Eyes, nose, mouth, chin, cheeks, brows — all of those words are home-grown English. But when you put them together and view them as a whole, they turn French in the word “face.” That doesn’t happen in German, where home-grown Augen, Nase, Mund, Kinn, Wangen, Brauen come together as home-grown Gesicht.

Faces, Races, Spaces

German is less of a hybrid language than English and I’d like to know how that affects the psychology of native speakers. The geometry of the two languages became much more different after the Norman Conquest and that must affect the way that minds move through them. If languages had faces, the German and English languages would look much less alike than the German and English peoples. I mean the real peoples: the white Germans and the White English. I’m a racist, which means I’m also a “facist” (i.e., face-ist). I think race is a biological reality with enormous — indeed, decisive — consequences for culture and civilization. And races are inescapably connected with faces. Evolution in different physical and cultural environments has sculpted faces in different ways just as it’s sculpted every other part of the human body, from the bones to the brain.

Composite faces of male athletes from different European nations, including Germany and the UK (from Dienekes Anthropology blog)

The outcomes of those different evolutionary paths are just much more obvious in the face, which is, after all, the most obvious part of the human body. That’s why so much of our brains is devoted to reading other people’s faces (and to controlling our own). Our intense interest in faces arises from the important information that they carry. Not that leftists like us to see some of that information. They hate the way we can tell Swedes from Somalis from Samoans at a glance. Sadly for leftists, it’s clear that facial is racial is spatial, because races and their faces have evolved in different places and taken different routes through genetic space. That affects more than the geometry of faces. The color of faces has important information too, both in subtle ways, like the intra-racial differences in the face-colors of men and women studied by the maverick anthropologist Peter Frost, and in gross ways, like the inter-racial differences in the skin-color of Blacks and Whites. When we look at a face we’re looking not just at geometry — the shapes and relative sizes of noses and mouths and eyes — but also at chemistry (which is geometry at a microscopic scale). The color of hair, skin and eyes says something about the chemistry of the body. You could say that a human face is like the cover of a book. It gives you imperfect but important information about the contents of the skull: the geometry and chemistry of the brain, and hence the psychology and cognition of the face’s owner.

The leftist miracle of an unbreakable brain-barrier

That’s why facism is an essential part of racism: the differences between the faces of different races convey real and important biological data. But leftism denies the significance of faces just as it denies the existence of races. Leftists can’t deny that evolution has sculpted faces, but they do deny that evolution has sculpted the brains that lie directly behind those faces. Or rather, they say that the same evolutionary forces that made the faces of Swedes, Somalis and Samoans so different were somehow prevented from working on the brains that lay directly behind those faces. After Homo sapiens evolved in Africa, the skull became an absolute and unbreakable barrier, sealing the brain off from all further evolution as Homo sapiens migrated into environments as different as the tropical, ocean-kissed islands of Tahiti and the icy, oxygen-starved plateau of Tibet. Bodies changed, but brains didn’t. That’s why the Psychic Unity of Mankind is a central axiom of leftism. According to leftists, the brains of all humans, Blacks and Whites, men and women, Finns and Fijians, are capable of exactly the same high intellectual endeavor. We have exactly the same cerebral hardware and we run exactly the same psychological software. Only racism and sexism can explain why Black women have never won Nobel Prizes for Physics or Field Medals in mathematics. Racism and sexism are also shamefully and solely responsible for the myth that White women are more attractive and more feminine than Black women.

Leftism says that Black-Jewish Afua Hirsch is just as beautiful as all-White Aphrodite

Well, that’s what leftism says, but leftism is a lie. Our faces are different and so are both our brains and our beauties. If we’d evolved to read the geometry of internal organs as easily as the geometry of external faces, we’d be able to distinguish between the brains of Blacks and Whites at a glance. And not just the brains but everything else in the body, from the liver to the lungs. To the dismay of leftists, artificial intelligence (AI) can now do exactly that: it can assign internal organs to different races with very high accuracy. As I described in “Biology is Blasphemy,” leftist scientists have been “shocked, confused, and frankly horrified” to discover that AI can read the reality of race in X-rays and other medical images. As one researcher despairingly concluded: “There is no easy way to remove racial information from images. It is everywhere and it is in everything.”

Ugly, asymmetrical and alien

But why would we want to “remove racial information from images”? Well, I don’t and I hope that you don’t, but lying leftists do, because they want to deny reality in pursuit of what really matters to them: power and the chance to scapegoat non-leftist Whites for the failure and criminality of Blacks. Take this photo of ten vibrant faces that recently appeared in the British media:

The ugly, asymmetrical and alien faces of a violent armed gang in racially and facially enriched Britain — the White-looking criminal is called Ihab Ashaqui

The faces are ugly, asymmetrical and alien (ugliness and asymmetry go together, in fact). If they were the covers of books, then the books would be in the genre of true crime. And they’d be autobiographies, because the faces are those of a violent armed gang who “used guns, knives, hammers and crowbars to terrorise [their victims] before fleeing in a fleet of stolen vehicles.” Leftists would say that the men are completely British and that they’ve been turned into violent criminals by living in a White-supremacist society that refused to nurture their innate intelligence, civility and potential for high achievement. I say: “Face the facts and see the facts in the faces.” And the facts are that both the faces and the brains behind the faces have followed very different evolutionary paths to those of the genuine White British. Nine of the ten men are obviously Black and Blacks haven’t been through the process of genetic pacification, whereby strong and stable states have weeded out genes for crime and violence in their subjects by executing and imprisoning violent and lawless men over many centuries. On the contrary, Blacks have evolved in environments where violence and selfish, impulsive behavior are advantageous.

An Albanian face in an otherwise Black gang: the torturers, rapists and murderers of White schoolgirl Mary-Ann Leneghan

The one White face in the gang isn’t the product of genetic pacification either. The White-looking thug is called Ihab Ashaqui, which may well be a misspelt Albanian name. Like mountainous Chechnya — which produced the Boston Bombers for America, a head-chopping young art-critic for France, and the most furious fighters of Islamic State — and mountainous Georgia — which produced the Machiavellian mass-murderer Josef Stalin, mountainous Albania has bred men who would rather feud and fight rather than obey laws. And so Albanians behave more like non-British Blacks than British Whites. That may be why Ihab Ashaqui appears in an otherwise Black gang just as Indrit Krasniqi, another Albanian, appeared in the Black gang that raped, tortured and murdered the White schoolgirl Mary-Ann Leneghan in 2005. Unlike the murdered Black and now-sainted schoolboy Stephen Lawrence, she has long been forgotten by the leftist media. After all, her death revealed the truth of how dangerous Blacks are to Whites, whereas the death of Stephen Lawrence can be used to promote the lie that Whites are dangerous to Blacks. Leftism hates truth and loves lies.

Jewish faces in the highest of places

And leftist lies killed Mary-Ann Leneghan, because she spent her short life saturated in pro-Black propaganda designed to persuade her that Blacks were cool and fascinating and perfectly suitable for White girls like her to be friends with. That’s how she ended up raped and tortured for hours, then stabbed to death in a park as she pleaded desperately for her life. By any objective standard, her murder was far worse than the murder of Stephen Lawrence. And it involved misogyny and patriarchy at its most brutal and femicidal. But leftists don’t apply objective standards and they don’t genuinely care about misogyny, patriarchy and femicide. They apply the standard of “What advances the cause of leftism and helps leftists like me gain more power?”

Bland Biden, bland Blair, unthreatening goyish frontmen for a hostile Jewish elite

Jewish faces in the highest of places: How Jews are in charge of the so-called Biden administration

Merrick Garland, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, is a former prosecutor who’s viewed as a moderate.

The sly and sinister Jew Merrick Garland, anti-White American Attorney-General

But it’s because leftists love power that they’re careful about the faces that front their parties. Like the Blair government in Britain, the Biden government in America is disproportionately staffed by Jews, particularly at the highest levels, and follows an anti-White Jewish agenda of open borders and plutocratic enrichment. But in both cases the Jews who ended up running things chose a bland and unthreatening goy to front their election campaign. After all, if the sinister Jew Merrick Garland had been the Democratic candidate for POTUS, even the dumbest goyim might have felt a chill down their spines and understood that voting Democrat was not in their best interests.

Three Jewish faces, three Jewish fraudsters: Bernie Maddoff, Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX, Caroline Ellison of FTX

Another Jewish face, another Jewish fraudster: the anti-White, anti-Christian Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky laundering money through FTX

And how do I know that Merrick Garland is sinister? Well, it’s there in his face. If that punim were the cover of a book, the book would be a torture manual or a grimoire of Black Magic. This is me being facist again: the faces of Jews often give me the creeps. And I’m not unique in that. In Western culture there’s a long and shameful history of Jews being represented as or likened to vampires, ghouls and other evil creatures — see Andrew Joyce’s “On Jews and Vampires.”

Cannibals, vampires and Princes of Darkness

At least, leftists and Jews call it a “shameful” history. As both a facist and a racist, I’d call it a healthy and appropriate response to the alien and predatory nature of Jews, which is plainly visible in their faces and body language — and also audible in their voices. In America, the bloodthirsty Jewish neo-con Richard Perle is nicknamed “the Prince of Darkness.” By no coincidence, the Machiavellian Jew Peter Mandelson received the same nickname in Britain (Mandelson was one of the hostile Jewish elite who pulled Blair’s strings). Elsewhere in Britain, the Jewish politician Gerald Kaufman was nicknamed “Hannibal Lecter” (after the cannibal serial-killer created by the writer Thomas Harris). And the Jewish politician Michael Howard, who headed the so-called Conservative party and failed to beat the bland and unthreatening goy Tony Blair at the 2005 election, was nicknamed “Dracula.” One of his own shadow-ministers, Ann Widdecombe, said of Howard that “there is something of the night about him.”

The ugly, evil and truth-hating Jew Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the anti-White ADL

Again, I think this is a healthy and appropriate gentile response to the alien and predatory nature of Jews. But healthy and appropriate racial responses are abhorred and abominated by media and business in the modern leftist West. Kanye West, the Black American musician, has learned that very strongly in recent months, as Andrew Joyce explained at the Occidental Observer in “Jewish Troubles with Uppity Rappers.” West is very intelligent and articulate by Black standards, and he’s very courageous by White standards, because he’s said things that no White of remotely comparable status has dared to say. The ugly and sinister Jew Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the totalitarian Anti-Defamation League (ADL), says that Kanye needs to be crushed because he’s accused Jews of having the power to crush their critics. The ADL is pro-LGBT and anti-BTG — against Beauty, Truth and Goodness. It’s no coincidence that Greenblatt is ugly, evil and a liar. As the great Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc said long ago in The Great Heresies (1938): “[T]here is (as the greatest of the ancient Greeks discovered) a certain indissoluble Trinity of Truth, Beauty and Goodness. You cannot deny or attack one of these three without at the same time denying or attacking both the others.”

The ugly, evil and truth-hating faces of American antifa

You can see Belloc’s words brought to life in Jonathan Greenblatt and in the ugly, evil and truth-hating faces of American antifa. But the converse of his words also applies: to promote any one of that “indissoluble Trinity” is to promote the two others. It’s also no coincidence that Whites have evolved the brightest and most beautiful faces, created the best art and the least corrupt and criminal societies, and pursued truth so successfully in science and mathematics. Faces are themselves works of art, sculpted down the millennia by the aesthetic choices and preferences of men and women competing for mates.

The specialness of European female beauty

But the anthropologist Peter Frost argues that male choices were particularly important in Europe, where women competed more intensely for fewer men in a much harsher and colder environment than that of tropical Africa. That’s why the color of women’s hair and eyes is most varied in Europe: women benefited by standing out from their rivals in the competition for mates in an individualist mating system in which personal preferences rather than family strategizing was paramount. Indeed, Frost says that “eye colors … have diversified only in Europeans and more so in women than in men. Specifically, the range of eye colors is more evenly distributed among women: they have the less frequent colors more often and the more frequent ones less often.” The eyes are windows to the soul, so it’s said. They’re certainly a window into evolution and the gem-like eyes — sapphires, emeralds and more — of European women are the result of a distinct and uniquely beautiful evolutionary path. But what have Jews, whose faces and brains are the product of a different evolutionary path, done with the beauty of European women? They’ve turned it into the drug and dross of pornography. The vast majority of the alien-faced young men migrating into Europe have undoubtedly seen White women in Jewish pornography and had their rape-culture strengthened and stimulated by it.

Facial (and racial) propaganda from the anti-White, pro-migrant Guardian

Again, leftists don’t care. Their pro-migrant propaganda studiously ignores the predominance of rape-inclined young men and pretends again and again that non-White migrants are helpless women and children. We often see crying women and children in the pro-migrant leftist media. It’s facial propaganda that’s also racial propaganda, exploiting our instinctive sympathy for distressed human faces to promote the invasion of White nations by hostile and dangerous outsiders. Facism is always racism, whether it’s the healthy, truthful facism that helps Whites by recognizing that non-White faces go with non-White brains, or the unhealthy, lying facism that harms Whites by pretending that non-White faces go with brains that are just like ours. No, they’re not like ours and they don’t fit in White societies. The faces of different races belong in different spaces.

Stalin’s War Against the Jews: The Doctor’s Plot and the Soviet Solution
Louis Rapoport
Free Press, 1990

A person’s lack of self-awareness can produce a sense of eye-rolling irony. Not a pleasant feeling—sort of like spinning one’s wheels. But such an encounter doesn’t have to be a total loss. A self-unaware person can still teach us things, as long as we don’t let the irony get the better of us.

Louis Rapoport’s 1990 work Stalin’s War Against the Jews gives us such an opportunity by offering an engaging roundup of a vital part of twentieth century history. Although Rapoport presents it as part of the interminable saga of Jewish “lugubria” (if I may coin a term), what he really offers is an eye-opening account of Jewish culpability in the vast blacklist of Soviet atrocity. In mentioning anti-gentile enormities offhandedly and focusing more on the significantly less deadly anti-Jewish crimes of the Soviets, Rapoport reveals his appalling lack of self-awareness. (As do Natan Sharansky, Benjamin Netanyahu, Robert Conquest, and Theodore Draper, who provide glowing blurbs on the book’s back cover.)

Would these reviewers have responded as well to a book entitled Hitler’s War Against White Christians which only mentions Jewish suffering in passing?

Rapoport starts with some useful biographical information about Stalin, whom he correctly vilifies throughout his book. He describes young Joseph Djugashivili as an industrious bully who was always cynical and pragmatic regarding his interactions with Jews. Rapoport covers Stalin’s time as a young radical robbing banks, getting into Lenin’s good graces, and vying with the more urbane and Mephistophelean Leon Trotsky during the early days of the Bolsheviks. Rapoport compares Stalin, being a Georgian, to the Corsican Napoleon and the Austrian Hitler as an ethnic outsider identifying with gentile majorities as a basis for his power and appeal.

Right off the bat, however, he discusses Stalin’s sinister yet unrealized intention in his last years to deport nearly all Soviet Jews to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Birobidzhan. Yes, I think it is fair to say that Russian Jews dodged a bullet when Stalin died. Despite this, Rapoport makes the dubious claim that “the Jews suffered far more under the ‘anti-racist’ Bolsheviks than they had under the openly anti-Semitic czar Nicholas II.”

Here is where the lack of self-awareness comes in. Everyone suffered more under the Bolsheviks than under the Czar. For gentiles, it wasn’t even close, yet Rapoport never directly acknowledges this. It’s as if for him no one can suffer the way a Jew suffers. Furthermore, he quite astonishingly indicts the Jews for much of this suffering. He admits not only that Jews “laid the foundations of communism and socialism” (for example, Karl Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle, and Eduard Bernstein) and made up Lenin’s “top men” (Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, and Jacob Sverdlov) but also that Jews were instrumental in the rise of Bolshevism.

In the three decades before the Revolution of 1917, a growing number of young Jewish revolutionaries flocked to the new religion of communism, seeing it as a means of delivery not only from their own constricted status as Jews, but for all humankind. These were the educated, secular equivalents of those Jews who had followed previous false Messiahs—such as Shabtai Zvi in the seventeenth century, or much earlier pretenders like David Reuveni. The very high proportion of Jews in the forefront of the movement in Russia was, however, also directly linked to the fact that the aristocracy and peasants shared a mutual antipathy toward Jews, considering them Russia’s main source of bedevilment.

It gets better. It turns out that Jews got their hands dirty after the Revolution as well.

Under Lenin, Jews became involved in all aspects of the Revolution, including its dirtiest work. Despite the Communists’ vows to eradicate anti-Semitism, it spread rapidly after the Revolution—partly because of the prominence of so many Jews in the Soviet administration, as well as in the traumatic, inhuman Sovietization drives that followed. Historian Salo Baron has noted that an immensely disproportionate number of Jews joined the new Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, “perhaps in subconscious retaliation for the many years of suffering at the hands of the Russian police.” And many of those who fell afoul of the Cheka would be shot by Jewish investigators.

And did someone say genocide? Here is a direct quote from Zinoviev in a 1917 conversation with Polish Cheka leader Felix Dzerzhinsky and Jewish Menshevik leader Raphael Abramovich:

We must carry along with us ninety million out of the one hundred million Soviet Russian population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.

Moving on to the 1930s, it gets even better.

Thousands of Jewish revolutionaries helped to spearhead the Terror machine with a messianic fervor. One of them, Matvei Berman, had helped to institutionalize slave labor as early as 1922. . .

And then we have the Jewish “Iron Commissar” Lazar Kaganovich:

Kaganovich was also known for his vow against alleged class enemies and saboteurs: “We’ll break their skulls in.” In 1932, when he was in charge of suppressing a strike by Kuban Cossacks during collectivization in the Ukraine, he transferred whole Cossack settlements to Siberia—a mere rehearsal for the transfer of eight entire nationalities in the forties. Khrushchev, who participated in many of these events and whose own hands were not unsullied, termed Kaganovich “unsurpassed in his viciousness.”

I saved the best for last:

Other Jewish Chekists who rose to the top included Aron Soltz, long known as “the consciences of the Party,” and Naftali Frenkel, a Turkish Jew whom Solzhenitsyn would characterize as “the nerve of the Archipelago, which stretched across the nine time zones of the vast country.” It was Frenkel who refined Berman’s use of prisoners as slave laborers. In 1932 Stalin put him in charge of the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, which took the lives of some 200,000 prisoners, and later he worked under [Genrikh] Yagoda, the first and last Jewish head of the Cheka. Most of the chief overseers of the canal were Jews.

While it is nice that Rapoport likens communism to false religions, he fails to consider why the Russian aristocracy and peasantry “shared a mutual antipathy toward Jews.” I understand that tit-for-tat can reach farther back into history than we can fathom, and that the Jews have their side of things. But to assume that this anti-Jewish antipathy sprang out of nowhere or from the black hearts of gentiles is simply dishonest. Honesty would compel Rapoport to discuss uncomfortable topics like usury, alcohol peddling, prostitution, draft evasion, tax evasion, anti-assimilation, russophobia, ideological subversion, terrorism, and the weaponization of the Jewish fund known as the Kahal against gentile economic competitors—which effectively wiped out gentile middle classes in places like Odessa.

Honesty would also compel him to admit that perhaps this anti-Semitism he’s so worried about (which he refers to as a “disease”) was justifiable given the atrocious behavior of so many Soviet Jews. It’s as if he feels anti-Semitism is a worse crime than working 200,000 slaves to death or deporting whole populations to their doom in Siberia.

Not only is Rapoport not entirely honest, his argument doesn’t follow logically. Given that. . .

1. Jews suffered as Jews under the anti-Semitic Czar, and
2. Jews rebelled against the anti-Semitic Czar through Bolshevism.

It follows that. . .

1. Jews suffered more as Jews under Bolshevism than they did under the Czar.

How does this even make sense?

It only makes sense when rewriting C as “Jews—especially urban, educated Jews—benefitted enormously from taking part in the vast Soviet system.”

So then where does this war against the Jews come in? Well, first Rapoport discusses the well-known suppression of all nationalist, religious, and ethnic identity during the early Soviet period. This included abolishing the teaching of Hebrew, instruction in Judaism, and the existence of all Jewish organizations. But if you don’t read Rapoport carefully, you’d think the Jews were the only group being repressed during this time. Ironically, however, Rapoport admits (again, with zero self-awareness) that the Jews themselves were doing most of the repressing.

The Jewish Bolsheviks were the most fanatical advocates of suppressing Jewish parties—no matter how anti-Zionist, such as the Bund. The main Jewish enemy was the “Bourgeois-clerical-Zionist” camp: Judaism, Zionism, the Hebrew language. At one and the same time, the Bolsheviks granted grudging recognition of the Jews as a nationality while taking the rights of nationality away from them. For the sine qua non of the Communist revolution remained the dissolution of all nationalities, and the Jews were at the head of the list.

Next, Rapoport provides a chilling rundown of the Great Terror, with all its plots, paranoia, denunciations, and show trials. This was essentially Stalin’s mid-1930s purge of the Communist Party, which resulted in seven to ten million being killed. Rapoport estimates that “hundreds of thousands” of these victims were Jewish—which makes sense, given that so many Jews were active communists at the time. His chapter on the Great Terror certainly makes for some gripping reading and provides an excellent introduction to this grisly topic. Still, however, he cannot seem to help himself with his lack of awareness. He admits that “[m]any of the prosecution witnesses and agents provocateurs” used against Jews during the Terror were Jews themselves, as were “[s]ome of the main instruments of the Terror.” He names M.I. Gay, A.A. Slutsky, Boris Berman, and others.

Yet on the same page he condemns contemporaneous actions against Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky as anti-Semitism. Basically, we have bad Jews doing bad things to other bad Jews in a bad system that they themselves had created after doing bad things to not-so-bad gentiles—and all Rapoport can do is point and sputter about anti-Semitism.

We can see where his priorities lie.

Rapoport dutifully chronicles Jewish suffering during the early days of the Second World War, which he paints as Soviet-Nazi collusion. One example is the Soviet silence in the face of German anti-Jewish atrocities in Poland from 1939 to 1941 during the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Another is Babi Yar, where the Soviet press reported that nearly 50,000 Russians or Ukrainians (but not Jews) had been massacred. This all counts as part of Stalin’s war against the Jews, apparently. But Rapoport fails to consider other reasons for Soviet behavior here. In the former case, the Soviets did not want to upset a supposed ally whom they were intending to attack anyway. (See Viktor Suvorov’s The Chief Culprit for more on Stalin’s secret war plans against the Germans.) In the latter case, the Soviet newspapers’ prime goal was to inspire anti-German hatred among the Soviet masses. Calling the Babi Yar victims Jews simply would not have accomplished this as well as calling them Russians or Ukrainians.

The best Rapoport can do to forward his “Stalin’s-war-against-the-Jews” thesis during his Second World War chapter is to bring up the massive eastward deportations Stalin executed in the wake of the German invasion. Sure, hundreds of thousands of Jews suffered during this period—as did all people of all nationalities. I’m sure a good bit of this suffering had been caused by gentile cruelty. But it’s a stretch to call these deportations a “war against the Jews,” especially when they were taken either to protect the Soviet citizenry from the German invasion, or to prevent them from taking part in it, which, after decades of terror and oppression, many Soviet citizens were keen to do.

Up until this point, it is clear that Stalin disliked Jews and was not above treating Jewish Party members as harshly as they had treated their victims throughout the 1920s and 1930s. But he had always been willing to work with them and kept several, such as Kaganovich, as his favorites. This changed after 1948, when Golda Meir, the Israeli Ambassador to the Soviet Union, visited Moscow and was thronged by 50,000 enraptured Soviet Jews. This bold ethnocentric display infuriated Stalin, who from then on marked Soviet Jewry as an unstable element which needed to be dealt with. If there is any point in Rapoport’s narrative where his war-against-the-Jews thesis is strongest, it’s here.

Right away, Stalin began ordering the mass arrest, deportation, and execution of Jews for the flimsiest of reasons, such as merely attending the Meir visit, communicating with various Jewish groups such as the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), being a prominent cultural figure, or simply receiving Zionist brochures in the mail from the Israeli embassy. Perhaps some of these victims had been bad actors during the Great Terror or before, but the vast majority were certainly innocent.

Stalin was growing increasingly paranoid and totalitarian in his old age and the Jews of the Soviet Union were bearing the brunt of it according to Rapoport. His writing assumes tremendous urgency as he depicts the disastrous Crimea Affair—an episode in which prominent Jews, including Vyacheslav Molotov’s Jewish wife Paulina, hoped to convince Stalin to concede the Crimea to the Jews. The famous Doctor’s plot garners its own chapter, as it should, since no event in Russia since the Beilis Trial had exhibited as much controversy surrounding Jews and anti-Semitism as that.

My favorite moment describes how Paul Robeson, the Black American singer and left-wing luminary, visited the Soviet Union in 1949. He repeatedly asked the Soviet authorities to arrange a meeting with an old friend of his, the Jewish poet and former JAC Deputy Chairman Itzik Feffer. Unbeknownst to Robeson, however, Feffer had run afoul of Stalin and had been rotting away in Lubyanka Prison. The Soviets stalled while they fattened Feffer up in his cell before finally allowing him to visit Robeson in his (no doubt bugged) hotel room. While chatting amiably with his old friend, Feffer indicated through gestures his own dire circumstances as well as those of other Jews, such as the actor Solomon Mikhoels, whom Stalin murdered the year before. The two were crying when they parted because they knew they would never see each other again.

Despite knowing that his friend’s fate was sealed, Robeson later performed brilliantly at the Tchaikovsky Hall and then spoke glowingly to the audience about the freedom that writers and artists enjoy in the Soviet Union. Afterwards, the tragic farce continued:

When Robeson went home, he continued to misrepresent the reality of life in the Soviet Union. Apparently Robeson, Howard Fast, and others who knew what was going on felt that “quiet diplomacy” was the best way to help their friends. Robeson made his son vow not to make the story public until after his death, “because he had promised himself that he would never publicly criticize the USSR.” The singer-actor who had become as much a leader for black Americans as actor Mikhoels had become for Soviet Jews was covering up not only the murder of Mikhoels and the arrest and imminent death of his Jewish writer friends, but the clear signs of an anti-Semitic campaign that spelled impending genocide.

A poignant story, and Rapoport tells  it well. But it is undone (again) by his astonishing lack of self-awareness. Several chapters earlier, Rapoport writes how Feffer’s fate could not have happened to a nicer guy.

The JAC’s deputy chairman, poet Itzik Solomonovich Feffer, was a very different kind of Soviet Jew, much more in the tradition of those who had helped shape totalitarian terrorism. Feffer, born in Kiev in 1900 and a Party member from age nineteen, was a devoted communist, a Red Army colonel, and an operative of “the organs.” In his poem, “I am a Jew,” he declared that he drank “happiness from Stalin’s cup” and praised Kaganovich, “Stalin’s friend.” Though Feffer boasted of his rabbinic ancestry, his poems jeered at Judaism, while celebrating the slave-labor society. He immortalized the show trials of “traitors, spies, and assassins. . . .[w]e shoot you down like mad dogs.”. . . . There is no doubt now why Beria chose him as second in command at the JAC—to watch everyone else, and denounce them at the appropriate moment.

The more Rapoport denounces anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, the more he underscores its rock-solid justifications.

Of course, Stalin cannot be defended. His murderous and possibly genocidal anti-Semitism was only one of his many evil facets. Rapoport does a fine job condemning him through his reporting—a necessary case to make, if somewhat trivial given the millions of deaths already on Stalin’s head by the time he turned on the Jews. Despite its author’s obvious blind spots, Stalin’s War Against the Jews is a well-written and serviceable history of the highs and lows of twentieth century Soviet Jewry—and how interconnected these extremes actually were. Much of this book will be a revelation to those unacquainted with the Jewish Question.

But by conflating Stalin’s personal anti-Jewish animus (as paranoid as it was) with something as broad as anti-Semitism, Rapoport prestidigitously condemns the Russian people when such a charge is unwarranted. No, the Russian people are not to blame here. Stalin’s war against the Jews was his alone. Once he died in 1953, so did much of the violent anti-Jewish repression in the Soviet Union, and his plan to deport them all was permanently shelved. If anything, Rapoport does a better job of painting Soviet Jews as anti-Semitic—or worse—since they had always oppressed their own and by the late 1940s were being forced to lie in the very same bed that they had so enthusiastically made twenty to thirty years prior.

That Louis Rapoport remains oblivious to this irony throughout his book is incomprehensible. He writes in his Preface that one purpose of Stalin’s War Against the Jews was to help readers understand how the “pogrom atmosphere of 1948 to 1953 that culminated in the Doctor’s Plot” had led to the great exodus of Jews from the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Instead, however, he presents all the excellent reasons why the Russians wanted them gone in the first place.

In a recent article entitled “The American Political System and White Racial Discourse,” I suggested that White advocacy dialogue and debate

[m]ake room for American voices—Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and (I’m thinking out loud) Emerson and Thoreau and Mark Twain and Edgar Rice Burroughs (the Tarzan author) and Teddy Roosevelt and H.L. Mencken and . . . oh, I don’t know, just somebody besides Julius Evola, you know? American thinkers, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Teddy Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, somebody.

In the week since—it’s now December 22nd—I’ve asked myself, “Who are White ‘somebodies’ you think ought to be heard?”   Of course, the possibilities are virtually endless, but I’ve got to start somewhere and nine people come to mind at the moment: philosopher, essayist, and lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson; novelist and short story writer Ernest Hemingway; Civil War combatant William T. Anderson; film director Sam Peckinpah; poet Emily Dickinson; artist and art educator Robert Henri; U.S. Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin; cartoonist Steve Ditko; and country singer Hank Williams.  In that order, I’ll deal with them here to the extent I can given the space limitations I’m working with.   You can Google and check Amazon and libraries to look into them further if you’d like.

As you read through this material, I invite you to be vigilant to what comes up for you: thoughts, feelings, images, memories, observations, insights, questions, issues, goals, things-that-need-to-be-done.  Get clear about all that, put words to it, and discern what significance, if any, it has for you.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) was an American essayist and lecturer.  He was a prominent figure in an American form of philosophical idealism called Transcendentalism.  His address to a Harvard audience in 1837, published with the title The American Scholar, has been called America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence.”  One of Emerson’s major writings is the essay Self-Reliance, which he included in a book published in 1842.   Excerpts from that essay:

• To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light that flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of bards and sages.
• There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance, that imitation is suicide, that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best, but what he has said and done otherwise shall give him no peace.
• Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated in their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.  We are now men and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny, not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.
• Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
• Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemera. It is always ancient virtue.
• Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto.  Henceforward I am the truth’s.  I must be myself.  I cannot break myself any longer for you.   If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier.  I will not hide my tastes or aversions.  If you are noble, I will love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical intentions.  If you are true but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own.  I do this not selfishly but humbly and truly.  It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men’s, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth.  Does this sound harsh today?  You will soon love what is dictated by your nature as well as mine, and if we follow the truth, it will bring us out safe at last.
• Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. That which one can do best, none but his Maker can teach him.  Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare?  Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton?
• That which a man is does always by necessity acquire; and what a man acquires is living property, which does not wait upon the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes. It is only as man puts off all foreign support and stands alone that I see him to be strong and to prevail.  Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

Ernest Hemingway

In both public and private writings, Ernest Hemingway increasingly reasserted his distaste for politicians, re-emphasized his abiding lack of faith in governmental solutions to social problems, and reaffirmed his personal and artistic independence from political parties and ideologies.

No one would call Hemingway a sophisticated political thinker, but novelist John Dos Passos was wrong to conclude that he had “no consistent political ideas.”  From adolescence to old age, his ideas were remarkably consistent.  They stemmed from main currents of American political thought—principally from the libertarian tradition of Jefferson and Emerson, salted by the philosophical pessimism of Alexander Hamilton and Henry Adams.

Hemingway agreed with Adams that power was poison.  Like Jefferson, he welcomed integration into a small group or family or village and expounded the virtues of as little government as possible.

With the Transcendentalists, Hemingway thought that government could provide no panaceas for social ills.  What was needed was a whole man, uncompartmentalized, unspecialized, a modern Thinking Man—a god to drive the half-gods out of the political arena as the great bullfighter would drive the fake messiahs from the bull ring.

Ideally, the individual man, like the individual family, should be left alone to confront his destiny.  At the root of Hemingway’s support for individual liberty lay a longing for a golden, mythical past in which each man—for him as for Jefferson, the self-sufficient man—lived free, unencumbered, and in harmony with nature.  This ideal closely approximates the one Hemingway’s heroes in his fiction seek but do not find, as the complicated modern restraints impinge and can only be escaped at the moment of death, when the heart that beat to the sway of the Gulf Stream or against the pine-needled floor of the Spanish forest stops.

Bloody Bill and Bloody Sam

A pro-Confederate guerrilla fighter during the Civil War, William T. Anderson unleashed untamed brutality toward Union soldiers and pro-Union partisans that prompted the nickname Bloody Bill.   Film director and screenwriter Sam Peckinpah (1925–1984), whose explicit depiction of feral violence during the 1960s and ’70s evoked controversy, was called Bloody Sam.

“You Federals have just killed six of my soldiers, scalped them, and left them on the prairie,” Bloody Bill declared. Earlier, federal troops had murdered his father and sister and destroyed the family property.  “From this time forward, I ask no quarter and give none.  Every federal soldier on whom I put my finger shall die like a dog.”

On September 27th, 1864, Anderson presided over the slaughter of federal troops in Centralia Missouri.  Most all of the federal soldiers had been stripped naked and lay twisted and crooked in their death agonies, pinned down like bugs by bayonets, eyeless, earless and had dark oozing holes where their mouths had been.  Many lay with heads flattened into mush or smashed open like melons.  There were those with no heads, which had been cut off, stuck on rifle barrels, or placed atop fence posts and tree stumps like jack-o’-lanterns.  If a corpse had a head, it was likely someone else’s.  Here and there were bodies lacking hands and feet or arms and legs.  Worst of all was the naked body of a soldier whose genitals had been sawed off and stuffed into his mouth.  His contorted face testified that this had been done while he was alive.

Bloody Sam’s film Straw Dogs, distributed in 1971, tells the story of an American academic David Sumner on a research grant in Cornwall, England.   Sumner endures the ridicule, harassment, and cruelty of five men from the village who persist in the face of his posture of kindness and reasonableness and his attempts to placate and ingratiate them.  Things escalate to the point that two of the men rape Sumner’s wife and attack the house he is living in.  The half hour climax of the film depicts Sumner slaughtering them all, one by one, the last by ramming his head into a giant animal trap and springing its jaws on his neck.  Said Peckinpah, “David Sumner is a guy who finds out a few nasty secrets about the world and about his situation and about himself.”

Emily Dickinson

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

Robert Henri

Robert Henri (1865–1929)—pronounced Hen-rye, birth name Robert Cozad—was an American painter.  Shortly before his death, the Arts Council of New York chose him as one of the top three living American artists.  Henri was also a popular and influential teacher of art.  Henri’s ideas on art, life, and education were compiled from lecture notes by a student, Margery Ryerson, in a book entitled The Art Spirit, though Henri is listed as the author. Below are excerpts from the book.   Henri is not just talking about someone who creates paintings or sculptures; he is talking about a way to live in the world regardless of one’s vocation.

• The question of development of the art spirit in all walks of life interests me. I mean by this the development of individual judgment and taste, the love of work for the sake of doing things well, the tendency toward simplicity and order.
• When the art is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressive creature. He becomes interesting to other people. He disturbs, upsets, enlightens. He opens ways for a better understanding.  Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, he opens it.  He shows that there are still more pages to be read and to be written.
• Artists do not forget the present in looking backward or forward. They are occupied wholly with the fulfillment of their own existence. Because they are engaged in the full play of their own existence, in their own growth, their fruit is bountiful.
• Artists should study their own individuality to the end of knowing their tastes. They should cultivate the pleasures so discovered and find the most direct means of expressing those pleasures to others and thereby enjoy them over and over again.
• An artist can’t be honest unless he is wise. To be honest is to be just, and to be just is to realize the relative value of things. The faculties must play hard in order to seize the relative value of things.
• The best art the world has ever had was left by men who thought less of making great art than of living completely with all their faculties in the enjoyment of full play.
• Find out what is really important to you. Then sing your song. You will have something to sing about and your whole heart will be in the singing.
• What is life to you? What reasons and principles have you found? What are your deductions?  What projections have you made?  What excitement, what pleasure, do you get out of it?  I should like to see every encouragement for those who are fighting to open new ways.  I should like to see every living worker helped to do what he believes in the best he can.
• You have to make your statement of what is essential to you, an innate reality not a surface reality. Choose things seen and use them to make your statement.
• Reduce everything you see to the utmost simplicity. Let nothing but the things that are of the utmost importance to you have any place.
• Each individual needs to wake up and discover himself as a human being with needs of his own. He needs to look about, to learn from all sources, to look within, and to invent for himself a vehicle for self-expression.
• An artist must educate himself. He cannot be educated. He must test things out as they apply to himself. His life is one long investigation of things and his own reactions to them.
• All art that is worthwhile is a record of intense life. Each artist’s work is a record of his special effort, his search, his findings, in language that best expresses that. The significance of his work can only be understood by careful study: no crack-judgments; looking for the expected won’t do; and we can’t even trust the critics with the best reputations.
• The real artists are too busy with just being and growing and acting like themselves to worry about the end. The end will be as it is. Their object is intense living, fulfillment.

Jeannette Rankin

Jeannette Rankin (1880–1973) was the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives to represent an at-large district in Montana.   After she was elected, she said, “I may be the first woman member of Congress, but I won’t be the last.”  She was the only member of Congress who voted against declaring war on Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor.  When asked by incredulous interviewers how she could have done such a thing, she declared that war was a barbaric relic of the past and absurd and immoral, and that there are better ways to resolve international disputes than violence, and that she was not going to send mothers’ sons to be blown to bits in some distant land.  She was mocked and ridiculed and shunned and in the next election voted out of office.

Steve Ditko

Steve Ditko, who died in 2018, is deemed by cartoon insiders to have been one of the supreme stylists in the history of the form.  In the 1960s, Ditko drew Spider-Man, and as time went along, made both character and plot contributions to the Spider-Man series.  In his half-century career, Ditko worked on a number of other characters and series, including The Hulk, Iron Man, and Dr. Strange.

The success of the Spider-Man movies brought new prominence to Ditko’s work among the general public.  Then over eighty, Ditko was barely getting by on social security and a veteran’s pension.  He could have improved his financial stress by selling his original artwork and accepting private commissions to re-create his old work, but he would have none of that.  To Steve Ditko, there was a right way to do things and a wrong way.  It’s one or the other, right or wrong, period.  Things aren’t relative: what is right and true is right and true here, there, in the past, and now, and for you and me and everybody else, no qualifications, no exceptions.  He was determined to do things the right way regardless of the negative consequences that may result.   He refused to do anything that compromised his principles, his honor.

One’s work should reflect the outer edge of one’s current beliefs, insights, and commitments, thought Ditko.  Recreations of his old work would have been going backward.  When the Spider-Man films came out, he pressed for credit as the character’s artist, but he didn’t push for financial gain and made it clear that he had long since abandoned the character and was now engaged with other projects.

Ditko turned down lucrative work starting up the Star Line of children’s books over the issue of whether being heroic is a decision rather than an inherent part of the make-up of a few special individuals that can be revealed but not chosen.  He believed that being a hero isn’t a matter of special grace, something you are born with à la Superman.  Being a hero is something that every one of us can choose to become by the way we conduct our lives.  Even though it will likely take rigorous preparation and diligent hard work and personal fortitude to become a hero, it is nevertheless possible for all of us, in our own way and in our own circumstance, to be heroic.  We can do more than fall at the feet of heroes, insisted Ditko.   We can become heroes ourselves.

Ditko was asked to work on a new series called Dark Dominion.   Depicting the supernatural was a violation of his beliefs and he quickly ended his association with the project.  He also turned down an assignment drawing the Transformer coloring book anthology because the central character for the series was a vampire.  To Ditko, this life is it.  What you see is all there is.  What you do with this life is all there is going to be.  What you accomplish in your private and public existence and its consequences is the only legacy you will ever leave.

A comic book organization scheduled a ceremony to give Ditko an award for a distinguished career in comics, but he refused to attend.  He was honored in absentia, and without his knowledge or approval, someone accepted the award on his behalf.  Thinking Ditko would be pleased, the person who accepted the award sent it to him.  Ditko phoned him and said, “Awards bleed the artist and make us compete against each other.  How dare you accept this on my behalf!”   Ditko sent the award back.

Ditko, very old, and unwell, to the end, sat every day at his drawing board drawing pictures the best he could, in the most honest way he could, and self-published them.  He could have been working for major publishing outlets that had the resources to promote and distribute his creations effectively, but they wouldn’t do it in a way he believed in.  With no mainstream publishing outlet, very few people would get to see his work, but he did it anyway.

Hank Williams

Hear that lonesome whippoorwill
He sounds too blue to fly
The midnight train is whining low
I’m so lonesome I could cry

I’ve never seen a night so long
When time goes crawling by
The moon just went behind the clouds
To hide its face and cry

Did you ever see a robin weep
When leaves begin to die?
Like me, he’s lost the will to live
I’m so lonesome I could cry

The silence of a falling star
Lights up a purple sky
And as I wonder where you are
I’m so lonesome I could cry