Ethnocentrism

The Extreme Hyper-Ethnocentrism of Jews on Display in Israeli attitudes toward the Gaza War

If you know anything about traditional Jewish ethics (i.e., Jewish ethics before a great deal of intellectual work was performed aimed at providing a rationale for Judaism as a modern religion in the West—apparent in the Wikipedia article on Jewish ethics), you know that pre-Enlightenment Jewish ethics was entirely based on whether actions applied to the ingroup or the outgroup. Non-Jews had no moral worth and could be exploited or even murdered as long as doing so did not threaten the interests of the wider Jewish community. I have written a great deal on Jewish ingroup morality, beginning with the Chapter 6 in A People That Shall Dwell Alone:

Business and social ethics as codified in the Bible and the Talmud took strong cognizance of group membership in a manner that minimized oppression within the Jewish community, but not between Jews and gentiles. Perhaps the classic case of differential business practices toward Jews and gentiles, enshrined in Deuteronomy 23, is that interest on loans could be charged to gentiles, but not to Jews. Although various subterfuges were sometimes found to get around this requirement, loans to Jews in medieval Spain were typically made without interest (Neuman 1969, I:194), while those to Christians and Moslems were made at rates ranging from 20 to 40 percent (Lea 1906-07, I:97). Hartung (1992) also notes that Jewish religious ideology deriving from the Pentateuch and the Talmud took strong cognizance of group membership in assessing the morality of actions ranging from killing to adultery. For example, rape was severely punished only if there were negative consequences to an Israelite male. While rape of an engaged Israelite virgin was punishable by death, there was no punishment at all for the rape of a non-Jewish woman. In Chapter 4, it was also noted that penalties for sexual crimes against proselytes were less than against other Jews.

Hartung notes that according to the Talmud (b. Sanhedrin 79a) an Israelite is not guilty if he kills an Israelite when intending to kill a heathen. However, if the reverse should occur, the perpetrator is liable to the death penalty. The Talmud also contains a variety of rules enjoining honesty in dealing with other Jews, but condoning misappropriation of gentile goods, taking advantage of a gentile’s errors in business transactions, and not returning lost articles to gentiles (Katz 1961a, 38).[ii]

Katz (1961a) notes that these practices were modified in the medieval and post‑medieval periods among the Ashkenazim in order to prevent hillul hashem (disgracing the Jewish religion). In the words of a Frankfort synod of 1603, “Those who deceive Gentiles profane the name of the Lord among the Gentiles” (quoted in Finkelstein 1924, 280). Taking advantage of gentiles was permissible in cases where hillul hashem did not occur, as indicated by rabbinic responsa that adjudicated between two Jews who were contesting the right to such proceeds. Clearly this is a group-based sense of ethics in which only damage to one’s own group is viewed as preventing individuals from profiting at the expense of an outgroup. “[E]thical norms applied only to one’s own kind” (Katz 1961a, 42).

Evolutionary psychologist/anthropologist John Hartung, referenced above, has continued his work on Jewish ethics on his website strugglesforexistence.com; note particularly “Thou Shalt Not Kill … Whom?.” The Jewish double ethical standard has been a major theme of anti-Semitism throughout the ages, discussed in Chapter 2 of Separation and Its Discontents; these intellectuals are good examples:

Beginning with the debates between Jews and Christians during the Middle Ages (see Chapter 7) and reviving in the early 19th century, the Talmud and other Jewish religious writings have been condemned as advocating a double standard of morality, in addition to being anti-Christian, nationalistic, and ethnocentric, a view for which there is considerable support (see Hartung 1995; Shahak 1994; PTSDA, Ch. 6). For example, the [Cornell University] historian Goldwin Smith (1894, 268) provides a number of Talmudic passages illustrating the “tribal morality” and “tribal pride and contempt of common humanity” (p. 270) he believed to be characteristic of Jewish religious writing. Smith provides the following passage suggesting that subterfuges may be used against gentiles in lawsuits unless such behavior would cause harm to the reputation of the entire Jewish ingroup (i.e., the “sanctification of the Name”):

When a suit arises between an Israelite and a heathen, if you can justify the former according to the laws of Israel, justify him and say: ‘This is our law’; so also if you can justify him by the laws of the heathens justify him and say [to the other party:] ‘This is your law’; but if this can not be done, we use subterfuges to circumvent him. This is the view of R. Ishmael, but R. Akiba said that we should not attempt to circumvent him on account of the sanctification of the Name. Now according to R. Akiba the whole reason [appears to be,] because of the sanctification of the Name, but were there no infringement of the sanctification of the Name, we could circumvent him! (Baba Kamma fol. 113a)

Smith comments that “critics of Judaism are accused of bigotry of race, as well as bigotry of religion. The accusation comes strangely from those who style themselves the Chosen People, make race a religion, and treat all races except their own as Gentiles and unclean” (p. 270).

[Economist, historian, sociologist] Werner Sombart (1913, 244–245) summarized the ingroup/outgroup character of Jewish law by noting that “duties toward [the stranger] were never as binding as towards your ‘neighbor,’ your fellow-Jew. Only ignorance or a desire to distort facts will assert the contrary. . . . [T]here was no change in the fundamental idea that you owed less consideration to the stranger than to one of your own people. . . . With Jews [a Jew] will scrupulously see to it that he has just weights and a just measure; but as for his dealings with non-Jews, his conscience will be at ease even though he may obtain an unfair advantage.” To support his point, Sombart provides the following quote from Heinrich Graetz, a prominent 19th-century Jewish historian:

To twist a phrase out of its meaning, to use all the tricks of the clever advocate, to play upon words, and to condemn what they did not know . . . such were the characteristics of the Polish Jew. . . . Honesty and right-thinking he lost as completely as simplicity and truthfulness. He made himself master of all the gymnastics of the Schools and applied them to obtain advantage over any one less cunning than himself. He took a delight in cheating and overreaching, which gave him a sort of joy of victory. But his own people he could not treat in this way: they were as knowing as he. It was the non-Jew who, to his loss, felt the consequences of the Talmudically trained mind of the Polish Jew. (In Sombart 1913, 246)

… Pioneering German sociologist Max Weber (1922, 250) also verified this perception, noting that “As a pariah people, [Jews] retained the double standard of morals which is characteristic of primordial economic practice in all communities: What is prohibited in relation to one’s brothers is permitted in relation to strangers.”

A common theme of late-18th- and 19th-century German anti-Semitic writings emphasized the need for moral rehabilitation of the Jews—their corruption, deceitfulness, and their tendency to exploit others (Rose 1990). Such views also occurred in the writings of Ludwig Börne and Heinrich Heine (both of Jewish background) and among gentile intellectuals such as Christian Wilhelm von Dohm (1751–1820) and Karl Ferdinand Glutzkow (1811–1878), who argued that Jewish immorality was partly the result of gentile oppression. Theodor Herzl viewed anti-Semitism as “an understandable reaction to Jewish defects” brought about ultimately by gentile persecution: Jews had been educated to be “leeches” who possessed “frightful financial power”; they were “a money-worshipping people incapable of understanding that a man can act out of other motives than money” (in Kornberg 1993, 161, 162). Their power drive and resentment at their persecutors could only find expression by outsmarting Gentiles in commercial dealings” (Kornberg 1993, 126). Theodor Gomperz, a contemporary of Herzl and professor of philology at the University of Vienna, stated “Greed for gain became . . . a national defect [among Jews], just as, it seems, vanity (the natural consequence of an atomistic existence shunted away from a concern with national and public interests)” (in Kornberg 1993, 161).

 So we should not be surprised to find that a great many Jews view Palestinians as having no moral worth. They are seen as literally not human, as noted by the prominent Lubavitcher Rebbe Schneerson:

We do not have a case of profound change in which a person is merely on a superior level. Rather we have a case of…a totally different species…. The body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of [members] of all nations of the world…. The difference of the inner quality [of the body]…is so great that the bodies would be considered as completely different species. This is the reason why the Talmud states that there is an halachic difference in attitude about the bodies of non-Jews [as opposed to the bodies of Jews]: “their bodies are in vain”…. An even greater difference exists in regard to the soul. Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness.  (see here)

Different species have no moral obligations to each other—predator and prey, parasite and host, humans domesticating cattle and eating meat and dairy products.

This ethic differs radically from Western universalism as epitomized by Kant’s moral imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”  Moral universalism is fundamental to Western individualism: Groups per se have no moral status—the exact opposite of Judaism.

Jews may often present themselves as the height of morality, but appearances can be deceiving. From my review of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century:

In 1923, several Jewish intellectuals published a collection of essays admitting the “bitter sin” of Jewish complicity in the crimes of the Revolution. In the words of a contributor, I. L. Bikerman, “it goes without saying that not all Jews are Bolsheviks and not all Bolsheviks are Jews, but what is equally obvious is that disproportionate and immeasurably fervent Jewish participation in the torment of half-dead Russia by the Bolsheviks” (p. 183). Many of the commentators on Jewish Bolsheviks noted the “transformation” of Jews: In the words of another Jewish commentator, G. A. Landau, “cruelty, sadism, and violence had seemed
alien to a nation so far removed from physical activity.” And another Jewish commentator, Ia. A Bromberg, noted that: the formerly oppressed lover of liberty had turned into a tyrant of “unheard-of-despotic arbitrariness”…. The convinced and unconditional opponent of the death penalty not just for political crimes but for the most heinous offenses, who could not, as it were, watch a chicken being killed, has been transformed outwardly into a leather-clad person with a revolver and, in fact, lost all human likeness (pp. 183–184). This psychological “transformation” of Russian Jews was probably not all that surprising to the Russians themselves, given Gorky’s finding that Russians prior to the Revolution saw Jews as possessed of “cruel egoism” and that they were concerned about becoming slaves of the Jews.

At least until the Gaza war, Jews have successfully depicted themselves as moral paragons and as champions of the downtrodden in the contemporary West. The organized Jewish community pioneered the civil rights movement and have been staunch champions of liberal immigration and refugee policies, always with the rhetoric of moral superiority (masking obviously self-interested motivations of recruiting non-Whites who could be relied on to ally with Jews in their effort to lessen the power of the erstwhile White majority by making them subjects of a multicultural, anti-White political hegemony; here, p. 26ff).

This weighs heavily on my mind. This Jewish pose of moral superiority is a dangerous delusion, and we must be realistic what the future holds as Whites continue to lose political power in all Western countries. When the gloves come off, there is no limit to what Jews in power may do if their present power throughout the West continues to increase.  The ubiquitous multicultural propaganda of ethnic groups living in harmony throughout the West will quickly be transformed into a war of revenge for putative historical grievances that Jews harbor against the West, from the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans to the events of World War II. This same revenge was fatal to many millions of Russians and Ukrainians. It’s the fate of the Palestinians that we are seeing unfold before our eyes. Two recent articles brought this home vividly.

Megan Stack in The New York Times:

Israel has hardened, and the signs of it are in plain view. Dehumanizing language and promises of annihilation from military and political leaders. Polls that found wide support for the policies that have wreaked devastation and starvation in Gaza. Selfies of Israeli soldiers preening proudly in bomb-crushed Palestinian neighborhoods. A crackdown on even mild forms of dissent among Israelis.

The Israeli left — the factions that criticize the occupation of Palestinian lands and favor negotiations and peace instead — is now a withered stump of a once-vigorous movement. In recent years, the attitudes of many Israelis toward the “Palestinian problem” have ranged largely from detached fatigue to the hard-line belief that driving Palestinians off their land and into submission is God’s work. …

But Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, the creeping famine, the wholesale destruction of neighborhoods — this, polling suggests, is the war the Israeli public wanted. A January survey found that 94 percent of Jewish Israelis said the force being used against Gaza was appropriate or even insufficient. In February, a poll found that most Jewish Israelis opposed food and medicine getting into Gaza. It was not Mr. Netanyahu alone but also his war cabinet members (including Benny Gantz, often invoked as the moderate alternative to Mr. Netanyahu) who unanimously rejected a Hamas deal to free Israeli hostages and, instead, began an assault on the city of Rafah, overflowing with displaced civilians.

“It’s so much easier to put everything on Netanyahu, because then you feel so good about yourself and Netanyahu is the darkness,” said Gideon Levy, an Israeli journalist who has documented Israel’s military occupation for decades. “But the darkness is everywhere.” …

Like most political evolutions, the toughening of Israel is partly explained by generational change — Israeli children whose earliest memories are woven through with suicide bombings have now matured into adulthood. The rightward creep could be long-lasting because of demographics, with modern Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews (who disproportionately vote with the right) consistently having more babies than their secular compatriots.

Most crucially, many Israelis emerged from the second intifada with a jaundiced view of negotiations and, more broadly, Palestinians, who were derided as unable to make peace. This logic conveniently erased Israel’s own role in sabotaging the peace process through land seizures and settlement expansion. But something broader had taken hold — a quality that Israelis described to me as a numb, disassociated denial around the entire topic of Palestinians.

“The issues of settlements or relations with Palestinians were off the table for years,” Tamar Hermann told me. “The status quo was OK for Israelis.”

Ms. Hermann, a senior research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, is one of the country’s most respected experts on Israeli public opinion. In recent years, she said, Palestinians hardly caught the attention of Israeli Jews. She and her colleagues periodically made lists of issues and asked respondents to rank them in order of importance. It didn’t matter how many choices the pollsters presented, she said — resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict came in last in almost all measurements. …

or nearly two decades — starting with the quieting of the second intifada and ending calamitously on Oct. 7 — Israel was remarkably successful at insulating itself from the violence of the occupation. Rockets fired from Gaza periodically rained down on Israeli cities, but since 2011, Israel’s Iron Dome defense system has intercepted most of them. The mathematics of death heavily favored Israel: From 2008 until Oct. 7, more than 6,000 Palestinians were killed in what the United Nations calls “the context of occupation and conflict”; during that time, more than 300 Israelis were killed.

Human rights organizations — including Israeli groups — wrote elaborate reports explaining why Israel is an apartheid state. That was embarrassing for Israel, but nothing really came of it. The economy flourished. Once-hostile Arab states showed themselves willing to sign accords with Israel after just a little performative pestering about the Palestinians.

Those years gave Israelis a taste of what may be the Jewish state’s most elusive dream — a world in which there simply did not exist a Palestinian problem.

Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator who is now president of the U.S./Middle East Project think tank, describes “the level of hubris and arrogance that built up over the years.” Those who warned of the immorality or strategic folly of occupying Palestinian territories “were dismissed,” he said, “like, ‘Just get over it.’”

If U.S. officials understand the state of Israeli politics, it doesn’t show. Biden administration officials keep talking about a Palestinian state. But the land earmarked for a state has been steadily covered in illegal Israeli settlements, and Israel itself has seldom stood so unabashedly opposed to Palestinian sovereignty.

There’s a reason Mr. Netanyahu keeps reminding everyone that he’s spent his career undermining Palestinian statehood: It’s a selling point. Mr. Gantz, who is more popular than Mr. Netanyahu and is often mentioned as a likely successor, is a centrist by Israeli standards — but he, too, has pushed back against international calls for a Palestinian state.

Daniel Levy describes the current divide among major Israeli politicians this way: Some believe in “managing the apartheid in a way that gives Palestinians more freedom — that’s [Yair] Lapid and maybe Gantz on some days,” while hard-liners like Mr. Smotrich and Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir “are really about getting rid of the Palestinians. Eradication. Displacement.”

The carnage and cruelty suffered by Israelis on Oct. 7 should have driven home the futility of sealing themselves off from Palestinians while subjecting them to daily humiliations and violence. As long as Palestinians are trapped under violent military occupation, deprived of basic rights and told that they must accept their lot as inherently lower beings, Israelis will live under the threat of uprisings, reprisals and terrorism. There is no wall thick enough to suppress forever a people who have nothing to lose.

*   *   *

Ilana Mercer is a Jewish woman from South Africa who has posted on various conservative sites. Here she states the unmentionable about Israel—and by implication, a very wide swath of Jews living in the West: that sociopathy toward non-Jews is entirely mainstream among Jews. No one should be surprised by this. My only quibble is that real sociopaths have no guilt and even take pleasure in harming others without regard to their religion or ethnicity. But these same Jews who are reveling in slaughtering Palestinians are Jewish patriots and love their own people. But they have an extreme form of ingroup morality—a morality that is intimately linked to what I call Jewish “hyper-ethnocentrism” (e.g., here).

Ilana Mercer at Lew Rockwell.com: Sad To Say, but, by the Numbers, Israeli Society Is Systemically Sociopathic.

In teasing out right from wrong, discriminate we must between acts that are criminal only because The State has criminalized them (mala prohibita), as opposed to acts which are universally evil (malum in se). Israel’s sacking of Gaza is malum in se, universally evilGaza is clearly an easy case in ethics. It’s not as though the genocide underway in Gaza could ever be finessed or gussied up.

Yet in Israel, no atrocity perpetrated by the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) in Gaza is too conspicuous to ignore. One of the foremost authorities on Gaza, Dr. Norman Finkelstein, calls Israel a Lunatic State. “It is certainly not a Jewish State,” he avers. “A murderous nation, a demonic nation,” roars Scott Ritter—legendary, larger-than-life American military expert, to whose predictive, reliable reports from theaters of war I’ve been referring since 2002. That the Jewish State is genocidal is not in dispute. But, what of Israeli society? Is it sick, too? What of the Israeli anti-government protesters now flooding the streets of metropolitan Israel? How do they feel about the incessant, industrial-scale campaign of slaughter and starvation in Gaza, north, center and south?

They don’t.

In desperate search for a universal humanity—a transcendent moral sensibility—among the mass of Israelis protesting the State; I scoured many transcripts over seven months. I sat through volumes of video footage, searching as I was for mention, by Israeli protesters, of the war of extermination being waged in their name, on their Gazan neighbors. I found none. Much to my astonishment, I failed to come across a single Israeli protester who cried for anyone but himselfhis kin and countrymen, and their hostages. Israelis appear oblivious to the unutterable, irreversible, irremediable ruin adjacent.

Again: I found no transcendent humanity among Israeli protesters; no allusion to the universal moral order to which international humanitarian law, the natural law and the Sixth Commandment give expression. I found only endless iterations among Jewish-Israelis of their sectarian interests.

For their part, protesters merely want regime change. They saddle Netanyahu solely with the responsibility for hostages entombed in Gaza, although, Benny Gantz (National Unity Party), ostensible rival to Bibi Netanyahu (Likud), and other War Cabinet members, are philosophically as one (Ganz had boasted, in 2014, that he would “send parts of Gaza back to the Stone Age”). With respect to the holocaustal war waged on Gaza, and spreading to the West Bank, there is no chasm between these and other squalid Jewish supremacists who make up “Israel’s wartime leadership.”

If you doubt my findings with respect to the Israeli protesters, note the May 11 droning address of protester Na’ama Weinberg, who demanded a change of government. Weinberg condemned the invasion of Rafah and a lack of a political strategy as perils to both hostage- and national survival. She lamented the “unspeakable torture” faced by the hostages. When Weinberg mentioned “evacuees neglected,” I lit up. Nine-hundred thousand Palestinians have been displaced from Rafah in the last two weeks. Forty percent of Gaza’s population. My hope was fleeting. It soon transpired that Weinberg meant citizens of Israeli border communities evacuated. That was the extent of Weinberg’s sympathies for the “slaughter house of civilians” down the road. Hers was nothing but a lower-order sectarian sensibility.

The grim spareness of Israeli protester sentiment has been widely noticed.

Writing for Foreign Policy, an American mainstream magazine, Mairav Zonszein, scholar with the International Crisis Group, observes the following:

‘The thousands of Israelis who are once again turning out to march in the streets are not protesting the war. Except for a tiny handful of Israelis, Jews, and Palestinians, they are not calling for a cease-fire or an end to the war—or for peace. They are not protesting Israel’s killing of unprecedented numbers of Palestinians in Gaza or its restrictions on humanitarian aid that have led to mass starvation. (Some right-wing Israelis even go further by actively blocking aid from entering the strip.) They are certainly not invoking the need to end military occupation, now in its 57th year. They are primarily protesting Netanyahu’s refusal to step down and what they see as his reluctance to seal a hostage deal.’

Public incitement continues apace. Genocidal statements saturate Israeli society. The “lovely” Itamar Ben Gvir has provided an update to his repertoire, the kind chronicled so well by the South Africans (this one included). On May 14, to the roar of the crowd, Israel’s national security minister urged anew that Palestinians be voluntarily encouraged to emigrate (as if anything that has befallen the Palestinians of Gaza, since October 7, has been “voluntary”). He was speaking at a settler rally on the northern border of Gaza, in which thousands of yahoos watched the “fireworks” on display over Gaza, and cheered for looting the land of the dead and dying there.

“It’s the media’s fault,” you’ll protest. “Israelis, like Americans, are merely brainwashed by their media.”

Inarguably, Israeli media—from Arutz 7, to Channel 12 (“[Gazans need] to die ‘hard and agonizing deaths’), to Israel Today, to Now 14 (“We will slaughter you and your supporters”), and the lowbrow, sub-intelligent vulgarians of i24—are a self-obsessed, energetic Idiocracy.

These media feature excitable sorts, volubly imparting their atavistic, primitive tribalism in ugly, anglicized, Pidgin Hebrew. And, each one of these specimen always has a “teoria”: a theory.

Naveh Dromi is a lot more appealing in visage and voice than i24’s anchor Benita Levin, a harsh and vinegary South African Kugel. Dromi is columnist for a Ha’aretz, the most highbrow of Israel’s (center-left) dailies. Ha’aretz once had intellectual ballast. In her impoverished Hebrew, Dromi has tweeted about her particular “teoria”: “a second Nakba” is a coming. Elsewhere she has rasped a-mile-a-minute about “the Palestinians as a redundant group.” Nothing crimsons her lovely cheeks.

Such statements of Jewish supremacy pervade Jewish-Israeli media. But, no; it’s not the Israeli media’s fault. The closing of the Israeli mind is entirely voluntary.

According to a paper from Oxford Scholarship Online, the “media landscape in Israel” evinces “healthy competition” and declining concentration. “[C]alculated on a per-capita basis,” “the number of media voices in Israel,” overall, “is near the top of the countries investigated.”

Israel has a robust, and privately owned media. These media cater to the Israeli public, which has a filial stake in lionizing the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), in which each and every son and daughter serve. For this reason, avers Ha’aretz’s Gideon Levi, in his many YouTube television interviews, the military is the country’s golden calf.

Mainstream public opinion, Levi insists, molds the media, not the obverse.

Levi attests that right-wing and left-wing media are as one when it comes to the subject of the IDF and the Palestinian People. And in this, Israeli media reflect mainstream public opinion. It is the public that wishes to see nothing of the suffering in Gaza, and takes care never to disparage or doubt the IDF. For their part, military journalists are no more than embeds, in bed with the military.

At least until now, Israelis have been largely indifferent to their army’s orgiastic, indiscriminate bloodletting in Gaza. Most were merely demanding a return of their hostages, and the continuance of the assault on Gazans, punctured by periodic cease fires.

So, is Jewish-Israeli society sick, too?

When “88 percent of Jewish-Israeli interviewees” give “a positive assessment of the performance of the IDF in Gaza until now” (Tamar Hermann, “War in Gaza Survey 9,” Israel Democracy Institute, January 24, 2024), and “[a]n absolute majority (88%) also justifies the scope of casualties on the Palestinian side”; (Gershon H. Gordon, The Peace Index, January 2024, Faculty of Social Sciences, Tel Aviv University)—it is fair to conclude that the diabolical IDF is, for the most, the voice of the Jewish-Israeli commonwealth.

Consider: By January’s end, the Gaza Strip had, by and large, already been rendered uninhabitable, a moonscape. Nevertheless, 51 percent of Jewish-Israelis said they believed the IDF was using an appropriate amount (51%) or not enough force (43%) in Gaza. (Source: Jerusalem Post staff, “Jewish Israelis believe IDF is using appropriate force in Gaza,” January 26, 2024.)

Note: Polled opinion was not split between Israelis for genocide and Israelis against it. Rather, the division in Israeli society appeared to be between Jewish-Israelis for current levels of genocide versus those for greater industry in what were already industrial-levels and methods of murder.

Attitudes in Israel have only hardened since: By mid-February, 58 percent of this Jewish cohort was grumbling that not enough force had been deployed to date; and 68 percent did “not support the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza.” (Jerusalem Post Staff, “Majority of Jewish Israelis opposed to demilitarized Palestinian state,” February 21, 2024.) [One wonders if the Biden admin’s humanitarian pier — the one that drifted into the sea shortly after it was installed — was sabotaged.]

Scrap the “hardened” verb. Attitudes in Jewish Israel have not merely hardened, but bear the hallmark of societal sociopathy.

When asked, in particular, “to what extent should Israel take into consideration the suffering of the Palestinian population when planning the continuation of the fighting there,” Jewish-Israelis sampled have remained consistent through the months of the onslaught on Gaza, from late in October of 2023 to late in March of 2024. The Israel Democracy Institute, a polling organization, found that,

‘[D]espite the progress of the war in Gaza and the harsh criticism of Israel from the international community regarding the harm inflicted on the Palestinian population, there remains a very large majority of the Jewish public who think that Israel should not take into account the suffering of Palestinian civilians in planning the continuation of the fighting. By contrast, a similar majority of the Arab public in Israel take the opposite view, and think this suffering should be given due consideration.’ (Tamar Hermann, Yaron Kaplan, Dr. Lior Yohanani, “War in Gaza Survey 13,” Israel Democracy Institute, March 26, 2024.)

Large majorities of the Israeli Center (71 percent) and on the Right (90 percent) say that “Israel should only take into account the suffering of the Palestinian population to a small extent or should not do so at all.”

Let us, nevertheless, end this canvas with the “good” news: On the “bleeding heart” Israeli Left; “only” (I’m being cynical) 47 percent of a sample “think that Israel should not take into consideration the suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza or should do so only to a small extent, while 50 percent think it should consider their plight to a fairly large or very large extent.” (Ibid.)

In other words, the general run of the Jewish-Israeli Left tends to think that the plight of Gazans should be considered, but not necessarily ended.

On the facts, and, as I have had to, sadly, show here, both the Israeli state and civil society are driven by Jewish supremacy, the kind that sees little to no value in Palestinian lives and aspirations. …

*   *   *

Again,  any student of Jewish history, Jewish ethics, and Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism should not be surprised by this. The existential problem for us is that we have to avoid the fate of the Russians, the Ukrainians, and the Palestinians. Jews in power will do what they can to oppose the interests of non-Jews of whatever society they reside in, whether by promoting nation-destroying immigration and refugee policy or — when they have absolute power — torture, imprisonment, and genocide.

The contrast between the hyper-ethnocentric Israeli media described by Mercer and the anti-White, utopian, multicultural media in the West, much of it owned and staffed by Jews, couldn’t be greater. Whereas the Israeli media reflect the ethnocentrism of the Israeli public, the media in the West do their best to shape public attitudes, including constant and ever-increasing anti-White messaging — morally phrased messaging that is effective with very large percentages of White people, especially women, likely for evolutionary reasons peculiar to Western  individualist cultures (here, Ch. 8). The state of the Western media is Exhibit A of Jews as a hostile elite in the West.

It should be obvious at this point that Western cultures are the opposite of Middle Eastern cultures where ethnocentrism and collectivism reign. Westerners have far less of the ingroup-outgroup thinking so typical of Jewish culture throughout history.

Individualism has served us poorly indeed and has been a disaster for Western peoples. Nothing short of a strong ingroup consciousness in which Jews are seen as a powerful and very dangerous outgroup will save us now.

Whitewashing Ethnicity in the Ancient World: Erich S. Gruen’s Ethnicity in the Ancient World — Did It Matter?

 

Ethnicity in the Ancient World — Did It Matter?
Erich S. Gruen
Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2020

Erich S. Gruen is a Vienna-born Jewish classics professor who taught at Berkeley for more than 40 years.  He is 88 years old.

As a demonstration of the persistence of the Jewish project — comparable to George Soros cranking away at 92 — his late-in-life recent work is a collection of essays aiming to deny the importance of ethnicity in the ancient world.  Without saying so, he seems to be attempting to answer the White advocacy interest in classics — and the race realist interest in how inherent racial characteristics drive human events.

Ethnicity in the Ancient World — Did it Matter? surveys Western history from early Greece through Rome.  Considerable attention is paid to Jews as portrayed in the Old Testament, ancient Jewish writers like Philo of Alexandria, and Christianity.

In the introduction, Gruen rejects inherent racial characteristics.

“The idea of an immutable character determining the nature of a people or an ethnic group finds few takers today,” he tells us.  Never mind, of course, that to be a “taker” of this view is to be exiled from modern academia, which might explain why there are “few.”

Gruen says his purpose is to demonstrate that “ancient societies generally shunned the sense of ethnicity as an undeviating marker of distinctiveness stemming from descent, and that they were therefore open to change, adaptation, intermingling, and incorporation.  In our contemporary age when ethnic identity has become increasingly fraught and divisive, those characteristics can offer a salutary corrective.”

In other words, the ancients were woke.

But to style them as such, Gruen sets the bar where he needs it set to validate this thesis:   an ancient must have openly and repeatedly declared a belief in inherited — i.e., group genetic — inferiority.  And must have made this a central principle.  For ethnicity to “matter,” apparently, the only sufficient proof would be the frequent deployment of a centuries-old and heretofore unknown racial slur.

Of course, the ancients weren’t like this.

But even with this sleight of hand, Gruen struggles to overcome what’s apparent even to someone new to study of the ancient world:  ethnicity did matter.

In a chapter titled “Were Barbarians Barbaric?,” Gruen discusses Aristotle’s assertion that “barbarians” (non-Greeks, so called because their languages sounded like “bar-bar-bar” to Hellenic ears) are synonymous with slaves, and are the proper object of Greek rule.  He also references Plato’s account of Socrates saying something similar:  Greek states should not enslave each other, but to enslave barbarians is the ancient prerogative of warfare.

None of this mattered, in Gruen’s view, because they didn’t declare barbarians to be inherently inferior — simply the enemy, or the outsider.

Yet the grand triumvirate of Greek philosophy demonstrate in these passages not only recognition of the importance of nationality, but race — and how the latter is more important than the former.  They make a distinction that your average American Republican can’t seem to wrap his head around:  a Black American is less a brother than a White European.

In one speech quoted in the book, Herodotus has an Athenian spokesman declare that Greekness “rests on common blood, common language, shared shrines and sacrifices, and similar ways of life — which they would not betray”.

Could there be a more powerful affirmation of racial-national solidarity?  Gruen says no.  First, he says, Herodotus made the speech up.  Perhaps, though Herodotus was a man of his time and must have had strong basis for the speech.  Second, he says, the speech is more about inspiring Greek vengeance on Persia than an assertion of racial pride.

Incredibly, Gruen says, “it can hardly carry the weight of a serious and sweeping expression of Hellenic identity.”

Read the quote again and see if you agree.

Herodotus, sometimes known as the “father of history,” is often described as the world’s first ethnographer.  Indeed, his writings are replete with his observations — sometimes first-hand, other times heard from others — about the races and ethnicities of the world.

And, as Guillaume Durocher notes:

Herodotus’ world certainly featured peaceful commerce, cultural exchange, and ethnic intermarriage among these peoples — the historian is quite broad-minded and free of chauvinism in this respect. But, as Herodotus makes clear, this was also a world of extreme ethnocentrism and brutal wars. as Herodotus makes clear, this was also a world of extreme ethnocentrism and brutal wars.

This view is expanded in Durocher’s The Ancient Ethnostate: Biopolitical Thought in Ancient Greece.

Gruen tells us, in a pattern that repeats itself throughout the book, “Herodotus mentions black men of smaller than normal stature in Libya, presumably pygmies, but only in passing and makes nothing of it.”  In fact, Herodotus’ ethnic discussions aren’t “only in passing” — they’re a mainstay of his work.

Elsewhere, Gruen employs the technique of setting up a quote that damns his thesis, only to blithely follow up by saying this particular ancient only said that once.  Therefore, we should discount it.

God, in Genesis, said “let there be light” only once, though that doesn’t mean it wasn’t important.

To thoroughly refute Gruen’s conclusion that “ethnicity didn’t matter” in the ancient world might take years of reading the texts.  Or, you could just read the first few lines of a given work.

Take Tacitus’ The Agricola and the Germania.  The Roman writer’s tract on the German tribes bordered by the Rhine and the Danube jumps right in with a detailed description of ethnicity:

“I think it probable that they are indigenous and that very little foreign blood has been introduced either by invasions or friendly dealings with neighboring peoples… For myself, I accept the view that the peoples of Germany have never contaminated themselves by intermarriage with foreigners but remain of pure blood, distinct and unlike any other nations.  One result of this is that their physical characteristics, in so far as one can generalize about a large population, are always the same:  fierce-looking blue eyes, reddish hair, and big frames — which, however, can exert their strength only by means of violent effort.  They are less able to endure toil or fatiguing tasks and cannot bear thirst or heat, though their climate has inured them to cold spells and the poverty of their soil to hunger.”

I ask:  does talk of “contamination” of the blood square with a view that “ethnicity didn’t matter”?

Gruen mentions The Agricola and the Germania, but doesn’t quote the passage above.  Yet in an entire essay on these Germans, it’s the first thing Tacitus writes.  That indicates to me that ethnicity was important to him.

It should go without saying that for ancient Jews, ethnicity was crucial, just as it is for them today.  Gruen, perhaps to his credit, lays out some of the more pungent examples of this, but manages to be just as dismissive of their interest as he is of Greeks and Romans.

Gruen recounts the episode in the Book of Numbers where Phinehas, a grandson of Aaron, Moses’ brother, is so outraged by a Jewish man and Midianite woman having sex that he runs his spear through the two of them mid-act, like a miscegenation shish-kebob.  To top it off, God blesses the act.

It would be hard to imagine a more “racist” act, but Gruen goes on to insist that the only reason for disapproving race-mixing is that non-Jewish women will tempt Jewish men into worshipping foreign idols.  It was about religious purity, not racial purity.

Yet one can question which came first — was racial purity needed to keep religious purity, or was religious purity leading racial purity?  Gruen also seems to ignore the fact that many mixed marriages by Jewish Old Testament males were more a sign of conquering another people and absorbing them inward than a free-spirited exogamy.

The Book of Tobit, likely written during the Second Temple period, is a Jewish work sometimes deemed part of the Apocrypha (i.e., for most denominations, not included in the Bible).  Its central theme is the need for Jews to marry other Jews.

Gruen at least acknowledges this, but goes so far as to use examples of over-emphasis on racial kinship to prove his point.  The repeated use of the terms “brother” and “sister” for Jews leads him to say, “The Book of Tobit reads less like advocacy for the idea of Jewish identity as a descent group than like a parody of that idea.”

Of course, it was no such thing, and Gruen’s unscholarly observation seems almost desperate.

Gruen’s discussion of how prominent Romans viewed Jews trots out some zingers:  To Cicero, they were superstitious barbarians; for Seneca, “a most pernicious race.”  Tacitus called them “a race of men hated by the gods, with base and wicked practices, sordid and ridiculous rites, xenophobic, despised, and the vilest of nations.”

But these disparagements, Gruen assures us, were mere rhetorical heat.

There are several impediments to Gruen’s theory that ethnicity didn’t matter in the ancient world.

The first is that the peoples of the ancient Mediterranean were likely closer to each other genetically than, say, American Whites and sub-Saharan Black Africans.

The scholarship on the actual race of ancient Greeks and Romans is mostly unknown to me, but the sculptures and busts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, combined with Homer’s references to Athena’s gray eyes, Achilles’ blond hair and Menelaus’ red hair, leave me satisfied that prominent ancients looked pretty close to modern Whites.

Would the Greeks at the Battle of Thermopylae have looked slightly whiter than their Persian enemies?  I don’t know.  It is difficult to imagine that Athenians and Spartans looked markedly different as they squared off during the Peloponnesian War.  If ancients were discounting ethnicity, they had more reason to do so than a White Englishman being told that a black African from Zimbabwe is his equal.

In addition to closer genetics, the scientific insights about genetics — as well as intelligence and behavior — did not arise until some two thousand years later.  So ancients would not have had the opportunity to ponder, or dwell upon, how these differences might affect social policy.

The second impediment to Gruen’s theory is that the politics were different.  Mass immigration by one racial group to the welfare-state apparatus of another wasn’t something happening in the ancient world.  Movements of people happened by conquest or exploration, and the driver was likely simple power:  the Romans were either able to conquer Gaul, or not.

A conquering race had little reason to spend time thinking about whether it was “superior,” because it just proved it.

Relatedly, the concept of “equality” was a political one that only arose centuries on.  It was only when the insistence that all human beings are “equal” was presented in the West that anyone needed to refute it.  Natural differences in strength, beauty or intelligence were simply accepted.

The third impediment is that the evidence that ethnicity mattered still overwhelms the evidence that it didn’t.  Much of Gruen’s book, in fact, is simply the laying out of just such examples — which he proceeds to downplay.

Gruen clearly has the modern West marked as his enemy.  His comparison point is presumably the White nation-states that, through colonization and slavery on the one hand, and mass immigration and affirmative action on the other, have a racial dynamic unlike any other in the world.

In other words, we are (or were) head-caliper obsessed Nazis, while the ancients were mellow.

Gruen says that “the ancients were not absorbed in examining, analyzing, or agonizing over the concept.”  I personally may not have, either, but I was born into a society in which I am told that I cannot have a job because I am White.  Therefore, I will spend some time “agonizing” over the concept.

So, is the book of any value to White advocates?  The discussions do discuss actual writings of ancients, so for what’s that’s worth, yes.  His bibliography could serve as a model.

I suppose that Gruen has spent his life poring over these texts from the classical world.  I am humbled to realize that I have not, but am making up for lost ground later in life by setting up my own classical library at home.  I think all White advocates should do the same, and see to it that their children learn classical history, too.


Christopher Donovan has been a White advocate for at least 20 years, and believes Whites have no choice but to be positive about our prospects even in an obviously declining United States and Europe.  He is a practicing lawyer.

Lance Welton on Jewish ethnocentrism: Fairness, Paranoia, and Self-Deception

Lance Welton’s article on VDARE is a nice summary of research on Jewish ethnocentrism and its consequences: “Did the ADL Think It Could Get Away with  Hypocrisy on Replacement in U.S. vs. Israel? Answer: It Probably Didn’t Think At All.” As noted below, some of his presentation touches on my Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition as well as my books on Judaism.

Welton:

“Fairness,” as I noted in my article on blacks, is “impartial and just treatment or behavior without favoritism or discrimination.” This is a high-order value which demands that you put aside nepotism, ethnocentrism, and even personal gain, in favor of this abstract goal. So, on this basis, would we expect Jews to be as high in “fairness” as Whites?

No. Firstly, there is abundant evidence that Jews are more ethnocentric than whites; meaning they cooperate strongly with their own people and are hostile to other peoples. Jews have been stereotyped as being highly ethnocentric throughout their history, as Kevin MacDonald showed in his 1994 book A People That Shall Dwell Alone [Chap 8, 228ff]. There is overwhelming evidence that racial stereotypes, like all stereotypes, tend to be true; that’s why they develop [Social Perception and Social RealityBy Lee Jussim, 2012].

This goes very deep. Jewish babies react with far greater horror to strangers of a different ethnic group than do German babies [Security of Infant-Mother, -Father, and -Metapelet Attachments Among Kibbutz-Reared Israeli Children, by Abraham Sagi et al., Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 1985].

Data from the University of Wisconsin’s MIDUS survey of middle-aged Americans demonstrated that among Whites there is a positive correlation between how religious you are and how group-oriented you are. However, the same study found that Jews are the most ethnocentric—group-oriented religious group—even though they were the least religious group of those surveyed. When factors such as intelligence (which tends to make people less ethnocentric) and religiousness level were controlled for, Jews were still way more ethnocentric than the gentile White groups. (This is discussed in Religiosity as a Predictor of In-Group Favoritism Within and Between Religious Groups, by Curtis Dunkel & Edward Dutton, Personality and Individual Differences, 2016).

If you take into account the number of Jews in a population compared to the number of Whites, then the extent to which Jews “marry out” is far lower. Jews are about 49 times less likely to marry someone of a different faith than Protestants are, for example. [See Andrew Joyce’s “The Cofnas Problem.“]. The most obvious explanation for this, in the context of the other research: ethnocentrism. Jews seem to be evolved to be higher in ethnocentrism [see “A Genetic Perspective on Individualism/Collectivism,” A People That Shall Dwell Alone, Ch. 8: p. 236ff], something that would be heightened by their small gene pool; with people tending to be more ethnocentric when the gene pool is small [Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence, By Gregory Cochran et al., Journal of Biosocial Science, 2006]. This higher ethnocentrism would make them less able to suppress ethnocentric instincts in favor of creating fairness than are gentile Whites.

Fairness is one of the traits that is higher in Western societies based on individualism versus the kinship-based societies of the rest of the world. Joseph Henrich and colleagues reviewed research showing differences between subjects from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) nations and subjects in a wide range of other cultures, finding important differences in fairness and moral reasoning. This is reviewed in Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: 

In non-Western societies based on extended kinship, morality is defined in terms of whether an action satisfies obligations within the family or kinship group, whereas in individualist societies, morality is thought of as satisfying abstract notions of justice such as Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative: Act according to the maxim that you could wish all other rational people to follow, as if it were a universal law. … The differences between individualist and collectivist cultures—whether in fairness and altruistic punishment, moral reasoning, cognition, or perception—are all “of a piece;” they all fit into a consistent pattern in which Westerners detach themselves from social, cognitive, and perceptual contexts, whereas non-Westerners see the world in a deeply embedded manner. This pattern is highly consistent with Western peoples being more prone to scientific reasoning (p. 110).

On the other hand, collectivist cultures—my view is that Judaism is a paradigmatic collectivist culture—see the world from the standpoint of group interests, so that even scientific reasoning in the social sciences is performed through the lens of group interests. Hence, The Culture of Critique.

The Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) people discussed in Chapter 3 developed scientific and scholarly associations in the post-medieval West which assume groups are permeable and highly subject to defection—that there is a marketplace of ideas in which individuals may defect from current scientific views when they believe that the data support alternate perspectives. On the other hand, collectivist cultures create group-oriented intellectual movements based on dogmatic assertions, fealty to group leaders, ethnic networking, and expulsion of dissenters [i.e., the thesis of The Culture of Critique]. …

Moreover, … WEIRD people tend more toward analytical reasoning (detaching objects from context, attending to characteristics of the object and developing rules for explaining and predicting phenomena) as opposed to holistic reasoning (attending to relationships between objects and surrounding field). Westerners tend to categorize objects on the basis of rules that are independent of function and hence more abstract whereas non-Westerners are more likely to categorize on the basis of function and contextual relationship. Science is fundamentally concerned with creating abstract rules independent of context and developing explanations and predictions of phenomena in the empirical world. Such traits, which can be seen even in the ancient Greco-Roman world of antiquity, clearly predispose to scientific thinking. …

For collectivists, moral reasoning involves taking account of the social context, which is fundamentally centered on fitting into and strengthening a kinship group. For individualists, the social world involves a greater need to interact with strangers and to consider their reputation for respecting impersonal rules. …

Individuals are evaluated as individuals on traits—e.g., honesty, intelligence, military talent, and the logic and usefulness of their arguments—in abstraction from their (relatively weak) kinship connections. Moral situations are evaluated in terms of abstract concepts of justice that apply to all individuals rather than being vitally concerned with social obligations to particular people enmeshed in a particular extended kinship network. When confronting the natural world, individualists more easily abstract from social context and personal experience, seeking out and applying universally applicable laws of nature.

Back to Welton:

In addition, there is evidence that Jews are perfectly happy for a situation to be unfair. One study compared religious groups in the US—Baptists, Catholics, Methodists, Jews, and Atheists/Agnostics—and asked people what they thought was most important to live a “good life.” Jews, in contrast to all the other groups, highlighted “extra money” [“For Tomorrow We Die”? Testing the Accuracy of Stereotypes about Atheists and Agnostics, by Edward Dutton & Curtis Dunkel, Mankind Quarterly, 2019]. They see it as important to be richer than other people in a way that the whites do not, which implies that they are less concerned about a possibly unfair situation as long as they benefit. And, being more intelligent than gentile Whites on average (as Richard Lynn has shown in his book The Chosen People) they will better be able to rationalize achieving such an advantage, as intelligent people are typically better at finding ways of rationalizing their biases [Why smart people aren’t better at transcending their biased views, by Tauriq Mousa, The Big Think, June 13, 2012].

Finally, Jews are less mentally stable than Whites. Ashkenazi Jews have significantly elevated levels of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, both of which can make people paranoid [Genome-Wide Association Study of Schizophrenia in Ashkenazi Jews, by Fernando Goes et al., American Journal of Medical Genetics, 2015]. When people are paranoid, they are less interested in what is “fair”—they are interested simply in surviving and doing so may involve being very “unfair.” People with paranoid personalities tend to be hypocritical and self-seeking [Understanding Paranoia, by Martin Kantor, 2004, p.71].

Because Jews are better at finding ways of rationalizing away their bias and hypocrisy, they may well not believe that they are being “unfair” at all [a kind of self-deception one expects to find among highly ethnocentric people—Ch. 8 of Separation and Its Discontents  and elaborated by Andrew Joyce here]. In this sense, it can be said that intelligent yet paranoid people do not “know themselves”—meaning that they live in a fantasy world in which there is nothing wrong with them; only with others.

This personality type will see the world as packed full of hostile persecutors who want to destroy them, meaning that an obviously Mostly Peaceful protest at the Capitol becomes an “insurrection” in which people could have been killed.

This personality type will also engage in “paranoid projection,” whereby they purport to find an aspect of themselves they dislike in others, causing them to despise these people. “I hate them” becomes “They hate me,” based on finding some minor evidence of this. Hence the Leftist obsession with how “hateful” their opponents are [8 Key Traits of Paranoid Thinkersby Shahram Heshmat, Psychology TodayFebruary 24, 2016].

It’s interesting in this regard that paranoia about the surrounding world is a very central aspect of Jewish culture—analyzed as what behavior geneticists label genotype-environment correlation (e.g., paranoid parents with genetic predispositions to paranoia would socialize their children (who share their genes for paranoia) in a manner that would reinforce a worldview that the outside world is dangerous). From A People That Shall Dwell Alone, Ch. 7:

A permanent sense of imminent threat appears to be common among Jews. Writing on the clinical profile of Jewish families, Herz and Rosen (1982) note that for Jewish families a “sense of persecution (or its imminence) is part of a cultural heritage and is usually assumed with pride. Suffering is even a form of sharing with one’s fellow-Jews. It binds Jews with their heritage—with the suffering of Jews throughout history.” Zborowski and Herzog (1952, 153) note that the homes of wealthy Jews in traditional Eastern European shtetl communities sometimes had secret passages for use in times of anti-Semitic pogroms, and that their existence was “part of the imagery of the children who played around them, just as the half-effaced memory was part of every Jew’s mental equipment.”

This evolved response to external threat is often manipulated by Jewish authorities attempting to inculcate a stronger sense of group identification. Hartung (1992) provides anecdotal data on the emphasis on Jewish suffering and its exaggeration as aspects of modern synagogue service. Such practices have a long history. Roth (1978, 62) notes that Jewish “martyrologists” maintained lists of Jewish martyrs for commemoration during synagogue services during the Middle Ages, and Jordan (1989, 20) refers to the “forbidding martyrocentric self-image” during this period.

Woocher (1986) shows that Jewish survival in a threatening world is a theme of Judaism as a civil religion in contemporary America. Within this world view, the gentile world is viewed as fundamentally hostile, with Jewish life always on the verge of ceasing to exist entirely. “Like many other generations of Jews who have felt similarly, the leaders of the polity who fear that the end may be near have transformed this concern into a survivalist weapon” (Woocher 1986, 73). Woocher (1986) notes that there has been a major effort since the 1960s to have American Jews visit Israel in an effort to strengthen Jewish identification, with a prominent aspect of the visit being a trip to a border outpost “where the ongoing threat to Israel’s security is palpable” (p. 150).

Or, as Elliott Abrams (Faith or Fear, 190) wrote, “the American Jewish community clings to what is at bottom a dark vision of America, as a land permeated with anti-Semitism and always on the verge of anti-Semitic outbursts.”

Hence the Jewish motivation for diversifying America, the theme of Chapter 7 of The Culture of Critique (corroborated by Otis Graham (Unguarded Gates [2004]: 80), who notes that the Jewish lobby on immigration “was aimed not just at open doors for Jews, but also for a diversification of the immigration stream sufficient to eliminate the majority status of western Europeans so that a fascist regime in America would be more unlikely.” The motivating role of fear and insecurity on the part of the activist Jewish community thus differed from other groups and individuals promoting an end to the national origins provisions of the 1924 and 1952 laws.

Writing in the 1970s, Isaacs (1974: 14ff) describes the pervasive insecurity of American Jews and their hypersensitivity to anything that might be deemed anti-Semitic. Interviewing “noted public men” on the subject of anti-Semitism in the early 1970s, Isaacs asked, “Do you think it could happen here?” “Never was it necessary to define ‘it.’ In almost every case, the reply was approximately the same: ‘If you know history at all, you have to presume not that it could happen, but that it probably will,’ or ‘It’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when.’ ” (p. 15).

Writing long after the passage of the 1965 law, prominent Jewish social scientist and ethnic activist Earl Raab remarked very positively on the success of American immigration policy in altering the ethnic composition of the United States. Writing for a Jewish publication, Raab noted that the Jewish community had taken a leadership role in changing the northwestern European bias of American immigration policy (Raab, 1993a, 17), and he also maintained that one factor inhibiting anti-Semitism in the contemporary United States is that “an increasing ethnic heterogeneity, as a result of immigration, has made it even more difficult for a political party or mass movement of bigotry to develop” (Raab, 1995b, 91). (Culture of Critique, Ch. 7).

Welton concludes:

The self-centeredness and implicit unfairness of the ADL operatives’ fantasy world means they indeed might very well not have thought at all about what to any outside observer appears to be the utter hypocrisy of their position on the Great Replacement [via immigration] in the U.S. as opposed to Israel.

For such people, objective truth is “defamation”—but their “defamation” of others is objective truth.

Any objective observer would indeed have to agree that the ADL is utterly hypocritical in its stance toward immigration in Israel versus the United States. But activist Jews like Jonathan Greenblatt may not even be aware of it due to their powerful tendencies toward ethnocentrism and its corollary of self-deception. And now these people are firmly ensconced in the hostile elite that is running the United States. A dire situation indeed for the traditional White population of America.

Populist-Socialism: The Economy of the White Ethno-State

Abstract
Little consideration is given to the economic foundations of a White ethno-state. While many in the Alt-Right know conceptually what an ethno-state should be like in the abstract sense of demographics, the minutia of public and economic policy to obtain or maintain such a state is lost. While not exhaustive, the following paper is intended to steer conversations into more concrete terms addressing the economy of a White ethno-state. That is, an anti-materialist economy that serves the nation, versus the nation serving the economy in materialistic capitalism and socialist-communism. A Third Position meshing of populist and socialism is proposed.

The demagogues on the left and right both use the terms populist and socialist to malign their political opponents. Populism has become synonymous with right-wing authoritarianism to the left. The same argument is used by conservatives to associate socialism with communism. Indeed, the populist primacy of the people and the socialist primacy of the class are seen as contradictory ideals. In reality, elements of populism and socialism can be complementary to one another in a dynamic economy. Socialism’s securing the welfare of the people and populism’s emphasis on the common man’s economic growth and interests are not antagonistic to one another, but complimentary.

To many, the concept of socialism is distinctly leftist. Historically, Socialism has been associated with Marxism and “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” This Marxist Socialism aims at the elimination of all hierarchy which is natural to man. Communism aimed at the flattening out of wages and elimination of class distinctions altogether. Read more

Edward Dutton on The Culture of Critique: The importance of Jewish ethnocentrism

Edward Dutton, who is affiliated with Richard Lynn’s Ulster Institute for Social Research, has written an article supporting the main contention of my book, The Culture of Critique in an academic journal, Evolutionary Psychological Science: “MacDonald’s model is the more plausible hypothesis due to evidence that people tend to act in their ethnic group interest and that group selectedness among Jews is particularly strong, meaning that they are particularly likely to do so.” This is a most welcome development, and I agree with Dutton’s comments. Here I note some elaborations and a possible anomaly.

Dutton defends the multi-level selection model. The argument that group selection applies to Judaism is contained in the first book, A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (APTSDA). The argument there really has two parts—a cultural group selection model described in Chapter 1, and the idea that Jews are high on ethnocentrism, discussed in Chapter 8. Both aspects are important in thinking about how group selection applies to traditional Jewish groups. Read more

Ethnocentrism is normal and rational

The most often heard accusation by liberals against white nationalists and critics of mass immigration is that they are bedevilled by “irrational fears”.  White nationalists are parochial and unsophisticated, outside the standards of morality, lacking in sympathy and compassion for others and for “humanity” itself.

But none of this is true. Science is now educating us that White nationalists are normal humans beings who happen to exhibit a healthy and “positive” evaluation of their own ethnic group consistent with evolutionary theory. This is the argument white nationalists can opportunely take from a scientific paper published in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences (January 2011), with the fitting title: “Oxytocin promotes human ethnocentrism”.

It is not an argument liberals wanted to hear. Written by a research team at the University of Amsterdam, directed by Dr. Carsten de Dreu, this article shows that oxytocin is a molecule associated with in-group favoritism and out-group derogation. Through a series of experiments in which participants were administered doses of oxytocin,   the researchers learned that “a key mechanism facilitating in-group cooperation is ethnocentrism, the tendency to view one’s group as centrally important and as superior to other groups” at the expense of an out-group. Read more

Menachem Mendel Schneerson: The Expedient Messiah, Part 4

CONTROVERSIES

Criticism of Schneerson, limited among non-Jews mainly to his supremacist views, has been more varied among Jews. Some have questioned his mental competency and his veracity, criticized his professional manners and condemned his theology. Perhaps because they did not believe in the authenticity of Schneerson’s mid-life born again experience, many senior non-Lubavitch Chassidim opposed or took a neutral stance toward him throughout his reign. In an interview conducted on Israeli television shortly before Schneerson suffered a debilitating stroke, two years before his death, an important Orthodox Israeli philosopher, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, was asked what he thought of the Rebbe’s messianism. Leibowitz’s response was characteristically sarcastic: “There is only one thing that I cannot figure out about this man[Schneerson], and that is whether he is a psychopath or a charlatan. This is the only thing I just cannot decide—this kind of degeneracy, of phony prophets and false messiahs, is as ancient as Israel itself.”

A tenet in the shared code of professional behavior among Reform and Conservative rabbis and congregations includes the principle that one does not solicit members of each other’s congregations, regardless of synagogues or affiliation. Chabad, however, ignored this tenet. Indignant that Chabad was apparently proselytizing members of their congregations, the associated clergy of Pittsburgh congregations stated in a righteously indignant declaration:

We believe that people have a right to belong to the religious institutions that they desire without being called, visited or solicited to leave and support other places of worship and learning. Sadly, it has been the experience of several Reform congregations in the Pittsburgh area that the connections between congregants and rabbi are not always honored by those who speak on Chabad’s behalf. This has led to disruptions in congregational life, to ill feeling and needless strife. (See here)

The general Jewish community has been amused or indifferent to the proclamation by Lubavitch that Jewish belief requires belief in the messiahship or even the divinity of the Rebbe. Soon after his death members of Chabad-Lubavitch in fact were divided into two categories: the “Elokists” who believe that Schneerson is God and the “Mishichists” who hold that he is the messiah. Needless to say, some Jewish professors of theology interpreted this belief to be heretical and idolatrous and were thus in a quandary. They admitted that Schneerson’s success could not be denied: after all, he established a worldwide empire of followers, spread Orthodoxy to places where it had never been known, and established a most effective fund raising organization. To criticize him would be interpreted as an attack on his achievements.

Many Jews who are not Orthodox and maybe not even very observant praise Chabad and continue to fund its activities. They admire Chabad’s institution building, the devotion and selflessness of its emissaries, and its bold representation of Judaism in the public square. In addition, they carry with them nostalgia for their east European past and a sense that Lubavitch is the most authentic version of historical Judaism still extant. Finally, though perhaps not devout themselves, they hold the conviction that Orthodoxy is the firmest guarantor of a Jewish future.[33]

Though finding fault with Schneerson might be construed as an assault on his reputation and accomplishments, many non-Orthodox Jewish theologians, nevertheless, have been concerned about the similarities of Chabad messianic theology to Christology which they fear causes it to be heretical and even apostatical. To claim the messiahship of the Rebbe undermines the first line of defense against Christian missionizing, which has been that Judaism cannot accept a messiah who dies in the midst of his redemptive mission. Lubavitch texts after Schneerson’s death contain references to essence, omniscience, and omnipotence—all Christian concepts. With the decline of a pervasive Christian threat, familiarity with messianic texts and sensitivity to messianic deviationism has waned to the vanishing point even among learned Jews. Read more