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St. John Chrysostom on the Jews: Creating an Anti-Jewish Group Strategy

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Body of St. John Chrysostom (Chapel of the Choir – Basilica of St. Peter – Vatican City)

Body of St. John Chrysostom (Chapel of the Choir – Basilica of St. Peter – Vatican City)

A correspondent just notified me of a blog post from 2010 on St. John Chrysostom by Roger Pearse, a scholar of Christianity in the ancient world (“Some remarks about John Chrysostom’s homilies against the Jews“). Pearse quotes from a 1935 summary of Chrysostom’s writings whose author, A. L. Williams, notes that Chrysostom was motivated by the fact that many Christians were

frequenting Jewish synagogues,  were attracted to the synagogal Fasts and Feasts, sometimes by the claims to superior sanctity made by the followers of the earlier religion, so that an oath taken in a synagogue was more binding than in a church,  and sometimes by the offer of charms and amulets in which Jews of the lower class dealt freely.

Williams concluded:

We gather from these Homilies that the Jews were a great social, and even a great religious, power in Antioch.

Exactly. As discussed in Chapter 3 of Separation and Its Discontents, the phenomenon of Judaizing Christians in the ancient world is a marker of Jewish power at the time. For example, the rather limited anti-Jewish actions of the government during the 150 years following the Edict of Toleration of 313, which included many attempts to ban the common practice of Jews enslaving non-Jews, are interpreted by historian Bernard S. Bachrach “as attempts to protect Christians from a vigorous, powerful, and often aggressive Jewish gens.”  Jews as a powerful group were looked up to and emulated by many non-Jews, just as today we see the same phenomenon, not only Bush-yarmulkaamong many Evangelical Christians, but also Hollywood celebrities who dabble in kabbalah and pretty much the entire non-Jewish political class which we see making pilgrimages to Israel and proudly wearing yarmulkes and displaying menorahs during photo-ops. Read more

The Curse of Victimhood and Negative Identity

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Originally posted at Arutz Sheva: Israel National News, January 30, 2015. Posted here with permission of the author.

Days and months of atonement keep accumulating on the European wall calendar. The days of atonement however, other than commemorating the dead, often function as a tool in boosting political legitimacy of a nation – often at the expense of another nearby nation struggling for its identity.

While the media keep reassuring us that history is crawling to an end, what we are witnessing instead is a sudden surge of new historical victimhoods, particularly among the peoples of Eastern Europe. As a rule, each individual victimhood requires a forever expanding number of its own dead within the context of unavoidable lurking fascist demons.

Expressed in the postmodern lingo of today, the modern media-made image trivializes the real death and dying into an image of a hyperreal and surreal non-event. For instance, the historical consciousness of Serbs vs. Croats, Poles vs. Germans, not to mention the victimological memories of the mutually embattled Ukrainian and Russian nationalists today, are becoming more “historical” than their previously recorded respective histories.

It seems that European nationalists do not fight any longer for their living co-ethnics, but primarily for their dead. As a result, as Efraim Zuroff correctly stated, “in post-Communist eastern Europe, [they’re] trying to play down the crimes of the Nazi cooperators and claim that the crimes of the Communists were just as bad.” (AS,” Top Nazi Hunter: Eastern Europe Rewrote the Holocaust,” by Benny Toker, Ari Yashar, January 27, 2015).

Yet Zuroff’s s remarks, however sharp, miss the wider historical context. Any day of atonement or, for that matter, any day of repentance on behalf of a victimized group, is highly conflictual, if not warmongering by its nature. Read more

The Bizarre World of Dr Theodore Isaac Rubin

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We all have our guilty pleasures. One of mine is that I occasionally love reading the often crazy and convoluted theories of Jews who wrestle with the question: why have Jewish populations attracted so much animosity through the centuries? Whether the authors call it anti-Semitism, Judeophobia, Jew-hatred or any other label which is fashionable these days, the theories, abstractions, emotions, obfuscations and intellectual blindness in their works rarely fails to shock or amuse me. The productions of the psychoanalysts are among the most dependable for raising a chuckle. Clearing out a bookshelf recently, I found an old favorite tucked away and decided to give it one last read before consigning it to its rightful home — the trashcan. And before it began its fateful final journey, I took some notes in the hope of putting together an article through which I might share with you some of its choice pieces of dubious wisdom.

Although written in 2009, Ted Rubin’s Anti-Semitism: A Disease of the Mind,[1] is in several respects a relic of a by-gone era in that it is a classic work of old-school Freudianism and psychoanalysis. Kevin MacDonald has noted in The Culture of Critique that:

One way in which psychoanalysis has served specific Jewish interests is the development of theories of anti-Semitism that bear the mantle of science by deemphasizing the importance of conflicts of interest between Jews and gentiles. Although these theories very greatly in detail — and, as typical of psychoanalytic theories generally, there is no way to empirically decide among them — within this body of theory anti-Semitism is viewed as a form of gentile psychopathology resulting from projections, repressions, and reaction formations stemming ultimately from a pathology-inducing society.[2]

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On the HBD Chick Interview

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The following is from an interview of HBD Chick that appeared on the Hoover Hog. I should say that I am an admirer of HBD Chick and follow her on Twitter.

Hoover Hog: I think it’s fair to say that one of the most polarizing figures in the HBD-o-sphere is Kevin MacDonald, whose work is mostly concerned with the evolutionary psychology of Judaism. I remember reading his book, A People That Shall Dwell Alone (long before that Cochran/Harpending/Hardy paper), and thinking that he made a fairly plausible case that Jewish identity could be understood as an evolutionary outcome. But when I got around to reading The Culture of Critique – a genuinely captivating book, whatever its merits – I came away with the impression that it was ultimately more of a polemic than a scientific treatise. Do you see value in MacDonald’s work, or is he off the reservation? More generally – and I could just as easily cite the work of Richard Lynn or Frank Salter in this context – how do you approach scholarly work that seems to be politically motivated?

HBD-Chick: Before I answer any of those questions, I’m just going to come right out and say that I admire Kevin MacDonald (and Richard Lynn and Frank Salter) very much.  Anyone who stands their ground in the face of sometimes truly vitriolic political correctness deserves respect as far as I am concerned. I mean, as far as I can tell (and I haven’t read all of his books), MacDonald has compiled plenty of historical evidence in support of his theories. His theories may be wrong, or you may disagree with his theories or his approach, but he’s not making stuff up off the top of his head. (If he were, that’d be a different story.) If people object to what he has to say, they simply need to refute his evidence and/or argumentation. It’s really that simple. There’s no need for protests in his classroom or personal attacks in newspapers, etc., etc.

I don’t think MacDonald’s work is off the reservation at all – or if it is, so, too, is the work of people like Stephen Jay Gould and Jared Diamond (and many others!). I’ve only read A People that Shall Dwell Alone and three chapters from The Culture of Critique that happen to be floating around online – the one on Boasian anthropology, the one on the Frankfurt School, and the one on Jewish involvement in shaping U.S. immigration policy. I haven’t read Separation and Its Discontents at all. I don’t recall thinking that The Culture of Critique was very polemical, but perhaps that comes out more in the conclusion/other chapters (?).

KM: I am surprised that anyone would think CofC was polemical (I discuss why CofC had not gotten much traction for people like Hoover Hog here). A polemic on that topic could never have been published by an academic press.

I wouldn’t hesitate in reading MacDonald’s books even if he does have an ulterior political motive for writing them for the same reason that I still read Jared Diamond’s and other leftist academics’ books:  because there’s often a lot to be learned from them! And now I’m talking about simply acquiring knowledge – getting my hands on new info or data – although I suppose one could also learn something about what motivates people to write academic books in the manner that they do.  (~_^)  Maybe MacDonald does primarily want to convey his social/political message in his books. So what? And Gould didn’t? It’s not the way I’d like it to work, but as one of my high school teachers once said – she was a nun, by the way – books are for inspiring thought, not dictating it.

KM: For the record, I started out on the left during the 1960s madness and only came to my present views after a lot of reading. Because I was intellectually on the left, the whole thrust of my work beginning in the 1980s was on thinking about culture from an evolutionary perspective and how culture could trump evolution. My first interest was in understanding European family patterns, particularly what Richard Alexander called socially imposed monogamy, where the emphasis was on how the mating patterns of wealthy, powerful males were regulated by social pressures emanating from powerful institutions and lower status males. (This work eventually emphasized both culture and our unique biological heritage.)  Evolutionary psychology tends to theorize in a vacuum in which sexual behavior is determined by evolved modules, with no consideration of how social/cultural processes involving conflicts of interest over mating can affect the actual mating behavior of even very powerful individuals (like European monarchs).   Because of this interest in the social regulation of mating, it was a short step to the idea that groups could regulate themselves — whence the idea of cultural group selection which forms the basis of A People That Shall Dwell Alone. Much of PTSDA describes how traditional Jewish groups regulated behavior within Jewish groups and between Jews and non-Jews. I chose Judaism as the case study because it is so well documented and only much later became a critic of Jewish behavior because, quite frankly, I came to realize that there are and have always been conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews. These conflicts assume center stage in Separation and Its Discontents and, of course, The Culture of Critique. No evolutionist should be surprised that ethnic groups often have conflicting interests — or that conflicts of interest can range from territorial struggles to the ivied halls of elite academic institutions. The tragedy of evolutionary science is that, apart from Frank Salter and me, the vast majority of evolutionists completely ignore selection against their own people that is occurring throughout the West.  Read more

Have We Carefully Thought of the Consequences of Absolute Free Speech?

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One “thought experiment” in the recent — but not yet concluded — debate on freedom of speech surrounding the Charlie Hebdo massacre particularly impressed me:

Here is a thought experiment: Suppose that while the demonstrators stood solemnly at Place de la Republique the other night, …  a man stepped out in front …  carrying a placard with a cartoon depicting the editor of the magazine lying in a pool of blood, saying, “Well I’ll be a son of a gun!” or “You’ve really blown me away!” or some such witticism. How would the crowd have reacted? Would they have laughed? …  He would have been lucky to get away with his life.

Masses of people have turned the victims of a horrific assassination … into heroes of France and free speech. The point of the thought experiment is not to show that such people are hypocrites. Rather, it is to suggest that they don’t know their own minds. They see themselves as committed to the proposition that there are no limits to freedom of expression… But they too have their limits. They just don’t know it.

Perhaps because he’s a philosopher and by profession he’s obliged to analyse the logical consistency and theoretical validity of statements, Brian Klug here encapsulates the problem with the default mainstream “Je Suis Charlie” position.

There is no such thing as absolute freedom of speech. Read more

Obama’s State of the Union Address (Edited and Abridged)

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First draft.

Not for release (but leaked through a bizarre email accident to Nick Griffin)

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Members of Congress, Suckers:

We are 15 years into this new century. Nearly fifteen years covering up the truth about how 9/11 gave your real rulers the excuse to drag a new generation of poor young kids and middle-class taxpayers into fighting two long and costly wars; six years of a vicious recession cause by my banking friends who have made ordinary people spread across our nation and the world pay for their greed and corruption. It has been a hard time for many – and it’s going to get a lot worse yet.

For tonight, we turn the page. Tonight, after another dismal year for America, the bankers are making money again. We’re creating low-paid, insecure jobs at the fastest pace since 1999. (Applause.) So many people have totally given up on finding real work that our unemployment statistics are now lower than before the financial crisis. More of our kids are graduating with useless degrees and gigantic millstones of debt than ever before. …

Tonight, for the first time since 9/11, our combat mission in Afghanistan is over, just in time to get stuck back into Iraq. (Applause.) Six years ago, nearly 180,000 American troops served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thousands have come back in body bags or without limbs, so we salute the courage and sacrifice of every man and woman in this 9/11 Generation who has served to make mega-profits for the military industrial complex and to further the goals of Israel’s foreign policy. (Applause.) We can’t see any other reason for your service. … Read more

The Return of the Protected Jewish Minority in Europe

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Contrary to the standard narratives of Jewish ‘history,’ a prominent feature of the historical presence of Jews in Europe has been their protected status. The common context for this status was a symbiotic relationship between the Jewish minority and exploitative or tyrannical elites. As agents of the feared elite, as foreigners, as exploiters in their own right, and with interests antagonistic to those of the non-Jewish majority, the Jews would not be long in incurring the wrath of the peasantry. The elite, often in the form of the Crown, was keenly aware of this, and numerous measures were taken to increase security for Jewish populations across Europe. The now infamous “identifying badge,” normally a yellow star, originates from one such period, the 13th century  — though it is a lesser-recalled fact that it was first introduced to better facilitate the recognition of Jews by their official protectors.[1]

With this in mind, I’ve been intrigued, but not very surprised, by one of the broader developments arising from the Charlie Hebdo shootings. I’m often slow to form judgment of events such as what occurred recently in France, preferring to let the dust settle and to look for interesting patterns or opinions which may emerge in the aftermath. One such pattern, inescapable in its current scale, has been the Jewish co-opting of the jihadist murders. At TOO, and in Nationalist circles more generally, we are aware of what the narrative should be. We know that what occurred in France was the result of the actions of an Islamist fifth column which remains rooted in, and continues to thrive on, the Muslim mass immigration to Europe. In addition to this, we are only too aware of the Jewish role in facilitating this monstrous migration.

But this was not the narrative served up by the media. Instead we were treated to a confused and emotive chronicle, full of vacuous bleating about “free speech,” debates over whether the journalists “deserved it,” and how the actions of “a few cranks” certainly don’t typify “all Muslims.” As familiar and diseased as this narrative was, it was at least slightly more honest than the one now creeping into public prominence. You see, the events in France have now taken on a new aspect. In this new narrative, it is the kosher supermarket, rather than the unassuming office at 10 Rue Nicolas-Appert which has become the primary focus of the political fallout from the Charlie Hebdo incident. The attacks, clearly a symptom of disastrous immigration and foreign policies, are now redrawn as an allegory which offers a lesson to Europe on how it should treat its Jews, and the need to tackle what is imagined to be Europe’s ‘anti-Semitism problem.’ Read more