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Kinjies and Me

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Kinji is a metaphor I’ve used privately and now I’m going public with it.   It refers to realizing that something isn’t what you had been led to believe it was.  “I get it now, that’s a kinji, how about that?”

The kinji metaphor, or concept, comes from a writing I did for a personal website I’ve maintained since 2007, robertsgriffin.com.  www.robertsgriffin.com.  It’s included in an unpublished book of writings of mine called What Came to Mind: Thoughts Late in Life.  Here’s a link to a free copy of that book.  I called the writing “The Hollywood Argyles and Kinji Shibuya.”  The Hollywood Argyles was a musical group that in 1960 had a number one hit record of the novelty song “Alley Oop.”  Here is a link to the song online.  Kinji Shibuya was a professional wrestler back in the ‘50s.

My writing pointed out that in fact there was no such group as the Hollywood Argyles.  Someone named Gary Paxton made the “Alley Oop” record one afternoon in Los Angeles with musicians who were around the recording studio at the time.  The studio was on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Argyle Avenue, thus the name Paxton came up with for the non-existent group.  With Paxton’s approval, musicians traveled the country posing as the Hollywood Argyles.  I attended one of those imposter performances at the Flamingo Club in Saint Paul, Minnesota and bought the ruse completely.

As with the Hollywood Argyles, Kinji Shibuya wasn’t what I thought he was.  Here is the part of the website/book writing that deals with Kinji Shibuya.  After this excerpt, I’ll end this piece with six prominent examples of my current kinjies.

In the 1950s as a kid, I watched wrestling on television every week from Minneapolis on a local channel, like 8:00 p.m. on a Friday.  I understand now that televising the matches was a good deal for both the television station and for Verne Gagne, the promoter of the matches and a star wrestler himself. The matches were held in a downtown Minneapolis arena in any case, so there were no production costs to the station beyond the outlay for a couple of cameras, an announcer, and a technician or two, and the wrestling shows got good ratings.  For Verne, since only the preliminary matches were shown on television and the main events were hyped during the telecasts, it enticed people to come to his promotions.

There I’d be, week after week—I suppose I was thirteen, in there—sprawled alone on a dilapidated couch with a bag of Old Dutch potato chips in front of a 17-inch black-and-white Zenith television set that looked like a small refrigerator on the second floor of Mr. Jensen’s house that my mother, dad, and I rented from him.  A regular on those wrestling shows was Kinji Shibuya.  Nothing subtle about the personas of the wrestlers in those years (or now): Kinji Shibuya was a sneaky, evil Jap straight from Japan.  His presentation played well back then because this wasn’t long after World War II, a time when we had been conditioned to hate the Japanese with a passion—kind of like now with Putin, but even worse.  Check out the 1943 Hollywood film “Gung Ho” on YouTube sometime to get a sense of what anti-Japanese propaganda was like in those years.

Kinji Shibuya

Kinji Shibuya, short and stocky with a burr haircut, would enter the ring before his matches in bare feet wearing some kind of Japanese robe, a kimono or something, with a sinister look on his face to a chorus of boos from the crowd.  For sure, I didn’t like him lounging there on the couch as I was watching him on TV.  Before a match started, he would squat in his corner with his back ramrod straight and raise one bent leg with a flexed foot in the air and slam his foot to the mat, bam! and then do the same thing with the other leg, bam! and then, smirking, malevolence personified, rub his hands conspiratorially together in front of his chest, the whole business an alien, scary Jap ritual of some kind.

The actual match was basically given over to Kinji Shibuya and his clean-cut, all-American opponent shuffling sideways in a circle eyeing each other, and then they’d grab one another around the back of the neck and tussle a bit and then break apart and start shuffling in a circle again.  The entire match, they rarely left their feet.  During brief episodes of action, typically Shibuya would be getting his just comeuppance.   He’d have his back up against the ropes with his arms out to the side and his hands grasping the upper rope taking punches to the stomach from the valorous American and grimacing and grunting grandly with each punch—ugh, ugh, ugh!   For some reason, he was completely immobilized and helpless on these occasions.

Punches with closed fists were against the rules of wrestling; that’s what the announcer said.  Open fists where you hit people with your palm were OK, but no knuckles.  Even though closed fist punches were illegal, with Japs they were entirely justified, plus there was something American about them, the real deal, even patriotic, John Wayne the movie actor and all that, not foreign, ineffectual open-hand karate chops like Kinji Shibuya employed, so we cheered our hero on no matter if he broke the rules or not.

The referee, taking note of this transgression of the rules, the punching to the stomach, would ever so gently tap our surrogate, the good guy all-American, on the shoulder and shake his head no, you can’t do that.  When that mild reminder had no effect, the punching going on unabated, ugh, ugh, ugh, the referee would start counting in slow, deliberate fashion, raising and lowering his right arm way up and way down.  “One! . . . Two! . . . Three! . . .” At some number a penalty was going to be imposed, though I never found out what the number or penalty was, because at four the virtuous rule-breaker would stop and take a step back and the circle-shuffle would start up again.  Evidently, you could do anything for a count of four at least, even punching with your knuckles.

The shuffling and punching and a few headlocks and arm twists, plus some bounces off the ropes, went on for I suppose fifteen minutes.  The bounces off the ropes involved both wrestlers, for some unknown reason, to suddenly start running rapidly back and forth across the ring bouncing off the ropes.  They’d zip past each other three or four times and then stop and pose, glaring at one another and letting the excitement of what had just occurred, all the running back and forth, sink in.  Then, out of nowhere it seemed, Kinji Shibuya would pull a sneaky, dirty, Jap stunt à la Pearl Harbor and win the match.  Suddenly, it was over.  Why couldn’t the referee have seen the low, underhanded stunt Kinji Shibuya had connived to pull?  It was obvious to the rest of us—the announcer, the paying customers, and me—but the referee had somehow missed it.  Then Kinji Shibuya, victorious, leering in that devious Jap way of his, would put on his un-American kimono or whatever it was and leave the ring.  He got away with it this time, but just wait until next week’s match.  He’ll get what he deserves then and I’ll be there watching on TV.  But next week would come and darned if he didn’t fool the referee again and right at the end chalk up another unfair victory!

I later found out that Kinji Shibuya was actually Jerry Shibuya from Utah, a former college football player who lived a quiet suburban life with his wife and children.  Oh.

So that’s where the kinji metaphor, concept, whatever to call it, comes from.  Kinji was himself a kinji, not what I thought he was.  I’ll list six major kinjies for me these days with the idea that doing it might prompt you to come up with some kinjies of your own.

The first kinji is World War II.  This goes back to the late 1990s.  I was conducting interviews for a book about the white nationalist William Pierce.1 Up to that point I had held the accepted view of that war—you know, Hitler, evil incarnate, bent on conquering the world, was stopped from pulling it off by the forces of righteousness in The Good War.   Pierce was just speaking his mind—he was making no effort to shake up my thinking about World War II—but nevertheless he did, or anyway he started a reconsideration of that bloodbath.  All to say, Churchill is no longer my hero.

A second kinji—and again it’s related to my Pierce connection—is pretty much all center stage purveyors of truth and morality to the masses: movie and television show creators, major publisher authors, journalists (including “the newspaper of record” The New York Times), politicians, heavy traffic websites, textbook writers, and classroom lecturers.  Pierce was billed by the mainstream media and others in the know as this hate-filled bigot holed up in a guarded compound in West Virginia—“the most dangerous man in America” they called him. When I got to meet him, he turned out to be a quiet, sensible, self-effacing, bookish PhD in physics who didn’t hate anybody.  If Pierce wasn’t as he was portrayed, who and what else wasn’t?  As it’s turned out, enough else wasn’t that it kinjied me.

A third kinji, the whole white villainy thing.  I was an adult during the heyday of the black civil rights movement—the marches in the South, Martin Luther King, the evil of segregation, the lowlife Southern whites with their head-busting clubs and nooses.  I bought the idea that whites as a whole were down and dirty bad guys who deserve to get screwed over in any way you can come up with.  That whites were my race, me, that my father came from rural Georgia, put a check on that perspective just a tad, but very little. The power of propaganda and social pressure (snubs are the least you’ll endure if you get caught with the wrong attitude).  Movies like “To Kill a Mocking Bird” and “Mississippi Burning” and every television show reinforced my negative outlook on an entire race of people, not only now but for all time.  Writing the Pierce book in particular—Pierce again—encouraged me look at racial realities for myself and find books that were not on the reading list, as it were.  The outcome is that I broke from my strong predilection to hide out with old French movies and 19th-century Russian novels and takeout submarine sandwiches to advocate for whites as a race.  The racial area never ceases to surprise me.  I think of an article I started writing around the time of George Floyd’s death.  This was 2020, not that long ago.  Like everybody, I assumed that Derek Chauvin the cop was guilty of murdering Floyd and I was going to figure out the best possible defense of Chauvin at his trial and got into it and it hit me, “Damn, the guy’s innocent!” 2

Jews and Israel as unimpeachable good guys in life’s drama has been kinjied.  Nowadays, if a Jew has written a book or article or is proposing a policy or has made a movie, I don’t automatically, as I once did, nod a Pavlovian yes.  I think critically about its merits and implications.  Israel isn’t a priori blameless to me anymore.  They are either to blame or not and I’ll mull it over.  I note that Israel is only 263 miles long and from ten to 71 miles wide and think about how much attention and support and resources it gets and what’s going on with that.  I certainly don’t want Jews hurt, but with equal intensity I don’t want Jews hurting anybody.  I’ve had it with organized destruction and killing—war, terrorism—I don’t care who’s doing it.3

The women’s movement has gotten kinjied.  Betty Friedan and her comrades-in-arms like Gloria Steinem in the early days, the ‘60s, Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique4 and all, sounded good to me, but as the years went on, what Hemingway called his bullshit detector kept going off for me.   These days, I’m sympathetic to men’s concerns and the traditional family and I’m on the side of keeping biological males out of girls’ and women’s sports.   I’m sympathetic to gays5 and transexuals, and—the talk this election season—cat ladies, as well as cat gentlemen, for that matter.  I’m especially for whites being one of them, but I’m also for blacks and Asians and Hispanics and Jews and Arabs and American Indians and every other category of human being on the planet.   At the same time as I say this about collectivities, however, I see our fundamental challenge in life as an individual one: become the truest, wisest, most productive, most decent, most honorable, and happiest person you can manage in the finite time allotted to you on this earth.  Sing your unique song and look out for yourself and yours, find someone to love who’ll love you back, wish everyone well and help them when you can, try not to harm anybody, even in small ways, be kind, and then die, and try to leave some good behind.  That’s my take on it.

A sixth, and last, kinji I’ll mention, is really a rekinji.  The first two decades of my life, I was wholeheartedly a patriotic American—the Founding Fathers, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, our proud heritage, I pledge allegiance to the flag.   In my day, elementary and secondary schools didn’t badmouth the U.S. as they do now.  After I became an adult, that positive view of America was kinjied by the people I earlier called center stage purveyors of truth and morality: “Let me tell you about slavery and racism and imperialism and all the economic and social injustice.”  It sounded good and got me some dinner invitations.  Over the past couple of decades, however, I’ve kinjied that kinji.  Which is not to say I think America was, or is, unflawed; a place can be a great place without being an unflawed place.  I’m the son of a barely literate barber.  I couldn’t look you in the eye.  I accepted the charge I now see at the heart of what this country is about: to take personal responsibility for making something worthwhile out of myself.  I worked on my character and got an education and did the best I could with whatever job I was able to get (I’m doing my best with this article at the moment), and it’s worked out that now very near the end I’m gratified by what I’ve done with my life and at peace and, yes, I’m proud of myself.  The United States of America gave me the chance to make that happen and I’m incredibly thankful for it.  To people who denigrate my country and its people and their ancestors, my ancestors: how about if you stick that where the sun don’t shine.

Endnotes

  1. Robert S. Griffin, The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds: An Up-Close Portrait of White Nationalist William Pierce, FirstBooks Library, 2001.
  2. Robert S. Griffin, “If I Had Made the Closing Argument in Defense of Derek Chauvin . . .” The Occidental Observer, posted May 13, 2021.
  3. See my article, “A Commentary on the Life of Jeannette Rankin,” The Occidental Observer, posted June 22, 2024.
  4. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, W.W. Norton, 2013, originally published in 1963.
  5. See my article, “The White Racial Movement and Gays,” The Occidental Observer, posted June 26, 2018.

 

Why Are Cities So Decadent?

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Recently, I was in Helsinki, the capital of Finland; a generally dreadful place full of materialistic people who vote for Woke political parties, meaning that the area around the central railway station increasingly resembles Mogadishu. Some days later, I was in the beautiful rural town of Naantali, famed for its ancient church and exquisitely preserved nineteenth century wooden buildings.

I got to talking to a local and he made a very perceptive point. He disliked Helsinki people because they were “superficial” and “snobs,” but he distinguished between the Helsinki working class, who had been there many generations, and everybody else; the latter being the ones he disliked. For, as with most large cities, every generation a certain kind of stuck-up, materialistic, ambitious person will move from rural towns like Naantali to large cities like Helsinki. And some fascinating new research has found that this process makes them more likely to be leftist; more likely to be decadent.

The new study, in the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science, has the superficially technical-sounding title of “Life History Strategy in Poland: Population Displacement as a Life History Accelerating Event,” but the point it’s making is beautifully simple. What is a Life History Strategy?

We all sit on a spectrum ranging from fast to slow. A fast or r-strategy develops in an unstable yet easy environment. In such a situation, you could be wiped out at any moment, so you evolve to “live fast and die young.” You invest all your energy in mating—in order to have as many offspring as possible with as many partners as possible in the hope that some will survive. You invest very little energy in nurture, because such energy could easily go to waste. Any individual child could be killed at any moment. This r-strategy is reflected in every aspect of your “life history”—you’re born younger (less developed), you reach developmental milestones younger, you go through puberty younger, lose your virginity younger, you age more quickly, you go through the menopause younger and you die younger. In such an ecology, where you could be wiped out any second, cooperation may never be repaid, so makes sense to be selfish.

As the environment becomes more stable and also harsher, the carrying capacity for the species is reached. So, its members start competing more against each other to survive, moving towards a K-strategy. In such a harsh but predictable context, if you invest all your energy in mating then you may find that all of your offspring die. Hence, you have fewer offspring and fewer sexual partners but you invest more in them; you “nurture” them. There develops an arms-race where the species becomes increasingly adapted to the (predictable) ecology. It does this by learning about the ecology and learning how to cooperate (e.g., via pair bonding), as you must to survive in a harsh ecology, and thus becoming higher in altruism, empathy, impulse control and mental stability.

The study looked at the results of presidential elections in Poland by region. It further argued that being left-wing is, in essence, a reflection of a fast life history strategy. Conservatives are concerned with operating as part of highly cooperative group that they expect will last far into the future as they pass on their culture via their descendants. They value obedience to authority, in-group loyalty and the traditions that hold the group together, such as religion. Leftism, though leftists may signal how group-oriented they are, is concerned with equality, the avoidance of harm, and it tends to dislike and wish to tear down tradition. It is individually-oriented, as “equality” means that he who espouses it obtains more, while harm avoidance manages to avoid harm to self. Also, it is a fact that the people who signal concern with these values—leftists—are low in Agreeableness, are mentally unstable and are low in impulse control. They are fast life history strategists, the abundant evidence for which I have set out in my book Woke Eugenics.

The study found that the region of Poland that was part of Germany before World War II was the most left-wing; something which is put down to massive population disruption. As the authors summarise: “This pattern could be explained by forced population displacement of over 1.5 million people that were resettled from USSR into Western Borderlands, thus replacing prior German inhabitants. Forced population displacement can be understood as a disruptive life event that accelerates life history strategy. This can have long-lasting effects, and the present study provides additional insight into the detrimental consequences of population displacement.”

In other words, if you stay in the place you are from, the world is signalling to you that life is predictable. If, for whatever reason, you move somewhere else, especially to a city full of strangers, then the world is telling you that it is unpredictable. This will calibrate you towards a fast life history strategy—towards selfishness—and, so, towards voting for left-wing parties that will tear down tradition. The study refers to forced migration but it could be argued that, with a lack of jobs in the countryside, people with certain skill sets are effectively compelled to migrate to the cities.

In addition, fast life history strategists, precisely because they create weaker social bonds and value community less, are more likely to migrate and even do so multiple times. A 2020 study in the journal Papers in Regional Science, “Interregional mobility and the personality traits of migrants,” found frequent migration is predicted by low Agreeableness and low mental stability; both of which are fast life history traits. Numerous studies have also shown that migration is predicted by intelligence, as I have explored in my book on this subject.

So, every generation, intelligent fast life history strategists make their way to the cities and the fact of being in the cities makes their life history strategy even faster. Consequently, they support left-wing ideas and make cities decadent, just as Helsinki so obviously is. No wonder, in 2016, the cities in the UK voted Remain while the rest of England voted Leave.

How Did It Come to This?

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Reposted from:

Danmarks Frihedsraad

The last white people

This article was originally published in Danish on December 30, 2017.

Povl H. Riis-Knudsen

Just 50 short years ago, you would have been considered delusional if you had told anyone what Denmark would look like in the year 2024. In your wildest nightmare, you would not have been able to imagine a multicultural Denmark with representatives of all the world’s exotic peoples walking freely in the streets, a country where Danish schoolchildren are in the minority in their school classes, where an ever-increasing part of the state budget is spent directly or indirectly on foreigners while our infrastructure is in decay, our hospitals have to save on both treatment and patient care, and our elderly are left to lie in their own filth. And no one seems to protest vociferously. The few who do are quickly shamed by the united media mafia, and the particularly stubborn dissidents are hunted down by the system’s storm troopers from Redox, Demos1 and whatever else these criminal organizations are called. But this is really unnecessary, because such difficult individual who persist in demanding free speech are quickly excluded from the labor market and the community of the saved, and their voices are not heard. No wonder, so few dare to speak out, and when some few do, they do so with so much flour in their mouths that they are shrouded in a dust cloud of nonsense and contradictions.

How has it come to this? How has a healthy and thriving society on the rise been turned around in such a short time so that it is now headed towards not only cultural, but biological extinction at the speed of light?

Well, you do it like this:

First you destroy the family, and you do this by destroying the woman, because she is responsible for the family and the next generation2. She is made to believe that she cannot “realize” herself as a mother, even though the maternal role is her natural biological role. In media and movies, the housewife is portrayed as stupid3, naïve, and bland, and the job market courts her so that she can get out and “realize herself” at an assembly line or a cash register for a few pennies. The children, who used to roam freely and play naturally with the neighbors’ children, are now caged in kindergartens where they are looked after by young girls and boys who know nothing about children, and the culture that has been passed on from generation to generation through the mother for millennia is suddenly no longer passed on. The kindergarten staff are just looking after the children, that’s all there is time for. But let us face it: a random assortment of teachers and helpers with no real education wouldn’t be able to do this important job – even if they had time. The children have become the property of the state, just as they are in other totalitarian regimes. The resources that strong and well-educated parents previously passed on to their children are now lost to society. Everyone must be equal (i.e. disadvantaged), and as the labor market in the 1970s succeeded in attracting foreigners whose children also go to kindergarten, there can be no question of transmitting any culture at all, because now there are suddenly several cultures, and emphasizing the country’s own culture is considered discrimination. Gradually, the staff also become multicultural. Danish culture disappears from kindergarten and later from schools and universities.

Parents, schools and institutions are forbidden by law to educate children. Neither teachers nor parents are now allowed to put power behind their words, and both families and schools are transformed into discussion clubs where the 6-year-old’s words carry as much weight as those of parents and schoolteachers. All discipline disappears and with it the basis for concentration and “readiness to learn”. Children, who used to be a blessing, are now, in far too many cases, ill-mannered, impudent egotists who spread fear and terror wherever they appear in a crowd.

Women are then fed birth control pills so that they have fewer children – never mind the side effects – and if they do get pregnant, they are allowed to kill their child before it is born, even encouraged to do so – it is called “an adult decision”. A woman is the sole master of her own body, of course. However, she probably should have considered the possibility that she might get pregnant, before it happened, because now it is no longer her body. It is a small independent being that is now being killed. Abortion is genocide and the doctors who perform it are murderers. The women are helpless victims. And the father is left out of the equation. It seems like such an easy solution, but they often suffer the physical and psychological consequences for the rest of their lives. This ensures a sharp drop in the number of children and thus, in the long term, in the population. Where there used to be numerous flocks of 4 and 6 lovely children, it’s today considered to be a flock if you have 2, and many have none at all.

As women no longer have the time to cook from scratch, we are seeing more and more industrially processed food, while agriculture, which used to employ half the population, is turning into industrial companies owned by corporations. The farmer becomes a food producer. People are gradually losing all connection to the land, and the connection to nature that was once taken for granted disappears. The land, once sacred, is reduced to a means of production. Most farmers leave the profession and become industrial workers. Often they move to the cities. In the pursuit of profit, endless amounts of pesticides are poured over our food. Disease and increased infertility are the results. This is deliberate – it lowers the numerical strength of the people.

The rise of women in the labor market puts family life under pressure. The number of broken families is increasing. The moral stigma of extramarital affairs is being condemned and is disappearing. At the same time, it becomes economically feasible to break up families, which was previously more difficult. Children are now growing up outside the safe confines of a strong coherent family. They are no longer automatically part of a community because the family itself is no longer a small community, only perhaps a shared address. The adults put their selfishness above the children, who are just left to the “care” of the state. The family members live their own lives without having anything really important in common.

Not only the family, but also all other natural human communities are under attack. Singing is an essential factor when it comes to strengthening a community. We know this from the community singing during the German occupation. People gathered in public squares to sing – a kind of protest, for sure, but a positive protest – a protest in the form of a cultural expression of the people’s hopes and wishes, based on the love of their country! Today, there is no community singing, even though the situation today is a lot worse than the situation during the occupation. However, hardly anybody can sing anymore – that is, sing properly. This used to be taught in school – more or less. Proper singing lessons are long gone, as is the communal morning song. It ensured that people got to know the most important songs and hymns, it strengthened the cohesion of society and showed that people had something in common. That’s why it had to go. The church is the last place where you can still cultivate the community of song to some extent, but because no one has learned to sing, many people flee to the theology less and the Africanized universe of free churches with gospel singing and other things that simply do not belong to our culture and our community.

The natural historical geographical communities have also been torn apart by various municipal mergers, with many rural municipalities being incorporated into the big cities, where they quickly lost their identity, the merging of police and judicial districts, the closure of hospitals, medical practices, schools and railways, the centralization of tax services, emergency services, etc. Areas that naturally and historically belonged together were torn apart and areas that had never had anything to do with each other were forced together. As a result of this catastrophic development, many jobs disappeared. Doctors, lawyers, judges, teachers, nurses and many others left the small cities and villages, simply because their jobs disappeared. This spread like ripples in the water. There were fewer customers, businesses closed, people fled, and the remaining craft and industrial companies followed. Suburban Denmark had emerged, rural areas were depopulated, people lost their roots and their connection to nature. Cemeteries, which for centuries had been monuments to family cohesion, were transformed into grassland. There was no longer anyone to look after them and visit the graves of the deceased, and the churches’ inflated prices for the purchase and care of grave sites accelerated this sad development. Instead of the community, the individual, the rootless isolated human being, is cultivated.

The large state institutions that connected the nation as a powerful symbol were privatized and disappeared. Today DSB – the Danish State Railroads – is just one commercial company among many other railway companies. The postal service no longer exists. The state’s daily contact with every Dane in the form of the postman is gone. The impressive headquarters of the postal service and DSB, which in themselves represented the power and splendor of the state and the community, have been sold for hotel and residential purposes. The same goes for the military’s historic buildings. Earlier, there used to be magnificent barracks in almost every major city, which represented the power of the state and connected it to the people. Today there are only a few modernist facilities left – far from the rest of the population, so that the military is not part of people’s daily lives. Conscription has of course been abolished in practice. There is no longer anything to defend. The defense is just a business that seems to have no real purpose.

In school, culture and history are abolished, along with homework and the necessary memorization training. Effective teaching time is drastically reduced and, in reality, it becomes even shorter as a result of the lack of discipline. Higher education is de facto abolished, and the country’s three real universities are transformed into vocational schools. Classical education is abolished. The church is dismantled as an authority. Theologically, it is degraded to being part of the goodness industry, where everything is acceptable as long as it fits into the politically correct picture. People lose their moral compasses. Television and radio degenerate into the most banal form of so-called entertainment, and the language is degraded to the point where you can’t express deeper thoughts. The “heroes” of the new age are football players and pop stars, not Absalon, Niels Ebbesen or Voldemar the Great, who are completely unknown. A hero is someone who puts his life on the line for the sake of others, for the sake of the people – not a bunch of fools who, for sky-high wages, produce bland or insipid entertainment.

History is “deconstructed”, and “the people” is abolished as a concept. Everything that previous generations have revered and been proud of is ridiculed and “revealed” as “myths”. The people becomes a population, a seemingly random collection of individuals with no common religion, identity or history and no deeper sense of belonging. The concept of race is hated, indeed, races are said not to exist, even though every farmer, rabbit breeder or bantam keeper knows better. It is no longer allowed to see the difference between a Negro and a European – indeed, you can no longer even say ‘Negro’. “The only difference is the skin color,” they claim, even though the pharmaceutical industry, hormone and intelligence researchers, biologists, psychologists and physical anthropologists (not to be confused with today’s “anthropologists” who don’t even know what anthropology is) all know (or should know) better. However, it doesn’t pay to know. It pays to jump on the politically correct bandwagon. Universities are turning into spiritual brothels whose whores sell themselves to the highest bidder.

Instead, a wide range of unscientific and nonsensical ideas are put into circulation to keep people occupied and confused. Man-made climate change is a good example of such nonsense – and these and other crazy ideas can only be propagated in a population that is completely ignorant when it comes to history and science, a mass of people who are simply incapable of checking these distorted notions against reality and common sense. What these ideas and ideologies usually have in common is that they make people feel guilty (about the climate, slavery, imperialism, racism, refugees, eating meat, etc., etc., etc.) A population with a guilty conscience is not a proud people with a proud identity that upholds its culture and traditions. It is a people who has lost its bearings, a people who no longer has anything to commemorate, celebrate and be proud of, in short, a people marked for destruction.

Classical literature, painting and music that created a universe of beauty and harmony is abolished and replaced by talentless smears, bogus daubs and discordant noise – all preferably produced by foreigners who are presumed to be able to tell us so much more about the essential things in our life than our compatriots.

Literature revels in primitive depictions of the bottom of society. One need only think of Jakob Ejersbo’s Nordkraft, which is one of the most perverse, filthy and depressing works imaginable, yet its author was praised as “the greatest talent in Danish literature in generations”. That’s saying a lot. Obviously, forgotten are Jacob Paludan, Martin A. Hansen and a large number of other excellent writers who are no longer read. Another good example is the criminal Palestinian Yahya Hassan’s so-called “poems”, a talentless, infantile drivel from the gutter that was praised as brilliant by an almost unanimous group of critics and which sold more than 120,000 copies (where poems usually only sell a couple of hundred copies). The language was characterized as innovative, and indeed it is: a catalogue of oaths, insults, obscenities and other primitivities, the likes of which you have to look hard to find – thank goodness. Its popularity was largely due to the fact that, on the surface, the content seemed critical of immigrant communities. Bourgeois Denmark wanted to read it, even if they had to swim around in Hassan’s excrements along the way. Needless to say, Hassan was showered with important awards that have made him a wealthy man. He was laughing all the way to the bank, apparently having a great time in the environment he pretended to distance himself from. An overdose finally put an end to him.

When it comes to music, it doesn’t look any better. Who doesn’t remember Niels Viggo Benzon’s “piano concerto” that ended with the “artist” sawing the legs off a Steinway grand piano?

The different art forms have the task of uniting people around a common culture, each art form in its own way. Art should be a mirror of the people’s experiences and reflect its experiences reality – and its dreams and values. It can debate problems and important issues, but the result must be, in modern terms, cultural added value. In short, you need to gain a better understanding of the problems being raised. You need to get closer to a solution. Moral issues must be illuminated and clarified. Characters and issues must be relevant and credible. Art should not be glossy, but neither should it offend, it should be edifying in the broadest sense of the word. In this context, art should always be aware of its social and moral responsibilities. “Art” that sees its task as destroying the values that form the basis of national and popular unity dissolves the community and thus the precondition for an orderly and organized society, which is the condition for art to exist at all. It adds no value, but plunges mankind into an unmanageable chaos that only benefits the forces that want to destroy us!

Furthermore, art as a whole must be beautiful. People thrive best in beautiful and harmonious surroundings – this makes for harmonious people. Today, this beauty is deliberately trampled underfoot. Humans are accustomed to ugliness. Even the clothes we buy are ugly – with expensive holes in highly visible places. The body is desecrated with tattoos, piercings and the like. People have been purposefully prepared for ugliness, the ugliness that has entered all levels of society with immigration. An unaesthetic element has entered the streets, an element that does not fit into our world. Everywhere, ugliness is the great common denominator, and ugliness leads to physical and mental imbalance – to the loss of civilization as we understand it.

At the same time, the business community is crying out for foreign labor, even though we have over 100,000 unemployed people in Denmark. What the business community means is cheap labor. Moreover, this is a means of mixing populations, eroding borders and creating a large homogeneous global market. It will increase profits! And if we all just speak English, it will save a lot of money and effort. We must never forget that there is a political driving force behind business organizations and that business has always sided with profit at the expense of people’s unity.

All these things are the basic prerequisites for a healthy society to degenerate and head towards destruction.

However, all this is not just happening; it is being created to destroy Europe and the people who come from there. Behind it is a small, but highly influential, ethnocentric minority that has set itself the goal of eliminating the majority in order to maneuver more easily in a world that exclusively consist of minorities. Among the authors of all the evils listed above, not least the so-called student revolt of 1968,4 which greatly accelerated the development, or rather dismantling of society that we have witnessed, this minority is represented in large numbers, just as it has a decisive influence on the media world that peddles this madness.

Despite this, the right wing loves this minority and does not tolerate criticism of it. People who, like the Swedish journalist Ingrid Carlquist, have seen the connection between this minority and the dismantling of the homogeneous European nation-states are excluded by nationalist circles who suddenly fear being labeled anti-Semitic. But it is necessary to address this problem, to articulate it, as it is called today. How can it be that the overwhelming majority of this minority vigorously promotes immigration to Europe and its successor states, but does not make the same demands of Israel, which must remain a homogeneous Jewish community? As long as European nationalists refuse to open their eyes and analyze the situation as it is, but continues to talk about Muslims, burkas and all the other symptoms of impending doom, it will remain insignificant and unable to make a difference. The salvation of Denmark and the entire Western culture requires the courage of truth, however unpleasant that truth may seem! It is time to stop dealing only with the symptoms. You have to start calling a spade a spade and a shovel a shovel!

It is not the Palestinians who are destroying us!

Povl H. Riis-Knudsen

Translated by means of AI

  1. Redox and Demos are two notorious Anti-Fascist organizations that gather information and plan attacks on right-wingers. ↩︎
  2. This realization is not new. You find it in the Laws of  Manus, a some 2000-year-old Sanskrit collection of fundamentals for human life, which – by the way – has also been claimed to be one of the foundations of the Quran.   ↩︎
  3. See, for example, the extremely popular Dirch Passer movie “Dust on the Brain” from 1961!! ↩︎
  4. Pat Thomas: Did It! From Yippie To Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, An American Revolutionary. Fantagraphics Books; First Edition. August 29, 2017.
    ↩︎

The Power of Punim: Further Thoughts on the Nasty Nazi Nathan Cofnas

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“Point and splutter.” I think it was Steve Sailer who devised that term to describe a common tactic of the left. When leftists want to expose an academic or writer as a bad person who should lose his job and be driven out of respectable society, they don’t use facts, logic and reasoned argument. No, they simply quote something that is self-evidently wicked in the eyes of all right-thinking — that is, left-thinking — people. In other words, they point at wickedness and splutter in outrage. They don’t attempt to address the arguments of the anathematized.

“Racist, pseudoscientific phrenology”

For example, when leftists wanted to expose the Jewish philosopher Nathan Cofnas as a nasty Nazi, they quoted self-evident thought-crime in his writing. But they didn’t address his arguments or evidence. Cofnas has described their point-and-splutter like this:

[The leftist journalist Elizabeth] Haigh declares that my “paper was widely debunked by various scientists” and makes the assertion (of dubious grammaticality) that “He argued against the idea of racism and structural racism for difference between peoples’ achievements, saying some groups of people are ‘unfairly blamed’”. She doesn’t give any details about the alleged debunking of my article. The fact that some unnamed “various scientists” criticised me for saying something politically unpopular is enough to try to start a campaign to threaten my employment. Haigh revealed her intentions more explicitly later when she retweeted a thread about me by a linguistics PhD student which said, “we have to stop letting ‘intelligence researchers’ dress up their racist, pseudoscientific phrenology and pretend it’s anything other than nonsense. these people should not have jobs. they shouldn’t be tolerated in polite society.” (“My ‘debunked’ views,” The Critic, 2nd November 2022)

To leftists, ideas like those are self-evidently wicked and unacceptable. If someone espouses them in public, what more need be said? Cofnas is a crimethinker. Vaporize him! That’s point-and-splutter. Obviously, Cofnas thinks that this is a highly unfair tactic. But he also has to admit that it’s highly effective. Presumably that’s why he decided to employ it against the Occidental Observer and me. He pointed-and-spluttered in one of his critiques of Kevin MacDonald:

Here is a passage from a recent, representative article published in The Occidental Observer:

He’s Jugly, as you might say: that is, he’s ugly in a characteristically Jewish way. I agree with a fascinating article at [the neo-Nazi magazine] National Vanguard arguing that “Jews themselves are an unattractive and, on average, ugly people” and that “Jews, as a group, oppose beauty.”…And why are Jews and leftists “on average, ugly people”?…And ugly Jewish brains have consistently created ugly ideologies that war on the “indissoluble Trinity of Truth, Beauty and Goodness.” (Langdon, 2021)

So MacDonald thinks that “there are no good Jews, nor can they be good” is a “good rule of thumb.” […] As editor of The Occidental Observer and The Occidental Quarterly [MacDonald] regularly publishes nasty, scientifically baseless screeds against Jews. (“Still No Evidence for a Jewish Group Evolutionary Strategy,” Evolutionary Psychological Science, Volume 9, pages 236—259, 6th January 2023)

First of all, this article is hardly representative. TOO has posted very few articles on the topic of facial appearance. Cofnas is clearly cherry-picking an article he thinks will be effective in appealing to his audience. How about this series of articles by Szilard Csonthegyi on Bela Kun and Jewish-Hungarian conflict?  Or pick anything by Andrew Joyce, Brenton Sanderson, Horus, or  Marshall Yeats—not to mention MacDonald’s refutations of Cofnas—just to name a few.

And it’s ridiculous to claim that MacDonald thinks “there are no good Jews, nor can they be good.” Ron Unz has established perhaps the premier website for the dissident right, with many articles critical of Jews, including articles from TOO. Amy Wax, who invited Jared Taylor to her class at UPenn is another one that comes to mind. And Stephen Miller, Trump-administration stalwart on immigration (disowned by his synagogue). There are many more. But they don’t represent the power and influence of the mainstream Jewish community which is the main topic of TOO.

But more importantly, Cofnas is pointing-and-spluttering at my article “The Cult of Ugly: Leftist Lies, Jewish Junk, and the Malign Martyrdom of George Floyd.” He regards it as an example of the “nasty, scientifically baseless screeds against Jews” regularly published by Kevin MacDonald. Leftists have, of course, dismissed Cofnas’ own work as “nasty, scientifically baseless screeds against” Blacks and other non-Whites. They would also be happy to “debunk” Cofnas by noting that “the neo-Nazi magazine” National Vanguard shares his views on racial differences in intelligence. Well, I think that leftists are wrong about Cofnas’ ideas just as I think Cofnas is wrong about mine. In his ironically titled article “My ‘debunked’ views,” Cofnas reached this conclusion: “The reason we’re not allowed — on pain of (at least attempted) cancellation — to have frank discussions about the hereditarian hypothesis isn’t because it’s been ‘debunked’, but because it hasn’t been debunked.”

A short guide to debunking nasty Nazis like Nathan

I agree with that conclusion. But I also think that it applies to my pernicious punim hypothesis (punim is Yiddish for “face”). The reason decent people do not have frank discussions about Jewish ugliness isn’t because it’s been “debunked,” but because the reality upsets Jews like Nathan Cofnas. That’s why the topic is covered only in “nasty” publications like the Occidental Observer and “the neo-Nazi magazine” National Vanguard. Oh, and at TakiMag, where the Jewish writer David Cole once issued this “nasty, scientifically baseless screed”:

Christmas is supposed to be a holiday for Christians, but this year Santa’s bringing a very special present for America’s Jews: the gift of seeing Ruth Bader Ginsburg the way we wish she looked. Opening in theaters December 25th, On the Basis of Sex tells the story of a plucky young RBG as she risks everything in a quest to become a nationally known feminist hero. …

The actress portraying the young Ginsburg is Birmingham-born Felicity Jones, a Brit who is most definitely not Jewish, unlike the brittle SCOTUS [Supreme Court of the United States] scarecrow she’s portraying. In fact, Jones could not look less Jewish if she tried. This girl is so Aryan, she could give Himmler’s corpse a boner. And yet she’s portraying a woman who — hmm, how to put this gently? — is the reason Jewish men often date outside the flock. Not since Warren Beatty decided to portray Dick Tracy without facial prosthetics has there been a greater physical disconnect between actor and subject. […]

So we [Jews] don’t mind the idealized images, because in a way they give us comfort. We don’t see what we can never become, but what we can [with the help of plastic surgery]. … She [Ginsburg]’s probably as pumped as everyone else to see her ethnically cleansed onscreen depiction.

Well, actually, not everyone’s pumped. It took some searching, but I finally found a roaring dissent in the sea of silence regarding the Ginsburg/Jones ethnic switcheroo. Marissa Korbel is a self-described “bleeding heart lawyer” and “award-winning essayist” who writes for Harper’s Bazaar, Guernica, and Bitch magazine. Last week, she penned a piece for the online literary journal The Rumpus that I’d wager is the single most honest piece of writing on the ’net regarding Jews and the Aryanization of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. … But don’t expect Korbel’s essay to be picked up by national Jewish news and opinion sites. Even its concluding and comforting descent into leftist banality can’t make up for the disquieting honesty of the rest of it. We Jews are generally an introspective lot, but every now and then we encounter an abyss into which even we prefer not to gaze, lest we find Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Semitic mug gazing back at us. (“Ruth Bader Ginsburg… Shiksa?”, Taki Mag, 25th December 2018)

Yucky yenta becomes yummy shiksa: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Felicity Jones

Like the neo-Nazis at National Vanguard and the anti-Semites at the Occidental Observer, David Cole at TakiMag is what might be called an ideological outlaw. Like them and us, he isn’t scared of “cancellation” and exile from respectable society because he’s already been cancelled and exiled. I’ve already said that I admire the moral courage of Nathan Cofnas and his willingness to address the dangerous topic of racial difference. But his moral courage will only take him so far. He doesn’t share Cole’s honesty and willingness to address the dangerous topic of Jewish ugliness and Jewish envy of White beauty. That’s perfectly understandable. What would happen if Cofnas addressed that topic, even without Cole’s bluntness and brutality? He’d anger and upset his fellow Jews, of course. Literally or metaphorically, he’d make his yiddishe momme cry. And he doesn’t want to do that.

Ashkenazi inbreeding

I think that’s why Cofnas pointed-and-spluttered about my article “The Cult of Ugly.” But I don’t think he was fair to the article. First of all, it argues that ugliness is characteristic of leftists, not just of Jews. Does Cofnas agree with that description of leftists or at least accept it as legitimate? Does he accept the scientific work finding that the right tend to be more attractive and healthier in various ways than the left? I linked in the article to the scientific ideas of Edward Dutton, who argues that leftism in general, and antifa in particular, is the ideology of “spiteful mutants.” Modern life and vastly reduced rates of infant mortality have relaxed selection against deleterious mutations, which are now affecting the brains and psychology of far more people. Leftists would, of course, reject Dutton’s ideas as “nasty” and “scientifically baseless.” Does Cofnas agree with the left?

I also said this in the article: “As for Jews and the ugliness of both their punims [faces] and their brains, note the studies that have identified marked inbreeding and higher rates of mental illness among Jews.” Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending have famously argued that selection among Jews for higher intelligence has also produced higher rates of neurological disease. Emil Kirkegaard has argued that raw intelligence and mental illness both contribute to Jewish genius. These studies are perfectly scientific. Does Cofnas accept that Ashkenazi Jews like himself are highly inbred and subject to higher rates of mental illness? If so, does he agree that this might influence the appearance, art and ideologies of Jews for the worse? Or is that completely impossible?

Distinctive personalities (and punims)

Let’s examine an interesting statement made by Cofnas in his anti-KMac paper at Evolutionary Psychological Science: “The fact that stereotypes tend to have a basis in reality (Jussim et al., 2015, 2016) and that Jews have been consistently stereotyped as having distinctive personalities — for example, as being ‘shrewd’ (Brigham, 1971) — provides preliminary support for the hypothesis of personality differences.” As Cofnas is presumably well aware, Jews have also been consistently stereotyped as having distinctive punims. To be blunt, there is a stereotype of Jewish ugliness. Does Cofnas accept that this stereotype could have “a basis in reality”? And is Cofnas himself distressed or disturbed by references to Jewish ugliness? He characterizes my article as “nasty,” which is an emotive rather than a scientific term. I can assure him that, to the best of my conscious knowledge, I was not seeking to distress Jews or leftists in any way. Instead, I was seeking to explore what I regard as a real and important phenomenon: the relationship between harmful leftist ideologies and the disproportionate ugliness of the people who espouse them.

Stereotype and reality #1: drawing of Jew by David Cole’s friend Nick Bougas, aka “A. Wyatt Mann;” photograph of Alan Ginsberg

Stereotype and reality #2: Jews have been consistently stereotyped as having distinctive punims (I can’t identify the couple in the photograph)

Cofnas himself undoubtedly recognizes that many Blacks and other non-Whites are distressed and disturbed by his claims about racial differences in intelligence. His work is “nasty” for them. It does not follow that it is also “scientifically baseless.” Now, I can perfectly understand and sympathize with non-Whites who are distressed by any claim that their particular racial group is of lower average intelligence. I can also see that their distress will be greater, not lesser, if the claim is scientifically strong and realistic. As the saying goes: The truth hurts. That’s why a crude statement like “Blacks are stupid” is hurtful to Blacks. It conforms to what Blacks reluctantly recognize as reality. The truth hurts.

The power of punim: some examples of characteristically Jewish ugliness

However, “Jews are stupid” isn’t at all hurtful to Jews. They know it doesn’t conform to reality. What’s hurtful to many or even most Jews is the crude statement “Jews are ugly.” And I think it’s hurtful to Jews because the it conforms to what Jews reluctantly recognize as reality. I also think that Nathan Cofnas is among the Jews who are emotionally hurt by claims about Jewish ugliness. Whether or not Cofnas will admit this is up to him. My evidence would include this selfie posted by Cofnas at his Substack site:

Jewish punim, gentile architecture: Nathan Cofnas poses at Emmanuel College, Cambridge

I don’t think that Nathan Cofnas is (hmm, how to put this gently?) a facially attractive individual. I also wonder about his full motives for choosing to pose in that particular location. The architectural background is beautiful. The facial foreground is less so. Now, I’m sure that Cofnas recognizes and appreciates the beauty of Cambridge University. And it would be perfectly understandable and acceptable that he felt pride at being a high-flier there. But I wonder whether the selfie was also expressing triumph over those surroundings in some way. The handsome goy Robert Taylor once starred in a movie called A Yank at Oxford (1938). Is Cofnas’ selfie intended to proclaim “A Kike at Cambridge”? (Please note that I’m using the term “kike” as an ironic Jew like Cofnas might use it, not to insult Cofnas.) After all, it contains an obvious contrast between beautiful gentile architecture and an unattractive Jewish punim.

That Jews can have hostile feelings about beautiful gentile architecture is proved by the Jewish writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who promoted the not-so-infamous hate-hoax about a female student being raped on broken glass by a fraternity at the University of Virginia (UVA). Erdely set the scene for the non-existent crime by describing “throngs of toned, tanned and overwhelmingly blond students [who] fanned across a landscape of neoclassical brick buildings” at UVA.

Why would Jewish Sabrina Rubin Erdely resent “toned, tanned and overwhelmingly blond” gentiles? (image from Wikipedia)

As Steve Sailer pointed out, dark-haired Erdely’s hate-hoax was clearly powered by anti-gentile malice. That’s why she wrote of “overwhelmingly blond students” and “neoclassical brick buildings.” I’d hypothesize that unattractive Nathan Cofnas shares some of unattractive Sabrina Erdely’s resentment about the beauty of White gentiles and their architecture. That isn’t a scientific hypothesis, of course. But that doesn’t make it impossible to verify. If Cofnas confirmed such feelings in himself, that would be a good proof. But if Cofnas denied them, I don’t think that would be a good disproof, just as I don’t think leftist denials are a good disproof of Cofnas’ claims about racial difference. Leftists think that Cofnas’ ideas are “nasty” and “scientifically baseless.” Cofnas thinks they’re wrong. So do I. But I also think that Cofnas is wrong to describe “The Cult of Ugly” as “nasty” and “scientifically baseless.” There is science to support the idea of a connexion between physical ugliness and pernicious ideologies.

But let’s suppose that no such science exists or ever could exist. That would still not enable Cofnas to dismiss “The Cult of Ugly” out of hand as worthless. It may indeed contain worthless ideas and conjectures, but more work would be needed to establish this. As a philosopher, Cofnas is no doubt aware that there is a large and ancient branch of philosophy known as aesthetics, which studies topics like beauty and ugliness, and their relation to politics and morality. Due to its antiquity, aesthetics was “scientifically baseless” for many centuries. Much or even most of aesthetics is still “scientifically baseless” today. Does Cofnas regard that as a good reason to dismiss this field and reject all of its political and moral conclusions? I hope he doesn’t.

Resentment and distress

I also hope that Cofnas doesn’t reject Steve Sailer’s writing on ethno-aesthetics as “nasty” and “scientifically baseless.” Just as Sailer has devised the term “point and splutter” to satirize leftist dishonesty, so he’s devised the term “World War Hair” to satirize Black women’s resentment about the greater sexual attractiveness of White women. The ability to grow long, straight, glossy hair in various natural colors is one of several strong advantages White women possess over Black women in the sexual marketplace. And over other non-White women. Naturally enough, non-White women resent this trichological toxicity, which is part of why non-White women in the media so often announce “Let’s Talk About My Hair” (as Sailer again puts it). We already know that Cofnas regards my article about leftist and Jewish ugliness as a “nasty, scientifically baseless screed.” Does Cofnas regard Sailer’s writing on Black women’s resentment as “nasty” and “scientifically baseless” too? I very much doubt it.

If I’m right, then Cofnas’ double standard would be understandable, but also ethnocentric. Indeed, it would be understandable because it was ethnocentric. It would be perfectly natural that, as a Jew, Cofnas could accept discussion of Black imperfections in a way he couldn’t accept discussion of Jewish imperfections. But there are some imperfections that Blacks and Jews have in common. For example, both of them are groups that, in my opinion, don’t belong in White societies partly because of the resentment they feel about superior White beauty. I don’t think that Nathan Cofnas is the “nasty Nazi” that, because of his racial views, many leftists would describe him as. But I do think that he is one of the many Jews who feel resentment about White gentile beauty and concomitant distress at any discussion of Jewish ugliness. It’s up to him whether he confirms, denies or ignores this allegation.

Johann von Leers: ‘Judaism and Islam as Opposites’ (1942)

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Translated by Alexander Jacob

Johann von Leers (1902–1965) was one of the most important of the National Socialist ideologues. He joined the NSDAP in 1929, although he was at first associated with the Strasserist wing of the party. However, in 1933, he was hired by Goebbels to work in the Ministry of Propaganda. At the end of the war, Leers fled Germany and, in 1950, he migrated to Argentina. He was later persuaded by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al Husseini, to move to Egypt, where he converted to Islam. In Egypt, he served as political advisor in the Information Department under Nasser.

Leers’ numerous works written between 1933 and 1945 include Adolf Hitler (1933), Entwicklung des Nationalsozialismus von seinem Anfang bis zur Gegenwart (The development of National Socialism from its beginning to the present,1936), Judentum und Gaunertum (Jewry and the Underworld, 1940), Juden hinter Stalin (Jews behind Stalin, 1941), Die Verbrechernatur der Juden (The criminal nature of the Jews,1944), etc. One of his most interesting works is his refutation of Spengler’s Jahre der Entscheidung (The Decisive Years, 1933) called Spenglers weltpolitisches System und der Nationalsozialismus (1934), which detailed the differences between Spengler’s globalist politics and National Socialism. The present article, ‘Judentum und Islam als Gegensätze’,[1] sheds interesting light on the early history of Islam in Arabia, which Leers considers as having escaped Judaisation solely through the staunch faith and military efforts of Mohammed.

*   *   *

It is not uninteresting to read Jewish historians sometimes — not because one might find the truth in them but in order to get a glimpse into the psychology of the Jews. Now, here one thing is extraordinarily unique — wherever the Jews come to represent Mohammed and Islam they become expressly hostile, indeed hate-filled. Thus, Simon Dubnow describing Mohammed in his Weltgeschichte des jüdischen Volkes[2]  does not fail to remark that he was illiterate and then writes the following:

In this way there matures in the soul of this half-Bedouin the idea of monotheism, which becomes in him a glowing passion that incites him to a ‘holy war’ for which any means seems good enough. The knowledge of God is not coupled in Mohammed’s mind in any way with that noble moral consciousness that allows the ethical monotheism of the Biblical prophets, and even the one-sided Evangelical doctrine, to appear so attractive.  The life-story of Mohammed shows us no magical personality, no embodiment of that high moral principle that can captivate the believing mind more than revealed abstract ideas. The life story of the ‘messenger of Allah’, as well as that of the Koran itself, is full of examples precisely of how a religious founder should not speak and act. Behind the mask of a prophet there stares at us too often the glance of a semi-savage: the illumination of the seer is obscured by the raw passion of the Bedouin who murders ruthlessly in war and does not refrain from dragging the wife or the daughter of the murdered man into his harem. All these character traits of Mohammed are expressed in his  conduct towards the Jews of Arabia.

That is not historiography but, in fact, incitement and slander. First, Mohammed was not a Bedouin or a half-Bedouin but a member of the old urban, noble Quraish family in Mecca; then the Jewish Dubnow has clearly not read the Koran if he represents it in such a false way. But this passage betrays one thing definitely — the deadly hatred of the Jews even after 1400 years towards the man who created the youngest and, in many respects, most successful world religion.

The dispute between Mohammed and the Jews is not well-known but really very interesting. Already before the destruction of Jerusalem by Emperor Titus (A.D. 70) there were a few Jews in Arabia; after the destruction of Jerusalem large groups wandered in, settled in Arabian cities and conducted there a lively agitation for Judaism. In Arabia there dwelt particularly the three tribes, Banu Qaynuqa, Banu Nadir and Banu Qurayza[3] in the city of Yathrib;[4] from there the Jewish agitation radiated; there the three above-mentioned Jewish tribes began their opposition to the two large Arabian tribes Aws and Khazraj,[5] incited one against the other and in this way acquired for themselves the mastery of the city.  It was an economic, settler- and trade penetration by the Jews, but especially an intellectual one. Of course, Christian influences also flowed alongside, from Byzantium and Abyssinia, but of all the foreign religious doctrines Judaism was the most widespread, most active and most successful.

The Jews have later tried to demonstrate how much Islam has borrowed from Judaism. It is part of the Jewish vanity to consider themselves always as the origin of all innovations. In reality many superficial things in which Islam and Judaism agree are not borrowed from Judaism but from ancient oriental folk customs. The prohibition of pork is an ancient hygienic practice in the orient because, in the climate there, this fatty meat is unhealthy, and besides there is the danger of trichinosis. If the Koran refers here and there to Jewish things, the reason for that is not that Mohammed learned from the Jews but rather that, through the active Jewish mission, a number of Jewish legends and ideas had entered among the Arabian folk. With the undisturbed continuation of this Jewish penetration there was the possibility that large parts of the Arabian people would be Judaised — just as they later accepted Islam.  Jewry would then have been able to unleash for their own benefit all those native military and political powers of the Arabian people with which the first caliphs established their powerful empire. The cavalry troops that later, under Omar,[6] conquered Egypt and Persia and which later pushed towards Spain and India would have been drawn into battle for the Talmud. The catastrophe for all of humanity would have been frightful.

The Arab people of the pre-Islamic period had little to fight the Jewish period with. The belief in their old city gods and nature gods was disintegrated and dissolved and no longer corresponded to the sober, clear intellectual thought of the people. We hear of men of that time who tried out many religions, of ‘hanifs’,[7] thinkers in search of religious clarity, of a healthy, clear lifestyle, of the will of God. The people were in a religious crisis and sought a way out.

Mohammed ibn Abdallah is supposed even as a boy to have encountered a Christian monk who recognized in him the future bearer of religious knowledge and urged his companions to protect him from the Jews, who would stalk him throughout his life. It is possible that the boy Mohammed already expressed something about the Jews at that time that revealed his perspicuity to the monk, who was perhaps well trained psychologically. But only as a man in his forties, after a highly successful life as a trader, did Mohammed become gripped and shaken by the religious question. Illumination came to him in the solitude of the mountain caves around Mecca. The German scholar Müller rightly says[8] — and this statement of a professional German clearly differs from the bursts of hatred of a Dubnow:

The mockers maligned him in all possible ways, that he was crazy, a fantasist, a swindler – but the logical certainty of his conduct, the uniformity of his entire life was never criticized and appears to us even today clearly from the Koran. … His total honesty in the Mecca period can even less be brought into doubt. The conditions of desperate anxiety that preceded the decisive vision, the truly admirable endurance with which the in-no-way stouthearted man had maintained his preaching for over a decade amidst the harshest persecutions, and finally under imminent danger to his life, without the least prospect of an eventual success, are clear proofs of the tremendous power of the idea, at first uncanny even to him, that had gripped him and that brought him, independently of his will, to the firm conviction that the inspirations that forced themselves onto his thought were revealed by God himself. Therewith we have the image of a genuine prophet.

For years he tried in Mecca to get through with his sermon that there is only one God, the only one, the merciful, the king at the Day of Judgement. To the Trinity of the Christians, he opposed the singleness of God, discarded the Christian doctrine of original sin and salvation and gave, rather, to every believer as a guiding principle the complete fulfilment of the commandments of the Good, given by a merciful and just God before whom every man must account for his deeds. As a consequence of the close relationship between the ruling strata in Mecca and the former idolatrous worship, he did not succeed in finding believers in his doctrine outside a small following in his own family. Then he came into contact with men from Yathrib, Arabs who had also heard of the Messiah prophecy of the Jews. These he united and converted to Islam. He succeeded through very clever dealings in reconciling to one another the two hostile Arab tribes of the Aws and the Khasraj in such a way that he had formed a political basis for himself when he left Mecca on 20 September 622 and moved to Medina.

Here he came, for the first time, in contact with the Jewish problem. He believed in the triumphant power of the Good in the world, he was of the firm conviction that the religion of the one God, with its easy, practical and reasonable principles for human life, was nothing but the original religion. He wished to lead men from all the confusion of the times, to the original clear vision of God and, since he had to deal with men who were influenced by Christianity as well as by Judaism, he said that this was the religion that Abraham (Ibrahim) had already had, that Christ and Moses had announced, except that men had every time disfigured it. This had been revealed to him anew by God. He wanted to make the path easier for the Christians as well as for the Jews; so he let the orientation of the prayers be directed right from the beginning to Jerusalem. He repeatedly stressed that he only wished to purify the existing religions and perpetuate the reestablished, the newly revealed, original religion.

At the same time he was a clever statesman. With the unification of the two Arab tribes the Jews became a minority in Medina. Mohammed guaranteed for them a sort of protectorate contract;[9] they could maintain their administration and their religion, help the believers in the defence of the city, not ally themselves with enemies of Mohammed and pay taxes for the wars of the believers. The Jews could have been contented with this. But they began a general incitement against Islam, which announced a pure concept of God and does not want to know anything about the world-rule promised to the Jews by Yahweh. The Jews took pleasure in driving Mohammed into a corner with scorn and devious questions and to pull apart his revelation with the indecent and cunning methods of Talmudic dialectics. They raged against him openly and secretly. This destroyed Mohammed’s patience and he complained:

The Peoples of the Book are pleased with what we have revealed but many of them have also joined together to dispute with one part of them. (Koran, Sura 13,36)

He now changed the direction of prayers to Mecca, he annulled the feasts on the days of atonement that coincided with the similarly named Jewish festival and introduced instead the fasting during Ramadan; he set up the call to prayer of the muezzin against the shofar, the horn of the Jewish synagogue. When the Meccans attacked him and in the victorious Battle of Badr Springs[10] — in which for the first time the triumphant call of victory ‘There is no God but God’ sounded — and were defeated by the believers, the Jews showed their deep hatred and enmity against Islam. The Jew Ibn al Ashraf[11] composed an elegiac poem for the fallen Meccans and declared that he preferred the old idols of the Arabs to the religion of Mohammed. The Jew Abu ’Afak[12] asks the Arabs of Medina, in an infamous satirical poem, to drive Mohammed out. It had become fully clear that the Jews combated the unification of the Arab peoples through Islam. Now the prophet struck back:

See the worst animals before God are those that do not believe, for they do not come to the faith — those with whom you have partly undertaken a contract, but they will shamelessly break your contract at every opportunity. Therefore, when you encounter them in war, make an example of them for those who stand behind them so that they may be warned, and if you fear betrayal from people throw, down their contract before them; God does not like betrayers. (Koran, Sura 8,57)

When the Jewish Banu Qaynuqa molested an Islamic woman, he had their quarter besieged and forced them to arms. Only the intercession of the influential Abdallah ibn Ubayy[13] saved them so that they could walk out, but even on his deathbed he said to Abdallah: ‘O Abdallah, did I not dissuade you from your love for the Jews? But you have not listened to me.’

But the other Jewish tribes were no better. A Jewish composer of satirical verses, Kaab ibn al Ashraf,[14] was killed by a Muslim because he publicly criticized Mohammed. The Banu Nadir with whom a new contract was undertaken used a defeat of the Muslims in the Battle of Uhud[15] to immediately become hostile again. Of this period His Eminence the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el Husseini,[16] provides the following authenticated record:[17]

While Mohammed was in a friendly relation with one part of the Jews, another section prepared an attack on his life. They persuaded a man to throw down a heavy block of stone on Mohammed’s head. An inner voice warned him to leave the square, and in this way the traitorous Jews could not carry out their plan. Mohammed sent one of his prosecutors to the Jews and had them say that they had to leave the city within ten days. They had broken the contract that they had undertaken with him since they sought his life. Every Jew who might be found in the city after ten days would be punished with death.

As soon as he had put down the attack of the Meccans, Mohammed proceeded against them and expelled them. In spite of their strong fortifications, the Jews had to leave. Mohammed has recorded his memory of this in Sura 59:

Whatever is in heaven and earth praises God and He is the powerful, the wise. It is He who drove the unbelievers among the Peoples of the Book from their homes and into the first exodus. You did not think that they would leave, and they thought their fortifications would protect them from God. But God came to them when they least expected and sowed fear in their hearts, they destroyed their houses with their own hands and the hands of the believers. … They were like those who had lived recently before them; they tasted the evil of their affairs and they received a painful punishment.

But even the last Jewish tribe, the Banu Qurayza, violated trust and contract. They joined with the chieftain of the exiled Banu Nadir, the Jew Huyayy ibn Akhtab, and, when a great army of enemies of Mohammed was raised, offered to deliver the city to them. But Mohammed succeeded in forcing the retreat of the besiegers using a very skillful ploy — a big pit that he had dug out prevented the attacks of the hostile cavalry. Now he proceeded against the Banu Qurayza, closed down their quarter of the city and forced them to surrender. The Jews perhaps thought that they would get away with mere expulsion but Mohammed handed over the decision on their destiny to the sheikh of the Aws tribe, Saad ibn Muadh,[18]  whom they had wounded, and he demanded the execution of the Jews. In this way the 600 men of the tribe were killed. It was the only mass execution that the gentle Mohammed ever allowed to take place and it was, according to martial law, fully permissible since the Jews had conducted treason as armed allies. The Banu Qurayza were thereby exterminated but the remnants of them fled to Khaybar.[19] Mohammed besieged this city. In 628 he forced them to surrender. An old Islamic legend recounts that the Jewess Zaynab[20] invited Mohammed to a meal after the conclusion of the totally mild contract of capitulation. Here she offered a spicy roast meat. Mohammed’s armour-bearer, Bashir ibn al Baraa, hastily ate a piece of it but Mohammed did not swallow the first piece, which seemed remarkably evil tasting to him and stated immediately that the roast meat was poisoned. The armour-bearer died as a result of the poisoning. But Mohammed is supposed to have suffered poor health since then.

It is not well-known that the Jews contemptuously praise themselves even today that they poisoned Mohammed. Dubnow[21] writes with unconcealed joy:`

So even today the Jews rejoice in this crime! Even in Medina they sought once again to divide the Arab tribes there and to turn them away from Islam. They recited once again the old war- and battle-songs from the battles against one another and Mohammed himself had to ride to Medina and set things in order there. In his final years Mohammed combated the Jews systematically, drove them out of Tayma[22] and Wadi al Qura,[23] or at most permitted them to remain in certain places against the payment of a fee. The Koran is full of warnings regarding the Jews, who are called simply ‘Satans’. Mohammed also observed how many people are repeatedly corrupted by the Jews:

When they meet the believers they say ‘We believe’; but if they are alone with their Satans they say: ‘See, we stand with you and are just joking.’ God will mock them and let them go, blinded, farther astray in their rebellion. (Koran II, Sura 12,13)

Abu Hurayra[24] records the following statement of the great man of God: ‘The Day of Judgement will come only when the Muslims have defeated the Jews by exterminating them, when every stone and every tree behind which a Jew has hidden himself says to the believers: ‘Behind me stands a Jew, kill him’. Even on his deathbed Mohammed is supposed to have said: ‘There should not be two religions in Arabia.’ Among his successors Caliph Omar drove the Jews decisively from Arabia. They were placed under very restrictive and oppressive conditions that hindered Jewish activity completely. All the writers of that time, when the Islamic countries obeyed their own laws, agree that the Jews were especially mistrusted. On the other hand, the Jews hated Islam from the depths of their soul. One may remark here that even the Crusades were launched not in the smallest part by Jewish agitation, for the ‘Refutation’ of Islam written by the baptized Jew Petrus Alfonsi[25] was literally the only polemical literary source for the First Crusade from 1096 to 1099. The malicious distortion of the doctrines and the criticism of the personality of Mohammed that this Jew had concocted then passed into the literature of the Church against Islam and are found among the monks Petrus Reverendus, Gualterus de Sens, Guibert de Nogent Sous-Coucy,[26] Bishop Hildebert of Le Mans[27] and others, mostly French writers, who, through deliberate distortion of Islam –—but always based on the poisonous work of Petrus Alfonsi — unleashed the crusading fever in Europe.

Mohammed’s hostility to the Jews undoubtedly had one effect — eastern Jewry was fully paralysed by Islam. Its backbone was broken. The Jews of the east have had as little as no part in the powerful rise of Jewry to power in the last two centuries. Despised, the Jews vegetated in the dirty alleys of the mellahs,[28] lived under a special law that did not allow them, as Europe did, usury or dealing in stolen goods but held them under pressure and fear. If the remaining world had undertaken a similar procedure, we would not have had any Jewish Question today. To which one must add however that there were also Islamic rulers — among them the Spanish caliphs from the House of Muawiya[29] — who did not subscribe to the traditional Islamic hatred of the Jews — to their own detriment. But as a religion Islam has the immortal merit of having prevented the threatening conquest of Arabia by the Jews and having conquered the nightmarish doctrine of Yahweh through a pure religion that has opened the path for numerous peoples to a higher culture and given to its followers an education and human development such that even today a Muslim who is serious in his faith is one of the most admirable phenomena in this world of chaos.

[1] Published in Die Judenfrage, VII, pp. 275-278, 15 December 1942.

[2] Berlin, Vol. III, pp. 282ff.

[3] [The Jewish tribes seem to have moved from Judaea to the western coast of Arabia particularly after the Jewish-Roman wars of 66–135.] [All notes in box-brackets are by the translator.]

[4] [The old name of Medina]

[5] [These tribes had arrived in Arabia from Yemen. Mohammed’s great-grandmother belonged to the Khazraj.]

[6] [Omar ibn al Khattab (ca.583–644) was, after Abu Bakr, the second caliph and father-in-law of Mohammed.]

[7] [Hanifs are pre-Islamic Arabs who were Abrahamic monotheists though they were neither Jewish nor Christian.]

[8] August Müller, Der Islam im Morgen- und Abendlande, Vol.1, 57.

[9] [In the so-called ‘Constitution of Medina’ dated around 622.]

[10] [The Battle of Badr was fought in 624 near the present-day city of Badr in Saudi Arabia. It was won by Mohammed against the Meccan tribe of Qureshi led by Amr ibn Hisham. The Hashim clan to which Mohammed belonged was also part of the Qureshi, who were polytheists.]

[11] [Ka’ab ibn al Ashraf (d.ca.624) was a Jewish contemporary of Mohammed.]

[12] [Abu Afak (d. ca.624) was a Jewish poet who was killed on Mohammed’s orders.]

[13] [Abdallah ibn Ubayy (d.631) was a Khazraj chieftain in Medina.]

[14] [Kaab ibn al Ashraf (d.ca.624) was a Jewish leader and poet.]

[15] [The Battle of Uhud was fought after the Battle of Badr, where the Quraysh were defeated. At Uhud the latter succeeded in encircling the Muslims and stopping their advance.]

[16] [Amin al Husseini (1897-1974) was the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1948. He also composed a tract in 1943 called Islam i Židovstvo (Islam and Judaism) for the SS Handschar, which was constituted mainly of Bosnian Muslims.]

[17] In the excellent work of Mohammed Sabry, Islam, Judentum und Bolschewismus [Berlin, 1938].

[18] [Saad ibn Muadh (ca.590-627) was a companion of Mohammed.]

[19] [Khaybar is an oasis near Medina that had been inhabited by Jewish tribes until the Battle of Khaybar in 628.]

[20] [Zaynab bint al Harith (d.629) was a Jewish woman who attempted to assassinate Mohammed after the Battle of Khaybar.]

[21] Op.cit., Vol.III, p.403.

[22] [An oasis in northwestern Arabia.]

[23] [A river bed north of Medina.]

[24] [Abu Hurayra was a companion of Mohammed who authored several hadiths, or narrations relating to the life of Mohammed.]

[25] [Petrus Alfonsi (d. ca.1116) was a converted Jew whose Dialogi contra Judaeos (1110) included refutations of Islam.]

[26] [Guibert de Nogent (ca.1055-1124) was a Benedictine historian and theologian who wrote a history of the First Crusade called Dei gesta per Francos (God’s deeds through the Franks, 1108).]

[27] [Hildebert de Lavardin (ca.1055-1133) was Bishop of Le Mans and, from 1125, Archbishop of Tours.]

[28] [A mellah is a fortified Jewish quarter in mediaeval Morocco.]

[29] [Muawiya (ca.500-680) was the first caliph of the Syrian Umayyad dynasty. An offshoot of the Umayyad dynasty ruled the Caliphate of Cordoba in Al Andalus.]

What is a high-trust society?

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“What do they know of England who only England know?” Rudyard Kipling’s famous question, a line from his poem The English Flag, was actually written in defense of Empire, but is still worth asking by Englishmen in these post-imperial times. Enoch Powell, however, found the phrase sadly outdated. In a speech given on St. George’s Day, 1961, to London’s Royal Society of St. George, Powell (then Minister of Health) said:

It is a saying which dates. It has a period aroma… That phase is ended, so plainly ended, that even the generation born at its zenith, for whom the realization is the hardest, no longer deceive themselves as to the fact.

Powell, a man so steeped in the classics that he took down his House of Commons notes in Ancient Greek, put the decline of the British Empire in the context of past, faded imperial glories, and compared England with ancient Athens. When he gave the speech, I was 44 days old, born and living in London. I’m 63 years old now and, although I now reside elsewhere, comparing England with Athens is hardly realistic, unless you mean Athens, Georgia.

But, by Kipling’s reasoning, and having spent the last decade in Central America, I should now know more of England. How does it compare with Costa Rica? Global crime rate statistics from 146 countries place Costa Rica 20 places higher than the UK, at 42 and 62 respectively, but that doesn’t seem a particularly wide global margin between a 3rd-world country and the nation that used to run that same globe.

The respective economies of the two countries are, of course, wholly different considerations. The UK has an official population of around 70 million and is a member of the G7, while Costa Rica, with a population of 5 million, has as its main economic claim to fame its nickname, “the Switzerland of Central America”. When you see that it is up against the likes of Guatemala and Honduras, however, this epithet is flattering. All that said, Costa Rica’s latest GDP figures show growth of 4.5%, far outstripping the UK’s at 0.6%. Curiously, although Britain’s fertility rate is well below replacement level at 1.56, Costa Rica’s is just 1.53.

There is one obvious comparison to be made, however, and it took me a while to realize that I had moved from a high-trust society to a low-trust one. But what is a high- or low-trust society? Definitions differ. Some concentrate on trust in authority, and John Locke saw trust as essential to constitutional government. This is trust in government, the police, medical staff, teachers, the judiciary and so on, which I suppose might be called vertical trust. Others give precedence to interpersonal trust, which by the same token might be termed horizontal trust. The latter is easier to assess. Put simply, and to adapt an old English joke about barmen, what do you get if you cross a Costa Rican with an alligator? An alligator that steals from you. The attitude towards theft here is casual, particularly if the party stolen from is a gringo. A couple of examples.

I spoke to a Canadian woman who hired a cleaner, a Tica (Ticos and Ticas are the names Costa Ricans give themselves). Like everyone else, she stacks coins in piles as spare change. She noticed that a pile of coins would go missing now and then, and she confronted the cleaner. The woman quite innocently said, yes, I did take them. I didn’t think you were using them. In terms of organized crime, I appreciate that this is minor, but indicative. Next, something more personal.

I lived in an apartment for five years and the owner, another Canadian, decided to sell. She gave me a generous three-month notice period, and I was offered a house to share by a local musician, a very talented guitarist. The rent was 40,000 colones a month each (around $80US), plus the same as a deposit. I didn’t even have to take his word for that as he showed me the contract. I moved in, and it was a strange and beautiful place, made entirely of wood and smack in the middle of a palm-oil plantation. Troupes of monkeys (of the Squirrel and Capuchin variety, plus the occasional Howler) would come through the palm trees every day. I paid my housemate my half of the rent every month and he paid the owner. One month, I was in town so I decided to call in and pay my half personally. The owner was very surprised that I wanted to pay 40,000, as the whole sum was only 60,000. I said, no, there must be some mistake, it’s 80,000. He showed me the contract, the actual contract, not the one my housemate had dummied up in order to con an extra 10,000 a month out of me. If you are gringo here, and you don’t check every transaction and agree a price before you make it, you will be ripped off in taxis, markets, stores and anywhere else you can spend money. And it’s not just money. An American woman told me she called a repair man to fix her fridge. He took it away, taking care to give her a false name and address, as well as a worthless receipt. She never saw him or her refrigerator again. So much for the locals.

Then there are the north Americans who go native. I played bass for a while for a blues band fronted by a guitarist from Austin, Texas. He had met Stevie Ray Vaughan. When I first got the gig, every other musician told me not to trust the guy on tips, tipping being big here. One night, I saw a guy fold a $20 bill into the tip jar. The guitarist told me that the guy who left the tip was a friend and couldn’t afford to leave $20. He was going to give it back. I watched him and, of course, he did no such thing, just joked with his friend. After the gig, when it came to dividing the tips, the twenty was gone. Now, this may seem trifling, but there is a code about money among musicians the context of which explains what a low trick that was.

Then there are utilities. My Canadian landlord told me that the electricity bill had spiked, and I would have to pay more. I told him that I used exactly the same amount of electricity (in that I used the same devices the same amount) as I had in my old apartment, where the bill was always around 10,000 colones a month, and I knew that electricity prices are not regionally different here from where I used to live. But if he wanted to bring over the bills to compare the periods before and after I moved in, I’d be happy to pay as long as I saw the proof of the increase. It was never mentioned again. It’s a poor country, but these expats aren’t poor, and I am far less well off than both. They have both been here in excess of 20 years, and have essentially become honorary Ticos.

These are just the more colorful examples from many, and interpersonal trust, what I called horizontal trust, is low. What about widening the horizon to the societal level? Litter is not a problem here, as Costa Ricans have an innate respect for their environment. But I was a little surprised to see that rural bus-stops do not feature litter-bins for what little trash there is. Bus-stops are a place where people congregate, and so if there will be trash anywhere, that’s where you’ll find it. Kids hang around the bus-stop here just as much as they do – or did – in England when I was a kid. So why no bins? Because, a friendly American who clears up our local bus stop once a week tells me, they would immediately be stolen. They make useful containers, you see, and this is a poor country. You can tell that by the taxi rank. Eight taxis sit there, engines off. When a fare takes the first, all the others move up one space, but they don’t start their engines to do so. They all open their doors and push the cars into place to save petrol. Margins are tight here for the working man, far tighter than for their equivalent in the UK. But back to trust, and it’s time to look at bicycles.

There are a lot of bikes here, often left outside shops while the owner goes inside. I have never, once, seen a bike locked or chained up. In London, if you leave a bicycle unlocked even for a couple of minutes, you’ve ridden it for the last time because it will be gone when you return. You might object that the value of the bike in London is likely to be far greater than the cow-horned rattlers some ride around on here – who wants to nick a cheap bike? – but that would be to miss the point entirely. The value isn’t primarily financial. It’s practical. When I owned a canal boat, I was given a bicycle, but left with the problem of how to get rid of the old one. I detest fly-tipping, and as I had no fixed address, I couldn’t have the local council take it away. Then the answer hit me. I leant it against a tree on the towpath and went for a drink. Sure enough, when I returned, it was gone. Sometimes low trust can work for you. Now, in London, even locking a bike with an expensive gadget may not help, as thieves use angle-grinders to cut them off.

An example of the Costa Rican judicial system, or rather one of its local branches, and how they deal with breach-of-trust laws. One morning, I left my apartment to visit the shop across the road, and saw a couple of the Ticos who worked there outside giving another guy what we English would call “a bit of a slap”. They weren’t really beating him up, just knocking him about and intimidating him. A bicycle was lying on the ground but, when the staff eventually let him go, he didn’t ride off on it. I asked one of the shop-girls what the trouble was about and she told me; “Estada intendando robar la bicicleta”. He was trying to steal the bike, until her male colleagues intervened. In a townful of unattended, unlocked bicycles, he had crossed a bright line. He had sinned, which takes us to the church.

It is a beautiful building whose roof is concave and made from highly-polished teak, one of Costa Rica’s main exports. It looks like an upside-down boat’s hull. Now, this church is full of very stealable items, some made of gold. The windows are high but they are not glassed and would be easily accessible with a ladder. Thieves could be in and out in minutes at night, and considerably richer. In England, a church like this would be robbed and gutted, and quite possibly burnt down. But nobody does that here. The local thieves are certainly not afraid of the police. Must be someone else that dissuades them. Now let’s leave church, watching the drivers cross themselves as they pass the statue of the Virgin, and go to the beach.

A 15-minute bus ride from the town is a beach rated by TripAdvisor as the 12th-best in the world. It’s a tourist attraction, as you might imagine. One day, there was a crew of Nicaraguans stealing people’s belongings. Nicaraguans seem to be natural thieves, and the Costa Ricans even have a saying about the country to the north. The are three seasons in Costa Rica. The rainy season, the dry season, and the season when we have a problem with Nicaragua. Anyway, a group of locals saw this going on, cornered the gang, and started beating them up. They know that tourism is the lifeblood of the country, and robbing tourists will hardly improve figures in an industry still trying to recover from Covid. When the police arrived to help, they did just that. They helped the locals beat up the gang. Trust. Back to England.

In the UK, there has been a rise in the use of machetes in incidents of violent crime. The Government did what they always do, which was to introduce a ban, in the apparent belief that the sort of human being who would take a machete to another human being will suddenly respect the rule of law and drop his blade in at the local amnesty bin. There is no need for a machete even to exist in Britain. I suppose a farmer might have a use for one, but there is no jungle or rain-forest there, as there is in profusion here, where machetes are freely available. In my local town, there is a hardware store. In a large plastic bin by the door to the street, there is a selection of machetes. It is legal to carry one in public as long as it is sheathed. Anyone, should they so wish, could scoop up half a dozen of these blades and be away before a shop assistant had even noticed. But no one does. They are trusted not to.

At the time of writing, today is September 15, La día de la independencia. I wrote about Costa Rican Independence Day at Counter Currents here in 2021 and again last year, and these pieces give the background to Central American independence from Spain in 1821, as well as some local color, should you be interested. The first fireworks went off at 4am, even before the first roosters were awake, to signal Costa Rica’s happiest day of the year. I am almost certainly the only person in the town who is unhappy.

To see the marching bands of smiling, proud children in the local town, to see the streets awash in, ironically, red, white, and blue (the colors of both the Costa Rican and British national flags), to feel nationalistically lonely amid the camaraderie of people whose nation ranks 12th in the World Happiness Index, tells me much about England. In my country, displays of nationalism such as today’s have been frowned on for some time, and are edging closer to being criminalized. This is only the case in England, and does not apply to the other countries in the union. While traditional Costa Rican dancing, with its ribbons and swirling dresses making it a cousin to flamenco, is being enjoyed by Costa Ricans, English schoolchildren are taught that the history of their country is one of which they should be ashamed. While Pakistanis and Indians throng the streets of English cities for their national independence day, St. George’s Day celebrations are becomingly increasingly rare, and something of which the State disapproves. England is being steadily erased, first from the world stage, and then from the consciousness of the children who form what there is of its future. The last lines of Powell’s 1961 St. George’s Day speech show his prescience every bit as much as his more famous speech in 1968:

The danger is not always violence and force, them we have withstood before and can again. The peril can also be indifference and humbug, which might squander the accumulated wealth of tradition and devalue our sacred symbolism to achieve some cheap compromise or some evanescent purpose.

The last couplet of Kipling’s poem is as follows:

What is the flag of England? Ye have but my breath to dare,
Ye have but my waves to conquer. Go forth, for it is there!

England once ruled the waves and was unconquerable, where now she is being invaded by undocumented conquerors across the once-impregnable English Channel. Hitler couldn’t do it. Caesar and Claudius managed it, but didn’t stay long. William the Conqueror also invaded – the clue’s in the name – but he and his men chose to do what today’s Muslim hordes have no intention of doing. They integrated.

But, sadder still for a self-imposed exile such as myself, is that I can never go home. Another English poem from an attractive canon of poems about the old country is Browning’s Home Thoughts from Abroad, which begins:

Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England – now!

A shame I can’t see all that anywhere now except in my mind’s eye, but sometimes you can’t go home again. England Made Me was the title of a Graham Green novel, but its alternative title was The Shipwrecked. Well, England made me too, but I’m shipwrecked and I can’t even go back to thank her. There are people there I no longer trust.

James Edwards Interviews Lew Moore

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What follows is an interview conducted by James Edwards with Lew Moore, a former congressional chief of staff, speechwriter, and the national campaign manager for Ron Paul’s famous presidential bid. He is also the author of Forerunner: The Unlikely Role of Ron Paul.

James Edwards: You served as Chief of Staff for Congressman Jack Metcalf (R-WA) from 1995-2001. Please tell us a little bit about his policies.

Lew Moore: First, Jack was one of a kind, well known in the Northwest as a political “maverick.” He was America first all the way. He had strong views on the three classic populist issues: trade, immigration, and endless wars. He also believed the core of our problems lies with the Federal Reserve bank and the shadowy, globalist figures behind what is essentially a private institution. He had a basic belief in traditional values and small constitutional government and was clearly a “real” Republican.

Nonetheless, Jack had no qualms about reaching out to labor, to conservationists, and to people of goodwill on “the left” who had the same concerns he did about the concentration of power in the country and the erosion of our culture.

Edwards: What were your duties and responsibilities as his chief of staff?

Moore: I was responsible for managing the staff, usually around 18 folks, divided between D.C. and our district. I was involved with hiring. I was a surrogate for the congressman in media appearances and other events. I represented him in meetings with other congressional and senatorial staffs. I was ultimately responsible for ensuring he had access to all the arguments surrounding an important issue. I gave him advice. I wrote speeches. I interfaced with the teams working on his various campaigns.

Edwards: Being in Washington, D.C. during those years must have been quite memorable. What is it like to be in the middle of the American political system?

Moore: The political junkie inside of me was like a kid in the candy store. They call politics “the Great Game,” and it can certainly be exciting, at times. Meeting serious people with a lot of first-hand knowledge about government and politics was wonderful and had a huge impact on me. Meeting unserious, career-climbing types was tedious, and, at times, nauseating. Seeing the trajectory of decline America was on was sobering and frightening.

Edwards: After Rep. Metcalf retired, you went on to become the campaign manager for Congressman Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential bid. This was a groundbreaking campaign with historic enthusiasm. Will you share with us a couple of your favorite memories?

Moore: Once, I returned to the campaign office after a late dinner meeting that was long and engrossing. The office was packed full of young staffers on the phone, bustling about. The mood was great. The energy was incredible. But something seemed off. I looked at my phone. It was nearly one in the morning. No one wanted to go home. It was unbelievable.

Once, Ron came to Seattle for a rally, my home at the time. It was indoors, about 2,000 supporters packed into a hotel ballroom. He asked me to warm up the crowd and introduce him. I walked up to the podium and the place went wild before I said a word; deafening noise, but not for me. They wanted to get the thing rockin’.

I looked down at the state party chairman on the front row (not a supporter) and he looked terrified. I introduced Ron and the place went nuts. I was admittedly extremely proud of the energy “my hometown” crowd produced for the “Champion of the Constitution.”

Edwards: The Republican establishment was hellbent on stopping Ron Paul and minimizing the reach of his message in 2008 and 2012. What do you remember about this?

Moore: They tried to keep Dr. Paul out of the debates, right from the beginning. The first major GOP candidate debate in 2008, in “First in the Nation” Iowa, excluded Ron. So we rented the hall across from them in a large convention center and had a rally that drew several times more people than the John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee snore-session debate attracted.

In 2012, the RNC held a rigged voice-vote on the convention floor. The establishment brought forth a motion to prevent future insurgent campaigns from using the traditional caucus system to acquire delegates. Conservative activists joined Ron Paulers in shaking the rafters with a resounding “no,” but the RNC chair lamely read “the ayes have it” from a teleprompter. This whole shabby effort was 100% a reaction to the success of the Paul campaign in 2012.

There was constant “trench warfare” between Ron Paulers and the establishment within the GOP in every state in both of those elections.

Edwards: As you traveled the country with Ron Paul, did you get the sense that there was a growing movement that would be reckoned with in the future no matter how that campaign ended?

Moore: Absolutely. One tell was that Dr. Paul was getting support from people of nearly every background and ideology. At one juncture in the campaign, hundreds marched for Ron Paul in San Francisco, arguably the most liberal city in the country. He then got on a plane and flew to a rally in Salt Lake City, in possibly the most conservative state in the nation where he spoke before thousands.

As you have pointed out many times, Pat Buchanan had no doubt that his ideas, basically the same ideas espoused by Dr. Paul, would have their moment. I felt that way myself about the Buchanan campaigns, and was fortified in that belief when I witnessed the grassroots explosion that was the Paul campaign of 2008.

Edwards: Ultimately, the GOP establishment would indeed become radically changed. In your book, Forerunner: The Unlikely Role of Ron Paul, you deliver a first-person account of how a brewing middle-class/populist rebellion could first be seen in the surprising energy surrounding Rep. Paul’s presidential campaign. How is there a direct connection between the presidential campaign that you managed, the Buchanan campaigns of 1992, 1996, and 2000, and the explosion of the MAGA rallies that led to the election of Donald Trump in 2016?

Moore: The populist thread that runs from the Buchanan campaigns, through the Ron Paul campaigns to Donald Trump was centered around three key issues: trade, immigration, and endless wars. Each candidate decried globalist trade agreements like NAFTA, and the effects of deindustrialization on the United States.

Each candidate vigorously opposed illegal immigration and advocated building a wall. And each one of them vigorously opposed globalist “nation building” and committing our troops to foreign wars with no objective that aligned with the interests of only a handful of the American people.

There are also direct connections. Many don’t know Dr. Paul was an advisor to the Buchanan campaign of 1992. A number of Pat’s key state leaders performed the same role for the Paul campaigns of 2008 and 2012. Ron Paulers formed the activist core of on-the-ground organizing for Trump in several parts of the country in 2016.

Edwards: As a savvy and seasoned political operative, what is your survey of the current presidential race?

Moore: One day can be an eternity this late in a high-stakes race, so the snapshot of today may not mean much tomorrow. I think much of the enthusiasm we are assured is out there for Harris is manufactured. I think a lot of votes for her in the swing states will be “manufactured” as well. I think if she obviously falters before the election there will be another attempt on Trump’s life. I mean that. The powers that be obviously don’t want Trump in office. Look at the lawfare and everything else. On the other hand, Trump is a very imperfect vessel under a huge amount of pressure to trim his sails, which I believe also hurts his electability. We have already seen that. This is a wild one. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

Edwards: Democrats never miss an opportunity to infuse racial politics into the conversation, almost constantly mentioning what they will do explicitly for black voters and other minorities. The Republicans also pander to certain racial and ethnic groups, but never to the majority of voters most likely to support them. Why are Republicans so afraid to mention White voters when naming the people they seek to represent?

Moore: The Republicans look ridiculous when they trim their sails and pander to every different group. It is no longer “outside the Overton Window” to state that every part of our agenda must relate to saving Western civilization. In this age of massive cynicism and rapid communications, we have the opportunity to take our politics away from the special interests and their social engineers, but we cannot do it without authentic candidates who have that central objective. And that means no pandering.

It is in the interest of all people of goodwill to save the “white male” from the constant campaign of vilification orchestrated by powerful financial interests animated by the satanic dogmas based essentially on Marxism. The Great Replacement, if it is successful, will not go well for anyone except those who wish total control for themselves and an end to the civilization that has been a blessing for all of humanity.

Edwards: If you were Donald Trump’s campaign manager, what advice would you give him that would ensure his victory in November?

Moore: Get rid of your advisors who want you to “move to the middle” and pander to outlying groups. Stay on your core America First message. Deport illegals. Restore energy independence. Bring manufacturing back to our country. Purge our institutions of manifest, misnamed evils like CRT, ESG, and particularly DEI. Make clear we will use our economic and military strength as leverage, but only for the interests of actual Americans.

We must quit spending our strength on those who would entangle us all over the world to our detriment, with the agenda of destroying us as a nation and as a people.