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Alfred Rosenberg: The Overthrow of the Gentleman

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Translated and introduced by Alexander Jacob

This 1940 essay by Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946) serves as a supplement to Chamberlain’s 1914 essay on ‘England’ in his Kriegsaufsätze.[2] It continues Chamberlain’s delineation of the degeneration of the aristocratic English gentleman into an unscrupulous businessman with a characteristic National Socialist focus on the Jewish contribution to this degeneration. At the same time, it highlights the socialist, ‘worker’-oriented aspect of National Socialism in general.

Alfred Rosenberg: The Overthrow of the Gentleman[1]

When the French Revolution smashed an old system, there fell, along with the political regime, also a social type that had been exemplary for the French of that time: the chevalier. The chevalier was the perfectly formed courtier of the culture of his time. He represented what was then called French culture. In his attitude, his sceptical way of observing the world, devotion to the king, social sleekness, he was doubtless the model for several phenomena of the eighteenth century. To his honour one can say that this type of gallant nobleman bravely retained itself in the end against the regime of Terror. In France there entered in the place of this chevalier a no longer definable mixture of sated bourgeois and Jacobin imitator, especially a stock-exchange speculator — in short, the ideal of the man of private means.

What played itself out in France a hundred and fifty years ago is repeated now to a greater extent in England. Even here a social type is declining: the English gentleman. This gentleman has become increasingly the ideal of the entire British world empire, but the significance and conception of this gentleman seemed, besides, to be somehow worth striving for even among other states and peoples.

The gentleman was, from the start, a man provided with ample wealth, educated according to the rules of social self-discipline, a privileged man, who could make financial manoeuvres that were not innocent and yet within the limits of that which was accepted by society, a man who offended nowhere and acknowledged all the narrow, even if unwritten, laws of British social intercourse as an obvious principle of life. Becoming such a gentleman had become the ideal not only of some bourgeois English circles but, beyond that, of most Englishmen in general. This striving was doubtless so powerful that no social revolution could emerge with greater force because every leader of such workers’ movements inevitably fell under the spell of the gentlemen, was elevated by them, accepted and then absorbed by them. Increasingly the gentleman became the British type characteristic of a big capitalistic age for his existence was bound to abundant financial means. But abundant financial means were to be striven for in the last decades only through big industrial and financial undertakings, and the latter were once again dependent on the exploitative possibilities of a large colonial possession. In order to maintain a large stratum of such rich gentlemen millions and millions of people had to, all over the world, and in England itself, labour with their slave work. England went to war in 1914 in order to maintain this condition of the gentleman forever, and one has not wrongly said that Great Britain conducted the war for the sake of the leisurely long weekend! The advantages of this British type — considering democracy as a political fact — doubtless lay in the fact that a certain stratum was, on account of their property, politically independent and did not need to become so corrupt as the poor parliamentarian devils in France, whose purse had to be repeatedly filled to make them amenable to great transactions, whether it be the Panama scandal[3] or other great profiteering schemes. But the great disadvantages lie exposed today, for the gentleman stratum wishes in principle for the eternalisation of the world capitalistic condition and it finally implies a contempt for work as a decisive value.

At this point intervenes the National Socialist Revolution, whose vocation it is to replace the type of British gentleman living on the work of others with a modern German type of work, though possible for every nation. Work in this National Socialist ethos has once again been recognised as the great decisive value, the real touchstone of the creative and performative capacity of the individual. And therefore every work that takes place on German soil is worthy of respect. It would be an absolutely false, ‘lordly’, standpoint if one wished to declare that any work in Germany could not be done by a German because it would offend his ‘lordly’ consciousness. This standpoint, explicable in Africa and under tropical conditions, would be intolerable for the German nation because therewith the possibility of a class warfare would enter once again on the horizon. If we wished to represent any work on German soil as unworthy of a German, then immediately so many subjective views would gain ground and nobody knows when the evaluation would pass from a negative to a positive one. We must rather hold fast, precisely now, to our old National Socialist principle that every work honestly performed extends to the benefit of the entire Reich and nation, that therewith also every industrious work, even the smallest, possesses its value and its share in the entire national work. Obviously we are not levelling here in any way and know that social justice does not consist only in giving to each honest worker a social security corresponding to his work and in increasing this according to the increase in performance; but it is equally a part of social justice that great work performances be also honoured appropriately in front of the entire nation with regard to the bearer of this performance. Only this correlation ensures what we call a ranking of life conditioned by value (emphasis added), and it is at the same time a truly national social attitude. Only through this can it be prevented that at any time a caste arise once again, and it be made possible that that hard type of our battle period remains decisive in the future — in another selective form but one still conditioned by work performance — for the National Socialist attitude even in the time of peace that follows.

*   *   *

Even the British gentleman, before he disappears now from the stage as a social ideal, has undergone a change. He was earlier predominantly the independently operative politician; with increasing capitalistic development he became to a decisive degree a businessman, the business idea became finally predominant,[4] until Edward VII[5] allowed even the rich Jews to enter increasingly into this capitalistic gentlemen’s society and, in the end, helped, through clubs and the press, to bring in a quick degeneration. The German language has already observed this change through certain nuances. Whereas earlier one spoke of a gentleman in a certain respectful tone, one speaks today of ‘gents’, and certain types of the present ruling Englishmen arouse in us only contemptuous laughter. In this way it has proceeded to such an extent that ‘honourable man’ and ‘gentleman’, which were perhaps similar concepts a hundred years ago, are today so differentiated that they often signify opposites. And when they emphasise ever so eagerly in London that they are fighting for the ‘old British’ and ‘humanitarian’ ideal, the present age is sufficiently enlightened about the actual facts of the social and political development to be able to view certain types of Great Britain today as real representatives of phenomena that were possible and understandable earlier. For, earlier, even dubious lapses were tempered by a certain moderation; today, British representatives have lost all form, and therewith all synoptic vision and attitude.

Today, we may say, to speak personally, that many outstanding people are definitely not honourable men but recent ‘gentlemen’ who are bound to the Jews. That is, personally, an insult but, in a social sense, a symbolic confirmation of an actual condition of social and political degeneracy. Whether it can still be changed is a question for the future. And so the faded gentleman must, like the French chevalier in the eighteenth century, disappear as an ideal worthy striving for, because the nations search for and wish to develop out of a new ethos also a new form of life.

[1] “Die Überwindung des Gentleman,” Völkischer Beobachter, 30 June, 1940.

[2] See “Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s England ,”Occidental Observer, December 13, 2021.

[3] The Panama scandal resulted from the floating of a lottery loan by the French Panama Canal Company to overcome a financial crisis in 1888. French parliamentarians were accused of taking bribes to vote for this loan, and the bribery was organised principally by the Jews, Baron Jacques de Reinach, Léopold Arton and Cornélius Herz. The loan itself proved incapable of preventing the collapse of the Panama company in 1889.

[4] Cf. H.S. Chamberlain’s comment on the degeneration of the British gentleman in A. Jacob, ‘Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s “England”, Occidental Observer, December 13, 2021: ‘This crudeness has slowly imbued almost the entire nation from the bottom to the top — as is always the case. Even fifty years ago it was an offence against class dignity if a member of the nobility took part in industry, trade and finance; today, the head of the oldest and greatest house of Scotland, brother-in-law of the king, a banker!’

[5] King Edward VII (1841-1910) was the eldest son of Queen Victoria was groomed by his parents to be the ‘first gentleman of the country’ and became an arbiter of men’s fashions in his time (see Maurice Muret, The Greatness of Elites, tr. Alexander Jacob, Arktos, 2022, forthcoming, Ch.V).

 

Stress Test for a Fading Superpower

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And as we went crusading for a new world order, Vladimir Putin’s Russia gradually recovered from its crushing Cold War defeat, and China began to move out of America’s shadow to become the most powerful rival modern America had ever faced.

Because America entered both world wars of the 20th century last, while all the other great powers bled one another, and because we outlasted the Soviet Empire in the Cold War, America emerged, in the term of President George H.W. Bush, as “the last superpower.”

We had it all. We were the “indispensable nation.” We saw further into the future. We could impose our “benevolent global hegemony” on all mankind. And so it was that we set out to create a “new world order,” plunging into successive wars in Iraq, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Syria, Libya, Yemen.

So doing, we bled ourselves, distracted ourselves, exhausted ourselves and sundered ourselves, until half the country was echoing George McGovern’s 1972 campaign slogan: “Come home, America.”

And as we went crusading for a new world order, Vladimir Putin’s Russia gradually recovered from its crushing Cold War defeat, and China began to move out of America’s shadow to become the most powerful rival modern America had ever faced.

Now, U.S. hegemony is being everywhere challenged — in Eastern Europe, the Near East, Southeast Asia, East Asia. And the challenges arise from autocrats united in their resolve to reduce the power and the presence of the United States in their part of the world.

All of America’s adversaries have something in common: They want us out of their neighborhood.

After President Joe Biden’s humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, Ukraine is the site of the latest challenge, triggered by Russia’s deployment of some 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders.

Given that he caused this crisis, Putin is unlikely to withdraw all his forces without visible assurances that Ukraine never becomes a member of NATO. And, given that no NATO ally or neighbor of Ukraine has shown a disposition to fight Russia for Ukraine, Putin is likely ultimately to prevail.

Neither Georgia nor Ukraine will soon be invited to join NATO, no matter the “open door” policy of the alliance.

And as Putin is committed to creating a sphere of influence where no next-door neighbor is a NATO ally, we are probably only at the beginning of a series of crises over the exclusion of nations from the alliance.

A second member of the global anti-American front is Iran.

The U.S. and Iran are said to be close to renewing the nuclear deal from which former President Donald Trump walked away. Yet, the persistent threat from Iran and its radical allies like the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Shia militia in Syria and Iraq, and Hezbollah in Lebanon is likely to complicate any U.S. effort to extricate ourselves from a Middle East that has consumed so much of our attention and resources since 9/11.

In East Asia, China has begun anew sending military aircraft into the Air Defense Identification Zone of Taiwan, and it has never relinquished its claim to that island of 24 million and former U.S. ally. After the Ukraine crisis is resolved, Taiwan is likely to soon be back on the front burner.

If we would not fight Russia on behalf of Ukraine, why would we go to war with China to defend the independence of Taiwan, when, 50 years ago this month, President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger declared Taiwan to be “a part of China”?

North Korea has resumed testing its cruise and ballistic missiles. And Pyongyang is not going to hold off forever the testing of nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The question here is how far off is the next confrontation. And, as there is no U.S. national disposition to fight for Ukraine, it is hard to believe that, 70 years after sending 350,000 troops to South Korea, we would send an army of that size to again fight the North.

Bottom line: The balance of power is constantly shifting. And in this new century, it has been shifting in favor of America’s adversaries, all of whom wish to see us diminished.

Where former President George W. Bush warned of an “axis of evil” that included Iraq, Iran and North Korea, its successor today includes Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, a far more formidable axis. Moreover, America’s relative power and willingness to use it is far diminished from what it was in George Bush’s day.

The new correlation of forces:

North Korea has become a full-fledged nuclear power with intercontinental ballistic missiles that can hit the USA. Russia’s armed forces are more imposing than they were two decades ago. China has swept past every rival power to the United States, while America’s allies are less powerful and less united behind it.

Meanwhile, America has run up a national debt larger than the entire U.S. economy. Its trade deficits are at record levels. Its borders are being overrun by migrants from all over the world. And its disposition to intervene, engage and fight for democracy has rarely been lower.

The global stress test of the last superpower is on, and it is not likely we will pass it with a grade as high as the one we had earned by the Cold War’s end.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.” To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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It’s Hate White History Month!

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TOO has now contracted to syndicate Ann Coulter’s columns. I’ve always been a big fan of her writing and her appearances in the media—witty but also spot on when it comes to almost everything we care about. There’s an obvious reason why she has been banned from the mainstream media, including, as far as I know, Fox News. Her column posted here has special resonance for me. She asks: “Why did slavery end so much sooner in white Christian countries?” Two chapters in my book Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition deal with the end of slavery in the West. The basic idea is that individualists are less connected to kinship groups and more likely to feel empathy for suffering others, in this case Africans, whether or not they are members of the same kinship group. But the abolitionist movement was indeed embedded within a Christian religious context. From Chapter 7, from the section on Evangelical Anglicans:

Evangelical Anglicans were motivated by moral outrage at slavery combined with strong ideological overtones based on a religious worldview. Unlike the Quakers or Methodists, they “enjoyed prominence and social standing,”[1] and were thus in a better position to alter the attitudes and behavior of elites. The principle figures are Rev. Thomas Clarkson (the principle activist, an effective writer, and a bridge between the Evangelical Anglicans and the Quakers), Rev. James Ramsey (the preeminent writer and pamphleteer), William Wilberforce (the leader of abolitionist forces in Parliament), Hannah More (the writer and philanthropist who, as noted above, first used the phrase “Age of Benevolence”), Beilby Porteus (an influential Anglican bishop), Elizabeth Bouverie (a wealthy benefactress), and Admiral Charles and Margaret Middleton (the latter a wealthy, pious benefactress who “insisted that Barham Court [Middleton’s estate in Teston] serve as a space for conversations about slavery”[2]); she is regarded as a formative force among the Evangelical Anglicans.

While empathy for the slaves is quite apparent in their writings and comments, there was also a strong religious emphasis—a universalist ideology in which all humans were created by God and candidates for eternal salvation.[3] “The Evangelical revivalists sometimes overlooked racial and ethnic difference more readily. There were important differences in theology and in practice among the Evangelical sects. Yet they possessed a shared tendency to assume the spiritual equality of black men and women.”[4]

Indeed, in his book, An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (1784), Rev. James Ramsey emphasized the intellectual and moral equality of the African slaves: “I shall assert the claim of Negroes to attention from us, by explaining their natural capacity, and proving them to be on a footing of equality in respect of the reception of mental improvement, with the natives of any other country.”[5] Ramsey’s book was influential and well-reviewed in elite publications, but provoked “paroxysms of outrage” from the West Indies interests.”[6] By 1788 even pro-slavery tracts conceded the basic moral premise of the abolitionists, for example, noting “that slavery is an evil no man can deny” or “no man condemns, as an abstract proposition, more than I the command over the lives and properties of their fellow creatures.”[7]

Nevertheless, with authority deriving from his experience of having lived nearly 20 years in the West Indies and as a former slaveholder himself, Ramsey provided graphic descriptions of the oppression of the slaves clearly designed to evoke empathy. Slave owners are “accustomed from their infancy to trifle with the feelings and smile at the miseries of wretches born to be the drudges of their avarice and slaves of their caprice.”[8] He describes slaves getting “twenty lashes of a long cart whip” for minor failures in carrying out the daily task of gathering grass for domestic animals.[9] The cart whip, “in the hands of a skillful driver, cuts out flakes of skin and flesh with every stroke; and the wretch in this mangled condition, is turned out to work in dry or wet weather, which last, now and then, brings on the cramp, and ends his slavery altogether.”[10]  There are detailed descriptions of the punishments given to slaves, often for trifling offenses. The dangers of work on the sugar plantations are also described, such as arms being cut off in the machinery, the danger made worse because overworked slaves were so exhausted from lack of sleep. …

Based on the ideology of moral universalism, the desirability of bringing slaves within the Christian fold was paramount. This ideology rationalized strong social controls aimed to rein in the planters. The Evangelical Anglicans proposed to achieve their aims by effecting, “in the words of Bishop Beilby Porteus, the institution of ‘fixed laws’ and ‘police’ to restrain abusive slaveholders and for initiatives that would provide the enslaved ‘protection, security, encouragement, improvement, and conversion.’”[14] Porteus was greatly affected by the descriptions of the treatment of slaves: “for him the treatment of British slaves had become by 1784 a measure of collective virtue.”[15]

Ann Coulter: It’s Hate White History Month!

It’s Hate White History Month!

Last week, we covered the monumental lack of self-awareness of liberals denouncing others as “snowflakes,” even as they force Amazon to remove books, tear down historical monuments, hide black suspects’ race, and demand the immediate firing of anyone who mentions black performance on standardized tests.

This week, we’ll cover the left’s claim that they are teaching “history.”

Terrified that their hate-America curricula have been discovered by parents and politicians, liberals hysterically accuse them of opposing the teaching of “history.”

As MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid put it: “Like, it is a problem for old Ron DeSantis, because I think what he’s saying is that he believes that the white citizens of Florida are too snowflaky, too sensitive, too scared, and not strong enough to handle actual facts about history.”

In fact, the precise objection to critical race theory is that it doesn’t include anything resembling “facts.” Instead, it’s wacko conspiracy theories dreamed up by the stupidest people in academia to justify their “diversity” jobs.

The primer for the CRT nonsense is The New York Times’ idiotic “1619 Project,” which holds that slavery in America is the single most important event in the history of the world!  Yes, apparently, America was founded on slavery; the reason Americans fought the Revolutionary War was to protect slavery; the engine of our prosperity is slavery; the cause of black suffering to this day (and those low SAT scores) is slavery.

American History = Slavery

Upon the Times’ publication of this hastily assembled paper out of the Black Studies Department, dozens of actual historians — across the political spectrum — rebuked the Times for printing ahistorical gibberish. (They didn’t put it that way, of course. The historians’ objections were phrased with extravagant respect, because — well, you know … Nikole Hannah-Jones: SNOWFLAKE!)

Among the first historians to object were 12 Civil War historians, who wrote a joint letter to the Times, politely correcting some of the wildest claims of the “1619 Project.”

Absolutely devoted to historical accuracy and open dialogue, the Times responded by refusing to print their letter. The 1619 Project — with the Times’ imprimatur — was promptly distributed to schools throughout the nation, where it is taught today.

Although most of K-12 education is dedicated to reliving slavery, it would be unfair to say that it’s all that’s taught. There’s also Jim Crow, Selma, Rosa Parks, Little Rock, Emmett Till, redlining, John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr., Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali and Black Girl Magic.

Also, Christopher Columbus was a terrorist, European settlers committed genocide against “Indigenous Peoples,” everything whites have accomplished they stole from People of Color, and so on.

With the surfeit of “Whites R Evil” lessons, there’s barely even time to get to the gay porn! (From one library book in a Fairfax, Texas, high school: “I can’t wait to have your c*** in my mouth. I am going to give you the blowjob of your life, and then I want you inside me. … I sucked Doug Goble’s d***, the real estate guy, and he sucked mine too.” If that’s OK for teenagers — as every major media outlet assures me it is! — then it’s more than OK for my column.)

When parents objected to the filth in their kids’ schools, MSNBC and CNN began running nightly specials on MODERN-DAY BOOK-BURNING! (Now try to buy from Amazon — with your own money, of your choice, as a free American — Jean Raspail’s “Camp of the Saints,” Ryan Anderson’s “When Harry Became Sally” or any book by Jared Taylor or David Cole.)

Parents would be tickled pink if teachers ever got around to teaching “actual facts about history.” The problem is: They’re doing nothing of the sort. What they’re doing is jamming anti-American propaganda down kids’ throats. In fact, if schools ever taught “actual facts about history,” liberals would squeal louder than when gay porn is removed from taxpayer-supported public high school libraries.

I have some “actual facts about history” that ought to be taught. This will be the first in a series.

Slavery has existed everywhere — practiced with most enthusiasm, brutality and longevity (13 centuries) by the Arabs. Barbary pirates kidnapped more than a million white European slaves from captured ships — as well as directly off the streets of European ports. Nearly a century before Columbus set sail, Arab traders had brought back 4 million slaves from West Africa, according to William Phillips, author of the book “Slavery From Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade.”

The descendants of those slaves aren’t getting affirmative action at the Moorish Harvard or given preference for a seat on the Islamic Supreme Court. Among other reasons, the vast majority of their ancestors were castrated and murdered.

On the “intersectionality” front, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole all had African slaves. The Trail of Tears is littered with black slaves — those who were not shipped ahead of their Indian masters to await them in Oklahoma.

Slavery still exists today in many, many parts of the world — especially Africa. According to the Global Slavery Index, “Modern slavery is most prevalent in Africa, followed by Asia and the Pacific region.”

Lesson Plan:

1. Why did slavery end so much sooner in white Christian countries?

2. Are countries run by Muslims, Buddhists or voodoo doctors more or less likely to recognize human rights than Christian nations?

3. Why would your teachers refuse to tell you about slavery among the “Indigenous” peoples?

4. A Smithsonian magazine article about the Trail of Tears is titled, “How Native American Slaveholders Complicate the Trail of Tears Narrative.” What’s the “narrative”?

5. In your other readings, have you found that the sins of whites and Christians are comically exaggerated, while those of nonwhites and non-Christians are buried in a lead casket and dropped in the middle of the sea?

COPYRIGHT 2022 ANN COULTER
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[1] Ibid., 341.

[2] Ibid., 349.

[3] Ibid., 349.

[4] Ibid., 66.

[5] James Ramsey, An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies, xvii.

[6] Brown, Moral Capital, 366.

[7] In Ibid., 369,

[8] Ramsey, An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies, 67.

[9] Ibid., 70.

[10] Ibid., 74–75.

[11] Ibid., 3.

[12] Ibid., 4.

[13] Brown, Moral Capital, 442.

[14] Ibid., 352.

[15] Ibid., 357.

 

 

Israel: A Refuge for Swindlers

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Criminal proceeds recovered from a mass Israeli-run fraud ring by French police, 2020.

“Most of the Jews are thieves.” Thus said the founding father of Israel, David Ben Gurion, when he heard about Jewish soldiers carrying Persian rugs from freshly looted Arab properties during the Arab-Israeli war. If he were around today, I don’t think Ben Gurion would find any reason to radically change his opinion, and he probably wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Israel has become a hub of international fraud. A recent hit for Netflix is the documentary The Tinder Swindler, which charts the outlandish career of Israeli con artist Shimon Hayut, the son of a rabbi, who manipulated a large number of predominantly Scandinavian women into collectively handing over more than $10 million. Hayut’s modus operandi is that old favorite of Jewish white-collar criminals — the Ponzi scheme, though Hayut inflected it with a romantic twist. Using the alias Simon Leviev on the dating app Tinder, Hayut told his gullible victims that he was the son of Lev Leviev, CEO of one of the world’s largest diamond traders. He would initially lavish the women with gifts and trips on private jets (funded by a previous victim), before introducing the idea that he was under threat from unspecified enemies, that his financial accounts had been inexplicably locked, and that he needed “loans” from the women that he would repay many times over when an “imminent deal” worth many millions was completed. The women were pressured into requesting, and then extending, bank loans in their own names, often until they were as much as $300,000 in debt. Once Hayut had extracted the maximum possible funds from a woman, he would begin using some of it to groom a new victim. Moving from woman to woman, and country to country, Hayut lived a lifestyle of private jets, international travel, caviar, and designer clothes until a Norwegian newspaper finally helped secure his arrest in Greece in 2019 for using a fake passport. He was then sent to Israel, where authorities released him after just five months. He remains a free man in Israel, and appears as wealthy as ever.

While the now-viral Netflix documentary is very interesting and well-made, it does a very poor job of contextualizing and framing Hayut’s behavior. Hayut’s career of fraud is presented solely in terms of the perils of online dating, and, ludicrously, as a kind of feminist revenge tale (despite the fact the women fell into Hayut’s clutches in part through their own thirst for a lavish lifestyle, and the final justice served on Hayut was ridiculously weak to say the least). Very little is made of the fact Hayut began his career in fraud as a teenager, sparking questions of cultural influence, and there is no comment at all on the peculiar manner in which Hayut seemed to target Scandinavian women in particular. But the more egregious oversight is surely that Hayut fits incredibly well into a pattern that is absurdly common — the ubiquity of Israeli con artists of international reach, and their habit of finding a very accommodative justice system in the State of Israel.

An Israeli Specialty

International fraud of all kinds is an Israeli specialty. Israel’s Money Laundering and Terror Financing Prohibition Authority receives frequent requests for information from financial intelligence units in at least 19 countries around the world. The main crimes that are the focal point of these requests are “money laundering, fraud, particularly investment scams, binary options and forex scams, bribery and corruption, forgery and illegal gambling.” If there is a way for someone to be parted from their money, you can be sure there is an Israeli working very hard to accomplish it.

In June 2021, an operation led by German police secured the arrest of ten Jews of various nationalities for operating fake investment sites that defrauded European investors of around $36 million. In a fraud scheme that Europol said was “organized mainly by Israeli nationals,” the criminals operated the fake investment sites Tradorax, Tradervc, Kayafx, Kontofx and Libramarkets. Tradorax used the platform supplied by Israel’s SpotOption, which was charged with fraud by the US Securities and Exchange Commission in April 2021. According to Europol, the Jewish network lured thousands of victims through advertising on social media and search engines. These victims were then encouraged to invest in high-risk options, CFDs or cryptocurrencies. However, according to German police, the money was never actually invested but simply taken by the Jews involved. During raids in several countries, police seized electronic devices, real estate, jewelry, high-end vehicles and approximately $2.4 million in cash.

The case was reminiscent of the story of the Canadian-Israeli Cartu brothers. In May 2020, the Ontario Securities Commission brought civil charges against David, Jonathan, and Joshua Cartu for soliciting Canadians to trade binary options. The trio scammed residents of Ontario alone out of $1.4 million, but the total value of their globally-operated scheme was estimated at $233 million. The brothers live lavishly today in Israel, safe in the knowledge that “Israeli prosecutors have yet to indict a single binary options suspect on charges of fraud.” The Times of Israel points out that the brothers’ story is only part of a much wider scenario in which “hundreds of companies in Israel employed thousands of Israelis who allegedly fleeced billions out of victims worldwide.”

8 Israelis arrested in the Philippines in 2018 for operating a multi-million dollar scam

Five months ago, 26 Israelis were arrested for running a cryptocurrency fraud scheme that targeted US investors. The suspects, known as the ‘Wolves of Tel Aviv,’ were said to be marketing products and investments, without providing returns, and keeping the victims’ money. According to a police statement, “all of the 26 suspects of the alleged fraud are residents of Israel, and the victims all live abroad.” The Israeli news station i24News commented that “Israel has been a major hub of online fraud in recent years.” A month after the arrest of the ‘Wolves of Tel Aviv,’ a further eight Israelis were arrested, including Moshe Hogeg, who owns the Beitar Jerusalem soccer club. Israeli police said the group were detained on suspicion of “of cryptocurrency fraud of as much as hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars.”

A Criminals’ Paradise

A poor history of complying with extradition requests together with generous tax breaks for millionaires has resulted in Israel, and Tel Aviv in particular, being perceived as a criminals’ paradise. Remarking on Israel’s “massive fraudulent online and scam industry” and its potential to “undermine Israel’s economic reputation and stoke anti-Semitism,” the Times of Israel pointed out that a 2008 piece of legislation had acted as a “a nudge and a wink to would-be tax evaders and money launderers worldwide to settle in Israel and launder their money here.” The law grants a 10-year tax exemption on income earned abroad to olim hadashim (new immigrants) as well as toshavim hozrim vatikim (returning residents who have lived abroad for at least 10 years) and other eligible new residents. It also gives a 10-year exemption on reporting earnings abroad to people in these categories. It’s a magnet for Jewish thieves.

Last week, plastic surgeon David Morrow and his wife Linda, dubbed “The Jewish Bonnie and Clyde,” faced the American justice system two years after it was discovered the pair had been operating one of the most extensive and sickening health care frauds in California history. In total, the Morrows are thought to have cost insurance companies between $25 million and $65 million for procedures that were medically unnecessary. According to the Jerusalem Post,

They were active and highly respected members of the Orthodox Jewish communities in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles and Palm Springs and very generous contributors to Jewish causes. … They were arrested in California on charges of cheating health insurance companies of more than “tens of millions of dollars for cosmetic procedures that were not medically necessary,” according to the US Attorney’s Central District of California office of the Department of Justice. Add to that a guilty plea of conspiring to commit mail fraud and filing a false tax return, Dr. Morrow was in huge trouble. He was sentenced in absentia to 20 years in federal prison and had his medical license revoked. In her ruling, Judge Josephine L. Staton noted that Morrow’s “greed knew no bounds,” and that he showed an “utter disregard for patients’ well-being and safety.”

The pair were sentenced in absentia because they quickly liquidated their assets and moved to Israel where they could be among their co-ethnics and not have their wealth probed or questioned. According to locals in Israel, before the FBI finally orchestrated a rare extradition (for Linda — David is still fighting the case from an Israeli prison) “they were very active in the congregation, went to shiurim (classes) and synagogue functions.”

In 2017, the Times of Israel commented on the arrest of “35 individuals for allegedly running a network of scam boiler rooms.” The gang operated secret call centers inside residential apartments in the cities of Ashkelon, Ashdod, and Netanya, defrauding people in Europe and North America with a variety of different scams. One method was the CEO scam, where the fraudsters impersonated senior executives in a European company and persuaded employees to wire money to the Jews’ Israeli bank accounts. Other employees called companies in Europe selling goods and services that never materialized. A government prosecutor worried that “The phenomenon has become a national scourge in both Israel and abroad. It is causing damage to the reputation of the state of Israel as well as to Jews in other countries.” The Times of Israel remarked that many of those arrested were Jews from America and France, and that they were assisted by “thousands of Israelis.”

The most prominent example, of course, is the so-called “sting of the century,” in which over 1 billion euros was stolen via a tax scam between November 2008 and June 2009 from the French government. The theft was carried out by French Jews Arnaud Mimran, Marco Mouly, and Samy Souied from a Tel Aviv office. The trio were assisted by a significant number of co-ethnics, with the Times of Israel reporting that “six of the defendants were tried in absentia and are believed to be living in Israel.” In a May 2016 interview with the Times of Israel, Laurent Combourieu, director of investigations for the the Autoritй des marchйs financiers (AMF), France’s securities authority, said that there is overlap between the French-Israeli citizens who were involved in tax fraud carried out against the French government from Israel, and the perpetrators of the ongoing wave of online trading fraud targeting French speakers. In the past six years, according to the Paris prosecutor, French citizens had lost 4.5 billion euros to online trading and CEO scams, with many of these perpetrated from Israel.

That Israel is a hub for Jewish international criminality is further indicated by a random sampling of the bank accounts of new immigrants who had moved to Israel between 2008–2012, carried out by the Israeli state comptroller. It was found that “one in six were found to have irregular activity that caused the bank to flag them for suspected money laundering.” In 2013, the OECD Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes pressured Israel to cancel the exemption from filing tax returns by new immigrants and veteran returning residents, in an effort to remove what many saw as a clear incentive to international criminality. Israel agreed to change their legislation in May of that year, but almost nine years later it has yet to do so. In the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR) issued by the U.S. State Department, Israel is discussed as a “a major money-laundering country.” The report adds that

Israel’s ‘right of return’ citizenship laws mean that criminal figures find it easy to obtain an Israeli passport without meeting long residence requirements. It is not uncommon for criminal figures suspected of money laundering to hold passports in a home country, a third country for business, and Israel.

Some Considerations

Writing in Mein Kampf, Hitler argued during a discussion of Zionism that “What [Jews] really are aiming at is to establish a central organization for their international swindling and cheating. As a sovereign State, this cannot be controlled by any of the other States. Therefore it can serve as a refuge for swindlers who have been found out and at the same time a high-school for the training of other swindlers.” All things considered, this is obviously a very prescient comment that has an undeniable ring of truth in light of the facts presented above. Far from being an example of fortune-telling, however, the prediction rests on what would today be regarded as certain anti-Semitic assumptions based on stereotypical traits associated with Jews.

The first of these assumptions is that Jews have a special relationship with, or interest in, money. Assuming an ethnic group has a special relationship with, or interest in, money would obviously lead one to predict a number of things. The group might be, on average, wealthier than other groups. It might produce more billionaires. Its criminality might also be reflected less in violent offences than in those most directly correlated with the acquisition of wealth. By most metrics, Jews are indeed wealthier than other groups. In regards to crime, there is also a clear skewing towards wealth acquisition. In 1971 A. Menachem of the Berkeley School of Criminology published a study in Issues in Criminology titled “Criminality Among Jews: An Overview.”[1] In this study, Menachem argued that ‘the Jewish crime rate tends to be higher than that of non-Jews and other religious groups for white-collar offenses, that is, commercial or commercially related crimes, such as fraud, fraudulent bankruptcy, and embezzlement.”

In 1988, Yale University’s Stanton Wheeler published “White-Collar Crimes and Criminals” for the Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. Among Wheeler’s findings were that while Protestants and Catholics were under-represented among white-collar criminals relative to their share of the population, Jews were over-represented to a very large degree (2 percent of the population, 15.2 percent of white-collar convictions). Wheeler states that “It would be a fair summary of our data to say that, demographically speaking, white-collar offenders are predominantly middle-aged white males with an over-representation of Jews.” While Stanton’s statistics are enlightening in themselves, a more detailed picture emerges in David Weisburd’s Yale-published Crimes of the Middle Classes: White-Collar Offenders in the Federal Courts (1991). Here Weisburd informs us that although Jews comprise only around 2 percent of the United States population, they contribute at least 9 percent of lower category white-collar crimes (bank embezzlement, tax fraud and bank fraud), at least 15 percent of moderate category white-collar crimes (mail fraud, false claims, and bribery), and at least 33 percent of high category white-collar crimes (antitrust and securities fraud). Weisburg’s updated data showed that overall, Jews were responsible for an astonishing 23.9 percent of financial crime in America.[2] Given the statistical data, not to mention the well-charted historical trajectory of Jewish financial behavior,[3] the argument that a Jewish predilection for financial misdeeds is a mere “canard” is unsustainable.

Desiring to acquire wealth, and actually acquiring it either legitimately or illegally, are obviously two different things. Jews are equipped for wealth acquisition, including criminal wealth acquisition, through the same background traits that facilitate their efficiency in social and political activism: ethnocentrism, intelligence, psychological intensity, and aggression.[4]

Ethnocentrism clearly plays a large role in international Jewish scams based in Israel. Many of these large-scale frauds are perpetrated by groups consisting of Americans, Bulgarians, Canadians, Romanians, Italians, and so on, whose only substantial common ground is their shared ethno-religious background. Criminal activity is inherently risky, so the level of trust among individuals from such varied national groups is all the more astonishing. Coupled with the almost exclusive targeting of outgroups (U.S. citizens, Canadians, Europeans, and others), the clannish quality of these Jewish groups drawn from the diaspora and based in Israel emphasizes the strength of Jewish ethnocentrism as a foundational base for Israeli international financial crime. In a further demonstration of Jewish ethnocentrism, or trust in one’s co-ethnics, the flight of many international Israeli swindlers to Israel, or their “disappearance” in the state, suggests a level of comfort and expectation from other Jews. Jews who have defrauded outgroups really do expect the government and state of Israel to be their refuge, and very often, through lenient sentences or lack of investigation, they are proved correct in having that expectation.

Intelligence is also key to the success and perpetuation of Israeli-based international fraud. Many of the schemes discussed above are relatively complex, requiring high levels of understanding of international financial markets, banking practices, legal loopholes, differing national standards and legislation, web and software design, search engine optimization, and all of the skills associated with money laundering. As mentioned above, Israelis are responsible for some of the biggest thefts in the financial history of several nations, often involving government-level fraud. These frauds have been executed thanks to the input of large numbers of highly intelligent and multi-skilled Jews who dedicated themselves to the criminal acquisition of wealth.

This extreme dedication to wealth acquisition is obviously driven by significant psychological intensity. In many cases, the frauds required an extraordinary level of audacity, e.g., involving the impersonation of major CEOs or even government figures. In one such example, in 2019 an Israeli scam operation obtained around $90 million after impersonating French foreign minister Jean-Yves le Drian, calling African heads of state, ambassadors, clergy and business figures, and asking them to help France pay ransom for French citizens abducted by ISIL or other terrorist groups in Syria. The impersonator donned a custom-designed silicone mask of the French minister’s head and spoke to his targets via Skype from an office decorated with the French flag and a portrait of French Prime Minister Emanuel Macron. The four ringleaders were eventually arrested in Netanya, which seems to be second only to Tel Aviv in the number of international scams it has hosted. The French were sufficiently incensed for an Israeli police officer to tell a local judge that ““This is a case with international diplomatic repercussions. This is not an ordinary case but one with great international sensitivities that has caused a diplomatic incident between our two countries.” The Times of Israel laments that “An Internet search for ‘scam’ and ‘Israel’ in French yields hundreds of articles, many of which are accompanied by anti-Semitic slurs in the comments section. … Despite the damage such fraudulent activities are doing to Israel’s reputation, Israeli law enforcement has made very few arrests and prosecuted even fewer suspects in the decade or more since the phenomenon first arose.”

Finally, Israeli international financial crime requires aggression. An interesting aspect of The Tinder Swindler involved the manner in which Shimon Hayut dropped the veil once he realized a particular woman had given him all the money she could or would. Threats and insults were immediate. The fundamental drive behind most of the discussed Jewish International scams is aggressive, involving forms of coercion and manipulation against a backdrop of callous disregard and disdain for the targeted outgroups. These aggressive aspects, of course, only highlight those instances in which some of the ill-gotten proceeds, as in the case of the Morrows for example, generously find their way to Jewish charitable causes — which brings us full circle to ethnocentrism.

The concern shown by the Israeli press, and some government officials, that such activity will lead to an increase in anti-Semitism is based for the most part on the implicit understanding that “anti-Semitic” assumptions about the traits associated with Jews (special interest in money, ethnocentrism, intelligence, psychological intensity, and aggression) have a basis in fact. Such concerns also imply the fear that wider knowledge or discussion of these large-scale frauds based in Israel will undo many decades of propaganda that has convinced outgroups that such assumptions are false or bigoted, and that Israel is a natural friend and ally to Western nations. The reality is that Israel is happy to welcome internationally looted funds into its economy, and cares little for the opinion of other nations. The nation’s founder wouldn’t be surprised.

[1] A. Menachem, “Criminality Among Jews: An Overview,” Issues in Criminality, Volume 6, Issue 2, (Summer 1971), 1-39.

[2] D. Weisburg, Crimes of the Middle Classes: White-Collar Offenders in the Federal Courts (Yale University Press, 1991), 72

[3] For example, across Europe, between 1881 and 1914, Jews were over-represented in bankruptcy, forgery, fraud and libel. See P. Knepper, The Invention of International Crime: A Global Issue in the Making, 1881-1914, (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 80. The trend, of course, went much further back in history.

[4] K. MacDonald, “Background Traits for Jewish Activism,” The Occidental Quarterly: A Journal of Western Thought and Opinion (Summer 2003): 1-37.

The Death of White Philosophy

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The current dismantling of academic Humanities subjects across the West was always going to target philosophy. The charge sheet is by now familiar and reducible to one piece of evidence; Western philosophy was written by White men. This is now all the requirement a discipline requires to be defenestrated.

Western philosophy, from the pre-Socratics to the 2oth century, was indeed an exclusively White affair (the north African St. Augustine possibly excepted). Accordingly, for the progressives who wish to cull all record of Caucasian achievement, philosophy’s pure ethnic heritage is emblematic of historical racism and White supremacy, and so must be consigned to history.

The far Left have an uneasy relationship with history. They need it as it is a rich crop of White evil which yields a harvest of Black and White Liberal grievance. But they also require a revisionist version, a pop-up edition of history in which Blacks and Muslims invented everything from the plough to the Large Hadron Collider, taking breaks only to invent movable type and the internet, while Whites beat their slaves and gloated over their cotton margins. A new history book is what the far Left want, also the dream of Jacobins, Bolsheviks and Maoists. Well, if the revised edition of history does not include White Western philosophy and intellectual history, then to tweak a famous phrase from the film Jaws, we’re going to need a smaller library.

Philosophy had fallen out of favour culturally long before the ‘woke’ assault of the last decade. The last time there was a series on philosophy on TV in the UK was probably Bryan Magee’s Men of Ideas in the early 1980s. Philosophy simply can’t function in the current intellectual atmosphere. As a pursuit, it was never intended for the masses and now if something cannot be sold to the public it has no value. You can’t dumb down philosophy.

Historically, the schism between Western philosophy and science/technology during the Enlightenment bequeathed to philosophy the abstractions remaining after natural philosophy went its own way. Philosophy was left with metaphysics, morality, language and history. It could build no bridges, invent no engines, discover no surgical techniques. Accordingly, philosophy retired from the consultative capacity it had held within society and retreated to the universities, insular and remote like the students of the fictional city Castalia in Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, and becoming a far more antiquarian affair. In the 20th century, despite the razzmatazz of existentialism, structuralism, post-modernism and other fashions, philosophy finally sickened and died, and now the legions of woke have arrived at the battlefield to bayonet the corpse.

For anyone of even a mildly conservative tendency, philosophy is a part of the old world, wise and challenging and worthy of respect. For the intellectually negligible ideologues who now effectively run Western academia, philosophy is also a part of the old world, but one to be swept away just as Mao’s Cultural Revolution was designed to destroy much of China’s cultural heritage in order to rid the empire of the ‘Four Olds’: old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas. In quite another context, Nietzsche writes in Schopenhauer as Educator: “I believe in all seriousness that it is to the state’s advantage to have nothing further to do with philosophy.”

There is also a vestigial trace of class enmity in the stripping of philosophy’s medals. Epictetus may have been a slave, Spinoza a lens-grinder, and Wittgenstein a hospital porter in London during WW2, but philosophers have generally come from the moneyed and even aristocratic class. At one time, Leftist cultural revolutionaries would have sniped at philosophy on behalf of the working class. But that working class is now too White, and progressives have found a new pet.

The banishing of philosophy has an additional benefit for the curricular revolutionaries; it saves actually reading it. So there is no need for a campus diversity officer to plow through, say, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, because Kant’s work has already been found racially guilty. From Kant’s Lectures on Physical Geography;

‘The White race possesses all incentives and talents in itself. … The race of Negroes can be educated, but only as slaves. The [indigenous] Americans cannot be educated, they care about nothing and are lazy’.

Philosophy and the current crop of grievance studies students are a poor fit, not least because traditional White Western philosophy is hard work. I remember at my alma mater, The University of Sussex in England, when English literature students would take a philosophy module for a few weeks before realizing that a feminist critique of Jane Austen was a good deal easier than 600 pages of Hume, and they would scurry back to their safe little box of leaves.

The universities, as the engine-room of philosophy after the 19th century, are now effectively run by the students. Plato warns, in a throwaway line from the Republic, about teachers who ‘flatter their students’, and it is rare now to see a faculty stand up to a newly enlightened student body. One among many examples of this power shift is from my own university.

Professor Kathleen Stock was hounded from Sussex by student objections to her comments about gender. A philosophy lecturer, Professor Stock’s position was made untenable. She was threatened and humiliated and the faculty did the bare minimum to help her, squeaking about freedom of speech but largely staying out of it. What an irony that one of the very first Western universities, at Bologna in the 12th century, was also run by the student body, but this was to ensure a high standard of teaching rather than adherence to a politico-cultural line.

A relatively early example of ‘decolonizing the curriculum’ is a manifesto of the same name from the University of California-Berkeley in 2015. Ironically, Berkeley was famously the scene of demonstrations against the suppression of free speech in the 1960s. Now, authors Rodrigo Kazuo and Meg Perret have the following to say about the curriculum their university offers:

We have major concerns about social theory courses in which White men are the only authors assigned. These courses pretend that a minuscule fraction of humanity — economically privileged White males from five imperial countries (England, France, Germany, Italy and the United States) — are the only people to produce valid knowledge about the world. This is absurd. The White male syllabus excludes all knowledge produced outside this standardised canon, silencing the perspectives of the other 99 per cent of humanity.

They provide specific examples of ‘colonisation’, some so gruelling that, ‘Sometimes, we were so uncomfortable that we had to leave the classroom in the middle of lectures.’ Philosophy is not, we discover, inclusive. ‘We were required to read Hegel on the “Oriental realm” and Marx on the “Asiatic mode of production”, but not a single author from Asia’. Even last night’s news was seen as a serious omission from a philosophy course:

The professor even failed to mention the Ferguson events, even though he lectured about prisons, normalizing discourse and the carceral archipelago in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish the day after the grand jury decision on the murder of Michael Brown.

It does not, cannot, occur to the authors that White Western thinking could be in any way superior, given any indicator you like, to that of non-Whites. There is no longer any permissible inter-cultural calculus you can read off and which will show the worth of one race’s intellectual endeavors set against another’s. For us, this explains why, for example, the architects of Britain’s Industrial Revolution were not brought up in the tradition of Ghanaian ontologists or Afghani empiricists. The British technological class’s ability to reason, deduce, experiment, improve and invent was honed on the rock of the British philosophical tradition, a White tradition. This is why Mogadishu is not Tokyo.

So much for decolonizing the curriculum, including philosophy. What are these revolutionary brigades actually doing philosophically? The answer is even more ominous. As well as removing philosophy from the syllabus, progressives are interfering with philosophy’s center of gravity: truth. Where the Renaissance was the response to a weakening Church, what is happening across the West — what we might call a ‘Denaissance’ — is the response to a weakening epistemology.

Epistemology is the study of what we can know to be true. It is also concerned with the different ways in which truth functions. For example, ‘2 + 2 = 4’ is true, as is the statement that ‘Japan is composed of four islands’. However, we recognize that, while both true, these statements are not true in the same way. Ultimately, however, the truth of either has an objective requirement, it needs to be validated from ‘somewhere’ other than the subjective perceiver. What the progressives are doing, under the jocular banner of ‘woke’, is to reverse this arrangement.

The epistemological difference between Left and Right revolves around a philosophical decision concerning knowledge and truth. For the Right, knowledge concerning the world should stay firmly on the side of the objective, which enables it to be open to shared consensus or dispute and thus partake in the communitarian.

For those on the Left, however, the subjective is everything. Opinion is equally as valid as objective knowledge (doxa and episteme in Ancient Greek, the first travelling to today’s English as ‘dogma’). And whereas for the Right, emoting is seen as wholly subsidiary to the acquisition of knowledge, incidental and — if anything — a hindrance on the path to wisdom, for the Left, it is the key functional state. This is the rematch between Hume’s reason and the passions. But if emotio is held to be more methodologically vital than ratio, then a whole apparatus of reasoned thought is made obsolete, and we begin to hear talk of ‘my truth’ and ‘your truth’.

A radical subjectivity, devoted to itself and its attributes and solipsistic in outlook, is given the right to arbitrate concerning reality. It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi movie, but this is what is happening at the epistemological level.

The Left have also commandeered language and meaning. As they do not have the mental apparatus required to debate, progressives have instead produced a lexicon of words of command engineered to prevent discussion, designed to have a quasi-magical effect on others. Terms such as ‘racist’, ‘White supremacy’, ‘micro-aggression’ are not concepts, they are statements ex cathedra, backed as in medieval times by a new form of papal infallibility. These terms are what the political philosopher J L Austin would have called ‘perlocutionary’, statements intended to produce an effect but not to provide reasons for that statement. Plato presciently describes the tactic in the Theaetetus:

‘If you ask any of them a question, he will produce, as from a quiver, sayings brief and dark, and shoot them at you; and if you inquire the reason of what he has said, you will be hit by some other new-fangled word, and will make no way with any of them…’

Why should we read philosophy? Because it is a repository of White culture, a race-based resource which we know to be valuable simply by noting the progressive wish to destroy it. Philosophy teaches the student how to reason, how to construct an argument, how to spot logical inconsistencies, how to debate. It teaches how to tread carefully with an argument or concept, not to rush in two-fisted with your opinions foremost. These things are all heretical practices to modern academia, which is the source of ideas that filter down into culture and society in general, and thus philosophy is heresy.

It is not necessary to approach philosophy by way of the latest publications and writers. In fact, quite the opposite. Classical philosophy has much to say to us. Reading Plato, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca’s letters to Lucilius will be of more use to the modern student than the ideologically crafted candy-floss currently on offer. My university supplied me, on request, with a photograph of the philosophy syllabus the year I began my first philosophy degree, 1981. The courses were specific, based around source texts and carrying requirements for certain modules. Today’s prospectus alludes vaguely to a few philosophers, but the rhetoric is much more about learning how to phrase questions and make sense of the world, vague, woolly incentives that offer no hard core of White Western philosophy. And, finally, if you still require persuasion to read your tradition’s finest intellectual output, consider the remarks of Mark Zuckerberg’s sister, Donna.

Donna Zuckerberg wrote a book in 2018 entitled Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age. With a doctorate in Classics, Ms. Zuckerberg is very much on her appropriate territory but, like most woke academics, she is not concerned with the glories of the classical world, but preoccupied with the color and gender of the writers who produced them, and who might be reading the classics:

The Alt. Right is hungry to learn more about the ancient world. It believes that the classics are integral to education. It is utterly convinced that classical antiquity is relevant to the world we live in today, a comfort to classicists who have spent decades worrying that the field may be sliding into irrelevance in the eyes of the public.

It is fine and it is good that an interest is taken in your field, provided you let the right ones in or, rather, not the Right ones. She continues:

Classics, supported by the worst men on the internet, could experience a renaissance and be propelled to a position of ultimate prestige among the humanities during the Trump administration, as it was in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Classics made great again.

So, not only do those who Nietzsche called ‘we philosophers’ have the benefit of two and a half thousand years of wisdom, we can also enjoy being referred to as ‘the worst men on the internet’. Philosophy is beginning to look rather enjoyable. As Cicero writes to M. Portius Cato in the first century before Christ:

I have only one last resource – philosophy: and to make her plead for me, as though I doubted the efficacy of a mere request: philosophy, the best ever friend I had in all my life, the greatest gift which has been bestowed by the gods upon mankind.

Premature Birth and Genius

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Sent Before Their Time: Genius, Charisma, and Being Born Prematurely
Edward Dutton
Australia: Manticore Press, 2022
328 pages, $24.95 softbound

Ed Dutton’s latest book marks a return to the theme of genius, which he previously explored in The Genius Famine (with Bruce Charleton, 2016) and At Our Wit’s End (with Michael Woodley of Menie, 2018). There is no universally recognized definition of genius. The word always implies high intelligence, and may imply nothing more, as when a certain IQ score—there is no agreement exactly which—is said to constitute “genius level.” But Dutton is interested in men who have “made a disproportionately large impact on human history,” often through revolutionary contributions to the disciplines in which they work: Newton, Mozart, Michelangelo, Archimedes, Darwin, and so forth. Others have been great statesmen or religious leaders. All have been extremely intelligent, but intelligence by itself is insufficient for genius-level accomplishment: many who possess the necessary brain power never use it to achieve great things.

Intelligence is a highly polygenetic trait, so outlier high IQ requires the inheritance of an improbable number of alleles all pulling in the same beneficial direction. But the case is otherwise with some of the other traits associated with outstanding achievement. Geniuses, as Dutton explains, are marked by a certain personality profile.

They are low in ‘rule-following,’ permitting them to ‘think outside the box’ and so to generate original ideas, and they are low in altruism and empathy, meaning that they don’t care about the probability that their ideas will offend vested interests. They are obsessed with truth, and they wouldn’t anticipate that their ideas would offend even if they did care. In many cases, they are also high in anxiety, meaning that they are constantly thinking and have a desperate desire to make sense of their world.

Low empathy and high anxiety are not, prima facie, especially desirable traits, so as prerequisites for genius, they may appear counter-intuitive.

An analogy may be helpful. A person ignorant of viticulture would probably assume that the best wine would be produced by the best soils. In fact, when vines are planted in especially rich soil, the result is an enormous profusion of leaves and very few grapes. High-quality wine grapes are grown in relatively weak—but not too weak—soil: it is precisely the vine’s struggle against a suboptimal environment which brings out the best in grapes. Genius seems to involve a similar dynamic. (This, incidentally, is what makes eugenic intervention such a delicate matter: nature may be acting more wisely than any possible human agent by allowing certain normally sub-optimal traits to survive within a population.)

Few things would appear more sub-optimal for human flourishing than premature birth. Humans have evolved to spend nine months in the womb, and being born significantly (= more than three weeks) earlier is traumatic and stressful. Dutton’s list of risks associated with prematurity is sobering: “blindness, vision problems, underdeveloped lungs resulting in frequent infection, deafness, poor muscle tone, mobility problems, difficulties with fine motor skills, developmental delay, heart problems, high blood pressure, infertility, birth defects, depression, ADHD, autism, psychopathic personality, low self-esteem, never having a relationship nor having children, low IQ (especially low spatial and Mathematical IQ),” and much more besides. The more premature the birth, the greater the odds of problems developing.

And yet children born prematurely, or with exceptionally low birth weight, are statistically overrepresented among outstanding high-achievers. Dutton’s examples include “Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Goethe, Voltaire, Victor Hugo, [and] John Keats.”

This is certainly not because preterm birth contributes to high intelligence; as mentioned above, the two correlate negatively. “If you are born prematurely or small,” Dutton explains, “the brain is unlikely to develop properly. . . . [I]t leads to a form of mild mental handicap.” Yet when such a handicap happens to combine with exceptionally high genetic intelligence, a kind of synergy comes into play that makes for outstanding achievement. This is because, as Dutton explains, the brain has an extraordinary ability to rewire itself: “if it loses an area, it can be expected to strengthen the other areas.” This leads the prematurely born (colloquially known as “preemies”) to think in unusual ways, meaning that they are prone to look for solutions where others might not. As Dutton puts it, geniuses “are almost childlike in the degree to which they are imaginative, meaning they ask questions few others would ask and make connections that few others would make.”

A recent neuro-imaging study offers some clues to how this works:

A subject had to press a button as quickly as they could each time a new letter came onto a screen, unless it was the letter ‘x.’ Controls used ‘proactive’ brain activation, meaning you are working on a task and you are mentally prepared for new, unexpected, things to happen. Preemies used ‘reactive’ brain activation (Olsen et al., 2018). According to Norwegian neuroscientist Alexander Olsen, they were unprepared for change and ‘their brains reacted as if they were encountering something new each time. … It suggests their brains are hyper-vigilant due to the suboptimal organization of the central nervous system.’

Geniuses often have extremely narrow intelligence: while they achieve outstanding things in specialized fields, they may also be highly impractical, failing at tasks that do not require exceptional intelligence and that ordinary people master easily. A famous example is that Albert Einstein never learned to drive a car.

Extreme examples of this sort of lopsided intellectual development are found in “idiot savants”—now more politely and properly known as “autistic savants.” Such persons may be unable to tie their own shoelaces, and yet play the piano masterfully or display outstanding mathematical ability. Autistic savants are overwhelmingly extreme pre-termers. So it should not be surprising that genius, which represents a milder form of the same phenomenon, is often associated with preterm birth.

Geniuses are also often erratic in their ability to pay attention. Despite their intelligence, most do not do that well in school because they easily become bored. Sir Isaac Newton, e.g., was never a good student and nearly failed his degree at Cambridge. Young geniuses tend to be the sort of boys who today get diagnosed with ADHD—which, interestingly, is also statistically associated with preterm birth. And yet this comes not of any intrinsic inability to concentrate, but of a disinclination to concentrate on anything they find less than fascinating. When they do come across such a thing, typically involving some unsolved problem, they are capable of working on it compulsively to the exclusion of all else.

Asked the secret of his discoveries, Newton said: “I keep the subject constantly before me and wait till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.” In other words, he had an ability to focus on a problem obsessively, not letting up until he had fully solved it. There are anecdotes concerning him getting distracted by a problem while walking up or down a staircase and remaining standing there for hours on end. Oblivious to all around him, he sometimes even forgot to eat while in such a state.

But it may take a long time for a genius to find his true calling. Many have been late-bloomers, or made their discoveries in a field other than that in which they were formally trained. In contemporary parlance, they might be said to have difficulty “finding themselves”—though of course it is not really “themselves” they are looking for, but a suitable problem to which they can devote their utmost efforts.

New ideas always offend vested interests, so they are more likely to be formulated and spread by persons with autism spectrum disorders, which make it difficult for them to empathize with others. They may fail to anticipate the offence their ideas will cause or, if they do anticipate it, not care about this. As an example of the first tendency, Dutton cites the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. His view of society as based on human contract without reference to the divine will ran counter to the Christian thinking of the seventeenth century. Yet when the English parliament denounced his Leviathan as a book “tend[ing] to atheism, blasphemy and profaneness,” Hobbes himself was apparently among the few taken by surprise. He hastily destroyed many of his own unpublished manuscripts for fear they might be compromising. Other original thinkers, such as the late J. Philippe Rushton (on whom Dutton has written a monograph), may know full well that their ideas will cause offense, but actually derive enjoyment from the discomfiture of more timid and less original colleagues.

Finally, genius is associated with anxiety, in particular a desperate desire to make sense of the world in which they live. This may go directly back to the experience of the fetus finding itself in an unaccustomed environment for which it is unprepared. It is certainly not due to high intelligence, which—as I was somewhat disappointed to learn—actually correlates with intellectual conformity. As Dutton explains:

People who are more intelligent are better at noticing what the dominant worldview is, better at realizing the social benefits of conforming to that dominant world view, and better at forcing themselves to believe it and coming up with superficially convincing arguments for so-doing. This, of course, better permits them to attain social status.

An obsessive devotion to truth above all else is thus no consequence of mere intelligence, but it does appear characteristic of the high-anxiety genius personality profile.

Psychologists have not reached agreement on the precise number and character of factors which make up human personality, but a five-factor model is currently popular. J. Philippe Rushton pointed out, however, that all five factors on which this model is based correlate positively to some degree. This led him to speak of a General Factor of Personality (GFP) analogous to ‘g,’ the general factor of intelligence. The GFP amounts to a measure of how pro-social a person is. Those high in GFP, writes Dutton, have

the kind of personality type and behaviors that underpin many socially desirable traits, the degree to which someone approximates to the type of person that makes for friendliness, helpfulness, being a ‘good neighbor;’ for peaceful, orderly, cooperative, hard-working, placid citizens. A person who is high in GFP is the kind of person who ‘gets on in life.’ [Such traits] evolved as an adaptation to complex and stable societies so that people would ‘get along together.’ So a person with high GFP would be sociably extroverted, be empathetic and be concerned with the feelings of others, conscientious and self-disciplined in pursuit of socially-approved goals.

It should be clear by now that the genius is unlikely to have a personality of this sort, desirable as it may be in other respects. Instead, the genius is

self-sufficient and indifferent to the opinions of others or to normal social aims. Such a person is wrapped up in his own personal goals and making judgments using his own internal, subjective evaluation systems. He will work very hard and for long periods on his own projects but will not willingly go along with other people’s plans and schemes.

In part, such qualities represent survivals from a fast-life strategy better adapted to unpredictable environments.

There are many specialized forms of activity in which one may accomplish at genius level, and some involve variations on the basic genius profile we have just outlined. An artistic genius is more likely to score high on the ‘divergent thought’ aspect of Openness-Intellect, one dimension of the five-factor personality model, and are also higher in Neuroticism, than scientific or philosophical geniuses. As Dutton writes, “the Neurotic is constantly thinking about aspects of life, meaning that they are continually generating thoughts, making them creative as an indirect consequence of their anxiety.” Depression is also associated with artistic genius. While about 20% of people in Western countries experience depression at some point in their lives, one study of high accomplishment found figures of 41% for eminent artists and 72% for eminent writers. In what may seem a paradox, depression can even contribute to the ability of certain extraordinary men whom Dutton calls political and religious geniuses to influence others:

Depression is associated with profound religious experiences, which are adaptive because they force the person out of their depression and provide them with a sense of deep existential meaning (Newberg et al., 2002). With this certainty and positivity, they can then inspire others, as do charismatic figures. It has also been found that charismatic leaders tend to be high in psychopathic traits (Post, 1994) includ[ing] superficial charm, grandiosity (and thus confidence), and the ability to manipulate others. It is traits such as these that are the essence of ‘charisma’ (Sargent, 1957).]

An example of a religious genius is Charles Wesley, founder of Methodism. Dutton’s account is worth quoting at length:

It is 1726, in a room at Christ Church College, Oxford. It is evening, just after college dinner. A small group of students are singing, but this is no ordinary hymn practice. Their eyes are closed. They seem to be in a trance, with looks of intense peace on their faces. They live according to what they call ‘the Method.’ They meet after dinner every day to discuss how they have used that day to witness for Christ, to read the Bible together, and to pray. Some people call them Methodists. They call themselves ‘the Holy Club’ (Pearson, 2011, p.193).

The Holy Club was recently founded by the rather charismatic student who seems to be leading the singing, Charles Wesley (1707–1788), the son of a Lincolnshire vicar. Wesley would go on to lead one of the largest religious revivals in the history of English Christianity: Methodism. He also wrote thousands of hymns, articulating and inspiring the religious sentiments of Englishmen who remained in the Church of England and did not join his breakaway movement. In inspiring people to be more religious, Wesley inspired them to follow the dictates of traditional religiousness: go forth and multiply, cooperate with your neighbor, make sacrifices to repel the invader, who, unlike us, does not have God on his side; believe that your life has eternal significance and that you, and your people, are uniquely chosen by the Lord. As we will now see, in doing so, Wesley indirectly helped his own people — the British — to triumph in the battle of ‘group selection’ against other peoples. Wesley was born two months prematurely (Cairns, 2015, p.81). When he was born, he seemed ‘more dead than alive.’ Charles didn’t even cry until several weeks after his birth (Cavendish, December 2007). But he pulled through. If he hadn’t, then we wouldn’t be able to sing ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing!’ at Christmas.

So geniuses, while always unusual personalities in certain respects, need not resemble the deeply uncharismatic recluse Isaac Newton. Some are, in Dutton’s words, “the kind of people whom you’d follow to the ends of the earth, who can inspire you to super-human feats.”

Geniuses often fail to marry or reproduce, but they still increase the inclusive fitness of their peoples. It is possible, therefore, that they are the product of an unconscious group selection strategy, as has been argued by Michael Woodley and A. J. Figueredo:

Their inventions do not benefit themselves or even their families. There are examples of geniuses who treat their families appallingly, receive little credit for their invention, and end-up living in penury. Their innovations benefit the group of which the genius is a member. The inventions which kicked-off the Industrial Revolution, for example, allowed the British population to soar in size and wealth and to expand around much of the globe. Clearly, then, a successful society needs to maintain an optimum but relatively low number of geniuses. It cannot be too many, because a society full of uncooperative, impractical dreamers will be dominated by a more internally cooperative and practical one. And it cannot be too few, or the society will be dominated by one which has the appropriate number of geniuses to allow the necessary level of innovation.

With dysgenic selection having taken hold in the West since the late Nineteenth Century, we are seeing a decline in the number of geniuses; this is not sufficiently offset by a much higher survival rate for premature children. With the collapse of group selection, Dutton also predicts the rise of ‘evil geniuses,’ brilliantly talented men whose achievements harm rather than enhance the evolutionary fitness of their group, for example, by promoting extreme individualism, a preference for outgroups over one’s own group, feminism, anti-natalism, and other harmful ideologies. Clearly many such people exist in our society, but few of them merit the title of genius. Dutton considers Winston Churchill and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (both born prematurely) as two possible cases, but decides in both cases that the evidence is inconclusive.

Dutton has a personal interest in prematurity, having been born three months early himself, and he includes a chapter on his own experiences growing up preterm. As he wryly notes, this autobiographical chapter puts him in the forefront of academic fashion, as many young scholars are now making their reputations with accounts of the intersectional oppression they have personally experienced.

Putin Wants His Own Monroe Doctrine

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When the Union was fighting to preserve itself in the Civil War, the France of Napoleon III moved troops into Mexico, overthrew the regime of Benito Juarez, set up a monarchy and put Austrian Archduke Maximilian von Habsburg on the throne as Emperor of Mexico — one month before Gettysburg.

Preoccupied, the Union did nothing.

At war’s end, in 1865, however, at the urging of Gens. Ulysses S. Grant and William Sherman, the Union sent 40,000 troops to the Mexican border.

Secretary of State William Seward dispatched Gen. John Schofield to Paris with the following instructions: “I want you to get your legs under Napoleon’s mahogany and tell him he must get out of Mexico.”

The U.S. troops on Mexico’s border convinced Napoleon to comply, though Maximilian bravely refused to leave and was captured and put before a firing squad.

The point of the episode for today’s crisis in Ukraine?

A powerful army on a nation’s border can send a message and dictate terms without going in and without going to war.

Whether Russian President Vladimir Putin intends to send his 100,000 troops now on the Crimean, Donbass and Belarusian borders of Ukraine into the country to occupy more territory we do not know.

But the message being sent by the Russian army is clear: Putin wants his own Monroe Doctrine. Putin wants Ukraine outside of NATO, and permanently.

If his demands are unacceptable, Putin is saying with his troops on the border, we reserve the right to send our army into Ukraine to protect our vital national interests in not having a hostile military alliance on our doorstep.

U.S. officials have been describing a Russian invasion as “imminent,” an attack that could come “any day now.”

Given the Russian preparations and size of its forces, some U.S. officials said last week Kyiv could fall within hours of an attack and there could be 50,000 civilian casualties and 5 million Ukrainian refugees.

Ukrainian leaders are less alarmist, arguing that an invasion is not imminent and there is still room for a negotiated settlement.

Russian officials are contemptuous of U.S. claims that they are about to invade. Last weekend, Russia’s deputy ambassador to the UN tweeted, “Madness and scaremongering continues. … What if we would say that US could seize London in a week and cause 300k civilian deaths?”

Should Russia invade, and go beyond what President Joe Biden earlier called a “minor incursion,” the event could be history-changing.

A major invasion would trigger automatic and severe sanctions on Russia, crippling European economies on both sides of the conflict and forcing Putin to take his country more fully into a Eurasian alliance with China. Yet, ultimately, it is China, not the U.S., and not NATO, that is the long-term threat to Russia.

Neither we nor Europe have any claims on Russian territory.

But China, with an economy 10 times the size of Russia’s, and a population 10 times as large, has historic claims on what are now Russian lands north of the Amur and Ussuri rivers. Russians living in Siberia and the Far East are far outnumbered by scores of millions of Chinese just south of the border. These Russian lands are rich in the resources China covets. The two nations came close to war over these borderlands in the late 1960s.

To return to the analogy of the U.S. waiting for the right moment to force France out of Mexico, China and Russia both now appear stronger, more united, more assertive and more anti-U.S. than either was at the turn of the century.

Russia is now demanding to have its borderlands— ex-Warsaw Pact nations and ex-Soviet republics — free of NATO installations and troops.

Half a dozen ex-Warsaw Pact countries and three USSR republics — Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — are members of NATO.

China, with an economy and military far larger than at the turn of the century, is also becoming more assertive about its land claims. These include claims against India in the Himalayas, against half a dozen nations on the South China Sea, including our Philippines ally, against Taiwan, and claims to the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands.

The combined strength and reach of Russia and China are growing, while the U.S., post-Afghanistan, is facing challenges to its resources that it seems increasingly strained to meet.

Russia has marshaled an army estimated at between 127,000 and 175,000 troops in a few months, just across the border from Ukraine, while the U.S. this weekend sent 3,000 troops to Rumania, Germany and Poland.

Where is the deterrent here?

Again, Putin’s demands that ex-Warsaw Pact countries and Soviet republics be kept free of NATO installations, and that the enlargement of NATO end, if agreed to, would leave Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and Belarus permanently outside.

But if Moscow is going to push to remove NATO forces from its borderlands, this means an endless series of diplomatic-military clashes or a U.S. recognition of a Russian sphere of influence where NATO does not go.

In short, a Putin Monroe Doctrine.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.” To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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