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A Two State Solution — For Us

Races, like individuals, have interests. Some of those interests are of major importance whereas others are of minor or even trivial importance. The most important interest of all is continued existence, which includes the conditions required for continued existence, which can be properly referred to as existential interests, those necessary for continued life. The next most important interest, for a race as for an individual, is control of its own existence, which is properly described and defined by such terms as freedom, liberty, independence, self-rule and sovereignty.

For races, the condition required for both their continued existence and their control of their own existence is separation and independence from other nations and races. In multiracial conditions, where different races exist in close proximity over enough time, they intermix so that one or more of the different races are genetically submerged into a new blended population and cease to exist. Also, so long as the population remains multiracial the different ethno-racial groups typically have opposing and competing interests. Most importantly, in the current situation, the European populations, whether in their new homelands in North America and Australia or their ancient homelands in Europe, have an existential interest in separation, which means keeping their countries monoracially European. The interests of the non-Europeans in the historically European countries are the exact opposite. They are based on multiracialism and racial integration, thereby justifying, securing and promoting their increasing presence and power, and denying Europeans their existential interest in the separation necessary for their continued existence.

It should be noted that these conflicting racial group interests are not equivalent. The European interests involved are existential, as separation is required both for their continued existence and control of their own existence. The non-European interests involved are not existential as they can continue to exist, and control their own existence, in countries of their own, separate from Europeans as they normally have in the past, which can be regarded as the natural order. Rather than existential, their interests here are racially invasive and a violation of the natural order — an interest in dispossessing and replacing the historical European populations in their homelands.

A major difference between Europeans and non-Europeans in this situation is that the non-Europeans tend to be well aware of what their interests are, whether at a conscious or sub-conscious level, and asserting them with a great vigor and intense subjectivity that has no regard for the adverse effects on the existential interests of the Europeans.

In contrast to this is the phenomenon of Europeans being opposed to their own race and its interests. Indeed, most Europeans seem to be unaware of having racial interests, or what their racial interests are, and to have little or no identification with, or appreciation of, their race and its existence. Obviously, this renders them very passive and ineffective in the defense of their racial interests, causing them to lose the conflict of competing racial interests by default. To the extent that they do engage in this competition, rather than be seen defending the existential interests of their own race, they are much more likely to be seen promoting the non-existential interests of other racial groups against their own as part of the ruling Anti-White Coalition, an alliance of all those who promote the causes of European racial dispossession, replacement and destruction — e.g., multiracialism, non-White immigration and racial intermixture — consistent with the larger program of global homogenization or “globohomo.” Their stance can be regarded as either anti-White or pro-non-White, i.e., as benefitting the non-European races, but either way their stance is blind to the existential interests of their own race while intensely focused on the non-existential interests of the other races, in conformance with the dominant culture. Although the present course leads to their racial oblivion, they are almost universally unaware of any alternative course or choice.

Every racial population has its own unique “gene pool” which contains all the genes in the population. This gene pool is the source of the race from which all members of the race receive their genetic traits. The genes that exist in that pool, their proportions and distribution, combination and recombination, provide the genes for a racial population and all its individual members. All the Europeans who exist today and in the past were the product of a certain gene pool, and without that gene pool they could not exist and could not have existed. All Europeans came from a European gene pool, and if they have children, their genes will return into that pool. If they don’t have children, their genes will continue to exist so long as the gene pool they came from exists, and continues to make people like them. As long as the European gene pools continue to exist in the form of in-breeding populations there will continue to be individuals of the particular European populations and of the European racial group in general. But if these gene pools are destroyed then such people, and their works, will be seen no more. The works of Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Shakespeare, Newton, Bach, Beethoven, Hugo, Tolstoy, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, etc., ad infinitum would not have existed without them, and they in turn would not have existed without the particular gene pools that contained and provided the genetic material, the stuff of life, they were made from.

Multiracialism, by destroying racial gene pools through intermixture, is the destroyer of races, an engine of racial destruction. Those who accept, support or promote multiracialism, in whatever degree and whether knowingly or unknowingly, are accepting European racial destruction. Awareness of this tends to be low because racial dispossession is not publicized, discussed or acknowledged by the dominant Anti-White Coalition that supports and promotes it, whether in the media, schools, entertainment, churches, political parties or any mainstream social, political or cultural institution. Indeed, the subject is among the most forbidden, and there are both strong inculcated inhibitions and disincentives — social, economic, and in many countries legal — against raising it.

But however much the subject is suppressed, the fact remains that multiracialism destroys a people’s existence as a racial population and also, through the intermixture it promotes, surely alters the gene pool by blending it with the genes of other races, and so destroying the source of racial existence. Thus in the long term a race cannot long exist in multiracial conditions. It must have separation from other races to preserve its gene pool and its own existence. Separation preserves races. Multiracialism destroys them. Or, as Lincoln put it, in his June 26, 1857 speech in Springfield, Illinois: “A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation [i.e., intermixture].”

The Black (sub-Saharan African) population that was brought into U.S. territory before 1808 is the only non-European racial group that did not enter the country of its own free will. All other non-European racial groups who migrated to the U.S., the great majority since the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, did so knowing it was historically, and still at least nominally, a European country. The same is true of the huge and racially invasive migration of non-Europeans into Europe since the Second World War, which is projected to make Europeans in Western and Central Europe minorities in their own ancient homelands before the end of this century, replacing and dispossessing the indigenous European populations and transforming the populations from European to non-European: a non-British Britain without the British, a non-French France without the French, a non-German Germany without the Germans, etc.

However, this situation is ignored, censored, and denied by the dominant anti-White culture, so it can be promoted with minimal awareness and resistance. But it should be obvious that it has created an existential problem for the European peoples, meaning a problem that threatens their continued existence. Indeed, in the United States, Canada and the countries of northwestern Europe, the populations can no longer be accurately described as European, but rather as multiracial, as the Europeans no longer exist at the population level, as racial populations, but rather their racial existence has been reduced to the level of small communities and groupings, families, and sometimes only of individuals. But a race that exists only at the individual level cannot exist for long. The continued existence of a race requires that it exist as an essentially separate in-breeding population with its own particular “gene pool” through which its traits are preserved and passed on generation after generation.

Separation is not only required for the continued existence of a race, it is also required for it to have control of its own existence. As stated at the beginning of this essay, all racial groups have interests, of which the most important is its continued life or existence. The next greatest interest, to which its continued existence is very often connected, and on which its well-being is almost always connected, is control of its own existence. Normally racial groups, and certainly healthy ones, act in accord with their group interests, and especially their most fundamental and vital ones.

In the historically normal state of monoracial existence, this did not result in significant conflict between group interests, but in the increasingly prevalent multiracial conditions in the West, and especially since the Second World War, there has been a proportionate increase in competition between conflicting group interests. The countries most afflicted were White — or in the case of the U.S. at least predominantly White — before the war, but within several decades transitioned into multiracial societies in which only non-White group interests were recognized as legitimate matters of concern, and the only interests promoted and served as the culture became increasingly centered around them. White group interests were dismissed as unimportant, discredited as illegitimate or denied as non-existent, and in no case a proper matter of concern, and so either ignored or condemned. Throughout the formerly White countries of the West the White populations submitted to this abrogation of their fundamental group interests with little effective resistance, and were soon largely converted to beliefs and practices that were diametrically opposed to the interests of their own racial group.

It is natural for all groups to want to be in control of their own existence, in fact to have exclusive power and control of their own existence, and to not share this power and controlwith any other group, i.e., to not allow any other group to have any control over them. This is the optimal condition for their existence and so in their best interests. In fact, it is one of the two main conditions, along with the prevention of intermixture, that is required to secure continued racial existence, and why it is best for races to be separated into independent countries. In a system of true monoracial societies or environments the races in each society enjoy uncontested exclusive control of their own existence. When two or more separate peoples, ethnic groups or races with conflicting interests inhabit the same society or environment there will be a contest or struggle for more power and control, with each group seeking dominance or supremacy to have maximum control of their own existence. This contest is necessarily a zero-sum game. The greater the degree of one group’s power and control the less the degree of power and control possessed by the other groups over their own existence.

Jews and Their Racial Interests

In this matter, until relatively recently, Whites (i.e., Europeans) have based their power and control over their environment, and their existence, on living in environments that were either all White or nearly so, with Whites being such a great majority of the population that their control and interests could hardly be challenged. The Jewish experience of the diaspora has been much the opposite, living as a small minority amid a much larger population whose group interests, most importantly control over the environment in which they both existed, conflicted with their own. The Ashkenazi Jews of Europe, being a semi-European Caucasian people genetically about half European and half Middle Eastern Caucasian, and with strong religious and cultural traditions going back to their Middle Eastern heritage, preserved their existence by seeing and maintaining themselves as a separate people from the much larger European populations that surrounded them, with different, competing, and often conflicting group interests.

Control and security tend to go together, so to gain security the Jews had to adapt their methods of obtaining power and control of their environment to the fact that they were a small minority in that environment. Separation into their own segregated semi-autonomous communities or ghettos solved this problem at the lower level but not at higher levels. Gaining power and control at higher levels despite being a small minority required highly mobilized, organized, coordinated and energetic group effort toward this common goal. These methods, tactics and goals continue today, and it is no secret that Jews have a highly developed, and in fact unrivaled, network of interacting and mutually supporting organizations that promote their interests, including their power and control over the larger society:

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (commonly referred to as The Presidents’ Conference or the CoP) is an American non-profit organization that addresses issues of critical concern to the Jewish community, and the state of Israel in particular. It comprises 51 national Jewish organizations. It was founded to develop a consensus voice among Jewish organizations in dealings with the

The Jewish population as a corporate ethnic entity is the most highly organized and networked ethnic group in the world at both the national and international levels, with hundreds of well-funded and coordinated organizations energetically and aggressively promoting Jewish interests. In every country in which Jews are a minority (i.e., all except Israel) multiracialism is regarded as a core Jewish interest or value and intensely promoted as such, creating a fundamental conflict and adversarial relationship between core Jewish interests and the diametrically opposed vital racial interests of the White population.

To repeat, this matter is necessarily a zero-sum game, and as it is played for the highest stakes, it involves an adversarial and even hostile relationship between the players. The greater the degree of Jewish power and control, the less the degree of White (i.e., European) power and control. In a multiracial society when a racial group has control over its own existence it necessarily also exercises power and control over the existence of the other races in the society. So as Jews (and to a lesser extent other non-Whites) increase their share of power and control there is a corresponding decrease in the White share, as the White population is progressively subjugated to the power and control of other races, with the Jews being historically in the forefront, aligning themselves with the non-White races against the White population and presiding at the core of the Anti-White Coalition. Racial separation and independence is the only way to prevent one racial group from exercising power and control over others, and without them the existence of the White race, dispossessed of power and control, is terminal.

Jews tend to be inculcated with a powerful sense of a collective identity and destiny separate from Europeans and other races which gives them a quasi-instinctive sense of their group interests, which often conflict with the interests of other groups. But that should not be regarded as a fault, as it is true of all healthy ethno-racial groups, albeit Jews seem to possess this ethnocentrism to an exceptional and often hyper-subjective degree. For some time, at least since the Second World War, Whites in general have been an exception to this, leaving them powerless in the group competition. Thus even when Jewish populations are very small minorities in a multiracial society, the level of energy, activism, wealth (providing control of corporations, media, academia and politicians), agitation, argument, propaganda, etc., devoted to promoting their interests is greater than that generated by much larger populations, thus centering the society around them and their interests and enabling them to move the society in the direction of their interests.Since the Second World War, and especially since the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s, racial nihilism has been the dominant mainstream position on racial relations publicly supported by Whites.

Nihil is Latin for nothing, and so racial nihilism literally means the reduction of race to nothing, rejecting it as a matter of no value or importance or even denying its biological reality, asserting it is merely a “social construct,” although it has not yet been credibly denied that race is genetically determined (i.e., transmitted through the genes of parents and ancestors), and anything determined by genes is biologically real, and thus a genetic and biological, not social, construct. Claims to the contrary are more examples of the gaslighting that is so pervasive in the false narratives of the Anti-White Coalition.

Philosophically and hypothetically, racial nihilism would reduce all races to nothing, with no races or racial diversity, just a global uniform human population without any separate group differences. But in practice, and in practical effect, this suicidal view of race is expected only of the White race. Non-Whites who express support for racial nihilist values almost never apply them to their race, only to other races, and often only to Whites. But the only true racial nihilists are those who have no objection of the reduction of their own race to non-existence, and even welcome and support it.Whites are inculcated with the anti-White culture of racial nihilism to minimize their resistance to their own racial dispossession, the opposite of the positive inculcation experienced by Jews. They are socialized from an early age to reject any racial identification, to view their race and its interests — including its continued existence and control of its own existence — as a matter of no importance, value or concern, and to consider contrary views to be evil and hateful.

This is the essence of the anti-White morality that has been dominant since at least the 1960s. Support for the causes of White replacement and destruction is presented as morally good and motivated by love while opposition to them is seen as morally evil and motivated by hate. Consequently, while other racial groups have advocacy organizations to assert their interests, the White race essentially has none, or at least none that are permitted to present their case in the mainstream media or the main social media platform. The advocacy of White interests, and any alternative to White destruction, is effectively censored and suppressed, and removed from the public square.Racial nihilism is essentially the position advocated by the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s, and most Whites now not only conform to it but are intolerant of and reject those who do not, or their ancestors who did not. The supposedly most “White-friendly” movements that are still officially tolerated, such as civic nationalism and populism, have no racial basis, support multiracialism, and embrace the teachings, values and results of the Civil Rights revolution — which denies Europeans the condition of separation needed for their continued existence and control of their own existence — as gospel.

Movements such as these are not concerned with the continued existence of the White race. By definition, only a movement based on race, such as racial nationalism or racial populism, would address that issue in any meaningful sense. Both Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson, in spite of all the accusations of racial “dog whistling” or supporting White interests (i.e., the actual currently applied definition of “racism”), frequently give public expression of their conformance to the racial nihilist teachings and values of the Civil Rights revolution. But they are still criticized because this is no longer anti-White enough. The Anti-White Coalition has moved beyond the racial nihilist teachings and values of the Civil Rights revolution, in which racial or “color” blindness was the ideal, and has become ever more explicitly anti-White, more strident in its criticism of Whites, and more hostile to White interests as it escalates its advocacy of conflicting non-White interests.

The “Kumbaya” moment heralding the dawning of a “New Age” based on racial nihilism and multiracial harmony, that was promoted following the victory of the Civil Rights revolution, turned out to be just a stage in the progression of anti-Whiteness, which is what the misnamed ideology of “Progressivism” really is. The anti-White animus at the core of that ideology and movement has “progressed” well beyond the teachings of Martin Luther King and the Kumbaya delusion of the 1960s. Now it is much more in line with the explicitly anti-White ideas and spirit of Noel Ignatiev than those associated with MLK Jr. and Kumbaya. By the 1990s Ignatiev’s children had transformed academia with the proliferation of university departments devoted to the teaching of anti-White ideologies such as Critical Race Theory and “Whiteness studies,” of which critic David Horowitz observed, Black studies celebrates blackness, Chicano studies celebrates Chicanos, women’s studies celebrates women, and white studies attacks white people as evil.”

Often times people who come together find that their relationship is not mutually beneficial. However much that is good in the relationship, that which is bad is so harmful, so much greater than the good, to one of the parties, that a separation is needed for that party to fulfill their life, or even to continue their life.

As we have learned from our own historically recent experience, it is often the same with peoples, especially when they come together in the same country where their interests conflict and even existential interests are threatened. There is a scene in the 1956 film The Ten Commandments where Ramesses (played by Yul Brynner) places copper weights on one of the weighing pans of a scale each time an accusation is brought against Moses (played by Charlton Heston). Moses responds to the accusations with a single overriding point, and places a brick that is heavier than all the copper weights on the other weighing pan, causing it to drop to the table.

So it is with our current experience of multiracialism. Most non-Whites are good and productive people, with many doing things of great value and benefit, but all the weights the positives of multiracialism placed on one of the weighing pans of the great scale of White existence are outweighed by the one single brick of the great negative of multiracialism causing our destruction. The same would apply to the interests of the non-White races against separation compared to the interests of Whites for separation, as the White interests are existential and so outweigh the non-White interests which are not.

It is important to provide Whites with an alternative, to show there are other options that would preserve the White race. Unfortunately, many Whites are successfully gaslighted by our adversaries on this point as on so many others, leaving them unable to trust their own mind and disagree with those who are promoting their ruin.

The populations of the European racial group were many thousands of years in the making, yet all that could be undone, and the White race could be unmade, in just a few generations, if the racially destructive process caused by multiracialism is allowed to run its course. Normally, when faced with a choice between preservation and destruction, the default choice is in favor of preservation. Sadly, but I think realistically, I do not expect most non-Whites to make that choice in our favor, as it would require separation which most of them do not consider to be in their interest, which it probably is not. But separation does not threaten their, or anyone’s, existential interests. All races can live and be free separate from other races. This is still the normal state of human existence. It is multiracialism that is the destroyer of races. Separation is the preserver. Still, Whites cannot count on non-Whites for our racial preservation. That choice and task is up to us.

It might help us in making that choice if, rather than taking a leap into the dark, we had a good idea of what an alternative to multiracialism would be, preferably something that can be visualized and clearly delineates both physical and racial boundaries. But first it should be considered that the difficulties of the task involved with separation have grown enormously since the 1960s as the non-White population has grown from about 38.4 million or 19 percent of the 203.2 million total in the 1970 census to about 144.4 million or 43.6 percent of the 331.45 million total in the 2020 census, and this number may have grown by another 10 million or more during the unrestrained illegal immigration of the first three years of the Biden administration. It is often said that every generation blames the previous one for the problems they have inherited. So it could be with the problem of multiracialism from the first importation of Black (i.e., sub-Saharan African) slaves in 1619, to the Civil War and the Reconstruction, to the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s, to the huge expansion of the non-White population through immigration, to our present terminal situation, with every generation seeing the problem worsen, so that a preservationist solution becomes more difficult. With this problem, we today are the do-nothing (so far) heirs of many generations of do-nothing ancestors, and if we continue to do nothing a possible solution might be removed beyond our grasp and the doomed generations of the future will blame us most of all.

I can still remember my reaction to reading a section of essays on the race question in the November 18, 1963 edition of U.S. News & World Report. The section was entitled “Intermarriage and the Race Problem — As Leading Authorities See It.” Among these “authorities” were such notorious champions of racial intermixture as Ernest van den Haag, Gunnar Myrdal and the ubiquitous Boas disciple Margaret Mead. It seemed to me that their common purpose was to lessen White opposition to the impending Civil Rights revolution with soothing assurances that racial integration would not noticeably increase racial intermixture. Even at the age of fourteen I knew this was false and that these supposed “authorities” were actually either ignorant or were engaging in the form of lying we now call “gaslighting” to mislead the readership. The same could be said for the Kennedy brothers who a couple years later testified before Congress that the proposed Immigration Reform Act would not change the racial balance of the country. As the problems become ever greater, so the falsehoods and gaslighting have ever increased to lessen opposition. Just four years after the publication of the U.S. News & World Report edition, its gaslighting was revealed for what it was by the 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, released after the legislative victory of the Civil Rights revolution. After this “progress” of racial nihilism the message in the media Kool-Aid regarding increased intermixture changed from “It’s not something that’s going to happen,” to “It is happening and it’s not something any moral person should be concerned about or object to.” The objections to intermixture that were addressed — however deceptively — as morally respectable and legitimate concerns in 1963 were by 1967 portrayed and categorized as morally reprehensible and worthy only of censure.

Assuming we choose the alternative of racial preservation over the racial destruction and oblivion that will come from multiracialism, the task before us would be a geographic (i.e., physical) and political separation of the European and non-European racial groupings. To address that task and purpose I offer the proposal below.

A Proposal for Racial Separation

In this proposal there would be a partition into two major racial states or nations, one exclusively for those who are racially, genetically and phenotypically European (White), which is here identified as White, and the other would be for those who are racially non-European, but including Europeans who have non-European spouses, children or grandchildren who choose to live in the non-European country with them. It would also include any other Europeans who choose to live there dependent on the approval of the non-European state’s government. A separate autonomous nation reserved for indigenous Amerindians would be associated with the multiracial non-European nation, with Amerindians being free to live in either one. The physical boundary between the two states starting in the east would run from the Gulf of Mexico along the Atchafalaya, Mississippi and Arkansas rivers, and from there westward by the southern state lines of Kansas, Colorado and Utah, and the northern county lines of Lincoln, Nye and Esmeralda counties in Nevada and Inyo, Fresno, San Benito and Monterey counties in California.

  1. A White (European) American nation with a contiguous area of 2,225,841 square miles, 75.1 percent of the “lower 48” area of 2,962,031 square miles, for the racial group that was 81.1 percent of the U.S. population in 1970, i.e., at the beginning of the massive non-White immigration promoted by the Anti-White Coalition. Alaska would be retained by the White nation. Hawaii would be divided, with the White nation retaining the 597 square mile island of Oahu as a White state — to secure the lines of communication across the Pacific to Australia and New Zealand — and the 4,028 square mile “Big Island” of Hawaii as a place for non-Whites that may be born or arrive in the White nation after the partition. The other islands (Maui, Kauai, Molokai, Lanai, etc.) totaling 6,306 square miles would be an autonomous, and possibly independent, state for the native Hawaiians and other Polynesians. The White American nation would be the continuation of the historic American nation with the national capital and all of the original pre-1803 territory, and most of the post-1803 territory, where circa 82 percent of the White population currently lives. Its territory would include about 40 percent of U.S. oil production and 50 percent of natural gas production, although this has the potential to be substantially increased by the expansion of fracking and offshore drilling, etc.
  2. A multiracial non-White (non-European) transcontinental and bicoastal nation with a contiguous area of 669,392 square miles, making it the 17th largest country in the world by area at 3.19 times the size of France. Its territory would include about 60 percent of U.S. oil production and 50 percent of natural gas production. It would be assigned all non-Whites except those Amerindians who choose to live in their separate nation, including all mixed-race or multiracial persons who are part-White but who are outside of the normal European phenotypic range, i.e., those with visible non-European ancestry. White Hispanics who identify as Hispanic rather than White could choose to live with the non-White Hispanics in the non-European nation. White parents and grandparents of non-White children (including part-White mixed-race children, of whom over 14 million were born in the half-century 1970–2020), and White spouses of non-Whites, would be permitted, but not required, to live with their children and spouses in the non-European nation. Other Non-Hispanic Whites who might prefer to live in the non-European nation could make their own arrangements to do so dependent on the nation’s consent.
  3. An autonomous Amerindian (American Indian) nation with an area of 66,798 square miles would be reserved as an exclusive homeland for indigenous Amerindians, but they would have a dual citizenship permitting them to live in the multiracial on-European nation, and move between the two.

The future of the new White American nation would gain by enjoying a close relationship with a White Europe of friendly kith and kin instead of suffering a difficult coexistence with a multiracial Europe dominated by hostile anti-Whites. The opposite situation, with Canada and Europe continuing on the path to become non-European majority regions, would be a very dangerous geopolitical situation for a European America, not to mention the great loss to the larger European racial group from the loss of these populations and territories.

Based on the 2020 census the U.S. non-White (non-European) population was about 144.5 million or 43.6 percent, up from 38.4 million or 19 percent in 1970. (This number could have grown by as much as ten million by the end of the third year of the Biden administration with its unrestrained non-White immigration.) This includes the semi-European Caucasian Jewish population, who organizationally and institutionally regard themselves in word and deed as a population separate from Europeans and closely aligned with non-Europeans, and with interests that are diametrically opposed to the most fundamental and existential racial interests of the European population, most importantly in their energetic promotion of multiracialism, intermixture, and non-White immigration, with Alejandro Mayorkas in the U.S., Barbara Roche in the U.K., Barbara Lerner Spectre in Sweden, and Miriam Faine in Australia being prominent examples. In fact, the multiracial non-European nation created by this partition would, in terms of its racial demographics, be essentially what they have long advocated and worked for as a core Jewish interest.

On the assumption that a racial separation could occur concurrently in one grand common effort with Canada, Europe and Australia it would constitute a comprehensive solution to secure the continued existence and independence of the White racial group as a whole. This would add the 8.2 million non-Whites in Canada (7.7 million “visible”) making a North American non-White population of 152.7 million. This would also add the 49 million non-Whites in Europe (43 million in northwestern Europe, 2.5 million in Italy, 1.5 million in Spain not counting Hispanic non-Whites from Latin America, 2 million elsewhere) and 3.2 million non-indigenous non-Whites in Australia, making at least 204.9 million non-Whites to be geographically and politically separated from Whites for a sufficient solution that would fully secure White racial preservation. The 4.3 million indigenous Amerindians would have their own separate nation, leaving 200.6 million non-Whites for the new non-European nation. Many of the postwar immigrant non-Whites, including many Hispanics and Asians in the U.S. and many Turks, Arabs, Africans and Asians, etc. in Europe, are still citizens of their countries of origin, or dual citizens, and even vote in its elections. Many others still have strong family connections in the “old country.” It might be presumed that many would have the option to return there if they chose to do so. How many have this option, and how many of them would choose to exercise it rather than resettle in a new non-White country? It could be ten million or more among the non-Whites in Europe, and twenty million or more in North America and Australia. If 20 million non-Whites (e.g., 12 million from the U.S., 6 million from Europe and 2 million from Canada and Australia) with the option to return to their original countries chose to do so, 18 million White parents, grandparents and spouses of non-Whites (circa 15 million from the U.S.) chose to live with their relations in the non-White nation, and 3 million White Hispanics chose to live there with the non-White Hispanics, it would have a population of 201.6 million, with about 146.2 million of this total from the United States.

Based on the 2020 census the U.S. White (European) population was about 187 million or 56.4 percent of the 331.45 million total population, including 9 million Hispanic European Whites, up in absolute terms from 164.8 million in 1970 but down proportionally from 81.1 percent in 1970. Per the same scenario as the previous paragraph, if 15 million White parents, grandparents and spouses of non-Whites chose to live with their relations in the non-White nation, and 3 million White Hispanics chose to live there also with the non-Hispanic Whites, the White American nation would have a post-partition population of 169 million.

About 33.6 million European Whites (including Hispanic European Whites), or about 18 percent of the total European White population of circa 187 million (including Hispanic European Whites), and about 39.1 million non-Whites, or about 27.1 percent of the total non-White population of circa 144.5 million, currently reside in the area designated for the non-European and Amerindian nations.

This plan would require the relocation of circa 131.2 million people — 33.6 million or 18 percent of Whites and 105.4 million or 72.9 percent of non-Whites — and their personal property. As large as these numbers are, in a previous essay I calculated that the transportation logistics of relocating 150 million people and their personal property in a time frame as short as a year is feasible, although considering other factors such as the likely need for increased infrastructure in some areas, equivalent exchanges of real property ownership, matching relocated people with new employment, etc., it would be more realistic to expect a humane process proceeding at all reasonable speed to take at least five years.

Except for the aboriginal Amerindian population, for which I propose a separate autonomous country of their own with dual citizenship in the larger non-European nation, the other non-European populations would share the same single large contiguous territory and government. In the current and past context of the United States, or the other White countries suffering multiracialization, the non-White and Jewish groups have always supported, promoted and voted for multiracialism, rightly identifying it with their group interests and themselves as its beneficiaries. It therefore seems more likely they would prefer to be joined into a large multiracial state that was a major country at the world level rather than be separated into smaller states for each racial group. But if in a post-partition context that historical preference were to change in favor of separate racial nations they could accomplish that by a sub-partition of the larger non-European nation.

This proposal aims to attract maximum White support consistent with the goal of racial separation and independence, uniting on this existential issue and avoiding non-existential and potentially divisive non-vital issues. Territorially this means retaining most of the country, and especially the areas that are the more historically and culturally significant and where the great majority of Whites live. Ideologically and politically this means that, other than as required for the purpose of racial preservation, there should be no changes to the American constitutional, institutional and governmental system, or its programs, benefits and policies, until after the completion of the partition, when any proposed changes to their country would be decided by the newly all-White population consistent with its sovereign prerogatives.

Barbara’s Barbarians: How Jews Import Third-Worlders to Harm Whites, Then Play the Innocent Victim

What is CFI? And who is Ehud Sheleg? Those are two very important questions about British politics, but I doubt that even one in fifty voters could answer them. Which is just the way that CFI and Mr Sheleg like it. They don’t want their activities discussed or their influence analysed. Like all sensible criminals, they want to work away from the light and enjoy their booty without scrutiny.

Democracies In Name Only

And what is their booty? Control of British politics, that’s what. CFI are Conservative Friends of Israel and Ehud Sheleg was the Israeli treasurer of the Conservative party from 2019 to 2021. Sheleg has openly admitted that Britain takes “second [place] to my homeland” of Israel, yet he oversaw the finances of Britain’s governing party (the current Tory treasurer is the even more shadowy Graham Edwards, who appears to also be treasurer of the charity Jewish Care). Once you see the control Jews have over British politics, you understand why White voters never get what they want on the all-important issues of mass immigration and border control. The Tories entered government loudly promising to cut the horrifically high levels of immigration bequeathed to them by the Labour party. They then quietly proceeded to increase immigration even further. If you want to know why that happened, you have to understand that Britain is a DINO — a Democracy In Name Only. In harsh reality, it’s a Judeocracy, a state controlled by Jewish money and the Israel lobby.

Hugely powerful and almost unknown: Ehud Sheleg, former Israeli treasurer of Britain’s ruling party (image from Guido Fawkes)

America, France and other Western nations are Judeocratic DINOs too. That’s why the public desire to reduce mass immigration and control the borders never translates into political action. Jews don’t like homogeneous White societies. They don’t like standing out and they’re paranoid about gentile retribution for their financial crimes and cultural subversion. That’s why New Labour opened Britain’s borders to the Third World. Tony Blair was a narcissistic gentile frontman for a Jewish project to alter Britain’s demographics forever. As a New Labour apparatchik called Andrew Neather once put it: Labour “wanted to rub the Right’s nose in diversity.”

The sadism of open borders

That’s an interesting metaphor Neather used there. It’s a reference to a crude old pet-training technique: you rub a dog’s or cat’s nose in its own feces when it fouls the floor. And that’s supposed to teach it not to do it again. In other words, Neather was equating “diversity” — all those wonderfully enriching Black and Brown folk — with feces and foulness. Of course, he supposedly meant that the wicked right regards diversity as foul, but I think he was secretly admitting the sadism of open borders. Rich leftists inflict diversity on others, but make very sure to insulate themselves from the crime and chaos that it inevitably spawns. Do you think Andrew Neather himself lives in an enriched district, surrounded by Somalis, Pakistanis, and Jamaicans?

Barbarian-booster Barbara Roche

To ask the question is to answer it. But I don’t know where to confirm the answer: Andrew Neather is a little-known figure and details of his life and background are not available online. Patrick Cleburne dog-whistled at VDare that Neather may be Jewish. I could easily believe it. His ministerial superior Barbara Roche was certainly Jewish. And not just Jewish, but very happy to confirm that her Jewishness powered her passion for Third-World migration. In 2001, Roche told the Guardian that she “entered politics — she still emphasises this today — to combat anti-semitism and xenophobia in general.” In 2003, while urging her party “to promote the benefits of legal migration,” she told the Independent that “My being Jewish informs me totally, informs my politics.” After all, she’s the “child of a Polish-Russian Ashkenazi father and a Sephardic Spanish-Portuguese mother.” And when she surveyed the fruit of her labors in 2011, she sighed with pleasure:

Friday rush hour. Euston station [in London]. Who’s here? Who isn’t. A kaleidoscope of skin colours. The world in one terminus. Barbara Roche can see it over the rim of her cup of Americano coffee. “I love the diversity of London,” she tells me. “I just feel comfortable.” (Hideously Diverse Britain: The immigration ‘conspiracy’, The Guardian, 2nd March 2011)

Like CFI and Ehud Sheleg, Barbara Roche is nowhere near as famous as she should be in Britain. She was central to the opening of the migration flood-gates under New Labour, but few voters noticed her at the time and even fewer remember her now. That isn’t because she shunned the light the way CFI and Mr Sheleg have always done. On the contrary, she was happy to campaign in public for increased immigration and to promote the ridiculous lie that “Britain is a nation of migrants.” But British goyim didn’t understand the significance of what she was saying or connect her Jewishness with her highly successful efforts to dilute the Whiteness of Britain.

And to harm the White working-class. Too many British voters still take the Labour party at face value and think that its name reflects its purpose. But Labour long ago abandoned its commitment to champion the downtrodden workers against the oppressive bosses. No, for many decades it has championed the downtrodden bosses against the oppressive workers, with their greedy, selfish demands for higher wages and better working conditions. Open borders benefit the capitalist class in all manner of ways, from increasing the supply of labor to inflating demand for housing to boosting the profits of supermarkets and Big Pharma. Open borders also mean more non-White clients for the leftist managerial state. Last but by no means least, they mean that Jews like Barbara Roche can feel “comfortable” in an atomized society. After all, as many Jews have said down the decades, Jews and other minorities are “natural allies.” Against whom? They leave that part unspoken, but the answer is obvious: Jews and other minorities are natural allies against the White Christian majority.

Importing barbarians

That’s why Jews have been so enthusiastic about Muslim immigration. Muslims are both non-White and non-Christian. What’s not to like for a White-hating, Christophobic Jew like Barbara Roche? Third-World migrants are a huge and ever-growing burden in welfare and crime on any Western nation that accepts them, but that’s a feature, not a bug of Jewish enthusiasm for Third-World migration. For example, Roche oversaw the explosive growth in the number of Black Muslim Somalis on British soil. She knew she was importing barbarians, but she thought those barbarians would target Whites, not Jews:

One of Roche’s legacies was hundreds more migrants camped in squalor in Sangatte, outside Calais, where they tried to smuggle themselves onto lorries. News about the new liberalism — and in particular the welfare benefits — now began attracting Somalis who’d previously settled in other EU countries. Although there was no historic or cultural link between Somalia and Britain, more than 200,000 came. Since most were untrained and would be dependent on welfare, the Home Office could have refused them entry. But they were granted ‘exceptional leave to remain’. [Et cetera ad nauseam] (Conman Blair’s cynical conspiracy to deceive the British people and let in 2million migrants against the rules, The Daily Mail, 26th February 2016)

Alas for Barbara’s barbarian-boosterism! Since the Hamas atrocities committed in Israel on 7th October 2023, it has become apparent that Jews and Muslims aren’t natural allies after all. No, they’re natural enemies. Hamas-fans have flooded onto the streets of cities across the Western world, condemning the Israelis and condoling the Palestinians. In Australia, non-White Muslims have chanted “Gas the Jews!” outside the Sydney Opera House, that great White architectural achievement and symbol of White artistic genius. Barbara’s barbarians have turned on the very people that imported them into the West.

Pollock’s bollocks

But have Jews admitted their own responsibility for these horrific outbreaks of “anti-Semitism” and “Israelophobia”? Of course not. Instead, they have once again played the victim. Karen Pollock CBE, the chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET), has lamented her people’s plight like this in the Guardian:

Antisemitism has risen year on year but the events of recent months have shaken many of us to our core. It is unbelievable that today, 90 years after Hitler rose to power and almost 80 years since his antisemitic crimes were exposed to the world, we are seeing antisemitism reach levels that I have never witnessed before in my lifetime. At the same time we have seen a stark rise in Islamophobia, and many people are feeling isolated and frightened. … Anti-Jewish hate is on the march, and this time the world must not turn its back. Let us all make it our new year resolution to finally stamp out antisemitism, Islamophobia and hate. Let’s make 2024 the year when we finally find a cure for this poison.(Antisemitism and Holocaust denial are rife, just look at Stephen Fry’s X trolls, The Guardian, 24th December 2023)

Karen Pollock emits bollocks (image from Vimeo)

I would call that Pollock’s bollocks (British slang for  “testicles” and used to mean “nonsense”). How on earth is it “unbelievable” that importing millions of Muslims into the West has increased hostility to Jews and to Israel? It isn’t “unbelievable”: it’s entirely predictable. And note how Pollock slyly includes references to “Islamophobia,” as though Jews and Muslims are shared victims of the wicked White majority. In fact, the “antisemitism” is overwhelmingly coming from the Muslims whom Jews have imported into the West for so long, fondly imagining that they would be “natural allies” against that wicked White majority.

Pollock also has the chutzpah to claim that “History and facts are being replaced by emotion and a sense of righteousness.” As the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks admitted in 2007, that “replacement” took place long ago and was initiated by the group to which Pollock herself belongs:

Multiculturalism promotes segregation, stifles free speech and threatens liberal democracy, Britain’s top Jewish official warned in extracts from [a recently published] book. … Jonathan Sacks, Britain’s chief rabbi, defined multiculturalism as an attempt to affirm Britain’s diverse communities and make ethnic and religious minorities more appreciated and respected. But in his book, The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society, he said the movement had run its course. “Multiculturalism has led not to integration but to segregation,” Sacks wrote in his book, an extract of which was published in the Times of London.

“Liberal democracy is in danger,” Sacks said, adding later: “The politics of freedom risks descending into the politics of fear.” Sacks said Britain’s politics had been poisoned by the rise of identity politics, as minorities and aggrieved groups jockeyed first for rights, then for special treatment. The process, he said, began with Jews, before being taken up by blacks, women and gays. He said the effect had been “inexorably divisive.” “A culture of victimhood sets group against group, each claiming that its pain, injury, oppression, humiliation is greater than that of others,” he said. In an interview with the Times, Sacks said he wanted his book to be “politically incorrect in the highest order.” (Sacks: Multiculturalism threatens democracy, The Jerusalem Post, 20th October 2007; emphasis added)

The subversive sliminess of Stephen Fry

If Karen Pollock really wanted to combat “anti-Jewish hate,” she would look at her own dishonesty and ethnocentrism. And at the sliminess of the “national treasure” she praises in her article: the Jewish comedian Stephen Fry. He has campaigned assiduously throughout his career on behalf of two great causes: homosexuality and atheism. Pollock said how pleased she was that Fry would be “addressing the nation” in the “alternative Christmas message” broadcast by Channel 4. It’s the alternative to the Christmas message traditionally delivered by the British monarch — Queen Elizabeth the Evil began the tradition and it’s now maintained by her son Chuck the Cuck. I didn’t want to watch Fry’s Christmas message, because I can’t abide his appearance or his mannerisms. And I especially can’t abide his voice, which always gives me the impression that my ears are filling with an unpleasantly warm mixture of treacle and pig-slurry.

The Slimy Stephen Fry, attempting to present himself as trustworthy, avuncular, and harmless, addresses the nation (image from Channel 4 and Youtube)

But I forced myself to watch and listen all the way through. And I’m glad that I did, because something highly significant happened right at the end. Before that, Fry had claimed to love Christmas and had echoed Pollock’s bollocks, condemning the shocking rise in antisemitism and “anti-Jewish racism” without admitting that Jews themselves have been directly responsible for it. He appealed to the British values of “fairness” and “decency,” which is a futile exercise given that Muslims aren’t British and don’t believe in British values. And then, to sign off, he mocked the central figure of the festival he was supposedly so fond of:

And so this mad quintessential queer English Jew wishes you, whatever your race or creed, however you identify yourself, all peace, joy and a very Merry X-mas [eks-muss], formerly known as Twittermas. (See Stephen Fry’s Alternative Christmas Message at Youtube)

He couldn’t help himself. After all, he’s Jewish. Once again I’m reminded of the old story about the scorpion and the frog. But Fry’s propaganda-video also revealed that the Jews behind it do not understand the dilemma they have created for themselves. Like so many generals down history, they’re trying to fight a new war with the tactics of the previous war. Fry’s smarmy slogans about British “fairness” and “decency” will not work on Muslims and the other non-Whites who support them. Non-Whites aren’t British, don’t believe in fairness or decency, and don’t see Fry as a “national treasure.” On the contrary, they see him as an elderly white oppressor, physically weak and sexually perverted. They’re repelled by him, not beguiled.

They’re right to be repelled. But they don’t see the fullness of Fry’s foulness. Muslims and other non-Whites have been preying on the White majority ever since Jews and their traitorous gentile allies began importing them into the West. They’ve murdered and raped, robbed and defrauded us decade after decade after decade. Meanwhile, Jews like Fry have condemned all White attempts to resist the Third-World predators as “racism,” “xenophobia,” and “hate.” But now that their natural allies have turned on their importers, Fry and his tribe have begun bewailing barbarism. Yet again Jews have gone too far, carried away by their own arrogance and hatred of Christ, Whites, and Western civilization. They have sown the wind and are about to reap the whirlwind. As Jewish Bible also puts it: “Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein: and he that rolleth a stone, it shall return upon him.”

“When the Quarrel is Jewish”: Atrocity Propaganda, Moral Idealism, and the West

“When the quarrel is Jewish, more than usual caution is required, since the press of Europe isto a great and increasing extent in the hands of Jews.”
                     Goldwin Smith, New Light on the Jewish Question 1891[1]

 It should be considered an axiom that the Western political system can be bought with money, but that its people are best bought with sob stories. The above quote from the brilliant British historian and journalist Goldwin Smith (1823–1910), was in reaction to Jewish atrocity propaganda alleging extremely violent pogroms in the Russian empire. These ‘pogroms,’ covered in detail at The Occidental Observer by Andrew Joyce, were a media-designed mass moral panic designed to serve Jewish interests. In this case, for example, the pogroms acted as a pretext to mass economic migration, and lurid tales of atrocities and suffering were the moral currency used to purchase Western compliance with the immigration of millions of Jews. Although mass protests were held on behalf of Jews, and millions of dollars raised in aid, Smith reminded his gullible contemporaries that British government investigations had already revealed:

At Elizabethgrad, instead of whole streets being razed to the ground, only one hut had been unroofed. Few Jews, if any, had been intentionally killed, though some died of injuries received in the riots. The outrages on women, of which, according to the Jewish accounts, there had been a frightful number no less than thirty in one place and twenty-five in another and by which public indignation in England had been most fiercely aroused, seem, after inquiries by the consuls, to have been reduced to something like half a dozen authenticated cases in all. This is the more remarkable because the riots commonly began with the sacking of the vodka shops, which are kept by the Jews, so that the passions of the mob must have been inflamed by drink. The horrible charge brought by the Jews in The Times against the Russian women, of having incited the men to outrage their Jewish sisters and held the Jewesses down, to punish them for their superior finery in dress, is found to be utterly baseless. The charge of roasting children alive also falls to the ground. The Jewish pamphlet reprinted from the London Times states that a Jewish innkeeper was cooped in one of his own barrels and cast into the Dnieper. This turns out to be a fable, the village which was the alleged scene of it being ten miles from the Dnieper and near no other river of consequence.

Moral Currency

As Smith and Joyce both point out, the facts behind the pogrom narrative were more or less drowned out by the intensity of moral feeling provoked by the flamboyantly violent Jewish accounts spread from Russia, and we witnessed precisely the same dynamic play out in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Although this essay will focus on some of the detail and mystery surrounding early Israeli atrocity propaganda accounts about the Hamas incursion, the most interesting aspect in all of it is perhaps that Jews seem aware that morality is the currency with which to purchase compliance, or at least muted silence, from the Western public. They’re acutely aware of our sensitivity to moral arguments.

Kevin MacDonald has pointed out that “moral idealism is a powerful tendency in European culture. … Morality is defined not as what is good for the individual or the group, but as an abstract moral ideal.” This contrasts with approaches to moral questions followed by other peoples, which tend to be far more pragmatic, situational, or context-based. Take, for example, Deng Xiaoping’s maxim: “It does not matter whether a cat is black or white; if it catches mice, it is a good cat.” China’s pragmatic approach to morality, when reflected in foreign policy and international security, has been argued as a major driver of its rapidly expanding global influence. The United States, meanwhile, has for decades engaged in a moral demonization of its opponents (“Axis of Evil,” etc.) that makes compromise almost impossible. Writing for Global Asia, Kishore Mahbubani comments that “There is a moral streak that influences US foreign policy thinking that cannot be scrubbed out. And many Americans are proud of the fact that this moral dimension is a cardinal factor. Clinton stated in an April 2009 interview: ‘There is always and must be a moral dimension to our foreign policy.’” The fact that material interests are the main driver of foreign policy objectives doesn’t detract from the understanding of most politicians that they must nevertheless shoehorn their material objectives into a moral framework for public consumption. America’s allies must be presented as morally good, regardless of the reality behind the image, and its designated enemies must be presented as morally bad, even if the opposing group or nation is simply pursuing its own interests.

Jews are aware of this moral dimension, and Zionists in particular have a carefully crafted rhetorical arsenal for Western audiences that is based exclusively around the language of rights, morality, and justice, even if such concepts are far removed from the reality of Israeli actions, attitudes, and behavior. Although Israel is a demonstrably expansionist state, often aggressively so in the form of its settlements in the West Bank, its apologists in the West employ a set of defensive phrases such as “Israel has a right to defend itself,” “Israel has a right to exist,” and, in the phrasing of the Ayn Rand Institute “Israel has a moral right to its life.” An excellent example of what we might call “morality propaganda” appeared in the Wall Street Journal on October 11. The piece, titled “The Moral Duty to Destroy Hamas” and written by Jewish journalists Walter Block and Alan Futerman, argued that Israel was residing next to an “evil, depraved culture.” Arabs were said to be motivated by nothing more than a baseless and amorphous “Jew-hatred,” and had “slaughtered innocent men, women and children. These gangs raped, mutilated and tortured them while screaming “Kill the Jews!””

The language of morality employed here is of course identical to that used by Jews when explaining the history of anti-Semitism in Europe. “Jew-hatred” is always spontaneous and disease-like, emerging without context and entirely lacking in justification. “Jew-hatred” is both unexplained and unexplainable, a kind of demonic possession that takes hold of entire societies, and it is inherently unjust and immoral since its victims are always innocent. In a January 2 op-ed in The Jerusalem Post titled “Why Do People Hate the Jews?”, Micah Halpern explains anti-Semitism with the non sequitur “Today’s haters have only hate — a passionate fervor of hatred.” People thus hate Jews because they are filled with hatred of Jews. It’s really quite remarkable that this passes for serious analysis in most quarters.

Since Jews are never acknowledged as having harmed other groups, tales of their rape, mutilation, and torture by “Jew-haters” are all the more shocking and abhorrent. This framing and understanding of anti-Semitism inherently imbues Jews with a kind of moral currency, even superiority, and Jews have enjoyed an almost limitless abundance of moral currency since World War II because that war has been repeatedly packaged as the quintessential “good war” — a war against evil. Although efforts have been taken in recent decades to address Allied moral choices and ethical dilemmas such as the morality of using the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the British decision to bomb Hamburg to rubble, the one untouchable element of the popular understanding of World War II is that Jews were the primary victims of an ‘evil’ regime in the conflict and that their experience during that war has profound and enduring moral lessons for all Western peoples.

The Jewish Carte Blanche

The most immediate and geopolitically significant result of this framing of World War II was the establishment of the State of Israel and the international granting to Jews of carte blanche to dominate and remove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from desired lands. In fact, it is difficult to point to an instance of ethnic cleansing in living memory that has provoked a more muted international response than the Israeli displacement of the Palestinians. US consulate officials in Palestine in 1948 noted that Jews were bombing Palestinian civilian targets in a fashion “so completely motiveless as to place [it] in [the] category of nihilism.” Jews, who only a few decades earlier had been spreading false rumors of Russian rape and looting to the world, were reported by a U.S. diplomat in 1948 as “carrying furniture, household effects and supplies from Arab buildings and pumping cistern water into tank trucks. Evidence indicated [a] clearly systematic looting [of the Arab] quarter [by Jews].” But these observations remained precisely that — observations.

Although it is tempting to fully throw one’s support behind the Palestinians, it’s important to remember that we have more than enough problems of our own — even if many of them have been caused by the same suspects. I echo Kevin MacDonald’s comment that “This does not mean that I am a cheerleader for Palestinians. The Palestinians are a typical Middle-Eastern people and all that that entails in terms of non-Western social forms—the clans, the collectivism, and Islam with its long history of hatred against Europe.” But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is of vital interest to Western peoples for two main reasons. First, Israeli dominance in the region is totally reliant on Western support, especially American financial, diplomatic, and military aid. Adjusted for inflation, American taxpayers have handed over hundreds of billions of dollars to the Jewish state since 1948. Israeli actions in the Middle East have direct implications for Western nations — they consume Western resources, they provoke acts of terrorism in Western countries, and they are components of a kind of manipulative morality theater in which Israelis constantly struggle to present themselves as the heroes battling against a mob of villains. Central to this theater is the atrocity tale.

Beheaded Babies?

It’s indisputable that Hamas committed violence against children during and after the October 7 incursion into Israeli territory, but the particularly gory and emotive claim that Hamas beheaded dozens of babies gained sudden and widespread prominence in the days after the massacre. This prominence largely resulted from amplification of initial claims by a single Israeli journalist by U.S. and Israeli government figures. The claim was also widely repeated by politicians including Republican representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Elise Stefanik, by major news outlets such as CNN, Fox News and the New York Post; by Israeli officials, including the prime minister’s office; by ADL President Jonathan Greenblatt, and by a number of Jewish actors and celebrities on social media. The claim became a viral phenomenon in its own right, but as time went on it became clear that evidence was lacking.

Sarah Swann, writing for PolitiFact, commented:

The confirmed violence is horrible enough. So why did a weakly sourced claim about 40 beheaded babies travel far and wide? Experts on disinformation and the Middle East pinpointed the emotional response elicited by violence against children, along with a lack of confirmation from official sources. “Because it is such a shocking claim … it has garnered significant attention as well as attempts to support or rebut,” said Osamah Khalil, a Syracuse University history professor specializing in the modern Middle East and U.S. foreign policy.

The claim that Hamas beheaded 40 babies can be traced to an Israeli reporter’s on-air comments. on October 10, three days after the Hamas attack on Kibbutz Kfar Aza in southern Israel. Nicole Zedeck, an American Jew attached to i24 News, an Israeli news channel, claimed IDF soldiers told her infants had been killed in the attack. During an English-language broadcast from Kfar Aza, Zedeck  said “The Israeli military still says they don’t have a clear number (of the casualties), but I’m talking to some of the soldiers, and they say what they’ve witnessed is they’ve been walking through these different houses, these different communities — babies, their heads cut off. That’s what they said.”

Zedeck said the claim came from Israeli soldiers, but the IDF hadn’t confirmed how many babies were killed or if any were beheaded. Other journalists on the ground in Kfar Aza that day, including Oren Ziv of +972 Magazine, and Samuel Forey of the French news outlet Le Monde, denied that any such claims had been made by IDF soldiers. In a post to X that Ziv has since mysteriously deleted, he said that he saw no evidence that Hamas beheaded babies during the tour of the kibbutz that day, “and the army spokesperson or commanders also didn’t mention any such incidents.” Ziv said journalists in Kfar Aza were allowed to talk to hundreds of soldiers without supervision from the Israel Defense Force communication team, and that no such gruesome discoveries were mentioned. Similarly, Forey said in a post which is still viewable on X, “No one told me about beheadings, even less about beheaded children, even less about 40 beheaded children.” Forey said emergency services personnel he spoke with had not seen any decapitated bodies.

Despite rebuttals by other journalists present on the same tour of the kibbutz, Zedeck later posted the next day on X that “one of the commanders told me they saw babies’ heads cut off.” Thirty-five minutes later, she posted again, saying “soldiers told me they believe 40 babies/children were killed.” Within 24 hours, news outlets in the U.S. and UK, including The IndependentThe Daily MailCNNFox News and the New York Post, repeated the claim that Hamas had beheaded babies, citing Israeli media or the prime minister’s office as sources. The latter gained traction because, on October 11, a spokesperson for Benjamin Netanyahu told CNN that babies and toddlers were found in Kfar Aza with their “heads decapitated.”

By the following morning, however, CNN reported that the Israeli government could not confirm the claim that Hamas beheaded babies, contradicting the Netanyahu’s office’s previous statement. This didn’t prevent Joe Biden from repeating the claim during an October 11 meeting with Jewish leaders, saying, “I never really thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children.” It fell to White House staff to later inform CNN that Biden had in fact neither seen photos nor received confirmation that Hamas beheaded babies or children. Biden was referring to public comments from media outlets and Israeli officials, which hardly amounted to having personally “seen and have confirmed” images of children beheaded by terrorists.

Netanyahu said during Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Biden’s visits to Israel on October 18 that Hamas beheaded people, but Netanyahu did not say whether the victims were infants. Netanyahu’s office then went public with photos of babies it said were “murdered and burned” by Hamas, but the provenance of these images was as obscure as the earlier claims. Sarah Swann pointed out that:

When asked about the authenticity of the images of dead children Netanyahu had shared, White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said Oct. 12, “I don’t think we’re in the business of having to validate or approve those kinds of images. They’re from the prime minister of Israel and we have no reason to doubt their authenticity.”

So the information was authentic solely because it came from Netanyahu.

“Proportionality” and the Renewed Carte Blanche

Just as atrocity propaganda was crucial to facilitating Jewish mass migration to the West during the time of the Tsars, and crucial again in founding the state of Israel, so it is also crucial in the granting to the Jews of their latest carte blanche. The invasion of Gaza by the IDF has so far led to the deaths of more than 22,000 Palestinians, with a further 7,000 missing or buried, and the exodus of around 1.9 million. More profoundly, the international amplification of the Jewish narrative has paved the way for something previously considered unthinkable — the Israeli abolition of the governing system in Gaza. Rumors are now circulating that the Israelis intend to “divide the Hamas-governed territory into areas ruled by tribes or clans rather than a single political entity. According to public broadcaster KAN, the plan was devised by the Israeli army. … It stipulates that the Gaza Strip be divided into regions and subregions, with Israel communicating separately with each group.” In other words, it amounts to “divide and conquer.”

Israel is being Internationally permitted to carry out actions that would be considered beyond the pale by other nations because of international Jewish political and cultural control, and the veneer of morality glossing its rhetoric. Early calls for “proportionality” were deftly swept aside by a tide of carefully positioned Jewish commentators. Jill Goldenzeil, writing for Forbes in an article titled “Proportionality Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means in Gaza,” performs a classic role in shaping ways of seeing, encouraging readers to abandon even the most common sense understanding of a proportionate response to what happened on October 7, and instead flummoxing her readers with the explanation that “Proportionality is a challenging principle to understand—not only because of semantics, but because of the cruel reality of war.” The Jewish News Syndicate rushed out an article on “What Proportionality Actually Means,” and Steven Erlanger at the New York Times bluntly informed readers that Israelis would not be bound to an expectation of “a balanced number of casualties.” In fact, the sheer scale of the Jewish propaganda effort to redefine and nullify any expectation of moderation led the Brussels International Center to note that Israel was engaged in a “war on proportionality,” or any suggestion that there be limits on its action against Gaza.

Critics of Israel’s action would have been saved from their apparent surprise with a little reading of Goldwin Smith. When the quarrel is Jewish, after all, and especially when moral pleading and horror stories are involved, more than usual caution is required.


[1] G. Smith, “New Light on the Jewish Question ,” The North American Review , Aug., 1891, Vol. 153, No. 417 (Aug., 1891), pp. 129- 143 (133).

A House Divided: Schizocracy

A house divided cannot stand.
Matthew 12:22.

With election season approaching on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, political rhetoric will increasingly favor certain themes, and even certain words, in an attempt to entrance and ensnare the public. In the UK, where the government quite blatantly uses NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) both internally and when addressing the voter, modern classics such as “sustainability”, “diversity is our greatest strength”, and “growth” will be on display alongside old favorites such as “tough choices”, “British/American values”, “not who we are,” and other greatest hits.

As for sheer rhetoric, politicians will once again employ a trusted phrase to assure the listener of the veracity of what they are claiming, and it is quite elegant in its Cartesian simplicity; “Let’s be absolutely clear about this”. They often back this up with another epistemological surety as they inform us what “the reality is”. There is a whole rhetorical lexicon dusted off by the political class at election time. Horace would have a field day.

But this season there is a new debutante, not “division”, but its clumsy cognates “divisive” and “divisiveness”. The word “divisive” falls uneasily on English ears when pronounced by an American English speaker. All three instances of the letter i are pronounced short, as in “thin”.  A British speaker would pronounce the middle i long, as in “wide”; “Div-eye-sive”. To the English ear, “divisive” in an American accent sounds like a Russian surname.

The phrase “divide and conquer” (divide et impere) is familiar, variously ascribed to Philip II of Macedon and Julius Caesar, and reiterated (and programmatized) by Niccolò Macchiavelli. Merriam-Webster includes the following definition of divisiveness: “To make a group of people disagree and fight with one another so that they will not join together against one”.

This seems a straightforward diversionary tactic; If you are a deeply unpopular government and the people you govern are fighting one another, then they are not fighting you. Thus, Israel v Palestine, the vaccinated v “anti-vaxxers”, Black Lives Matter v “systemic racism/White privilege” (Whites, essentially), transgender activists v “transphobia”, those who urge caution over immigration v the “refugees welcome” lobby; the list of divided combatants is ever-growing, and that suits beleaguered governments on both sides of the herring-pond.

Yuri Bezmenov, the 1980s Soviet defector who described the methods used by Communist regimes to subvert a country from within, does not thematize division, but it still plays its gruesome part in proceedings. Bezmenov worked for Novesti while in the USSR, the Party’s media arm. From the transcript of one of his interviews, Bezmenov describes how, during a key part of his first stage of subversion (demoralization), division is shown as both deliberate and ruthlessly consequential:

Most of the activity of the department was to compile a huge volume of information on individuals who were influential in influencing public opinion. Publishers, editors, journalists, actors, educationalists, professors of political science, Members of Parliament, representatives of business circles. Most of those people were divided roughly into two groups. Those who were told the Soviet foreign policy, they would be promoted to the positions of power through media and public opinion manipulation. Those who refuse the Soviet influence in their country would be character-assassinated, or executed physically contra-revolution.

A guaranteed job for life and use of the Party stores in perpetuity, or a bullet in the head. That is a very clear statement of division which certainly serves pour encourager les autres.

Now, of course, we are not dealing with raw, undiluted Marxism, but with the deadlier ideology of cultural Marxism—the Soviets never tried to replace the people the Russians they didn’t kill by importing Africans, etc.). Bezmenov’s division according to political adherence/acquiescence is updated by Jordan Peterson in an article in The Daily Telegraph concerning pro-Hamas demonstrations. Mutatis mutandis, his snapshot of the new societal division can be overlaid on top of Bezmenov’s with minimal mismatch. Peterson replaces “oppressor” and “oppressed” with “victimizer” and “victim” — misleading terminology to describe life’s successful people (and nations) as against those who have been unsuccessful:

A rigid moral claim accompanies this act of starkly black-and-white comparison: there are … only two forms of acceptable and laudable moral conduct or reputation. If you are a victim, or an ‘ally’, you are with no further effort goodness incarnate. This is supposed, on ‘philosophical’ grounds, to be self-evident, following as it does so deservedly in the wake of your loudly trumpeted compassion. If you are a victimizer, however, look the hell out: you are evil incarnate, and inescapably so: a predatory parasite, rightly subject to the most brutal of treatment. Indeed, the terrible treatment you thereby experience does nothing but redound to the credit of your so-Godly-and-compassionate persecutors.

Now, at least for the time being, it is merely your job or career which can be assassinated if you come down on the wrong side of the great divide.

Language is a key battleground in the battle to divide a populace, and society is further sub-divided by its bifurcation into discursive and disruptive. Broadly speaking, this is the current division between free-speech absolutists and censors. The battle between the two camps can be clearly seen in Right-of-center political content providers on YouTube. For most, each video is a walk between the raindrops, with algorithms roaming the informational perimeter fence like guard-dogs. Phrases and words must be avoided,  along with certain images and the mere mention of taboo subjects.

Engineered divisiveness in the media is present even at the typographical level. In July 2020, Associated Press (AP) issued an edict to the effect that they would now be capitalizing “black” across their publications. AP being more or less the Alpha fish in the media complex, many other publishers fell into line. The word “white” was not accorded this upper-case honor, despite it being at least as valid as a descriptor of a historical race:

“After a review and period of consultation, we found, at this time, less support for capitalizing white. White people generally do not share the same history, or the experience of being discriminated against because of skin color”.

White people certainly do not share the same history as Blacks, having preferred to build successful societies rather than floundering, savage messes. As for White people not having the experience of being discriminated against because of their skin color, that is changing, and changing fast. And what does discrimination have to do with accurate labeling anyway?

But the corralling of language by the Left which shows that its drive to division does not always create a simple binary, an ideological 1/0. Language as a delivery system for information has been further sub-divided by the politico-big tech complex into mis-, dis-, and malinformation. It is not certain which of these was employed by noted orator Kamala Harris when she claimed recently that the Republicans were “seeking to divide our country in the most crude and profound way”. Crude and profound. Harris has certainly put the “moronic” in “oxymoronic”. And clearly she is projecting: Democrats are the masters of division.

Multiculturalism is applied divisiveness. It was sold as a tableau of many colors, a wonderful 1980s Benetton advert, young, vibrant and above all diverse people smiling and happy in one another’s company.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses use similar artwork in their promotional literature. But multiculturalism turned out to be just that, a multiplicity of cultures, with all the friction and spillover and internecine warfare it brings in its wake. Multiculturalism is not mums of differing hue chatting easily with their best friends at the school gates. Multiculturalism is Roma gypsies picking pockets on the Champs-Élysées, Muslim rape gangs in England, grenade attacks and gang-related crime in Stockholm. These pestilential sub-divisions spread from the central blast of multiculturalism like cutter bombs.

A simple test may be applied to any media story; Does its subject matter seek to divide or unify the citizenry? It will almost always be the former. Unity of the populace is anathema to the current Western juntas. The corrosive machineries of division are operative at all levels of society as identity politics seeks to replace a meritocracy (e.g., by appointing a completely underqualified plagiarist as Harvard president0) judged by merit alone with one dependent on ethnicity, sexual preference or, most dangerously, mere personal whim concerning one’s identity. Identity politics is not a simple process of categorization, it is a marketing fair with dozens of stalls offering hundreds of deals.

More, division seems to be intentional, a driving motive of governmental legislation. In the UK, more and more police time is devoted to online policing, with the criteria for criminality being sourced directly from identity politics, and less time serving the community, which was the original purpose of the police force. Hiring policies, even in the private sector, are increasingly divisive, with Whiteness being a natural and suspect sign of difference and otherness. The word “divisive” or a cognate is unavoidable if British political, commercial, and social environments are under discussion. Recently, the CEO of a British insurance company announced that top-level appointments to the company would have to be approved by her personally where the applicant was White. The company defended this position with standard meaningless technocratic verbiage, but the decision was partly the subject of a report commissioned to assess this new form of racial discrimination. The findings are unsurprising, as Fortune reports:  “The findings concluded that although well-meaning, diversity policies can backfire and create a resentful and divided workforce”.

Can I suggest that we are living, by design, in a schizocracy? It’s my own coinage, as far as I can see, but the “schizo-” part will look familiar. “Schizophrenia” is an ancient Greek portmanteau word, although it was first coined by Eugen Bleuler, Jung’s mentor. Schizein is a verb meaning to split or cleave in two. It’s the sort of result you get from a log-splitting axe. Phrenos is the head. Schizophrenia; the head split into two. Schizophrenia is popularly portrayed as the “split personality”, Norman Bates in Psycho or Stevenson’s The Strange Tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It seems clear from popular clinical evidence that the two disassociated personalities do not work in tandem. They are opposed, combative, cleaved, a house divided.

And this is where we are, a clinically maintained state of constant low-level civil war, constantly forced to divide others between friend and foe just as our friends and foes are doing. And what our foes are doing is of interest in another way. When seeking to divide, the political Left are guilty of another term gaining in popularity: projection.

We are in an age in which certain technical intellectual concepts have been coopted and given a role in political and cultural discourse. “Deconstruction” is one. The term originated with Jacques Derrida and is a complex metaphysical operator with multiple philosophical tributaries and technical uses. For the politico-media complex, it sounds jazzier to deconstruct something than plain old understand it.

Another of these low-rent intellectual accessories is “projection”, a Freudian concept turned to use as a sociological diagnosis. This reaction to themselves being guilty of what they are accusing the Right of — divisiveness — has become a hallmark of the Left, and when you have seen and heard the social justice league in action, you witness the weakness of their personalities, both individual and collective. They are of the psychological cast described in this potted prognosis of projection from Psychology Today:

“People tend to project because they have a trait or desire that is too difficult to acknowledge. Rather than confronting it, they cast it away and onto someone else. This functions to preserve their self-esteem, making difficult emotions more tolerable. It’s easier to attack or witness wrongdoing in another person than confront that possibility in one’s behavior. How a person acts towards the target of projection might reflect how they really feel about themselves”.

As for any divisions within the two arms of the great political divide, identity vs meritocracy, the former tolerates no division in thought or opinion. Several celebrities who have uttered heresies (usually concerning gender) have found just to what extent the Left require intellectual — if it can be so called -— lockstep. The divisions on the Right — and the dividing line is generally race — are entirely self-inflicted, and the Right are failing to learn the simple lesson that if we don’t all hang together, we shall most assuredly hang separately. Internecine fighting helps no one but your enemy. When Orwell arrived in Spain to take up arms against Franco, as recorded in Homage to Catalonia, he was appalled less by the state of the rebel army than by the internecine squabbling between its various factions.

The one place where there should be division, Parliament, has no such thing. In the UK, the only two parties with realistic chances of forming next year’s government are Labour and the Conservatives and, thanks in part to the homogenizing effect of technocracy, they are essentially two wings of the same party, differing in policy on nothing of import.

So, a house divided against itself — a schizocracy — must fall — unless one side wins (likely the identity addicted left) and establishes an authoritarian regime that simply destroys its opponents. That this division is instituted and maintained by those responsible, by mandate, for the house itself shows that Western governments feel that their fealty is owed to the corporate-globalist complex rather than the people who voted for them to be their representatives. How long will the masses tolerate this state of affairs? Britain is a country in a very serious period of decline, and governments of the near future may have to work doubly hard to keep in place a division, or series of sub-divisions, among the populace whose mutual antagonism will keep them from marching on parliament with pitchforks and blazing torches. The world is increasingly re-wilding, and the ruling class must hope that division as a policy decision is a tiger they can ride.

The Jewish Question

The argument that Jews have acquired excessive influence in a ‘host’ society has appeared in all the world’s continents, and has surfaced with frequency from Antiquity to ‘post-modernity.’ Of all social, political, and economic subjects, including race and gender, few have provoked more controversy, or conjured up a more powerful set of mental images and emotional responses, than the Jewish Question. The issue of Jewish influence is both powerful and elusive, profound and yet somehow obscure. In the course of its journey through the centuries, and travels across the oceans, approaches to the Jewish Question have at times acquired an esoteric and mystical character. Alternately, even in the depths of Antiquity we find analyses of this subject that are strikingly clinical and ‘modern’ in their sociological observations. At all times, however, and in all locations, a robust and insidious taboo has pushed back against such investigations, driving the subject to the periphery of acceptable discussion, or beyond. The Jewish Question is thus the proverbial anvil, having worn out a thousand hammers.

At time of this writing, the taboo remains strong. Today, no group of people on earth enjoys legal protection of its historical narrative to the extent enjoyed by the Jews. Publicly refusing to accept the claim that six million Jews were systematically executed during World War Two, a significant proportion of them via specially constructed gas chambers, is a criminal offence in more than fifteen European countries. An even stronger legal aspect of the taboo is the growth and spread of ‘hate speech’ legislation, versions of which have been adopted by almost every Western nation. These ‘group libel’ laws protect not only the Jewish historical narrative, but also the contemporary Jewish population, from critique. Moreover, Jews enjoy uniquely positive portrayals in the media, are uniformly and lavishly praised by the political establishment, and enjoy special police protection at many of their institutions. Along with legal intervention from the state, dissent from such patterns of praise is closely monitored and censored by a large number of international Jewish ‘anti-defamation’ bodies, some of which are explicitly Jewish and some of which strategically disguise their Jewish origins, leadership, or funding sources. The taboo can also be observed in the case of the State of Israel, which occupies one of the most incongruent and inexplicable positions in modern politics. Acting in every sense as an ethnostate, Israel nevertheless continues to enjoy the strenuous support of Western nations that have ritualized the disavowal of their own ethnic interests.

The Jewish Question, simply explained, consists of two enquiries: Do Jews possess an excessive influence in their host societies and, if so, what should be done about it? Most commentaries on the subject have focussed on the first question, leading the scholar John Klier to remark on one occasion that the assessment and critique of Jewish influence has throughout history been predominantly an intellectual pursuit. However, in pushing back against the taboo, even via the modest pursuit of research and the dissemination of one’s findings, one engages in activism of a sort. Indeed, one cannot expect to formulate a response to a problem if one cannot first convince others that a problem exists. The essence of the Jewish Question is therefore the argument that Jews do enjoy an excessive influence in their host societies, and that this excessive influence, for a large number of reasons, is highly problematic for those societies. These problems straddle all spheres of society — the cultural, the economic, and the political.

One might argue that a problem of a such a scale should be self-evident; that no taboo could conceivably veil an issue requiring pressing societal attention. A response would be that throughout history the problem was indeed self-evident, resulting in centuries of academic, cultural, and political discourse on the Jewish Question — a term that peaked in usage in Europe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For a thousand years and more, the Jewish Question was not only self-evident, but urgently exigent. Populations clamored for action on it, the fate of economies rested on responses to it, and even kings couldn’t escape the implications of it. The slipping of the Jewish Question from public life is very recent, beginning in the 1950s. And the reasons for this slippage have not been that the issues of the past were resolved, but that sweeping changes in the nature of the Western nations have taken place. Chief among these changes was that the West stopped seeing external threats to its interests and began to see itself as a threat. Encouraged by parasitic and carefully constructed ideologies, the West turned inwards, issuing forms of rhetorical, cultural, and demographic violence upon itself. The Jewish Question became the ‘Whiteness Question.’ New values were adopted, and new ways of seeing. Among the latter was a new way of seeing the Jewish past. In a relentless wave of Western forgetfulness and mass self-recrimination, the Jews, long the villains of the European story, became its unblemished heroes. Europe, for the most part, is today a Zionist continent.

The taboo that masks the Jewish Question relies to a great extent on this new story, and the construction of the story has been monopolized in order to add to its strength and security. Jewish history produced in academia is dominated by Jewish scholars. The same applies to the history of anti-Semitism (rational hostility towards Jewish group behavior), and increasingly also to the scholarly discussion of ‘Whiteness’, race, ethnic identity, and immigration. The current dispensation provides a climate in which attempts by White scholars to investigate or publish on these themes would be viewed with suspicion, with these suspicions couched in claims of potential bias, or ‘unconscious prejudice.’ The real fear is that the status quo would be distorted, and that older narratives would resurface. Of course, no claims of bias can be made against Jews, who often boast of a uniquely objective perspective on society as both ‘outsiders’ and ‘insiders.’ Similar patterns and boasts may be witnessed in media presentations on these subjects, and increasingly also in the development of legislation.

Europeans have for the most part already lost control of their own narrative, their own story. Having lost sight of their historical trajectory, they have lost sight of their interests. And having lost sight of their interests, they have lost sight of those acting against them. It is therefore imperative to start at the beginning, and to turn to the origins of the Jewish Question in Europe.

Europeans and Jews: An Historical Overview

Jews have settled among European host populations since ancient times. The oldest communities were in the urban centers of the Mediterranean, and a list of Jewish colonies in this area can be found in the First Book of Maccabees. In the early Roman empire clusters of Jews could be found as far north as Lyon, Bonn and Cologne.[1] The economic nature of these communities was uniform, and similar to those in the East. Even prior to the Talmudic era, c.300–500 A.D., Jews had developed a strong interest and aptitude in commerce and banking. From its origins, the Jewish involvement in these spheres was regarded by host populations as malevolent and exploitative. In one of the earliest examples, a papyrus dated to 41 A.D., an Alexandrian merchant warns a friend to “beware of the Jews.”[2] During the 4th century, Alexandria witnessed a number of anti-Jewish riots, nearly all of them provoked by accusations of economic exploitation.

While hostility towards Jews was common during the life of the Roman Empire, it was only later that the extent and nature of the Jewish Diaspora began to pose a ‘Jewish Question’ to the European people as a whole. Between the 5th and 10th centuries, Jewish trading posts took hold across Europe, from Cadiz and Toledo to the Baltic, Poland, and Ukraine. Crucially, this extensive network afforded the Jews a near total monopoly in the exchange of currency and information. Islamic and Christian civilizations during this period were bitterly opposed and traders from either faction were reluctant to carry goods into rival territory. Jews, enjoying relative tolerance from both civilizations, were able to carry goods from the Middle East into Europe, where Carolingian elites were particularly fond of purchasing luxury goods from Arab lands via Jewish merchants. Similarly, Jews were strategically positioned to overcome the legal obstacles of both civilizations to usury, an economic area they had refined to something of an art form in Babylon.

During the Carolingian Dynasty (c. 714–c.877), the Jewish population of Northwestern Europe evolved from a scattering of individual international traders to growing communities of local traders. The shift to local trade enabled the Jews to acquire an influential middleman role in European society, to which they added widespread engagement in credit operations. On this foundation of growing economic influence, the later Carolingian period also witnessed the development of the first symbiotic relationships between Jewish finance and European elites. This granted significant privileges and protections to Jews, who soon acquired elite status themselves. One of the first examples of such a relationship emerged in the 810s, when Agobard (c.779–840), the Archbishop of Lyon attempted to restrict the financial activities of Jews in his locality, and was confronted with royal power. Although many Jewish scholars have taken great pains to portray Agobard as a religious fanatic who agitated against Jews purely on the grounds they were not Christians, Jeremy Cohen concedes “Agobard objected to the privileged position that the Jews appeared to command in Frankish society.”[3] Along with observations of supremacist attitudes among the Jews of Lyon, Agobard complained that the King of the Franks and co-Emperor with Charlemagne, Louis the Pious (778–840), had issued charters and appointed special officials to protect both Jews and their economic interests, and had turned a blind eye to the fact “the slave trade was run by Jews.”[4] After repeated agitations on these grounds, Agobard and his priests were threatened by both Jews and royal officials in 826, with the result that some of the priests went into hiding. Agobard’s agitation, including his opposition to the policies of Louis the Pious, was ultimately a failure, resulting at one point in his personal exile. Perhaps even more so than when Muslims invaded Spain in 711, when “the Jews helped them overrun it,”[5] the silencing of Agobard may be regarded as the birth of the Jews as a hostile elite in European society. Certainly it was the first major political victory for the taboo on Jewish influence.

Encouraged by the successes of financial-political pioneers like those in Lyon, significant numbers of Jews from southern Europe began a steady northern migration. Many gathered in the Rhine basin, forming the nucleus of what would later come to be known as ‘Ashkenazi’ Jewry. Expansion from there was rapid. A colony of Jewish financiers reached England in 1070, following on the heels of the Norman Conquest four years earlier. Although there is a lack of clear evidence, Jewish financiers enjoyed pre-existing relationships with Norman elites and Jewish money was very likely to have formed part of the invasion’s war chest. We have conclusive evidence that Strongbow’s later Norman conquest of Ireland, in 1170, was financed by a Jewish usurer named Josce, then based in the English town of Gloucester.[6] Headquartered in London, the Jews of England mirrored their counterparts elsewhere on the continent in that they became “a tightly knit class of financiers. From the start they managed to associate closely with the kings in their operations, turning over to the royalty the notes of defaulting debtors in return for a share of the sums due. They were the ‘king’s men,’ vassals of a special kind, since they were the chief source of their suzerain’s revenues.”[7] The foundation of the Jewish relationship with European elites was thus a general confluence of financial and political ambitions. The primary victims would be the European masses.

The Jewish penetration of European society was a risky venture, but one that Jewish populations evidently felt was worth the gamble. No Jews were ever forced to settle in a European country, but still they came and still they expanded. They were aware that as non-Christians and as masters of debt they would generate hostility. Indeed, these considerations formed an important aspect of their bargaining for charters — agreements drawn up between Jews and European elites that laid down the terms of residence, levels of protection, and financial rewards that would make it worthwhile for Jews to settle. For example, in 1084, Jews were given a defensive wall around their settlement quarter in the Rhineland town of Speyer in fulfilment of promises made in their charter.[8] Some of the oldest houses still standing in England were originally built on the orders of Jews, their longevity owing to the fact that Jews possessed the wealth to build homes with a generous use of stone for security.[9] The Jewish move into Europe was thus predicated upon an understanding that Jews would be hated but untouchable, reviled but rich, merciless but unaccountable.

Evidence from 13th century Perpignan in the south of France indicates that the peasantry and townsmen comprised around 95% of customers for Jewish moneylending colonies, a figure that should be regarded as broadly representative of patterns elsewhere in Europe.[10] Even though these Jewish populations expanded via immigration and natural increase, occupational diversification was negligible. Paul Johnson remarks that the number of moneylenders merely multiplied, and that “lenders had very complex transactions among themselves, often forming syndicates.”[11] These developments increased rates of interest, which in many cases were obscured in initial loan agreements. The true nature of a peasant’s debt was thus rarely apparent until he discovered, to his surprise and horror, that all his worldly possessions would be seized by the local court, with the Jewish usurer taking his share and moving on to the next victim. In some countries a special Exchequer of the Jews was established in order to process the sheer volume of such transactions.

Because royal elites stood to gain from property seizures based on Jewish-owned debt, and even more so from the defaults of the landed gentry, they were highly protective of their profitable alliance with Jewish usury colonies. In many cases Jews were granted a quasi-royal status, which meant that any instance of assault or disobedience against Jews would be treated as if it was an act against the king himself. Anti-Jewish hostility, occasionally intertwined with anger at the greed of the elite class, was thus legally restrained but culturally rampant. It was also at times helpfully displaced by legal means. Jews had very little interest in possessing and working land, so the prohibition on their owning it was ultimately a common but meaningless feature of the medieval European legal landscape. However, what the prohibition did achieve was to perform a legalistic sleight of hand whereby Jews and elites could conspire to defraud the lower orders, particularly the moderately wealthy lesser barons. In essence, it enabled Jewish moneylenders to engage in the risky game of playing one class of Europeans against another. For example, in thirteenth-century England, Jewish usury was a key point of contention, and even crisis, between the knightly class and the barons. Clause twenty-five of England’s Petition of the Barons (May 1258) complained that “Jews sometimes transfer their debts and lands pledged to them to magnates and other powerful persons in the kingdom, who thus enter the lands of lesser men.”[12] Beneath the immediate competition for material interests, a deeper struggle raged. This was the contest between the lower orders and Jewish-involved elites, between the democratic impulse and corruption, between national/religious fidelity and betrayal. Nowhere was this struggle more evident than in England’s Magna Carta (1215), which had attempted, with moderate success, to check the power of both the king and the Jews.

Other than the combined force of an aggrieved barony, in medieval Europe there was only one force capable of undermining the royal protections bestowed upon the Jews and their practices. This was religion. The religious impulse of medieval Christendom was strong, it was emotional, and in many cases it possessed a political will and a political power of its own. A king could execute an economic rival with relative impunity, but it was significantly more difficult to execute someone who cultivated an appearance of utter Christian piety and thus enjoyed the support of the Church. For this reason, while the causes of anti-Semitism were almost exclusively rooted in material matters such as economic exploitation, religion and spirituality feature strongly as veneers for the period’s strongest anti-Jewish actions. In effect, religion became a safer and more useful pretext for anti-Jewish action than explicit economic grievances. Religious opposition to Jewish colonies thus became the superficial means to advance an agenda designed to reduce the material power and political influence of the Jews.

Two notable developments in medieval Europe are indicative of the pattern discussed above: anti-Jewish violence during the Crusades, and the evolution of the so-called ‘Blood Libel’ and associated folklore regarding Jews. I have come to term these events the “First European Reaction.” Prior to the Crusades there is some evidence that religious pretexts were used to mask material and political ambitions underlying actions against Jews. Between 1007 and 1012 a number of expulsions of Jews took place throughout Northwestern Europe, initiated first under the apparent direction of King Robert the Pious (972–1031) and his nobles, and then by the Holy Roman Emperor, King Henry II (973–1024). Although Robert framed his purges as a war on religious heresy, evidence suggests that he was more greatly concerned that Jews had developed autonomous political power based on growing financial influence —that “there is one people spread throughout the provinces, which does not obey us.”[13] One interesting aspect of these actions against Jews is that they were later reversed by the intervention of Pope Alexander II. Norman Golb notes that by the eleventh century a group of some two hundred Jewish intellectuals had acquired influence in Rome, among them the Jewish scholar R. Yehiel who “enters and leaves the pope’s residence freely.”[14] The period thus witnessed an escalation in the development of international elite influence, in which cross-border networks of influence entered into Jewish political life. Jewish influence in the German lands was also boosted by a population boom. Numbering approximately 5,000 Jews by the end of the tenth century, by the end of the eleventh they numbered between 20,000 and 25,000.[15]

During the preaching of the First Crusade, beginning in 1095, a century of economic exploitation and competition rose to the surface, and the tumultuous and restless political atmosphere added opportunity to motive. Paul Johnson writes of a “breakdown in normal order.”[16] This breakdown undermined the security and protections offered by the relationship between Jews and European elites, opening Jewish communities and their wealth to acts of retribution. Both tiers of the Crusade, both the tier of Crusading knights and that of the peasant army, sought provisions from their surroundings as they passed through Europe. This frequently involved settling scores with wealthy Jewish colonies, often in violation of elite orders from the political and religious authorities. Looting was common. In Mainz the Jews were keenly aware of the motivations of Christians who made their way into the Jewish quarter, buying time for escape by throwing money to Crusaders from their windows.[17] Ultimately, however, the agitation was relatively short-lived. Following the destruction of Jewish debt rolls, and occasionally the reassertion of local elite power, violence dissipated rapidly. Assaults on the Jewish centers of Europe were “limited in scope and impact,” and “the bulk of northern European Jewry emerged from the crisis shaken but unscathed.”[18]

Despite limited immediate impact, the Crusades had a lasting influence on Jewish and European mentalities. In some instances, Jews had been presented with the option of converting to Christianity or being executed. Whether the latter threat would have, or could have, been carried out is uncertain given that forcible conversion of the Jews had been effectively outlawed by papal decree. However, Jews reacted in such situations in a manner demonstrative of intense feelings of ethnocentrism and group loyalty — mass murder-suicide, along with instances of self-immolation, were not uncommon. The experience left an imprint on the Jewish mental landscape far out of proportion to the reality of the threat posed to Jewish colonies. Perhaps even more so that the ‘memory’ of the sojourn in Egypt recounted in the Book of Exodus, in the Jewish mind the Crusades marked the beginning of the ‘lachrymose’ trajectory of Jewish history; a seemingly endless persecution of blameless martyrs. Just as saliently, the sight of Jews engaging in an extremely violent mass repudiation of the Christian faith, and of their own individuality, brought about a transformation of the Jew in the European mind. Jews were no longer just exploitative, non-Christian aliens, but fundamentally different from European humanity. In some instances, Jews had reacted with such viciousness to the prospect of conversion that Europeans detected a demonic hatred for their creed. For example, in 1096 in Trier, two Jews urinated on a crucifix, having been handed it with an injunction to convert — an act that historian Elliott Horowitz believes was not uncommon.[19]

After the Crusades, and directly as a result of behaviors like these, Jews entered into European folklore. Between the medieval and early modern periods, Jewish communities continued to expand in influence, as well as demographically and geographically. Folk stories about Jews were arguably developed as part of an attempt to embed admonitions against contact with Jews in European culture, and via culture, the European subconscious. One of the most potent folk legends regarding Jews was the ‘Blood Libel,’ the allegation that Jews kidnapped and murdered European children for quasi-satanic ritual purposes. A related accusation was that Jews abused Christian sacraments. Allegations like these should be read as attempts to provide the same unsettling of social and political norms offered during the Crusades. In essence, what we continue to see is the use of religion and religious fervor as a pretext to address underlying socio-economic grievances in a context in which Jews remained under the protection of elite political power.

Another theme of the early European-Jewish conflict, in which religion and socio-economic concerns overlapped, is that of the mass expulsion. It goes without saying that the very numerous Medieval expulsions of Jewish communities from a large number of European locations left an indelible imprint on the Jewish psyche. Adam and Gedaliah Afterman have written of the Medieval period as a time in which Jews cultivated a powerful theology/ideology of revenge for perceived wrongs perpetrated by host populations. One Medieval Ashkenazi tale, for example, portrays God as “listing on his garment” the names of all Jewish victims of Gentiles over the course of time so that in the future the deity would have a record of those to be avenged.[20] And just as Medieval Jews perceived that they were the innocent victims of evil Gentiles, so Jewish historiography has overwhelmingly portrayed the expulsions as the result of “rumors, prejudices, and insinuating and irrational accusations.”[21] Such understandings of the expulsions have only very recently come to be revised, most saliently in the work of Harvard historian Rowan W. Dorin, whose 2015 doctoral thesis and subsequent publications have for the first time helped fully contextualize the mass expulsions of Jews in Europe during the Medieval period, 1200–1450.[22] Dorin points out that Jews were never specifically targeted for expulsion qua Jews, but as usurers, and notes that the vast majority of expulsions in the period targeted “Christians hailing from northern Italy.” Jews were expelled, like these Christian usurers, for their actions, choices, and behaviors.

What the period witnessed was not a wave of irrational anti-Jewish actions, but rather a widespread ecclesiastical reaction against the spread of moneylending among Christians that eventually absorbed Jews into its considerations for common sense reasons. A number of laws and statutes, for example Usuranum voraginem, were designed in order to provide a schedule of punishments for foreign/travelling Christian moneylenders. These laws contained provisions for excommunication and a prohibition on renting property in certain locales. The latter effectively prohibited such moneylenders from taking up residence in those locations, and compelled their expulsion in cases where they were already domiciled. It was only after these laws were in effect that some theologians and clerics began to question why they weren’t also applied to Jews who, in the words of historian Gavin Langmuir, were then “disproportionately engaged in moneylending in northern Europe by the late 12th century.”[23] The Church had historically objected to the expulsion of Jews in the belief that their scattered presence fulfilled theological and eschatological functions. It was only via the broader, largely common sense, application of newly developed anti-usury laws that such obstructions to confrontations with Jews became theologically and ecclesiastically permissible, if not entirely desirable. And once this Rubicon had been crossed, it paved the way for a rapid series of expulsions of Jewish usury colonies from European towns and cities, a process that accelerated rapidly between the 13th and 15th centuries. These I call the “Second European Reaction.”

*   *   *

Weakened and unsettled following this sequence of expulsions, the nexus of European Jewry shifted eastwards from northern Europe towards what is now Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. As these communities put down their uneasy roots, and then commenced the process of building influence with elites in those countries, Sephardic Jews were ready to commence their rise in Spain. Regarded as the safest Latin territory for Jews, Spain had hosted a financial and administrative Jewish elite from the early Middle Ages. However, throughout the 13th century, Christians in Spain steadily developed their own financial and administrative elites, with the result that resource competition began to intensify rapidly. By the 14th century, a number of restrictive laws were imposed by the Christian majority in order to control and contain Jewish influence.

What made events in early modern Spain different from any previous period or location of settlement was the Jewish response. For the first time, rather than simply leaving, significant numbers of Jews — especially the ambitious — began to engage in insincere conversions to Christianity in order to stay and obtain, or retain, certain privileges and protections. The advent of the conversos was of course an unexpected theological challenge, even contradiction. The Church had for centuries been discussing the problem of Judaism in purely spiritual terms, as a matter of belief or unbelief. The natural remedy to unbelief was therefore always assumed to be the introduction of the Jews to Christian belief, to be followed by exposure to the transformative waters of baptism. Much to the shock and dismay of many Christians, it was gradually understood that even after baptism, entire communities of Jewish converts to Christianity continued in the same social and economic patterns as in their prior, Jewish lives. They retained a strong tendency to marry only among themselves. They tended to retain the same hold over certain positions within finance and political influence, and they frequently bolstered this hold via nepotism and in-group favoritism. Such behaviors not only led to the growing sense that the conversos were cheaters and hypocrites, but also that they were socially subversive, acting as disguised, harmful agents in culture and religion. It is this latter aspect of Jewish history, the idea of the Jew as cultural subversive, that separates the Jews from other ‘middle man minorities’ throughout history, and it is one of the most crucial elements in the history of the European-Jewish interaction.

The first wave of reactions against the conversos occurred in the early 15th century. Investigations were formally commenced by the Church in 1430, and the first anti-converso riots began in the 1440s in Toledo, sometimes lasting for as long as two weeks. As was the case in the anti-Jewish riots in England centuries before, all lists of debtors discovered by the rioters were destroyed, and most conversos sought refuge with sympathetic or allied elites.[24] Much like the advent of the ‘Blood Libel,’ the intensification of resource competition and the presence of elites sympathetic to Jews led to a drift once more to religious authority. In this instance, there was a push for a new, special Spanish Inquisition that would be equipped to root out and confront the converso problem. The process was ruthlessly efficient, with the establishment of new systems of social segregation. Around 18,000 secret Jews were burned at the stake under the first five inquisitors-general.[25] The completion of the Reconquista in the early 1490s brought renewed determination and confidence among Christians to deal conclusively with foreigners, culminating in the promulgation of an Edict of Expulsion in April 1492. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were driven from Spain, with around 100,000 making their way to Portugal, where a strikingly similar Edict of Expulsion would be promulgated four years later. Aside from a significant remnant that relocated to France and the Netherlands, Spanish Sephardic Jewry was essentially destroyed, being dispersed all over the Mediterranean and Muslim world.

Jerome Friedman has noted that “a New Christian [i.e., converso] problem affected not only Spain, but all of Europe,”[26] and has suggested that the issue of Jewish conversion even played some role in provoking the Protestant Reformation.[27] Such arguments are difficult to dismiss. After the expulsions of the various Ashkenazi colonies, and after being driven out of Spain, Sephardic New Christians established new networks in northern Europe. While in France they established themselves in commerce, causing officials in Bordeaux to remark in 1683 that “commerce is almost entirely in the hands of that sort of persons,”[28] in Germany they presented themselves as scholars of Hebrew and quickly ingratiated themselves to the German church.[29] Friedman, after consulting the relevant documents, has argued that “many, possibly all, early teachers of Hebrew at German and other north European universities during the early decades of the sixteenth century were in fact New Christians.”[30] What these Jewish converts brought to their new roles was an interpretation of the Old Testament steeped in subtle critiques of Christianity that had long been part of a tradition of Jewish antichristian polemics.[31] As a result, the early sixteenth century witnessed a flurry of interest in Hebrew and Hebrew texts in Germany, prompting the Catholic authorities to condemn this sudden trend as proto-Jewish and heresy. Despite these condemnations, interest in Jewish texts continued among the higher echelons of the German clergy, eventually boiling over in the years 1516–1520, when a Jewish convert named Johannes Pfefferkorn published a pamphlet, Der Judenspiegel, calling for the suppression of all Jewish texts and the burning of the Talmud. Pfefferkorn, who claimed these steps were the only way to deal with the Jews and force them to convert, and who may or may not have been sincere in his conversion, was opposed by the religious scholar Johann Reuchlin, who insisted the Talmud and kabbalistic texts be retained in order that they might be used to confirm the truths of Christianity. The Reuchlin-Pfefferkorn debate quickly exploded, consuming most of the major religious figures of the day, and even involving Emperor Maximilian.

*   *   *

One interested onlooker was Martin Luther, who had himself been subject to at least some New Christian teaching. Perhaps because of this indoctrination, Luther was initially very sympathetic to the idea that Jews should be allowed to keep their texts, and to the idea that they contained content that was worthwhile for Christians to study. He published a pamphlet, That Christ was Born a Jew, and certainly imbibed a Jewish hostility to “idolatry” that he subsequently incorporated into his critique of the Catholic hierarchy. In fact, the pamphlet makes it clear that he viewed himself as fashioning a form of philo-Semitic Christianity that would be more appealing to potential converts from Judaism. As such, after his formal break with Rome, Luther proceeded to launch his own missionary efforts to the Jews, during which he appears to have encountered the reality of Jewish-European interactions for the first time. The converts he expected never materialized. Luther then turned on the Calvinists, who had insisted that God’s Covenant with the Jews remained in place. For Luther, it had definitely and conclusively been revoked. What Jews remained were both cursed and a curse. By 1542, he was sufficiently angered by what he saw to write On the Jews and Their Lies, in the course of which he asserted:

No one wants them. The countryside and the roads are open to them; they may return to their country when they wish; we shall gladly give them presents to get rid of them, for they are a heavy burden on us, a scourge, a pestilence and misfortune for our country. This is proved by the fact that they have often been expelled by force: from France, where they had a downy nest; recently from Spain, their chosen roost, and even this year from Bohemia, where in Prague they had another cherished nest; finally, in my own lifetime, from Ratisbon, Magdeburg, and from many other places.

Faced with renewed anti-Jewish feeling from European religious powers, Jews turned to tried and tested strategies, in particular the cultivation of links with European elites. Ever since the first century Exilic period, Jewish political activities became increasingly uniform, with Amichai Cohen and Stuart Cohen noting of the new Diaspora: “Notwithstanding variations dictated by vast differences of location and situation, all Jewish communities developed and refined a remarkably similar set of broad [political] strategies.”[32] Lacking a state, and insistent on remaining apart from their host nations, Diaspora Jewish populations developed an indirect and at times highly abstract style of politics in order to advance their interests. In Jewish sources it became known as shtadtlanut (“intercession” or “petitioning”), and represented a personal and highly involved form of diplomacy or statecraft that, in the words of the Cohens, “prioritized persuasion.”[33] Prior to c.1815, when the era of Absolute monarchy began to rapidly decline, Jews often pursued their interests via a small number of very wealthy and “persuasive” individual shtadlans who would form personal relationships with a king, prince, or other powerful members of the European elite. This was most pronounced during the Early Modern period when Hofjuden, or Court Jews, negotiated privileges and protections for Jews with European monarchs. In the sixteenth century, Yosel of Rosheim (c. 1480 – March, 1554) became the pioneer of intensive Jewish relationships with non-Jewish elites in the modern period after he interceded with the Holy Roman Emperors Maximilian I and Charles V on behalf of German and Polish Jews, successfully blocking a number of planned expulsions, including one from Hungary and one from Bohemia. His interventions were fateful, setting the pattern and role for shtadlanut.

Court Jews acted as moneylenders, agents and emissaries of their patron, and in return would request, and obtain, broader privileges for themselves and their community. They in fact became the nucleus of a community that was essentially built around them. Agreements between patrons and Court Jews, known as charters, became increasingly common, setting out protections for Jews, but also, following a number of cases of Jewish exploitation, limiting their size, business activities, and movements. The 1750 charter of Frederick II of Prussia, for example, gave very precise allowances for the presence in Berlin of one rabbi, four judges, two cantors, six grave diggers, three butchers, three bakers, one communal scribe, and so on. That Jews had a history of circumventing such agreements is indicated by Clause V, which stipulates:

In order that in the future all fraud, cheating, and secret and forbidden increase of the number of families may be more carefully avoided, no Jew shall be allowed to marry, nor will he receive permission to settle, in any manner, nor will he be believed, until a careful investigation has been made by the War and Domains Offices together with the aid of the Treasury.

Perhaps the most consequential aspect of the charters was the very relaxed attitude they took to the indulgence of moneylending by Jews among all social classes. At the higher end of the Jewish communal structure, the Court Jews themselves, Jewish usury took the form of formal banking. The best example in this regard is Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744–1812), a Court Jew to the German Landgraves of Hesse-Kassel in the Free City of Frankfurt. The rise of the major Jewish moneylenders also paved the way for a mercantilist mindset to take hold in the European governing class, and Jews used their new status and influence, as well as the appeals of mercantilism, to secure readmission to states from which they had previously been expelled, most notably England. Among the lower Jews, pawning and the sale of goods on credit became epidemic, with historian Jacob Katz remarking that “the peddling trade developed extensively” during the era of the Court Jew.[34] Katz adds that the latter form of economic activity, more than the increasingly abstract methodologies of the Rothschilds and their cohorts, “brought Jews into close contact with non-Jews in such a way as to afford an opportunity for ethically dubious practices.”[35] That Jews would take such opportunities, and on a scale that can only be described as massive, is one of the foundations of modern anti-Semitism.

*   *   *

As well as ushering in a new era in the nature of Jewish finance among Europeans, the later Court Jew period also witnessed a new era of Jewish activity in European culture that would become so pernicious as to throw the New Christian phenomenon into the shade. Beginning with the German Jew Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) and a coterie of Jewish intellectuals known as the Maskilim, Jews began to demanded to be accommodated via changes in European culture. Mendelssohn, who is often held up as the first “assimilated” Jew, and the first real Jewish intellectual who wanted to be ‘part of German culture,’ advocated for “tolerance” and famously asked, “For how long, for how many millennia, must this distinction between the owners of the land and the stranger continue? Would it not be better for mankind and culture to obliterate this distinction?”[36] The very first Jewish intrusion into Western culture was thus accompanied by a call for the obliteration of borders and the migration and settlement rights of “the stranger.” From the very beginning of Jewish activism in Western culture, it has been in the interest of Jews to undermine the position of the owners of the land and to promote “tolerance,” and it was Mendelssohn’s 1781 work, On the Civil Amelioration of the Condition of the Jews, that is said to have played a significant part in the rise of “tolerance” in Western culture. Although Mendelssohn and the Maskilim postured as Jews who wished to modernize Judaism, they were in fact the first Jewish intellectual movement and the earliest pioneers of what would become the Culture of Critique.

*   *   *

It wasn’t long before the cultural demands of Jewish intellectuals became political demands. Jews had always had political access via their relationship with elites under the system of shtadlanut, but the decline of the absolutist monarchies and the rise of democracy required new strategies, and new access to the levers of political power. Jews began obtaining direct political power during the French Revolution, after they were granted full citizenship despite many bitter complaints about their economic activities.[37] There then followed a domino effect throughout Europe, though not without intense debate. Many contemporary political figures, misguided in retrospect, viewed the granting of political privileges to Jews as a means of ensuring control and accountability.

In England, for example, Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), a famous historian and one of Britain’s leading men of letters, took up the cause of removing Jewish “civil disabilities” in Britain. In a succession of speeches, Macaulay was instrumental in pushing the case for permitting Jews to sit in the legislature, and his January 1831 article Civil Disabilities of the Jews had a “significant effect on public opinion.”[38] But Macaulay was no supporter of Jews. A complete reading of his famous 1831 article on Civil Disabilities of the Jews reveals much about the extent and nature of Jewish power and influence in Britain at that time, and Macaulay viewed emancipation as a means of ‘keeping the Jews in check.’ He insisted that Jews already held great influence and added that “Jews are not now excluded from political power. They possess it; and as long as they are allowed to accumulate property, they must possess it. The distinction which is sometimes made between civil privileges and political power, is a distinction without a difference. Privileges are power.”[39] Macaulay was also aware of the role of finance as the primary force of Jewish power in Britain. He asked: “What power in civilised society is so great as that of creditor over the debtor? If we take this away from the Jew, we take away from him the security of his property. If we leave it to him, we leave to him a power more despotic by far, than that of the King and all his cabinet.” Macaulay further responds to Christian claims that “it would be impious to let a Jew sit in Parliament” by stating bluntly that “a Jew may make money, and money may make members of Parliament. … [T]he Jew may govern the money market, and the money market may govern the world. … The scrawl of the Jew on the back of a piece of paper may be worth more than the word of three kings, or the national faith of three new American republics.”

Macaulay’s insights into the nature of Jewish power at that time, and his assertions that Jews had already accumulated political power without the aid of the statute books, are quite profound. Yet his reasoning — that permitting Jews into the legislature would somehow offset this power, or make it accountable — seems pitifully naive and poorly thought out. By 1871, with the unification of Germany, direct Jewish access to the political systems of Europe was essentially complete.

What followed was a period characterized by historians as Jewish “assimilation” into Western culture. The term implies an adaption to, blending with, or adoption of Western norms, and is far from appropriate or sufficient to explain what actually took place in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Under democracy, Jews, remaining for the most part a culturally and genetically distinct group, advanced to elite positions in the press, government, academia, and the professions. From these positions, Jews protected their systems of economic dominance and advanced new forms of cultural power. They excelled as distributors of pornography, as purveyors of contraception, and, in their sarcastic scorn for patriotism, as the avant-garde for anti-national ideas. In Europe’s great East, they enjoyed a population boom funded by the mass exploitation of the serfs under the tavern system, pawning, and other forms of moneylending. In many of the great cities they pooled resources, developed monopolies, and everywhere extended their power and influence.

The European response to these developments has been deemed “the rise of modern anti-Semitism” by today’s ruling intellectuals. Distanced from religious interpretations that influenced Europe’s first great reaction (1095–1290) against Jewish influence in the Middle Ages, and transformed from the political contexts of the expulsions that characterized the Second Reaction (c.1290–1535), Europeans of what I have come to understand as the Third European Reaction (c.1870–1950) were highly focussed on the economic, social, and political impact of the Jews on European society. What began as opposition to Jewish political “emancipation” developed into a coherent political philosophy and ideology based on several key precepts:

  • Jews are a separate and distinct race, inherently different in traits and characteristics from Europeans.
  • Jews are incompatible with nationalism because they possess cultural and national aspirations of their own, cannot be integrated, and thus represent a state within a state.
  • The modern state has become subject to an aggressive capitalism pioneered and in many cases operated by Jews.
  • Jewish influence in public life is closely connected with the negative aspects of modernity and European racial decline.
  • The excesses of Jewish influence in public life under democracy required the democratic mobilization of anti-Semitism under anti-Semitic parties, an anti-Semitic press, and the expansion of anti-Semitism in culture.

Jews had their own responses. In the West, they strengthened existing ties with friendly European elites and formed their first formal, secular defense committees, from which they agitated for speech laws and other oppressive legislation. In the East they had two primary strategies. In the first, they began one of the largest propaganda hoaxes ever conceived and, under the guise of mass pogroms purportedly instigated by Russian elites, mass migrated to the West, especially the United States, accompanied by waves of media-induced sympathy. In the second, they threw their demographic bulk and intellectual aggression into Communism, forming its vanguard and using its momentum to exact revenge on a Russian elite that they felt had failed to support their interests and an East European peasantry they viewed as little better than animals.[40] In a final strategy, they developed Zionism, with Palestine postulated as a Jewish homeland but instead coming to represent a colonial halfway house, a safe haven from which to administer a growing and increasingly complex Diaspora, and a safe place to be utilized in the event of a Reaction. These strategies would be so successful that they would prompt historian Yuri Slezkine to describe the twentieth century as “The Jewish Century.”[41]

The major event of that century was of course World War II, a conflagration that was more than a result of Germany’s expansionist war aims, or its ideological trajectory. In fact, World War II was a series of overlapping conflicts, one of which, the Third European Reaction against the Jews, unleashed decades, if not centuries, of suppressed inter-ethnic tensions throughout Europe. Jews were frequently active and violent participants during the war, meaning mass casualties were inevitable. The number of deaths on all sides was indeed significant. But honest, full, and unbiased accounts of why this inter-ethnic catastrophe occurred, and the true nature of its extent, remain absent from the mainstream, and extremely rare in scholarship. What instead emerged in the aftermath of the war was a “Holocaust Industry” that initiated an era of “White Guilt” that has, in turn, contributed heavily to the Western cultural paralysis and inertia of the present time.

This paralysis and inertia was furthered by growing Jewish influence in Hollywood, academia, and the press, and by the extraordinary growth in power of the Jewish defense leagues, most notably New York’s Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Buoyed by the financial support of wealthy donors from the worlds of international finance and the mass media, the ADL and similar organizations have assumed an importance in public life far out of proportion to the size of the population they exclusively serve. Their legacy has been the rapid expansion of speech legislation, the invention of so-called “hate crime” legislation, and the slow, steady creep of mass censorship. It is in this context, and against these odds, that we publish the website you are currently reading.

“Between Reactions”

It might be argued that we are presently “between Reactions.” Here, at the outset of the twenty-first century we are both in the uncomfortable, lingering aftermath of a prior Reaction against the Jews and at the beginning of a rise in tension that means a further Reaction is almost certainly inevitable. At the time of this writing, the tiny and objectively inconsequential state of Israel has come to consume an inordinate amount of U.S. funding and military support, as well as diplomatic and military support from most Western countries.[42] These supports have been secured via an Israel Lobby that spans the Jewish Diaspora and beyond, and works closely with Diaspora Jewish defense leagues to monitor discourse on Jews and Israel and intervene vigorously against dissent. Opposition to Israel outside the Middle East is found mainly among the more extreme elements of the European Left, and much of the Student Left on campuses. These movements, however, have no sympathy with, connection to, or understanding of, the historical trajectory of European anti-Semitism, leaving their activism easy to caricature and, ultimately, easy to quash. Similar ineffectiveness can be found in contemporary responses to the exponential growth of globalist mass finance and consumer culture, a phenomenon with which the Jews are closely bound up.[43] The last two decades have witnessed a series of mass riots and “Occupy” protests that ultimately lack direction and eventually dissipate into the familiar pattern of inertia and apathy. This is, in turn, analogous to the muted response to ongoing mass migration, a situation that if left unresolved will lead to the death of the West, the replacement of our people, and the extinguishing of our culture.

In a 2020 article for RT, “The trouble is not with Jews, but with my accusers,” the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek described one of our own writers, Andrew Joyce, as an example of “the true anti-Semites.”[44] What is anti-Semitism, and who are the “true anti-Semites,” at the outset of this century? Anti-Semitism, to the extent that term may be used in a non-pejorative sense to describe attitudes antagonistic to the historical and contemporary expressions of negative Jewish influence, cannot be routinely or simplistically described as a phenomenon of the Right. In fact, more than any other subject, it is in the context of the Jewish Question that the conventional Left-Right political spectrum reveals itself as especially useless as an analytical tool. Anti-Semitism, if it is true in the nature and motivation of its antagonism, must derive itself not from existing political categories or assumptions, but from the same trajectory as prior anti-Semitic Reactions. In other words, true anti-Semitism is a cultural manifestation of already existing tensions around resource competition, the protection of culture, and the maintenance of the biological and political integrity of the state. To the extent that such a definition is accurate, one may find “true anti-Semites” in any location where Jews have threatened the established order.

In light of such definitions, it is important to remark that not everything that appears as “anti-Semitism” is in fact true anti-Semitism. Elements of the Western Left may berate Jews or Israel for actions undertaken in Palestine but, while there is an issue of resource competition present, the Left is not really concerned with the protection of Arab culture or with the biological and political integrity of any Arab State as such. And they are certainly not concerned with the preservation of the cultural, biological, and political integrity of their own nations. The Left has certain ulterior motives for their support of Palestinians, which include a Marxist attack on perceived Israeli/Western imperialism and the desire to help bring about the creation of a socialist state in the Palestinian territories. These muddy the ideological waters of this defiance against Jewish interests, and because anti-Semitism is ultimately an extremely straightforward position, what has been classed as “Leftist anti-Semitism” is in fact merely the confrontation of Marxism with Jewish nationalism, a contradiction that is more than a century old and possesses its own historical trajectory. This does not mean that one can’t find true anti-Semites on the Left (history is full of them), but it does mean that “Leftist anti-Semitism” doesn’t exist in itself.

Nor should it be assumed that expressions of negativity against Jews on the Right are necessarily evidence of “true” anti-Semitism or that there exists such a thing as “Rightist anti-Semitism.” There is only anti-Semitism. The early twenty-first century has witnessed a proliferation of varieties of anti-Semitism, not all of which are genuine or “true.” The 2010s, for example, witnessed the emergence of what might be termed an ironic anti-Semitism that focused heavily on flamboyant dark comedy. Many individuals, drawn heavily from the gaming community, who otherwise had little knowledge or direct experience of the Jewish Question, encountered anti-Semitism as little more than a genre of trolling. Blending with the incel sub-culture, and other corners of grievance within our decaying culture, these “anti-Semites for fun” interacted with anti-Semitism with their own ulterior motives and thus produced a sub-culture no more genuinely or traditionally anti-Semitic than that pursued by pro-Palestinian Leftists. Their very visible presence on social media, coupled with other forms of internet-based activism, led to an over-estimation of power and effectiveness, both on the part of the ethno-nationalist movement and on the part of Jews.

After it became apparent that the Trump presidency was going to be an anti-climax for both trolls and political dissidents, many of these “anti-Semites for fun” dissolved back into other movements or sub-cultures. They are often identifiable through a lingering online presence that decries a “focus on the Jews,” and reverts to a kind of ironic nihilism. In fact, once one subtracts these individuals, true anti-Semitism is extremely rare in the twenty-first century, and is entirely extinct from mainstream political life. When the influential Oxford Handbooks series published a print and online entry on “The Radical Right and Antisemitism,” the author remarked that:

Many scholars in the area of right-wing populism believe that antisemitism has practically vanished from the political arena and become a “dead prejudice” (Langenbacher and Schellenberg 2011; Beer 2011; Betz 2013; Botsch et al. 2010; Albrecht 2015; Rensmann 2013; Stögner 2012, 2014) or that anti-Muslim beliefs and Islamophobia have more or less completely replaced it (Bunzl 2007; Fine 2009, 2012; Kotzin 2013; Wodak 2015a, 2016) … The British sociologist Robert Fine critically observes, “Antisemitism is tucked away safely in Europe’s past, overcome by the defeat of fascism and the development of the European Union … Antisemitism is remembered, but only as a residual trauma or a museum piece” (Fine 2009, 463).

Some explanation for this state of affairs can be found in the disappearance of knowledge of Jews among the Western masses. Since the early 1950s, there has been the almost total transformation in what the mass of the public “knows” about Jews. This transformation has been a dramatic shift from objective to subjective knowledge. For example, ask a random member of the public today what they know about Jews, and they would very likely respond by regurgitating a series of media-derived tropes: Jews are good actors/directors/comedians; Jews are harmless and very smart/talented; Jews are a historically downtrodden and victimized group. This is essentially “junk” knowledge; entirely subjective, and more or less useless to forming a meaningful opinion on matters involving Jews — or worse, this “knowledge” is actually obstructive to forming a meaningful opinion on matters involving Jews. The contemporary situation contrasts sharply with the knowledge earlier generations possessed about Jews (derived from politics, journalism, and anti-Semitic discourse), and with the knowledge possessed by those today classed as true anti-Semites. This knowledge includes objective facts: population statistics of Jews and their relative wealth; the prevalence of actual positions of influence occupied by Jews, particularly in the media and in the political process (e.g., the Israel Lobby, donors to political candidates); the contents of Jewish intellectual efforts (from the Talmud to the Frankfurt School and beyond); the prevalence of Jews in White Collar crime; the reality of the Jewish relationship with moneylending/usury; the extent and nature of Jewish involvement in the pornography industry; and the manner in which Jews view non-Jews.

 

A challenge for ethno-nationalists of the twenty-first century will be to further a discourse in which this kind of objective knowledge concerning Jews is once again brought to bear on the mainstream. This would necessitate a new discourse orbiting an Identitarian form of anti-Jewish critique that is based on a sophisticated level of objective knowledge about Jews, underpinned by a traditional, coherent, and well-informed ideology opposing Semitism. Towards this end, there would appear to be an abundance of foundational texts, most obviously in Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique series, that elaborate upon the Jewish presence in harmful intellectual movements and the transformation of Western ethnic demography. The task remains, of course, to further the discourse in the face of overwhelming Jewish censorship. This is no easy task, but ethno-nationalists might benefit from seeing “the obstacle as the way” — by further drawing out our opponents and then incorporating Jewish censorship itself into the discourse. The extent to which this can be accomplished will determine precisely how the Jewish Question will proceed as one of the foundations of the twenty-first century.


[1] P. Johnson, A History of the Jews (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), p.171.

[2] S. Baron (ed) Economic History of the Jews (New York: Schocken, 1976), p.22.

[3] J. Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p.126.

[4] Johnson, A History of the Jews, p.176.

[5] Ibid, p.177.

[6] P. Skinner, The Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary, and Archaeological Perspectives (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2003), p.36.

[7] L. Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, Volume 1: From the Time of Christ to the Court Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), p.78.

[8] Johnson, A History of the Jews, p.205.

[9] Ibid, p.208.

[10] Ibid, p.211.

[11] Ibid, p.212.

[12] Coss, P.R. ‘Sir Geoffrey de Langley and the Crisis of the Knightly Class in Thirteenth-Century England,’ in Aston, T.H. (ed.), Landlords, Peasants and Politics in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p.192.

[13] R. Chazan (ed.), Church, State, and Jew in the Middle Ages (Springfield: Behrman House, 1980), p.293.

[14] N. Golb, The Jews in Medieval Normandy: A Social and Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p.8.

[15] D.P. Bell, Sacred Communities: Jewish and Christian Identities in Fifteenth-Century Germany (Boston: Brill, 2001), p.127.

[16] Johnson, A History of the Jews, p.207.

[17] J. Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and Idea of Crusading (London: Continuum, 2003), p.52.

[18] R. Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p.63.

[19] N. Rowe, The Jew, the Cathedral and the Medieval City: Synagoga and Ecclesia in the Medieval City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 73.

[20] A. Afterman & G. Afterman, “Meir Kahane and Contemporary Jewish Theology of Revenge,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 98, No. 2, (2015), 192-217, (197).

[21] Joseph Pérez, History of a Tragedy: The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 60.

[22] R. W. Dorin, Banishing Usury: The Expulsion of Foreign Moneylenders in Medieval Europe, 1200—1450 (Harvard PhD dissertation, 2015); R. W. Dorin, “Once the Jews have been Expelled,” Intent and Interpretation in Late Medieval Canon Law,” Law and History Review, Vol. 34, No. 2 (2016), 335-362.

[23] G. Langmuir, History, Religion, and Antisemitism (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 304.

[24] Johnson, A History of the Jews, p.225.

[25] Ibid, p.226.

[26] J. Friedman, “Jewish Conversion, the Spanish Pure Blood Laws and Reformation: A Revisionist View of Racial and Religious Antisemitism,” The Sixteenth Century  Journal, Vol. 18, No. 1, (1987), 3-30, (6).

[27] J. Friedman, “The Reformation and Jewish Antichristian Polemics,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, Vol. 41, No. 1, (1979), 83-97, (83).

[28] Friedman, “Jewish Conversion, the Spanish Pure Blood Laws and Reformation: A Revisionist View of Racial and Religious Antisemitism,” 10.

[29] Ibid., 23.

[30] Ibid.

[31] See Friedman, “The Reformation and Jewish Antichristian Polemics.”

[32] A. Cohen & S. Cohen, Israel’s National Security Law: Political Dynamics and Historical Development (New York: Routledge, 2012), 31.

[33] Ibid.

[34] J. Katz, Exclusiveness & Tolerance: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (New York: Schocken, 1961), 156.

[35] Ibid.

[36] M. Mendelssohn, “Anmerkung zu des Ritters Michaelis Beurtheilung des ersten Teils von Dohm, über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden,” (1783), Moses Mendelssohn gesammelte Schriften, ed. G. B. Mendelssohn (Leipzig, 1843), vol. 3, 367.

[37] Z. Szajkowski, Jews and the French Revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848 (New York: Ktav Publishing, 1970), 505.

[38] P. Mendes-Flohr (ed), The Jew in the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 136.

[39] T. Macaulay, “Civil Disabilities of the Jews” in M. Cross (ed) Selections from the Edinburgh Review (London: Longman, 1833), vol. 3, 667-75.

[40] See Haim Nahman Bialik’s poem “The City of Slaughter,” a masochistic pogrom fantasy, which describes Ukrainian peasants as “wild ones of the wood, the beasts of the field.”

[41] Y. Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

[42] See J. Mearsheimer and S. Walt, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (New York: Penguin, 2007).

[43] P. Lerner, The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880-1940 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015)

[44] https://www.rt.com/op-ed/475552-independent-jews-slavoj-zizek/

Review of “The Forgotten Soldier” by Guy Sajer, Part 3 of 3

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Part Four (Winter 1943 — Summer 1944)

Following Sajer’s evacuation to the west bank of the Dnieper River, the anticipated German camp where they will be refitted and allowed to rest and recover proves to be an illusion. The chaos that reigned along the east bank is mitigated on the west bank but not eliminated. For men used to German exactitude within the Wehrmacht, the disorder was disconcerting. They are left in the open and then interrogated by military police who seem to view them as cowards if not outright traitors for their retreat. It is a jarring sequence; we know the hell that Sajer and the other survivors endured just to make it to the west bank — their courage and almost-superhuman will to live was beyond doubt. Yet, the retreating men were treated with derision. And the hope that the mighty Dnieper River would stall the Soviet onslaught also proved to be illusory — desperate fighting takes place along the entire front with Kiev being the Soviet focal point. It is at this point that the sheer advantage of Soviet matériel became overwhelming and they appeared to gain almost complete air superiority — to say nothing of the seemingly inexhaustible supply of Soviet soldiers.

From the Dnieper, the new German front largely broke, although not without fierce fighting. The Germans were hurled back again in a chaotic and sanguinary retreat through Ukraine. Sajer was, at this point, very sick — and indeed he was sick for seemingly much of the latter half of the book. He developed dysentery and recounted how, in what must have been excruciating, he soiled himself on a moving truck while in acute abdominal pain. He was mortified by the time he finally made it to something like a field hospital — filthy and disgusting in every sense of the term. He was promised leave to rehabilitate but it was cancelled as the situation continued to deteriorate. He is forced to man the line while his illness was still raging. He did this several times. When he and his fellow soldiers were reunited with Hauptmann Wesreidau a few weeks later, Wesreidau asked him if he recovered during his leave to which he responded that he never was able to take it. Wesreidau, as a father figure to Sajer, expressed that enormous sacrifices were expected from all of them. To Sajer’s surprise, his Großdeutschland regiment was fully equipped and supplied with the best of what the Wehrmacht had left and was used as a mobile force sent to weak points in the German lines. While the entire German front continued to collapse, the regiment was moved from one emergency to the next. But at least during this brief period, Sajer tasted victory over the Soviets as opposed to continual retreat. The mobile unit harried the Soviets in offensive action in an otherwise defensive German posture, which was followed inevitably by another retreat. Later, the irony of his “mobile” unit was that it would still be called a “mobile” unit long after it was reduced, either from want of fuel or machines, to being solely on foot.

Throughout the book, and it doesn’t matter when, Sajer describes combat in excruciating detail. The horror and fear are palpable in virtually every combat setting. One description of engagement suffices to convey Sajer’s ability to communicate what he experienced with the caveat that there are many more just like it:

What happened next? I retain nothing from those terrible minutes except indistinct memories which flash into my mind with sudden brutality, like apparitions, among bursts and scenes and visions that are scarcely imaginable. It is difficult even to try to remember moments during which nothing is considered, foreseen, or understood, when there is nothing under a steel helmet but an astonishingly empty head and a pair of eyes which translate nothing more than would the eyes of an animal facing mortal danger. There is nothing but the rhythm of explosions, more or less distant, more or less violent, and the cries of madmen, to be classified later, according to the outcome of the battle, as the cries of heroes or of murderers. And there are the cries of the wounded, of the agonizingly dying, shrieking as they stare at a part of their body reduced to pulp, the cries of men touched by the shock of battle before everybody else, who run in any and every direction, howling like banshees. There are the tragic, unbelievable visions, which carry from one moment of nausea to another: guts splattered across the rubble and sprayed from one dying man to another; tightly riveted machines ripped like the belly of a cow which has just been sliced open, flaming and groaning; trees broken into tiny fragments; gaping windows pouring out torrents of billowing dust, dispersing into oblivion all that remains of a comfortable parlor.

In the long retreat through Ukraine, Sajer introduced a new enemy in the guise of newly emboldened “partisans” whom Sajer and the other soldiers despised. Despite the relative successes of Sajer’s unit, the German lines continued to deteriorate across the southern front. There is then a book within a book in which Sajer detailed a war against the partisans during the German withdrawal, which added a new layer of anxiety and trauma for the soldiers. He notes how the same Ukrainian villages that welcomed the Germans as liberators from the Soviet yoke were now crawling with partisans and the unexpected violence that they brought to bear on the retreating Germans. The partisans also exacted a toll on the native population who were suspected of aiding the Germans and made otherwise friendly people wary and unhelpful. It was during this long retreat through Ukraine that Sajer witnessed the death of Hauptmann Wesreidau, who was killed when his car leading the caravan was destroyed by a partisan mine. The death of Wesreidau was a seminal moment for Sajer and the book — the war may have been lost by any measure at that point, but the death of Wesreidau seems to mark the defeat for his men. Collectively, they could not process his death even though they had seen, as a group, thousands of bloodied and disemboweled corpses strewn across the Russian Steppe. At least with Wesreidau, they had a commander who would shepherd them through the worst of what was to come; without him, they were like children without a father.

The partisan aggression grew fiercer as they were supplied by the Soviets with more and more sophisticated weaponry and tactics. Sajer notes another partisan engagement in which he was personally involved with the firefight that left virtually all of the partisans dead — partisans who had derailed a train going back to the front and killed more than a hundred weary German soldiers. Commanded by a group of the S.S., Sajer and other soldiers successfully attacked the partisan stronghold, and in the melee that ensued, Sajer killed his first partisan at very close quarters. A few of the partisans are captured and executed. The S.S. commander justified his actions because the “laws of war condemned them to death automatically, without trial.” Writing twenty years after the war, Sajer drips with anger towards the partisans. He viewed them as something like snakes who violated the rules of war that even the Soviets understood. He also agreed ultimately with the harsh justice meted out to partisans, noting without objection that, “partisans were not eligible for the consideration due to a man in uniform. The laws of war condemned them to death automatically, without trial.”

Part Five (Autumn, 1944 — Spring, 1945)

The German army was pushed from Ukraine. For Sajer and his compatriots, the escape was through Romania into Poland. Like similar retreats, this one was completely disorganized and marked by hunger and desperation. The men traveled back in packs and found a disabled German truck filled with provisions — they glutted themselves after weeks of starvation but only to have two of their group arrested by the military police on the route back and subsequently hanged as thieves. Sajer’s group was eventually organized with other retreating elements and a march back to Poland commenced. Once in Poland, and notwithstanding seemingly complete Soviet air superiority, the men were reorganized again. A theme that runs throughout the book: each successive retreat, which was costly in terms of men and matériel, forced the reorganization of the remaining forces into either a reconstituted version of their earlier units or scratch units altogether. Sajer, Lensen, Hals, and others were greeted again by the rigors of military discipline, which after their ordeal during the last several months was unwelcome. They were placed under the command of Hauptmann Wollers and sent to Lodz where they were resupplied. Sajer notes that many replacements were old men or virtual children; he wondered how these troops would be useful in combat. The Veteran rejoined the group where the division was regrouped and recounted recuperation in Germany; observing that German cities had been bombed into rubble. His ear was also missing. The Veteran explained to the group that this was total war.

The reorganized unit moved to relieve the German soldiers fighting on the northern front and they traversed on foot a new nightmare of endless miles without water or any available provisions. Some have complained that Sajer exaggerated the lack of food during the war but his refrain regarding hunger took center stage very late in the war. Considering that the Wehrmacht had a short supply of trucks, fuel, railcars, and men over a collapsing front the length of Russia, it does not strike me as surprising that the remaining troops would have been lacking food — even for days and weeks. Days of grinding hunger and fatigue blended with the endless and flat terrain in what can only be described as something otherworldly and wretched. It is at this point we wonder, perhaps more globally, what prompted Sajer and his fellow soldiers to survive under these impossible conditions — without food or support — and maintain their fighting prowess. Sajer writes:

Faced with the Russian hurricane, we ran whenever we could. … We no longer fought for Hitler, or for National Socialism, or for the Third Reich — or even for our fiancées or mothers or families trapped in bomb-ravaged towns. We fought from simple fear, which was our motivating power. The idea of death, even when we accepted it, made us howl with powerless rage.

On their way to the new front, they met with a completely disorganized group of German soldiers in flight. When Wollers attempted to reorganize them, he was greeted with derision as if the last marks of order within the Wehrmacht had broken down. If there is one passage that marks the end of the war, and there are probably many, it was this sorry scene. These retreating troops were more like starved and crazed refugees than a professional army. They insist that they are the men that were to be relieved and all that waits for Wollers and his relief force at the front is death. The entire sweep of the German soldier’s distress is put into stark relief here — the extreme cold, hunger, fatigue, and filth of the battlefield that existed alongside the disorder and lack of supplies. Their lives had become unbearable. He recalled that in late 1944 that “food was our most difficult problem. For a long time now we had received no supplies. … We became hunters and trappers and nest robbers.” As to the starving troops they encountered in flight, he noted that extreme hunger produced “a curious frame of mind. It is impossible to imagine dying of hunger. Our stomachs digested substances which would kill a comfortable bourgeoisie … in a few weeks.” He said that the situation got so bad that “men… no longer distinguished between enemies and friends … [and] were ready to commit murder for less than a quarter of a meal. … These martyrs to hunger massacred two villages to carry off their supplies of food.”

The group collectively retreated towards East Prussia, which was considered as much Germany then as Berlin or Munich are today. They were reorganized yet again for the defense, but this time of German soil. Lensen, who was the most strident patriot of the group, was East Prussian and excoriated his fellows for their defeatism in light of the pending invasion of Germany by the Soviets. Lensen was by far the most complicated of Sajer’s comrades in the Wehrmacht. Despite Sajer’s loyalty to France and his limited knowledge of the German language, many of his closest comrades still accepted him as a fellow German soldier, but there were a few instances in which Sajer faced abuse for his mixed ancestry. Much earlier in the book, in one of the more significant encounters between Lensen and Sajer, while they were drinking during a lull in the fighting, Lensen began criticizing France after Sajer had sung a French song, and Lensen’s drunken harangue made Sajer question himself and his toughness. He wrote then that “[he] found the war almost totally paralyzing — probably because of my soft French blood.” Sajer concluded that his poor soldiery was the result of his ethnicity and upbringing. However, despite the occasional abuse attributed to his French origins, Sajer felt particular pride at being a soldier in the Wehrmacht, especially after his service in the Großdeutschland in which he promised to “serve Germany and the Fuhrer until victory or death” and expressed his eagerness to “convert the Bolsheviks, like so many Christian knights by the walls of Jerusalem”. Notwithstanding his sometimes-strained relationship with Lensen, he still considered him his friend. Sajer described Lensen’s horrific death under the tracks of a Soviet T-34, which he found fitting, at least in terms of where it took place, ergo, he died in defense of his ancestral home. In Sajer’s accounting, there was no bitterness towards the proud Prussian. It was also during this fighting in East Prussia that Sajer introduced the civilian problem in terms of their pell-mell flight from the Soviets, which complicated the military preparedness to meet them.

Sajer and his compatriots continued to fight a rearguard action and were pushed back in horrific fighting to Memel (now Klaipėda) where they were organized as a defensive barrier to allow the terrified civilian population to escape by ship through Memel’s port on the Baltic Sea. Memel, while not the last battle in which Sajer fought, was the most defining for him. The scene he paints is one of terror. The civilians and the soldiers alike knew what the Soviets would do to them if they were captured — tales of the indiscriminate torture, murders, and rapes (such as the Nemmersdorf massacre by Red Army soldiers in October 1944) were already circulating throughout the civilian populace seeking to flee the Soviet menace.

If they only knew how bad it would be. Some two million Germans lived in East Prussia and had been there for more than six hundred years since the age of the Teutonic Knights — in cities such as Danzig, Königsberg, and Memel — and the entirety of their history, homes, and heritage would be wiped out after the Second World War. Most of the German inhabitants, which then consisted primarily of women, children, and old men, managed to escape the Red Army as part of the largest exodus of people in human history: a population that had stood at 2.2 million in 1940 was reduced to 193,000 at the end of May 1945

After holding the Russians back in vicious and heroic fighting — long enough for almost all the civilians to escape — Sajer, Hals, and a few others made for the docks. It was then under constant aerial bombardment and the Soviets had breached parts of the city. Sajer and the others embarked in a makeshift raft into the icy Baltic, where they were picked up by a passing ship. They made their way to yet another East Prussian town just north of Danzig. There the soldiers experienced a few days of relative recovery but another siege, like that of Memel, was imminent and the evacuation of civilians continued as it had in Memel. Here, Sajer and his group meet the last officer that will demand military rigor of them — and instead of frustration at his insistence, the group was heartened by a relative return to military decorum and order. The evacuation here, however, happened by foot over the frozen Baltic Sea and intermittent isthmus. Civilians and troops marched about twenty-five miles to Danzig over the frozen sea while Soviet bombers dropped bombs to break up the ice to drown them. Once in Danzig, they expected another round of defense and a fight to the death protecting the evacuation, but they received orders to depart to the west. Still fighting until the very end in Danzig, Sajer, Hals and those remaining alive in the Großdeutschland depart for occupied Denmark.

When they landed during the spring of 1945, they are shocked to learn, after making their harrowing seaborne escape, that the Americans and British — and the French — are moving through Germany in a western assault. While the reasoning behind Sajer’s enlistment into the German army was not made explicit, it was cemented and justified by his belief that France would eventually join the Germans in their fight against the Soviets. He believed that Germany was protecting Western Europe by attacking the Soviet Union. At the beginning of Sajer’s long march back to Germany from southern Russia, he continually believed that the French “were already on their way. … The first legionnaires had already set out” to assist them from the mounting Russian onslaught. Sajer thought that Germany and France had established a collaborative government such that the French would be used in the fight against the Soviets. And while thousands of French enlisted to help the Germans, Vichy France remained aloof. He felt as if he had been “betrayed” by France, but the thought of possibly having to kill his fellow countrymen seemed unimaginable to him.

Once in the West, yet another reorganized group of soldiers was formed to resist the Allies, but they were soon captured without any resistance. Each soldier was interrogated, and Sajer’s particular case caused consternation because he was initially deemed a traitor to France but then he was simply allowed to walk away as a liberated French citizen. How or why the Allies changed their minds is never explained. He left the prison yard in a jumble of emotion — so much the more that he did not get to say goodbye to Hals or his other compatriots. His journey home was surreal. His family, after many months of no contact, could not believe that their son had arrived home. As if they understood, Sajer did not speak of the war, nor did his family ask him of it. He joined the French army to rehabilitate his legal standing but was discharged after ten months due to illness. The book ends poignantly enough — in attending a “victory” parade in Paris as a now-French soldier — Sajer recounts silently to himself the memorial of all of the German dead that he had known. To these, he adds one more name — that of Guy Sajer — who too must die as if he lost his life on the Russian Steppe. With no apology or equivocation, he concludes his story.

Reception

It is a mistake to use intense words without carefully weighing and measuring them, or they will have already been used when one needs them later. It’s a mistake, for instance, to use the word ‘frightful’ to describe a few broken-up companions mixed into the ground: but it’s a mistake which might be forgiven. I should perhaps end my account here, because my powers are inadequate for what I have to tell.

The Forgotten Soldier is universally considered one of the best accounts available of the German experience on the eastern front. Sajer’s description of the conflict captures its brutality and its harshness — all in a visceral and authentic voice. He is fearless in what he recounts — documenting the summary execution of partisans and Russian POWs as well as the fear and disorder on the German side. He captures the war in the east in an almost completely unvarnished way — with virtually no effort to sanitize the conflict. Its believability and realism are augmented by his mode of relating the conflict. He hides nothing from his reader — including his refusal to apologize for his involvement. It must be that any soldier’s story, such as this one, endears the reader to the side that the soldier fought on — maybe that is why, more than anything else, this book is hated by some. What is more, Sajer, or at least it seems to me, did not write a book with an agenda beyond telling the story of the men with whom he fought, suffered, and died. His agenda is the story — so that it can be known, and their valor and sacrifice are accorded the recognition that is almost always deprived of the losers in war. In that way, The Forgotten Soldier is a living memorial etched in words to a forgotten generation of men who gave everything for their country — and then some.

While it has similarities to All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque in that All Quiet captured the brutality and horror of mechanized modern warfare from the perspective of a young German soldier on the losing side, Remarque wrote his book soon after the war and appeared to have an anti-war agenda in writing it. Sajer’s book is worse — more horrible and more gut-wrenching — and yet even though Sajer is appalled by what happened to him and his fellow soldiers, there is no anti-war agenda per se. All of it is still too raw for him as if he was still shellshocked twenty years after to think in those terms. And if his account was even half-true, his shellshock was well deserved. He seems to want nothing more than for us to listen to him relating what happened. His book humanizes the man and simply does not permit us to “otherize” the German soldier as something less than human. For all of the conjecture that the German soldier was more machine than man, Sajer is proof positive that this idea is nonsense. They lived and died like anyone else; they dreamed of seeing their parents and their sweetheart like anyone else; they bled and cried like anyone else; they were hungry and cold like everyone else; they prayed for victory like everyone else; and they were bewildered and crestfallen in defeat like anyone else.

The Forgotten Soldier is also compelling because it is a coming-of-age story in a context that few can imagine. He developed from a naive youth to a hardened combat veteran through his experience in uniform over the war. During his first few weeks, Sajer’s “knees trembled, and [he] dissolved in tears. [He] could no longer grasp anything that was happening to [him].” By the end of the war, he was a rugged veteran who fought for survival like a wild beast. He survived, in part by luck, but also because, “[w]e fought for reasons which are perhaps shameful, but are, in the end, stronger than any doctrine. We fought for ourselves.” I have always wondered what the German retreat from the highwater mark of the German occupation of Russia must have been like. Through Sajer, I feel like I have a very good idea and it is more terrible than anything I ever imagined.

There are so many other themes and motifs that I could touch upon that are related to what is essentially a survival tale of epic proportions. The will to live, which far deeper than we can imagine; the loss of innocence of a sixteen-year-old boy in a way that is different from moral failings but just as tragic; the destructive futility and inhumanity of modern warfare; the sheer terror of fear; the despair of facing imminent death and surviving only by blind chance; the vacillation between cowardice and heroism; the cold, the hunger, and the exhaustion of the Russian front and the limits of the human body; Russia herself — her endless steppe that stretches beyond the horizon in a treeless mirage of desolation and expanse; and the meaning of the German defeat for the world that we all now take for granted. All of these themes are present in this book — all of the themes could be unpacked over a lifetime.

*        *        *        *

Only happy people have nightmares, from overeating. For those who live a nightmare reality, sleep is a black hole, lost in time, like death.

Notwithstanding my praise for this book — mine and many others — there are still more who hate it. For my part, the disrepute that some have lobbed at The Forgotten Soldier has more to do with ideologies today than it does Germany during WWII. The first is obvious — it is unapologetic of the Wehrmacht, and, to a lesser extent, it is conspicuously silent on Hitler and the Third Reich. Sajer treats the German army and the Third Reich no different than any other losing army and nation in history. There is no odium attached to any of it — other than the senseless carnage that is war. More than that, there is a sense of pride in Germany — a genuine affinity on the part of the author for Germany, its people, and the honor of its fighting men during World War II. Sajer epitomizes a pan-European consciousness even if he never articulates it as such. He grasped that, even as a French citizen, he was part of a broader European civilization. His actions on the field of battle were the greatest proof of that hidden conviction. While it is far from propaganda, the book feels like propaganda for a generation that has been taught to demonize Germany.

In other words, his non-demonization feels like exultant praise. Throughout, even if there is not an explicit defense of the German cause per se, there is a defense of the German soldier almost without equivocation. It is as if he wanted to avenge himself upon every sleight and calumny ever lodged at the rank-and-file soldiers of the Wehrmacht. He writes: “throughout the war, one of the biggest mistakes was to treat German soldiers even worse than prisoners, instead of allowing us to rape and steal — crimes which we were condemned for in the end anyway.” The implication here is obviously that the German soldiers did not rape, steal, and murder with impunity — at least in any systematic way similar to what the Red Army did across eastern and central Europe. Considering that a wide swath of the public believes — and is taught to believe — that German soldiers were active extensions of genocide and slaughter, this defense of Wehrmacht must be like nails on a chalkboard for certain types of modern intellectuals.

The second is also obvious — the Jews are virtually never mentioned. Twenty years after the war, the author must have known about the atrocities committed against the Jews but there is no mention at all of the Holocaust. Nor is there any mention of the racism of the Nazis. The closest Sajer comes to acknowledging the Jews at all is rather oblique: he mentions sightseeing in Poland during his initial training and writes, “[o]ur detachment goes sightseeing in the city, including the famous ghetto — or rather, what’s left of it. We return to the station in small groups. We are all smiling. The Poles smile back, especially the girls.” It could be — and I think this is the most probable explanation — that Sajer’s experience did not overlap with the Jews in any meaningful way, and he never witnessed any atrocities against them. But if one wants the story to be one unrelenting narrative about the Jews, the omission of them is especially galling because, after all, most now think that World War II was about the Jews. Parenthetically, we tend to think of the U.S. Civil War similarly since it is reduced, almost wholly, to that of slavery. As such, just with the Civil War, we lose sight of the other facts that motivated the Second World War, and we turn people and causes into gross caricatures.  The invisibility of the Jews is unforgivable to modern ears, as is the implication that Sajer never witnessed any abuse directed at them by German soldiers. The current gloss, of course, is that the Soviet war was one, long premeditated German pogrom masquerading as an invasion. That Sajer never sees or reports this type of activity is so disconcerting to some that it is to call into question the entire authenticity of his account.

There have been written seemingly hundreds of books about the Holocaust and the suffering of the Jews during World War II; it has become the central defining aspect of modern Judaism. Without debating it, I am reminded of Professor Norman Finkelstein’s controversial work, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. Finkelstein, a Jew and child of concentration camp prisoners noted that the Holocaust has become the predominant theme in American cultural life — one in which the Holocaust now is treated alone in its utter uniqueness as a mystical measure of human suffering and that the Holocaust casts the Jews as always and everywhere as victims of historical antisemitism that reached its climax during World War II. It doesn’t matter that other groups of human beings have suffered similarly throughout history — the Holocaust is a singularity. To write a book that recounts three years in Russia where the Holocaust was, as we have been taught, raging and never mention the Jews is inexplicable to most modern readers.

I do not begrudge anyone writing to document their particular story — or the story of their people. With that same latitude, it seems to me a book that captures the suffering of the German soldier and the German civilian during World War II is something long overdue. Not every book that is written on the fall of the Ottoman Empire during World War I must mention the Armenian genocide; similarly, not every book on World War II must preoccupy itself with the Jews. Sometimes it is OK if another people’s grief and sorrow take center stage even if those people were fallen human beings, like everyone else.

The third is related — his description of the Soviets generally and partisans in particular. If one remembers that most of academia was — and remains — sympathetic to communism, the Soviet Union can never be vilified in the same way that the Third Reich is vilified. True enough, they may concede that it was an experiment that failed on the margins but never in its “laudable” aims, which remain quintessentially moral. Sajer’s description then of Soviet brutality has a mark of inexcusable temerity that is most unwelcome for academics who despise Germany and Nazism. Indeed, Sajer takes it for granted that the Soviet Union was an evil country, which is something, ironically enough, he never does regarding the Third Reich. Sajer, to his credit, does not shrink from describing the cruelty meted out to certain Soviet POWs or captured partisans. Sajer does not claim, however, that such treatment was ordinary or practiced widely. But he describes certain treatments that were understood: for example, Soviet prisoners who stole from the bodies of dead German soldiers were summarily executed. He recounts one such gruesome abuse as follows: “the hands of three [Soviet] prisoners [were tied] to the bars of a gate. … [The German soldier] stuck a grenade into the pocket of one of their coats. … The three Russians, whose guts were blown out, screamed for mercy until the last moment”. This type of despicable activity should make anyone sick and here Sajer shared the sentiment; he wrote that incidents such as these “revolted us so much that violent arguments broke out between us and these criminals every time.” The element within the Wehrmacht that was cruel and “criminal” towards Soviet POWs often claimed that they were giving to the Soviets what the Soviets were giving to German POWs. Sajer rejected those claims categorically, “Russian excesses did not in any way excuse us for the excesses by our own side.”

But the broader point, and I think this is understandable assuming the veracity of the account, Sajer describes the Soviets and the Soviet Union as something barbaric and ugly. The conception of the enemy generally leaks over with the conception of the Russians in particular. I think all wars tend to make soldiers dehumanize the army opposing them and Sajer is unexceptional here. His hatred towards the partisans, which was still simmering many years after he was driven from the Soviet Union, is more difficult to understand and more objectionable to modern readers. After all, even from a quasi-objective point of view, the “partisans” were ordinary people resisting an invading army. That Sajer never mentions the systematic abuse of the Russian populace during the occupation or retreat by the German army is something certain critics cannot stomach — especially when Sajer spills much ink on the systematic abuse by the Red Army of the German populace in East Prussia. Not only does the mention of suffering by “guilty” German civilians rankle some; a corresponding omission of suffering by “innocent” Soviet civilians is unforgivable. Modern critics believe, like an article of faith, that the German army committed atrocity after atrocity in the U.S.S.R. — that Sajer mentions none is something that cannot be believed.

The critics of this book — for many of the reasons just mentioned — have attacked it not so much on moral grounds but on its veracity. I suppose that makes sense: if it were a verifiable account, the only argument against would be, “I don’t like it,” which is not an argument at all. So, some have argued that Sajer made it up — maybe he was in Russia for a time, maybe not, but the experiences recounted are largely the stuff of fiction. I won’t debate that beyond noting that others have responded to the alleged proofs of the fictionalized The Forgotten Soldier and offered counter-narratives why it is more likely than not an authentic story. For his part, Mouminoux contended it was authentic but admitted that it was never meant to be a chronological retelling of his time in Russia. He admitted that he may have gotten some details wrong in his memory. The records of the German army, especially later in the war, are in shambles or non-existent. There is no way to prove the argument one way or the other. That said, it struck me as an authentic story — and German veterans from the eastern front have also said that it struck them as consistent with their experiences.

In that sense, does it matter? If Mouminoux wrote what is, at worst, alleged to be a novel, it is a brilliant historical novel that aligns with the experiences of verifiable veterans who were there. Should it matter to me if Guy Sajer was there? Great Memoirs and novels have the power to move us — either way, The Forgotten Soldier is such a book.

Conclusion

Abandoned by a God in whom many of us believed, we lay prostrate and dazed in our demi-tomb. From time to time, one of us would look over the parapet to stare across the dusty plain into the east, from which death might bear down on us at any moment. We felt like lost souls, who had forgotten that men are made for something else, that time exists, and hope, and sentiments other than anguish; that friendship can be more than ephemeral, that love can sometimes occur, that the earth can be productive, and used for something other than burying the dead.

While I became enraptured by this story for the sake of the men involved, God was never far from me or them. Sajer was wrong: he and his fellows were never abandoned. Christianity, much like the Jews, is not a significant part of The Forgotten Soldier. Besides a lustful Catholic chaplain who carries on with a local girl as almost a stock comical character, there is no prayer to speak of and no mention of Divine Providence, one way or another. Our Lord’s name is used in vain throughout. Religious themes and metaphors from our Lord’s Passion are occasionally used to signify the suffering of the soldiers. It is clear that some of the soldiers that Sajer and his friends know are religious and the reason we know that is the occasional abuse that is showered upon such men when they pray instead of act in a given circumstance. But this book is not particularly interested in God. In that sense, it is a thoroughly modern book.

National and international socialism, i.e., Nazism and Soviet communism, were developments of the modern era that had thoroughly rejected God. The war in the east, ironically enough, was fought between two largely atheistic ideologies by many men who carried with them the simple faiths of their Catholic, Orthodox, or even Protestant families. Patriotism and duty — and lest we forget, state compulsion — were more compelling than Mein Kampf or The Communist Manifesto. The faith passed out of Europe much like it passed out of the Holy Land — and the disappearance of both came because the people were faithless, obstinate, and licentious. By the time World War II began, the faith in Europe had largely disappeared from the agendas and ideologies of secular nation-states. The elites of European society became apostates long before their fellow ordinary citizens ever did. Pockets of faith remain, and they remain today, but Europe, at least in terms of its faith, has been in an accelerating process of religious ossification for a long time. Places of faith have slowly been transformed from central loci of community and spiritual life to museums of a dead cult. The Forgotten Soldier then does not have an agenda per se with God; it simply reflects the accumulated and rotten milieu of several generations of men raised without a sense of public and private faith.

One hundred and fifty years after the French Revolution and fifty years after Otto von Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church, is it really surprising that we see German soldiers who reflect irreverence and irreligiosity? And even if I have been sensitive to German civilization and German sufferings throughout this essay, and even if I believe that the Soviet Union was more objectionable than the Third Reich (and I do), the reality is that Nazism was an attempt to reconstruct a neopagan cult of ethnos that failed to honor the True God. While my mind has been changed — and I have been red-pilled, as it were — on the question of ethnic and racial homogeneity and its relationship to stable political order, the reality is that ethnos without some correspondence to a cult — and the True cult — is a half-measure that must inevitably fail.

Setting aside the neo-paganism, before we simply condemn the German aspiration of a Germany peopled and ruled by Germans, as articulated by the National Socialists, we should pause to consider whether we are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The Nazi Party platform, mentioned above concerning the Treaty of Versailles, endorsed a coextensive political state that corresponded with the “racial” elements of Germans. In other words, the Nazis wanted Germany to be populated by citizens who were German. They were:

  1. None but members of the nation may be citizens of the state. None but those of German blood, whatever their creed may be. No Jew, therefore, may be a member of the nation.
  2. Whoever has no citizenship is to be able to live in Germany only as a guest and must be regarded as being subject to foreign laws.
  3. The right of voting on the state’s government and legislation is to be enjoyed by the citizen of the state alone. We demand therefore that all official appointments, of whatever kind, shall be granted to citizens of the state alone. We oppose the corrupting custom of parliament of filling posts merely with a view to party considerations, and without reference to character or capability.
  4. We demand that the state be charged first with providing the opportunity for a livelihood and way of life for the citizens. If it is impossible to nourish the total population of the State, then the members of foreign nations (non-citizens) must be excluded from the Reich.
  5. All immigration of non-Germans must be prevented. We demand that all non-Germans, who have immigrated to Germany since 2 August 1914, be required immediately to leave the Reich.
  6. All citizens of the state shall be equal as regards rights and obligations.

Contained within this portion of the platform is the idea that ethnic homogeneity, territory, and sovereignty ought to converge in political reality. This type of platform is, of course, anathema to the modern, globalist Americanist ideology today, but, ironically enough, these six planks of the Nazi platform essentially mirror the modern state of Israel’s Jewish political character. In particular, the so-called legal “right of return” for any Jew to acquire Israeli citizenship and the express adoption in 2018 in law that Israel is defined as a nation-state for the Jewish people has a remarkable degree of concurrence with the National Socialist view that Germany ought to be defined as a nation-state for the German people. It is absurd to suggest that this aspiration was per se immoral — the aim of cohesion between state and people politically is only alleged to be immoral when a person of European stock suggests it for their people.

Many would be grievously offended by my comparison of Israel to the Third Reich but my point, and it should be obvious, is that there are countries today that pursue the same type of folkish policies — namely Israel — that tie a land to exclusively to a people. And I agree with that idea more and more, i.e., “blood and soil” has a currency in my life that it never did before. To the extent that it makes me liable to the charge of intellectual Nazism (which is ridiculous), it makes me equally liable to the charge of Zionism. It is no thought crime in the United States to support Zionism as it relates to the Jews in a sliver of land that borders the Mediterranean Sea; likewise, it should not be a thought crime to support the similar idea that European peoples too ought to have a political state tied to the land and their particular people and culture. One cannot be simultaneously a “beyond-the-pale” racist and a wonderful person for espousing the same idea. I refuse to abide by such cognitive dissonance. For my part, however, the ambition to preserve the culture, language, and the stock of a people is reasonable but without Catholicism as its animating soul, it becomes just another idolatry (viz., the idol being the folk themselves). Preserving a people without preserving their souls in the True Faith is a futile project of which I want no part.

And what we see in the suffering of the German soldiers on the eastern front through Sajer is misery and anguish without God and reason. True enough, the ghosts of duty and history animate them. The notion of patriotism motivates them. And the awful specter of fear and death move them. But their suffering is rooted in the dirt of this world — it is materialist and crimped. A man with faith — who fights for faith alongside kith and kin — dies differently than a man merely avoiding death for an idea of this world. Both can be heroic, but the effect of heroism is very different on them. The soldier with faith is immune to cynicism; the soldier without faith becomes overwhelmed by it. Ultimately this is why The Forgotten Soldier is ultimately a secular school of suffering and cynicism that destroys the heart. Suffering for an idol — a false god — is something that eventually destroys man’s natural religious inclinations to look and find the True God. Suffering, which is man’s lot, is either suffered unwillingly and angrily or is suffered willingly and meekly. It is either redemptive if it is fused to the Cross of our Savior or it is destructive if it is fused with anything else. For both, it is always endured reluctantly but only Christianity provides an understanding of this human constant and mystery that makes more than sense — it transforms it. We all suffer. The vital question is how we are shaped by it. The men of The Forgotten Soldier were destroyed by their suffering — in a context of a war that destroyed everything else. Germany is a place, and the Germans are a people, but neither can supply the transcendent reason for suffering adequately. No country or people can.

That I have a different view of World War II — and who its villains and heroes were — does not mean that I condone the idol of race or ethnos. If Germany embraced a racial idol while pursuing otherwise sensible policies of economics, foreign policy, and immigration, I do not condone their racial idol. They failed, at least in my estimation, because of the delta that existed between the principles of their racial idol and the True Faith. For my part, I see the value of homogeneity and the political state but what is more important to me is that the state be true to God. The two need not be mutually exclusive despite the liberal rot within the Church that claims otherwise. It is a false choice between Americanism and Nazism — we Catholics ought to strive for something better. I suppose the difference between my view and that of the conventional demonization of Germany is that I choose to splice the good and the evil from the Third Reich, just as I do the same for the Allies. The “Axis” and the “Allies” are not talismanic terms that confer the magical properties of good and evil. And even if I abhor many policies pursued by the German government during the Nazi era — like, for example, the liquidation of the “useless bread gobblers” or the forced deportation and migration of the Jews and Gypsies which led to their wanton destruction, among many others, that resulted in the deaths of millions — I choose to take a wider view of the historical contest that existed then and exists now. That wider view is what intellectuals do in every other context of history.

*        *        *        *

Peace has brought me many pleasures, but nothing as powerful as that passion for survival in wartime, that faith in love, and that sense of absolutes. It often strikes me with horror that peace is really extremely monotonous. During the terrible moments of war one longs for peace with a passion that is painful to bear. But in peacetime one should never, even for an instant, long for war!

The paradox of an experience, like the one recounted in The Forgotten Soldier, is the dual recognition that life during the crucible was hellish, but, at the same time, it was the only time that such men felt alive. He captures this dilemma well — no one should long for war but there is a vitality of life that throbs when life itself hangs in the balance in a real and unrelenting way. Parenthetically, this is why young men often seek out dangerous activities gratuitously. What makes all of this horrible — what makes it abusively horrible — is that the men of Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS who survived the ordeal of Russia never had a country to which they could return. I am not discussing here things like the aged veterans gathering for the dedication of a war memorial or gathering for drinks at the equivalent of the VFW. No, these men had to endure silence and shame and a refusal to acknowledge their sacrifice. Even if the post-war German bureaucracy accorded some of them pensions for time served, the shame of the war imposed by the Allies created something that made their sacrifice border on dishonorable.

By contrast, the American South, which was similarly smashed as a nation, managed to honor its war dead and surviving veterans as taking part in something honorable even if defeated. It was only until the United States lost its mind — well into the twenty-first century and long after such veterans were dead — that such monuments and memorials were pulled down to satiate an irreverent and evil mob. There was no “lost cause” in Germany and no honor was given to these men who sacrificed enormously. Wesreidau’s comments to his men then proved prophetic when he said, “With our deaths, all the prodigies of heroism which our daily circumstances require of us, and the memory of our comrades, dead and alive, and our communion of spirits, our fears and our hopes, will vanish, and our history will never be told. Future generations will speak only of an idiotic, unqualified sacrifice.” Sajer did what he could to tell their history.

*        *        *        *

I had often thought that if I managed to live through the war I wouldn’t expect too much of life. How could one resent disappointment in love if life itself was continuously in doubt? Since Belgorod, terror had overturned all my preconceptions, and the pace of life had been so intense one no longer knew what elements of ordinary life to abandon in order to maintain some semblance of balance. I was still unresigned to the idea of death, but I had already sworn to myself during moments of intense fear that I would exchange anything — fortune, love, even a limb — if I could simply survive.

Guy Mouminoux may have traded any semblance of a normal life to just survive World War II, but he did something much more. As someone who participated from outside of Germany, he was uniquely able to pay homage to these men. For all of the hatred and bile poured upon Germany for almost the full extent of the twentieth century, Sajer did something that bucked the trend: He said enough and told his story.

Saint Boniface, pray for us.

Review of “The Forgotten Soldier” by Guy Sajer, Part 2 of 3

Go to Part 1.

Part Two (Spring, 1943–Summer, 1943).

The retreat culminated in a reorganization of German units and lines beyond the Don River. Parenthetically, much of the book is organized around the various retreats to rivers and then eventually to the sea. They formed natural front lines to be held only to see the Germans pushed back until they reached the terminus of their retreat in East Prussia on the Baltic Sea (at which the body of water was behind them). At the point that they reached relative and momentary safety beyond the Don, Sajer and his compatriots were still affiliated with fragmented support units. Several hundred men are organized into a parade ground and asked to volunteer for the Gross Deutschland Division (or Großdeutschland, an elite infantry regiment). First, a few men volunteer but the recruiting officer vacillates between shaming those who do not volunteer to offering sweeteners. Finally, when a two-week leave home is offered for volunteers, Sajer and his companions agree.

After initial training in June 1943, the men received their leave and Sajer traveled back to Germany with Hals by train. The slow journey was delayed several times by bombardment and the soldiers were enlisted to clear wreckage. Finally, Hals and Sajer reached Berlin and parted ways. Sajer decided to visit Neubach’s parents before continuing to Alsace, which Hals sought to dissuade him from doing. Hals was proven right — Sajer’s detour into Berlin ended up eating up his entire leave. The bombardments were bad enough that Sajer never was allowed to leave Berlin as the Allied bombing campaigns created civilian havoc and the soldiers still in Berlin were keelhauled into assisting the recovery crews. Sajer walked through Berlin, his first time there, and was surprised to see both the precise order of the city coupled with the devastation of the Allied air raids. It is a reminder that not only was Sajer young, but he was also a wide-eyed country boy from a village. That he was impressed with the efficiency and order of Berlin is a theme that runs throughout the book — he was generally impressed with German order and contrasts it with the relative lack of it that he had seen in France. It is something that endears Germany to him.

Upon calling on the Neubach family, who have now lost two sons in the war, Sajer meets the family’s neighbors including a teenage girl named Paula. Sajer and Paula enjoy an intense two-week romantic relationship in which they are effectively betrothed. Paula is every bit the stereotype of a young German woman — modest, pretty, steadfast, patriotic, intelligent, virtuous, and noble. Out of all of the characters in the book, she is the easiest for me to picture in my mind’s eye as if “Paula” was drawn from central casting. It is hard to assess the reliability of a soldier in his description of a woman, especially when that soldier is both very young and has been separated from women for a long time. After what he had been through, any reasonably friendly teenage girl would have seemed like heaven to him. That said, Sajer’s description of Paula appeared to justify his affection. She was a remarkable young woman. The relationship which takes place in the middle of the book, more or less, is like an interlude of relative normality. It is the stuff of young beating hearts and the ineffable swoon of love for the first time — in fair weather no less. Here is a young man who fell head over heels for a pretty young girl, and his obsession with her was probably accentuated by the privations he had suffered over the previous year. Unlike other young lovers in any other context, they spent much of their time digging out men, women, and children out of the ruins created by Allied bombing and tending to the wounded, and burying the dead. The specter of little children being pulled from the debris only to be left as crying orphans is a reminder of the toll.

One vignette still sticks with me regarding Sajer’s time in Berlin: Sajer and Paula escaped for a picnic on the outskirts of Berlin. It is a perfect June day, and the love of spring is intoxicating among these young people. Their park-like location was not far from a German air force base, which is visible in the distance. Their picnic was interrupted by a bombing raid that took place very nearly over their heads — enough for Sajer, who was experienced enough to know what to do during a bombing raid — to make Paula run for cover. The ruin of the picnic is a metaphor for the relationship between Sajer and Paula — the war and the times refused to allow them an opportunity to be with one another and no matter the fire of their affection, it was doomed.

His father’s surprise visit to him in Berlin was seen by Sajer as depriving him of precious time to see Paula. In addition to the reversals in the east and the bombing raids in the west, it was through his father that Sajer comes to grips that the war was going badly for the Germans. The looming defeat for the German foot soldier was something that was doled out in chunks — even after the German defeat at Stalingrad and the retreat to the Don, Sajer still had not grasped the perilousness of the German position. His father’s remarks struck him like a thunderbolt and the prospect of defeat hit him for the first time. His father’s visit was an interlude within an interlude within an interlude — Sajer is confronted by someone who palpably disapproves of the Germans and who exhibits something between disappointment and disillusion that his son was serving in the Wehrmacht.  His father’s silent censure was yet one more psychological pressure applied to this teenager’s psyche in what was a crucible of enormous proportions.

If his father’s news of the declining fortunes of Germany came as a surprise to Sajer, these pressures are magnified when the war becomes more and more lost on the ground in front of him. This collective disillusionment of the foot soldiers compared with the propaganda that they are fed is also a theme that works itself throughout the book. Disillusionment here is something different from defeatism; if the latter is a moral defect in a soldier, the former is a psychological condition of constantly fighting a losing war. Disillusionment cuts against a necessary and universal sentiment needed for the morale of any army — hope — and all soldiers are told that they are righteous warriors, and every soldier is told that his cause is not lost until it is lost. The twilight between the knowing that vanquishment is coming, and actual vanquishment is something that is explored in the psychology of Sajer and his companions. The mental toll of defeat — especially in total war — is staggering. It is clear that Sajer himself never quite recovered and The Forgotten Soldier is an exhibition of the toll that defeat took upon him etched in five hundred pages. For Sajer, the anxiety was magnified because of his compromised “Germanness.” Much of the book is about Sajer’s vacillations between attempting to prove his “Germanness” to discouragement that he could not.

After Sajer’s two week leave, he painfully separated himself from Paula and boarded a train east for Großdeutschland training. Notwithstanding that they corresponded regularly during the war — or at least while the German military postal service continued to function — he never saw her again. Left unstated is her fate, which given what the Soviets did to German women and girls (from the ages of eight to eighty), it is stomach-churning to think of her fate if she had survived the Allied bombing raids. It is horrifying enough to say abstractly that so many German women in the east were subjected to repeated and systematic mass rapes — it is quite another to say that someone we know — i.e., Paula — was subjected to them by Soviet animals.

After his leave, Sajer and his friends rejoined the Großdeutschland and underwent “brutal” training with Hauptmann (Captain) Fink for about three weeks as a full initiation into the Großdeutschland. Sajer credited this training as transitioning him from a Rollbahn man into a fighting soldier. He noted that a few of his fellow initiates were killed during the training, which involved physical punishment and sometimes the use of live ammunition that put the lives of the trainees at serious risk. It is hard to know how true to life his description was — at least part of it strikes me as potentially spurious. On one hand, the most valuable commodity an army has is its men, and training — even for elite divisions — may be exceedingly difficult and physically demanding but it is not something that subjects men to unnecessary dangers (like firing live ammunition over their head to make a point). On the other hand, by this point — the summer of 1943 — Sajer and his fellow trainees were far from the best men to be considered for elite training units like the Großdeutschland — men like these would have never been considered in the earlier stages of the war. But after suffering enormous casualties, the bar for admission was presumably lowered based upon necessity. Men who were on the bubble of being Großdeutschland soldiers might have required training that was harsher than more conventional training. The other point to consider is that intense military training is designed to replicate, as much as possible, the conditions of war without wanton dangers. In that, the best training would make trainees feel as if their lives were in danger so it is possible that Sajer, as a then seventeen-year-old recruit, might have surmised incorrectly that his life was in fact in danger. He might have been told that Fink was firing live ammunition when he in fact was not, in order to heighten the training experience. From what I understand, there are no records of Sajer’s Großdeutschland unit number, which indicates that it was created later in the war to make up for the division’s crippling losses. It is a section like this, among other things, that has seen many critics criticize Mouminoux as attempting to pass off a Roman à clef, or a realistic novel passed off as a memoir. There are many ulterior motives why critics have attacked Mouminoux for writing this book, which are touched upon later in this review, but suffice it to say that his description of his Großdeutschland training is part of the critique of the authenticity of this account. Ironically enough, Sajer viewed the brutal training administered by Hauptmann Fink for his later survival through the hellhole that was the constant German combat under nonstop Soviet attacks.

*         *         *         *

Part Three (Autumn 1943). Following his training and initiation in the Großdeutschland, Sajer and his compatriots were assigned to a unit under Hauptmann Wesreidau to defend a new front against the Russian effort to recapture Kharkiv. In addition to Wesreidau, Sajer introduced another pivotal character, August Wiener, who is almost exclusively referred to as “the Veteran” throughout the book. The Veteran was older and fought in Russia since the beginning of the German invasion. He was a skilled machine gunner who was seldom without his Maschinengewehr 42, or “machine gun 42”. Unlike all of the other German soldiers, the veteran had picked up the Russian language. The Veteran and Sajer met on the Belgorod front, where they were assigned to the same assault unit. Sajer initially found the Veteran’s cynicism unbecoming. Within a few hours of heavy fighting, however, Sajer comes to trust the Veteran’s instincts for battle and sense of self-preservation during combat. In particular, Sajer and his compatriots were saved by the Veteran who disobeys an officer’s order to hold a position because it is about to be overrun — in the retreat that the Veteran ordered over the ferocious objections of the officer, the men barely escaped from certain destruction and the officer was killed. From that point on, the Veteran’s credibility was accepted without question. The Veteran was wounded at Belgorod but rapidly recovers. He was later seriously wounded during the Soviet success on the second Dnieper front. Eventually, at the later point of the Veteran’s self-sacrificing death, an impressed Sajer will muse that the Veteran should have directed the entire German army or have been the “Fuhrer”.

Sajer’s unit is led by Hauptmann Wesreidau. Wesreidau is the consummate German officer. The battle-scarred soldiers approved of him fully, especially the Veteran. Sajer was in awe of him. Wesreidau’s men developed an almost fanatical devotion to him — and he was the first and last officer where such a sense is apparent. If the war had previously been presented as chaotic and gratuitous, Wesreidau put forth their cause and privations in a heroic context. Wesreidau’s words were the stuff of real motivation compared with the canned messages of patriotism and duty provided by the German high command that Sajer heard parroted by other commanding officers throughout the book.

In the telling of Sajer, we catch a glimpse in Wesreidau’s unit of the elan of Großdeutschland that reminded me not necessarily of Nazi indoctrination but rather of a much older German tradition of the “comitatus”. That term has been used to describe the ancient Germanic warrior culture for a warband tied to a leader by an oath of fealty and the almost familial relations between a lord and his retainers, or thanes. It was not the pursuit of glory in battle that marked the comitatus that necessarily reminded me of Wesreidau’s men but rather the code of the comitatus that demonstrated the incredible bond between the warrior and his lord. The lord was supposed to surpass his men in courage and bravery. Wesreidau and his men embodied this type of relationship.

Between the Veteran and Wesreidau, we see an unflinching loyalty that Sajer never loses throughout the book. One of the implicit themes of the various critical assessments of The Forgotten Soldier is incredulity at Mouminoux’s refusal to condemn the Wehrmacht or the German cause. Indeed, it is precisely in this obtuseness that so many critics have been so harsh towards Mouminoux and this book. The critics, of course, assign moral leprosy to Germany during the war, and Mouminoux, while no apologist for Hitler or the Nazis, seems to defend his participation on the grounds of patriotism and in the remembrance and valor of the men involved. This cuts too close to an unforgivable equivocation of alleged German villainy for modern ears. Whatever the cause, it seems to me that his devotion to his fellow German soldiers is animated by the Veteran and Wesreidau more than anyone else — to put it bluntly, these two men justify everything. Mouminoux wants the memory of the sacrifice and privations of his compatriots remembered with the honor to which he believed that they were entitled — even if they were vanquished.

The moral gloss that Wesreidau offered his men for Germany’s cause that Sajer reconstructs in The Forgotten Soldier is, as much as anything, a justification for what Mouminoux continued to believe long after the war was lost. Wesreidau’s words still haunt me; they are compelling enough to quote at length:

Germany is a great country. Today, our difficulties are immense. The system in which we more or less believe is every bit as good as the slogans on the other side. Even if we don’t always approve of what we have to do, we must carry out orders for the sake of our country, our comrades, and our families, against whom the other half of the world is fighting in the name of truth and justice. All of you are old enough to understand that. I have done a good deal of traveling —to South America, and even to New Zealand. Since Spain, I have fought in Poland and France, and now Russia — and I can tell you that everywhere there are the same dominating hypocrisies. Life, my father, the example of former times — all of these taught me to sustain my existence with rectitude and loyalty. And I have clung to these principles in spite of all the hardships and follies which have been my lot. Many times, when I could have responded with a thrust of the sword, I only smiled, and blamed myself, assuming that I myself was the cause of all my troubles.

When I had my first taste of war, in Spain, I thought of suicide — it all seemed so vile. But then I saw the ferocity of others, who also believed in the justice of their cause, and offered themselves up to acts of murder, as to a purification. I watched the soft, effete[ness] of [the] French shift from terror to toughness, and take up the arms they couldn’t use when they needed them, once we had restored their confidence, and offered them the hand of friendship. In general, human beings don’t accept the unaccustomed. Change frightens and upsets them, and they will fight even to preserve situations they have always detested. But a slick armchair philosopher can easily arouse a rabble to support an abstract proposition — for instance, “all men are equal” — even when the differences between men are obviously as great as the differences between cows and roosters. Then those exhausted societies, drained by their ‘liberty,’ begin to bellow about their ‘convictions’ and become a threat to us and to peace. It’s basic wisdom to keep people like that well fed and content, if one wishes to extract even a tenth of the possible return.

Something of this kind is happening on the other side. As a people, we are fortunate in being somewhat less indolent than they. If someone tells us to examine ourselves, we at least have the courage to do it. Our condition is not absolutely perfect, but at least we agree to look at other things, and take chances. We are now embarked on a risky enterprise, with no assurance of safety. We are advancing an idea of unity which is neither rich nor easily digestible, but the vast majority of the German people accept it and adhere to it, forging and forming it in an admirable collective effort. This is where we are now risking everything. We are trying, taking due account of the attitudes of society, to change the face of the world, hoping to revive the ancient virtues buried under the layers of filth bequeathed to us by our forebears. We can expect no reward for this effort. We are loathed everywhere: if we should lose tomorrow those of us still alive after so much suffering will be judged without justice. We shall be accused of an infinity of murder, as if everywhere, and at all times, men at war did not behave in the same way. Those who have an interest in putting an end to our ideals will ridicule everything we believe in. We shall be spared nothing. Even the tombs of our heroes will be destroyed, only preserving — as a gesture of respect toward the dead — a few which contain figures of doubtful heroism, who were never fully committed to our cause. With our deaths, all the prodigies of heroism which our daily circumstances require of us, and the memory of our comrades, dead and alive, and our communion of spirits, our fears and our hopes, will vanish, and our history will never be told. Future generations will speak only of an idiotic, unqualified sacrifice. Whether you wanted it or not, you are now part of this undertaking, and nothing which follows can equal the efforts you have made, if you must sleep tomorrow under the quieter skies of the opposite camp. In that case, you will never be forgiven for having survived. You will either be rejected or preserved like a rare animal which has escaped a cataclysm. With other men, you will be as cats are to dogs and you will never have any real friends. Do you wish such an end for yourselves?

Anyone who wishes to go but is hesitating from fear of our authority should speak to me; I will take as many nights as it needs to reassure you. I repeat: those who wish to leave should do so. We cannot count on men who feel that way, and our efforts cannot gain from their presence. Please believe that I understand your sufferings. I feel the cold and fear as you do, and I fire at the enemy as you do, because I feel that my duty as an officer requires at least as much from me as your duty does of you. I wish to stay alive, even if it’s only to continue the struggle somewhere else. I wish my company to be united in thought and in deed. Once the fighting begins, I will not tolerate doubt and defeatism. We shall be suffering not only in the interests of ultimate victory, but in the interests of daily victory against those who hurl themselves at us without respite, and whose only thought is to exterminate us, without any understanding of what is at stake. You can feel certain of me, in return, and certain that I will not expose you to any unnecessary dangers.

I would burn and destroy entire villages if by doing so I could prevent even one of us from dying of hunger. Here, deep in the wilds of the steppe, we shall be all the more aware of our unity. We are surrounded by hatred and death, and in these circumstances we shall daily oppose our perfect cohesion to the indiscipline and disorder of our enemies. Our group must be as one, and our thoughts must be identical. Your duty lies in your efforts to achieve that goal, and if we do achieve it, and maintain it, we shall be victors even in death.

Such a man was Wesreidau.

Notwithstanding valor in defense, the German defeats at Kursk and Belgorod hastened a sustained and disorderly retreat toward the Dnieper River. The Soviet troops almost overwhelmed Sajer’s unit — and encircled them at one point — but the Germans fought desperately to escape annihilation. During this retreat — and of all the many that are recounted — the conditions of the flight, the breakdown of logistics and support, the hunger and weather, and the sheer carnage of wounded men limping towards survival were harrowing and horrifying. Sajer described the evacuation to the west bank of the Dnieper, south of Kiev; it was dramatic, blood-soaked, and chaotic. Minutes of being stranded on the east bank of the Dnieper felt like hours — strafed by Soviet planes and menaced by Soviet tanks — the Germans experienced an excruciating waiting game in which the last ones to be moved were sure to die. Men by the hundreds perished in the vain hope that they would be ferried next to what they thought would be a serviceable front line. Some jumped into the wide and freezing river to swim for it — and none of them made it. Eventually, Sajer made it across as one of the “lucky” ones only to be met with relative chaos on the western side.

Go to Part 3 of 3.