karl Evers-Hillstrom writes:

Bloomberg, who made his billions as the founder and CEO of financial services firm Bloomberg L.P., has slammed aggressive regulation of the financial sector… Bloomberg’s contributions ebb and flow as the political tides shift…Following the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC, Bloomberg took advantage of his newfound ability to give unlimited sums to super PACs. His Independence USA PAC shelled out millions to back Bloomberg’s preferred Republicans and Democrats, and spent roughly 90 percent or more of its money backing winning candidates every cycle since 2014. In 2018, the group spent all of its $38 million backing Democrats and opposing Republicans. It helped kick out key Democratic targets such as former Reps. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) and Pete Sessions (R-Texas) with multi-million dollar ad buys. Bloomberg’s other major group, Everytown for Gun Safety, was also successful at kicking Republicans out of Congress. The group spent $4.2 million backing Rep. Lucy McBath (D-Ga.), a gun control activist, and helped gun control groups outspend gun rights organizations on independent expenditures for the first time in 2018. The Bloomberg-funded group was also instrumental in helping Democrats turn Virginia blue this week. Also during the midterms, Bloomberg poured $20 million into Senate Majority PAC, the super PAC arm for Senate Democrats. He added another $5 million to the League of Conservation Voters.[26]

Notable Democrats who’ve received funds from Bloomberg in recent years include Cory Booker and Kamala Harris. Interestingly, Bloomberg has never donated to Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, or Bernie Sanders. Naturally, though, people like Jerrold Nadler, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Lieberman have also received Bloomberg’s largesse. What could possibly unite them?

Rhetorically, Sanders and Warren are very much opposed to the Bloomberg/Steyer modus operandi, but as mentioned near the beginning of this piece, their donors are virtually the same as every other major Democratic candidate. Surely there is some in-group tension here regarding Wall Street and venture (vulture) capitalism, but all indications are that it will probably prove either minor or altogether irrelevant. Sanders may have been a True Believer at one time, but he has clearly been co-opted. Big tech and the major multi-nationals appear to be off-limits completely. It remains to be seen how or if Bloomberg is able to explain his way out of his support for “stop-and-frisk” while mayor of New York to the Woke Golems.

On the other side of the aisle, the Center for Responsive Politics informs us that Bloomberg has donated to the Republican National Committee, the Republican Party of Massachusetts, New Jersey Republican State Committee, New York Republican Federal Campaign Committee, and the New York Republican County Committee, as well as current Maine Senator Susan Collins, former Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, Mitt Romney, Orrin Hatch, John McCain, George Bush, George W. Bush, and Rudy Giuliani. He donated $250,000 to Mississippi Conservatives in 2014 and in that same year, donated another $250,000 to West Main Street Values, a single-candidate super-PAC in support of Lindsey Graham. The following year, while Graham was gearing up for a presidential bid of his own, as Ben Kamisar reported in late July 2015:

Of the total [$2.9 million raised since March], $200,000 came from a super-PAC that supported Graham’s Senate bid, West Main Street Values PAC Inc….Ronald Perelman,[27] the billionaire investor that’s a member of Graham’s national finance team, also gave a half-million. Access Industries, a holding company that owns Warner Music Group and others, also donated that same sum…General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt gave $25,000 to the group, as did Boston philanthropist Theodore Cutler.[28] Graham appeared at a fundraiser for the group in March, which was co-chaired by GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson. Adelson doesn’t appear to have given to the super-PAC directly, but another co-chair, former American Enterprise Institute board member Roger Hertog,[29] donated $100,000 a week after the event.[30] 

Access Industries is owned by the Jewish Len Blavatnik. “So you see, my dear Coningsby,” the Jewish Benjamin Disraeli wrote in his novel Coningsby,[31] “that the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” It is my goal—and if I may be so bold as to speak for others, that of the other writers at the Occidental Observer and other dissident voices I’m sure—to shoulder our way into the conversation and show plainly the architects of this modern horror show. With any luck, figures like Steyer and Bloomberg will continue to drop the mask and show the public who they really are, making our job that much easier. To combat the pernicious agenda of the globalist establishment, we must first understand it. We must know the what’s, the when’s, the where’s, the who’s, the why’s, and the how’s and proceed accordingly.


[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/jewish-donors-prominent-in-presidential-campaign-contributions/

[2] Jewish.

[3] Jewish.

[4] Jewish.

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rubin

[6] https://www.sun-sentinel.com/florida-jewish-journal/fl-jj-shalala-decades-israel-congress-20181219-story.html

[7] Ibid.

[8] https://www.wikizero.com/en/Lazard

[9] https://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,790199,00.html

[10] https://www.wikizero.com/en/Andr%C3%A9_Meyer

[11] Jewish.

[12] Jewish ancestry.

[13] https://www.wikizero.com/en/Felix_Rohatyn

[14] Jewish.

[15] Jewish. “You know, I remember when I was young hearing my grandfather ask, apropos of almost anything—‘So, is it good or bad for the Jews?’”

[16] Jewish.

[17] Jewish.

[18] Jewish.

[19] Jewish.

[20] It was designed as the headquarters for what became the Seagram Company with the active interest of Phyllis Lambert, the daughter of Samuel Bronfman who acquired Joseph E. Seagram & Sons in 1928. Much of the family’s initial fortune was gained from bootlegging. The Bronfmans are Jewish and are immensely powerful and influential from their legacy of having owned and grown the Seagram Company into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise with diverse holdings. The building is owned by the Jewish Aby Rosen’s RFR Holdings.

[21] Jewish.

[22] “A top New York political consultant who went to prison for masterminding a massive state pension fund scandal has won parole, officials said Tuesday. Hank Morris, the longtime political guru to disgraced state Controller Alan Hevesi, is scheduled to be released no later than June 3 from the Hudson Correctional Facility and be under community supervision until Feb. 18, 2015. ‘I’d say that he’s very happy,’ said Morris lawyer Orlee Goldfeld. ‘It’s been a long time coming.’” https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/digraced-ex-controller-hevesi-aide-corruption-free-article-1.1325828

[23] Jewish.

[24] Jewish.

[25] https://www.wikizero.com/en/Steven_Rattner

[26] https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/11/bloomberg-enters-presidential-primary/

[27] Jewish.

[28] Jewish.

[29] Jewish.

[30] https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/fundraising/249802-graham-super-pac-raises-nearly-3m

[31] “Coningsby, or The New Generation is an English political novel by Benjamin Disraeli, published in 1844. It is rumored to be based on Nathan Mayer Rothschild. According to Disraeli’s biographer, Robert Blake, the character of Sidonia is a cross between Lionel de Rothschild and Disraeli himself.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coningsby_(novel)

 

 

Uncut Gems (2019) and Jewish Neuroticism

Uncut Gems (2019) begins with an unusual transition sequence, where we first see a badly injured Ethiopian miner and a mob of fellow Ethiopian miners (lip service is later paid to them being Ethiopian Jews) on the verge of revolting against what looks to be Chinese mine-owners (and/or “It’s all so tiresome”-styled Asian foremen). This distraction allows two rogue miners to chisel out the titular uncut gem (a rock containing multicolored opal gems), so that ultimately, and through a presumed smuggling network, an unscrupulous Jewish jeweler in NYC can sell it and other shiny things to black rappers and superstitious NBA stars with a surfeit of disposable income. As the two miners admire the rock, the camera slowly zooms into one of its luminous opals. We then ‘enter’ the inner world of the gem via gemological photomicrography, allowing us to see the sharp, colorful, and crystalline topology of minerals-inside-minerals. This inner world of the opal then seamlessly transitions into a colonoscopy camera view of the said jeweler’s bowels, with its own fleshy and odious topology.

Whether this unusual opening to a film is simply intended as a smidgen of scatological humor (a Jewish forte) or has some deeper symbolic meaning is open to interpretation, but what is certain is that Uncut Gems is very much a Jewish film, a critical reflection on modern Jewish identity and one of the most self-consciously Jewish films since the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man (2009). As such, the world of professional movie critics love this movie, perhaps because of its saturation in Jewish ingroup realities (i.e., what non-Jews are otherwise told are awful Jewish stereotypes), which might help explain the notable, and often revealing, sociological insights provided by the relatively wide ‘mind the gap’ measurements at Rotten Tomatoes:

The movie is directed by NYC-born Jewish sibling filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ronald Bronstein, a frequent collaborator with the brothers, and to whom the rabidly anti-white movie critic Richard Brody wrote a glowing profile of some years back. (A previous collaboration by the three, 2015’s Heaven Knows What, a Larry Clark-styled film about a NYC heroin addict, itself has a formidable 21-point Rotten Tomatoes gap skewed in the same direction.)

Uncut Gems centers on the manic Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), a jeweler in NYC’s seedy Diamond District (inspired by the experiences of the Safdie brothers’ own rather odd and manic father), and whose life is nothing short of a high-wire act of narrowly escaped destruction, and even death, on a near daily basis. Howard is not a good person, not in the least. He ignores his wife and kids, to the point that most of them come to despise him. He has a trashy shiksa mistress, an employee whom he lets live in his in-city apartment (a glorified man-cave far removed from the nice suburban home he shares with his estranged family). And, most importantly, Howard is a compulsive and degenerate gambler, whose downwardly spiraling habit will ultimately lead to his ruin.

Adam Sandler as Howard Ratner

Because of gambling losses, Howard owes a significant sum of money to his brother in law Arno (Eric Bogosian), a loan shark who operates with two vaguely Eastern-European looking mobster thugs. Despite his Semitic-looking features, Arno does not appear to be Jewish himself. (Bogosian is of Armenian descent). A further clue that the ill-fated Arno character is not a Jew takes place when, during a Passover celebration, Howard’s Jewish father in law Gooey (Judd Hirsh) is talking to another Jewish relative about Arno. “You know what he says to me. He comes over to me and says ‘Happy Holidays.’ Like it’s Christmas. It’s like having an intruder in your own home.” Gooey’s interlocutor replies “He’s not bothering anybody, right?” to which Gooey responds “He’s trying. Easy for you to say; he didn’t marry your daughter.”

That Gooey’s display of paranoia here, as well as his ethnocentric contempt for the goy that his daughter has married, takes place during a Passover celebration is no accident. In an interview about the film, Josh Safdien, one of the film’s co-directors, discusses how the Passover (Pesach) scene was deliberately placed in the movie for thematic reasons:

The fact that the movie takes place around Passover, the holiest of holidays, is so apt. This particular holiday, you’re supposed to derive much meaning from suffering, in a movie about a guy where your hero is enduring and suffering. … Once we landed on Passover itself, you start to mine your own personal experiences with Pesach and certain intricacies of thousands of years of tradition connected to this barbaric story.

Both the context for creating this scene, and the scene itself, provide insight into a central feature of modern Jewish consciousness, the framing of social conflict in terms of purported anti-Semitism and an all-encompassing sense of historical and ongoing persecution. “Jewish religious consciousness,” writes Kevin MacDonald in Separation and Its Discontents (1998, p. 215), “centers to a remarkable extent around the memory of persecution. Persecution is a central theme of the holidays of Passover, Hanukkah, Purim, and Yom Kippur.” In The Ordeal of Civility (1974), John Murray Cuddihy draws attention to how the Jewish sense of persecution underwent something of a narrative reboot in the nineteenth century (which radically accelerated after World War II). Cuddihy points out that whereas pre-modern Diaspora Jewry explained its Exile “as a punishment from God for its sins,” beginning in the nineteenth century, after Jews were granted civic emancipation in the predominately Christian nations of the West (so-called Emancipation), secular Jewish elites began to re-frame the Jewish Diaspora in secular terms:

Before Emancipation, Diaspora Jewry explained its Exile… as a punishment from God for its sins. After Emancipation, this theodicy, now turned outward to a new, Gentile status-audience, becomes an ideology, emphasizing Gentile persecution as the root cause of Jewish “degradation.” This ideology was so pervasive that it was shared, in one form or another, by all the ideologists of nineteenth-century Jewry: Reform Jews and Zionists, assimilationists and socialists, Bundists and Communists — all became virtuosos of ethnic suffering. … The point is that these Diaspora groups were uninterested in actual history; they were apologists, ideologists, prefabricating a past in order to answer embarrassing questions, to outfit a new identity, and to ground a claim to equal treatment in the modern world. (Cuddihy 1974, p. 177)

In a recent interview about the film, Josh Safdie expresses this prevailing, modern form of Jewish self-consciousness, one which interprets Jewish overcompensation and materialism to be functions of persecution:

I think that Howard, the character Adam Sandler plays, falls in a long tradition. I think the humor of the film is explicitly Jewish. … This concept of learning through suffering is very Old Testament. Obviously, we are Jewish, so that perspective is easy for us. But in addition to that, the early inspirations were these titanic 20th-century Jews, these overachievers, these overcompensators, these guys with interesting perspectives based on that, trying to work their way into society: the Rodney Dangerfields, the Lenny Bruces, the Don Rickles, the Al Goldsteins…

I think what you see in Howard is the long delineation of stereotypes that were forced onto us in the Middle Ages, when the church was created, when Jews were not counted toward population, and their only way in, their only way of accruing status as an individual, as a person who was considered a human being, was through material consumption. That was the only way in. … What you’re seeing in the film is a parable. What are the ill effects of overcompensation? Why?

While not plentiful, there are other insightful moments of Jewish self-consciousness in the dialogue of Uncut Gems. We find this through moments of black humor (“Jews and colon cancer. What’s up with that? I thought we were the chosen people,”) and when Howard gives NBA star Kevin Garnett (playing himself) a quasi-rationalization for his greed, and why he has not been forthcoming with Garnett, trying to maximize his profit from him vis-à-vis having his father shill to bid up the price of the titular gem at auction. Howard points to how Garnett, even when a basketball game is clearly won, will still go 100% in order to up his numbers and prove to the world his greatness. “Come on! KG,” Howard says to Garnett, “This is no different than that. This is me. All right? I’m not a fuckin’ athlete, this is my fuckin’ way. This is how I win. All right?”

In many lengthy sequences, the film is unnerving to watch, due to the cacophony of voices talking over each other with extreme intensity, and within an environment of constant crisis and chaos, like a continuous cinematic panic attack, all of which is accentuated by Darius Khondji’s cinematography and the film’s frenetic pace. In the end, this level of aural chaos (which is far more disorienting than anything done by Cassavetes, Altman, Scorsese, or Paul Thomas Anderson in their films) is a deep flaw, but one that various Jewish film critics admire for its literal familiarity (Jews are nothing if not noisy and psychologically intense; here, p. 24) and symbolic relevance.

Of the film’s noise pollution, P.J. Grisar, writing in The Forward, puts it this way: “For a Jewish viewer, it will likely often be triggering in its familiarity.” Grisar, who praises the film, first exhibits the obligatory “Is-it-good-for-the-Jews?” caution towards any depiction of Jews in an unflattering light:

As the lights go down and Adam Sandler springs to frenetic life as protagonist Howard Ratner, a New York Diamond District sleaze, you might muse as to why it took so long for someone of his boorish, magnetic ilk to get a star turn in a film. You may also wonder, there in the dark with your coreligionists, if non-Jews are really ready to encounter Ratner without viewing him as proof of certain ethnically-charged judgments. … 

Surely, film history has no dearth of stereotypically greedy, sex-crazed or slovenly Chosen, but never ones so thoroughly and meticulously rendered by and for Jews. Jewish auteurs’ resistance to examining a Ratner is understandable. There’s a justifiable fear that such characters are a shanda far di Goyim.

Ultimately, however, Grisar seems to take the position that non-Jews in the audience are sophisticated enough to see the “unflattering face of American Jewry” depicted, or, at a minimum, that Jewish audiences’ fears should be allayed in the spirit of self-criticism:

We, like any other people, have unsavory characters, who root their personal identities in our peoplehood. We should not have to make excuses for or overlook them for fear of what others might say.

One suspects that such critics would have a quite different attitude if they thought the film would make a dent in the contemporary reality of Jewish power. Indeed, films made by Jews with negatively depicted Jewish characters are really a marker of Jewish power. The strongly identified Jews who make these films would be loath to actually damage to Jewish interests.

In a similar vein, Noah Kulwin, in a review of the film titled “In Praise of the Difficult Jew”, goes so far as to say:

Ratner is the latest in a long line of sympathetic Jewish pervs and idiots, men whose fundamentally crude nature can overpower nearly all other parts of their personality. It’s a key part of what makes Adam Sandler so well-suited to the role, given the gross-out nature of his oeuvre, and his portrayal revives a variety of Jewish stereotype that’s gotten, to my mind, an excessively bad rap. …

Not every Jew depicted in art has to be a saint, or even attempt to be one, and the vague possibility of stimulating a few genuine antisemites has never been a good reason for Jewish artists to stop making good art.

Gabe Friedman, in his review for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, notes how the film “deeply explores modern Jewish identity.” while in Slate, Heather Schwedel refers to Uncut Gems as an “extremely Jewish film.” The aforementioned Richard Brody calls the film a “brilliant masterstroke”, praising the Safdies for having “long specialized in drama kings and queens, in protagonists who knock their lives out of joint and into action with breathless, reckless, perpetual cycles of frenzied, self-imposed challenges and daily dangers… The Safdie brothers have always been artists of chaos.” Like other Jewish reviewers of the film, Brody describes Uncut Gems as “a very Jewish movie,” particularly in the way it is “tonally Jewish.” Brody, too, characterizes Jewish materialism and deception, as well as Jewish paranoia and internalized outsider-ness, as functions of historical Gentile persecution and ensuing Diaspora:

The hustle knows no nationality, but the Forty-seventh Street trade in precious stones reminds me of the old joke about why there are so many great Jewish violinists: because when you’re being chased out of town by the Cossacks, it’s harder to carry a piano. Portable wealth defined by no one currency corresponds to the longtime demands of rushed migration, as well as the inner state of exile and outsiderhood that’s part of the Jewish heritage (indeed, in the Passover story). The panic and the paranoia that drive Howard have an underlying historical undercurrent, a weird sense of belonging that he finds in the uncertainty, the instability, the terror, the exclusion that he endures—even if he largely brought it on himself.

***

It should be said that Sandler is terrific in the lead role. While I’m not necessarily a fan of all or even most of his movies, I’ve always found him to be comedically, musically (“The Chanukah Song”; “Lunch Lady Land”), and dramatically talented, quite humble in interviews, and possessing a ‘relatable’ quality rare in Hollywood. (It was perhaps fitting that he starred in a remake of Frank Capra’s 1936 film Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, which starred everyman Gary Cooper, as Mr. Deeds in 2002). Sandler has proven himself capable and reliable, whether in his early goofball comedies, to his dramatic turns in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love (2002) and Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (2017), to throwaway but fun movies like Murder Mystery (2019). (It’s worth noting that Sandler graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts before he ever entered the world of stand-up comedy.)

Ultimately, however, Uncut Gems fails due to a series of fundamental flaws. The script feels incomplete. Various characters are shown, in passing, vocalizing digressive and inconsequential asides. There is the pat and violent ending, a now-standard trope in post-Scorsesean cinema. (Note: Martin Scorsese is a co-producer of the film.) There is the prevailing chaos in dialogue and miscellaneous diegetic sound. There is the agonizing weight of profanity used throughout the film (which apparently has the seventh most F-bombs in movie history). But the most serious and critical flaw is that Howard Ratner is not a character we can feel sorry for, root for, or even care about. He displays no dignity and his narcissism is boundless. The film’s defenders will likely offer some form of postmodern argument that this is deliberate and provocative, that standard, three-act character arcs, especially when this arc involves redemption or growth, are horribly passé, etc. But when the audience doesn’t care about a movie’s protagonist in any substantive way, that movie will be forgotten in time.

The phenomenon of Jewish neuroticism, while often joked about in Jewish humor (e.g., Woody Allen, Larry David) or elaborated upon in Jewish literature (e.g., Philip Roth), is, like other Jewish “stereotypes” typically a subject that non-Jews are not allowed to broach, else they be branded anti-Semites. However, many Jews themselves accept the basic premises of a Jewish predisposition for mental illness and the idea of a “psychological Jewishness.” (As a personality trait, neuroticism is likely half or more attributable to genetics).

For the Dissident Right, the value of watching Uncut Gems may lie in how the film serves as a symbolic reflection of Jewish neuroticism. Through devices of chaotic direction and frantic delivery, the stereotypes of Jewish intensity, overcompensation, obnoxiousness, money obsession, paranoia, and continuous persecution complex are on full display, as is that world-weary form of Jewish pessimism which, in this case, seems to have its ultimate expression in the lead character’s suicidal death wish.

The author writes at Logical Meme and @Logicalmeme.