From Kosher to Halal: When Greed, Politics, and the Sneaky Destruction of Western Civilization Intertwine
Suzanne Bousquet
Translated from French by David Smith, 2020.

Four years ago, I was asked by a Jew on social media why I thought myself an expert on the Jewish people. The question was obviously intended as the prelude to an argument or abuse, and I’d gotten used to such approaches. “I don’t think any such thing,” I replied. “There are large swathes of information about Jews, their religion and history, that I’m not even remotely interested in. The Talmud, for example, would bore me to read in full. But I do consider myself to possess some expertise on the subject of anti-Semitism. I’m interested in Jews only insofar as they affect, and have affected, Europeans. You can start with the cumulative bibliography of my essays, spanning hundreds of texts, if you wish to argue otherwise.” My Jewish correspondent had no reply to this, and I never heard from him again.

The Jewish Question is, of course, vast in terms of its historical and geographical spread, and my claims of expertise were somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Yes, I’ve read a great deal of the historical literature. I’ve even spent 12,000 words in reviewing much of the best of it, and I’ve written over 200 essays of original material on aspects of the subject. But there are always areas in which it is best to defer to others. I was reminded of this when reading Suzanne Bousquet’s recently-published From Kosher to Halal which, more than any other book I’ve read in recent years, confirmed for me just how much I don’t know about the Jewish Question. Much of my pre-existing opinion on kosher slaughter had been informed by the 1920s pamphlet “The Legalised Cruelty of Schechita” by the eccentric British veterinarian, and avowed Fascist, Arnold Spencer Leese. But this pamphlet, although retaining remarkable relevance, is now a century old, and has nothing to say about the modern mass-certification industry. Bousquet’s extremely well-researched, well-written, and tightly argued book brings an entirely different, and infinitely more professional, level of detail and context to this quite convoluted subject, and she connects dots I barely knew existed. In the following review I want to offer a summary of what I now regard as an essential text in the study of Jewish influence on Western modernity.

Bousquet’s From Kosher to Halal is a fascinating combination of religious study, history, and contemporary political commentary. In the words of the Quebec-born author,

This book seeks to fill a remarkable gap, viz., the absence from any Canadian publisher’s catalogue of any rigorous explanation of the business of kosher and halal certification from an outsiders’s point of view. This absence can be explained in several ways, including a certain sensitivity about dealing with a subject whose mere mention causes controversy — as if there were domains that must remain taboo from the mere fact of their religious connotations.

Bousquet is the granddaughter of the former owner of one of Canada’s largest industrial bakeries, and, in From Kosher to Halal, she combines some inherited instincts from the Agri-Food industry with editorial and communications experience gained in her professional life. Bousquet’s concern is primarily that, although we live in an age of “enlightened consumerism,” kosher and halal certification is shrouded in almost complete secrecy and is declared off-limits politically.  The author comments that although

there are discreet kosher logos on nearly 80% of products at the grocery, and subtle pressures are increasingly felt by producers to acquire halal certification as well, these two labels are not publicized: they remain a mystery for many people. And meat from animals slaughtered in kosher or halal fashion are still not subject to systematic, strict identification and labelling even now.

The agencies which sell religious certification services, and the companies which profit from products labelled kosher or halal, have never been subject to an objective or critical scholarly examination of their practices. We soon learn just how necessary such an examination is. Bousquet argues that these agencies push companies to adopt high certification costs that are then passed on to the consumer, a kind of “kosher tax,” with the acquired funds funnelled into the Jewish and Muslim communities. Bousquet proposes to analyze the practices of the agencies, and follow the money trail, “modestly putting down a first milestone toward a better understanding of a reality unknown to the public.”

The book’s first chapter “From Kashrut to Kosher Industry,” begins with an historical overview of the development of kashrut, the set of dietary laws dealing with the foods that Jews are permitted to eat and how those foods must be prepared according to Jewish law. Bousquet points out that dietary laws were a means by which Jews could accentuate ethnic particularism, arguing that “the ‘chosen people’ distinguish themselves in particular by the way they eat.” Bousquet demonstrates a comprehensive reading of Jewish religious texts in this area, including the Mishnah, and is very clear in their implications:

Rabbi David Bar-Hayim of the Merkaz HaRav Yeshiva confirms in a study that Judaism establishes a distinction between individuals based on religion. Meat designated “kosher,” and by extension the absolute obligation that the slaughter be carried out only by a believing Jew, comes from a conception which figures in the Hebrew Law (the halakha), whereby non-Jews (goyim) are considered animals. The terrestrial soul of non-Jews has the same type of anima as that of impure animals (such as pigs or apes): the goyim are creatures judged very inferior, and this is why meat from an animal slaughtered by them cannot be kosher.

The text then moves to an analysis of the essential rules of kashrut before providing a very interesting, and for me entirely novel, account of the origins of kosher certification in North America. Kosher certification is, we learn, an invention of early twentieth-century New York, having no real precedent in history. The practice, revealed here as little more than an elaborate scam, was created in 1919 by a New York Jew named Joseph Jacobs. Jacobs had been a school teacher in the Bronx until a failed attempt to obtain a promotion resulted in a move to the advertising industry. Taking up a position at the Yiddish-language Daily Forward (Forverts), Jacobs “got the idea of offering his services to facilitate the sale of certain products to the Yiddish-speaking community of New York, at that time 1.5 million strong and unable to understand English.” In 1919, Jacobs founded the Joseph Jacobs Advertising Agency, Inc., which still exists. In the early days of the company, kosher certification was more or less limited to kosher marketing — convincing Yiddish-speaking Jews that foods they thought were prohibited were in fact permitted under kashrut. Bousquet uses the example of coffee:

To illustrate how Jacobs worked, let us take the example of coffee. At the time, religious Jews considered this vegetable matter, a bean, and thus not kosher for Passover. Jewish grocers classed coffee with hamets (forbidden for Passover) under the erroneous belief that coffee beans were kitniyot, when they are in fact the seeds of a fruit — and not beans. So Jacobs launched a publicity campaign to explain that coffee beans are not leguminous vegetables but fruits, and consequently kosher. He found a cooperative Rabbi to confirm his point of view and published announcements in the Yiddish papers. This is how Maxwell House became kosher: without inspection or blessing.

Jacobs soon merged this kind of kosher marketing campaign with a more formal style of kosher certification rooted in Jewish communal meat regulation. This latter context is explored in detail by Bousquet, who reveals the entire subject to be rooted in Jewish gangsterism, violence, and attempted murder. The violence had its origins in the desire of the rabbis to boost their income by overseeing shechita, or kosher slaughter. Rabbis would form small kosher certification boards and, if a town or city had two or more rabbis, violent rivalry would break out between factions as each sought a monopoly on shechita funds. As part of this rivalry, each faction would place its own brand on kosher products (e.g. “U” for Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations), and encourage the boycott of products marked with a rival brand.

Joseph Jacobs saw an opportunity to bring this branding into play in his own marketing efforts, and convinced an increasing number of non-Jewish businesses to mark their products with “K” for kosher and, later, any one of the expansive range of other logos or initials that represented the various kosher certification factions. Competition between Jews persisted to some extent but, since the target was now the more lucrative outgroup market, the violence eased. Maxwell House (1923) and Coca-Cola (1937) were among the first mass market products to obtain kosher certification, but the pace didn’t really begin to pick up until the 1960s, alongside Jewish advertising campaigns that marketed kosher hot dogs and rye to non-Jews as “healthier, superior foods.” [Bousquet skewers this later in the book.] Despite the relatively minuscule numbers of observant Jewish consumers, over the next six decades the kosher certification industry has expanded in the West to cover everything from toilet paper, household soap and diapers, to pet food and suppositories. In America, up to 50% of grocery products are now kosher certified, for an estimated annual sales of 500 billion dollars.

When you want your ferret to have a better diet than the goyim

At this point, Bousquet’s book really comes into its own. The most contentious aspect of kosher certification, aside from methods of slaughter, is the question of cost. What expenses are incurred by certification, and what impact do they have on retail prices? Here Bousquet employs detective work and penetrating logic. The author notes the mafia-like silence on this issue, pointing to a “sort of omertà regarding how much money certifiers earn from their activities, going as far as denying all profitability.” The Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs, for example, decries “mistaken beliefs” that kosher certification is a for-profit industry, arguing that costs merely cover inspection and that certification only profits the companies certified. Other interested parties have argued that “the additional costs assumed by consumers are quite minimal,” and that “rabbis make no profit from certification.” Bousquet, by contrast, points to a number of studies, including a 2011 PhD thesis, demonstrating that kosher certification brings in enough profits to be dispersed not only within certification bodies, but also Jewish schools, cultural institutions, and other Jewish communal organizations. In short, it’s quite easy to deduce that kosher certification is not only highly profitable, but that it involves a significant transfer of wealth from the general population to the Jewish population.

Bousquet describes in detail this “lucrative racket,” which involves the mass certification even of products already regarded as intrinsically kosher (e.g. virgin olive oil, frozen blueberries, coffee, detergent, dishwashing soap, toilet paper, salt, and pepper). In Bousquet’s native Canada, the kosher-certified market has expanded 64% since 2003. We learn that the situation reached such ridiculous proportions in Canada that Paul Lungen, an investigative journalist with Canadian Jewish News, conducted an eight-month investigation into kosher certification practices at the Kashrut Council of Canada (COR) that exposed numerous irregularities and abuses. These included arbitrary pricing and false declarations of what is and isn’t kosher. It was also revealed that COR reported annual revenues of over $5 million, but, despite being a registered charity, dispensed only $2,500 to charitable causes. One vegetable oil company reported that it had to cancel its kosher certification after learning that COR would charge $45,000 just to have a rabbi, possessing no meaningful qualifications in food production, attend an annual inspection of their manufacturing processes. For his efforts in reporting these facts, Lungen was quickly denounced by his co-ethnics for committing the sin of chillul HaShem, which translates as “profanation of the name of God” but actually means that a Jew has informed non-Jews of Jewish misdeeds. In other words, Lungen was declared a race traitor.

The scam runs deep, and often has links to Jewish influence in government. At least one Canadian kosher certification business, the Canadian Kosher Food Safety Initiative (CKFSI), was started thanks to a $763,650 funding grant from government minister Christian Paradis, the latter having a history of bribery allegations. The government has also permitted rabbis from organizations like CKFSI to profit from conducting general health inspections at food production sites, despite their overwhelming lack of professional or educational qualifications in the area. This has prompted economist David MacDonald from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives to declare: “It is not the responsibility of a religious organization to determine the safety of the food you eat. … We cannot have the same level of confidence. … We will have less well-trained, less experience personnel.” Because Jews are combining their dubious “health inspections” with expensive kosher certification, production costs are expected to increase 5-7%, with the additional costs then passed on to consumers.

At less than 1% of the population in Canada and the United States, with similar representation throughout the West, it’s clear that Jews aren’t assuming the costs of the vast kosher certification enterprise, which takes up 60% to 80% of the grocery trade and has “kosherized” entire production chains. Jewish apologists for the kosher certification industry have claimed that non-Jews have come to the conclusion that kosher foods are of superior quality and that kosher means “good food” to many consumers. They argue that kosher certification is sought after by the general consumer, and that the various kosher logos are therefore an attractive attribute for any product. Bousquet points out that such claims stand in sharp contrast to university studies that have found these kosher labels “pass almost unnoticed by the general population,” many of whom have absolutely no idea what the logos actually mean.

To those that do know what the labels mean, and object to the wholesale kosherization of the food industry, Jews have a blunt response. Bousquet has a very interesting section on how Jews, especially the ADL, have used accusations of anti-Semitism to silence criticism of kosher certification and prevent meaningful investigation of its practices. In 1991, the ADL effectively created a template response to accusations of a “kosher tax” that has been used by almost every kosher certification body since. The hallmarks of this template response are:

• Declare the idea of a “kosher tax” to be a “hoax” concocted by “right wing extremists.”
• Assert that any insinuation that rabbis are enriched by kosher certification is a “conspiracy theory” dependent on “stereotypes about Jews.”
• Deny that only a small segment of the general population desires such markings.
• Repeatedly mention that the idea of a kosher tax has been promoted by “various Ku Klux Klan groups” thus making anyone uneasy to share these ideas.

Bousquet does an excellent job of interrogating the ADL’s claim that kosher certification costs are “so negligible in practical terms as to be virtually non-existent.” In response, Bousquet asks, if they are so low, why no business has ever revealed the exact figures, and why the Jewish communities which demand certification can’t pay the costs themselves. Also, asks Bousquet, if this is such a low-revenue industry, why are there 273 kosher certification agencies in the United States all competing fiercely for a slice of what is alleged to be a very meagre pie? The author then points out that COR’s revenues for 2013 were $5.4 million, with nine of its employees earning salaries of between $80,000 and $119,000, with one making between $120,000 and $159,000. All from a “virtually non-existent” income!

Despite its factual bankruptcy, the ADL template is used with alarming regularity. When Louise Mailloux, a philosophy professor and candidate for the Parti Québécois, spoke of a “religious tax” during an April 2014 electoral campaign, the Quebec branch of the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs issued a statement accusing Mailloux of echoing “a conspiracy theory created and spread by the Ku Klux Klan” and insisting that there is no real cost behind certification and that companies get certified in order to “open up a new market segment and boost sales.” When Pierre Lacerte, a journalist, attempted to defend Mailloux and add detail to her claims, a Rabbi Zvi Hershcovich issued a statement accusing both of “bringing up a myth created by Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups. … The cost of certification is minimal. … Acquiring kosher certification is a wise business decision.” All of which goes to show that while Jews are not a creative people, what they lack in originality they make up for in sheer repetition. As such, their outcries are not so much dramatic, as possessing the ominous monotony of the drone of an approaching swarm of hornets. Undeterred by the obvious weakness of a lie, they’ll beat you with it a thousand times rather than open up the books.

Bousquet is undeterred by the swarm, and swats back at it very effectively. She follows the money relentlessly, and finds many examples of major companies and organizations (and even one rabbi) who are willing to go on record as confirming that kosher certification is expensive and that the costs are passed on to the consumer. When Jewish pressure was brought to bear on the Girl Guides to make their cookies kosher, Girl Guide Cookies replied publicly: “Although the ingredients are kosher; Dare equipment is not. The kosher certification is very expensive, over and above the annual cost required to maintain it. We are refraining from certifying these produces because the costs greatly outweigh the benefits. We are sorry, but making these cookies kosher is not a good business decision.” Didn’t these Girl Guide bigots, with their prejudiced cookies, realize they were making the same claims as the Ku Klux Klan? Apparently not. Later, however, after “lots of perseverance,” Jewish lobbying was able to achieve the desired result. How many observant Jewish consumers of Girl Guide Cookies are out there? It doesn’t matter. What matters is the Girl Guides aren’t like the Ku Klux Klan, and you can now be sure you’re eating a superior, and more expensive, food.

The book’s treatment of halal is no less fascinating and infuriating. Although there is a richness of detail, the main theme that emerges here is that Muslims have essentially followed the Jewish template, inventing a certification system that funnels money into their community while spreading their unchecked influence in the food production system. In the words of Hajj Habib Ghanim, President of the USA Halal Chamber of Commerce:

The introduction of halal certification to the United States owes much to the kosher certifiers who conducted similar, well-established activity and know the industry. We have learned from them. … We are learning from our Jewish cousins who have been operating for years. We are learning, and we have a great deal of support from them.

Much of this mutual support is rooted in the shared desire to continue ritual slaughter in Western lands where the mistreatment of animals is illegal. Bousquet’s chapter on ritual slaughter is exceptional, with an excellent section titled “From Multiculturalism to Legal Pluralism,” in which she argues that the “pernicious cultural relativism of multicultural policies has allowed religious fundamentalists quietly to impose legal pluralism.” Thus the laws for producing kosher and halal meat obey Hebrew and Islamic law and not the law of the nation. Bousquet explores these grim methods of slaughter and succinctly dismantles apologetics in their favor. Most concerning to the author is the fact that a lot of kosher and halal meat finds its way to the mass market, where it is not labeled as such. For example, Jews might ritually slaughter 100 cattle, but perhaps only 10 will pass inspection as kosher after the slaughter. This is because a rabbi conducts an examination of the major internal organs after the killing of the animal, and even a slight blemish on a lung is sufficient for the meat to be declared unclean and fit to be consumed only by goyim. It is then placed back onto a conveyor belt, butchered, packaged, and sold to an unsuspecting housewife entirely unaware that this evening’s steaks were earlier essentially tortured alive, eviscerated, mulled over, and rejected by an Ashkenazi fanatic.

The complicity of the major meat processors is revealed by Bousquet as owing much to the desire to build a thriving meat export business supplying the Middle East and North Africa, while filtering undesired meat to Western consumers without even a hint of the way in which the animal was killed. The author’s detailed and lengthy analysis in this area, too sizeable to be given adequate treatment in this review, represents a damning indictment of modern monopoly capitalism and its willing participation in Western cultural decline, a participation motivated by greed and underscored with a cold indifference to the great mass of consumers. Indeed, in an age where we are fed the lie that the consumer is king, Suzanne Bousquet’s exploration of kosher and halal certification reveals we are more like the topic’s unfortunate cattle, being mass farmed and abused for the benefit of others.

Suzanne Bousquet is to be congratulated for this brave, original, and detailed study of a subject I was quite unfamiliar with. I have no hesitation in recommending it to others with an interest in Jewish influence, the kosher and halal industries, or the interplay between multiculturalism and globalist capital. This is precisely the kind of investigative and damning literature we need, and it’s a very worthy addition to my library. If there’s a Jew out there busily preparing to ask the author just why exactly she thinks herself an expert in this area — I can assure you, she is.

Learning how Bill Gates and a bunch of patent attorneys and mad scientists through the Institute for Disease Modeling (Mongering) are advising Oregon’s Governor Kate Brown in her continuing lockdown apocalypse on the economy and people of the state, I wondered what other states were receiving similar advice from IDM.

I sent IDM an email inquiry and received this reply: “Washington, NYC, White House Council of Economic Advisors, 3-4 other states.”

Washington State

It should be expected that Washington State would be a recipient of IDM’s philanthropy, since its offices are located in Bellvue WA. Just as in Oregon, IDM provided a study paper to Washington’s Governor on April 10 titled “Physical distancing is working and still needed to prevent COVID-19 resurgence in King, Snohomish, and Pierce counties.” with an addendum of April 16. Authors Niket Thakkar, Roy Burstein, Daniel Klein, Jen Schripsema, and Mike Famulare are all with IDM.

The Authors

See the previous essay “Oregon Governor Advised by Bill Gates and Patent Lawyers“ for Klein’s links to Gates.

Niket Thakkar seems only to have indirect ties to Gates. Aside from receiving a PhD from University of Washington, which gets huge grants from Gates, he also won a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. It was over ten years ago that Gates partnered with NSF in a joint $48 million grant, but it funded a five year competitive awards program for technologies to improve ag production in developng countries.

Roy Burstein is another U of WA PhD graduate, who worked previously at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a disease modeling firm similar to IDM which received a gargantuan grant from Gates in 2017, as will be explained below. Prior to working at IDM, Burstein conducted “primary data collection… for the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project.” “GBD work was initiated at the World Health Organization.” to which we know Gates is now the largest donor in the world. “With funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, IHME began to serve as the coordinating center for the international network of GBD contributors to produce comprehensive GBD updates. … GBD estimates have been produced to provide policymakers, donors, and other decision-makers with the most timely and useful picture of population health.” It is certainly useful to Gates and the medical industry in selling vaccines and other med tech world-wide.

Jen Schripsema is a Senior Technical Writer and “has written and edited content for Windows Embedded.” Here’s an author who formerly worked with Microsoft, like the top founders and advisors at Intellectual Ventures.

Mike Famulare is still another PhD grad from U of WA. He works in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative for IDM. It was noted in the previous essay that GPEI received huge funding from Gates’s Foundation and other organizations Gates funds. Not to single out Famulare, but do he and his colleagues ever factor in polio vaccine-caused damage and death to their models, or for all vaccines, or iatrogenic effects generally? Because Gates’s polio vaccine program paralyzed almost half a million children in India alone, and is Spreading polio, not eliminating it.

Washington Precariousness Must Endure

What implications does the IDM study have for the state of Washington? First of all, just as in Oregon, IDM affirms that the “social distancing measures are working: Our collective efforts to limit physical interaction across society have stabilized the rate of spread of COVID-19, but the situation remains precarious with the effective reproductive number near and possibly varying above and below one.” The recommendations for Washington are not surprisingly exactly the same as Oregon: “Continued adherence to physical distancing policies remains necessary to further reduce transmission; otherwise, rebound transmission is likely to occur.” IDM provides similar graphs showing alarming spikes and upward swooping curves in their projection models to incite the appropriate fear that justifies their recommendations.

As in Oregon, Washington’s Governor Jay Inslee is buying it. He even denounced the gathering of protestors in the state Capital recently.The lockdown apocalypse will continue in Washington as in Oregon, to the devastation of both economies and peoples. But the IDM will not be tracking and graphing the increasing numbers of bankrupt small businesses, laid off employees, desperately impoverished people, increasing mental health epidemics, drug abuse, suicides, domestic violence, cancelled medical treatments and fear and despair. They are not in the model.

I lost the tangled trail of IDM and did not examine all fifty states for its influence. IDM stopped responding to my emails with this reply from COVID@idmod: “We are an independently supported institute, and neither solicit nor accept contracts or other outside financial support. We freely share our analyses to those partners that we solely determine we can assist.” We know where you get your money, and thanks for the free help.

New York City & IHME

I could not discover that New York City Mayor De Blasio or NYC Health Department are using IDM data and recommendations. No problem, Gates has this covered. The other disease modeling (mongering) center he funds is on the job. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluations (see below) is certainly being used by NYC Mayor De Blasio and the Health Department to decide when and how to let the city breathe again. Market Watch’s City Watch article lays it all out, and as you can imagine, IHME has the exact same requreiments based on the exact same fears for NYC as the IDM. Like IDM, Gates’s IHME also advises other states with its benevolent philanthropy, and even the Federal Government, as we will see. June at the earliest is IHME’s best case scenario to start loosening NYC’s lockdown apocalypse, though that should be long enough to destroy the targeted number of businesses and lives. Longer would be better. I mean worse.

National  & IHME

Director of the White House Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) Larry Kudlow (J) said on CNBC (1:00) that “The data itself… and all of the health guidelines and the roadmaps for Governors and Mayors are based on the data.” Who is supplying this data? IDM told me it’s them, but I find no evidence. I do see that IHME advised the CEA on its:

Dynamic Ventilator Reserve to ensure that patients everywhere can continue accessing ventilators. The Dynamic Ventilator Reserve will deploy ventilators from areas throughout the country with ample excess supply to places that may need a bigger buffer to avoid local shortages.

The Great Ventilator Swap

State Governors and the White House are virtue signaling to show that “We’re all in this together” by shhippng ventilators around the states and beyond. California assessed it might be short of ventilator supply early on, and requested more. When 170 arrived from the National Ventilator Stockpile sent by President Trump, CA Governor Gavin Newsome claimed some were broken, and had to be repaired. In Illinois, Governor Pritzker (J) claimed he was “competing” with other states, the Federal government and other countries to purchase expensive ventilators. In New York State, Governor Cuomo also complained that competition is driving up ventilator prices, since “all 50 states, plus the federal government, are trying to acquire ventilators.” The President quickly responded to Pritzker and sent 300 ventilators to Illinois, but has been dismissive of Cuomo and New York, refusing ventilators. That’s when Oregon and Washington came to the rescue of New York, since mean old Trump would not. Oregon Governor Kate Brown sent ventilators to New York, and Washtington Governor Inslee returned over 400 ventilators to the National Stockpile so they could go to New York. California, perhaps having repaired some of the broken ones, returned some to the National Stockpile to help New York. California’s ventilators in the National Stockpile were sent to Nevada, Maryland, Delaware, the District of Columbia, the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam.  Colorado ordered 500 ventilators, but they were seized by FEMA instead. Trump, artist of the deal, negotiated with FEMA and eked out 100 to Colorado.  Cuomo had to finally admit New York had thousands of unused ventilators in storage. Governor Cuomo went on to send ventilators to Michigan and Maryland. Outcry arose when President Trump suggested sending ventilators to Europe. He’d already sent ventilaltors to China, with minimal outcry. Turns out Chinese businessmen sent ventilators to New York.

This I call the Great Ventilator Swap, and it has one big problem: ventilators are not needed for the main symptom of concern, oxygen deprivation. The symptom is essential hypoxia, insufficient oxygen exchange, for which supplemental oxygen supply is needed—not ventilators. In fact ventilators, which are used to assist lung function—not a symptom in these cases—are associated with lung damage and even death. Most patients placed on ventilators die. Senator Jensen from Minnesota who is also an MD has said that hospitals get compensation three times higher from Medicare when they use ventilators, from around $13,000 per COVID-19 patient intake, to over $39,000 when they are put on ventilators.

But never let a good fake crisis fail to sell a good fake cure.This is all a sales opportunity of course. “Companies that include Medtronic, Drager and Philips currently make ventilators, as do overseas competitors including in China, while efforts like the venture between General Motors and Ventec Life Systems are working to produce more ventilators to fill the need. A new startup called BreathDirect has designed a new slimmed-down ventilator.” Gates has given grants to Medtronics and Phillips in the past, and through his investment in Berkshire Hathaway holding company (see below) has investments in Phillips and GM.

Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluations

Gates has the national level advisory position covered as well. The models that predict medical system overload which the US government’s Presidential Coronavirus Task Force is using come from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, based at the University of Washington. IHME is proud to state: “You may have heard during a recent White House press briefing about ‘the Chris Murray Model,’ a new COVID-19 forecasting model created by Dr. Christopher Murray and researchers in Washington state that predicts the state-by-state impact of the coronavirus pandemic on health systems in the United States. That model is our model.” And a dire model it is, showing alarming spikes in the near future for hospitalizations, need for ventilators, and deaths, overwhelming state capacities to meet (potentially) exploding needs. Proud of its mention in the national spotlight, IHME says: “Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, was referring to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s model when she spoke with ‘Meet The Press‘ host Chuck Todd in a March 29, 2020, conversation about steps the US government is taking to support COVID-19 ‘hot spots’ across the country.”

As you might guess for almost any such research center predicting disease disasters, especially in the Pacific Northwest, it will be produced by Gates’ minions. I’ll let the Director of IHME and now national celebrity Christopher Murray express it. It comes in the very first sentence of his Director’s Statement: “The announcement of the 10-year, $279-million investment in IHME by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation this year (2017)  provides a moment in time to reflect and to look ahead.” Yes, let’s take a moment to reflect on how much $279 million of Gates money can influence national policy and promote false panic about overwhelmed hospitals.

Looking under the History tab, we find the IHME launched in 2007. Who funded the start up? “The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) launches with the goal of providing an impartial, evidence-based picture of global health trends to inform the work of policymakers, researchers, and funders. Main supporters are the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the state of Washington.” No further mention is made of Gates in the timeline until “October 2016: The University of Washington’s Population Health Initiative receives a $210 million gift from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fund construction of a new building to house several UW units working in population health, including IHME.” Just a few months later we see the $279 million to fund the Institute’s work for the next decade, including the advice they are distributing today directly to the President’s Coronavirus Response Task Force on this devastating disease scare.

Of note among the distinguished Founding Board Members of IHME, we find the current Director of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Minister of Health, Ethiopia (2005–2012). Like China, Ethiopia is a Communist country, and Tedros was a high-ranking member of that country’s Politboro totalitarian dictatorship. Prior to his Ministerial position he was a member of a group US intelligence identified as terrorists, and oversaw slaughters and attempted genocide of tribal rivals. As Health Minister Tedros was known to have suppressed knowledge of cholera outbreaks, endangering lives. Bill Gates was instrumental in installing Tedros as WHO Director.

He… developed a close relation with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As (Ethiopian) health minister, Tedros would also chair the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria that was co-founded by the Gates Foundation. …Today the largest donors to the WHO are the Gates Foundation and its associated GAVI Alliance for vaccination. With backers like Gates… it was no surprise that Tedros went on, after a stint as Ethiopian Foreign Minister, to win the post of WHO Director-General.

The President of the US has suspended donations while conducting an investigation into Tedros and WHO, making Gates now the top donor. Gates objected, disease-mongering as usual.

Other powerful people among the Founders of IHME are Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway; Lincoln C. Chen, President, China Medical Board, USA; Harvey Fineberg, President, Institute of Medicine, USA; Julio Frenk, Board chair, Dean, Harvard School of Public Health; and Jane Halton, Secretary, Australian Department of Finance, among others.

Gates is a huge donor to the Harvard School of Public Health, making multiple whopping multi-million dollar grants in 2019 alone. Fineberg was Dean of the School for thirteen years, and Gates’s grants go back to 2010. Fineberg, like so much of this medical network, is focused on “medical technology, evaluation of vaccines, and dissemination of medical innovations”. Gates has also made grants to the Institute of Medicine in the past, where Fineberg is now President.

Another prior Dean of Harvard School of Public Health and founder of IHME is Julio Frenk (J). Among many positions and accolades, including at “World Health Organization as executive director in charge of Evidence and Information for Policy” and Minister of Health of Mexico, “He also served as a senior fellow in the global health program of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation…”

IHME co-founder Jane Halton was the Secretary of the Australian Department of Finance and formerly its Secretary of Health. “Ms. Halton is the Chair of the Board of CEPI…” This stands for the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, to which Gates gave an enormous grant of $100 million in 2017.  CEPI is all about vaccines and nothing else. It’s main slogan is “New Vaccines For A Safer World”. You can bet Gates is deeply involved. Under Investors and Partners, we read “CEPI was founded in Davos by the governments of Norway and India, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and the World Economic Forum.” “CEPI has secured financial investment from the Governments of Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Ethiopia, Finland, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, the UK and Switzerland, as well as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation…” Distinguished company.

The last co-founder of IHME we will look at is David Roux. He is the chairman of Jackson Laboratory, to which Gates gave over $3.5 million in 2011, to understand the impacts of pneumonia vaccines in Africa and SE Asia. And what were these impacts? I could not find results for the original study, but other studies show the devastation pneumonia conjugate vaccines (PCV) cause to child and adult health. A top researcher at pharmaceutical giant Genentech and chancellor of the University of San Francisco gave the keynote speech at a Jackson Laboratory Discovery Day event, then went on to become the CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2014.

Other States?

Having established the powerful influence of IDM and IHME, both Gates-funded institutes providing ‘assistance’ to state Governors and the Federal Government in prolonging the lockdown apocalypse, I chose some sample states partly randomly, partly based on rumors, to see if any of Gates’s thousand tentacles were entwined.

Ohio

Ohio State University is providing the data and recommendations upon which Ohio’s Governor Mike DeWine is continuing the lethal lockdowns. It uses different graphics to frighten the public than IDM uses in Oregon and Washington, but the effect is the same: alarmism at spiking infection rates if social distancing measures are relaxed.

The Director of the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation gave the Commencement Address at Ohio State in 2018. Also,

The Ohio Global One Health Initiative team met with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation core team members … [who) …expressed great interest to work with the Global One Health Initiative to establish an integrated system to support interventions and also assist in the alignment of programs with the Ethiopian government’s priorities and building capacity for development.

The Gates Foundation urged Ohio State to become more involved in Ethiopia:

As the Ohio State Global One Health Initiative East Africa Regional Office takes its roots in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the Foundation team highly commended that Ohio State will need to play a convening role in bringing together stakeholders of the One Health Initiative in the region to create more collaborative engagement, use effective and efficient mechanisms and bring about sustainable outcomes at the grass root level.

We have already seen Gates’s mentorship of Communist tyrant Tedros in Ethopia and rise to WHO Director. It looks like the Gates Foundation Millepus (thousand-armed octopus) tentacles of money have also deeply entangled Ethiopia with Ohio State—the same institution that is advising the Governor.

North Carolina

North Carolina is also a suspect for Gates money and influence. Governor Roy Cooper uses the exact same language as other Governors we have examined, in his ‘Path Forward‘ statement.

“We want to get back to work while at the same time preventing a spike that will overwhelm our hospitals with COVID-19 cases.” Expert modeling has shown it would be dangerous to lift the restrictions all at once because it would increase the chances that hospitals become overwhelmed and unable to care for severely ill patients. Cooper emphasized that changes in restrictions must protect public health, especially those who are most vulnerable to severe illness.

Cooper uses very similar language when describing what’s needed to restore life and sanity: “In order to ease restrictions, the state needs to make more progress in three areas: testing, tracing and trends.”

The following statement from Cooper has startling similarity to a now notorious statement Gates himself recently made: “This virus is going to be with us until there is a vaccine, which may be a year or more away. … That means that as we ease restrictions, we are going to enter a new normal.” Compare to Gates: “To the world at large, normalcy only returns when we’ve largely vaccinated [Gates snickers] the entire global population [!].”  Gates gave an eighteen-month timeline.

Where does Cooper’s “expert modeling” come from? The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (NCDHHS)  is working with: “The models, constructed by experts from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University, RTI International, and others..”

UNC

The UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health received over $1 million from the Gates Foundation from 2015–2018. Margaret Bentley PhD works there, and is also Associate Director of the Institute of Global Health and Infectious Diseases, and Fellow at the Carolina Population Center. Dr. Bentley “is Principal Investigator of a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant for analyses of nutrition data from the Breastfeeding, Antiretroviral and Nutrition (BAN) study.” The Carolina Population Center received a grant from the Gates Foundation in 2017 of $4 million, to study “contraceptive method choice for youth aged 15–24” in “10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.” This is a favorite stomping ground for Gates, and contraception and population control is a fundamentalist pursuit of his. Bentley’s colleague at IGHID Jeff Stringer “holds active grants from… Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation…”

Duke

The Gates Foundation gave well over $12 million to Duke University just last year alone. This money went to a few endeavors, including vaccine development and studying the funding mechanisms for clinical trials of new medical products—for-profit ventures. Duke is conducting a special research project during this crisis, the COVID-19 Pandemic Response Network, looking to enroll 200,000 participants. If you “would like to track your symptoms twice a day for four weeks” you can sign up here. This must be the collaboration Governor Cooper references, “to assess changes in COVID-19 prevalence.” The parent organization sponsoring the study is National Institute of Health, to which Gates donated over $30 million last year alone.

RTI

RTI International presumably stands for Research Triangle Institute, since it is located in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. The Gates Foundation grant tracker returns no hits, but searching on the RTI website shows the first eight hits are media reports or brochures directly referencing the funding of the Gates Foundation to RTI (though none more recent than 2016). Next are ‘experts’ who either work on projects funded by the Gates Foundation, or were former employees of Gates. From there, the relevance of the search terms falls off.

RTI describes itself as “an independent, nonprofit research institute dedicated to improving the human condition. Our vision is to address the world’s most critical problems with science-based solutions in pursuit of a better future. .” It’s funding sources are not readily found, but its revenue was approaching $1 Billion in 2018. RTI does have two for-profit business operations, including RTI Health Solutions, which offers many services assessing data for pharmaceutical and health companies, including vaccines.

RTI’s scope of operations is vast, and like Gates its tentacles encompass health, energy, education, agriculture, social justice and more. I could not review all of the website’s many sub-pages, but sampling under Emerging Issues, I was curious to see what RTI is doing with Drone Research and Application. “We have worked with law enforcement and other first responder agencies to use drones in crime scene investigation, crowd control, intelligence collection…” Remember, RTI is “seeking ways to use (drones)…that improve the human condition”—and spot violators of social distancing?

Of course RTI is fully engaged in COVID-19 research, and like IDM and IHME is also in the computer modeling game. It worked with the North Carolina Department of Public Health as well as the CDC to develop a model for identifying and tracking health care workers that will now be adapted to track everyone for COVID-19. It uses “geospacially explicit… information about patient movement.” As part of its modeling possibilities, RTI was opportunistic in monitoring people’s Twitter activity to track their locations and movements in and out of Wuhan China, and “reviewed the (sample) group’s activities on Twitter for a 30-day period.” RTI will no doubt do more of this social media spying to ID and track us as the epidemic goes on. RTI is studying “the use of wearable sensors for… public health interventions.” and leads a project for DARPA to use wearable mobile sensors to “detect respiratory pandemics”. Our future lockdowns are assured.

Of special note, leading the RTI modeling team is Sarah Rhea. Among her many accomplishments in her career, “Before joining RTI, Dr. Rhea was an Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) Officer…” EIS has come to attention recently in the reporting of a long-time analyst of phony disease scares, who calls EIS agents “virus hunters”. They identify viruses as the cause of disease clusters and health issues, no matter what other environmental factors are contributing. Covering up the damage done to popluations by corporations and governments is one specialty of US intelligence agencies, and EIS specializes in naming boogey-viruses. I’m sure Sarah Rhea was a good agent.

An entire book devoted to the virus pretext scam, Virus Mania, How the Medical Industry Continually Invents Epidemics, Making Billion Dollar Profits at Our Expense, still available on Amazon for now, is gaining renewed interest. Dr. Kaufman presents a succinct explanation of the viral fraud, and the new-old theory that viruses are in fact exosomes.

The Gates Millepus

Following the Gates Foundation’s grant and funding paths is like tracking the arms of a spastic octopus. But this is a Millepus, because in the last two years the Foundation has made over 2000  different grants to a huge range of organizations and businesses, in a vast scope of areas, from education to global development to of course vaccine and other medical tech, to universities, local food banks, the World Health Organization… This is just for 2020 and 2019, and we are not even a third of the way through 2020. Just scanning through this year so far, I see grants anywhere from $5000 to $22 Million ( the largest I saw, to WHO). Median amount seems to be around $500,000, though this is a wild guess. The information is too voluminous to crunch. Perhaps one of Gates’s AI programs could accomplish it.

These totals are for grants only, and “do not include direct charitable contracts or Program Related Investments.” This last is a link, but “this site can’t be reached.” Oh well, I am already overwhelmed with the information. How much all these grants total per year must be staggering, perhaps in the  billions, Last year, 1918 different grants were issued.

Of note, Warren Buffet is a Trustee and pledged over $30 billion to the Foundation in 2006, in the form of stock from Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway. This giant holding company has among its Operating Subsidaries energy companies, pipelines, military defense contractors, insurance companies, media outlets, clothing manufacturers, diamonds and more. When we look at Buffet’s Notable Minority Holdings we see the pharmaceutical companies including Johnson & Johnson, big banks including Goldman Sachs (how much is that helping life in the developing world?), oil companies, more media, Master Card and Visa, Coca-Cola (another blessing for the Third World), and much more. But Buffet and Gates are devoting their huge wealth to helping the poor and sick of our suffering world. The contrast between their for-profit companies ostensibly inflicting harm on the world’s poor and sick, and their philanthropies trying to save them is either schizophrenia or an interactive plan for world power and control. I expect it’s the latter.

The World’s Most Evil Philanthropist?

Should anyone still be wondering if Bill Gates is a genuine philanthropist trying to help the poor sick children of the world, much investigation into the associations between pedophile blackmailer agent Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gates emerged during that too-soon-forgotten atrocity scandal.

But just days ago, astounding new knowledge came from a three-hour interview investigator Whitney Webb had with long-time Epstein sex-trafficking victim Maria Farmer.

Epstein made most of his money from his business ties to three men: Leslie Wexner, Donald Trump, and Bill Gates. … In 2001, Epstein had made a ton of money with Bill Gates. And she [Maria Farmer, Epstein victim] said she was around Epstein and Ghislaine (Maxwell) from 1995 to 1996—and she said that she heard them talking about Bill Gates like they knew him really well. And there was definitely a relationship there. — Whitney Webb, TLAV (16:50)

Even much fake stream media was examining the connections at the time the scandal broke, though most posing it as a question, casting doubts, wondering at the implications. Whitney Webb at Mint Press News at the time, gives a good summary:

Epstein’s most notable “business links” in 2001 contradicts Bill Gates’ recent assertions that he never had any business relationship with Epstein and did not meet with him until 2013. Notably, Gates’ former chief scientific adviser was recently named as an alternate executor for Epstein’s will and Gates appears on the flight logs of Epstein’s now-infamous private plane.

We must face it. Bill Gates had close connections with Jeffrey Epstein going back to the mid-90s, but lied about them. Lying is the least of Gates’s evil. Even any association at all with Epstein after the world knew of his underage solicitation and certainly worse in 2007  is enough to bring serious denunciation on Gates, and bring all of his profiteering disastrous “philanthropy” to a rattling halt.

But Gates is spending billions to help the poor and sick children of the world. He’s a sincere philanthropist changing the world for the better with a genuinely giving and caring heart. Follow one tentacle of the Gates Millepus back to its source and there we find at least a god-complex of stupendous ego, and at most a demonic agenda of world population control, dysgenics, and totalitarian technocratic tyranny. We’ve only considered a few of the tentacles here. Many more exist to be explored. They all meet at the center, which is the man, the god, the demon, Bill Gates.

Humanity has its own historic course. People and nature have lived in a profound dance of destiny through the eons long before any of this big money, big tech, big ego of Gates. The mere thought—much less public statement—of trying to inject anything into the entire population of the world, for any reason or no reason, or else it must be confined in an ever-shrinking prison of house arrest, is a hubris perhaps no demagogue God-Emperor ever conceived. None ever had the means to make it remotely come true.

Bill Gates cannot seriously believe he has this means today. It is upon us, We the People, to evoke the spirit of freedom  in humankind to show him he’s dead wrong.

Vitam impendere vero (“Dedicate one’s life to truth.”)
—Juvenal, Satire IV, 91[1]

Every movement needs its icons, the alt-right no less than any other social-political ideology. Any icon—a term deriving from the Greek eikôn, meaning a likeness or image—serves to embody key elements or aspects of a particular outlook, or to encapsulate certain key values. Within Christianity, the image of a crucified Jesus serves this purpose, as does an empty cross, which signifies his alleged resurrection. Within the alt-right, we have our own secular heroes, often drawn from among the great philosophers and intellectual figures of Western history, among whom I would include Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; French thinkers like Rousseau, Diderot, and Voltaire; and leading German intellectuals like Kant, Goethe, and Nietzsche. All have contributed seminal and indispensable ideas to the Western project.

But special standing is reserved for Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), a man of exceptional insight and courage. At once a brilliant metaphysician and a visionary social critic, Schopenhauer combined both aspects of his persona in his two main works, The World as Will and Representation (1818)[2] and Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)[3]. It is worthwhile examining his views on life and death, Christianity, and the Jews. There are valuable lessons here for us all.

Metaphysics of the Will

Let’s start with the big metaphysical picture. In its broad outline, Schopenhauer’s worldview consists of a universe of struggle, strife, and conflict—of tension and opposition which is only ever temporarily relieved, except to resume once more later on, in new and more potent forms. We see this clearly, he said, in the human realm, in the guise of war, oppression, and criminality. We see it in the mundane struggles of daily life, for money, friends, influence, power. We see it in countless minor actions and decisions that we all make, every day, aiming at something new, something better, something more. Every human action, even the most trivial, is a manifestation of a want, a desire, an urging, a striving—in short, of the will. As such, all social conflict reduces, ultimately, to a battle of wills.

But this situation is not limited to humans. We see a comparable picture in the animal kingdom, in the struggle for existence, for mates, for food, and for survival. We see it in plants, in their battle for sunlight and water, and for nutrients in the soil. And we see it even in inanimate nature, via such forces as gravitation, magnetism, and electrostatics. All the world, said Schopenhauer, is comprised, in its essence, of struggle, strife, frustration, and opposition; all the world is a manifestation of the will. The metaphysics here are fascinating and strikingly original, but I won’t elaborate for now. Here, we are most concerned with the social realm and the far-reaching implications of seeing “the world as will.”

For we humans, as mentioned, our daily life is a constant expression of our will. We want: want food, want drink, want material goods, want sex, want prestige, want power. Different people express their wills differently, but the essential nature of all people is the same: a constant striving or desiring for something. This has two important consequences. First, since we all are constantly striving—often for the same limited things—we are thereby engaged in an endless competition with others. As in any competition, there are (a few) winners and (many) losers. The losers become frustrated, disappointed, depressed, perhaps angry, perhaps aggressive. They either vow to try harder next time, or they give up altogether. Even the winners—and we all do win, from time to time—are not really satisfied. After a short-lived sense of relief or satisfaction, we immediately settle into a new sense of desiring and wanting. The sweetness of victory is fleeting. Soon we are either fending off jealous rivals, or we are constructing new, higher desires that we hope to fulfill. At best, we are simply bored.

Hence the second consequence: the basic reality of human life is a condition of unsatisfied want, endless craving, relentless competition, and unfulfilled desire—in other words, of suffering. Our lot in life is a constant striving for things that we can never really possess, least of all ‘happiness,’ and therefore the tangible reality of life is pain, suffering, and want. ‘Happiness’ or ‘satisfaction’ are merely temporary releases from such pain; therefore, happiness and pleasure are negative in their nature, and pain and suffering are the positive realities of the world.

Thus we arrive at Schopenhauer’s infamous pessimism. Life is a task, a chore, indeed, a punishment. We are all condemned to lives of greater or lesser suffering, sometimes physical, sometimes psychological, sometimes intense, sometimes mild—but ever-present and always looming greater in the future. The end of this life of suffering comes only with the ‘great suffering’ of physical death, which we all dread, and which therefore weighs upon our heads as yet more suffering. It would have been better, he concludes, if we had never been born.

What to do? Such a depressing picture almost inclines one to suicide. And yet Schopenhauer masterfully turns the picture around for us, finding a way through the morass of existence. First, he says, we are strangely fortunate that the world is as it is. Were it otherwise—if we somehow attained fulfillment and satisfaction on a regular basis, life would become truly pointless. We would either be driven insane by boredom, or would create artificial conflicts and struggles, wars and mass atrocities, simply to have a reason for being. Failing these, we might simply end our own lives—ironic, that the suicidal person is the one who has all his desires satisfied, not the one, like us, condemned to a life of struggle and pain. Suffering, said Schopenhauer, was like the ballast of a ship; it keeps us on the straight-and-narrow, keeps us focused, and drives us forward. Paradoxically, we ought to be grateful for our condition; if nothing else, it leads us to the ultimate metaphysical truths about the world.

Be that as it may, we still need to live our lives, preferably with a minimum of suffering. Hence we are faced with a profound dilemma: Life is desire, and desire leads to the very suffering that we seek to avoid. On the one hand, then, we ought logically to minimize or reduce (“deny”) our desires. But this is tantamount to denying life. This may be a theoretical possibility for a saint or a god, but it is an unworkable plan for the real world. At its worst, a ‘life of life-denial’ is an incoherent and self-annihilating concept, one appropriate only for a pathological individual.[4]

Therefore, to live, we must accept the struggle and pain of life, keep our expectations low, press ahead, and hope for the best. This is the only practical conclusion. Yes, we ought to minimize our desires where possible: avoid a fixation on money, material things, status—all those things that Jews, for example, obsess about, and thus foist upon the public mind as the ultimate goals in life. We should not be too concerned about a nebulous and facile goal like ‘happiness,’ which in any case is virtually impossible in a world of perpetual strife. We ought not expect that things will necessarily turn out well, and therefore not be disappointed when they don’t. Life goes on, the struggle goes on—such it is.

It’s a striking moral picture that Schopenhauer paints for us, one that is hard to refute. I think we all can relate to such thinking in our everyday experience. Much of this rings true, and yet we rarely follow the logic out to the full implications.

If it all sounds vaguely Buddhist, that’s because it is. One of Schopenhauer’s great surprises, and greatest satisfactions, was his discovery of Buddhist philosophy in the 1830s, well after he had written volume one of his monumental work, World as Will and Representation. There are many obvious affinities, and Schopenhauer viewed himself as independently coming to the same eternal truths as the Buddha but from an entirely different route, and with a much firmer philosophical foundation. Their prescriptions were essentially the same: end suffering via an elimination of desire and attachment, which is the source of that suffering.[5] But Buddhism was entangled in a mythological schema involving samsara or a cycle of endless reincarnation and rebirth, and of nirvana, conceived as an end to that cycle. Schopenhauer had no patience for such mythology but he respected the metaphysical insight, and placed it, in his mind, on a superior rational footing.

‘One True Christian’

But it wasn’t only Buddhism that Schopenhauer found affinity with; it was also there, to a surprising degree, in Christianity. In fact, his alignment with ‘original’ or ‘true’ Christianity was so strong that Schopenhauer considered himself the ‘one true Christian,’ and the only such person in all of modern history: “my teaching could be called Christian philosophy proper, paradoxical as this may seem to those who do not go to the root of the matter, but stick merely to the surface.”[6] This astonishing conclusion demands some examination.

Consider, he says, the basic creation myths of the major religions. In Hinduism, the god Brahma is said to have created the world “through a kind of original sin”[7]—a mistake or error, one in which Brahma himself must atone for. (Schopenhauer adds with emphasis: “This is quite a good idea!”) Buddhism, for its part, sees the world as coming into being “in consequence of an inexplicable disturbance in the crystal clearness of the blessed…state of Nirvana.” (“An excellent idea!”) The ancient Greeks saw the formation of the cosmos as an act of “unfathomable necessity,” that which simply had to be. This too was reasonable. All such views saw the act of cosmic creation as a negation, as a failing—an error, a mistake, or an unfortunate necessity.

But the Judaic view was altogether different. There, the Jewish god Jehovah creates this world “of misery and woe,” stands back on the seventh day, and declares it “all good”—what is this? Utter nonsense, declares Schopenhauer, and in fact “something intolerable.” Recall the key passage from Genesis 1:31: “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.” Schopenhauer repeatedly mocks this idea, drawing from and paraphrasing the Greek Septuagint version by use of the phrase πάντα καλὰ λίαν (pánta kalá lían),[8] “all was very good.” This was pure nonsense, utterly disproven by common sense, philosophical insight, and even a modicum of a realist view of the world. Indeed, says Schopenhauer elsewhere, the world could hardly be any worse than it is.[9] To proclaim the opposite is sheer stupidity.

As a putative religion, however, Judaism is even worse. There is a god in it, of course, but this deity is merely a brutal enforcer of the Law. He praises and cajoles his “chosen” and smites their enemies, nothing more. In this metaphysical system there is no immortal soul, no real afterlife, no heaven, no hell; all such things are utterly lacking in the Old Testament. Schopenhauer concludes,

And so in this respect, we see the religion of the Jews occupy the lowest place among the dogmas of the civilized world, which is wholly in keeping with the fact that it is also the only religion that has absolutely no doctrine of immortality, nor has it even any trace thereof.[10]

Not that Schopenhauer endorsed the concept of an immortal soul; far from it. But he realized that any honest religion must include some such doctrine. Judaism, as we will see, evidently served a different purpose.

Nor did he accept anything like a moral, omnipotent, all-good god. “Such a view…is too flagrantly contradicted by the misery and wretchedness that fill the world, on the one hand, and by the obvious imperfection and even burlesque distortion of the most ‘perfect’ phenomenon…of man.” The evil inherent in worldly existence, and the many failings of humanity, decisively disprove the existence of any such god. In fact, the great suffering of the world is proof of the opposite, namely, that it came into being in “sin,” as the other religions have it. There remains a trace of this original sin, of course, in the Bible, in the myth of the Fall, of Adam and Eve—which stands as the only philosophically valid insight in Judaism: “it is only the story of the Fall of Man that reconciles me to the Old Testament. In fact, in my eyes, it is the only metaphysical truth that appears in the book.”

Schopenhauer next turns to a central issue: the view of earthly life in the various religions. For emphasis, he contrasts the ancient Greek view with that of Christianity. Consider first the distinction between Greek and Christian views of death, as seen in images engraved on ancient sarcophagi. For the Greeks, the dead man’s life is depicted in happy, optimistic terms: his birth, family, marriage, occupation, and so on. It is, says Schopenhauer, an essentially positive, life-affirming outlook; life is good, life is to be lived to its fullest, and people can indeed attain happiness. Then look at the Christian coffin: draped in black, and topped by the cross, the symbol of ultimate suffering and death. This, he said, is an essentially life-denying outlook. But it is fitting: for the Christian, this temporal life of sin and suffering is superseded by eternal life in heaven. What is life for a Christian, after all, but a test, a burden, indeed, a “cross to bear”?

From the perspective of a modern-day secular philosopher, one looks at this distinction and says: “Of course, the Greeks were right; you have one life, it can be good, so live it to the fullest. Those foolish Christians, with their mindless belief in an afterlife, disavow the value of earthly existence. They are always looking ahead, to heaven, never to the here and now.” But Schopenhauer again turns the tables on us:

Between the spirit of Graeco-Roman paganism and that of Christianity is the proper contrast of the affirmation and denial of the will-to-live, according to which, in the last resort, Christianity is fundamentally right.[11]

(I note here parenthetically that he frequently clarified his concept of the will as, more specifically, the will-to-live [der Wille zum Leben].) Christianity is “right” in the sense that the world is suffering, it is ‘sin’—not for Christian reasons, of course, but because that is the nature of a world of pure willing. Even more, the Christian ‘solution’ is nearly the same as Schopenhauer’s: deny the will, be life-denying. Will is will-to-live, and thus to deny the will is to deny life. Deny your material desires, deny bodily pleasures. Become an ascetic. “Take up your cross and follow me.”[12] This is the path of redemption.

Hence Schopenhauer sees his philosophical worldview as aligned with the Christian New Testament and its ‘pessimism’ about the world, whereas other philosophers are inherently more consistent with the ‘optimistic’ view of Judaism and the Old Testament:

My ethics is related to all the ethical systems of European philosophy as the New Testament to the Old, according to the ecclesiastical conception of this relation. Thus the Old Testament puts man under the authority of the Law [of Moses] which, however, does not lead to salvation. The New Testament, on the other hand, declares the Law to be inadequate, in fact repudiates it. On the contrary, it preaches the kingdom of grace which is attained by faith, love of one’s neighbor, and complete denial of oneself; this is the path to salvation from evil and the world. For in spite of all protestant-rationalistic distortions and misrepresentations, the ascetic spirit is assuredly and quite properly the soul of the New Testament. But this is just the denial of the will-to-live…

He then places his own outlook in historical context:

Now all the philosophical systems of ethics prior to mine have kept to the spirit of the Old Testament, with their absolute moral law and all their moral commandments and prohibitions, to which the commanding Jehovah is secretly added in thought. … My ethics, on the other hand, … frankly and sincerely admits the abominable nature of the world, and points to the denial of the will as the path to redemption therefrom. It is, accordingly, actually in the spirit of the New Testament, whereas all the others are in that of the Old, and thus theoretically amount to mere Judaism (plain despotic theism). In this sense, my teaching could be called Christian philosophy proper, paradoxical as this may seem to those who do not go to the root of the matter, but stick merely to the surface.[13]

Thus he arrives back at the quotation I cited above. Judaism, with its pánta kalá lían, an all-good God, and a promise of material prosperity, is a pathetic form of optimism, utterly at odds with the real world. (Of course, for the Jews themselves over the past century at least, and excepting a few years during World War II, the world has been exceptionally good; it’s good to be king. I will return to this shortly.) Christianity, with its sufferings of the world, its sin and misery and death, and its “you will be hated by all,”[14] is realistic pessimism—albeit, as with Schopenhauer, with an escape route, namely, denial of the will and the consequent asceticism. The analogy is imperfect but sufficient to allow for an instructive comparison. It permitted Schopenhauer to draw out some fascinating implications but it also blinded him to a likely deeper truth about Christianity.

Go to Part 2.

[1] Opening quotation in Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1851/1974; E. F. J. Payne, trans.). Original from Juvenal, circa 110 AD.

[2] World as Will and Representation (New York: Dover, 1969; E. F. J. Payne, trans.) The German title is also rendered in English as The World as Will and Idea, owing to the ambiguity of the word Vorstellung.

[3] A ‘parergon’ is a supplement or addition, and a ‘paralipomenon’ is something omitted or overlooked. Hence this book comprises a number of essays and aphorisms on a variety of topics that are supplemental to Schopenhauer’s main work. As an aside, I note that some of Schopenhauer’s other “books,” such as Essays and Aphorisms and On the Suffering of the World, are just extracts from Parerga and Paralipomena.

[4] Nietzsche recognized and acknowledged this very point: “For an ascetic, life is a self-contradiction. … [For such a man,] life somehow turns against itself, denies itself” (Genealogy of Morals III, sec. 11). And again: “Morality, as it has so far been understood—as it has in the end been formulated once more by Schopenhauer, as ‘negation of the will to live’—is the very instinct of decadence, which makes an imperative of itself. It says: ‘Perish!’” (Twilight of the Idols V, sec. 5).

[5] Putting an end to personal desires and attachment to material things was in fact the third of the Buddha’s “four noble truths”.

[6] Parerga and Paralipomena (hereafter, P&P), vol. 2, p. 315.

[7] P&P, vol. 2, p. 300.

[8] The full phrase in Genesis is: kaí eíden o theós tá pánta ósa epoíisen kaí idoú kalá lían kaí egéneto espéra kaí egéneto proí iméra ékti.

[9] “Now this world is arranged as it had to be, if it were to be capable of continuing with great difficulty to exist; if it were a little worse, it would no longer be capable of continuing to exist. Consequently, since a worse world could not continue to exist, it is absolutely impossible; and so this world itself is the worst of all possible worlds. … Consequently, the world is as bad as it can possibly be, if it is to exist at all.” (WWR, vol. 2, pp. 583-584).

[10] P&P, vol. 2, p. 301.

[11] P&P, vol. 2, p. 314.

[12] Mark 8:34; Matthew 16:24.

[13] P&P, vol. 2, p. 314.

[14] Matthew 10:22, Luke 6:22, John 15:19.