If you like books that are both entertaining and intelligent, here’s some advice that’s been good for two centuries and more: read The Monk. Written by a highly gifted teenager called Matthew Lewis and first published in 1796, this greatest of Gothic novels sparkles with wit and wisdom. Among much else, it contains one of the cleverest illustrations of a perennial theme: that evil wins its way by lies. Satan seduces before he strikes, appearing in disguise until he can reveal his true ugly nature.

Enchanted by Evil

The titular monk of the novel, a pious but flawed Spanish abbot called Ambrosio, is seduced by evil to his own damnation. When a false friend summons Satan on Ambrosio’s behalf, the abbot is fooled by a clever disguise. Satan appears as a beautiful seraph with dazzling white limbs and “silken locks.” He is “surrounded by clouds of rose-coloured light” and wafted by delicious perfumes. Ambrosio is “enchanted at a vision so contrary to his expectations” and gazes on “the Spirit with delight and wonder.” (The Monk, vol. 2, ch. 4)

Early edition of The Monk by Matthew Lewis

If Satan had appeared in his true ugly form, Ambrosio would have been repelled and would have left the path to damnation. Instead, Ambrosio is seduced and led further into mortal sin. But when Satan is finally certain of his prey, he casts off all disguise. Summoned by Ambrosio alone, he appears amid “sulphurous whirl-winds” and in “all that ugliness which since his fall from heaven had been his portion.” He is black-skinned, sharp-clawed and menacing, and his hair consists of “living snakes” that writhe with “frightful hissings.” (The Monk, vol. 3, ch. 5)

Rosy visions of racial harmony

Now Ambrosio sees the ugly truth, but it is too late by then. He has been fooled at every step and will shortly be dragged off to damnation. Well, that’s a Gothic novel from 1796, but I can’t help being reminded of modern Western politics. In the recent past, Whites were seduced by the Left with rosy visions of racial harmony and culturally enriched societies. For example, many millions of Whites voted for the well-spoken, mild-mannered Barack Obama in the sincere hope that he would create a post-racial, rainbow America where state-imposed White guilt and state-encouraged Black grievance melted away, and everyone finally “just got along.”

Enter the Church of the Damned

In return for their good-will, those White Obama-voters got Black Lives Matter and an intensification of anti-White pandering, propaganda and crime. The leftist seduction is ending and leftism has begun to throw off its disguise. Whites are no longer being offered post-racial redemption, but accused of innate depravity. In other words, Satan has stopped wafting perfume and started spewing sulphur. At American Renaissance, Gregory Hood has described the shift from seduction to damnation in an excellent essay called “Anti-Racism: The Church of the Damned.” He writes that “Anti-racism is a church with no salvation. To be white is to be counted among the damned, no matter what you do.” White America is under assault by an anti-White “death cult” whose leftist high-priests are “preaching an eternal white guilt that must be eternally expiated.”

That leftist death-cult has risen on a tide of non-White immigration into America and other Western nations. And when the Left was working to open the borders, it lied about what it was doing. For example, Kevin MacDonald has shown how the 1965 Immigration Act that opened America’s borders to non-Whites was the culmination of a decades-long campaign by ethnocentric Jews to dilute (and eventually destroy) America’s White Christian majority. But, just as Satan did not reveal his true nature or intentions to Ambrosio, the bill’s Jewish sponsors did not reveal their true nature or intentions to White Americans.

“The ethnic mix of America will not be upset”

Instead, they used gentile frontmen to shill for the bill and tell lies about the demographic damnation it would work on America. The Irish-American senator Teddy Kennedy responded to critics of the 1965 bill like this:

I want to comment on … what the bill will not do. First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same … Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset … Contrary to the charges in some quarters, S.500 will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and economically deprived nations of Africa and Asia. In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think. Thirdly, the bill will not permit the entry of subversive persons, criminals, illiterates, or those with contagious disease or serious mental illness. As I noted a moment ago, no immigrant visa will be issued to a person who is likely to become a public charge … the charges I have mentioned are highly emotional, irrational, and with little foundation in fact. They are out of line with the obligations of responsible citizenship. They breed hate of our heritage. (See So Much for Promises — Quotes Re 1965 Immigration Act, VDare, 9th August 2006)

Teddy’s brother Senator Robert F. Kennedy issued similar lies, as did a host of other leftists and their right-wing dupes. In 1965 the Left was seducing White America; in 2020, the Left is proclaiming the damnation of White America. Whites are slated for dispossession and persecution as a despised caste by resentful non-Whites with officially approved grudges.

The blatantly sentimental and dishonest graphic novel Illegal (2017)

But seduction and lies are still being used by the Left, as you can see in a recent graphic novel for children called Illegal (2017). The title is ironic and comes from a famous quote by the Jewish activist Elie Wiesel about illegal migrants: “No human being is illegal.” Written by two Irish Whites, Eoin Colfer and Andrew Donkin, and illustrated by the Italian White Giovanni Rigano, Illegal tells “the story of [the Black brothers] Ebo and Kwame and their tortuous journey from North Africa to seek a new life in Europe.” In other words, it’s propaganda for open borders and the demographic damnation of Europe. No wonder it won first prize in the category “Best Books for Kids and Teens” at New York Public Library and in the category “Best Fiction for Older Readers” at Chicago Public Library in 2018. Leftists like to think of themselves as sophisticated thinkers, but Illegal panders to their true nature as reality-denying narcissists. In reality, for example, most of those seeking “refuge” in Europe are arrogant young men of prime crime-committing and rape-gang-forming age.

Big-eyed, button-nosed Ebo wants you to help him

In the fantasy of Illegal, however, the hero is a pre-pubescent boy called Ebo, whose “big eyes, chubby cheeks and button nose” might have been drawn straight from a scientific article entitled “How cute things hijack our brains and drive behaviour” (2016). Yes, Ebo does have a tall, strongly built post-pubescent brother called Kwame, but guess what? Kwame is drowned while crossing the Mediterranean and Ebo has to complete his “torturous journey” alone. In short, the graphic novel is blatantly sentimental and dishonest. And it raises an uncomfortable question. Is it a coincidence that two Irishmen are behind such lying propaganda, just as the two Irish Kennedy brothers shilled for the 1965 immigration bill in America?

“Help me, White Saviours!” Ebo’s big eyes gaze upward

Unfortunately, it’s not. As a resentful, anti-WASP minority, Irish Catholics have been useful allies to the hostile Jewish elite in both America and Britain, paralleling the role of resentful, anti-Russian minorities like Georgians and Latvians in the Jew-controlled Soviet Union. The Bolshevik Revolution and its forerunner in 18th-century France are further examples of how the Left issues seductive lies before revealing its true ugly nature. In both France and Russia, revolutionaries promised “Liberté! Égalité! Fraternité!,” then created mass-murdering tyrannies.

Profiting from hate: The smug, self-righteous Irish authors and Italian illustrator of Illegal want to assure you that they are more moral than you

But leftists have shrunk in intellectual stature and ambition since the days of Robespierre and Lenin. Books like Illegal and Ibram X. Kendi’s Anti-Racist Baby are not serious and minutely reasoned in the fashion of Marx’s Das Kapital (1867). Modern leftists have abandoned intellect for emotion, as you can see in Illegal. The images of cute little Ebo are intended to trigger primitive brain-circuits and by-pass the intellect. A team of psychologists explain it like this in a study of cuteness: “Babies are designed to jump to the front of the queue — our brain-processing queue, that is. They get ahead of everything else going on in our minds, which makes them difficult to ignore. They also grab our attention even before we have time to recognise that they are babies. They do it by being cute[,] with their big eyes, chubby cheeks and button noses.”

Ibram X. Kendi’s Anti-Racist Baby

The distressed faces of women and children are also “designed to jump to the front of the brain-processing queue,” which is why leftists use non-White women and children so often in their dishonest reporting on the migrant flood. But I’ve often thought that leftists’ concern for non-Whites is related to their concern for animals and involves the same emotion circuits in the brain. For example, compare the three images below, taken from leftist propaganda-outlets like the Guardian:

Three distressed female faces from leftist propaganda

The images are intended to appeal to the same irrational leftist sentimentality, which takes a maternalistic, de-haut-en-bas attitude both towards human migrants, seen above, and towards “Xita, a Rondon’s marmoset” hit by a car as it fled forest-fires in Brazil in October 2020. And in fact, the migrant woman on the top right, clutching an overweight baby, was also fleeing a fire, this time in a migrant-camp on the Greek island of Lesbos in September 2020.

Seeking power, feeding narcissism

Britain is many hundreds of miles from Lesbos, but the Guardian approvingly reported that “Pressure is mounting on the UK government to take in some of the thousands of asylum seekers left without shelter following a devastating fire at Europe’s largest migrant camp on the Greek island of Lesbos.” These mostly adult male “asylum seekers” are from the least progressive and most misogynistic and homophobic cultures on Earth, but leftists don’t care. As I’ve often pointed out, leftists are interested in winning power and feeding their own narcissism, not in understanding the world or improving the lives of their supposed objects of concern.

And how do leftists win power and feed their narcissism? They lie, as you can see above. Teddy Kennedy claimed that “the ethnic mix” of America would “not be upset” by the 1965 Immigration Act. He was lying. Eoin Colfer and friends have portrayed migrants as big-eyed, button-nosed poppets in Illegal. They are also lying. And leftist lies are carrying the West towards demographic damnation just as surely as Satan’s lies carried Ambrosio to literal damnation in The Monk.

“I command the Jews not to agitate for anything beyond that which they have hitherto enjoyed, and not from henceforth, as if they lived in two cities, to send two embassies — a thing which never occurred before now – nor to intrude themselves into games and elections, but to profit by what they possess and to enjoy in a city not their own an abundance of all good things, and not to introduce or invite Jews who make voyages to Alexandria from Syria or Egypt, thus compelling me to conceive the worst suspicions; otherwise I will by all means take vengeance upon them, as fomenting a general plague upon the whole world.”
Emperor Claudius, Letter to the Jews at Alexandria, A.D. 41.^[1]

The above proclamation from Claudius, in response to riots between Greeks and Jews in Alexandria almost two thousand years ago, illustrates the profound lack of mystery in anti-Semitism. For Claudius, peace in the city would be restored if the Jews ceased certain negative behaviours: agitating for heightened and special privileges (“to agitate for anything beyond that which they have hitherto enjoyed”); attempting to circumvent established practices of representative politics (“to send two embassies — a thing which never occurred before now”); attempting to intrude into, and disrupt, the cultural life of the Alexandrians (“to intrude themselves into games and elections”); attempting to manipulate the demographic context of the city (“to introduce or invite Jews who make voyages to Alexandria from Syria or Egypt”); and finally, abusing and exploiting the advantage of their diaspora condition to cause problems internationally (“fomenting a general plague upon the whole world”). These basic premises of Jewish financial and political acquisitiveness, cultural intrusion, disregard for political norms, propensity to demographic warfare, and exploitation of being essentially rootless, have been mainstays of ethnic conflict involving Jews for over two millennia, with extraordinarily little variation in themes. Imagine my annoyance and amusement then, on seeing Variety’s recent announcement that we are to be treated to yet another documentary, titled “The Conspiracy,” exploring the putative mystery of anti-Semitism.

Variety reports:

An array of high-profile documentarians have come on board “The Conspiracy,” exploring the history of anti-Semitism and archaic conspiracies against the Jewish people. “The Conspiracy” will explore various myths and inaccuracies that have plagued Jewish people and the Jewish religion through the centuries, and which have given rise to a unique prejudice that persists to this day. This documentary seeks to showcase the manner in which one of the most pervasive deceptions about Judaism of all time — that a dangerous group of powerful Jewish people equipped with mysterious powers control the world — can be traced through cataclysmic and violent events toward Jewish people throughout history and into the present. This film includes a mixture of animation and archival footage as it shows the evolution of these lies via the stories of different Jewish families throughout history.

For an apparently self-evident calumny, the Variety report mirrors ADL literature in utilizing a ridiculous array of persuasive adjectives and descriptive terminology when discussing the subject. Like some kind of inoculation for the reader, across just four sentences we are repeatedly reassured we are dealing with something “archaic,” “mythic,” “inaccurate,” “unique,” “deceptive,” involving beliefs in “mysterious powers,” and above all, riddled with “lies.” The documentary will presumably employ much the same rhetorical tactics. Maxim Pozdorovkin, a Russian-Armenian leftist, will direct the film, which is being produced by Jews Caroline Hirsch, Allison Maher Stern, Liz Garbus, Dan Cogan, and Jon Bardin — a gang that has already produced such propaganda as “Why We Hate,” and “All in: The Fight for Democracy.” Pozdorovkin, who presumably sees the project as a means to ingratiate himself with influential elites on the path to fame and fortune, has ignorantly parroted the usual non-sequiturs: “In times of anxiety and disorientation, anti-Semitism reappears with lethal force. Living through such a time now, it feels of utmost importance to make a film that grapples with the historical forces that have perpetrated the lie that Jews are somehow dangerous.”

Since the world is, and always has been, in periods of “anxiety and disorientation,” it would appear that we have to endure the perpetual justification that the time has come for yet more books, documentaries, museums, remembrance days, speeches, initiatives, and laws reminding us that Jews are blameless, powerless victims of a mysterious and esoteric hatred that has absolutely nothing to do with anything they might have done. In fact, this process is so obviously mysterious that we need endless propaganda reminders that anti-Semitism is mysterious, and that we require Jews to explain it to us. Hirsch and Stern add that

There is no better time than this exact moment in our shared human history to expose to the world the many historical lies, myths and incidents that have festered and evolved into the explosive Antisemitism we see today. Now is the time to put a spotlight on where and how it all began and bring greater awareness through this powerful and unique film. [emphasis added]

I’ve read the first sentence several times and it still doesn’t make any sense to me. Imagine considering the last two thousand years of ethnic conflict and deciding that “this exact moment” is witness to “explosive anti-Semitism” (have we finally graduated beyond the “virulent” kind?) and that “there is no better moment” in this history to produce such a film. Cogan remarks that the film will be “a landmark in storytelling about the Jews,” which I take to mean that we should brace ourselves for a veritable tsunami of bullshit.

Rather telling is the fact the documentary is based primarily on Phyllis Goldstein’s 2011 A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism. Goldstein, too, also played her part in perpetuating the never-ending story by promising that 2011 was the right time to finally unveil the mystery of anti-Semitism by writing “a book that would trace the history of anti-Semitism from ancient times to the present … and deepen our understanding of this pernicious hatred.” A year earlier, however, it had been decided that 2010 was the right time to finally unveil the mystery of anti-Semitism, when Robert Wistrich published his A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad. This happened to be the same year Albert Lindemann and Richard Levy published their Antisemitism: A History. These publications followed the 2003 decision that the time had finally arrived to expose the irrational mystery of anti-Semitism in Marvin Perry and Frederick Schweitzer’s Anti-Semitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present. The pair were apparently unaware that the mystery had already been uncovered in Dan Cohn-Sherbok’s 1992 The Crucified Jew: Twenty Centuries of Christian Anti-Semitism, with Sherbok in turn apparently unaware that the mystery of anti-Semitism had already been explained by Robert Wistrich (yes, the same) in his 1991 Anti-Semitism: The Longest Hatred. All the above were presumably unaware that anti-Semitism had already been explained in Shmuel Almog’s 1988 Antisemitism Through the Ages and Jacob Katz’s 1982 Anti-Semitism: From Prejudice to Destruction. Having read them all, I can assert that these texts are more or less identical, and I could continue with others, but the point is that the repetitive, dubiously-written, and poorly referenced grand narrative of sensationalized historical anti-Semitism has become a genre in its own right, with Amazon returning over 4,000 results for books on the subject, all of which invariably claim to once and for all expose, explain, or radically reinterpret anti-Semitism and its history.

Far from being novel, despite the almost annual and much-lauded appearance of a new volume (see the fascism genre for an equally lucrative and bastardized treatment), these texts merely shuffle what is now a standard deck of alternative and Jewish-friendly explanations of anti-Semitism. Christopher Browning, in his critical foreword to the 2020 edition of George L. Mosse’s Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism, mentions Jewish academics who draw

a straight line from early Christianity’s “teaching of contempt” and “Christ-killer” accusation to the Holocaust. Some looked to psychological abnormality, social-psychological pathology, the “authoritarian personality,” and the dynamics of prejudice. Marxists had portrayed anti-Semitism as a manipulated distraction into false consciousness to obscure realisation of the true nature of capitalist oppression and class conflict. Other scholars emphasised economic factors: envy and resentment of Jewish economic success and inordinate domination of particular professions in the wake of emancipation and the industrial revolution. Hannah Arendt added a further twist, arguing that resentment over Jewish visibility increased after actual Jewish wealth and power had peaked and were in decline.^[2]

These excuses are in fact the leitmotifs of Jewish historiography, with all hints of common-sense approaches to the problem of European-Jewish ethnic conflict relegated to an almost comical periphery. An excellent example is the treatment of Claudius and his Letter to the Jews in Simon Schama’s lavishly-praised 2013 The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words 1000 BCE–1492 CE, which devotes a single sentence to the Emperor, with the middling comment that he was “astute and not inhuman” and tried “to make peace between the now warring Egyptian and Jewish communities in Alexandria.” A single sentence for an Emperor who intervened decisively in one of the most intense inter-ethnic conflicts of the first-century Empire, and who was reported by Suetonius to have taken the related and hardly insignificant later action of expelling the Jews from Rome.^[3] Remarkably, the same minimal level of attention to Claudius is found in Goldstein and Almog, while Wistrich, Lindemann, Levy, Perry, Schweitzer, Cohn-Sherbok, and many others dining out on the sensationalist anti-Semitism literary genre are unanimous in acting like he never existed.

One of the most astonishing features of this genre is that, despite their claims to vast sweeps of history, they remain stubbornly narrow in their chosen points of discussion, omitting much that contradicts the above shopping list of alternative interpretations of anti-Semitism. On a personal level, I find it rather compelling that, outside the Old Testament, some of our oldest protestations of ethnic hatred are found in relation to Jews. In a Hellenistic papyrus dated to the first half of the first century B.C., for example, we find the letter of a man named Heracles in which he writes, “You know that they detest the Jews.”^[4] The intricacies of socio-economic inter-ethnic rivalry are significantly under-discussed in relation to the Jews and anti-Semitism, with much greater focus placed on events, trends, personalities or texts that lend themselves more easily to narratives of irrational hate, conspiracy theory, and esotericism in general.

After my recent discussion with Frodi Midjord on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, it dawned on me that today’s Jews must really rather appreciate the Protocols, not necessarily for the content but for the extremely neat way they can used as a byword for anti-Jewish conspiracy thinking among Europeans. Why analyse Claudius, with all the uncomfortable attending context, when you can point to a sensational account of Jews meeting in graveyards at midnight to discuss global domination? Small wonder then, that the first detailed information on the origins of the Protocols, in a plagiarism of Hermann Goedsche and Maurice Joly, was given to the Irish Times journalist Phillip Graves by an anti-Semitic Russian nationalist concerned that the text, intended originally as an artistic riff on well-established political commentary, was going to backfire in a tactical sense. This individual, whoever he was, was probably correct. One need only look at texts like Stephen Eric Bronner’s 2000 A Rumor About the Jews: Antisemitism, Conspiracy, and the Protocols of Zion, to see how, in Jewish hands, the Protocols is a useful tool for discrediting anti-Semitism in toto. For Bronner, the Protocols, a niche and stylistically outlandish document but for its startling popularity, is nothing less than “part of a broader assault on the civilising impulse, and the liberal, secular, egalitarian heritage of the Enlightenment. … This infamous forgery fashioned the Jew as the quintessential “other” of European civilization, how the self-absolving bigot sees himself, and the peculiar appeal of anti-Semitism to the “losers” in the struggle over modernity.” The history of anti-Semitism according to the Jews is therefore the history of the Protocols, with equally sensational sprinklings of Martin Luther, some expulsions of moneylenders, and the narrative goldmine of the medieval ritual murder accusations.

A curious feature of the history of anti-Semitism is of course the prominent role that Jewish converts have played in producing some of the more sensational and outlandish content and accusations. In fact, but for its obviously plagiarised content, I think I would have suspected a Jewish authorship of the Protocols. In one of the earliest examples, from the early sixteenth century, the German-Jewish converts to Christianity Victor von Carben and the former thief Johannes Pfefferkorn produced a series of quasi-esoteric and highly inflammatory (not to mention financially lucrative) pamphlets calling for the burning of all copies of the Talmud and, in Pfefferkorn’s case, the expulsion or enslavement of all Jews.^[5] Pfefferkorn, who was a major promoter of the host desecration idea, was in turn denounced even by many contemporary anti-Jewish agitators, who, despite their support for the burning of insulting passages in the Talmud, accused him of subversive activity and heresy regardless of his superficial fanaticism (Pfefferkorn oscillated between extreme suggestions of physical harm and appeals for no physical harm). A public debate between Pfefferkorn and his accusers ensued, in which Pfefferkorn was defeated, a later pamphlet on the affair bearing a woodcut depicting “Pfefferkorn in the hands of two executioners, one of whom punctures his leg with a sharp-edged sword, while the other beats him repeatedly on the head, whence issues a fetid blood, which is lapped up by a dog.”^[6]

In the 1860s, a similar figure emerged in the form of Jacob Brafman, a Russian-Jewish professor of Hebrew, and convert to Christianity. In the late 1860s Brafman published The Book of the Kahal and Local and Universal Jewish Brotherhoods in the course of which, as one contemporary explained:

We learn that each Christian landowner is sold by the Kahal to a Jew. Yes, sold like an investment, both in his person and in his property. It is not just a way of speaking, but a legal term because the transaction is sealed by a special sales contract. Similarly, villages, whole sections with their inhabitants (Christians of course) are bought and sold. Under the cover of our civil laws there exists a radically different legal code, secret and negative, that rules over and subjects to the jurisdiction of the Jews not only the Jews but also the Russians, without their knowledge. … The brotherhoods are the major arteries of Jewish society. … They link all the Jews scattered over the globe into one powerful and invincible body [allegedly then based in France].

Brafman’s work, of course, laid some of the groundwork for the production of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion a few decades later, and thus the entrenchment of the caricature of a coherent and intensely political, and corporately organized, international Jewish conspiracy with a single leading council. This aspect of Brafman’s work stands somewhat apart from the genuine issues his work occasionally touched upon, such as the clear practice of ethnically-exploitative monopoly capitalism by the kahals and the trade in debts within the Russian Pale’s vast Jewish communities. A book strictly on such themes would have been a bombshell then, and a bombshell today. As it happened, however, the effect of Brafman’s intervention was, like Pfefferkorn’s, to add certain mysterious or esoteric airs to what had been for the most part a straightforward matter of material and cultural conflicts of ethnic interest, with the result that both texts became in time a matter of embarrassment to certain nationalist circles, and a useful old horse for the Jews to flog.

The irony in all of this is that, if anything, Jewish interpretations of anti-Semitism are considerably more esoteric than the phenomenon itself. Ideas about Christianity, that anti-Semitism is a “virus,” that anti-Semites inevitably have authoritarian personalities, or that ethnic conflict can be abstracted into myriad impersonal systems are all mere flights from reality and the universal principle of cause and effect. The Jews propose an effect without direct cause, a negative miracle if you will. As a result, this endless production of documentaries, books, and “revelations” to uncover this “pernicious hatred” — none of which addresses or mollifies the inevitable antagonism, prompting the Jews to assert that the only way to deal with Europeans is to introduce laws punishing them if they deviate from the given message. Thus we return, in a way, to Claudius, who warned Jews against an overreach in places “not their own” that would arouse “the worst suspicions.” Why have the Jews always aroused the worst suspicions? Claudius gave us the answer almost two thousand years ago. Jewish financial and political acquisitiveness, cultural intrusion, disregard for political norms, propensity to demographic warfare, and rootless activism. There’s no mystery here. But, with Claudius relegated to a mere footnote in history, the Never-ending Story will continue, as will the proliferation of weird and esoteric theories like the Protocols that are useful to Jewish propagandists. And I’m sure that next year we will have a few more books and films promising to lift the veil at last.

^[1]Translation found in H. Stewart Jones, “Claudius and the Jewish Question at Alexandria,” Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. XVI, Part I (1926), pp.17-35.

^[2] G. L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), xiii.

^[3] Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars: The Deified Claudius, (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2004), 171.

^[4] Quoted in Almog (ed), Antisemitism Through the Ages, 16.

^[5] For more on Pfefferkorn’s remarkable career see J. Adams (ed) Revealing the Secrets of the Jews: Johannes Pfefferkorn and Christian Writings about Jewish Life and Literature in Early Modern Europe (De Gruyter, 2017).

^[6] J.M. Vincent, History of the Life, Writings, and Doctrines of Luther, Vol. I, 68.

The intelligence is clear: Beijing intends to dominate the U.S. and the rest of the planet economically, militarily and technologically. Many of China’s major public initiatives and prominent companies offer only a layer of camouflage to the activities of the Chinese Communist Party. I call its approach of economic espionage “rob, replicate and replace.” China robs U.S. companies of their intellectual property, replicates the technology, and then replaces the U.S. firms in the global marketplace.
     John Ratcliffe, U.S. Director of National Intelligence, “China is National Security Threat No. 1,” The Wall Street Journal, December 3, 2020

In the [hermeneutic] circle is hidden a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing.  To be sure, we genuinely take hold of this possibility only when, in our interpretation, we have understood that our first, last, and constant task is never to allow our fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception to be presented to us by fancies and popular conceptions, but rather to make the scientific theme secure by working out these fore-structures in terms of the things themselves.
     Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927)

In Fall of 1981, I was a newly arrived young undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin.  The former White House National Security Advisor to U.S. Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson was a professor at the Johnson School of Public Affairs, and the Rex Baker Professor of Political Economy.  His name was W.W. “Walt” Rostow.  I had heard of him through my readings in economic history, and thought I would see if he would let me into his graduate seminar in economics that he had otherwise made famous while at M.I.T.  He not only let me in with enthusiasm, but proceeded to load me up with a stack of his books to read in preparation.  One was titled The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto.

This book became famous, eagerly embraced among the Washington, D.C. establishment as a political manifesto, and in the corridors of the Pentagon as a call to arms, as it was a clarion call for the defense of U.S. interests and its methods of free markets.  It was also perfectly timed to coincide with a post-war obsession against communism, especially the Soviet kind, and the threats emanating from Cuba, and later, Southeast Asia.  Much has been written about the men who championed the Vietnam War, the so-called “brain trust” or, as author David Halberstam called them in his best-selling book, The Best and the Brightest.  Rostow was among a group of middle-aged intellectuals and academics, most also World War II veterans and, as in Rostow’s case, who had also served in the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA).  From that experience, and the ideology it reinforced, the advisors surrounding America’s post-war presidents were Hawks; even what today would be called “Neo-cons” and far-right advocates for U.S military intervention (or pre-emption).  But as the Vietnam war dragged on, their reputations were dragged through the mud.  In Rostow’s case—one of the last holdouts for U.S. victory—he constantly pushed LBJ (president Johnson) to commit more troops, more planes, more bombs, and more money.  To most in opposition however, it was only more blood.  And so it ended, with hundreds of thousands of casualties, billions spent in taxpayer money, and at best an exit finally under Nixon and Kissinger (not without still highly critical accusations of political opportunism) that had the appearance of a negotiated truce.

Rostow was vilified by the northeastern establishment, and effectively black-listed among the university ivy-league for his role in that war and in US foreign policy generally—until Johnson built his new graduate school on the Austin, Texas campus, and gave Rostow a permanent position, effectively its titular head, from its founding in 1970, until his passing in 2003.  In 2002, British historian David Milne came to Austin and chronicled Rostow’s tenure as a wartime advisor, and consistent with his general reputation even today, characterized Rostow (and named his book) America’s Rasputin.  In a more normal, “globalized” international order, Rostow does seem an anachronism; an outdated older generation of “communist hunters” that saw Red everywhere, and overstated its danger.  Indeed, much of communism’s threatening posture seemed to fade under a triumphant Reagan foreign policy that saw “glasnost” and “perestroika” (openness and rebuilding) under former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, collapse into utter ruin with the Soviet Union broken up, and America, seemly triumphant.  China was still a distant, if unsophisticated developing country beginning to be known more for making all the consumer goods that the U.S. had divested in favor of “high-tech” and Wall Street.

But the international order is no longer normal (indeed, some have called for the CCP to be officially declared a transnational criminal organization).

Rostow believed early on that communist China, if it continued to advance through the “stages of growth” into a high-tech, modern mass society, would be a profound regional, and if consolidated, a global competitive threat to nearly everything America stood for.  Rostow advanced the thesis that the United States had actually “won” the Vietnam war; he believed the war had “bought time” for the rest of South-east Asia to economically advance and escape Chinese Communism. Today, China’s growing economic, financial, technical and political influence isn’t through those regional proxies, and mere regional hegemony, but directly through China itself, and its increasing global reach, including in the new space race.  It is even seen by many as a model for a socially flat, “fair,” controlled, regulated society.

Today, China’s growing economic, financial, technical, and political influence isn’t through regional proxies, but by China itself: A giant high-tech, authoritarian machine with a population over 1.5 billion and growing; a military to rival the U.S. and Russia; aggressive ambitions in space travel, and abundant natural resources, infrastructure, and businesses with global reach.  Indeed, Rostow’s belief that Chinese influence could spread to Vietnam and act with a domino effect across greater South Asia (even Austral-Asia) may have understated the effect, and the danger, because the country most at risk now isn’t Vietnam or Cambodia; Thailand, Korea or Taiwan even, but the United States itself.  That is, China is no longer an ideological opponent for geopolitical control or regional hegemony within the context of competitive ‘empires” seeking regional dominion, but instead a direct, frontal threat to the integrity of the United States itself, as a sovereign nation. The CCP is the new “USSR”).

Indeed, was the U.S. the ultimate prize that China has had its disciplined eye on, especially for the last 20 years?   Was Rostow right?  I believe he was, and more: he was not only right about the threat communism posed to Western freedoms and liberty, but about the dislocations and distortions in scientific and technological development: China’s culture is imitative and assimilative; it is the like the “Borg.”  Resistance is futile.  And therein is the ideological danger: China has become a role model of conformity, conditioning and control to the progressive Left that sees the U.S. as a mistake; a selfish White beast of capitalism that pollutes and ravages; consumes and oppresses; the “Anglosphere” that is pitted now against the “Sino-sphere,” the Indo-spere; the Afro-sphere, and the Zio-sphere.

Indeed, the entire far Left “woke” culture of identitarian-based (racial) coercive moralism, rests on an effective spiteful lust for vengeance that naturally sees China as a solution for a flat, “fair,” controlled, and highly regulated society, but especially, as a model of absolute power.  The CCP is the new cult-hero of the radical Left globalist, who views the U.S. as a dying establishment society of privilege.  Except the Left doesn’t actually despise privilege; it despises being denied privilege for itself—and now, it wants it all for itself, with an objective of a unitarian, consolidated American political monism that destroys its opposition and consolidates its hegemony over all aspects of society in ways completely foreign to American traditions of individual freedom — economic and religious liberty, with a government subordinated to the civil public, and the civil public in control of its military, its property, currency, and most of its natural resources.  Communism upends all of that (but there is more: China has been waging an “irregular” war against the U.S. since at least 2000, and in the current environment, has been cited as responsible for the SARS-coV-2 virus, including recent accusations as the actual sponsor of what is called “Operation Warp Speed” and cited as a CCP assault proxy).

China — and emulation of China — threaten to dismantle most if not all American routines and traditions, and in an insidious way that slowly but consistently encroaches on every aspect of American culture and custom.  China has laid down the economic, geopolitical and military gauntlet, and with a renewed confidence, reinforced by eager if naive encouragement by America’s Left progressives who are overwhelmingly non-White, and largely Jewish in its most senior leadership, financial and media roles.

China’s ancient philosopher of war, Sun Tzu, said that the victors of a war can win without even fighting, by subduing the enemy through his own self-defeat and surrender.  Rostow’s Cold War hawkish stance of defiance was right: It is modern, strong, sober and confident, in the face of another U.S. political world view that is anarchic, compliant, hysterical and weak.

Endnote on U.S.-Israel Relations

It is important to appreciate a few things about Rostow that inform my full opinion of him.  There is much to admire about his aggressive, fighting spirit, even though there is much that causes me some reservation. That fighting spirit, however, was not always, or strictly, in service to readily identifiable, domestic, institutional or otherwise transparent causes, interests or objectives.  Rostow’s family were Jewish immigrants from Russia — a fairly traditional immigrant story of a family with modest means, working in traditional labor markets, and with the ambition to see their children attend college.  Walt Rostow and his brother Eugene both went to college and graduate school at Yale, where Walt received his Ph.D. from Yale, and his brother his law degree from Yale Law.  Both served in public administration and became deeply embedded in high-level state policy circles.  Walt also served in the U.S. military, the OSS, and that pedigree formed much of his persona and modus operandi.   However, many people, including myself, felt that he was inordinately ambitious and that this fueled a complex mix of motivations and professional and personal alignments.  He became usually candid with me concerning the complexity of competing interests in the U.S. government during the 1960’s and how those led to the rise of LBJ, and the further deepening of American military activity in Vietnam and bordering countries, along with a radical escalation of the intelligence agencies and their conversion to “black” or irregular warfare outside the normal chains of civilian, even military control.

It is my view that Rostow was a central, principal actor in the elimination of the legacy of JFK and the supersession of LBJ who had a set of policies almost entirely written and controlled by Rostow.  And while his hawk posture in Vietnam—possibly including preemptive tactical nuclear options—was indeed a bulwark, notionally, against China, he had an equal measure, along with his brother (the central author and advocate for the narrative deployed in the Warren report) of commitment to Israel, to Israel’s nuclear development, and to U.S. foreign aid becoming a normal feature of annual transfer payments to Israel.  Moreover, his naïve idealism about U.S. domestic social programs—he authored the “Great Society” strategy—led some to even go so far as to label him a “bourgeois Marxist” for his championing of government involvement, or even control, of many key industries.  His idealism also led to an aggressive platform of controlling wages and prices in order to “tame” inflation.

Rostow was a social engineer at heart, and in his inherent intellectual extremism, not unlike the radical Left today.  His ultimate loyalties are uncertain, and he was indeed a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” who could justify any degree of violence in order to realize his academic theories and Weltanshauung.  This view has a particularly fascinating, if disturbing, similarity with a trend in academia among certain Jewish legal scholars in the immediate pre-war and post-war period.  A poignant example involves Harvard Law’s notorious and historically revered Felix Frankfurter.  Working in the Wilson administration in the then War Department (like Rostow in the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson offices), Frankfurter was assigned to Europe where he became actively, and officially involved in the Zionist cause, working with Dr. Chaim Weizman.  After the War, Frankfurter attended the Paris Peace conference, supporting the Balfour Declaration that the British sponsored to establish a “permanent home for the Jews in Palestine.”  As with Rostow, the co-mingling of American and British cultural influence, combined with Zionist interests, may have created a logic in Frankfurter’s mind that Anglo-Saxon culture, and the larger dynamic of the British Empire (and, later, the American Empire) could be integrated with the ambitions of Zionism.  Like Frankfurter, Rostow (and his brother) may have held out a broad front of US defiance and patriotism against communism, and an aggressive militancy in combating it. But they also had a passionate obsession with Israel, and a personal conviction that Americanism and Zionism were an effective identity.

Indeed, one of Rostow’s obsessions was Russian (Soviet) communism, and I believe he saw Vietnam not only as a proxy war with China, Chinese communism and the larger communist bloc including the then-dominant Soviet Union, but also a “shield” over Israel, and a Israel-US cultural, economic, financial and military duplex.  The extent of Johnson’s lobbying, commitment and favor on behalf of Israel was immediately apparent after he assumed office, and Rostow had a central role as a national security advisor in articulating, planning and directing these activities.  LBJ and his Rostow-headed national security team, declared that Israel had “no better friend,” and Johnson was the first U.S. president to formally align U.S. policy with Israel. Thus Rostow may very well have been as asset — an agent or working in some agency capacity — on behalf of Israel.

The United States may now be considered caught in a vise, between a perpetual irregular war of Zionist contours that systematically infiltrates U.S. institutions, including government, media, and key commercial sectors (central and commercial banking), combined with a regular, direct force (not without its irregular components, especially within our top-level research universities) prepared for direct physical confrontation — a new “Sino-Bolshevism” that combines a systematic assault on America’s Western cultural foundations and emulation of a massive Sino empire that has stolen U.S. technology and military secrets (often with our own political cooperation) and been able to create a first-rate military, reinforced with a fighting population five times the size of America’s and with a reserve population that is equally outsized.

American technology transfer to China was also facilitated directly by Israeli actors.  Israel has also appropriated U.S. technology through systematic, on-going industrial-military espionage, while reselling it, often to China, or Chinese surrogates. It is not surprising therefore that the current China-originated virus combined with Jewish media and Silicon Valley election engineering, speech suppression, and on-going public relations psy-ops, are together creating an effective constitutional “crucible.”  Indeed, is China in some regards, the alter ego of Israel?  Is a theocratic-ethnic, hegemonic, nuclear armed and technologically advanced social monism, the ambition of Israel as well? In both cases—China and Israel—the real battle is cultural, and culturally determined.  This puts Western culture in an especially fascinating position of necessary assertion across all regular and irregular dimensions.

Moreover, not only the United States, but the “Five Eyes” of Canada, the UK, New Zealand, and Australia are, along with the U.S. and Western Europe under cultural assault — a highly systematic, programmatic “invasion.”  Indeed, these countries have surrendered in several dimensions; they are more easily captured politically, institutionally and economically because they have less of a tradition of individual liberty and because their multiethnic social infrastructure is significantly more porous and vulnerable. Because of its strong tradition of individual liberty, the United States required a much more complex invasion strategy in order to gain operative control of U.S. systems.

Is Israel finally “done” with the U.S. in a bi-lateral mode, and changing its posture to a new phase of an attempted complete acquisition?  In historical terms, this makes actors such as Rostow (and his brother) into archetypes. They combine an American “immigrant” narrative with academic achievement, military service and senior national security roles—all reinforced with a lengthy university pedigree and authorship—that ultimately disguise their ethnic motivations that work against U.S. interests, and in fact actively damage its sovereignty.  Some call this the profile of traitorous behavior, and in Rostow’s case there is a constellation of associations and actions that reinforce this view.  His model of culturally and institutionally embedded special interests that are ultimately ethnically based has multiplied radically since the 1960s, and has become almost institutionalized itself in several key American institutions.