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James Edwards Interviews Warren Balogh

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[Notice Trump lost the Reform Party nomination in 2000 to Pat Buchanan and that at the party convention Trump called Buchanan a “Hitler lover”  who “doesn’t like the blacks, doesn’t like the gays.”]

What follows is an interview conducted by James Edwards with Warren Balogh. It was originally published by the American Free Press.

James Edwards: Please give us a little information about your background and current activism.

Warren Balogh: At age 18, I was a volunteer for the Pat Buchanan presidential campaign, and I was a Buchanan delegate at the Reform Party convention in summer of 2000. I spent many years active in electoral politics until the Alt-Right came along, when I attended the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Eventually, I co-founded the National Justice Party in 2020 and was one of its main speakers and activists. Today I do a weekly show on Odysee called “Modern Politics,” and I also co-host a streaming show called “WarStrike” twice weekly on Odysee and Rumble.

Edwards: Let’s go back to the year 2000 and talk about that Reform Party convention in Long Beach, California. You and I both served as delegates for Pat Buchanan, who won the nomination for president. People might be shocked to learn who he defeated that year. Who was it?

Balogh: It was none other than Donald J. Trump. Many people are unaware of the fact that 2016 was not Donald Trump’s first foray into politics. In October 1999, he announced he was seeking the Reform Party nomination. Buchanan was already running at that time, and Trump decried him as a “Hitler lover” who “doesn’t like the blacks, doesn’t like the gays” and said Buchanan would only ever get the “wacko” vote. Trump thought he could waltz in and walk away with the nomination, but he never stood a chance against the better-organized, more highly motivated Buchanan Brigades.

Edwards: The fact that the Buchanan Brigades stopped the future president from becoming the party’s nominee in 2000 is a mostly unknown chapter in the evolution of Donald Trump as a politician. Trump was running on issues then that would be somewhat unrecognizable to his voters today. What was the platform of candidate Trump nearly twenty-five years ago?

Balogh: In some ways his platform was familiar, in that he spoke about trade and immigration, but on cultural issues, he ran as a moderate centrist or even a liberal. He described himself as very pro-choice and even said repeatedly he wanted Oprah Winfrey as his running mate. He said he would be willing to do a first strike on North Korea and also floated Colin Powell as Secretary of State John McCain as a potential Secretary of Defense. He was just a typical New York liberal in many ways, and there was none of the racial “dog whistling” for which he later became so infamous.

Edwards: Fast-forward to 2015, when Trump first announced his intention to seek the GOP nomination, and you have a very different candidate. That is not to say that his transformation was entirely insincere, but you commented in a recent speech that Trump has always been good at recognizing an undervalued property and picking it up at a steal. How did this ability play into his political fortunes?

Balogh: Right, well this is something he talks about in “The Art of the Deal” and for which he built his reputation. He has always been skilled at realizing when a property is undervalued, picking it up at a steal, and then turning around and making a fortune on it. I strongly believe that his experience getting soundly beaten by Buchanan in the year 2000 taught him that there is a huge, untapped source of political strength — fanatical loyalty, activism and enthusiasm — in the paleocon, populist, proto-white nationalist sentiments of the masses of white Americans who have been ignored for so many years by the two-party system. This is the same base George Wallace tapped into decades ago. Donald Trump’s 2016 victory was powered by what they call “whitelash” — the white working-class backlash against years of liberal globalist, anti-white policies from both parties. Not only that, a lot of Trump’s top activists, online and otherwise, were some of the same people who backed Buchanan years ago.

Edwards: Though I don’t believe the media has covered it nearly enough, an increasing number of journalists and historians are now pointing to his Buchanan/Reform Party experience as the precursor to Donald Trump’s successful 2016 run for the White House, which has essentially defined the politics of the Trumpian era. Please list the headlines of just a few of these articles and provide a brief summation of their findings.

Balogh: Yes, for example, in VOX April 2016: “Donald Trump learned overt nativism from losing his first campaign to Pat Buchanan.” In this article, Matt Grossman wrote:

One aspect of [Trump’s] first campaign was decidedly different [from his 2016]: He declined to pursue a nativist appeal. In fact, he repeatedly accused Buchanan of racism…. What did Trump learn from his first presidential campaign? His new campaign retained his anti-trade and anti-elitist message but added Buchanan’s warnings of losing the country to ethnic and religious minorities. In retrospect, the changed approach does not seem like an accident…. Many political candidates learn from their first loss, sometimes overcompensating in an effort to remedy their biggest difficulty from the prior campaign. In losing to Buchanan, Trump learned that many disaffected anti-establishment voters shared Buchanan’s ethnocentric views. In his first campaign, he avoided nativism and never led. This time, he began with Buchanan’s message and led from the beginning. Perhaps losing to Buchanan taught Trump some new tricks.

Some more headlines on the same theme: Politico, October 2016: “Trump Is Pat Buchanan With Better Timing.” Esquire, April 2017: “When Pat Buchanan Tried To Make America Great Again.” A Politico Magazine, May/June 2017 profile of Pat Buchanan: “The Ideas Made It, But I Didn’t.”

Edwards: This is interesting to me. By all means, please share with us a couple more.

Balogh: Balogh: Sure. In an NBC News piece from October 2018, titled “When Trump ran against Trump-ism: The 1990s and the birth of political tribalism in America” Steve Kornacki wrote:

He wanted a wall along the entire southern border and a pause on all immigration. He vowed to rip up trade deals and revive manufacturing. He hated political correctness and warned of the decline Western culture. He railed against a “rigged” system and fomented a populist uprising that terrified the Republican Party’s leaders. He was endorsed by David Duke. And he was denounced and labeled a racist — by Donald Trump.

His name was Pat Buchanan, and when he set out in 1999 on his third presidential campaign of the decade, it was under a new banner: The Reform Party, which had just been built from the remnants of Ross Perot’s two independent White House bids. But Buchanan encountered unexpected competition from Trump, a bombastic New Yorker who turned the race for the Reform nomination into an insult-heavy pop culture spectacle. In style and tactic, this Trump was indistinguishable from the man the world knows today. But on substance, he was jarringly different man, running against a worldview he would a few years later embrace.

As recently as April of this year, Ari Berman, writing for the Atlantic, observed: “Pat Buchanan made white Republicans fear becoming a racial minority. Now Donald Trump is reaping the benefits…. Buchanan never came close to winning the presidency, but the fear he incited of a majority-minority future has become integral to the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. Like Buchanan, Trump has made opposition to undocumented immigration the cornerstone of his presidential bid. Although he and his supporters try to portray this as a matter of law and order, they often admit that their chief concern is America’s shifting ethnic composition…”

Edwards: Though there are some differences between Buchanan and Trump, their positions on Israel being chief among them, how would you compare a speech given by Pat Buchanan in the 1990s to many speeches given by Trump today?

Balogh: Trump is hitting all the same hot buttons Buchanan did. America First was a slogan Buchanan used. Trump’s appeal to “Law and Order” echoes the sentiments in Buchanan’s famous 1992 Culture War speech, where he referenced the LA riots and talked about the need for “force, rooted in justice, and backed by moral courage.” The same Donald Trump who in year 2000 wanted John McCain and Colin Powell in his presidential cabinet, later got elected partly by running against the foreign policy of the neo-cons, and just like Pat Buchanan, he was called an isolationist for it.

Edwards: What were the similarities between the activists and voters who powered Buchanan’s three presidential campaigns and the Americans who put Trump in the White House in 2016?

Balogh: As I said, it’s the great mass of white middle- and working-class voters, economically populist and culturally conservative or nationalist, who are hated and despised by the elite political ruling class in America. Trump is tapping into a source of strength that not only powered Buchanan, but also George Wallace, Huey Long, and figures like William Jennings Bryan and even Andrew Jackson before him. But he learned the untapped power of appealing to this base from his loss to Pat Buchanan in 2000.

Edwards: As you mentioned, Buchanan himself was quoted as saying, “The ideas made it, but I didn’t.” Do you believe, even in defeat, that honor can be found in fighting for cutting-edge movements that lay the groundwork for future victories?

Balogh: Yes and no. I honestly believe Trump is an opportunist, which is something Pat Choate also observed. Choate is an anti-globalist economist who was Perot’s running mate in 1996 and, unlike Perot, endorsed Buchanan in 2000. I think Trump cynically appealed to the populism and nationalism of his base to put himself in the White House, but if you look at his first four years in office, he governed largely as an establishment Republican. Right now, he’s busy enlisting the support of powerful Jewish donors in NYC, and he’s already signaling to his donors that he’s going to staff his new administration with Wall Street types and neocons.

I do believe honor can be found in fighting a losing battle that plants the seed of a future triumph. But I don’t believe Trump is the man to make those victories happen. I think he is fundamentally very much the same man who ran against Buchanan in 2000: cynical, opportunistic, self-absorbed. He uses the anxiety and desperation of white Americans who have nowhere else to go for his own purposes.

The most interesting thing to me about the Trump era is not Trump himself, or that he represented any kind of actual break from the system, but just the fact that there are so many white Americans ready for a nationalist, populist message. That there is this huge untapped source of political strength in America, that white America isn’t finished yet, that people really are fed up with the broken two-party system and want sweeping change. Trump may have tapped into it for his own reasons, but he’s awakened a kind of sleeping giant that hopefully will lead to some greater movement down the line.

Edwards: Though we are still presently swimming against the tide, do you believe that our enemies are closer to defeat today than they were at the turn of the century?

Balogh: Yes. Absolutely. If you think of the year 2000, Buchanan got less than half a percent of the vote. Bush and Gore dominated, and they were basically indistinguishable on all the major issues of our time: globalization, immigration, and foreign wars. If you just take the issue of support for Israel, and how much that has changed on both the Left and Right since October 7th, you can see the system is growing weaker. Trump may be self-serving, but the fact that a guy like that was even able to come along and topple the Clinton and Bush dynasties, on the strength of the issues Buchanan appealed to years ago, shows how much things are changing. I think the elites would like to go back to the politics of the 90s: neoliberals vs neoconservatives, but the people don’t want that and will never go back to it. Trump opened Pandora’s box and there’s no going back.

This article was originally published by American Free Press.

Whiffing with the Bases Loaded: The Supreme Court Wrongly Decides Murthy v. Missouri

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But sometimes the Court gets it wrong.  In its recent (June 28, 2024) decision in Murthy, et al.  v. Missouri, et al., the Court lapsed badly from its long traditions of protecting dissident speech.

As I noted in an earlier article on the Free Expression Foundation website (February 5, 2023) about the Murthy v. Missouri lawsuit, the case is extraordinary not only for the importance of the issues it presents but because it involved opposing parties roughly equal in legal resources, i.e., the plaintiffs included the Attorney Generals of two states (Missouri and Louisiana) and the defendants were officials of the federal government. This contrasts strongly with the usual cases involving dissident speech, in which the proponent of the dissident speech is often indigent while the opponents are governments or well-funded private organizations conducting lawfare campaigns.

As to the gravity of the issues the case presented — Justice Alito in his dissent (joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch) aptly wrote that “this is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this Court in years.”  A little context puts these momentous issues into stark relief.

A fundamental principal applicable to First Amendment jurisprudence is that the First Amendment restrains only state actors – i.e., governmental entities – and not private actors, such as social media companies, e.g., Facebook (which was at the center of the issues in the Missouri case).  Thus Facebook and other social media companies, despite their enormous power over the boundaries and content of public debate, have always successfully argued that they are free to censor and limit as they see fit.  But what if a governmental entity – the Biden administration in the Missouri case – bullied and threatened the private entity – Facebook in the Missouri case – with the aim and successful result of coercing the private entity to comply with the Biden administration’s censorship demands?  This was the central question presented in the Missouri case.

Justice Alito in his dissent described numerous concrete instances of the Biden administration’s tactics, which he convincingly argued crossed the line from mere permissible Bully Pulpit advocacy by the President and his staff into unconstitutional threats and coercion. First, however, Justice Alito explained why the administration had the power to, as he expressed it, coerce Facebook into the role of “a subservient entity determined to stay in the good graces of a powerful taskmaster.”  Justice Alito wrote:

[I]internet platforms, although rich and powerful, are at the same time far more vulnerable to Government pressure than other news sources. If a President dislikes a particular newspaper, he (fortunately) lacks the ability to put the paper out of business.  But for Facebook and many other social media platforms, the situation is fundamentally different. They are critically dependent on the protection provided by §230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 . . . which shields them from civil liability for content they spread.  They are vulnerable to antitrust actions; indeed, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has described a potential antitrust lawsuit as an “existential” threat to his company. And because their substantial overseas operations may be subjected to tough regulation in the European Union and other foreign jurisdictions, they rely on the Federal Government’s diplomatic efforts to protect their interests. For these and other reasons, internet platforms have a powerful incentive to please important federal officials, and the record in this case shows that high-ranking officials skillfully exploited Facebook’s vulnerability.

Justice Alito then spelled out, among many other instances in the administration’s “far-reaching . . .  censorship campaign,” the following conduct by high-ranking government officials, gleaned from the extensive discovery taken in the case:

  • In March 2021, Rob Flaherty, the White House Director of Digital Strategy, emailed Facebook about a report in the Washington Post that Facebook’s rules permitted some content questioning COVID-19’s severity and the efficacy of vaccines to circulate. Flaherty noted that the White House was “gravely concerned that [Facebook] is one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy,” and demanded to know how Facebook was trying to solve the problem. In his words, “we want to know that you’re trying, we want to know how we can help, and we want to know that you’re not playing a shell game with us when we ask you what is going on.” Facebook responded apologetically to this and other missives. It acknowledged that “[w]e obviously have work to do to gain your trust.”
  • In April 2021, Flaherty again demanded information on the “actions and changes” Facebook was taking “to ensure you’re not making our country’s vaccine hesitancy problem worse.” To emphasize his urgency, Flaherty likened COVID–19 misinformation to misinformation that led to the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Facebook, he charged, had helped to “increase skepticism” of the 2020 election, and he claimed that “an insurrection . . . was plotted, in large part, on your platform.”  He added: “I want some assurances, based in data, that you are not doing the same thing again here.” Facebook was surprised by these remarks because it “thought we were doing a better job” communicating with the White House, but it promised to “more clearly respon[d]” in the future.

Rob Flaherty

  • A few weeks later, the White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked at a press conference about Facebook’s decision to keep former President Donald Trump off the platform. Psaki deflected that question but took the opportunity to call on platforms like Facebook to “‘stop amplifying untrustworthy content . . . , especially related to COVID–19, vaccinations, and elections.’”   In the same breath, Psaki reminded the platforms that President Biden “‘supports . . . a robust anti-trust program.’”
  • About this time, Flaherty also forwarded to Facebook a “COVID–19 Vaccine Misinformation Brief ” that had been drafted by outside researchers and was “informing thinking” in the White House on what Facebook’s policies should be. This document recommended that Facebook strengthen its efforts against misinformation by adoption of “progressively severe penalties” for accounts that repeatedly posted misinformation, and it proposed that Facebook make it harder for users to find “anti-vaccine or vaccine-hesitant propaganda” from other users. Facebook declined to adopt some of these suggestions immediately, but it did “se[t] up more dedicated monitoring for [COVID] vaccine content” and adopted a policy of “stronger demotions [for] a broader set of content.”
  • The White House responded with more questions. Acknowledging that he sounded “like a broken record,” Flaherty interrogated Facebook about “how much content is being demoted, and how effective [Facebook was] at mitigating reach, and how quickly.” Later, Flaherty chastised Facebook for failing to prevent some vaccine-hesitant content from showing up through the platform’s search function. “‘[R]emoving bad information from search’ is one of the easy, low-bar things you guys do to make people like me think you’re taking action,” he said. “If you’re not getting that right, it raises even more questions about the higher bar stuff.” A few weeks after this latest round of haranguing, Facebook expanded penalties for individual Facebook accounts that repeatedly shared content that fact-checkers deemed misinformation; henceforth, all of those individuals’ posts would show up less frequently in their friends’ news feeds.
  • Facebook subsequently told the press it had partnered with the White House to counter misinformation and had “removed accounts that repeatedly break the rules” and “more than 18 million pieces of COVID misinformation.” But at another press briefing the next day, Psaki said these efforts were “[c]learly not” sufficient and expressed confidence that Facebook would “make decisions about additional steps they can take.”  That same day, President Biden told reporters that social media platforms were “‘killing people’” by allowing COVID related misinformation to circulate.  A day later, Psaki said the White House was “reviewing” whether Section 230 should be amended to remove the Social Media platforms’ immunity to civil suits.

Justice Alito and his fellow dissenters thus made a compelling case that the Biden administration has been strong-arming Facebook into censoring disfavored views on vaccination and other issues in accordance with the White House’s dictates, a set of facts that clearly implicates First Amendment issues. The other six justices, however, in an opinion written by Justice Barrett, sidestepped these uncomfortable facts by invoking the doctrine of standing.  Standing is a rather esoteric doctrine that courts invoke when they conclude for various reasons that the plaintiffs who have brought the suit are not the proper plaintiffs to litigate it.  One of the required elements of standing is “traceability,” i.e.,  the plaintiffs must show that they incurred concrete and redressable harm that was traceable to the defendants’ conduct.  In the Missouri case, the majority, through Justice Barrett, held there was a break in the chain of traceability because Facebook, so they asserted, independently made its decisions about censoring and consequently the White House could not be held responsible for them. For the reasons previously discussed, however, this assertion seems deeply flawed, given that Facebook needed to worry about losing its Section 230 immunity and dealing with antitrust suits if it became too uncooperative with the White House. But on this basis the Court’s majority ruled in favor of the Biden administration.

So where do we stand now? A few points:

  1. Despite its victory in this litigation, I suspect the Biden administration is a little chastened by having its clandestine coercions brought into public view.  Perhaps it will back off a little.  But probably not much and not for long.
  2.  We should keep in mind that although the Missouri case focused on disfavored views about COVID vaccines, precisely the same concerns apply as to other disfavored topics, such as “hate speech,” Israel’s and America’s conduct with regard to Gaza, the prosecution of the January 6 Defendants, and a host of others. We should have no doubt that on these topics as well the White House has pressured and continues to pressure social media to suppress disfavored opinions.
  3.  What would be the effect of the reelection of Donald Trump in 2024? Certainly Trump, with his repeated “fake news” accusations, should not expect much cooperation from the likes of Facebook and other social media.  On the other hand, Trump is no stranger to making threats and demanding conformity to his views.
  4.  One hopes that Elon Musk and X are not as obsequious to government demands as Facebook has proved to be.

In summary, the Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri missed a once-in-a-generation opportunity to vindicate, dramatically and with far-reaching consequences, the Court’s long tradition of protecting disfavored speech from an overreaching government.  Had Justice Alito’s incisive dissent become the majority opinion, it would have been a watershed victory for civil liberties. It was not to be.

Let me nonetheless end on a positive note. The vast document discovery in the Missouri case stripped away the camouflage surrounding the social media / government connections to reveal what many of us had long assumed – that high-ranking government officials have been aggressively pressuring social media to censor dissident viewpoints.  The plaintiffs’ theory of their case in the Missouri litigation was based on the First Amendment; regrettably, this theory failed.  But the government’s threatening communications with social media may have done more than violate the First Amendment;  if false, they may have been defamatory or tortious.  A plaintiff injured by government-engineered censorship on social media, accordingly, may have greater success based on common law tort actions than on the First Amendment.

Reposted from the Free Expression Foundation with permission.

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Britain is Now a Sectarian Society

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England is now a sectarian society. As of the General Election, on 4th July, some people are sent to parliament by specific religious and ethnic communities simply because they are members of those communities, not because of the policies they espouse. A system which has long existed in sectarian Northern Ireland has now come to the English mainland. The reason? Mass immigration into England over the last 25 or so years of South Asian Muslims, who are highly concentrated in certain areas.

The UK’s General Election has led to the utter humiliation of the ruling Conservative Party, which had been in power for 14 years and done nothing to reverse the process of mass immigration set off by Tony Blair’s Labour Party in the early 2000s. In fact, they’d accelerated it, with more than 745,000 legal immigrants arriving in 2022 alone, putting appalling pressure on housing and public services, putting aside what this does to national unity [Net migration to UK hit record 745,000 in 2022, revised figures show, By Patrick Butler and Peter Walker, The Guardian, November 23, 2023]. Led by Rishi Sunak, a second generation Indian immigrant, the party, which has existed since the seventeenth century, was plunged into its worst defeat ever, gaining just 121 seats in the 650 seat House of Commons which, as in the US, is elected by First Past the Post. Labour, under its rather dull leader, Sir Keir Starmer, attained the second largest majority in its history.

But far more interesting, and worrying, is the fact that a number of Labour MPs in previously strongly Labour areas lost their seats. Specifically, they lost them to independent Islamist candidates standing on Pro-Gaza platforms. In Leicester South, in the East Midlands, a senior Labour MP lost his seat to a South Asian Muslim, who was once a Labour supporter, who declared, upon victory, “This is for Gaza!” and held up a keffiyah; the head scarf which is strongly associated with the Palestinian cause. In Blackburn, in the northwest, the sitting Labour MP was defeated by an independent called Adnan Hussain, a lawyer who declared: “This is for Gaza. I cannot deny that I stand here as the result of a protest vote on the back of a genocide.” Iqbal Mohammed, an IT consultant and once a Labour supporter, took Dewsbury and Batley, also in the northwest, from Labour on a manifesto of fighting for a ceasefire in Gaza. Ayoub Khan, a barrister and former Liberal Democrat councillor, took Birmingham Perry Bar from Labour as a Pro-Gaza independent [Who are the pro-Gaza independents who unseated Labour MPs? By Haroon Sidique, The Guardian, July 7, 2024]. In addition, a number of senior Labour MPs came close to losing their seats to Pro-Gaza candidates [Labour cannot afford to be complacent over pro-Gaza vote losses, By Josh Halliday, The Guardian, July 5, 2024].

Labour has long taken the Muslim vote for granted, but its failure to condemn Israel’s actions in Gaza has led to a political uprising which the First Past the Post System is uniquely set up to deliver. In democratic terms, the 2024 general election is an absurdity. The Labour Party took 411 seats (64% of the seats), and a majority over all other parties of 178, on just 33.7% of the national vote. With 12.2% of the vote, the Liberal Democrats took 72 seats, while the populist conservative Reform Party, led by Nigel Farage who very much spearheaded Brexit, got just 5 seats on 14% of the vote. These were all seats that very strongly supported Brexit [Wikipedia].  (The Conservative Party: 23.7 percent vote share and 121 seats.)

The Reform vote share differed so wildly from the number of seats won because it was roughly even nationwide; they came second or third in numerous seats. Muslims, however, are concentrated into very specific areas; usually ex-industrial towns. In many of these towns, they have set up parallel societies: everybody is a South Asian Muslim (due to White Flight and people’s evolutionary desire to be with people like themselves), the community is centred around a number of (often fundamentalist) Mosques, people are highly religious, and there is a strong feeling of fighting against the dominant society [see Among the Mosques: A Journey Across Muslim Britain, By Ed Husain, 2022]. It is conditions like this that allow Muslim independents to be elected, once they reject the Labour Party which they have done due to its stance on Gaza. In that regard, it is surely no coincidence that the seats that sent Reform Party members to parliament were overwhelmingly native British and substantially working class.

Of course, once this happens you have sectarianism and this is the end of democracy, or the beginning of the end, because people are not voting on policy, they are simply voting for a person who represents their ethnic group. Finnish political scientist Tatu Vanhanen spelt this out in his book Ethnic Conflicts. Although it is possible for multi-ethnic societies to be democracies – India is an example – in general there is a negative association between ethnic diversity and the ability to sustain democracy. This is mediated by ethnic conflict. In fact, Vanhanen found that ethnic diversity explains 66% of the variance in ethnic conflict when you compare different countries. In other words, ethnic diversity is very likely to lead to ethnic conflict and this is, in turn, likely to lead to sectarianism, which will render democracy hollow.

India, though it is multi-ethnic, generally shares a religion – about 80% of Indians are Hindu – and the ethnic groups of which it is composed are all relatively similar. This is not the case in the UK, where the independents MPs are of a different race and a different religion than the native population. It follows that the UK cannot be compared to India and that it really is seeing – in the most stark fashion with the election of these MPs – what has a long been happening anyway; the break-up of the country into a parallel societies; into Muslim and non-Muslim areas.

This shouldn’t be surprising. As I have explored in detail in my book The Past is a Future Country: The Coming Conservative Demographic Revolution, the ethnic diversity, mass immigration and the splintering of large polities always occurs in the winter of civilization and it is likely happening in the US as well. How deliciously ironic that Labour candidates, who have dogmatically espouse mass immigration and condemned critics as “racist,” are now losing their seats in parliament due to the sectarianism that has developed due to mass immigration.    

Jared Taylor on Guillaume Faye’s French Apocalypse

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ARKTOS JOURNAL

Jared Taylor reflects on his admiration for Guillaume Faye, recounting their first meeting and enduring friendship, while highlighting the dark, apocalyptic themes of race, survival, and societal collapse in Faye’s Racial Civil War.

This is Jared Taylor’s preface to Guillaume Faye’s final and most hard-hitting work, Racial Civil War.

Because I speak French, it has been my great good fortune to become acquainted with some of the major figures in the French nationalist movement. I have the deepest respect for these men and women who are fighting for their people, but the Frenchman who most deeply impressed me from the very first meeting was Guillaume Faye.

I well remember the occasion. It was in 2003. I had an introduction to Faye from a mutual friend, and we met in a small restaurant.

At that time — and it is true even now — many patriotic Frenchmen hesitated to use the word that I think essential to understanding the crisis France faces: the word “race.” But after an hour with Faye, I found myself thinking: “This guy understands the problem perfectly — maybe even better than I do. And he has a clear perspective on what must be done — maybe clearer than my own.” I was struck by the power of his mind, his passion for truth, and his love for his people. It was the beginning of a friendship that has lasted for more than fifteen years.

Living as we do on different continents, Faye and I have not seen each other nearly often enough, but I invited him twice to speak at the American Renaissance conferences that I organize. Each time, he charmed his listeners with his French accent and moved them with his eloquence and insight. And for me, every trip to France naturally included long conversations with Faye.

Gradually, thanks to the efforts of Arktos Media, this great philosopher of the crisis of the West has become better known to English speakers. Words such as “archeofuturism,” “ethno-masochism,” and “xenophilia” are now well known to those of us who keep abreast of events in Europe. Guillaume Faye is now among the very best-known spokesmen for the survival of our people.

The book you now hold in your hands is certainly the darkest, bravest, and frankest book my friend has ever written. It is a brilliant analysis of the mortal threat to us of massive non-white immigration.

I cite the following ominous passage that justifies the book’s title:

There are three possibilities concerning the sequence of events.

The first, the worst of them all, would be that of submission. It takes two to wage a war, and if our white Frenchmen do not defend themselves against these invaders and foreign aggressors, there will be no war. What will result instead is decay, collapse without real combat or isolated acts of revenge.

This is a possibility which I cannot exclude.

The second possibility, a terrible, distressing and unthinkable one at that, is the outbreak of a racial civil war resulting in the defeat of French natives and other ethnic Europeans, who would have to fight against their own collaborationist state. This is a development mentioned particularly by Jean Raspail.

The third possibility is that of a victorious civil war with incalculable historical consequences, including, of course, the collapse of all our political paradigms. Whatever the case, we will find it impossible to evade major disorders in the coming years. Indeed, Western Europe will soon be the setting for an inevitable earthquake.

This is pure Guillaume Faye. While others fail to grasp the extent of the problem — or even the form or nature of the problem — Faye cuts straight to the fateful choices we face: submission, defeat, or victory. He writes that there is no other choice because a “convivial living-together is only possible when it involves populations that are biologically and culturally related. Anything else is but a sham. We do not wish to live with these people. Period.”

There actually is a fourth possibility, which is voluntary, peaceful separation. There are a few modern examples: the dismemberment of the Soviet Union and the separation of the Czechs from the Slovaks.

In the former Yugoslavia, separation was mostly violent, but Slovenia was born virtually without bloodshed.

In all these cases, however, there was a crucial difference from that of France: These nations were (re)established in territories that had been historically populated by distinct peoples. In France, an alien population with a ruthless will to power and united by a triumphalist religion threatens the native population, and the entire country is at stake. Peaceful separation is hard to imagine.

And, of course, as Faye writes so clearly, France is not the only white nation in peril. All of Western Europe as well as the overseas nations built by Europeans face the same crisis of dispossession — and for the same reasons. The capitulationist spirit of the French that Faye describes with such penetration applies word for word to the ruling and media elites everywhere from Germany to Canada to New Zealand. Only those nations that were sheltered by what we used to call the Iron Curtain have escaped — at least for the time being — the effects of ethno-masochist poisons. This apparent determination of the white man to bring about his own destruction is without precedent in the history of our species, and no one describes it better than Guillaume Faye.

One of the three choices this book outlines for France is submission.

I cannot imagine a more miserable or ignoble fate for a nation that has contributed countless treasures to our civilization. And yet, for the reasons that Faye explains both with sadness and with fury, such a fate is not unthinkable. A similarly contemptible collapse is likewise possible in my own country. If our people awaken and build for themselves a future as glorious as our past, it will be thanks to the efforts of brilliant, tireless men such as Guillaume Faye.

I am grateful and deeply honored that my friend of fifteen years has dedicated this book to me. I also rejoice in his having jointly dedicated the book to my comrade Sam Dickson, who has been Guillaume’s friend and co-combatant for more than four decades. Sam Dickson has faithfully and courageously fought the forces that would transform the West and he admires France and its people as deeply as I do.

He joins me in this message to the readers of this book: Frenchmen and Americans — we are the same people. Your struggle is our struggle!

Racial Civil War is Guillaume Faye’s final work. Order the limited leather-bound edition now — only 7 copies left (out of 50) — before it’s too late, right here at the Arktos Shop.

 

“Our” Man in Israel

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Introduction

The issue of dual loyalty is an ancient one. As noted in a previous TOO article,

[Stephen] Walt points out that Ross has a long involvement with pro-Israel activist organizations, such as being director of WINEP [Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel think tank headquartered in Washington, DC].

But Ross’s ties to Israel are even deeper than that. Until his appointment as Middle East envoy in the Obama Administration, from 2002–2009 Ross was Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute. This organization has assumed the role of long term planning for the Jewish people, not only in Israel but also the Diaspora. The JPPPI is an independent think tank that reports to the Israeli government and has close ties with other Jewish organizations. Its mission is “to promote the thriving of the Jewish people via professional strategic thinking and planning on issues of primary concern to world Jewry. JPPPI’s work is based on deep commitment to the future of the Jewish people with Israel as its core state.”

The JPPPI’s report Facing Tomorrow 2008 is interesting because it focuses on the threat of Iran and but also because it sees people like Stephen Walt as a threat to Israel:

The Jewish people must, as the highest priority, develop an appropriate response to the Iranian nuclear threat to Israel and to global stability as a whole. While there is no ambiguity about the need to do so in Israel, it is necessary to mobilize Jewish opinion around the world as well. The American Jewish community cannot be intimidated either by a post Iraq syndrome in the United States, or by the false and pernicious allegations of Professors Walt and Mearsheimer, or former President Carter.

In other words, Jews around the world are encouraged to mobilize to combat the threat to Israel represented by Iran. The assumption is that Jews have common interests as Jews no matter what country they happen to live in. Dennis Ross is doing his best to promote exactly this view within the Obama administration.

One might think that such a view would leave Jews in the Diaspora open to the charge of disloyalty, but the problem is easily finessed: Jews in the Diaspora are told to frame Israel’s concerns about Iran as a global threat, not simply as a threat to Israel.

Of course, that’s what we are seeing now. But we needn’t be naïve. Jews like Dennis Ross are clearly far more loyal to Israel than to the US. Speaking as a psychologist, they wouldn’t be able to see a conflict of interest between the US and Israel if it was staring them in the face. Indeed, as Gore Vidal said of Norman Podhoretz, they are unregistered agents of a foreign government.

In a sane society, there would be a huge groundswell of public opposition to Ross’s appointment–as there has been for a number of Obama’s appointments. But that won’t happen.

Since there has been no groundswell of media or public opposition to pro-Israel operatives like Ross at the highest levels of the U.S. government, it’s not surprising that the practice continues. Amos Hochstein is a good contemporary example. Israel and the powerful Lebanon-based Shiite Hezbollah militia are on the brink of open warfare, conflict that could trigger U.S. intervention and escalate to a regional or even a world war. To date these dangers have attracted little notice from the American mass media, ever eager to divert and dissemble from the direr consequences of the Washington regime’s one-sided support for Israel. Small wonder, then, that the media should evince the same reluctance in investigating the shadowy past and dubious allegiance of Hochstein, the emissary the U.S. recently dispatched to “mediate” between Hezbollah and Israel. The following is a brief foray into the workings of the Israel Lobby in the Biden Administration, as well as a primer on the perks of being Jewish in America.

Hochstein’s  importance

To be sure, media reports have not slighted Hochstein’s great influence in the Biden White House or his meteoric career. He has been described as “one of President Biden’s closest confidantes [who] has worked with him for many years,” while another Washington insider calls Hochstein “the person who bridges State, Treasury, the White House and Energy”
Fittingly, one of Hochstein’s titles is “Special Presidential Coordinator.”

Yet the media have underplayed, and often ignored, a key fact about Hochstein in his role as an impartial arbiter between Hezbollah and Israel: his birth, youth, and military service in Israel.

Beyond those bare facts about his origins, Hochstein has been remarkably unforthcoming about his life before he arrived in the United States in 1974. While nearly every successful denizen of the D.C. is eager to brandish Ivy League/Seven Sisters (or the equivalent) educational credentials, one may scour the internet (including his page on the usually resume-rich LinkedIn job-hunting site) without finding anything about Hochstein’s education, college or secondary.

Just as murky are the circumstances by which Adam Hochstein, a 21-year-old immigrant with unknown credentials, became a congressional staffer within a year of his arrival in this country, working for Rep. Sam Gejdenson (D-CT) who, like Hochstein, is  a Jew.

Despite his youth and inexperience, Hochstein carried out important assignments for Gejdenson. Not yet 25, he traveled to North Korea in 1997 to report on its economic and military situation; still in his twenties, he undertook negotiations with the Iraqi government (against the advice of the U.S. State Department) aimed at “resettling” thousands of Palestinians there in exchange for loosening some of the crippling sanctions then in force there.

Well before 9/11, Hochstein advocated acting against Iraq for harboring “weapons of mass destruction” in a press release issued by Congressman Gejdenson, and soon afterward he was serving as senior advisor to a senator and a governor. Like many members of the permanent government, Hochstein has used hiatuses between his party’s dominance to work in lobbying and industries close to government, in his case capitalizing on energy policy expertise that he seems to have acquired with no expertise in the field. He’s evidently done well, at some point becoming a partner in two D.C. restaurants and a movie theater.

Under Obama, Hochstein (without known diplomatic training or experience) rapidly climbed the ladder at the State Department to become America’s chief energy negotiator, deeply involved in efforts to block Russian natural gas from Europe and to facilitate Israeli access to energy.

During the Trump presidency, Hochstein served on the board of Ukraine’s natural gas company, Naftogaz.

Hochstein’s knowledge of the ins and outs of Ukraine’s shady corrupt energy industry is evidently considerable. In his testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives, Hunter Biden stated that Hochstein had advised him merely to be “very careful” in serving on the board of the notoriously corrupt Burisma corporation.

Hochstein also seems to have had a role in the “whistle blowing” that led to Trump’s first impeachment resulting from a phone call interpreted by Democrats as pressuring Zelensky to investigate Biden family corruption in Ukraine, and to have been advising Zelensky before his election.

It’s also interesting that there is a lack of definitive information on Hochstein’s current citizenship:

According to one report, a State Department source has claimed that he is “not a dual national,” but refused to state if he has renounced his Israeli citizenship, and in fact gave no [details as to Hochstein’s American citizenship.] So the question raised, unanswered— Hochstein’s citizenship is evidently a “carefully guarded secret.” Not acknowledging Hochstein’s Israeli citizenship would be useful because, for example, in Lebanon, where Hochstein has been involved as an American negotiator on the Israeli conflict with Hezbollah, “it is normally illegal for an Israeli” to visit Lebanon.

Even Hezbollah at the time did not comment on the mediator’s nationality or military past, with leader Hassan Nasrallah saying they will “not express an opinion or position related to the demarcation of borders”.

Given all this, it’s hard to disagree with this quote originally from Ha’aretz:

…the American brokerage farce, whose players are almost all American Jews, some of them former or future Israelis. If the United States is a side in the conflict, then it should say so and conduct the negotiation as though Israel is its protégé. And if it really wants to be an honest broker, then come on – Amos Hochstein?…

Shut Up and Obey: How Democracy Can’t Survive Disagreement

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Do you need to translate Indonesian into English? Or Filipino into French? Japanese into German? No problem. Artificial intelligence will do all of that with ease. But there are some vital translations that AI won’t currently perform. It won’t translate English into English. Or French into French. Or German into German. Why is this a problem? Well, if you read leftist newspapers or websites in any of those languages, you’ll find that they often need translating into the same language. For example, here’s some English from The Guardian that needs translating into English:

  • Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, is an immensely divisive figure who has helped polarise his country. (source)
  • Divisive messages from public figures are directly linked to tipping some people into violence on the streets. (source)
  • The radical right is growing in confidence as it attempts to push what [Hope Not Hate] called “divisive, populist, anti-immigration, climate-sceptic policies”. (source)
  • By giving oxygen to these divisive and dangerous individuals, Suella Braverman is legitimising fringe far-right elements that threaten our cohesion and democracy. (source)
  • It’s part of a populist approach: choose a well-known institution and level divisive accusations at it. (source)

The English word “divisive” is a favorite of the left, but it needs translating into English. In fact, it needs translating twice. In all the quotes above, it first of all means “in disagreement with the left.” But fundamentally it means “Shut up and obey.” If you disagree with the left, you’re dividing opinion and destroying unanimity. That’s obviously a wicked and hateful thing to do. After all, the left are infallibly correct and impeccably moral. Anyone who disagrees with leftist ideas about race or migration or transgenderism or Islam is a Bad Person. And Bad People need to be silenced.

Democracy means leftism

If you disagree, you’re being divisive and proving that you’re a Bad Person who needs to be silenced. Otherwise you’ll be a threat to democracy – which is another favorite word of the left. Again it’s an English word that needs translating into English:

  • With Trump surging, democracy is in peril. (source)
  • [Bernie Saunders’] assessment of a Trump victory in November is sobering. “It will be the end of democracy, functional democracy.” (source)
  • As Germany’s postwar constitution turns 75, threats to its democracy are looming. (source)

By “democracy,” the left mean “leftism.” That’s why, for the left, it’s perfectly democratic to import millions of Third-World folk against the will of the White majority. Third-World migration strengthens our democracy. Anyone who objects to it is divisive and a threat to democracy. In other words, Third-World migration strengthens leftism and objectors are wickedly disagreeing with leftism.

Keen to vote for more migration

Of course, leftism now includes so-called right-wing parties across the West. For example, the British Conservative party was in power for fourteen long years. But it did nothing to enact the will of the Whites who voted for it and everything to increase the power of non-Whites and the left. The Tories presided over a massive increase in Third-World migration that has imported millions of votes for their supposed political rivals on the left:

Voting for the first time in a British election, Prathesh Paulraj and other immigrant voters are excited to take part in the July 4 ballot, hoping they can influence change in the country that they have chosen to call home. The opposition Labour Party is widely expected to win by a landslide, replacing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party which has been in power for 14 years.

Refugees and immigrants from Commonwealth countries, mainly former territories of the British Empire such as Nigeria, India, and Malaysia, are eligible to vote in British elections.

Paulraj, 27, who came to Britain in February last year, said he was excited to cast his vote after missing the election in his native India. “In my country, they don’t allow people from other countries to vote. … I came here on a student visa, but they are giving us an opportunity, like British citizens,” said Paulraj who works part-time as an ambassador at his university in Manchester, northwest England.

Teh Wen Sun, a 33-year-old Malaysian student from Salford, not far from Manchester, said she did not see much difference between the two main parties, but she was keen to vote for a party that is more receptive to immigrants. …

Oyinkansola Dirisu, 31, a support worker from Manchester who came to Britain in 2022, said she was looking forward to voting for Labour, and said she wanted whoever won power to make it easier for people like her to move to Britain. (“UK election gives hope to first time immigrant voters,” Reuters, 3rd July 2024)

Importing non-Whites to strengthen anti-White leftism is true democracy

Why did the Tories not remove the right of foreign students and other obviously non-British migrants to vote in British elections? Well, because doing that would be a threat to democracy. In other words, it would prevent votes for the left. Non-Whites like Prathesh Paulraj vote for leftist parties which then import more non-Whites to vote for leftist parties which then import more non-Whites to… The governing elite of the Conservative party never made the slightest effort to end that leftism-strengthening cycle. There’s a simple reason for that: the governing elite of the Conservative party are themselves leftist. More precisely, they’re leftist for Britain while being rightist for Israel.

Booty without scrutiny

This is because the elite in the Conservative party are either Jewish or controlled by Jewish money. Jews like Sir Ehud Sheleg and Sir Mick Davis regularly occupy the hugely powerful but rarely scrutinized post of party Treasurer. Sheleg is an Israeli citizen who has openly stated that his first loyalty is not to Britain. He told the Jewish Chronicle in 2019: “I was brought up, albeit in Israel, with the sentiment of very strong ties to Britain. In the family of nations, this has to be my favourite one. Second to my homeland, of course.”

Jewish moneyman Ehud Sheleg put Israeli Jews first and British Whites nowhere

Yes, second to his homeland, which does not allow migration from the Third World, let alone allow Third-World folk to vote in its elections. But Ehud Sheleg and other fervent Zionists in the Conservative party want Britain only to offer unconditional support to Israel, not to copy Israel’s majority-favoring politics. In Israel, it’s good that the will of the Jewish majority is obeyed. In America or Britain, it would be very bad for the will of the White majority to be obeyed. Instead, the will of the Jewish minority must be obeyed. And so America’s and Britain’s borders remain open to the Third World. That’s true democracy, folks!

Fatal Antigone: Between Modern Lawfare and Cursed Heredity 

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Authors and their literary heroes are always subject to conflicting interpretations in different historical contexts. Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone was performed quite differently in the Greek city state of fifth-century Greece than it is in contemporary versions crafted by modern producers and directors beholden to modern literary critics. The story of the mythical and rebellious princess Antigone raises a haunting question whether all we have learned so far from our Western cultural treasure trove, be it from Homer’s epics, Biblical proverbs, or from Shakespeare’s verses, or for that matter from the US Constitution, is just apocryphal nonsense or perhaps a conman job resulting in a terrible waste of time for gullible readers and theater audiences. Projecting our modes of conceptualization into the mindset of our distant ancestors is a game of wishful thinking.

Sophocles’ play Antigone is the centerpiece of Western legal, philosophical and political thought. The play conveys a timeless interaction between the rule of positive law versus the notion of unwritten justice, known also as natural or divine law.  Antigone believes that in accordance with divine laws she must provide for a decent burial for her dead brother, irrespective of his brother’s insurrectionist past and despite the fact the he was accused by their  uncle Creon of what we would call today “terrorist activities.” In Antigone’s mind, divine or natural laws honoring dead kinsmen must precede the written law of her city of Thebes however much the law of her  city strictly forbids memorial service to enemies of the state. As she claims in her defense: ”

Justice, enacted not these human laws
Nor did I deem that thou, a mortal man
Could’st by a breath annul and override
The immutable unwritten laws of Heaven.” (1)

But what god or  which gods? What divine justice did Antigone have in mind? Most modern scholars overlook the fact that the Ancients had a radically different concept of religion and justice than modern lawmakers in the US or EU. Ancient Greeks or Romans could not possibly conceive of the end-time salvation religions like monotheistic Christianity, Islam or Judaism. The Greco-Roman mindset and its conceptualization of the hereafter can in no way be substituted by Christian-inspired notions of justice. Therefore, analyzing Antigone through glasses of Christian self-denial or guilt feelings is a nonstarter. In prodding the self-perception of early Christians, Walter Otto, the well-known authority on the spiritual legacy of Antiquity, makes the following critical statements about Christian sense of justice;  “Instead of pride reigns fear. The fullness and bliss of life have vanished; dignity and distance have been abandoned and the freedom of the spirit has been stifled.” (2)

Those who cheer up Antigone are oblivious of the fact that modern Western legalism and the concept of natural law is largely influenced by the Judaic-centered religion of a vindictive, revengeful, self-centered, Semitic and totalitarian god who must be obeyed and who resolutely rejects the presence  of other gods — and therefore the possibility of existence of other truths or any other forms of justice. “If we reject such considerations as ‘antisemitic,’ we burden ourselves with new forms of ban on thought and discourse that dangerously restrict our reflection on history. … The capacity to historicize and relativize oneself is a precondition to any genuine tolerance.” (3)

These words by Jan Assmann, a renowned modern expert on Semitic religions, certainly do not come as a consolation to American January 6 Capitol protestors, who, similarly to Antigone had also their ideas about justice when rejecting the rapidly enacted voting legislation that had propelled Joe Biden into the White House. Much like Antigone’s outlawed and demonized brother, the January 6 demonstrators were quickly dubbed by Biden’s DOJ commissars with hyperbolic and criminalizing qualifiers such as “insurrectionists,” “seditious individuals,” “obstructers of justice.” Most of them have subsequently faced stiff penalties. However, the same judicial travesty when applied to the upholding of the liberal judiciary in the US and EU is neatly covered in the garb of the liberal rule of law which even King Creon would not object to. Most scholars—in fact most readers or viewers of Sophocles’ Antigone—are justly horrified over King Creon’s inhumane decision to refuse the burial of Antigone’s insurrectionist brother Polynices, leaving his corpse to rot in the field amidst vultures instead. However, modern law and opinion makers in the EU and US are fully in agreement that even eighty  years after World War II, countless burial locations of killed or deceased National-Socialist or Fascist officials and soldiers scattered all over Europe should remain banned from the public eye, with their distant next of kin being denied access to their graves. Former US president Ronald Reagan’s visit to the military cemetery in Bitburg in Germany in 1985 and his unintended homage to the fallen German Waffen SS soldiers was met with massive criticism all over the liberal and Jewish-run media. (4)

In recent times, a Catholic memorial service that has been regularly held each May 13th over the last thirty years in the Austrian village of Bleiburg in memory of Croat victims of communism was banned by the Austrian government on the pretext that this was the “largest mass gathering of European Nazi sympathizers.”  (5)

One could go on and on with the judicial lawfare or state-sponsored criminalization of the defeated side and mention the case of fallen Confederate soldiers. General Robert E. Lee’s statues have been smeared and torn down, his name likely to be soon branded in high school history manuals with the label “forerunner of modern white supremacism.” 

The Revisionist trap

Everybody nurtures a conception of Antigone analogously to how one thinks about a household pet. Over the last century Sophocles’ play has been performed hundreds of times all over Europe and the US and will likely continue to attract comments from literary critics for centuries to come. Likewise, everybody judges Antigone’s defiance of Creon’s decrees in his own way. Everybody fits her fate within his own legal, religious or political framework when it best befits his preconceived bias or value judgments. A right-winger will praise harsh measures taken by King Creon who endeavors to secure peace and order in his city threatened by a looming civil war. Modern antifascist activists or LGBTQ+ activists, let alone some modern ageing menopausal drag queen will, by contrast, construe Antigone’s effrontery as a sign of worldwide transsexual/gender liberation.

The necessity of readaptation, reappropriation, revisionism, or probably outright scriptural or legal fraud applies to all fields of science and law, often coming in handy as a tool for academic zealots or nascent political movements in search of cultural and political hegemony. Some contemporary conventional wisdoms, however, must never be revised or questioned. While it is a common and a legally acceptable practice in the US/EU to historicize, that is, inflate or deflate the number of victims of communism or dispute the veracity of distant historical facts and figures, the process of historical revisionism must stay off limits when applied to Jewish World War II victimhood. Any reinterpretation, any new reassessment of the Jewish World War II narrative is a felony in almost all Western states. By contrast, all scientific or literary adaptations, including the fate of Sophocles’ Antigone are given free reign of reinterpretation. Cases of literary reappropriation abound. The late eighteenth-century German playwright Friedrich Schiller was elevated to the level of the spiritual founding father of twentieth-century National-Socialist Germany. His name was adorned in 1935 by dozens of flowery words by hundreds of National-Socialist academics who honored Schiller’s legacy by bestowing the new Germany with the all-year-round headline the “Schillerjahr” (the Year of Schiller) on the occasion of the 130th anniversary of his death. A prominent German lawyer, also a high-ranking National-Socialist politician, Hans Fabricius, wrote in his essay a glowing praise of Schiller:

Schiller as National Socialist! With pride we must salute him. With pride and gratitude. Because no one knows if and what we would be without him. (6)

Latter-day communist and liberal intellectuals didn’t lag much behind with their revisory eulogies. Schiller’s dramas enjoyed great popularity in what was to become the Soviet-ruled East Germany (DDR). Especially popular was his drama Wilhem Tell which depicts the eponymous Swiss freedom fighter (seditious terrorist?). Tell refuses to pay homage to the hat of the late medieval Hapsburg ruler who was terrorizing Swiss peasants. Nowadays we may be disgusted at the sight of those times when European citizens were obliged to kiss the feet of their local rulers, while forgetting that our contemporary liberal deities also require mandatory public worship. Once upon late medieval times, politicians had to kneel down in front of their rulers; now they have to take the knee in front of non-White criminals or stage pilgrimages to the supremely sacred Yad Vashem.

And today’s Schiller? The spirit of the time has changed, along with the arrival of the new liberal ruling class who has tuned up Schiller’s verses to a new set of globalist, multiracial, foreigner-friendly, transgender edicts. Now Schiller’s verses from his Ode to Joy have become the official anthem of the multiracial European Union. The same methods of reappropriation of an author (or when needed demonization), bordering on outright literary or historical fakery, is the inevitable fate of all Western classics and critical historians.

Antigone’s travails know no end. On February 6,1944 around 8 pm, in the midst of US and British nightly aerial bombardments of France (7), the revamped play Antigone was staged by the French nationalist playwright Jean Anouilh at the Paris Théâtre de l’Atelier. Despite power cuts and the freezing cold, the play had a large audience turnout, earning the author an accolade from the German and Vichy government officials in the audience. After the end of World War II, or the so-called Liberation of France, Anouilh’s Antigone did not disappoint his earlier communist detractors because he made Antigone sound like the chief female symbol of antifascist resistance. Thus, the mythical and rebellious Antigone turned after World War II into an antifascist figurehead in the eyes of European leftwing literati. She was remolded into the mirror image of the Spanish communist heroine La Pasionaria or the much-acclaimed American writer and drunkard Ernest Hemingway who after World War II openly bragged about killing dozens of disarmed “Kraut soldiers.” (8)

In the fall of 1944, Anouilh along with thousands of other French nationalist intellectuals was on edge as waves of massive purges were being carried out by self-styled antifascist liberators — with the full benediction of American/UK legislators. Anouilh’s skill for allegorical plots and his irony-clad literary style, however, helped him weasel in and out and survive the vengeful shooting gallery of the antifascist victors. This was not the case with hundreds of his colleagues and fellow travelers who ended the winter 1944/45 with a rope around their neck. (9) The late 1944 Paris scenario was a postmodern reenactment of the duel between the two Antigone’s brothers who had killed each other in their quest for the throne. The much-decried modern cult of wokeness, the religion of political correctness, the dogma of cancel culture, along with their leagues of virtue signalers did not start yesterday — their origins must be traced to 1945. Or even further back to Sophocles’ Antigone and her doomsday father/brother Oedipus…

 Genes as natural law

“In large measure, our fate is in our genes”. (10) This quote by the American molecular biologist James Watson may shed in hindsight additional  light on the fate of Antigone. And for that matter it can better explain the behavior and sociopolitical choices of people throughout the ages. We can change our lifestyles, we can change our citizenship, we can learn or unlearn our acquired cultures, but for now at least, we can’t change the DNA passed down to us from our distant ancestors. No wonder that Watson’s words come as a shock to modern social science theorists and lawmakers who, despite empirical data to the contrary insist on the sole role of the economic and political environment in shaping human behavior. Some contemporary American scholars complain that “Most political science degree programs do not require any coursework in the life sciences, much less genetics.” (11) Their words basically echo belatedly the words of German biologists and geneticists who fell into disgrace after 1945.

The above observations are by no means novel; similar — albeit more expressive and now banned — German words such as “Ahnenerbe” (ancestral heritage), “Erbanlagen” (hereditary factors), “Rassenhygiene” (racial hygiene) were used hundreds of times by hundreds of German psychiatrists, geneticists, physicians, criminal law experts and historians during the fateful years of 1933–45. For obvious political reasons, after World War II such German appellations had to be shred and gradually replaced by vague, neutral and more academically and politically correct terms such as behavioral genetics, evolutionary biology, and sociobiology, in an attempt by contemporary race scientists to clear their names in advance from any tentative suspicion of harboring racism or “Nazism.” When one looks at Antigone’s fate from the point of view of her genetic makeup, the entire play obtains a deadly different meaning.

Antigone was a progeny of kinship inbreeding; her father Oedipus was a husband of her mother Jocasta. Both Antigone and her father Oedipus, whom she had faithfully accompanied until his tragic death, were children of the same mother. Her doomsday fate resulting from the incestuous bond between her father-brother Oedipus and his mother Jocasta had been predetermined on the day she was born. It comes as a big surprise that Antigone’s genetic makeup has never been studied in the analysis of her rebellious behavior. In addition, one must also wonder, what made Sophocles and ancient Greek playwrights, as well as their future readers and viewers relish such morbid tales of incest and kinship killings — all the more as the ancient Greeks had laws allowing parents to physically remove their handicapped children. In fact, Antigone’s father, Oedipus, as a newborn baby had been ditched in the wilderness by his parents, most likely because his parents had suspected their lineage of carrying a serious genetic flaw, thus spelling doom for the city; “Sympathy with the decadents, equal rights for the degenerates — that would be the deepest immorality, that would be the very perversion of morality!” wrote a prominent German lawyer in reference to Nietzsche and his attitudes towards the legislation of ancient Greeks. (12)

What was crossing Sophocles’ mind when he wrote Antigona will never be known with certainty. Very likely he wrote the Oedipus trilogy having in mind how mixed interracial marriages or incestuous bonds are bound to cast a curse on entire ancestral lineage and in the long run destroy the life of a tribe or ingroup in the Greek polis. German scholars in National -Socialist Germany insisted on the careful choice of partners and a good insight into the family tree of both the wife and her husband. Crime and heredity are deeply interwoven, since recessive criminal genes of one or both partners may lead to disaster for future distant offspring.

Just as research on human heredity must not disregard the fact that man, in contrast to all other living creatures, is spiritually determined, we must request today from social science that it also takes into account the biological process which is closely linked the mental/spiritual process. (13)

The above quote is from a prominent German medical doctor who was dealing with crime and heredity in National Socialist Germany and who also proposed an academic curriculum fusing natural science and social science research into a single whole. He added an ominous remark that wouldn’t sound well in the ears of left-leaning college professors: “And no one can deny it: biologically based psychopathology and social science are much closer to each other than psychopathology and experimental physics.” (14)

With each regime change, such as the one that occurred in Germany and Europe, and to some extent in the US in 1945, comes along inevitably the change in political dogmas. Each time a regime change happens the new ruling class must automatically doctor up new “paradigms” in order to make scientific research fit better into their dominant ideology. Just as the story of ancient Greeks, their racial and genetic makeup, their beliefs and their mores were a foremost topic of interest to German scholars after the National Socialist takeover, so has the liberal-communist dogma of interchangeability of human races become a new myth of our times.

The Greek man always feels himself to be a son and heir: from his ancestors he inherits property and dominion, rank and fame, the noble shape of his body, strength, power, courage and achievement. The two belong together, for one is inconceivable without the other. … We are familiar with the hereditary curse in the Oresteia, which always beget new bloodguilt. This is not the revenge of a jealous god, but the natural effect of a natural cause, a fate that extends to several people, given that the family is a unit of blood. (15)

How do those ancient Greek tragedies square away today with the issue of the much-debated topic of natural laws vs. legal positivism in modern jurisprudence, especially in the US? Imposing universal rights and the concept of dignity across the board on all peoples worldwide has had so far little positive effects in terms of securing a lasting multiethnic environment or world peace. An indigenous man from Borneo or Sumatra has a different idea of natural laws and its derivative human rights than a merchant from Queens. A Palestinian-American will have a different concept of natural law and the underlying justice than an American Jew. An African-American DA conducting court proceedings involving a White American defendant will likely file a different motion than a White defense attorney representing his White client.

The American common law, unlike European civil law brags of the superiority of grand juries when passing a final verdict on an indicted suspect. But if a jury is composed of more than half of different non-White or mixed-race jurors, it is highly unlikely that the judge will hand down a just sentence, and it’s relatively unlikely that a White suspect will be acquitted.  The multiracial US and its protectorate, the multiracial EU, are more and more in the process of copying the policy of the ex-communist judiciary in Eastern Europe and Soviet Uinon where the verdict against political dissidents was known before the staged trial had even started. One good thing about Antigone is that she harbored no illusions about her fate. She had known all along that she was by her bloodline destined to die young and that she could not expect any salvation, either from people or the gods.

Notes:

  1. Sophocles, Antigone, transl. Storr, (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1912). p.15
  2. Walter Otto, Der Geist der Antike und die christliche Welt (Bonn: Verlag F. Cohen, 1923), p. 36.
  3. Jan Assmann, The Mosaic Distinction or the Price of Monotheism. Transl. by David Lorton / Litrix.de 2004, online, p.9.
  4. David Green, “This Day in Jewish History, 1985; Ronald Reagan Sparks Storm with Visit to German War Cemetery”, Haaretz, May 4, 2016. https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2016-05-04/ty-article/.premium/1985-reagan-visits-german-war-cemetery/0000017f-f460-d47e-a37f-fd7c41730000
  5. Hasnain Kazim, „Neonazis in Kärnten; Gedenken mit Hakenkreuz und Hitlergruß“, Der Spiegel, May 10, 2018. https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/oesterreich-neonazi-treffen-in-bleiburg-kaernten-a-1206675.html
  6. Hans Fabricius, Schiller als Kampgenosse Hitlers (Berlin: Verlag Deutsche Kultur-Wacht, 1934), p. 164.
  7. Jean Claude-Valla. La France sous les bombes américaines :1942-1945 ( Paris : Les Cahiers libres de l‘histoire, Nr.7, 2008).
  8. Wolfgang Stock, „Hat Ernest Hemingway im Krieg wirklich 122 Deutsche getötet?“, Der Spiegel, December 21, 2023. https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/ernest-hemingway-hat-der-schriftsteller-im-krieg-wirklich-122-deutsche-getoetet-a-3bb3b624-78d6-4c87-880a-207daed266ab
  9. Dominique Venner, Histoire de la Collaboration (Paris : Pygmalion, 2000), pp. 515-516.
  10. D. Watson, quoted in Time, March, 20, 1988.https://time.com/archive/6702116/science-the-gene-hunt/
  11. Peter K. Hatemi and Rose McDermott, “The genetics of politics: discovery, challenges, and progress”, Trends in Genetics, October 2012, (Vol. 28, No. 10, p. 528). https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0168-9525%2812%2900111-4
  12. Kurt Kassler, Nietzsche und das Recht (München: Verlag Ernst Reinhardt, 1941), p.67.
  13. Friedrich Stumpfl, „Verbrechen und Vererbung“, Monatsschrift für Kriminalbiologie und Strafrechtsreform, 29. Jahrgang, Heft 1 (München: J. F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1938), p.2.
  14. Ibid.
  15. Walter Haedicke, „Die Anschauungen der Griechen über Familie, Herkunft und Vererbung“, Volk und Rasse, 12.Iahrg., Heft 10, (München-Berlin, 1937), pp. 371-372.