The Elusive “Jewish Solution”: Thoughts on Igor Shafarevich’s “Postscript to ‘The Three-Thousand-Year-Old Enigma’” 

I recently provided a translation of Igor Shafarevich’s final remarks on his own work, “The Three-Thousand-Year-Old Enigma,” addressing the Jewish Question in which he tries to expound on possible solutions going forward. Please read the original text first.

If I wanted to, I could easily write a glowing review of Igor Shafarevich and his work and leave it there. The man was a respected academic, a genius in his respective field, and brave enough to tackle the Jewish Question the way that he did. But I will leave that task up to another writer and, instead, I will focus on the work that he left us and ask if it there are any fresh insights that Shafarevich has to share with Westerners or if there are differences in his characterization of the Jewish Question and his proposed solution.

Shafarevich is a window into Soviet-era Russian understanding of the Jewish Question. By reading him, we can decide for ourselves if these Russians understood the problem that they were facing in a similar way to how we conceptualize it now.

For example, Western counter-Semites are well aware of the problem of dual-loyalty and the phenomenon of Jewish crypsis. Shafarevich points out that Jews dislike being recognized for being Jewish and often treat exposure as a direct insult or even a threat. Said another way: “But call him a Jew and you will be astonished at how he recoils, how injured he is, how he suddenly shrinks back: “I’ve been found out.”

Also, the idea of the Jews needing people to work, toil and fight on their behalf is a point well understood by both Western and Russian counter-Semites living under Jewish occupation governments. It is truly incredible to see how so many people from different countries, periods of history and intellectual traditions were able to come to such similar conclusions about the Jews.

Here, it would perhaps be enlightening to take a detour and compare Shafarevich’s conclusions to Solzhenitsyn’s. The latter, if anything, played down the culpability of the Jews and their destructive behavior. That is to say, that while he did not cover up their crimes or try to whitewash them as the products of misguided intentions, he ultimately concluded that the Jews were like a divine sort of punishment unleashed on Russians for their own sins. He used a very familiar Christian metaphysical framework when framing his narrative. That, in short, the Jews were God’s tool (or the tool of God working through Satan) for punishing his people and creating more Christian martyrs through adversity.

Shafarevich, however, takes a more biological view of the matter, a perspective familiar to most Western counter-semites, no doubt. Shafarevich uses a herbivore/carnivore metaphor to describe the relationship between the gentiles and the Jews. But, if we’re looking to the animal kingdom for inspiration, parasites come to mind as a better analogy for Jews and their behavior. This also neatly explains the supposed limits on their fertility. Society, if it is conceptualized as a living organism, would quickly reach parasitical overload. The host would succumb to disease and keel over eventually.

For our new metaphor to work however, we have to consider a concept put forward by another Russian thinker, Lev Gumilyov. He conceptualized society as a living organism, or rather, that one’s ethnic group is an extension of oneself. His reasoning is simple: a tribe helps protect the individual. A tribe and then a society grows around an individual like a protective hide grows around a boar. Better yet, individuals can be compared to the cells in a body. Castes or types of individuals are organs in this metaphor. A people has to work together in unison for both the collective body and the individual cells to survive. People of one ethnos then, are connected on a deep level to one another and not just atomized individuals who happen to share some proteins with the people around them, as our society conceptualizes things now. For nationalists, this would be a very powerful metaphor to first internalize and then use. And the power of a well thought-out metaphor should not be discounted.

Shaferevich’s big point, the solution that he is offering to us, the great herbivore herd as he characterizes us, is to relearn how to close ranks around our own and to relearn how to recognize predators in our midst.

Now, there is nothing wrong with this idea in theory. In actual practice however, getting people to think of their collective interests, the interests of the weaker elements of our society and of the fate of our future descendants has proven to be quite difficult. Many Western Whites, in particular, balk at the idea that they belong to something inborn that is greater than themselves that they cannot simply opt out of by changing their ideology, their profession, or buying a new set of clothes. Western Whites, prone  as they are to individualism, prefer to rally around ideology instead of identity. In practice that means an immigrant from Taiwan with the right talking points and values, is accepted into polite White society. But, a White man, who may have had ancestors come over on the Mayflower even, would be kicked out of polite society as soon as he voiced a politically incorrect opinion. Like, say, about Jewish power.

We’ve seen it occur countless times already.

The question of how to rekindle national or racial consciousness in a country of radical individualists has plagued counter-Semites for the last half-century at least. It is because of this hyper-individuality perhaps, that calls to close ranks fall on deaf ears. Furthermore, the individual White has much to gain by denouncing his people. We, on a society-wide scale, are in a classic prisoner’s dilemma scenario. It would make sense for Whites to cooperate in good faith with other Whites and improve their lot by cooperating, but in our poisoned culture, the pursuit of rational, individual self-interest dictates that Whites fight each other to prove who is the least racist and most tolerant to get more lenient sentences from the prison warden. It was the same in the Soviet Union, although the reigning ideology was somewhat different. Only cooperation among the prisoners will get them out of the prison, but it was because of their inability to close ranks that they became prisoners in the first place.

Quite the dilemma.

Since the “closing ranks” solution is the main thrust of Shaferevich’s argument, it is disappointing that he spends so little time talking about methods that might help us close ranks against the nefarious influence of foreigners and what the obstacles are for us doing so.

If I had one critique of Shafarevich, it would be that his writing suffers from the same problem that a lot of other researchers’ writings suffer from. These people are able to do Herculean work when it comes to meticulously sifting through vast swaths of information as a researcher and organizer of data. Where they falter, however, is in the solutions that they then go on to propose. Perhaps this is because solution-seeking requires an entirely different mental skillset with analyzing and dissecting being quite different from synthesizing policy or practice.

Another important point that Shafarevich hones in on though is the idea of the Jews’ self-ordained role as priests for all of humanity, dedicated to toppling the idols of other peoples whether they be the native gods or the native culture. This is now well-known in our circles as “Tikkum Olam” or the Jewish dedication to “healing the world,” i.e., remaking the world to better suit themselves and their agenda. Jews also conceive of themselves as “idol-destroyers.” And, in the Jewish conception of them, “idols” can mean any idea or cultural practice that is not approved of by Jewish authorities.

Also, while monotheism is not a Jewish invention, the Jews certainly did promote the worship of one god, their god, Yahweh, above all other nations’ gods. Sadly, the early Christians who opposed Yahwehism lost their battle with Christian orthodoxy, and the Old Testament’s capricious ethnic deity became our God.

Pre-Socratic Greek thinkers, Zoroastrians, and Gnostics, in contrast, believed that there was indeed a powerful, but evil, materialistic, petty deity that ruled over this world. Polytheistic Aryan pagan religion conceptualized the gods as being capricious and cruel. However, this all began to change with Plato. This famous Greek was equal parts philosopher as much as he was a political activist and a Klaus Schwab-style social planner. Plato’s “Great Reset” began with him arguing to ban Homer’s Odyssey and working to combat the peasants’ leery attitudes towards the gods. Plato believed that criticism of the god(s) and their intentions ought to be banned in his priest-run utopian society.

Shafarevich demonstrates an awareness of how deeply the general thrust of Western thinking has been affected by Judaism and Plato. We are the products of Platonic, Judaic and then Christian (an offshoot of Judaism) thinking, he says, and the trajectory of our society was defined by the merger of these intellectual and religious traditions.

Recent scholarly analysis of the Old Testament, however, reveals that it was probably written far later than what the Jews have historically claimed. In fact, scholars in the “minimalist school” like Russel Gmirkin make a convincing case that the Bible was written in the second century BC and inspired by Plato’s work. The Torah, the Jewish nationalist foundation myth, took Plato’s idea of a higher mono-deity as its guiding principle. Now, Plato was not the first monotheist, but he was, however, one of the first to insist that the mono-deity had to be both omnipotent and good. Also, he was the first to outline a WEF-style program for the radical transformation of society through the use of psycho-religious tactics to manipulate the population.

Jews like to claim credit for inventing monotheism, but, as Shafarevich points out, they take credit for just about everything. He plays down their accomplishments by stating that the Jews have observably invented or contributed very little throughout modern history and were only able to do what they did using the tools that were handed to them by the host cultures in which they found themselves. The controversial example of the Old Testament would fit neatly into this observable phenomenon of Jews only being able to adopt, modify or invert what already exists. It is, after all, a goulash stew of borrowed and, in some cases, inverted legends and myths from the people that they came into contact with over the course of their history. The Jews then claimed that their knock-off copy predated the originals and took credit for what they stole. A classic Jewish move. As a result, we ended up with a convenient Judeo-centric narrative to theology and history in which the Jews invented monotheism, had the oldest written religious text, were God’s chosen, and so on.

Shaferevich was unaware of this particular revisionist school of Biblical scholarship when he was writing and doing his own research. His own analysis of the Old Testament, however, would rankle many generic Western conservatives and even veteran counter-Semites. It should come as little surprise that Soviet scholars were freer to question some of the core claims of Christianity and, encouraged even, to deconstruct holy texts like the Bible. As a result, skepticism of Jewish religious history, by extension, became more acceptable in the USSR. America, in contrast, remained largely Protestant. i.e., Old Testamentarian and never had a period of state-imposed atheism during which the Bible was delegitimized and stripped of its holy veneer.

This accounts for one of the subtle differences between Russian and Western counter-Semitic thought.

Also, for fear of rocking the boat, most Western counter-Semites try to stay away from religious debates, or, rather, away from asking too many questions about the Old Testament. Nowadays, there is, however, a disturbing trend of counter-Semites identifying with the Jews of the Old Testament by claiming that they were, in actual fact, Scandinavians or Germans and that the current stock of Jews are “fakes” from Khazaria. It is easy to understand why many are drawn to this ideology. After all, it is rather strange to be a nationalist and then to adopt the national myths and ethnic deity of an enemy people as your own. It is harder still to admit that our ancestors lived in a low-information environment and were simply duped centuries ago.

Now, many counter-Semites have tried to sidestep the discussion entirely and simply try to focus on promoting ethnic self-awareness. Again, however, we come head-to-head with the recurring problem of the low levels of ethnocentricity among Western Whites. If the simple “closing ranks” approach works among more ethnocentric groups of people, perhaps it makes sense to work with the grain and not against it when it comes to proposing a solution for peoples who seem to have developed, for one reason or another, extremely low levels of empathy for their own kin.

Instead of being drawn to ideas of identity, these peoples seem drawn to religious-type/ideological thinking. Even if they are secular. After all, secular religions like Social Justice Warriorism and the global warming cult dominate White Western polite society now.

So, the point I am driving at here is rather simple.

Perhaps the solution for peoples who struggle to close ranks because of low levels of ethnocentricity ought to be to do what they do best and re-adopt religious thinking and Puritan-style religious fervor, to which they seem so well-suited naturally. If this is to be done however, perhaps it makes sense to stop pretending to be the real Jews and start focusing on becoming the real Christians instead. My contribution to the debate on possible solutions to the Jewish Question would be to recommend Marcionite Christian thinking, with its rejection of the Old Testament and juxtaposition of Christ to Yahweh, as a theologically sound and spiritually exclusionary alternative approach to religion.

While religious thinking certainly has its drawbacks, it does seem able to convince conscientious people from time to time of the possibility that destructive self-serving actions have grave metaphysical consequences. Again, both Shafarevich and myself agree that the only way to break out of the political, economic and social prison that the Jews have constructed for us is to close ranks and learn to engage in cooperative behavior with our own people. But, the only way to get Whites to cooperate and think about saving more than just their own skin is to adopt best practices that encourage cooperative behavior, punish self-serving selfishness and exclude the Jews by recognizing them as mortal enemies.

The how or the actual practice of closing ranks and promoting cooperation among our own is what we should be developing and debating now. Sadly, there has been very little progress on this front in either the West or the East.

Shafarevich and, to a certain extent, Solzhenitsyn, have done brave work in researching the Jewish Question and bringing the crimes of the Jews and the threat that they pose to the attention of millions of people worldwide. What they fail to do is advance the ball much further than describing the problem and shedding light on the Jews’ tactics and their ultimate agenda to destroy and remake our societies to better serve their own interests. To continue the analogy, these researchers passed the ball forward, into the enemy’s half of the field, hoping that someone on their team would pick it up and take it the rest of the way to the goal. Thanks to the hard work of researchers like Shafarevich, we now have a clear understanding of the Jewish Problem. Anyone looking for the holy grail that is the Jewish Solution, however, needs to start looking and thinking on their own.