From a monologue by Carlson introducing a long video titled “Tucker Carlson on the Israel First Meltdown and the Future of the America First Movement.”

Short version whose main message is that we should not become like Mark Levin: https://tuckercarlson.com/live-show-november-12-highlights-2

Tucker does his usual schtick against collective identities, in favor of Christian ethics, and proclaiming he is not an anti-Semite, just a critic of Israel’s hold over U.S. policy. As always, it completely eludes Tucker that Jews like Mark Levin are never going to give up their Jewish identity and attachment to Israel, and that advocating that Whites eschew White identity politics is obviously a losing strategy in a world increasingly dominated by non-White identity politics. The overriding issue is that we must win this battle.

But the point is that Levin is really losing it on Tucker and showing his true genocidal character against the Palestinians. The intense hatred shown here by Levin is the real story and we should all realize how utterly common such hatred is among Jews. Such people are running the Israeli government and are the backbone of the West Bank settler movement. They dominate the pro-Israel Lobby throughout the West.

The fact is that whenever Jews have had power over non-Jews we see this genocidal hatred emerge. We recently posted Karl Nemmersdorf’s “Jewish Bolsheviks and Mass Murder: Rozalia Zemliachka and the Jews Responsible for the Bloodbath in Crimea, 1920″ which detailed Jewish involvement in mass murder in Crimea in 1920, a part of the much larger mass murder of Russians in the 1920s and 1930s perpetrated by the USSR and typically carried out by Jewish operatives. From my “Stalin’s Willing Executioners: Jews as a Hostile Elite in the USSR,” a review of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century.

For example, a statute of one nationalist organization, Michaelthe Archangel Russian People’s Union, expressed “particular trust in the German population of the Empire,”16 while its leader, Vladimir Purishkevich,accused the Jews of “irreconcilable hatred of Russia and everything Russian.”17 Jews disliked the Christian religion of the vast majority of Russians becauseof the antagonistic relationship between Judaism and Christianity over theages; Jews distrusted the peasants, who “fell from grace” (p. 140) with theintelligentsia after the numerous anti-Jewish pogroms, especially after 1880;and Jews blamed the tsar for not doing enough to keep the peasants in checkand for imposing the various quotas on Jewish advancement that went intoplace, also beginning in the 1880s—quotas that slowed down but by no meanshalted Jewish overrepresentation in the universities and the professions. In this respect, the Germans were far more like the Overseas Chinese, in that they became an elite without having an aggressively hostile attitude toward the people and culture they administered and dominated economically. Thus when Jews achieved power in Russia, it was as a hostile elite with a deep sense of historic grievance. As a result, they became willing executioners of both the people and cultures they came to rule, including the Germans. …

And when people don’t cooperate in becoming a new species, there’s always murder. Slezkine describes Walter Benjamin, an icon of the Frankfurt School and darling of the current crop of postmodern intellectuals, “with glasses on his nose, autumn in his soul and vicarious murder in his heart” (p. 216), a comment that illustrates the fine line between murder and cultural criticism, especially when engaged in by ethnic outsiders. Indeed, on another occasion, Benjamin stated, “Hatred and [the] spirit of sacrifice…are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.”29 Although Slezkine downplays this aspect of Jewish motivation, Jews’ lachrymose perceptions of their history—their images of enslaved ancestors—were potent motivators of the hatred unleashed by the upheavals of the twentieth century. …

But [Georg] Lukács also expresses his hatred for “the whole of official Hungary”—how he extended his unhappiness with his father to “cover the whole of Magyar life, Magyar history, and Magyar literature indiscriminately (save for Petőfi)” (p. 97). Ah, yes. Save for Petőfi. All else—the people and the culture—would have to go, by mass murder if necessary. (Lazar Kaganovich, the most prolific Jewish mass murderer of the Stalinist era, is pictured at the end of his life reading Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Turgenev [pp. 97–98].) But rather than see this as an aspect of traditional Jewish hatred for non-Jews and their culture, souped up and rationalized with a veneer of Marxism, Slezkine explains these radicals as enlightened Mercurians who wished to destroy the old culture except for a few classics of modern literature. We may give thanks to know that Shakespeare would have survived the revolution. …

What united the Jews and philosemites was their hatred for what Lenin (who had a Jewish grandfather) called “the thick-skulled, boorish, inert, and bearishly savage Russian or Ukrainian peasant”—the same peasant Gorky described as “savage, somnolent, and glued to his pile of manure” (p. 163). It was attitudes like these that created the climate that justified the slaughter of many millions of peasants under the new regime. Philosemites continued to be common among the non-Jewish elite in the USSR, even in the 1950s, when Jews began to be targeted as Jews. One such philosemite was Pavel Sudoplatov, a Slav married to a Jew and with many Jewish friends, who was a high-ranking secret police official with a great deal of blood on his hands. The only murder he unequivocally condemned in his memoirs was that of Paul Mikhoels, a Jewish ethnic activist associated with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. …

The migration of the Jews to the urban centers of the USSR is a critical aspect of Slezkine’s presentation, but it strains credulity to suppose that these migrants threw off, completely and immediately, all remnants of the Eastern European shtetl culture which, Slezkine acknowledges, had a deep sense of estrangement from non-Jewish culture, and in particular a fear and hatred of peasants resulting from the traditional economic relations between Jews and peasants and exacerbated by the long and recent history of anti-Jewish pogroms carried out by peasants. Traditional Jewish shtetl culture also had a very negative attitude toward Christianity, not only as the central cultural icon of the outgroup but as associated in their minds with a long history of anti-Jewish persecution. The same situation doubtless occurred in Poland, where the efforts of even the most “de-ethnicized” Jewish Communists to recruit Poles were inhibited by traditional Jewish attitudes of superiority toward and estrangement from traditional Polish culture. …

Slezkine’s argument that Jews were critically involved in destroying traditional Russian institutions, liquidating Russian nationalists, murdering the tsar and his family, dispossessing and murdering the kulaks, and destroying the Orthodox Church has been made by many other writers over the years, including Igor Shafarevich, a mathematician and member of the prestigious U. S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Shafarevich’s review of Jewish literary works during the Soviet and post-Soviet period agrees with Slezkine in showing Jewish hatred mixed with a powerful desire for revenge toward pre-revolutionary Russia and its culture.65 But Shafarevich also suggests that the Jewish “Russophobia” that prompted the mass murder is not a unique phenomenon, but results from traditional Jewish hostility toward the non-Jewish world, considered tref (unclean), and toward non-Jews themselves, considered sub-human and as worthy of destruction. Both Shafarevich and Slezkine review the traditional animosity of Jews toward Russia, but Slezkine attempts to get his readers to believe that shtetl Jews were magically transformed in the instant of Revolution; although they did carry out the destruction of traditional Russia and approximately twenty million of its people, they did so only out of the highest humanitarian motives and the dream of utopian socialism, only to return to an overt Jewish identity because of the pressures of World War II, the rise of Israel as a source of Jewish identity and pride, and anti-Jewish policies and attitudes in the USSR. This is simply not plausible. The situation prompts reflection on what might have happened in the United States had American Communists and their sympathizers assumed power. The “red diaper babies” came from Jewish families which “around the breakfast table, day after day, in Scarsdale, Newton, Great Neck, and Beverly Hills have discussed what an awful, corrupt, immoral, undemocratic, racist society the United States is.”66 Indeed, hatred toward the peoples and cultures of non-Jews and the image of enslaved ancestors as victims of anti-Semitism have been the Jewish norm throughout history—much commented on, from Tacitus to the present.67

It is easy to imagine which sectors of American society would have been deemed overly backward and religious and therefore worthy of mass murder by the American counterparts of the Jewish elite in the Soviet Union—the ones who journeyed to Ellis Island instead of Moscow. The descendants of these overly backward and religious people now loom large among the “red state” voters who have been so important in recent national elections. Jewish animosity toward the Christian culture that is so deeply ingrained in much of America is legendary….

[Maxim] Gorky himself remained a philosemite to the end, despite the prominent Jewish rolein the murder of approximately twenty million of his ethnic kin, 58 but afterthe Revolution he commented that “the reason for the current anti-Semitism in Russia is the tactlessness of the Jewish Bolsheviks. The Jewish Bolsheviks, not all of them but some irresponsible boys, are taking part in the defiling of the holy sites of the Russian people. They have turned churches into movie theaters and reading rooms without considering the feelings of the Russianpeople.” However, Gorky did not blame the Jews for this: “The fact that theBolsheviks sent the Jews, the helpless and irresponsible Jewish youths, to dothese things, does smack of provocation, of course. But the Jews should have refrained” (p. 186). …

[Neverftheless.] Gorky’s mild rebuke of Jewish anti-Christian zealotry was too much for Esther Frumkina, a leader of the Party’s Jewish section. Frumkina accused Gorky of attacking “Jewish Communists for their selfless struggle against darkness and fanaticism” (p. 187). In their self-perceptions, Jews are selflessly altruistic even when acting out ancient hatreds. …

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 reminds me of being bored listening to Levin’s FoxNews show where he was all about his love for the Constitution, etc. A true American patriot. Suddenly, when the Israel Lobby is on the defensive, we see the transformation into his real persona of genocidal hater.

The point is that the current Jewish animosity toward Russia and support for Ukraine doubtless reflect these traditional Jewish hatreds. And we see that same intense hatred and genocidal attitude in Mark Levin and the Israelis (not all, but the great majority who support the Netanyahu government) toward the Palestinians. Americans should ponder that fact that if Jewish power increases to the point that they can do what they want to White Christians whether in Russia or the West, it will be yet another horrifying bloodbath of mass murder.

*   *   *

Tucker: But we are absolutely moving toward violence and it should be really clear, that’s the other thing, is you don’t want to espouse violence because where does it go? It always begets more violence 100% of the time. September 11th? Led to millions of deaths in the Middle East. October 7th led to Gaza. Like this, all, once the violence begins, you can’t predict its course, but you can be fairly certain it will accelerate. And when that happens, all calculations change and people change. And the feud becomes irresolvable and more people die and that could happen in our country. So the only way to stop it is by controlling your own behavior so you yourself don’t become evil. So Mark Levin is already there and we know that because Mark Levin has repeatedly and he’s not the only one but he’s the most blunt has repeatedly called for just murdering civilians and children in Gaza because they’re Amalek or whatever they’re stained by blood guilt. Tbe Prime Minister of Israel said exactly the same thing: they are guilty by virtue of how they were born so that by definition which includes women and children. So Mark Levin is not clever enough to keep the implications of these views to himself and he said them repeatedly on television. Just to give you a sense about how Mark Levin feels about human life and the human soul:

Mark Levin SOT [00:22:26] And I’m supposed to, what, shed crocodile tears for what’s going to happen to these people? I’m not. Maybe I’m the only one who will voice it, but I’m NOT. Israel has every right. To throw every damn thing it has at barbarians and if they’re innocent people quote-unquote civilians who are killed that maybe they ought to organize to take out the government they elected. Tapper and the others are saying, there’s two million Palestinians in Gaza. They’re not all terrorists. They don’t all believe in Hamas. They really have no choice. Let me ask you a question. Is that how we treated the German people when we were fighting the Third Reich? Well, they’re not All Nazis. You gotta fight to win and survive. You can’t sit there and figure all that stuff out. Oh, but don’t hurt the civilians! We have to defend ourselves, the Israelis have to defend ourselves. The free world has to defend itself. And if there’s collateral damage…

[In other words, it would have been fine with Levin to have murdered every last German. The Morgenthau Plan on steroids.]

Tucker Carlson [00:23:45] 25 years ago in this country, people didn’t talk that way. They didn’t. It was a different landscape, different expectations. The idea of blood guilt, because that’s what he’s describing there. You should be killed by virtue of who your parents are, who your grandparents were, by virtue how you were born. You should killed. You don’t have a right to live. You’re guilty because you were born, which of course leads to collective punishment and genocide. That’s the basis of genocide, right there. That attitude. That was considered totally un-Christian and un-American because it is. And if someone said something like that on television, I mean, he’d be probably pulled off the air for that. You should kill kids because you don’t like their parents. That is their attitude. That’s the Israeli government’s attitude, well-documented attitude. We’re paying for that, and you could say, well, you know, you don’t have to hate Israel, but that behavior is not better than Hamas at all. In fact, it’s kind of the same. Killed civilians. They came in and killed people at a music festival. Bibi turns out let them in, we found out today in the Knesset.

[In  other words, Israel knew damn well that Hamas would attack and let them do so they could genocide the Palestinians.]

But whatever you think of what happened on October 7th, you know, Israeli civilians were killed. That’s terrible. We’re against that. We have to be against that and we’re no better than the people we’re fighting, of course. What is the difference between us and them? We’re in different groups? That’s not a meaningful difference. The difference is we’re committed to a set of Western principles. And those principles begin with we reject And because we do, we reject collective punishment and genocide. A lot of us thought that was a consensus after World War II. That was the lesson of the Nazi regime. Should have been the lesson the Soviet regime, which of course practiced collective punishment and committed genocide against Christians. Most people don’t even know that. They did, more efficiently than the Nazis did. But all of it is terrible. All of it awful. And a lot of thought that that was the main lesson. That we’re supposed to take away from the war. And by the way, that’s a great lesson. That’s an excellent lesson. We should take that lesson from the Second World War. And then you wake up and there’s Mark Levin, not just Mark Leven, but our policymakers, our members of Congress. Most of them are not Jewish, by the way. This is like infected everybody. That’s okay. It’s not okay. It’ll never be okay. It’s a shame. It’s shameful behavior. It’s the stain on this country. You can’t fight people unless you think you’re morally superior to them. Shouldn’t be. And how can you say you’re morally superior if you’re operating from the same assumption, which is that every one on the other side should be killed because of how they were born?

But that is absolutely Mark Levin’s assumption. And he said it out loud. Look at this Twitter exchange. Watch this. She’s basically saying, I don’t understand why we’re getting involved in all this stuff. And Mark LeVine is saying, well, you’re a Nazi. And someone writes in and says, Mark, I’m not even… You know, I may be on your side or not, but what you’re saying is actually creating antisemitism. And he’s saying, and I’m quoting, antisemitism is quote, in your family’s DNA.

[Criticizing the Jewish community makes you a Nazi and it’s in your DNA. Which means that if they had enough  power, they would murder every last critic of Israel and the Jewish community.]

Who thinks that? Who would say something like that? Guilt or virtue are not in your DNA. We don’t believe in a chosen people and we don’t believe in a damned people, period. We don’t believe that in the West. We don believe that some peoples are inherently better or worse than other peoples. We believe in individuals in the capacity of every person to make individual choices and change for the better or the worse. And on that basis, they are judged. But not on how they were born. And if we don’t believe that, if we think that some people are just inherently bad because of their DNA, as Mark has said, and a lot of other people like Mark have said, then what’s the point of all of this? At that point, it’s just like, well, my group has more guns than your group and we’re in charge. That attitude gets people killed and it rots your soul. That’s why we say anti-Semitism is bad in the first place, isn’t it? You can’t judge a whole group of people by how they were born, by their genetics, by the DNA. But there’s Marc Levin doing it. So it shouldn’t surprise you that, of course, if you have those attitudes and you think they’re Americans, and he clearly does, whose DNA makes them less than human, unsalvageable, inherently evil, Well, it shouldn’t surprise you that he’d be calling for violence against them, and he is. And this isn’t like your kind of classic, like, oh, everyone’s out to kill me, I’m so important. I despise that. But it’s a fact, and we know that from what he says. So here’s Mark Levin about two weeks, in fact, I think exactly two weeks after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, and he was trying to explain how this happened. How did Charlie get killed? Here’s what he said.

Mark Levin SOT [00:28:45] A call to violence! That’s what it is. You’re calling people Hitler, it’s a mass murder. You’re treating ICE like it’s the Gestapo or the SS. You’re free to shoot them!

Tucker Carlson [00:29:01] You call people Hitler, they get killed, right? You torque up the rhetoric to, we’ve all decided Hitler is the worst, okay, great. Hitler’s bad, for sure. So once you call people that, you liken them to the person we collectively agree is the worse person ever, person we collectively agree, if you had a chance to kill baby Hitler, you would. Then why wouldn’t you kill the people who are Hitler in your own society? You probably would, and you’d feel justified in doing it, and that was the point he was making. Yeah, fair point. You know, you hope it’s not used to censor people. You’re allowed to have ugly thoughts. By the way, they’re constitutionally protected. But you should be discouraged from it, for sure. And as Mark Levin just said, they lead to violence. Calling people Hitler leads to violence.” Well, since that’s his description and his terms, consider this clip about a month later.

Mark Levin SOT [00:29:53] Some of these people who say, look, I’m going to stand by Tucker. You know, he’s just inquisitive. He likes to have these people on and ask them questions. Really? But I’m not gonna platform them now. So Tucker is a racist, is that okay? First of all, how many of you have friends who are racists? Isn’t that a fair question, Mr. Producer? How many of you have friends who are racist and are proud of it and talk about it on a national platform? This is what I get now. Will you debate him? Will you talk about Tucker Carlson? I don’t debate the Klan. I don’t debate Nazis!

Tucker Carlson [00:30:32] I don’t debate Nazis. He texted me that. Almost didn’t want to address this because you never want to make anything about yourself. It’s another way in which you can very easily become Mark Levin, start talking about yourself all the time. Your family, your people, no. If you’re interested in improving the country, you should be talking about all people in the country. It’s not just about you or your people. Whoever they are. It should be about everybody. That’s the universalist spirit without which this country can’t continue. Just to be clear, it’ll break apart, of course. Into warring groups. The basis of racism and anti-Semitism and all forms of bias that we abhor, forms of biased that treat people as members of groups rather than individuals, all emanate from the same idea, which is you’re born a certain way and you can’t be fixed. You have blood guilt. And that’s why it’s bad to call people Nazis. And here is Mark Levin calling people Nazis, well, in this case, me. So what is that? Well, that’s of course a call to violence and it’s not just me. We compiled a list of all of some of the people on Twitter, Mark Levin has referred to, These are all recent, Nazi, Nazi Nazi Bastard! F off Nazi, NAZI, NAZI, NAZI!

Finally, somebody writes in on Twitter and says, and we’re quoting, this is Mark Levin’s 12th post today that’s related to Israel or its critics. I know he’s Jewish and sympathy for Israel is understandable, but this now borders on obsession, to which Mark Levin responds, Nazi! You should pause before you call people names like that. And I should just say, because righteousness is a goal, self-righteousness is a sin, I don’t want to be self- righteous. I’ve certainly called people things they didn’t deserve. I’ve leveled ad hominem attacks on people. I did against Liz Cheney. I apologize for what I meant. But we shouldn’t let ourselves go in this area. We should force ourselves to treat other people like human beings with sincere disagreements or insincere disagreements, but still agreements that we can debate. Because once you start calling people Nazis, we really have no choice but to start shooting them. To be Dietrich Bonhoeffer and sort of reach the end of reason or even Christianity, Bonhoaffer decided Christianity’s not even, he was a Lutheran pastor. Christianity’s is not enough, we have to kill the guy. Not judging Bonhoffer, he was a great man in some ways, but that’s inevitable once we decide that people are Nazis. You kinda… Have to wonder why they’re doing this. And of course, it’s because when you call someone a Nazi, and maybe in Marc Levin’s case he believes it, you immediately freeze them in the headlights of your slur. Nazi, Nazi. You deter people from arguing with you because no one wants to be called a Nazi. But you also, for the bystanders who aren’t even directly part of the debate, you draw their attention away from what the debate is actually about. In other words, for every moment, we’re arguing about who is and who is not a Nazi. Answer really, nobody. The Nazi’s been gone for 80 years, sorry. But for every moment where they’re having that debate, we’re not debating the things we ought to be debating. In this case, should we use military force on behalf of a small country, a totally irrelevant country? That’s a fair debate. We’re not having that. We’re screaming about who’s a Nazi, who’s not a Nazi. So I guess the thing that we can learn from Mark Levin in this case If you have a position, argue that position.

Levin doesn’t want to argue his position. It’s very hard to defend, so he won’t defend it. He’ll just attack. But the rest of us who have a sincere position about America’s relationship with Israel and the damage it has done to the Trump coalition, which we’re watching it be destroyed, very unfortunately, those people should argue what they believe and not get caught in this trap. Of identity politics, whose a Nazi was a right to speak buzz off. Is a foreign lobby, it should register as one. Our country should come first in the thinking of every person who represents our country. Those are the debates that we ought to be having.

A specter is haunting America — the specter of a vanished predator.[1] More precisely, it’s haunting the prairies west of the Mississippi, the home of a remarkable antelope called the pronghorn, Antilocapra americana. What’s remarkable about the pronghorn is that it runs far faster than it needs to. No living predator in America gets close to its top speed of 55 mph (88 kph), so some biologists have suggested that the pronghorn is, in effect, running from a dead predator, the long-extinct American cheetah, Miracinonyx spp.

Speeding from a specter: a pronghorn displays its remarkable speed (image from Wikipedia)

If those biologists are right, the pronghorn is the surviving half of an evolutionary arms-race, a competition between predator and prey in which each side had to respond when the other side evolved to be faster. A similar arms-race took place across the Atlantic between African antelopes and the African cheetah, which isn’t in fact closely related to its American namesake.[2] But both groups of cheetahs evolved ever-greater speed to catch ever-fleeter prey. By now, after millions of years of evolution, cheetahs and antelopes must be at the limits of biological possibility. They couldn’t get much faster. Nor could biology ever catch up with one of H.G. Wells’ most memorable short-stories. In “The New Accelerator” (1901), Wells describes the invention of a stimulant drug that makes the body work “several thousand times faster,” “heart, lungs, muscles, brain — everything.”

Power-hungry priests

When the narrator and the inventor take the stimulant and go for what seems to them a stroll, they find that the world of people, animals and objects has, from their point of view, almost frozen to immobility, because they’re moving and perceiving so fast. And when they run, air-friction almost sets their clothes on fire. It’s a highly inventive and entertaining story, but also physiologically absurd (as Wells must have been well aware). After the narrator takes the stimulant, he says: “My heart, for example, was beating a thousand times a second.” But in that case, his heart would have burst. And if his heart and blood-vessels hadn’t burst, his joints and muscles would have disintegrated when he began to move. And so on. Biology can’t be indefinitely accelerated. That’s why biological arms-races between predators and prey haven’t resulted in cheetahs and antelopes that break the sound-barrier.

But if biology can’t be indefinitely accelerated, theology can. Indeed, theology can be infinitely accelerated. I think the concept of an evolutionary arms-race can be applied to the human mind too. For example, some arms-races in theology have gone to infinity — and to absurdity. So have some arms-races in politics and culture.[3] What am I talking about? Well, in theology I’m talking about the concepts of Hell and infallibility. Both of these are big and so-far insurmountable barriers to my becoming a traditionalist Catholic, because I find them absurd and literally unbelievable. But I also find them fascinating as psychological phenomena. And I think I can explain them sociologically and epistemologically. More precisely, I think I can explain them memetically — as conceptual products of a cognitive arms-race, as memes in a Kulturkampf. The concept of Hell, of everlasting punishment in the afterlife, is the product of an arms-race between competing religions or between power-hungry priests and pleasure-hungry layfolk. The point of Hell is to frighten and manipulate. But any religion that used the threat of finite punishment in the afterlife, no matter how prolonged and agonizing, would be out-competed by a religion that used the threat of infinite punishment.

Obey the Church or be eternally tortured: Jan van Eyck’s 15th-century depiction of Hell (image from Wikipedia)

However, threatening infinitely intense pain would be no good, because we can’t imagine that. But we can imagine infinitely prolonged pain. That’s why even atheists and unbelievers can be disturbed by one section of James Joyce’s autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Joyce describes a preacher trying to frighten his audience with an utterly absurd but also deeply disturbing vision of Hell. And I think that vision represents the culmination of a conceptual arms-race between priests seeking to frighten and layfolk seeking to resist being frightened:

The preacher’s voice sank. He paused, joined his palms for an instant, parted them. Then he resumed:

—Now let us try for a moment to realise, as far as we can, the nature of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. Hell is a strait and dark and foulsmelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke. The straitness of this prison house is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by His laws. In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.

—They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of hell gives forth no light. As, at the command of God, the fire of the Babylonian furnace lost its heat but not its light so, at the command of God, the fire of hell, while retaining the intensity of its heat, burns eternally in darkness. It is a neverending storm of darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid which the bodies are heaped one upon another without even a glimpse of air. Of all the plagues with which the land of the Pharaohs were smitten one plague alone, that of darkness, was called horrible. What name, then, shall we give to the darkness of hell which is to last not for three days alone but for all eternity?

—The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable when it has been long enclosed. Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jellylike mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.

—But this stench is not, horrible though it is, the greatest physical torment to which the damned are subjected. The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow creatures. Place your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly fire was created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts whereas the fire of hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner. Our earthly fire also consumes more or less rapidly according as the object which it attacks is more or less combustible so that human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preparations to check or frustrate its action. But the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury. Moreover, our earthly fire destroys at the same time as it burns so that the more intense it is the shorter is its duration; but the fire of hell has this property that it preserves that which it burns and though it rages with incredible intensity it rages for ever. […] And this terrible fire will not afflict the bodies of the damned only from without, but each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals. O, how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a redhot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls. […]

—O, my dear little brothers in Christ, may it never be our lot to [enter Hell]! May it never be our lot, I say! In the last day of terrible reckoning I pray fervently to God that not a single soul of those who are in this chapel today may be found among those miserable beings whom the Great Judge shall command to depart for ever from His sight, that not one of us may ever hear ringing in his ears the awful sentence of rejection: Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels! (James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, chapter III, 1916)

I’m an unbeliever, but I find that description of Hell disturbing. I also find it both absurd and atrocious.[4] How could any rational person believe in a perfect god and just God who inflicts such a punishment on weak and fallible humans for their finite sins?[5] Well, the simple answer is that Hell isn’t a matter of rationality but of cratology.[6] That’s a useful word meaning “study of power” or “system of power.” The preacher, as proxy for the Church, wants to exercise power over the minds of his audience. And he succeeds very well in one case. Joyce’s alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, is badly frightened by the sermon and after it has a psychosomatic illusion that his “brain [is] simmering and bubbling within the cracking tenement of the skull.” That’s the point of Hell: to frighten. But anything short of an infinitely prolonged Hell isn’t frightening enough or can be out-competed by an infinite Hell. And so, for most of Christian history, the atrocity outweighed the absurdity and the threat of eternal punishment was a potent means of psychological manipulation by the priesthood.[7]

An arms-race with science

There’s no atrocity in another theological concept created by an ideological arms-race. But there is plenty of absurdity. It’s the concept of infallibility, that is, the claim that a religion can offer certain knowledge without any tincture of doubt or uncertainty. I’ve pointed out before that mathematics doesn’t claim infallibility because it doesn’t need to. Math is obviously as close to certain knowledge as fallible and intellectually limited humans can get. Theology, by contrast, is about as far as humans can get from certain knowledge. Our opinions about God and the supernatural are obviously both subjective and arbitrary, in that they’re highly dependant on the time, place and circumstances of our birth. And on our own, unchosen psychology (atheism goes with autism, for example). But one can hardly expect competing religions to admit their own contingency. Instead, competing religions — or ideologies — will enter an epistemological arms-race. The logical culmination of that arms-race is infallibility: the claim that a religion offers complete certainty about all-important matters.

And it’s no coincidence, I’d suggest, that Papal infallibility was proclaimed as dogma in the century that saw the full rise of modern science. In the nineteenth century, Catholicism entered an arms-race with science, which had proved very successful in a physical sense but remained epistemologically modest. Mother Church could not compete materially with science but could compete metaphysically. And so Pius IX proclaimed the absurd concept of Papal infallibility.[8] Protestantism struck back with the even more absurd concept of Biblical inerrancy.[9] And these concepts then influenced secular politics: Leszek Kołokowski, the great Polish philosopher and intellectual historian, said this in his magisterial Main Currents of Marxism (1978): “When the party is identified with the state and the apparatus of power, and when it achieves perfect unity in the shape of a one-man tyranny, doctrine becomes a matter of state and the tyrant is proclaimed infallible. […] Lenin had always been right [and] the Bolshevik party was and had always been infallible.” (Op. cit., Vol 3, p 5) And Italian fascism, which was strongly influenced by Marxism, had the slogan Il Duce ha sempre ragione — “The Duce is always right.”

From pronghorns to perverts

The political concept of infallibility is again the product of an arms-race between competing ideologies. Part of the reason that communism won the arms-race in Russia and fascism won in Italy is that communists and fascists went to infinity. They believed that their leaders and their ideologies weren’t probably or overwhelmingly right, but infinitely right — infallibly right. I think such political and cultural arms-races have continued to this day. But they can be intra-ideological as well as inter-ideological. For example, I think the demand for open borders or defunding of the police is the culmination of an arms-race within the left, not just between the left and the right. Any leftists who support even minimal border-controls leave themselves vulnerable to charges of racism and xenophobia. And so, just as the theological arms-races resulted in the absurd but potent concepts of Hell and infallibility, the intra-leftist arms-race results in the absurd but potent concept of open borders. That is, it’s psychologically potent, because it maximally feeds leftist narcissism and self-regard.

A leftist absurdity: All races have the same brain and cognitive potential

So do two even more absurd leftist concepts: “Race does not exist” and “Transwomen Are Women.” There have been two more arms-races powered by the fact that accusations of racism or transphobia will shower down on any leftist who questions the Psychic Unity of Mankind or who doesn’t fully accept translunacy. And translunacy itself can be seen as the product of an arms-race between feminists and autogynephiles, that is, men who fetishize themselves as female. Translunacy can also be seen as the product of an arms-race inside the heads of those male fetishists. Before the 1960s and ’70s, men who derived sexual pleasure from dressing and play-acting as women could be dismissed by feminists as exactly what they were: perverted men with an absurd and embarrassing fetish. That’s why those men began to claim that they were real women, not perverted and play-acting men. They were seeking to defeat the feminist critique but also to heighten their own pleasure. An autogynephile who knows he’s play-acting as a woman gets less pleasure than one who manages to convince himself that he really is a woman.

Hacking the hierarchy

Like Hell or infallibility, transgenderism is an absurd concept whose absurdity hasn’t hindered its success. Again, it’s cratology that applies, not rationality. And translunatics have been very successful in pursuing power and winning their arms-race with feminists. Indeed, they’ve been astonishingly successful. As I pointed out in “Power to the Perverts,” some stale pale males in Britain have managed to hack the hierarchy and claim to be victims of hate-crime by a Black lesbian called Linda Bellos. How on Earth did they do that? Under normal circumstances, Bellos would be right at the top of the hierarchy of racial and sexual privilege in leftism. And stale pale males would be right at the bottom. But these stale pale males are “transwomen” and Bellos is a TERF, or Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. Therefore the White men can claim that they are victims of “hate” by the Black lesbian. But since the besting of Bellos, translunacy has suffered setbacks, as I’ve described in “Trashing Traumatized Trannies” and “Moobs on the Move.” The British Supreme Court has ruled that women are defined by biology, not by bullshit.

The absurdity of autogynephilia: some bearded and balding male perverts invade female territory on a lesbian dating-site

But the translunatics haven’t gone away and haven’t dropped their absurd claim to be women. They never will drop it, because it’s the product of an arm-race inside their own heads: between sanity and sexual perversion. As you might expect, perversion has prevailed, because sanity and rationality aren’t essential elements of either psychology or cratology. Indeed, they often hinder the pursuit of power, which is why they’re often so conspicuously absent in human affairs. Concepts like Hell and transgenderism are absurd, but their absurdity has mattered much less than their potency. The seemingly disparate concepts of Hell and transgenderism are also united in the way they illustrate a famous principle: “Those who believe in absurdities will commit atrocities.” Those who believed in Hell used it to justify unlimited torture and tyranny. And those who believe in transgenderism have used to justify the mutilation and sterilization of children. As antelopes and cheetahs reveal, a biological arms-race often ends in celerity. As Hell and transgenderism reveal, a cultural arms-race often ends in atrocity.[10]

[1] This is a reference to Marx’s opening line in the Communist Manifesto (1848): “A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of communism.”

[2]American cheetahs seem to have been more closely related to pumas than to African cheetahs.

[3]  See also Nassim Taleb’s very interesting essay “The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority.”

[4]  I also find Hell an immoral or extra-moral concept. If you refrain from bad behavior because you think bad behavior will send you to Hell, you’re not behaving morally. That is, you’re motivated not by abhorrence of sin but by fear of damnation. And if you cease to believe in Hell, you’ll presumably cease to refrain from bad behavior.

[5] I’ve seen the argument that infinite punishment is justified because sin is an offence against an infinite God. This seems to me like arguing that five-year-olds or animals should be punished as adults or humans if they commit an offence against an adult or a human. After all, children and animals can do real harm to their superiors. But how can a human harm God or, in any lasting sense, God’s creation?

[6] Traditional portrayals of Hell and the Crucifixion also owe something to sadism and sexual pathology. The S&M in traditional Catholicism is another thing that keeps me out of Mother Church. It might be easier if I were homosexual: Gerard Manley Hopkins “was horrified to find himself aroused by images of Christ on the cross, and he would scourge himself after erotic dreams.”

[7] Under secular criticism, Hell became embarrassing for the mainstream churches and was increasingly left to the vulgar fringe. You’ve seen above from Joyce how a devout Catholic described Hell at the beginning of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, another devout Catholic says merely that unrepentant sinners will suffer “the isolation and emptiness of hell forever.” So it’s isolation, not incineration. And “hell” doesn’t even merit a capital letter. C.S. Lewis, the most popular Christian apologist of the twentieth century, presented a psychological Hell of self-willed egocentrism in The Great Divorce (1945). It’s an interesting book, but it owes much more to existentialism than to the unequivocal portrayal of Hell in the Gospels as a place of fiery torment.

[8] I’d also say that those traditionalists who claim in believe in Hell and infallibility don’t behave as though they do. If you possess passive infallibility (active infallibility is reserved to the Pope as God’s proxy), why do you not make your proof of infallibility central to your arguments in favor of your beliefs? Once infallibility is granted, all else follows, including the Virgin Birth, Resurrection and Hell. But traditionalist devote much more time and effort to arguing for those secondary concepts than they do to arguing for the primary concept of infallibility. And if they genuinely believe in Hell, why do they not talk about Hell much more?

[9] Traditional Catholicism also claims that the Bible is inerrant, but layfolk cannot interpret its inerrancy for themselves. Fundamentalist Protestantism claims that layfolk do not need a church or Pope to be infallible on matters of faith, because they can be guided by an inerrant Bible.

[10] Or in tinnitus. Bands like Swans or Sunn O))) are the products of an arms-race in volume. Cultural arms-races can also end in unlistenability or incomprehensibility. Try listening to Schoenberg or reading Finnegans Wake.