Against Mishima: Sex, Death and Optics in the Dissident Right

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“One learns from Confessions of a Mask how Mishima put “Circassians” (white boys) to the sword by the dozen in his dreams.”
Henry Scott Stokes, The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima

“Mishima is more a figure of parody than a force of politics.”
Alan Tansman, The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism 

I read with great interest Guillaume Durocher’s recent Unz Review article on Yukio Mishima’s commentary on the Hagakure, the eighteenth-century guide to Bushido, or Japanese warrior ethics. I rate Durocher’s work very highly, and as someone who once shared his interest in Mishima, and Japanese culture more generally, I expected the piece to be well-informed, insightful and provocative. Much as I was intrigued by Durocher’s piece, I think the Dissident Right would benefit from an alternative view of Mishima, and perhaps also the subject of Japanese culture in the context of European rightist sensibilities, especially when right-wing treatments of Mishima other than Durocher’s (which is suitably measured in the assessment of Mishima’s fiction) tend towards hagiography. In the following essay, I offer not necessarily a rebuttal or rebuke of Durocher, but an alternative lens through which to view the Japanese author, his life, and politics. Since a movement’s choice of heroes can have an impact on its spirit and ethos, the following should be considered an attempt at spiritual ophthalmology, or the bringing of certain perspectives into clearer focus. This clearer focus, I argue, can only lead to the conclusion that Mishima was a profoundly unhealthy and inorganic individual who should be regarded as anathema to European nationalist thought.

My first introduction to Yukio Mishima came several years ago in the form of a recording of a 2011 lecture delivered in London, by the late Jonathan Bowden, at the 10th New Right meeting. Bowden was an exceptional orator, yet to find an equal in the current crop of dissident right leaders. In fact, as we move further and further into patterns of YouTube-based “content producing” I fear that oratory of Bowden’s type may become an increasingly rare art. One of Bowden’s great strengths as a speaker was the ability to take dense topics and biographical overviews and reduce them to an hour or so of dynamic, entertaining, and extremely accessible commentary. Those in the audience, or listening in other forms, found it impossible for their attention to wander. A downside to Bowden’s oratory was that it didn’t translate quite as well onto paper, often following Bowden’s stream of consciousness rather than more logical and structured progression, with the result that one laments that Bowden didn’t focus also on a more formal type of scholarship that would surely have constituted a monumental and lasting bequest to the movement he devoted so much to. As it stands, recovering Bowden’s legacy has for the most part been the task of tracking down lost recordings of his speeches, a task that Counter-Currents have admirably taken the lead in.

Prior to listening to Bowden on Mishima, I had already established an interest in Japanese history and culture. I trained for several years in jiu-jitsu, spent a great deal of time in my early 20s reading the works of D. T. Suzuki and Shunryu Suzuki on Zen Buddhism (the former also had some interesting and sympathetic things to say on National Socialism and anti-Semitism), and Brian Victoria’s 1997 Zen at War remains one of the most interesting works on the history of religion and warfare I’ve yet had the pleasure to read. Somehow, however, Mishima escaped my attention until Bowden’s lecture, which really offered only the most raw and basic of introductions to the man. Bowden presented Mishima as a rightist thinker but never quite explained why. He indicated that Mishima had some relevance for the European right but couldn’t articulate how. The lecture only clumsily situated Mishima within near-contemporary Japanese culture, and Bowden himself evinced equivocation and incomprehension on the reasons why Mishima undertook his now infamous suicidal final action. Who was Mishima? Why was he relevant? In a bid to follow up these loose ends, and trusting Bowden that the effort would be worthwhile, I spent around a year making my way through Mishima’s fiction, biographies, scholarship, and other forms of commentary on Mishima’s life and death. The result of my research was a deluge of notes, many of which will now make their way into this article, and profound disappointment that such a figure should ever have been promoted in our circles.

Explaining how and why Mishima came to be promoted in corners of the European Right requires that one confront what could be termed “the Mishima Myth,” or the vague and propagandized outlines of what constitutes Yukio Mishima’s biography and presumed ideology. The Mishima Myth runs something like this:

Yukio Mishima was a gifted and prolific Japanese author and playwright who became profoundly disillusioned with the political and spiritual trajectory of modern Japan; influenced by Samurai tradition and Western thought, especially the philosophy of Nietzsche, he embarked on a program of radical self-improvement; he took up bodybuilding and formed his own 100-strong private army — the Shield Society; he led this army in an attempted coup at a military base, taking a very senior officer hostage, and demanded that all troops follow him in rejecting the post-war constitution and supporting the return of the Emperor to his pre-war status as deity and supreme leader; finally, rejected and ridiculed by the troops, he took his life via seppuku, ritual disembowelment in the tradition of the Samurai.

Occasionally, for added effect, rightist promoters of Mishima will add that he wrote a 1968 play titled My Friend Hitler, which, despite the provocative title, is politically middling, and has been interpreted as anti-fascist as often as it has been as fascist. Taken together, one supposes that the relevant factors here are that Mishima was an authoritarian, monarchist “Man of Action” who seized control of his own life and attempted to divert his nation away from empty consumerism (cue applause). Thus, in the Mishima Myth, rather than focusing on his actual writings on fascism and politics (which are in any event very few in number), Mishima’s ideology is read from selected chapters of his life, especially his final actions. Mishima becomes a man of the right because he was Mishima, because of what he did. This, so the narrative goes, is why he should be relevant to us.

A critique of the Mishima Myth is therefore necessarily ad hominem, since there is a glaring absence of ideas to argue against and since the myth is merely a composite of slices of edited and heavily sanitized biography. Despite an abundance of English-language biographies, rightist promoters of Mishima rarely engage in serious exploration of Mishima’s life, preferring to focus on hagiographic presentations of selected episodes, especially their interpretation of the dramatic death. This should be the first cause of caution, and it was certainly mine. The primary reason for this evasion, as I was to find out, is profound embarrassment, since Mishima’s life is thin on right-wing politics, or for that matter politics of any description, and rather heavy on homosexual sadomasochism (which is far from the only questionable aspect of Mishima-ism). But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s start at the beginning.

Yukio Mishima was born Kimitake Hiraoka on January 14 1925, into an upper middle-class family. One of the first things that struck me about Mishima’s life, and especially his childhood, is that it has attracted swathes of psychoanalysts,[1] the reason being that he is an important and visible example of what these writers perceive to be the link between oppressive and abusive childhoods, latent homosexuality, sadism, masochism, and authoritarian and fascist politics. Indeed, if one makes the argument that Mishima was in fact a fascist, then one begins to consent to some of the central theses of the Frankfurt School. Mishima certainly had a strange and psychologically distorting childhood, and I concur with Sadanobu Ushijima’s conclusion that it resulted in Mishima suffering most of his life from a personality disorder involving “recurrent episodes of depression with severe suicidal preoccupation.”[2]

According to Henry Scott Stokes, in my opinion Mishima’s best biographer as well as being the only Westerner invited to his funeral, almost as soon as Mishima was born his grandmother (Natsuko) “resolved to take personal responsibility for his upbringing and virtually kidnapped the little boy from his mother,” raising the child almost entirely in her sickroom.[3] Natsuko brought up Mishima “as a little girl, not as a boy,” and he was forced to stay inside, was prohibited with playing with most of his environment, and was told to be almost completely silent due to his grandmother’s complaints of constant head pain.[4] After some years, his mother was permitted to take him outside, but only when there was no wind.[5] There is some suggestion that he was beaten, or otherwise severely psychologically abused, with the result that he suffered a sequence of psychosomatic illnesses involving the retention of urine. There is also some suggestion of sexual abuse or “obscene” treatment at the hands of his grandmother’s nurse. Quasi-incestuous closeness in indicated by his later description of his grandmother as a “true-love sweetheart”, and on his death his mother described him as her “lover.”[6] Mishima was generally regarded by those around him as “an unusually delicate child.”[7]

In keeping with scientific studies strongly suggesting that dressing, or otherwise treating, young boys as girls can induce homosexuality,[8] and studies showing that homosexuals are more likely than the sexually normal to be predisposed to “brutal” violence[9] (to say nothing of what anecdotally appears to be a disproportionate preponderance of homosexual serial killers and cannibals), Mishima would later write in his semi-autobiographical Confessions of a Mask (1949) that he had homosexual fantasies from a young age and that many of these were sadistic in nature. At this point I should pause and concede that the British “anti-Fascist” collective operating as Hope Not Hate have described me as perhaps the most “homophobic” “far right commentator” in the Dissident Right, as well as simplifying my perspective as framing “homosexuality and modern conceptions of gender as socially constructed as a symptom of societal decay, and LGBT+ rights as a tool of a Jewish conspiracy to undermine white society. This vein of thinking sometimes even results in open calls for the expulsion or violent eradication of LGBT+ people.”

This may or may not be an entirely accurate representation of my views, but the point I want to make here is that my critique of Mishima isn’t based on his homosexuality qua homosexuality, since the argument could be made by some that a homosexual fascist is still a fascist (though such arguments could be easily problematized and I will later critique his “fascism” in and of itself). Piven remarks that there has long been a “Mishima cult” in France (perhaps Durocher can confirm), adding “though his following outside Japan consists largely of gay populations who champion him.”[10] My argument against the Mishima myth is mainly that if key aspects of his biography, including the death, are linked significantly more to his sexuality than his politics, then this is grounds to reconsider the worth of promoting such a figure, already non-White and with no significant Western cultural impact, within the Dissident Right.

Mishima was “eternally excluded from the lives of ordinary men and women,” and developed early fantasies about taxi drivers, bartenders, but especially soldiers.[11] He was particularly fixated on the idea of dying soldiers and death generally, and “the violent or excruciatingly painful death of a handsome youth was to be a theme of many of his novels.”[12] In childhood, Mishima enjoyed playing dead, and he had eroticized notions of suicide from early adolescence. In his own words, he had a “compulsion toward suicide, that subtle and secret impulse.”[13] His first erotic experience appears to have been masturbating to a print of Guido Reni’s St. Sebastian, which depicts the semi-nude and bleeding saint bound to a tree and impaled with arrows. Mishima would later explain that he “delighted in all forms of capital punishment and all implements of execution so long as they provided a spectacle of outpouring blood.”[14] Stokes comments that “In Mishima’s aesthetic, blood was ultimately erotic.” Mishima fantasized about wounded, dying soldiers, imagining “I would kiss the lips of those who had fallen to the ground and were still moving spasmodically.”[15] He day-dreamed about execution devices studded with daggers, designed to shred the bodies of young men, and had a “fantasy of cannibalism” in which he fed on an athletic youth who had been “stunned, stripped, and pinned naked on a vast plate.”[16] Jerry Piven observes that Mishima’s fiction is replete with “innumerable fantasies of raping and killing beautiful young boys, of scenes of masturbating to images of slain men, of ceaseless loathing for despicable women.”[17]

St. Sebastian by Guido Reni (c. 1625)

In Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima (1994), Roy Starrs comments:

Few writers since the Marquis de Sade himself have made a more public and provocative “performance” of their “perverse” sexuality. … He found himself aroused by pictures not of naked women but of naked men, preferably in torment. Again he finds that homosexual pleasure is inextricably linked, for him, with sadistic pleasure, and he indulges in the most outrageous fantasies of managing a “murder theatre” in which muscular young men are slowly tortured to death for his amusement.[18]

Mishima read both Freud and the works of the Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, and concurred with the latter (also a homosexual and transvestite) that pictures of the dying St. Sebastian were a favorite among homosexuals, with Mishima himself arguing that “the homosexual and sadistic urges are inextricably linked.”[19] Far from the image of the austere Samurai, as he approached middle age the increasingly bipolar Mishima was known to dance in gay bars with a 17-year-old drag queen,[20] and once flew to New York solely for the purpose of finding a White man who would be sexually “rough” with him. His former lovers recall how he “liked to pretend he was committing seppuku,” making them watch, before asking them to stand over him with a sword as if about to behead him. He would pull out a red cloth, that he would pull across his abdomen explaining this was his “blood and guts.”[21] Mishima once described himself as “strangely pathetic.”[22] Durocher may well be correct in his review of Mishima on the Hagakure that “Above all, Mishima would have men live full, worthy, and noble lives,” but readers should by now be aware of why I felt an alternative lens needed to be introduced to our perspective.

A theory thus presents itself that Mishima’s carefully orchestrated death was a piece of homosexual sadomasochist theatre rather than anything political, let alone fascistic or in the tradition of the Samurai. In order to parse this question more fully, it’s necessary to examine Mishima’s politics and spirituality, or what can at least be discerned in that direction.

One of the remarkable things about Mishima is that he seems hardly political at all. His fiction, denounced by early critics of all political hues as full of “evil narcissism” possessing “no reality,” is almost entirely devoid of ideology. (Durocher appropriately mentions how he tried to, and wanted to, like Mishima’s novels but couldn’t.) As such, Mishima is a pale shadow of ultra-nationalist literary contemporaries like Shūmei Ōkawa, Hideo Kobayashi, and Yasuda Yojūrō. Confessions of a Mask, his most autobiographical text and a style of novel (shishosetsu) that Kobayashi especially loathed as ‘popular’, “had nothing to say in it about political events that had influenced his life. … He was regarded as apolitical by his contemporaries.”[23] He was neither politically involved nor possessed of any real depth of feeling on political matters until the 1960s, when he was around 40 and becoming increasingly pessimistic and depressed — mainly because he was ageing and was disgusted and horrified by old age.[24] In his commentary on the Hagakure, Mishima would inflect his own anxieties about ageing and his own predilection for youthful suicide fantasies by telling his readers they should live for the moment and be content with a short life, and one gets the sense of personal inflections again when he informed his readers that “homosexual love goes very well with the Way of the Warrior.”[25] Otomo remarks that Mishima’s relationship to the Hagakure was simply peculiar and largely artificial, pointing to better, more authentic, examples of Bushido ethics and exploits such as Budoshoshinshu and the Kōyō Gunkan, and remarking on the Hagakure:

Ironically enough, the text is evidence of the absence of the code. It is an empty style that can be borrowed by anyone at any time of history and it no longer signifies a core culture of an Oriental entity called Japan. In fact, it has never signified as such except in one man’s nostalgia.[26]

In reality, and despite his self-presentation as the embodiment of the Hagakure, Mishima was strangely un-Japanese, something remarked upon by Stokes (“he was remarkably un-Japanese”)[27], who met him several times, and as evidenced in various aspects of Mishima’s life. Ryoko Otomo observes that, in a departure from the Zen Buddhism of the Samurai, Mishima, “was an affirmed atheist.”[28] What Mishima did in fact see in Zen and the Hagakure, so far as can be determined from his fiction and statements to journalists, was a dark and profound nihilism — something that any Zen master, including D. T. Suzuki who in one of his seminal texts has a chapter titled “Zen is not Nihilistic”, would argue is anathema to authentic Zen conceptions of “the Void.” When he became financially successful, Mishima set about building a large, Western-style, “anti-Zen” house, and Zen masters he associated with later remarked Mishima made “no profound study of philosophy.”[29] Mishima knew nothing of nature, being a decadent urbanite, and was unlike many Japanese in being ignorant of the most basic botany. Once, when accompanying a friend in the countryside, he was shocked and confused at the noise of frogs.[30] He once told reporters that his average day was spent with gym activity followed by lounging around a house regarded by his neighbors, and even its architect, as “gaudy,” “in jeans and an aloha shirt.”

Mishima went through with a hasty marriage of convenience to satisfy his dying mother, fathering two children that, in the style of the worst ghetto-dwellers, he was largely absent from. In fact, in several of his novels, especially Forbidden Colors which is replete with what Stokes calls “morbid sexuality,” he expresses contempt for children, families, and the normal, non-homosexual familial structure that is the backbone and future of all societies and civilizations:

Go to a theater, go to a coffeehouse, go to the zoo, go to an amusement park, go to town, go out to the suburbs even; everywhere the principle of majority rule is lording about in pride. Old couples, middle-aged couples, young couples, lovers, families, children, children, children, children, children and, to top it off, those blasted baby carriages—all of these things in procession, a cheering, advancing tide.

By contrast, as a homosexual, Mishima nurtured fantasies of himself as a member of an elitist minority.

Ideologically, Mishima was clumsy and confused at best. He believed that fascism and Freudian psychology were ideologically related,[31] and believed in resurrecting a Japanese imperialism that would make room for parliamentary democracy.[32] He insisted, meanwhile, that “fascism will be incompatible with the imperial system.” Moreover, he argued that Japanese right-wingers “did not have to have a systematised worldview,” perhaps because he had none himself, and that they “nevertheless have nothing to do with European fascism.”[33] By the early 1960s, Mishima was a writer of decadent romantic fiction so politically weak, and tendentiously left-wing, that he was targeted with death threats by right-wing paramilitaries.[34] Eventually, some time in the late 1960s and despite having no real depth of feeling for Shinto religion, Mishima decided that it would be a good idea if the Emperor was returned to his pre-war status as a deity, prompting Sir John Pilcher, British Ambassador to Japan to declare Mishima’s fantasy of placing himself “in any relationship to the Emperor” as “sheer foolishness.”[35] Mishima, of course, never explored the Emperor’s role in World War II in any depth, and his chief fixation appears solely to have been the decision of the Emperor to accede to Allied demands and “become human.” Although Mishima became increasingly vocal on this issue, and even started taking financial donations from conservative politicians to establish a small paramilitary grouping consisting of lovers and fans, “he never defined his positions clearly,” and was so poor at articulating his ideas to troops during his coup attempt that he was simply laughed at by gathered soldiers.[36] Whether or not Mishima was fully sincere is, of course, another matter, though his suicidal coup attempt came very shortly after literary career declined so rapidly that friends wrote to him “telling him that suicide would be the only solution.”[37] Suicide in Japanese culture is of course also crucial to this discussion and will be explored below.

Mishima’s purported militarism is worthy of some attention. I come from a military family, and have many friends in the military. One of the things that’s always irritated and amused me is the difference between how actual service personnel  discuss themes such as “being a warrior” or combat more generally in comparison to military fantasists. Among the former, there always exists a wry, sober, even bittersweet outlook. Among the latter, one is apt to find much talk of glory and conquest, but little action. Mishima was surely a military fantasist, who even by his own admission had a sexual fetish for the white gloves worn with the Japanese uniform,[38] and lied during his own army medical exam during the war in an effort to avoid military service: “Why had I looked so frank as I lied to the army doctor? Why had I said that I’d been having a slight fever for half a year, that my shoulder was painfully stiff, that I spit blood, and that even last night I had been soaked by a night sweat? … Why had I run so when I was through the barracks gate?”[39]

When the bombs fell during the war, Mishima recalled, “that same me would run for the air-raid shelters faster than anyone.”[40] Stokes suitably comments that “had he served in the army, even for a short while, his view of life in the ranks would have been less romantic, later in life,” but that instead “Mishima stayed home with his family, reading No plays, the dramas of Chikamatsu, the mysterious tales of Kyoka Izumi and Akinari Ueda, even the Kojiki and its ancient myths.”[41] When he eventually formed his own paramilitary organisation, he dressed them in “opéra bouffe uniforms which incited the ridicule of the press,” and Starrs comments: “He was no more a true ‘samurai’ than he was a true policeman or airforce pilot, in whose garb he also had himself photographed. The ‘samurai’ image was simply one of Mishima’s favourite masks — and also one of his most transparent.”[42]

One could add speculations that Mishima’s military fantasies were an extension of his sexual fixations, including a possible attempt to simply gain power over a large number of athletic young men. But this would be laboring an all-too-obvious point. More soberly, one could merely point to the ridiculous notion of a military coup being led by a bipolar, draft-dodging shut-in (Hikikomori) who, when confronted during the action itself, witnessed the beginning and end of his fighting career when he hacked frantically at a handful of unarmed men with an antique sword. The Jewish academic and Japan scholar Alan Tansman might well be a sexual pervert himself, but it’s difficult to disagree with his assertion that “Mishima is more a figure of parody than a force of politics,”[43] and attempts to link Mishima with our worldview only provide further grist for the Jewish mill.

Since Mishima’s writings and actions are politically opaque at best, it is little wonder that most attention from his propagandists has focused on the dramatic and quasi-traditional method of suicide, which is often portrayed as representing the utmost in honor, masculine courage etc. Such accounts, of course, normally omit the fact Mishima rehearsed his suicide for decades in the form of gay sex games, and was essentially a gore fetishist. A broader problem exists, however, in the nature of Western appraisal of seppuku, and suicide in Japanese culture more generally. The most enlightening piece of work I’ve read in this sphere has been that of the late Toyomasa Fuse (1931–2019), Professor Emeritus at York University and probably the world’s leading expert on suicide among the Japanese. In Suicide and Culture in Japan: A Study of Seppuku as an Institutionalized Form of Suicide, Fuse explains that suicide in Japan essentially originates from a servile position within a highly anxious and neurotic society. Needless to say, this is far from healthy and praiseworthy behavior. He describes seppuku as a form of “altruistic suicide” and an expression of “role narcissism,” it being a

Response to a continued need for social recognition resulting from narcissistic preoccupation with the self in respect to status and role. … Many Japanese tend to become over-involved with their social role, which has become cathected by them as the ultimate meaning in life. … Shame and chagrin are so extreme among the Japanese, especially in a perceived threat to loss of social status, that the individual cannot contemplate life henceforth.[44]

There is little question that seppuku had a place among the samurai, but the actual nature of its practice over time was complex and was successively reinterpreted, alternating between a voluntary way of recovering honor, and a form of capital punishment (peasants, meanwhile, were simply boiled alive). It also alternated in form, involving varying types of cut to the belly, and sometimes involving no cut to the abdomen at all — the individual would ceremonially reach for a knife before being quickly beheaded. Starrs observes that while misguided Westerners have “naively accepted” Mishima’s seppuku as being “in the best samurai tradition,”[45] it was simply Mishima’s own variation on a theme — the same theme that witnessed hundreds of servile Japanese slit their bellies in front of the imperial palace at the end of the war because of their embarrassment at failing the Emperor. Again, we must question, at a time when we are trying to break free from high levels of social concern and shaming in Europe, whether it is healthy or helpful to praise practices originating in pathologically shame-centered cultures.

As Fuse notes, the traditional European response to seppuku has been disgust, not solely at the physical act itself but because of the servile psychological and sociological soil from which it originates. Because of the difference in mentalities, there is a complication in how concepts such as honor and bravery translate in this particular instance. Seppuku certainly appears to be easier to undertake for a Japanese than for a European. Mishima himself, to give the devil his due, didn’t equivocate in his pursuit of the most brutal methodology. His own wound was found to be five inches across and, in places, two inches deep.[46] Those knowledegable enough in older times would make a cut so as to cut a renal or aortic vein, leading to such catastrophic blood loss that death would be almost instantaneous. Mishima doesn’t appear to have had such knowledge, spilling his intestines out in agony while three successive attempts (by a subordinate and rumored lover) were made to behead him, one opening up a massive wound on his back instead.

Conclusion

The facts surveyed here surely point out the inadequacies of the Mishima Myth as presented in corners of the European Right. I listened again to Bowden’s lecture just yesterday, and laughed out loud at Bowden’s brief gloss of Mishima’s catastrophic childhood (“he was a slightly effeminate child”). Unfortunately, because Bowden spoke more often than he compiled serious research, it’s impossible to determine if Bowden was a conscious promoter of Mishima propaganda, or an earnest but ill-informed believer in the Mishima Myth. I simply don’t know the extent of Bowden’s reading in the matter. Like Durocher, I’ve also watched Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, though I found it to be a cheesy, dated, and rather manipulative hagiography rather than a masterpiece. Durocher comments “You’re either the kind of boy who is challenged, energized, and inspired by this sort of film, or perhaps you’re not a boy,” which I can only regard as laden with irony given that the film’s subject was raised as a girl and once remarked, on being expected to act like a boy: “the reluctant masquerade had begun.”[47] Schrader’s documentary is also highly sanitized; according to Stokes this is due to the tight control that Mishima’s widow and extended family had over the production, and their concern about potential for embarrassment.[48] One small scene showing Mishima in a gay bar was enough for the family to block distribution in Japan, and they even invested money in paying Takeshi Muramatsu to write a 500-page biography, the central proposition of which was to try to convince the Japanese public that Mishima was heterosexual and had merely spent his life, to quote Stokes, “posing as a sodomite.” Rather predictably, the text failed to convince anyone, though it probably salved the family’s pride a little to know that it was out there.

We come back to the central questions of how and why Yukio Mishima should be relevant to us. No answers can be found in the life, politics and actions of a figure not only non-European and profoundly un-fascistic, but who was also strangely un-Japanese. I contend that there is simply nothing genuine to learn from him, and few people who have written in support of Mishima can point to anything tangible beyond the amorphous outlines of the Mishima Myth and a film heavy on style and low on authenticity. There is no single piece of text, no treatise, and no piece of authenticity beyond a final, radically un-European and sadomasochistically-inspired act of self-destruction and death-embracing nihilism. Mishima’s monarchism was servile and parodic, his militarism homoerotic, disingenuous and ludicrous, and his death-as-political-statement was psychosexual and ultimately lacking in logic. Otomo is probably correct in viewing the coup attempt more as a sexually inspired method of “politicising art rather than expressing a belief in ultra-nationalism.”[49]

The question thus arises as to whether associating ourselves with such a figure, surely a clownish homoerotic wignat in today’s vernacular, brings more positives or negatives, both within the Dissident Right and within broader considerations of “optics” or public image. In particular, we should question whether we want to place our politics in a nexus that involves, to borrow the terminology of the Japan scholar Susan Napier, “the interrelationship between homosexuality, politics, and the peculiar form of violence-prone psychosexual nihilism from which Mishima suffered.”[50] I’d argue in the negative.

Members of the Dissident Right with an interest in Japanese culture are encouraged to take up one or more of the martial arts, to look into aspects of Zen, or to review the works of some of the other twentieth-century Japanese authors mentioned here. Such endeavors will bear better fruit. Above all, however, there is no comparison with spending time researching the lives of one’s own co-ethnic heroes and one’s own culture. As Europeans, we are so spoiled for choice we needn’t waste time with the rejected, outcast, and badly damaged members of other groups.

[1] See, for example, Abel, T. (1978). Yukio Mishima: A psychoanalytic interpretation. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 6(3), 403–424; Piven, J. (2001). Mimetic Sadism in the Fiction of Yukio Mishima. Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 8, 69-89; McPherson, D.E. (1986). A Personal Myth—Yukio Mishima: The Samurai Narcissus. Psychoanalytical Review, 73C(3):361-378; Jerry Piven (2001). Phallic Narcissism, Anal Sadism, And Oral Discord: The Case Of Yukio Mishima, Part I. The Psychoanalytic Review: Vol. 88, No. 6, pp. 771-791; Piven, J. S. (2004). The madness and perversion of Yukio Mishima. Praeger Publishers/Greenwood Publishing Group; Cornyetz, N., & Vincent, J. K. (Eds.). (2010). Perversion and modern Japan: psychoanalysis, literature, culture. Routledge.

[2] Ushijima, S. (1987), The Narcissism and Death of Yukio Mishima –From the Object Relational Point of View–. Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 41: 619-628.

[3] H. S. Stokes The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (Cooper Square Publishers; 1st Cooper Square Press Ed edition, 2000), 40.

[4] Ibid., 41.

[5] Ibid., 47.

[6] Ibid., 47.

[7] Ibid., 42.

[8] John Money, Anthony J. Russo, Homosexual Outcome of Discordant Gender Identity/Role in Childhood: Longitudinal Follow-Up, Journal of Pediatric Psychology, Volume 4, Issue 1, March 1979, Pages 29–41.

[9] Mize, Krystal & Shackelford, Todd K., Intimate Partner Homicide Methods in Heterosexual, Gay, and Lesbian Relationships Violence and Victims, 23:1.

[10] J. Piven The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima (Westport: Prager, 2004), 2.

[11] Stokes, 43, 44.

[12] Ibid., 44.

[13] Ibid., 58.

[14] Ibid., 61.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] J. Piven The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima (Westport: Prager, 2004), 3.

[18] R. Starrs Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), 35.

[19] R. Starrs (2009) A Devil of a Job, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 14:3, 85-99, 85 & 87.

[20] Stokes, 103 & 136.

[21] Starrs, A Devil of a Job, 89.

[22] Stokes, 91.

[23] Ibid., 95.

[24] Ibid., 95 & 102.

[25] Ibid., 266.

[26] Ryoko Otomo, The Way of the Samurai: Ghost Dog, Mishima, and Modernity’s Other, Japanese Studies 21 (1), 31-43, 41.

[27] Stokes., 5.

[28] Otomo, 40.

[29] Stokes, 278.

[30] Ibid., 110.

[31] Starrs, Deadly Dialectics, 24.

[32] Otomo, 39.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Stokes., 295.

[35] Ibid., 277.

[36] Ibid., 273.

[37] Ibid., 281.

[38] Ibid., 57.

[39] Ibid., 81.

[40] Ibid., 76.

[41] Ibid., 81.

[42] Starrs, Deadly Dialectics, 7.

[43] Tansman, A. (2009). The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism. University of California Press, 257.

[44] Fusé, T. Suicide and Culture in Japan: A Study of Seppuku as an Institutionalized Form of Suicide Social Psychiatry (1980) 15: 57, 61.

[45] Starrs, Deadly Dialectics, 6.

[46] Stokes, 34.

[47]Ibid., 48.

[48] Ibid., 267.

[49] Otomo, 40.

[50] Napier, S. (1995). Reviewed Work: Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima by Roy Starrs  Monumenta Nipponica, 50(1), 128-130.

Predators and Propaganda: Minority Worship from Low Crime to High Politics

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A noble Black lawyer prosecutes an evil White sex-beast, who receives 33 life-sentences for his cowardly and despicable crimes against eleven innocent women and children. What a potent and effective way to smash the vile racist stereotype that Blacks are prone to violence and rape! And what a heart-warming symbol of Brave New Britain, where non-Whites are using their higher intelligence and morality to topple millennia of White supremacist barbarism.

Noble Black vs White Barbarian: Tetteh Turkson and Joseph McCann

Yes, Tetteh Turkson, the noble Black lawyer, is the future. Joseph McCann, the evil White sex-beast, is the past. Or at least that’s what the neo-Bolshevik Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) wanted to proclaim when it chose Turkson, “a senior crown prosecutor at the London North office” of the CPS, to prosecute McCann. But in fact the story of the evil White sex-beast isn’t what the CPS and other anti-White leftists would like it to be. The genuinely horrific crimes of Joseph McCann are further proof that pro-White racism is right and anti-White leftism is wrong.

A newspaper that censors reality

So are the genuinely horrific crimes of the White serial killers Fred West and Levi Bellfield. This is because McCann, West and Bellfield aren’t actually “White” in the sense used by the Occidental Observer. These three men don’t belong to the White race whose interests and achievements the Occidental Observer seeks to defend and explain. They’re genetically distinct and are the products of a different evolutionary history. Not that you get any hint of this when you read about McCann’s crimes in leftist propaganda-outlets like the BBC and Guardian:

Joseph McCann, who has been convicted of a horrific series of rapes and kidnappings against 11 women and children, was freed in error to commit his crimes after authorities failed to realise he should have been in jail for a previous violent offence. …

He raped eight victims, including an 11-year-old boy and a 71-year-old woman, during a fortnight-long rampage earlier this year that stretched from London to Cheshire. The boy aged 11 and his sister were attacked in front of each other in their own home. …

The trial produced some of the most harrowing evidence heard in a British court in recent times. Jurors and members of the court were frequently upset by the distressing nature of the evidence, with the judge ending one day’s hearing early after a tape was played of a 999 call by a 17-year-old girl who was attacked in front of her brother. …

McCann had an extensive criminal history. In 2008, he was convicted of aggravated burglary after breaking into the house of an 85-year-old man and threatening him with a knife, demanding money. He received an IPP sentence with a minimum tariff of two and a half years. The Parole Board decided he was safe to release in March 2017, on a 10-year licence. In August 2017, he was arrested for burglary and theft, and sentenced to three and a half years in prison. The halfway point of his sentence was reached in February 2019, and he was released automatically. (Joseph McCann guilty of horrific rapes after being freed by mistake, The Guardian, 6th December 2019)

There are some very interesting things missing from the Guardian’s reports about McCann’s crimes. To find them, you’ll have to go downmarket to bigoted and racist newspapers despised by the highly intelligent and educated rationalists who read the Guardian. The despicable Daily Mail reported that McCann “abducted a 21-year-old at knifepoint as she walked home from a nightclub and raped the mother of one on her own bed. Afterwards McCann told her rape is ‘what we do in the traveller community’.” And the despicable Sun reported that “Sick Joseph McCann, 34, wore wigs, told victims he loved them and claimed they were part of a ‘gypsy initiation ritual’ as he carried out a horrific rape spree across the UK.”

The narcissism and self-regard of leftists

Fancy that! The Guardian claims to be passionately committed to giving oppressed minority communities like Travellers and Gypsies “a voice,” but it failed to give a voice to Joseph McCann when he spoke on behalf of these fascinating communities and explained their vibrant culture to bigoted outsiders. In other words, the Guardian censored the story and concealed highly relevant facts about McCann from its readers. And by the Guardian’s own standards, they are certainly facts, not merely allegations, because McCann’s words were reported by his female victims and the Guardian is passionately committed to “believing women” and fighting “rape culture.”

In fact, of course, the Guardian is passionately committed to feeding the narcissism and self-regard of its reporters and readers. And that means not just censorship and concealment of the truth, but actually assisting the growth of rape culture and the immunity of rapists. When the Labour MP Ann Cryer was trying to fight the “large-scale paedophile abuse” being committed by non-White Muslims in her Yorkshire constituency, she naturally sought the help of the Guardian, Britain’s foremost progressive and feminist newspaper. But given a choice between admitting the truth and maintaining their narcissist fantasies, leftists never hesitate. Cryer says: “I couldn’t get The Guardian interested. Its reporters seemed paralysed by political correctness.”

Minority predators

In other words, the Guardian allowed rape culture to flourish and girls to suffer at the hands of brutal misogynists. And the Guardian is still helping rape culture, because it’s still censoring the truth about predatory minorities like Travellers and Gypsies. These two minorities appear to be distinct (but sometimes allied and inter-breeding) genetic groups that have evolved a strategy of preying on outsiders. Travellers and Gypsies are notorious for violence and aggression, both of which are, of course, under strong genetic influence. And it is very interesting that three of the worst sex-criminals in British history were drawn from these groups. You’ve already read about Joseph McCann. Now read about the serial killers Fred West and Levi Bellfield:

Minority Predators: Fred West and Levi Bellfield

Frederick Walter Stephen “Fred” West (29 September 1941 — 1 January 1995), was an English serial killer. Between 1967 and 1987, he and his wife Rosemary tortured, raped and murdered at least 12 young women and girls, many at the couple’s homes. … Fred West came from a long line of Herefordshire farm laborers. He was born in 1941 in the village of Much Marcle, approximately 120 miles west of London, to Walter and Daisy West. Fred began life as a beautiful baby with huge piercing blue eyes and blond hair. … The beautiful baby grew up into a scruffy-looking boy. His blond hair turned to a dark brown and became curly and unkempt. He had inherited some of his mother’s less attractive facial features: an overly large mouth and a gap between his large teeth. He looked distinctly like a Gypsy.

West would later claim that his father had incestuous relationships with his daughters. It has been suggested that incest was an accepted part of the household, and that his father taught him bestiality from an early age. West recalled, in police interviews, that his father had said on many occasions “Do what you want, just don’t get caught doing it.” It is also alleged that his mother Daisy began sexually abusing him from the age of 12. (Frederick Walter Stephen West, Serial Killer Calendar)

[Levi] Bellfield, a 20-stone Romany Gypsy who was the father of at least 11 children, would single out lone, blonde females, walking home late at night or waiting at bus stops and, when they rejected his uncouth advances, he would attack them violently. He casually told one girlfriend that he would wait in alleyways wanting to “hurt, kill, stab or rape women.”

Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton said this of Bellfield: “He has a massive ego to feed, he thinks he’s God’s gift to everyone. He drives around in his car … and sees some young blonde girl. Young blonde girl says ‘Go away!’ and he thinks ‘You dare to turn down Levi Bellfield, you’re worth nothing!’ and then she gets a whack over the head…”

On 20 August 2004, 22-year-old French student Amelie Delagrange missed her stop, after taking a bus home from an evening out with friends. She was crossing Twickenham Green when Bellfield struck. … Within minutes he had battered her to death in a fit of anger after she had rejected his advances. Detective Chief Inspector Sutton added: “We are looking at other murders which have not been solved… We looked at a dozen crimes in west London and we have not been able to eliminate Levi from any of them. I fear we may have only scratched the surface.”

On 27 February 2008, The Sun informed us thus: “Johanna Collings believes the fiend attacked at least 100, sometimes claiming two victims in one evening. He even bragged of laughing as he raped a disabled girl on a car bonnet in a nightclub car park — after lifting her from her wheelchair… (Levi Bellfield: Gypsy Beast, Rogues Gallery blog, 21st December 2008)

Remember what the Daily Mail reported about one of McCann’s victims: “McCann told her rape is ‘what we do in the traveller community’.” If McCann is right, the Guardian has a genuine example of “rape culture” to investigate and expose. If McCann is wrong, he committed a monstrous libel against the Traveller community and the Guardian should expose the libel.

Violence, aggression and ethnocentrism

Apparently the Guardian believes that McCann was speaking the truth, because it censored what he said. That is not honest or rational behaviour. Here at the Occidental Observer we try to honour the scientific tradition and conform our ideology to reality. At the Guardian, they honour the leftist tradition and conform reality to their ideology. But reality won’t conform, so the Guardian censors reality. That’s why the Guardian won’t discuss the true predatory nature of Travellers and Gypsies. In my article “Destroy the Goy: The Metaphysics of Anti-White Hatred,” I described a Traveller family in Lincolnshire that had enslaved non-Travellers, “forcing at least 18 victims — including homeless people and some with learning disabilities — to work for little or no pay and live in squalid conditions for up to 26 years.”

The Travellers in question obviously saw their non-Traveller slaves as worthless. In other words, the Travellers were ethnocentric, regarding themselves and their genetic kin as superior to non-Travellers and entitled to prey on those outsiders. Ethnocentrism, of course, is also under strong genetic influence. And you can see all three of these traits — violence, aggression and ethnocentrism — in the sordid story of Joseph McCann. At least, you can if you’re prepared to look. The Guardian and its readers aren’t, because they want to retain their narcissistic fantasies rather than understand the world:

Sadistic serial rapist Joseph McCann was one of Britain’s first ASBO [Anti-Social Behaviour Order] yobs [young male thugs] after terrorising locals [in Manchester] by setting cars alight and shoplifting. McCann, 34, was just 14 when he was slapped with the Anti-Social Behaviour Order alongside his brothers Michael and Sean. The teen tearaways rampaged through the poverty-stricken Manchester estate they lived on — robbing terrified locals and setting cars alight. …

Their campaign of terror on the gritty Beswick estate finally came to an end when they were banned from the area. … One resident told MailOnline: “They were a horrible family, absolutely vile — scum of the earth.” … Undeterred, the feckless brood then moved to Aylesbury, Buck[inghamshire], and Middlesex where they linked up with their traveller relatives. McCann, who began dabbling in crime in 1998 when he was convicted of shoplifting, continued his yobbish behaviour in his new home.

The family “brought havoc” to Middlesex — with McCann and one of his brothers repeatedly stealing cars and setting them ablaze. They soon became notorious on the estate — with locals too petrified to challenge the thug brothers. One said: “There used to be a brick wall outside their house. But they took all the bricks out to throw them at people. If you said anything to them they would threaten to beat you up. There were two older boys and one little one. They were really horrible. They were part of a gang. Their house was like their headquarters.” … (Serial rapist Joseph McCann was one of UK’s first ASBO yobs who terrorised neighbours, set cars ablaze and shoplifted, The Sun, 6th December 2019)

Note these words in the article: “They were part of a gang.” That is, they were part of a violent collectivist minority preying on an atomized, individualist majority. The McCanns and their “traveller relatives” have not been genetically pacified like the White majority across much of Europe, where powerful centralized states have been executing criminals for many centuries. Joseph McCann and his brothers descend from a long line of men who have enjoyed sexual success precisely because of their violence and aggression. But the victims of the McCanns descend from people who have relied on the state to maintain order and protect them from criminal violence.

Leftism is crypto-religious

Nowadays, however, the state has been subverted by another genetically distinct group that is hostile to the law-abiding White majority. The legal system in Brave New Britain no longer acts on behalf of the law-abiding, but on behalf of the lawless. In “Whites as Witches,” I described how the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), headed by the ethnocentric Jews Rebecca Hilsenrath and David Isaacs, had backed “successful legal action … against a pub which refused entry to Irish Travellers.” The pub undoubtedly had very good reason for “refus[ing] entry,” having experienced the violence and theft that Travellers and Gypsies are notorious for. These nomadic groups have evolved to prey on the settled, law-abiding majority, but the idea that minorities can be harmful to the majority is blasphemous in the modern West.

And “blasphemous” is the mot juste. Leftism is a crypto-religious ideology that seems to exploit the same brain-circuits as those involved in overt religions. That’s why I also use the term “minority worship” to describe the attitude of leftists towards minorities like Blacks, Gypsies and Muslims. In leftist propaganda, the saintly and virtuous lives of these minorities are under continual assault from the evil forces of White racism and White supremacism. In its full modern form, minority worship is a Jewish creation designed to serve Jewish interests, because Jews see themselves as the archetypal virtuous and victimized minority. In reality, they are a predatory and particularist minority whose contemptuous term for non-Jews, goyim, is echoed by gorja, the contemptuous term used by Gypsies for non-Gypsies. Indeed, you could describe Jews as Gypsies with high IQs, or Gypsies as Jews with low IQs. Both groups are predatory minorities who regard the majority with hostility and contempt, while justifying their predation with lachrymose self-histories in which they have been unjustly persecuted by the very majority that, in reality, they have preyed on.

Kosher Kabinet: Jewish Dominic Raab, Jewish-Turkish Boris Johnson, Pakistani Muslim Sajid Javid, Indian Hindu Priti Patel

But it’s precisely because Jews have high IQs that historical and biological realism about Jews, Gypsies and other predatory minorities is impossible in the mainstream. Jewish intelligence and verbal facility have enabled them to create the vast web of laws, academic studies, media propaganda, and censorship that sustains the cult of minority worship and ensures that Western nations remain firmly under Jewish control. That’s why the Guardian censored the truth about Joseph McCann and why the Crown Prosecution Service appointed a noble Black lawyer to prosecute this evil White sex-beast.

The war between reality and lies

It’s also why Brave New Britain is now ruled by a Kosher Kabinet consisting of a Jewish-Turkish Prime Minister, a Jewish Foreign Secretary, a Pakistani Muslim Chancellor, and an Indian Hindu Home Secretary. And while one minority — the Jews — keep control at the top, other minorities commit horrific crimes at the bottom. High politics and low sex-crime might appear to exist in completely separate realms, but they can both be explained by human biology and the evolutionary forces identified in the nineteenth century by the great White scientist Charles Darwin.

But while Darwin worked to describe and explain reality, the great Jewish ideologue Karl Marx worked to distort and exploit reality. And that’s the war we’re now living through: between Darwin and Marx, between those who believe in reality and those who believe in lies. The crimes of Joseph McCann were one part of that war. The government of Boris Johnson is another. Jewish ideology and Jewish control can be seen at work in both the low crimes and the high politics. But you’ll only read that at ADL-certified hate-sites like the Occidental Observer. After all, “Truth is hate to those who hate the truth.”

Karl Marx: Founding Father of the Jewish Left?  

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Should The Culture of Critique (CofC) be revised to focus on Karl Marx, the founder of the world’s first Jewish intellectual and political movement? As the Jewish founder of “scientific” socialism, he began a radical critique of European society that has continued into the twenty-first century. Although CofC is concerned specifically with twentieth-century Jewish intellectual and political movements, it would certainly broaden perspective on the Jewish left if Marx could be placed firmly within its framework as the founder of the intellectual and political movement that would guide so much of the Jewish left in the twentieth century.

The first question that must be asked is whether Marx qualifies as a self-identified Jewish leader of a Jewish intellectual and political movement? MacDonald’s CofC lays down a number of guidelines for making this determination. Let’s go over these in some detail.

MacDonald’s methodology is a straightforward one. The first step is to “find influential movements dominated by Jews, with no implication that all or most Jews are involved in these movements and no restrictions on what the movements are.” The second step is to “determine whether the Jewish participants in those movements identified as Jews AND thought of their involvement in the movement as advancing specific Jewish interests.”[i] Finally, we discuss the influence and impact of these movements on European and Euro-American societies.

Given MacDonald’s criteria, we believe that Marx’s scientific socialism certainly qualifies on both counts:

First, Marx had a direct role in the founding of the main organizations of the Left in the nineteenth century. Most of the earliest socialist organizations were directly influenced by Marx, i.e. the Communist League, co-founded by Marx and Engels in 1847; the Social Democratic Party of Germany, founded in 1863; the Socialist Labor Party of America, founded in 1876; the French Workers’ Party, co-founded by Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue in 1880; and the British Social Democratic Federation, founded in 1881. Most of these organizations would eventually shape the political life of twentieth-century Europe and North America.

Marx’s longtime Shabbos Goy, Engels, acknowledged the preponderance of Jews in nineteenth-century leftist movements:

“In addition, we owe a great deal to Jews. Not to mention Heine and Börne, Marx was of purely Jewish origin; Lassalle was a Jew. Many of our best people are Jews. My friend Victor Adler, who is now paying in a prison in Vienna for his devotion to the cause of the proletariat; Eduard Bernstein, the editor of the London Sozialdemokrat, Paul Singer, one of our best men in the Reichstag—people of whose friendship I am proud, and all of them Jews! I myself was made a Jew by the [conservative weekly] Gartenlaube. To be sure, if I had to choose, then rather a Jew than ‘Herr von’!”[ii]   

In 1911, the sociologist Robert Michels drew attention to the “abundance of Jews among the leaders of the socialist and revolutionary parties”:

“In Germany, above all, the influence of Jews has been conspicuous in the labour movement. The two first great leaders, Ferdinand Lassalle and Karl Marx, were Jews, and so was their contemporary Moses Hess. The first distinguished politician of the old school to join the socialists, Johann Jacoby, was a Jew. Such also was Karl Höchberg, the idealist, son of a rich merchant in Frankfort-on-the-Main, founder of the first socialist review published in the German language. Paul Singer, who was almost invariably chairman of the German socialist congresses, was a Jew. Among the eighty-one socialist deputies sent to the Reichstag in the penultimate general election, there were nine Jews, and this figure is an extremely high one when compared with the percentage of Jews among the population of Germany, and also with the total number of Jewish workers and with the number of Jewish members of the socialist party.”[iii]

Second, far from being a self-hating Jewish anti-Semite, Karl Marx had a strong Jewish group identity and was heavily involved in the Jewish community:

“Toward Jews and Jewishness Marx always retained many positive ties. Among his closest friends were the Jews Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Kugelmann; for a time he was close to Moses Hess, and he helped the former Cologne communist Abraham Jacoby emigrate to America (where he became an influential physician).”[iv]

Indicating a strong Jewish identification, when Jacoby was promoting revolution in Europe, his agenda was Jewish “emancipation”—the naturalization and enfranchisement of Jews. Like Marx, his closest associates also had a strong sense of Jewish group identity, with shared goals, beliefs and commitments to Jewish emancipation. Read more

Karl Marx’s Jewish Identity

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Introduction

There is a long-standing controversy over whether Karl Marx was a self-hating Jew who promoted anti-Semitism in his essay, “On the Jewish Question,” with prominent scholars weighing in on both sides of the question.[1] In my view, the position that Marx was an anti-Semite is substantiated by cherry-picked passages from his writings and correspondence and by tendentious interpretations of these passages. Here I show that the purpose of On the Jewish Question was to promote Jewish emancipation in the German Confederation (1815–1866) and thereby undermine the official status of the Christian religion, goals quite compatible with Marx having a Jewish identity and seeing his actions as advancing Jewish interests.

Is the claim that Marx rejected his Jewish heritage supported by the evidence? In a letter to his uncle Lion Philip, Marx mentioned “the fellow-member of our race Benjamin Disraeli,” a Jew he personally despised.[i] In another letter to the same Jewish relative, he wrote:

“[S]ince Darwin demonstrated that we are all descended from the apes, there is scarcely ANY SHOCK WHATEVER that could shake ‘our ancestral pride.’ That the Pentateuch was concocted only after the return of the Jews from Babylonian captivity had already been pointed out by Spinoza in his Tractatus theologico-politicus.”[ii]  

These aren’t the only references Marx made to his Jewish ethnic origins. Here he indicates that he was regarded as a Jew by the Prussian authorities:

“In regard to the Cologne communist trial of 1851—in which the Prussian government sought to demonstrate the existence of a conspiracy organized around Marx—he wrote: ‘The Jew-hunt naturally increases the enthusiasm and interest.’”[iii]

Marx was also sympathetic to the plight of Jews all around the world. For example, he was outraged by Ottoman ill-treatment of Jews in Palestine. In an 1854 article for the New-York Herald Tribune, he wrote: “Nothing equals the misery and the sufferings of the Jews at Jerusalem, inhabiting the most filthy quarter of the town . . . the constant objects of Mussulman oppression and intolerance, insulted by the Greeks, persecuted by the Latins, and living only upon the scanty alms transmitted by their European brethren.”[iv]

Marx’s strong sense of Jewish group identity motivated him to help out members of his own race, even at the expense of the collective interests of the European majority in retaining Christianity as the state religion. In 1843, Marx wrote to Arnold Ruge:

“Just now the president of the Israelites here has paid me a visit and asked me to help with a parliamentary petition on behalf of the Jews; and I agreed. However obnoxious I find the Israelite beliefs, Bauer’s view seems to me nevertheless to be too abstract. The point is to punch as many holes as possible in the Christian state and smuggle in rational views as far as we can.”[v]

Like other Jewish ethnic activists, Marx sought to destroy European ethnic identity by promoting Jewish emancipation. His agenda was about “punching as many holes as possible” in the White Christian majority states of Europe, undermining their ethnic and religious cohesiveness and political stability—thus creating an environment in which Jews could pursue their own collective interests without fear of persecution. Even though Marx was contemptuous of “Israelite beliefs,” he nevertheless self-identified as an ethnic Jew. Despite his conversion to Lutheran Protestantism in childhood, Jewishness would remain central to Marx’s identity for the rest of his life.

Marx never concealed his Jewish identity. Like many strongly identified Jews in the present age, the fact that Marx was a non-practicing Jew doesn’t imply that he didn’t have a strong Jewish identification. Even his personal Shabbos Goy and longtime collaborator, Friedrich Engels, never denied that Marx was a “full-blooded Jew.” There is no evidence he was ever afflicted with any pathological Jewish self-hatred, given his willingness to sympathize with his fellow Jews, even coming to their aid in times of distress.

Did Marx promote anti-Jewish views? First, those who call Marx an anti-Semite avant la letter (i.e., before the term had originated) commit the logical fallacy of anachronism. According to Hal Draper, historians who accuse Marx of anti-Semitism are “project[ing] themselves back into history as undercover agents of the Anti-Defamation league.” He continues:

“Mainly, the allegation is supported by reading the attitudes of the second half of the twentieth century back into the language of the 1840s. More than that, it is supported only if the whole course of German and European anti-Jewish sentiment is whitewashed so as to make Marx’s essay stand out as a black spot.”[vi]

Accusing Marx of anti-Semitism ignores the fact that, in pre-Unification Germany, Jews were not discriminated against for being members of the Jewish race. If Jews wanted to escape the civil and legal disabilities they faced in White societies, they could always convert to Christianity. Marx’s anti-Judaism should not be confused with the racial anti-Semitism of Houston Stuart Chamberlain and Georges Vacher de Lapouge. He could never condemn Jewish ethnicity because it would make his demands for Jewish emancipation in European societies nonsensical. The explanation that best fits the evidence is that Marx’s anti-Judaism was motivated by a deep-seated animus harbored toward religion in general.

We shall leave these caveats aside to address the accusation that Marx was an anti-Semite avant la lettre. Does Marx’s derogatory criticisms of Lassalle as a “Jewish nigger,” “Yid,” etc., constitute prima facie evidence of anti-Semitism? Robert Fine and Philip Spencer write:

“Marx is accused of deploying racist and antisemitic epithets in private correspondence with Engels. […] In reading this private correspondence, we may accuse Marx of bad taste or chuckle at his acerbic wit but there is no evidence that he had anything other than disdain for Lassalle’s belief in physiognomy and for the authoritarian and illiberal conception of socialism of which this was part. Marx was clearly making fun of his socialist opponent.”[vii]

For Marx, Lassalle presented himself as an easy target for mockery because of a binary classification scheme reserved for Jews. There were “good Jews” i.e., the Palestinian Jews persecuted by Ottoman authorities, Jewish proletarians, Jewish socialists, etc., who were to be treated respectfully, and “bad Jews,” the money-grubbing Jewish socialists and capitalists whose traits embodied the worst features of bourgeois industrial society. If Marx saw Lassalle as a target for invective, it was because he was a “bad Jew,” a Jewish “parvenu” who “flaunted his money-bags.” There are such people.

When accusing Marx of anti-Semitism avant la lettre, historical context must always be taken into consideration. If Marx was guilty of anything, it was unfettered vulgarity during private moments with friends and family, but he was no anti-Semite avant la lettre, and certainly not by the standards of the time. He negatively stereotyped Jews, but this is not anti-Semitic when based on well-supported fact. Moreover, if anti-Semitism is defined as irrational hatred of Jews because of ethnic group membership, then there is no trace of ethnoracial hatred in any of Marx’s writings. He said and did nothing unusual for the time, apart from being solidly committed to the anti-religious values of the Enlightenment. For example, Marx allowed the French quadroon Paul Lafargue to marry his daughter, Laura. In a letter to the interracial couple, he criticized racial theorist Comte de Gobineau: “I rather suspect that M. de Gobineau, dans ce temps là ‘premier secrétaire de la légation de France en Suisse,’ to have sprung himself not from an ancient Frank warrior but from a modern French huissier.”[viii] Translated into plain English, Marx is saying that belief in White racial superiority is the province of mediocrities, an unusual sentiment for the time he lived in.

There is still the matter of the stereotyping of Jews that appears in “On the Jewish Question.” Some critics have argued that, far from being a “youthful piece of extravagant Hegelianizing which the mature Marx later outgrew,” the essay is in fact virulently anti-Semitic. Jewish academic ethnic activist Robert S. Wistrich warns:

“Marx’s intransigent hostility to religion should not blind one, however, into naively assuming that the insecurity of his own origins or the weight of his Jewish rabbinical heritage contributed nothing toward shaping the intellectual and moral character of his outlook” (1974).

The charge of anti-Semitism avant la lettre is based on a superficial, yet tendentious reading, given the aim of Marx’s critique. To understand why this is the case, let us closely examine the text of “On the Jewish Question,” which is divided into two parts.

In the first part, Marx unravels German philosopher Bruno Bauer’s belief that Jews cannot be emancipated as Jews as long as they remain members of the Chosen People. If Jewry wants political emancipation, they must first work towards the political emancipation of Germany, not as Jews, but as Germans. Marx shows this to be unworkable; in Anglo-Saxon North America, people retain their religion despite political enfranchisement. Emancipating the state from religion merely banishes it to the private sphere, without abolishing man’s predilection for religiosity. In other words, this is a plea for Jews being free to retain their religion and their status as a people apart from the Germans.

The politically emancipated state, the atheistic democracy, says Marx, is the “perfect Christian state.” Because political emancipation entails church-state separation, it no longer contradicts the Gospels, whose message is “supernatural renunciation of self, submission to the authority of revelation” and “a turning-away from the state.” The individual “religious and theological consciousness” is heightened because of political enfranchisement. The Christian majority becomes an authentically Christian one because the Christianity they embrace is without “political significance” and “worldly aims,” just as Christ had commanded in the Gospels. This shows that politically emancipating the state from religion actually backfires because it increases man’s religiosity.

Through political emancipation, the citizen is granted certain democratic rights or “rights of man,” but these also increase man’s religiousness by offering him religious freedom, instead of freedom from religion, which requires human emancipation. These democratic rights have other inherent limitations. In theory, “political life declares itself to be a mere means, whose purpose is the life of civil society.” In other words, political institutions emancipate the citizen by granting him inalienable rights; however, this is not what one observes in practice. The right to freedom of the press is completely subordinated to bourgeois interests, i.e., “human rights,” establishing political life as the aim of civil society, rather than vice versa. Paradoxically for Marx, the political emancipation granted the citizen in the form of rights is, at the same time, the negation of these rights:

“Whoever dares undertake to establish a people’s institutions must feel himself capable of changing, as it were, human nature, of transforming each individual, who by himself is a complete and solitary whole, into a part of a larger whole, from which, in a sense, the individual receives his life and his being, of substituting a limited and mental existence for the physical and independent existence. He has to take from man his own powers, and give him in exchange alien powers which he cannot employ without the help of other men.”[ix]

Political emancipation is chimerical because it reduces man to an abstraction. By substituting man’s powers for “alien powers,” political emancipation reduces “man, on the one hand, to a member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual, and, on the other hand, to a citizen, a juridical person.” To fully emancipate himself, man must reclaim his “own powers.” In challenging the dominance of abstraction, he combines his individual and juridical roles to develop his individuality to its maximum extent, creating a society organized around his need for self-realization. This is the human emancipation that frees egoistic man from his religious consciousness so that he becomes, in Marx’s abstruse Hegelian jargon, a “species-being in his everyday life.” This means “the ability of human beings to freely shape the material world in accordance with a consciously adopted plan that provides the essential conditions for human fulfillment” (Wartenberg, 1982).

So far, there is nothing overtly or even obliquely anti-Semitic about any of this. Indeed, Marx may well have understood that a state without an official religion, where Jews could retain their group ties, and with freedom to pursue self-realization would be an ideal vehicle to achieve Jewish interests—which, of course, is exactly what happened.

What about the second part? Marx begins by disagreeing with Bauer that the Jewish Question is necessarily a theological one:

“Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew — not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew. Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew.”[x]

Given Marx’s approach, it is no surprise he identifies empirical Judaism with monetary exchange and huckstering. This is not mere “economic reductionism,” but well-supported historical fact:

“Julius Carlebach records that at the time of Marx’s 1843 writings small traders and hawkers constituted 66% of the Jewish working population in Prussia and the great majority of the working population in Eastern Europe. Marx acknowledged the historic role of some Jews in commerce and moneylending in pre-modern societies but saw it replaced by more systematic processes of national capital accumulation.”[xi]

Why is an empirical fact about ethnoracial differences in commercial activity construed as anti-Semitic? Marx was not alone among Jews in sharing these sentiments. Moses Hess, one of the founding fathers of modern Zionism, described Jews as “beasts of prey” who inhabited a “huckster world.” Heinrich Heine, the Jewish poet, said Israel was not known for its liberality, “save when its teeth are drawn by force.”[xii] Yet, no one would ever think of castigating Hess or Heine for anti-Semitism.

Marx continues:

“We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time, an element which through historical development — to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed — has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate.”[xiii]

Whereas an anti-Semite avant la lettre would have argued Jews bear full responsibility for their “anti-social” behavior — even deserving to be punished for it, Marx dismisses the nefariousness of empirical Judaism as a product of “historical development,” which may refer to standard themes in contemporary Jewish apologia, such as Jews were forced to be money lenders. The “anti-social nature” of Judaism refers to Jewish overrepresentation in financial occupations, as well as its attendant ills. For example, Jews were hired by Prussian Junkers as moneylenders and financiers; as they came to dominate these professions, their commercial immorality aroused the hatred of the peasantry. By explaining this away as the result of the transformation of feudalism into capitalism through the mysterious inner workings of the historical dialectic, Marx absolved Jews of their destructive behavior. If anything, Jews are victims of fate, despite having “zealously contributed” to their own sufferings. If Jewish behavior is historically conditioned, Jewish empirical character is not etched in stone but capable of alteration. Far from being anti-Semitic, Marx is engaged in pro-Jewish polemic.

Marx says Judaism is based on practical need and self-interest. The god of the Old Testament is the idealization of “the bill of exchange” which “is the real god of the Jew.” Marx’s analysis of empirical Judaism also applies to civil society generally: “Practical need, egoism, is the principle of civil society, and as such appears in pure form as soon as civil society has fully given birth to the political state. The god of practical need and self-interest is money.” If the bill of exchange is the “real god of the Jew,” it is the “real god” of Christian civil society as well, since it too is grounded in practical need and egoism. Civil society, despite its Christian character, is really Jewish society, where “money is the estranged essence of man’s work and man’s existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it.”[xiv]

Some have denounced the second part of Marx’s essay as virulently anti-Semitic. However, it is obvious Marx is not attacking the Jews, he’s attacking the entire bourgeois capitalist system. In doing so, the empirical Jew serves as a stand-in for the bourgeoisie’s capitalist economic interests. Empirical Judaism is turned on its head and used to point out what civil society and its members have become, a society of money-men worshiping at the altar of a money-god, i.e., the bourgeois capitalist system. If civil society and Judaism share the same material basis, then Prussians are just as Jewish as the Jews, if not Jews themselves. Empirical Judaism is Christian civil society in microcosm, since the “real nature of the Jew has been universally realized and secularized.” Marx even says:

“Christianity sprang from Judaism. It has merged again in Judaism. From the outset, the Christian was the theorizing Jew; the Jew is, therefore, the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has become a Jew again.”[xv]

Since Marx has inverted the rhetoric of the Jewish Question to critique bourgeois capitalist society, there is no longer a Jewish Question, but a Christian or Bourgeois Capitalist Question.

Empirical Judaism, Marx’s metaphor for capitalist economic activity, reached its pinnacle of development under Christian hegemony, eventually coming to dominate Christendom. Gentile civil society now embodies the nature of the empirical Jew. Christianity has now replaced man’s species-ties (his ties to the wider community) with egoism and selfishness; it “dissolve[s] the human world into a world of atomistic individuals who are inimically opposed to one another.” The bourgeois “revolutionary iconoclasm” of the Christian world-system destroys “all particulars — property, culture, family, marriage, childhood, education, country, religion, morality, occupation, personal worth” by reducing them “to a money relation.”[xvi] In Marx’s view, Christianity supplants Judaism by becoming like Judaism, but in doing so, it has become the world’s most destructive force.

Once the “emancipation of society from Judaism” has taken place, “the Jew will have become impossible.” This does not mean the extermination of the Jew, nor the dissolution of the Jewish community, as some hysterical critics have implied, such as Dagobert D. Runes’s edition of Marx’s On the Jewish Question, published as A World Without Jews for Cold War propagandistic purposes. Rather, Marx is proposing the dissolution of Judaism and the negative traits acquired by Jews, a result of their participation in the emergence of the bourgeois capitalist system.

The Jew, of course, will continue to exist biologically, as a branch of the Semitic race. Although he seldom wrote about race, Karl Marx acknowledged the reality of Jewish racial identity; in a letter to his uncle, he identified himself as being of the same Jewish race as Disraeli. He mocked characteristically Jewish racial features in his letters and writings. In the case of Joseph Moses Levy, a British newspaper publisher, Marx noted that “Mother Nature has inscribed his origins in the clearest possible way right in the middle of his face.”[xvii] Some Jews even had what Marx described as a “nastily Jewish physiognomy.”[xviii]

Conflating Jewish society with Protestant civil society serves as a literary device that allows Marx to demand Jewish emancipation and the “emancipation of mankind from Judaism,” meaning the liberation of all humanity from the oppressive capitalist economic system. Despite his seemingly “anti-Jewish” views, Marx’s conception of the role of Judaism is a positive one: “But the paradox is that for Marx, Judaism provided the basis for the liberation of modern society precisely because it was emancipation from bargaining and money that would liberate human beings.”[xix]

If Marx were a genuine anti-Semite avant la lettre, why would he be calling for the political emancipation of Jews in Germany? If he were genuinely anti-Semitic, he would have sounded much worse than post-Kantian philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries, the closest thing we have to an actual nineteenth-century German anti-Semite avant la lettre:

“In a pamphlet titled On the Danger Posed to the Welfare and Character of the German People by the Jews, Fries maintained that the harm caused by Jews was such that they should be prohibited from establishing their own educational institutions, marrying Whites, employing Christians as servants or entering Germany, that they should be forced to wear a distinctive mark on their clothing and that they should be encouraged to emigrate. Fries’ depiction of the Jews as the enemy of the people was coupled with the revolutionary conviction that all political life must derive exclusively from the people, a category from which the Jews were excluded.”[xx]

Marx sounds nothing like Fries, who typically referred to Jews as “bloodsuckers” and “parasites.” He was not even casually anti-Semitic, otherwise his writings and correspondence would be filled with anti-Semitic slurs; instead, there is nothing even remotely anti-Semitic in any of Marx’s writings. This makes the accusation of anti-Semitism avant la lettre a laughable one. By defending Jewish emancipation “unequivocally and without conditions,” Marx is defending the “subjective right of Jews to be citizens, to be Jews, and to deal creatively, singularly, in their own way, with their Jewish origins.”[xxi]

Why some writers consider Marx anti-Semitic is mysterious. Marx is actually pro-Semitic, which is why he argues for total emancipation of the Jew in Germany, who had virtually no civil and political rights. Although he is always sympathetic to Jewish suffering, Marx is contemptuous of Judaism as a religion and as a set of economic practices. He is not contemptuous of Jewish ethnic identity, which can and will be emancipated from religious consciousness. The second part of the essay is what is usually interpreted as anti-Semitic, but this interpretation is based on a superficial and tendentious reading of the passage. The truth is that Marx’s writings were not known for their clarity and economy of language. He relied on an esoteric “Hegelianizing” to get his point across, which has confused many of his critics ever since. Fine concludes: “Marx’s early essays on the Jewish question actually ushered in a lifelong critique of antisemitism. They showed that the point of view of the Jewish question is not an inevitability; that it can be overcome. Marx’s essays remain, for all their ambiguities, a key resource for recovering a tradition of critical thought that repudiates ‘left antisemitism.’”[xxii]

Far from being anti-Semitic, Marx was a “child of Enlightenment who struggled to emancipate the Enlightenment from its own anti-Judaic prejudices.”[xxiii] Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” is really a key document in the struggle for Jewish emancipation at the expense of European majorities. Critics who dismiss Marx as an anti-Semite have not carefully considered the evidence.

Bibliography

Blumenberg, Werner. “Eduard Von Müller-Tellering: Verfasser Des Ersten Antisemitischen Pamphlets Gegen Marx.” Bulletin of the International Institute of Social History, Vol. 6, No. 3, 1951, Pp. 178—197. Jstor, Www.jstor.org/stable/44629595.

Cofnas, Nathan. “Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy.” Human Nature, vol. 29, no. 2, 10 Mar. 2018, pp. 134—156, 10.1007/s12110-018-9310-x. Accessed 13 Dec. 2019.

Draper, Hal. Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution / [Vol. 1], State and Bureaucracy. New York ; London, Monthly Review Press, 1977.

—. Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution / [Vol. 4], Critique of Other Socialisms. New York ; London, Monthly Review Press, 1990.

Fine, Robert, and Philip Spencer. Antisemitism and the Left : On the Return of the Jewish Question. Manchester, UK, Manchester University Press, 2018, www.manchesteropenhive.com/view/9781526104960/9781526104960.00007.xml. Accessed 13 Dec. 2019.

Kaye, Howard. Social Meaning of Modern Biology: From Social Darwinism to Sociobiology. Routledge, 2017.

MacDonald, K. The culture of critique: An evolutionary analysis of Jewish involvement in twentieth-century intellectual and political movements. Westport: Praeger, 1998.

‌‌Marx, Karl. “On The Jewish Question by Karl Marx.” Marxists.org, 2019, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/. Accessed 13 Dec. 2019.

—. “The Holy Family by Marx and Engels.” Marxists.org, 2019, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch04.htm. Accessed 13 Dec. 2019.

‌—. Early Texts. Translated and Edited by David McLellan. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1971.

‌— and Engels, Friedrich. Collected Works. / Volume 41, Marx and Engels, 1860-64. New York, International Publishers, 1985.

Michel, Robert. Political Parties : A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democrary. New York, Free Press ; London, 1962.

‌Seigel, Jerrold E. Marx’s Fate : The Shape of a Life. University Park, Pa., Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Wartenberg, Thomas E. “‘Species-Being’ and ‘Human Nature’ in Marx.” Human Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, Dec. 1982, pp. 77—95, 10.1007/bf02127669. Accessed 26 Nov. 2019.

‌Wistrich, Robert S. “Karl Marx and the Jewish Question.” Soviet Jewish Affairs, vol. 4, no. 1, Jan. 1974, pp. 53—60, 10.1080/13501677408577180. Accessed 21 Nov. 2019.

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The Way Life Should Be?: Maine as a Microcosm of Jewish Activism

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The demographic war being waged on the state of Maine has received nothing but glowing press and for good reason—certainly not that it has any legitimacy, but that its beneficiaries are not just protected from scrutiny but praised for their efforts to swamp the indigenous White population by the media establishment. When we understand who controls it, this makes all the sense in the world.

While married to Congresswoman Chellie Pingree, Jewish financier S. Donald Sussman, through his Maine Values LLC, acquired a 75 percent ownership stake in MaineToday Media—the newspaper group that owns the Portland Press Herald, the Maine Sunday Telegram, the Kennebec Journal, the Coastal Journal, and the Morning Sentinel—meaning Sussman now had a controlling interest in most of Maine’s largest newspapers. The Jewish Cliff Schechtman is the editor of the Portland Press Herald, which has published naked propaganda supporting Jewish mayor Ethan Strimling’s call for any and all “migrants” to come to the city. The Press Herald and Sunday Telegram editorial board has endorsed Eliot Cutler[1] (also Jewish and childhood friend of former owner Richard L. Connor) for governor and in Portland’s 2015 Mayoral election, the newspaper endorsed Strimling. The paper has a long history of neglecting to report on essential facts—such as violent felons’ immigration status—and for favoring biased hit pieces. In other words, it is lock-step with its national counterparts in the Jewish-run media.

In 2015, Sussman sold the controlling interest in MaineToday Media to fellow Jew Reade Brower. In 2017, Brower bought Sun Media Group, parent company of the Sun Journal, in Lewiston. Brower now owns six of Maine’s seven daily newspapers and prints its seventh, the Bangor Daily News. He also owns twenty-one of Maine’s thirty weeklies and a number of other specialty publications.[2] From Brower’s profile in the New York Times (itself adamant that Maine and neighboring New Hampshire are too White and too old and…you know the rest):

Mr. Brower’s hold on the newspaper industry of a single state stands out…Maine’s emergence as a national political hot spot…adds to the influence Mr. Brower could have over the public discourse through his properties.[3]

Who needs state-run media when the unaccountable private sector exerts monopolistic control? So we have a situation in Maine where the entire media apparatus is privately-owned, its refugee re-settlement program has been privatized, and its financial and business interests—fully committed to importing an entirely new population—control its politics.

Speaking of politics, two prominent figures in our saga warrant closer attention: the aforementioned Cutler and current Governor Janet Mills.

Eliot Cutler

Cutler is president of the Board of Directors of the Emanuel and Pauline Lerner Foundation, which is focused on “youth development programming.” If said programming is anything like that of the state’s governmental counterparts in TRIO, this means essentially indoctrinating children. Unfortunately I cannot reproduce the conversation I had with a former TRIO employee who reached out to me to discuss the abuses within the program witnessed over the course of several years, for they had anonymity concerns, but I was given the greenlight to provide a rough outline of the tactics employed and the operant ideology. In effect, “disadvantaged” and low-income students are isolated from their school friends and forbidden from speaking with them over the duration of seasonal “camps,” held at a physical remove, where the threat of expulsion and ostracism from their new “friends” in the group looms if they are found to be in violation of any of the myriad rules or ideological transgressions. Ideologically, the program is designed to facilitate the transmission of anti-White programming and various other Cultural Marxist permutations—including the glorification of African migrants and pushing a pro-mass migration stance, incentivizing identification with “queerness” and gender fluidity, etc.—under the guise of “advanced collegiate preparatory scholarship.” There is no outside oversight.

The Lerner Foundation has also made the following organizations funding priorities: the Holocaust & Human Rights Center of Maine; the Jewish Justin Alfond’s Maine chapter of the League of Young Voters;[4] EqualityMaine; Mano en Mano; Opportunity Alliance; Somali Bantu Youth Association; African Diaspora Institute; Portland Adult Education, which has reoriented itself as essentially a jobs- and language-training program for migrants; Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project (ILAP); Maine Women’s Policy Center; the University of Maine Law School Justice for Women Lecture Series; Community Financial Literacy (described as: financial literacy programs for immigrant/refugee communities); Coastal Enterprises, Inc. (CEI); the United Way; Out! As I Want to Be (for the “expansion of the Gay-Straight-Trans Alliance presence in Midcoast schools”); Maine Initiatives (described as: ethnic community-based organization learning community project); Maine Access Immigrant Network (MAIN); and Franco American Heritage Center, which seems innocuous until you understand that this organization is no longer designed to preserve the Acadian-French culture but rather use the Francophone “heritage” as a justification for settling Congolese in central Maine.

Cutler’s former post-merger firm Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hoauer, and Feld LLP is deeply embedded in the network of immigration law firms that make significant money undermining federal immigration enforcement and representing the interests of the many large corporations seeking to import workers to undercut American workers’ wages and/or displace said workers. From their site:

With the largest public law and policy practice in the country, Akin Gump often represents clients in matters relating to immigration policy. We conduct analyses of legislative and regulatory proposals, and advocate on behalf of our clients in all areas of immigration policy…In every U.S. Akin Gump office, our lawyers represent clients seeking asylum in the United States. Asylum applications are adjudicated by the USCIS Asylum Office and/or the immigration courts. In either forum, access to a lawyer is key… Since 2007, nearly every Akin Gump summer associate, supervised by Akin Gump lawyers, has represented undocumented women who have been victims of domestic violence and need to “self-petition” for legal residency in the United States. Through this program, more than 150 women have secured permanent residency in the U.S. for themselves and their children…according to a study by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, asylum seekers represented by an attorney are 12 times more likely to be granted asylum than those without attorney representation…. Our experienced team of lawyers is deeply rooted in the immigration law community and is involved with various immigration-related organizations, such as the American Immigration Lawyers Association…Akin Gump’s pro bono work in the area of immigration has been recognized on multiple occasions. An early leader in conducting Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) employment authorization clinics, our firm has been involved in hundreds of immigration cases in the last decade. Through corporate and pro bono immigration work, our lawyers have obtained a thorough understanding of the process required to obtain employment authorization, Social Security cards, Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs), and the process necessary for foreign nationals to travel abroad and obtain visas at U.S. consulates. We have worked with multiple families ensuring entry of dependents into the United States, filed applications for Employment Authorization Documents and “advance parole,” and communicated with U.S. consulates and ports of entry to ensure the safe return of our clients to the United States…Our immigration practice group provides a broad range of immigration services for business organizations and individual clients in need of assistance. Our lawyers have knowledge and experience in the following areas of immigration law:

  • business immigration
  • employment-based temporary work visas
  • permanent resident (“green”) cards
  • company executive transfers
  • EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program
  • immigration compliance
  • waivers of inadmissibility
  • employee training programs
  • foreign national hiring practices
  • immigration-related internal investigations
  • H-1B visa enforcement issues
  • E-Verify Program
  • policy and lobbying
  • legislative proposals
  • advocacy before executive branch agencies
  • family-based immigration
  • student visas
  • visa issuance abroad
  • travel to and from the United States
  • naturalization[5]

Cutler is senior advisor to the chairman and CEO of Thornburg Investment Management, and is now a member of the board of directors. In the 2018 election cycle, donations originating from individuals with Thornburg went to candidates such as Beto O’Rourke, Kamala Harris, and Xochitl Torres Small. In 2016, we see money went to Hillary Clinton and in 2012 to Angus King, with whom we are very familiar at this point. Given both Cutler’s and Thornburg’s investment in the Chinese market and its prominent place in the company’s investment portfolios, it’s little surprise the official line on populism is that it is “divisive,” and that tariffs are an impediment to free trade and therefore a bad thing. This is not unusual among the neo-liberal establishment. In fact, it defines it.

Cutler’s MaineAsia LLC has received ample subsidies to explore the uses of “renewable energies,” greenhouse gases, and solar technology in year-round crop production in cold climates, such as Maine’s. Incidentally, Cutler is also a principal investor in ArchSolar, a company “developing more efficient solar electric technologies for sustainable year-round agriculture in northern latitudes.” Interesting. His Maine Seafood Ventures LLC is working to continue to expand the Asian market for Maine’s seafood industry, which will of course need more cheap labor to fish the waters into maritime fauna extinction.

Lastly, should we read into the company one keeps, the progressive-minded Day of Hope featured three Jews as its speakers in 2017—Cutler, Portland mayor Ethan Strimling, and Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project’s Board President Leslie Silverstein.

Janet Mills

In previous installments of this series, we’ve traced Mills’s sources of funding and her use of institutional support to aid in the importation of more African migrants into the state, but her track record before becoming governor also bears further scrutiny. The widow of real estate developer Stanley Kuklinski, Mills is notoriously cagey, frequently frustrating attempts by transparency organizations such as Vote Smart to provide an un-curated image of her.

As Attorney General, Mills repeatedly either declined to prosecute or delayed investigations of African migrants in Lewiston accused of violent crimes, including one brutal assault near Kennedy Park which ultimately resulted in the White victim’s death. In an absolutely grotesque display, Mills led a rally the following year in the very same Kennedy Park called Standing Up Against Hate, where “intolerance” was condemned— not the violent intolerance of the African imports toward their White neighbors, but the violence of the mosque shooting half a world away in New Zealand. South Portland City Council member Deqa Dhalac echoed Mills’s condemnations of “White supremacy” in stating:

“I am asking my non-Muslim brothers and sisters to stand with us in solidarity, and support us with your love and strong words to condemn White supremacy and Islamophobia.” Naomi Mayer of Portland represented March Forth, a social justice group based in Portland. She expressed dismay at the killings. “Fifty people (gathered) where they thought they were safe? How would you like it if you were having a party with your friends, and someone came in and killed all of you?” she said (my note: hmmm…more on this in a second).[6],[7]

Ethan Strimling was there as well, of course:

“We know better in the state of Maine about the importance of diversity and the importance of immigration,” he said. “Probably what I am most proud of is how we do stand up and say we do not tolerate intolerance every time it occurs.”

This must be little consolation to the family of the deceased Donald Giusti, who died three days after being savagely beaten by a gang of Somalis and Congolese:

In the days after the fight, several people insisted the attack on Giusti and his friends had been racially motivated, the result of tensions that had existed in and around the park since the end of winter…One witness, who videotaped part of the fight, told police a “White guy” had been running backward and had stumbled. After righting himself, “he was struck in the head with a brick, which caused him to fall to the ground.”…“After he fell, the Somali and Congolese group ‘stomped’ him for about 10 seconds, before they took off running,” Maine State Police Detective John L. Kyle II wrote in an affidavit. That witness said several people were armed with sticks, BB guns and a bat… Witnesses said the groups began fighting on Knox Street after teens in a car drove past the park and shot pellets and BBs at a group gathered there, striking several people… Police had said the investigation took longer than some because of the sheer number of people involved and because many were juveniles.[8]

That last claim is absolutely untrue, as I have on good authority the police were ordered to table the investigation until after Mills’s election.

Once again we see the obscuring of the true sources of racial tension and violence, a tried-and-true tactic practiced by the authorities from Sweden to Germany to the UK to Maine. The media is also complicit in refusing to cover that which does not fit their narrative. In 1980, there were 640 Somalis in the entire country. Now, there are at minimum 6,000 in Lewiston alone, and they are almost solely responsible—along with the Congolese—for all of the crime in the city. That said, from the “Immigrant and Refugee Integration and Policy Development Working Group Final Report” for the City of Lewiston, December 2017:

Immigrant and refugee youth of color can experience repeat encounters with the American juvenile justice system due in part to a lack of understanding around the way the system works [my note: we know that not to be the case].[9]

So in other words, the thirty Africans who shot at and assaulted a group of Whites outnumbered two-to-one didn’t understand the legal complexities of not beating someone to death on purely racial grounds, so they should be absolved of any wrongdoing. A hate crime—or a crime at all—this apparently is not. But wanting to not have this done to you and your friends and family, to your fellow citizens—that is very hateful indeed.

PS-If you aren’t already outraged, go ahead and read these two paywalled articles: “Waterville Man Deported to Haiti Pardoned by Governor“;  “Kicked Out of Shelter, Family Pitches a Tent and Struggles with Homelessness.”

 

[1] You might find it interesting that all six of Maine’s largest newspapers endorsed Cutler in his gubernatorial bid.

[2] Brower has also expanded into Vermont, purchasing the Rutland Herald and the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus.

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/26/business/media/reade-brower-maine-newspapers.html

[4] The League of Young Voters U.S. is a national advocacy organization which organizes progressive voter guides and voter blocs nationwide, particularly geared towards the 18–34 age group.

[5] https://www.akingump.com/en/experience/practices/regulatory/immigration-law-and-policy.html

[6] https://www.sunjournal.com/2019/03/17/governor-state-leaders-condemn-recent-killings/

[7] Organizer of 2017 Portland rally “against White supremacy, neo-Nazism, the Ku Klux Klan and President Trump,” Naomi Mayer, told the crowd at that rally: “I’m not here because I’m Jewish. I’m here, and all of you are here, because we are human. None of you were born to hate. It wasn’t in our DNA.” Yes, Strimling was also there, “proud of his city for standing against hate.” https://www.centralmaine.com/2017/08/13/more-than-400-rally-in-portland-in-solidarity-with-charlottesville/

[8] https://www.sunjournal.com/2019/04/24/state-seeks-to-try-lewiston-teen-as-adult-on-manslaughter-charge/; side note: Maine’s first Somali Moslem police officer, Zahra Munye Abu, was arrested at a Ja Rule and Ashanti concert and was charged with assault, battery, resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, and trespassing.

[9] https://www.lewistonmaine.gov/DocumentCenter/View/8885/REPORT—ImmigrantandRefugeeIntegrationandPolicyDevelopmentWorkingGroupFinalReport