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George Washington Plunkitt on the Sausage Factory of American Politics

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There’s a phenomenon among cave explorers called “the rapture“, akin to “an anxiety attack on methamphetamines”, that can overcome people in the claustrophobic depths. I believe a similar thing happens in the claustrophobic depths of our own struggle: some are overcome with frustration and desperation so overwhelming that they panic and abandon the movement altogether.

A spirit of relentless optimism and experimentation is a prerequisite for anybody taking on this cause. Thomas Edison epitomized that spirit when he famously quipped, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” George Washington Plunkitt, also born in the 1840’s, was a hustler in New York City’s notoriously corrupt Tammany Hall political machine. While Plunkitt was nowhere near as innovative or admirable as Edison, these men both typified the boundless ambition and optimism that White Americans would do well to revive.

His memoir, entitled Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, is a brutally honest and unapologetic tour through the sausage factory of American politics. In it, he describes how the democratic process is invariably driven by graft and special interests. He explains how to build and maintain a constituency. He lampoons patriotism and idealism in American politics as shams perpetuated by self-promoters. He calls out the “reformers” and “the civil service” for being more dishonest and corrupt than the machine politicians they were sent to replace.

His folksy meanderings can be at times amusing and obnoxious distractions, but the style is what one might expect to find from a bright and gregarious man who’s devoted himself to politics and eschewed academics. Even the parts that seem completely parochial or personal can be gleaned for thoughtful insight from a life of experience. He drives home his most important points, like the importance of loyalty, multiple times and from multiple angles.

The politicians who make a lastin’ success in politics are the men who are always loyal to their friends, even up to the gate of State prison, if necessary; men who keep their promises and never lie. Richard Croker used to say that tellin’ the truth and stickin’ to his friends was the political leader’s stock in trade. Nobody ever said anything truer, and nobody lived up to it better than Croker. That is why he remained leader of Tammany Hall as long as he wanted to. Every man in the organization trusted him. Sometimes he made mistakes that hurt in campaigns, but they were always on the side of servin’ his friends.

This book is antiquated and many of his prescriptions are outright immoral and/or illegal, but few other books have so thoroughly influenced my understanding of how the world actually works. My foray into political activism and “community organization” has confirmed over and over again how little has changed in the century since this book was written.

On one memorable occasion, a local GOP operative I met with lurched over the table at Steak ‘n Shake and confided that he’s really only in it to scrape lists and make contacts for his mortgage gig. There was the passionate tea party organizer who bellowed about taxes and principles through her megaphone…her husband was plotting a run for office. At the national level, the whole Obamacare distraction is little more than a transfer of “honest” graft from the private corporations that benefited under the Republican administration to the bureaucracies and organizations that benefit under this Democratic administration.

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Too many idealists attempt to cram their ideals onto reality, then become frustrated when reality fails to comply. To make any real progress, we need to use reality as the starting point and engage in practical politics to pull reality toward our ideals. It’s not about compromising or selling out, but about building a base of constituents who look to you as their most credible and competent advocate.

We White Advocates are in a curious position, as our ideology ultimately boils down to being advocates for our constituents. In theory, our job should be easy: White Americans want what’s best for themselves and that’s what we’re all about. Unfortunately, this simple formula has broken down at both ends: with White Americans being bamboozled into wanting what’s not best for themselves and White Advocates failing to be be credible and competent advocates.

The first half of this equation, persuading Whites to think for themselves, might even take care of itself as demographic, social, and economic realities impose themselves on the somnambulant masses. But even if there were some sort of mass awakening, the mob would have no credible and competent political machine to turn to. This is where practical street-level politics, community organizing, comes in. This is where we get to the point: fighting for our people.

William L. Riordan, the scholar who compiled Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, explained how Plunkitt put this theory into practice…

Everybody in the district knows him. Everybody knows where to find him, and nearly everybody goes to him for assistance of one sort or another, especially the poor of the tenements.

He is always obliging. He will go to the police courts to put in a good word for the “drunks and disorderlies” or pay their fines, if a good word is not effective. He will attend christenings, weddings, and funerals. He will feed the hungry and help bury the dead.

A philanthropist? Not at all He is playing politics all the time.

Brought up in Tammany Hall, he has learned how to reach the hearts of the great mass of voters. He does not bother about reaching their heads. It is his belief that arguments and campaign literature have never gained votes.

He seeks direct contact with the people, does them good turns when he can, and relies on their not forgetting him on election day. His heart is always in his work, too, for his subsistence depends on its results.

Plunkitt’s most memorable phrase, “I seen my opportunities, and I took ’em!”, epitomizes practical politics. Plunkitt, like most contemporary politicians, was a morally bankrupt ideological vacuum. But one needn’t abide our movement’s false dichotomy between the crooked winners and “beautiful losers”. We can adapt practical political tactics from him, Saul Alinsky, or whoever else offers a good idea.

Like Thomas Edison, we must never give up, even when it seems hopeless. In Edison’s own words, “Nearly every man who develops an idea works it up to the point where it looks impossible, and then he gets discouraged. That’s not the place to become discouraged.”

Matt Parrott is an analyst and family man in suburban Indianapolis. He is the chairman of the CofCC’s Indiana chapter, Hoosier Nation, and blogs at Fair and Delightsome. He hosts a copy of Plunkitt of Tammany Hall at his website for your reading pleasure.

Roots: The Prequel

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Roots came out in 1977. The made for TV film told the story of  the now famous African, Kunta Kinte, who was captured and enslaved by White men and brought to America where he lived as a slave. He is captured while out in the forest looking for the proper log with which to make his younger brother a drum. He is free and happy, having just finished his training as a man.  Roots became a classic. It would even be fair to say it defined the understanding of slavery by the American public.

The film does indicate that there were African “traitors” who sold their fellow Africans into slavery, presumably a peculiarly White institution. However, recent scholarship challenges this limited view.

As these scholars see it, slavery was widespread and indigenous in African society, as was, naturally enough, a commerce in slaves. The demographic impact, although important, was local and difficult to disentangle from losses due to internal wars and slave trading on the domestic African market. In any case, the decision makers who allowed the trade to continue, whether merchants or political leaders, did not suffer the larger scale losses and were able to maintain their operations. Consequently, one need not accept that they were forced into participation against their will or made decisions irrationally.

This quote is from the book entitled Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 by Prof. John Thornton. It was published by Cambridge University Press in 1992.

The book goes on to explain that unlike, the concept of land as wealth in Europe, people were the form of wealth on the African continent.

Slavery was widespread in Atlantic Africa because slaves were the only form of private, revenue-producing property recognized in African law. By contrast, in European legal systems, land was the primary form of revenue-producing property, and slavery was relatively minor. . . .

Thus it was the absence of landed private property – or, to be more precise, it was the corporate ownership of land – that made slavery so pervasive an aspect of African society. …

One common way to reconcile African law and the concept that landed property was a natural and essential part of civilization was to describe African land in Africa as being owned by the king (as a substitute for corporate ownership by the state).

And the use of slaves was not an infrequent or incidental part of African society. This text referring to Kongo indicated that tax was charged by the “head.” And in Benin the entire population was regarded as being “slaves of the king.”

In Africa people, rather than land, were taxed. In one scene of Roots it is made clear that Kunta loves a woman who has been raped on the passage to the colonies. But concubinage or the use of enslaved women for sex did not start in the new land. The film depicts the village life of Africa in an idyllic manner but there were other realities.

And I quote:

Another important institution of dependency was marriage, where wives were generally subordinated to their husbands. Sometimes women might be used on a large scale as a labor force. For example, in Warri, Bonaventura de Firenze noted in 1656 that the ruler had a substantial harem of wives who produced cloth for sale. Similarly the King of Whydah’s wives, reputed to number over a thousand, were employed constantly in making a special cloth that was exported.

There are those who will admit that slavery was practiced in Africa but contend that the slavery of the New World was uniquely and relentlessly brutal and that of Africa almost benign by comparison. 

But again, I quote:

In any case, Valentim Fernandes’s description of slave labor in Senengambia around 1500, one of the few explicit texts on the nature of slave labor, shows that slaves working in agricultural production worked one day a week for their own account and the rest for their master, a regime that was identical for slaves serving in Portuguese sugar mills on the island colony of Sao Tome in the same period.

Kunte Kinte is a Mandingo. The word itself means warrior as well as connoting sexual prowess. The fact that so many warriors were held as slaves in Africa’s inter-tribal wars may have had an indirect influence in the use of Africans in South America as mercenaries later on in history.

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In discussing wars on the African continent at the time, Prof. John Thornton says:

These wars do not appear to have been waged for territorial expansion; although we lack the chronicle sources of the Sudanese region to confirm this, certainly there was no consolidation in Sierra Leon as a result of warfare. But as Velor also testified, slaves were used in the domestic economy to increase the ruler’s personal income, and perhaps this in itself can explain the propensity for wars that did not increase wealth by the annexation of land but by the annexation and transport of people.

And again it must be made clear that slavery in Africa was not merely a response to European demand but existed prior to such a demand and was quite independent of it.

Again, I quote:

Although some of these raids may have also been undertaken to supply European demand; this demand was in addition to the greater demand for slaves to be used domestically as well as for export.

Many Africans retained females from the raids and sold off males, because the Atlantic trade often demanded more males than females. The Bissagos Islanders held many female slaves, and observers believed that virtually all the productive work was done by women.

And once the slaves were brought to the Americas, they changed the landscape of the society. The indentured workers, which, according to some estimates, made up 70 per cent of the Europeans who immigrated to America, were slowly replaced by African slaves.  

In Barbados, for example, once sugar took off as an export crop, it made fortunes for those who invested in it, allowing them to replace their indentured work forces with the more expensive but more satisfactory slaves, and then buy up available land from the remaining free farmers, gradually transforming the demography of the island from one of European settlement to one of African slaves and European owners.

The habit of hiring out slaves trained in the trades at below market rates by the wealthy landowners also cut into the income of the free workers. So, although freedom was certainly preferable to slavery, the practical reality for the indentured servant, once freed, in colonial America was one of hardship, struggle against great odds, and sun-up to sun-down labor, much like that of the African slave.

A Huguenot traveler in Virginia in 1648 noted that on one estate he visited, the master kept large barracks for both his slaves and his indentured workers, presupposing little community life and close discipline for both types of workers.

The book goes on to explain the complexity of life for all types of workers in colonial America, where no one model describes all the realities of the era. Sometimes slave families were split up, but often, due to the influence of Christianity, there was an attempt to create and sustain family life among the slaves. Certain economic enterprises such as mining were dominant by males while others such as farming had workers more evenly distributed between the sexes. But that is pretty much the way it would have been on the non-slave side of the economy as well.

In the opening scenes of the story of Roots, the audience is introduced to Thomas Davies, the captain of the slave ship, the Lord Liganier. His devout Christianity is underscored as is his discomfort with the treatment of slaves aboard the vessel. But what is also made clear is that despite his Christianity he does not stand up for the slaves in any way. Thus the audience is being told that Christians simply ignored the dictates of Christianity in their practice of slavery. It is also implies that that the importation of slaves into colonial America was a White Christian phenomenon.

But that is not, in fact, historically accurate. Slavery has never been exclusively a European institution. The only unique thing about Europeans and slavery is that they were the only group to end it.

Penelope Thornton (email her) is a freelance writer and a serious student of the media and its games.

Chapter 23 of 200 Years Together: “Before the Six-Day War”

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As noted in Chapter 22, Jews began to be purged from prominent positions in the government after World War II up to the time of Stalin’s death. Thereafter, things improved for the  Jews but deteriorated again. Chapter 23 has several familiar themes:

  • Jews continued to be overrepresented in all areas requiring education, but less so. For example, “if in 1936 the share of Jews among students was 7.5 times higher than that in the total population, then by 1960s it was only 2.7 times higher.
  • Jews continued to dominate some areas. Solzhenitsyn mentions the special role of Jews in Soviet psychiatry (e.g., Lifshitz and “his Jewish gang” at Kaluga Hospital) at a time when “healthy people” were being locked up in mental institutions. As is typical of his style, he notes a Jewish writer commenting that Russians were displacing Jews in the bureaucracy, but then points out that Russians were being displaced in the ethnic republics as well.
  • Solzhenitsyn also points to the special role of Jews in economic crimes, where quite often Jews formed the “vast majority” of these accused.
  • Jewish activists tended to exaggerate the plight of Jews. For example, Jews accused the government of enforcing the law on economic crimes in an anti-Jewish manner (“rampant anti-Semitism,” according to one writer). Solzhenitsyn pointing out that merely printing the names of defendants hardly counts as anti-Semitism: “to name them was equal to Jew-baiting.” The ethnic connections among defendants were typically ignored in the press.
  • Jewish power in the USSR was linked to their power in the West. When Jews were being accused of economic crimes, “the entire Western media interpreted this as a brutal campaign against Jews, the humiliation and isolation of the entire people; Bertrand Russell sent a letter of protest to Khrushchev and got a personal response from the Soviet leader.” This campaign was effective because the government became reluctant to prosecute Jewish economic criminals. The Western media continued to ignore issues like the millions of deaths during forced collectivization while “official Soviet anti-Semitism” came to be seen as a critical issue. Similarly, an article on the Jews who were murdered in 1937–1938 and 1948–1952 in a Jewish newspaper in France resulted in worldwide condemnation of the USSR among leftists.
  • Solzhenitsyn points to real conflicts behind anti-Jewish actions. For example, the 1956 Hungarian uprising had strong anti-Jewish overtones because of the prominent role of Jews in the Hungarian government. And when Russians sought to improve their social status, they came up against previously existing, well-entrenched Jewish elites.
  • Jews retained their powerful sense of being Jewish: “Jewish identity was never subdued during the entire Soviet period. In 1966 the official mouthpiece Sovetish Heymland claimed that ‘even assimilated Russian-speaking Jews still retain their unique character, distinct from that of any other segment of the population.’ Not to mention the Jews of Odessa, Kiev, and Kharkov, who “sometimes were even snooty about their Jewishness — to the extent that they did not want to befriend a goy.”
  • Jews who fancied themselves assimilated engaged in self-deception. He quotes a scientist who rejected “any nationalism” but then it dawned on him that all his friends were Jews. Even non-religious Jews defended the idea of “racial purity.” Other Jews, like Natan Sharansky, suddenly realized that they were very different from non-Jews, especially after the 1967 Six-Day War. “I suddenly realized an obvious difference between myself and non-Jews around me … a kind of a sense of the fundamental difference between my Jewish consciousness and the national consciousness of the Russians.”They then consciously realized what had only been implicit —that they had much stronger ties to the Jewish people as an international entity than to Russia and the Russians. Solzhenitsyn quotes a Jew: “The Jews felt free from obligations [to the Russians] at all sharp turns of Russian history,” and comments, “Fair enough. One can only hope for all Russian Jews to get such clarity and acknowledge this dilemma.”
  • Jewish consciousness became much stronger with the Six-Day War. “Israel has ascended in their minds and Soviet Jews awoke to their spiritual and consanguineous kinship [with Israel].” However, Israel’s victory was over Egypt, an ally of the USSR, so the result was a “thundering campaign against the “Judeo-Zionist-Fascism.” Amazingly, it included the charge that “because of the consistent pursuit of the ideology of racial supremacy and apartheid, Judaism turned out to be a very convenient religion for securing world dominance.” The effect was to spur large-scale Jewish emigration to Israel and the West.

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A central message is the power of Jewish ethnocentrism. Yuri Slezkine and a host of Jewish activist organizations make much of the idea that Jewish Communists in the USSR had no Jewish identity at all, at least until WWII. (See my rebuttal here, p. 75ff.) To some extent Solzhenitsyn buys into this, since he charts an increasing sense of Jewish identity beginning with WWII and the Holocaust and culminating in the Six-Day War. But, as the example of the self-deceptive Jewish scientist shows, Jewish identity is pliable. Jews continued to associate with Jews, marry Jews, and participate in and benefit from Jewish ethnic networks during the entire period—as Solzhenitsyn shows elsewhere, e.g., in his chapter on the 1920s.  

Solzhenitsyn’s example of the Jewish scientist reminded me of the self-deception of Jewish radicals described in Ch. 3 of The Culture of Critique:

Most Jewish Communists wear their Jewishness very casually but experience it deeply. It is not a religious or even an institutional Jewishness for most; nevertheless, it is rooted in a subculture of identity, style, language, and social network. . . . In fact, this second-generation Jewishness was antiethnic and yet the height of ethnicity. The emperor believed that he was clothed in transethnic, American garb, but Gentiles saw the nuances and details of his naked ethnicity…. Evidence of the importance of ethnicity in general and Jewishness in particular permeates the available record. Many Communists, for example, state that they could never have married a spouse who was not a leftist. When Jews were asked if they could have married Gentiles, many hesitated, surprised by the question, and found it difficult to answer. Upon reflection, many concluded that they had always taken marriage to someone Jewish for granted. The alternative was never really considered, particularly among Jewish men. (Paul Lyons (1982). Philadelphia Communists, 1936–1956. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 73, 74)

Jewish self-deception is a critical feature of trying to understand Jewish behavior and the topic of a chapter in Separation and Its Discontents. Jews sincerely believed that they had no ethnic identity even though it was apparent to everyone else. The general point is that Jewish ethnocentrism creates a blindness to things that are completely obvious to neutral observers.

This is apparent in contrasting how Jews see their experience in the USSR with how Solzhenitsyn sees it. Jewish intellectuals and activists see the entire Soviet trajectory through ethnocentric blinders. They see Jews as a hapless persecuted minority under the Czar, then rising to well-deserved prosperity after the Revolution. Jewish communists at least until WWII completely lost their ethnic identity, so whatever they did as an elite during the most murderous regime in European history was only due to their being loyal, idealistic communists, not because they were by far the most numerous and most powerful component of a non-Russian ethnic coalition that viewed the traditional people and culture of Russia with murderous hostility. Whatever social status they attained was solely due to Jewish merit—completely unrelated to Jewish ethnic networking and completely unrelated to the active suppression and eradication of the previously existing elites and their descendants. It was only because of the Holocaust and completely irrational anti-Jewish attitudes after WWII that Jewish communists became disenchanted with the USSR and began to identify as Jews, culminating in their embrace of Zionism, particularly after the Six-Day War.

Solzhenitsyn paints a very different picture — a picture that is not only historically accurate but also reflecting the reasonable concerns of a Russian ethnic actor who feels that his people have been done a great injustice. During the Czarist period, Jews aggressively overreacted to reasonable policies of the government designed to protect the Slavic population — the basic duty of any governmentthat pretends to represent the interests of the ethnic majority (Chapter 5). Duringthe 1920s Jews became a hostile elite—Stalin’s “Willing Executioners” —entrenched in all the high ground of Soviet society — the public face of the most brutal regime in history, and provoking a great deal of hostility among the Russian people. Then, after Jews failed to do their fair share of front line fightingduring WWII despite the fact that it was a war against the most deadly anti-Jewish force in history, Russians seeking to improve their social status came up against previously existing, well-entrenched Jewish elites. The purges of Jews that followed were certainly far less violent than the purges of the pre-revolutionary elites during the 1920s and had much to recommend them from the standpoint of ethnic fairness. Nevertheless, even after these purges, Jews remained highly overrepresented in high-status positions requiring education. Jews, however, responded negatively to being removed from their virtual ethnic monopoly on heights of power. With the rise of Israel, they also rediscovered their connections to the international Jewish community and a great many bailed out of Soviet society completely because they were more loyal to the international Jewish community and its identification with Israel than they were to Russia and Russians.

Having been around the block a few times on issues like this where there is a self-serving Jewish consensus on their own history, I realize that communication is impossible. Jewish activist intellectuals and organizations will continue to present their side of the story and do everything they can to vilify or ignore any account that departs from their orthodoxy. As an evolutionist, I am not surprised. That’s what ethnic conflict is all about — just as deadly when it is conflict among intellectuals over interpretations of history as it is in mass murders of Russians and Ukrainians carried out in the name of international socialism.

Kevin MacDonald is editor of The Occidental Observer and a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach. Email him.

Perceived Humiliation Followed by Revenge

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When I was in college, for a year-and-a-half I lived in a studio apartment attached to an old two-story house, in which lived 11 or 12 girls. I got to know them quite well.

Some stayed there the entire time but some left and others arrived, so altogether I got to know maybe 15 girls. It was an eye-opening experience.

One night I was in the room of one of them, listening to her records (this was before CDs, obviously). She was 21 years old, very attractive, very curvaceous.

For some unknown reason she began to tell me about when she was 12 years old. She had been ostracized in the seventh grade, she told me. She showed me a picture.

She didn’t look bad, just a gawky 12-year-old with glasses. A little pudgy. The word “nerdy” occurred to me. All these things together were enough for her to be ostracized.

That summer, within three months, she blossomed. The baby fat melted, she got contacts, she got taller, she filled out. It was the proverbial case of the ugly duckling turning into a swan.

When she went back to school in the eighth grade, all of the kids who had ostracized her now wanted to be her friends. She ignored every one of them. She told me from that time forward she was never attracted to “what most women consider good-looking men” — the kind who had ostracized her.

I remembered that story because it made such a vivid impression on me. Years later, when I began to think about it, I realized what had happened to her. It was a case of humiliation followed by revenge. I never asked her, but I wouldn’t doubt that if some really good-looking guy asked her out she turned him down. Neither would I doubt that she enjoyed it.

I tried to put myself in her place. How would I feel? Rejected? Offended? Hurt feelings (whatever that means)? Anger, resentment? Self-pity? Perhaps. Humiliated? The desire for revenge? In some form, yes.

Humiliation followed by revenge is the story of Cain and Abel, except in that case it led to murder. In this girl’s case, being much milder than that of those two unfortunate brothers, it took the form of rejecting or completely ignoring the kind of guys who had humiliated her when she was 12 years old. She was doing to them what they did to her.

What happened to her for those several months in the seventh grade affected her for the rest of her life. You could use the word “trauma,” although I think it’s a bit strong. But there is an old saying, “Trauma demands repetition,” which is done in order to relive the trauma and make it turn out right. It might be why some people who have been (or think they have been) humiliated seek revenge over and over.

I mentioned this girl was nerdy at 12 but very good-looking at 13. That reminded me of the well-known movie, The Revenge of the Nerds. And what was it about? Humiliation followed by revenge (for that matter, the same goes for Animal House). That formula is an archetype that everyone, the world over, understands. You could probably show both those movies without any sound, and people wouldstill understand it.

I was also reminded of Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie, about a girl who gets revenge on her high school — and the entire town — by destroying both.

Then of course there is the classic revenge novel, one that has influenced so many writers — The Count of Monte Cristo, which, in my copy, is over 1300 pages devoted to vengeance.

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I don’t see much difference, if any, between humiliation and shame — in both cases the sufferers perceive themselves as diminished. In the story of the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve (who, ominously, are Cain and Abel’s parents), are ashamed when they realize they are naked. And Cain is shamed and humiliated when God rejects his sacrifice and accepts Abel’s. 

Shame, humiliation…pretty much the same thing, then. They are apparently our earliest unpleasant feelings, and the cause of so much trouble in the world. In the story of Cain and Abel, those feelings are what bring murder into the world.

The psychiatrist James Gilligan, who studied murderers his entire career, one day realized what he was hearing from them, over and over, was the story of Cain and Abel. “I killed him because he dissed me,” he heard. It’s become a shorthand — “dissed.” And everyone knows what that word means: he disrespected and shamed me, so I got revenge by brutally battering or killing him.

Can there be a case of revenge that is not based on humiliation and being shamed? If revenge is not based on humiliation, then what else can it be based upon? I can’t think of any other reason.

“Humiliation followed by revenge” doesn’t have to be based on real humiliation. That is the problem. It can be based on perceived humiliations, perceived slights,even if they are non-existent. I suppose that’s the definition of paranoia: seeing attacks that are not there.

Perceiving humiliations that are not there is an excruciating problem in the United States, one that I believe is going to get worse, and could be fatal to this country,especially when dealing with ethnic groups.

How can an entire ethnic group be exploited and therefore humiliated? Individuals, yes, but entire groups? Every member, including ones who didn’t move to the United States until they were adults? The idea is preposterous.

Yet the prevailing multicultural paradigm today implies that people have an identity mainly as members of their ethnic groups, and not as individuals. Ethnic group status has become a legally recognized category. This means the institutionalization of the non-existent: group innocence and group guilt.

When people are legally judged as groups, I see no way around the belief in group guilt and group innocence. Because of human nature, if one group believes it has been humiliated, it is always going to blame that humiliation on another group. It will see itself as innocent and the other group as guilty.

The media as well as classes in many colleges — indeed in some high schools — have for some years been portraying White people (and especially White men) as a group as the cause of all the trouble in the world, which means that people are taught that Whites have been humiliating everyone else in the world who is not White. The result of all of this will be attempts at revenge from the resentful and paranoid who have been brainwashed into thinking White people are the cause of all their problems. (The theme of historical grudges held by non-White ethnic groups is a major theme of TOO.)

People’s first defense — projection — is to blame their problems on someone else. That’s one of the lessons of the story of the Garden of Eden: “The woman made me do it…the serpent made me do it.” Who has not heard from every small child, “You made me do it?” It’s your fault, not mine.

Coupled with the propaganda that non-White ethnic groups have been shamed and humiliated by White people (i.e., the West) is the attempt to disarm them and make them self-destruct by making them feel shame and guilt.

Guilt can lead to attempts at self-destruction. It may not be physical self-destruction, the way Arthur Dimmesdale branded himself in “The Scarlet Letter,” but it certainly can be attempts at psychological self-destruction.

Guilt is, in fact, self-hatred. If people are propagandized into believing they are the worst ethnic group in the world, and responsible for nearly every problem that exists, their guilt will make them attempt to debase and destroy themselves.

What we’ve got today are resentful ethnic groups, who believe they have been exploited and humiliated, and who have no guilt at all toward those they blame their problems on. The group that is taught to be guilty, if they internalize that guilt, will hate themselves and participate in their own destruction (see also here). It is a nifty little scheme.

White people are supposed to feel guilty and ashamed of themselves for their supposed sins against the world — as if every ethnic tribe hasn’t done horrible things to other tribes.

The Aztecs ripped the hearts out of hundreds of thousands of people who belonged to the tribes they conquered. American Indians used to bash out the brains of babies of other tribes on rocks. The Bolshevists of Russia killed 20 million Russian Christians, with a very large role played by Jews motivated by revenge against the old order. The Communists in China may have killed up to 50 million Chinese. How much worse can it get than those atrocities?

Once one group believes it has been humiliated and exploited, it is going to blame it on another group, then try to disarm that group by attacking it and trying to make the members feel shame and guilt. It’s happening today — witness insults about how Americans are “racists” if we don’t allow the U.S. to be inundated with illegal immigrants, or “prejudiced” if we don’t permit a mosque to be built near the WTC site.

What the aforementioned means is that it is sheer insanity to believe the United States can be a successful multicultural nation. Ethnic groups that believe they have been humiliated and abused are going to blame their problems on the White tribe — specifically White men — then try to disarm and then destroy them by trying to make them feel humiliation and guilt.

Leftism, at least extreme leftism, is predicated on the belief there is no human nature. Yet even leftists have to admit the existence of envy, since that is the one feeling leftism is dedicated to eradicating. So even leftists have to accept the irreducible minimum that human nature, if nothing else, is envious.

What goes along with the feeling of envying others? Feelings of humiliation. So we’re back to the desire for revenge, which painfully illustrates the fact that leftists don’t merely misunderstand human nature; they don’t understand it at all. That is one of the reasons they support multiculturalism. They are clueless as to where it will lead.

I believe “perceived humiliation followed by revenge” is a law of human nature, just as “You’re the cause of my problems” and “People who think they are guilty try to hurt themselves” are laws. I’d like to see them taught in the schools, but that’s not going to happen, not with public schools. I have no idea why they’re not taught in church, unless the churches are not doing their job. Which they’re not.

It’s up to individuals to teach themselves (autodidacts are the best-educated) and to teach their children, to arm them against the attacks they are going to subjected as soon as they start public school  — if you let them attend public school. (Personally, I consider public schools to be traumatizing children, not educating them.) And children are certainly going to be inundated with these attacks from the media.

I now know that when members of different ethnic groups attack White people not as individuals but as a group, these attacks are based on envy and fantasies about their entire ethnic group being shamed and humiliated, and are not attempts at fairness and justice, but instead attempts at revenge and therefore attempts at destruction.

Nietzsche well understood the ressentiment, or “life-envy” of those who feel themselves to be oppressed by others. He considered it to be at the root their desires to bring down their supposed oppressors.

These attempts to instill guilt and shame can only be done through propaganda — schools, commercials. TV, movies, magazines, and newspapers. It’s best to start when they’re kids. Get ‘em when they’re little and can be easily molded!

For me, and for others I know, it’s got to the point I’m very careful where I spend my money. Why should I fund my enemies?

As a friend of mine wrote me, “It’s getting to the point that I’m starting to feel the ol’ territorial defense mechanism kick in. It’s getting harder and harder not to notice that I (and others like me) are no longer included in most advertisements, that our only role in most popular entertainment is that of a buffoon or the ‘weak member that constantly needs getting rescued or the ‘evil criminal’ and that anything we do will have the credit taken by others or be ignored. It’s hard not to notice that ads now advertise jobs for ‘women and minorities’ only, and that loans/grants are given to, yes, ‘women and minority based…whatever’ and nothing else.”

People consumed with guilt don’t murder others — they murder themselves. Those who have convinced themselves they are oppressed and humiliated — they are the dangerous ones and the potential murderers. They attack, without guilt, and attempt to destroy, the people who have disarmed themselves through their false beliefs in their own shame and guilt.

What’s that old saying? “Forewarned is forearmed”? It’s true.

Bob Wallace (email him) has a degree in Mass Communications and is a former newspaper reporter and editor. He writes occasionally about economics and cultural issues.

Some recent news stories from up north

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The MV Sun Sea with 492 people on board.

This has been a crazy few weeks for Canada, where a number of ridiculous events worth discussing took place. Earlier this month, a ship with close to 500 Tamils on board entered Canadian waters to demand refugee status. This is yet another boat people story reminiscent of Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Saints. Of course, if the past is any indication, they will eventually be granted refugee status or will disappear into Canada’s large Tamil community—the largest in the world outside Sri Lanka—and the flood will likely intensify. As a matter of fact, last October, another ship going by the charming name of Ocean Lady, brought 76 Sri Lankans to Vancouver. All have now been released and have applied for refugee status. None will likely be deported.

VDARE posted a good story on this new arrival while the mainstream media spitted its usual useless nonsense. Citing an “international expert on human smuggling”, the Globe and Mail, Canada’s leading newspaper, reported that  the country “has an obligation under international law to accept the vessel and process refugee applications” and that “calling them illegal immigrants is simply wrong. They are coming here to seek status . . . we have a process for refugee determination and they will go through it.”

The Tyee, a British Columbia-based journal, published an article literally called “Why Tamil Boat People Should Be Let into Canada”. The Globe and Mail, in another article, lectures Canadians with catch phrases like “apprehension about the sea-borne Other — a primal form of xenophobia — has led to some dark episodes in our history.” This emotional, guilt-ridden line of thinking accurately sums up the tone of the Canadian press on this story. It has repeated ad nauseam boat people stories from the first half the 20th century in which ships were forced to go home. The most often-repeated example was that of the St-Louis, a boat carrying Jewish refugees in 1939. Another one was the story of the Komagata Maru, a ship carrying Sikhs in 1914.

The National Post, Canada’s “conservative” paper, seems concerned with the safety of the migrants making the trip and with blaming the smugglers who “exploit” them. The Vancouver Sun was likewise troubled by the death of a single Tamil passenger (out of 492) during the trip—which lasted months—whiletelevision networks focused on the refugees’ human rights and health issues. The only kind mild criticism in mainstream media articles was the concern that some of the refugees could be linked to the Tamil Tigers, officially recognized as a “terrorist” organization — and implying that the other ones represent no danger at all! This is worthless criticism, as the political views of these aliens are irrelevant. The bottom line is that Canada’s demography is permanently altered.

As usual, the only common sense came at the very bottom of online articles, that is to say, postings from ordinary people exasperated by the ongoing invasion of their country.  

Another ridiculous story that recently hit Canada was the capture of suspected “terrorists.” It is too early to tell what this story is really about. However, much more shocking than the accusations of “terrorism”, is the fact that one of the suspects was a contestant on Canadian Idol—the local variation of American Idol. The following picture shows the lamentable state of the “multicultural” junk culture that brainwashes the Canadian populace. It is hard to imagine something more repulsive. The Youtube video is here.

Canadian Idol contender Khurram Syed Sher, now suspected of “terrorism”.

This Pakistani-born man also attended medical school in Canada. While the thought of being treated by someone like that in a Western hospital is rather disturbing, even more deplorable is that universities are now largely filled with such third-worlders. This happens at the expense of our own people, as when Whites do not fall victim to affirmative action for “protected groups,” they are often literally crowded out of graduate schools by unimaginable numbers of applicants from developing countries. It is a disastrous situation, in which our academic institutions — especially in technical disciplines — now largely serve the interests of non-White foreigners.

Of course the nonsense doesn’t stop here yet. A recent topic in the Canadian media was the publication of a “report” accusing the Montreal police of racial profiling because they arrest Blacks in disproportionate numbers. We know that this is a common trend in every country with a Black minority due their higher propensity to committing crimes. That doesn’t matter to silly journalists whoexcoriated the police with vitriolic pieces accusing them of systemic racism, discrimination and all the other childish clichés. Police “brutality” is a recurrent theme in the Canadian mainstream media. A recent outburst of accusations occurred in late June, when the police tried to contain the violent anarchists, far-left rioters and arsonists who caused much chaos and damage during the G-20 summit in Toronto. As we know, in these demonstrations those hooded thugs provoke and assault the police. They then accuse them of brutality when the latter try to keep order.

It is enlightening to see what Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper is doing in the meantime. Believe it or not, he is touring the Yukon and the rest of the Canadian north claiming that the country’s “Arctic sovereignty” is threatened! He tours the Arctic every year on the pretext that “For far too long, Canadian Governments have failed in their duty to rigorously enforce our sovereignty in the Arctic. […] As a result, foreign ships may have routinely sailed through our territory without permission. Any such voyage represents a potential threat to Canadians’ safety and security.”

This is not a joke. These quotes are taken from his first annual Arctic trip in August 2006. What he calls a “threat” are some trivial boundary disputes with Denmark near Greenland as well as minor navigation rights issues with Russia in certain parts of the Arctic Ocean. Adding to the insult, he even dubbed his 2010 Arctic tour “nation building”! According to the Toronto Star, he also said: “This is the frontier. This is the place that defines our country.”

Canada’s prime minister Stephen Harper taking an ATV ride in the tundra during his 2010 “Arctic sovereignty” tour.

Of course, any fair-minded person should understand that Canada is threatened by the wide-open immigration policy and the insane multicultural/human rights ideology that has turned its institutions against its majority. Canada has a per capita (legal) immigration rate twice as high as that of the United States. Of course the Canadian government is more concerned with extraditing a few “holocaust revisionists” than sending back boatloads of hundreds of non-White refugees. The former have even been called a “threat to national security” by the government while no one in polite society is allowed to regard the massive demographic transformation as a threat to national security, much less to national survival.

William Davis (email him) is a freelance writer.

The Subtleties of Jewish Humor

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In response to a recent article by Edmund Connelly on Jewish self-mockery, Kevin MacDonald had this to say: “The question is, what about media pieces that have an obvious anti-Jewish sub-text? Jews control the media, right? So why do we find clips like ‘Overcome stress by visualizing a greedy, hook-nosed race of creatures.’”

“The Jewish sub-text,” MacDonald points out, “is obvious to anyone with any knowledge of negative stereotypes of Jews. Connelly doesn’t really know the answer, and I don’t either. That’s why we are asking for suggestions.”

Having spent quite a lot of time pondering Jewish noses and negative stereotypes — I once devoted an entire essay to the subject  —  I hope I may be allowed to suggest an answer to this riddle.

It’s a case of Jewish irony. If you don’t get it, it’s not because you are irony deficient. This is not meant to be a criticism of your sense of humor, still less of your intelligence. No way! It’s just that you have failed to understand that an extremely subtle sense of irony is the hallmark of Jewish humor. It is so nuanced, so rarefied, that you are often not even aware it is irony. Jews get the joke, but the goyim usually don’t. They’re not meant to get it. That’s the whole point.

The apparent self-mockery of the Jew is actually an inverted way of patting himself on the back. Woody Allen and Sarah Silverman specialize in this sort of black humor. Jewish comics make a habit of poking fun at Jews and their supposed faults in order to convince us of the sheer absurdity of anti-Semitism.

Let me give you some examples.

A few years ago, when I was a schoolteacher, I set up a cartoon competition for the students in my class. One of the entries was sent in by a boy called Cohen with a chip on his shoulder 2000 years long. It was a picture depicting a massive billboard on a major motorway. It showed a hideous, bald-headed man who looked like he’d just stepped out of a Der Sturmer cartoon:  a monstrous beak of a nose, a bile green complexion, and a mouth coruscating with gold teeth. The caption read: “WARNING!!! WATCH OUT FOR ALIEN ABDUCTION!!! Green-eyed monsters, Martian ghouls, and men with funny hooked noses could come knocking on your door offering to sell you encyclopaedias!”

You see what I mean? This apparent self-mockery was actually a sneer at the goyim for being so out of touch with reality that they still—even after the Holocaust—didn’t seem to get the message that Jews are just like everyone else: a pretty harmless, well-meaning race that the rest of the world have ganged up against for some inexplicable reason.

Of course, if such a billboard as featured in Master Cohen’s cartoon should ever become an actual  billboard one day, a large number of irony-deficient Jews would scream “Anti-Semitism!” And an equally large chorus of irony-deficient goyim would undoubtedly join the same shrill choir.

But consider this: a large number of Jews who were in on the joke and who were NOT offended by the cartoon would also, at this point, raise tongue-in-cheek cries of “Anti-Semitism!” These are the pranksters. The incorrigible pisstakers. You see, it’s a huge mistake to assume that every Jew who complains of anti-Semitism is one big angry Jew. No, he’s often pretending to be angry. His rage is ersatz. He’s putting on the fury, secretly snickering up his sleeve that you should be so dumb as to take him seriously.

Incidentally, I gave Master Cohen first prize for his cartoon. I had no choice.  If I’d given him second prize, he would have complained of anti-Semitism!

You can’t win.

*          *          *

Now consider this cartoon by the famous British cartoonist Steve Bell depicting Ariel Sharon eating a baby. Ask yourself: would this cartoon have won a major competition in a politically correct country such as Britain if organized Jewry had been up in arms against it? Of course not. No, the Jews let it win for two reasons: (1) It proved that “free speech” was alive and kicking in Britain and that we actually live in an intensely anti-Semitic world in which Jews, ever the victims, are totally helpless to stop people saying bad things about them. (2) The cartoon, on another level, was also saying: How absurd that anyone should regard cuddly old Ariel as a “baby eater” when President George W Bush apparently thought the world of him. I mean, wasn’t this charismatic war hero, so adulated in Israel and Brooklyn, actually a “man of peace”?

It has to be asked: was Ariel Sharon upset or angry at Bell’s cartoon depicting him as a child-eating ghoul?  No, I am reliably informed that he was delighted. He was tickled pink. This reminds me of the story of French poet Charles Baudelaire who, in order to improve his image as a monster of depravity, began to circulate the story that he ate babies for breakfast.

The point about anti-Semitism is this: when people who are neutral to Jews — and that includes most people — are presented with gut-wrenchingly distasteful displays of anti-Semitism, the seed of philosemitism is sown in their hearts. Their first reaction is: How unfair this is to the Jews, how needlessly cruel.

Here lies the supreme paradox: Philosemitism can actually be manufactured through ironical and over-the-top displays of anti-Semitism. It’s all a part of social engineering.

*          *          *

A point worth bearing in mind is this: a Jew is permitted to tell an outrageous anti-Semitic joke that a non-Jew would be crucified for relating. Recently, National Security Adviser General James Jones gave a key note speech at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and started the ball rolling by telling a joke depicting Jews as greedy merchants. He clearly meant no harm. He probably thought it would be obvious to his audience that he was merely sending up the silly anti-Semitic “canard” that Jews were just a bunch of moneygrubbing Shylocks.

 “I’d like to begin with a story that I think is true,” General Jones begins, somewhat tactlessly.  “A Taliban militant gets lost and is wandering around the desert looking for water. He finally arrives at a store run by a Jew and asks for water. The Jewish vendor tells him he doesn’t have any water but can gladly sell him a tie. The Taliban, the jokes goes on, begins to curse and yell at the Jewish storeowner. The Jew, unmoved, offers the rude militant an idea.  Beyond the hill, there is a restaurant. They can sell you water. The Taliban keeps cursing and finally leaves toward the hill. An hour later he’s back at the tie store. He walks in and tells the merchant: ‘Your brother tells me I need a tie to get into the restaurant.’”

Frankly, I think that’s funny. And if a Jew starts grinding his teeth with rage at such an innocuous joke, there has to be something seriously wrong with him. But sure enough, the joke was condemned by Jewish groups everywhere. Abe Foxman thought it “inappropriate”, and  the  Jewish Forward thought it “insensitive”. (See also here).

I have an anti-Zionist Jewish friend who told me this hilarious joke, adding a few embroideries of his own. He found it on a Jewish website, filed under “Israeli humor”. (See here). It’s the best example of Jewish self-mockery I’ve come across. I retell the joke in my own words, more or less as my Jewish friend told it to me.

If General Jones had told this joke, he would have been hanged, drawn and quartered.

This Israeli Jew arrives at Ben Gurion airport with two large suitcases. His name is Baruch and he’s been living in the United States. The customs agent opens up the first case and finds it stuffed with dollar bills. “How come you have all this money?” he asks.

Baruch grins and taps his hooked nose.

“Listen, I’ll tell you one way you can make a huge fortune in America. You just go into a public washroom and you see a guy having a pee. All you have to do is grab hold of his penis and say, ‘If you don’t donate ten bucks to Israel — for illegal settlements — I’m gonna cut off your goddamn penis!’ It’s fantastic, the amount of money you can make for Israel!”

“Wow, that’s cool!” says the customs agent. “So what’s in your other case?

Baruch shakes his head sadly.

“You just won’t believe,” he sighs, “the number of people in America who refuse to support Israel.” 

Sex and the Jews: Letter to a Jewish Correspondent

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“What was forbidden is now permitted.” — Rabbi Samuel Dresner

A few months ago, I received an angry email from a young woman called Victoria. Having ticked me off severely for various things I’d said in an article — and after a further exchange of emotional letters — Victoria, who was half Jewish, told me she would no longer be writing to me. So I wrote her a valedictory note in which I took my leave of her with the friendly words, “Farewell, my dear Jewess!”

Silence ensued for several weeks. And then, to my surprise, I received another confrontational letter from Victoria informing me that she was writing to me again (a) “to correct certain misconceptions you have”, and (b) to tell me that writing to me was “pointless.”

I found this quite amusing. It’s not often I get letters listing all my shortcomings and telling me how pointless it is writing to me. It makes a change. Victoria had taken offense at the term ‘Jewess’.  “Referring to me as a ‘Jewess’ was very offensive and condescending,” she scolded, “because I am only part Jewish.…But I guess in your racist mind,  the fact that I am even part Jewish is enough of a reason for you to deny my humanity completely. Continuing any further correspondence with you is pointless.”

This is the letter I wrote Victoria in response to her final communication. I don’t usually write such long letters to my correspondents, complete with a scholarly apparatus of facts, figures, citations, embedded links and picture illustrations.  On this occasion, I decided to make an exception.

*          *          *

Dear Victoria,

Your condemnation of the word “Jewess” as anti-Semitic would be accepted, I think, as fair comment nowadays. I meant no offense, but in any case please accept my apologies.

You may not be aware of this, Victoria, but it’s a sad fact that because of severe economic hardships endured by Jews in past centuries, many Jewish girls were forced into a life of prostitution. In all the great European cities, a certain type of prostitute was always to be found: exotic and semi-Asiatic in appearance. She was Jewish, and she was very much in demand. The word “Jewess” therefore entered the language as a loose synonym for “Jewish prostitute”.

When Baudelaire writes a poem about a Parisian prostitute with whom he had just spent the night, he refers to her simply as a “Jewess”. That was enough to identify her as a prostitute. “Une nuit que j’étais près d’une affreuse Juive…” (“One night as I lay next to a frightful Jewess…”).

When Keats refers to Jewish prostitutes in an unpublished poetic fragment quoted in a private letter (1819), he doesn’t call them “prostitutes”. He just calls them “Jewesses”. Why? Because so many Jewesses were prostitutes that the two terms had virtually become interchangeable. “Nor in obscurèd purlieus would he seek / For curlèd Jewesses, with ankles neat, / Who, as they walk abroad, make tinkling with their feet.”  (See here.)

Keats is here referring to the typical Jewess with her “curly” ringlets. The tinkling ankle bells he mentions were often worn in past eras by prostitutes to signal their approach. Ever since Ancient India, such bells have been prostitute accessories.

*          *          *

You say you are “half Jewish”, Victoria, and that your family originally came from the Ukraine. Did you know that Odessa, the fourth largest city of Ukraine, was once a magnet for prostitute lovers from all over Europe? The city was famous for its sumptuous brothels, all supervised by Jewish madams who had formerly been prostitutes themselves. As for the girls working in those brothels, they were predominantly Jewish. Valued for their seductive charms, these joygirls were referred to simply as “Jewesses.”

Here is a pertinent  quote:

By the 1860s a French visitor to Odessa wrote that Jews there were responsible for a white slavery market in Russian women to Turkey. This is feasible, especially since we know that Jewish brothel-keepers were already in place at the other end in Constantinople. The 1889 census shows that Jewish women ran 30 of 36 licensed brothels in Kherson province, where Odessa was located. In 1908 the American consul there claimed that the whole business of prostitution is almost exclusively in the hands of Jews. Jewesses were prominent in the practice of prostitution. Thus, of 5127 licensed prostitutes in 1889, 1122 or 22 per cent were Jewish. (See here; Note: 22% is significantly high, given that Jews constituted only 4% of the Ukrainian population..

A Rabbi Rosenak of the German Union of Rabbis writes in 1902 that up to 50% of the prostitutes in his area were Jewish. He deplores the fact and considers it “inconceivable” that so many Jewish women should go astray.

Jewish prostitution flourished throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Jewish procuresses ran the brothels, luring both Christian and Jewish girls into a life of prostitution. One Jewish madam was known as “Lucky Sarah”, so named because she was lucky enough to have founded the lucrative Hungarian export trade in girls. Hungarian girls were considered sexy. They had those dark, long-lashed eyes and exotic high cheek bones that so many men find attractive. In short, the Jewish look one finds enshrined in Hollywood’s first femme fatale, also known as “the Vamp”:

Theda Bara (born  Theodosia Goodman, 1885–1955), Jewish silent screen actress famous for her femme fatale roles. Note the corkscrew curls mentioned earlier by Keats (“curled Jewesses”). The  classic Hollywood femme fatale, Wikipedia tells us, was “often foreign … of an indeterminate Eastern European or Asian ancestry.”

Equally well-known to the Jewish Underworld of the time was Sarah Grossman, another Jewish procuress nicknamed “The Turk” because of the number of girls she had tricked into a life of prostitution in Constantinople. Two major sex emporiums were the industrial towns of Czernowitz and Lemberg. Here countless girls were enticed into a life of sex slavery. In 1892 a famous mass trial of twenty-seven procurers was held in Lemberg.  All the defendants were Jewish. The trial received so much attention, we are told, that it marked “a high water point for the anti-Semites.”

“A major device of the procurers was a Jewish ceremony referred to as the stillah chuppah. This included a religious wedding ceremony which had no civil validity. The soon-to-be abducted female would be misled into believing that she was married with the rights of a wife, only to discover later that her legal rights were nil. Innumerable Jewesses found themselves tossed into brothels by this device.”  (See here).

You see what is happening here, Victoria?  Vast numbers of innocent Jewish girls were tricked into a life of prostitution by their fellow Jews. It was their own race who tricked them and sold them down the river. It reminds me of the Jewish rabbis who tricked Norman Finkelstein’s mother out of her fair share of Holocaust reparations.

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These are the facts, Victoria. They are the truth. Resist the truth if you want, but truth will prevail in the end. Rather than dismiss me as an “anti-Semite” for drawing the obvious conclusions from these well-known historical data, you should come to terms with the fact that most ordinary Jews are the dupes and victims of organized Jewry. It’s not these ordinary Jews I criticize or condemn, it’s their rabbinical and ideological controllers: the Puppet Masters, or the “Masters of Discourse,” to use Israel Shamir’s apt phrase.

It’s not the sheep, it’s the Bad Shepherds, who are the problem.

*          *          *

No class of men appears to be quite as sex-obsessed as the Orthodox Jews and the rabbinate. If you compare the religious texts of the various world religions, you will find that all of them — with the single exception of Judaism — maintain a high moral tone throughout. They don’t keep harping on aboutbreasts and penises, prostitutes and semen. Judaism does.

Consider this inflammatory passage from the Hebrew English Bible, enough to bring a blush to any maidenly cheek:

There she lusted after her lovers whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. So you longed for the lewdness of your youth when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled. (Ezekiel 23: 20-21).

The number of Victorian damsels who must have swooned away over that passage is probably beyond computation.

Turn to the Babylonian Talmud and you will find yourself suddenly transported into a hothouse world of indelicate anecdotes dealing specifically with prostitutes and their rabbinical (or yeshiva student) clients. There are so many of these stories in the Talmud that a special name had to be invented for them:aggadah. Though these instructive anecdotes touch on all conceivable topics, usually with a rabbi as the central figure, sex often looms large. It can certainly be argued that Judaism is more obsessed with sex than any other world religion. (Scroll down to “Contents”, here.)

One such story starts like this: “They said of Rabbi Elazar ben Dordia that he did not leave one prostitute in the world that he did not come to. One time he heard that there was a certain prostitute in a town by the sea who took a purse of dinars for her price.  He took a purse of dinars and went and crossed seven rivers to reach her…” (Tractate Avodah Zara 17a). Another story begins: “There was once a man who heard that there was a prostitute in a town by the sea who took four hundred gold coins as her price.  He sent to her four hundred gold coins and set a time to come to her.  When his time came, he went. She said ‘Let him come in’.  When he entered, she sat naked on the top bed…etc. etc. ”  (Tractate Menachot, 44a)

The Talmud is full of such stories about rabbis and their students paying visits to prostitutes. Since the word “pornography” literally means “writing about prostitutes,” the Talmud is perhaps the only religious classic that could be described — in a literal sense — as pornographic.

We read in the Talmud of Rahab the harlot, for example, first mentioned in the book of Joshua. One of the most bewitching  femmes  fatales of antiquity, on a par with Helen of Troy and the fabulous Corinthian courtesan Lais mentioned by Demosthenes, the beautiful Rahab first began to sell her body at the age of ten.”There was no prince or ruler who had not slept with Rahab the prostitute,” the Talmud informs us breathlessly. (Tractate Zavachim  116b).

The rabbis, being the religious rulers of the day, were among the first to enjoy this nubile nymphette’s favors. Pedophilia? Yes, the Talmud is full of it. We are told of this Jewish Lolita: “They [the rabbis] allow her an honored place in Jewish tradition….Her past as a harlot is not held against her, and is almost entirely forgotten once she converts to Judaism.” (See here).

Nothing changes. Plus ça change. Pedophilia is okay, it seems, if you happen to be a Jewish rabbi or Roman Polanski — but not if you’re a Catholic priest.

 Pedophilia is not the only sexual perversion to which the Talmud appears to be tolerant. There is also voyeurism. An interesting anecdote relates how Kahane, a yeshiva student, hides under his rabbi’s bed and eavesdrops on him making love to his wife. He is discovered there and severely reprimanded by his teacher who orders him to leave the room at once. The student refuses. “No, I won’t!” he says. “For this is Torah, and I must learn!”

The rabbi is forced to take this into consideration. Spying on people having sex is arguably okay if your motive for doing so is a passion for the Higher Knowledge. (See  The Passionate Talmud, Introduction, p. 1).

Another section of the Talmud deals with bestiality. Widows are advised not to keep dogs. Why?  “Because”, one is told, “there’s some suspicion about what a woman who’s already tasted the pleasures of the flesh might do with her pet.”

I am not exaggerating when I say that the Talmud’s obsession with sex is unique among world religions. Amazingly, it has to be the only religious text in the world to discuss and compare the penis size of its most venerated sages.  (See  The Passionate Talmud, Introduction, p. 1).

Ex-President George W Bush on his way to Talmud class

*          *          *

Fast forward to the 21st century and we find that the contemporary rabbinate can hardly be cited as models of sexual restraint.

Turn from the Talmud to Ilana Hammerman’s  In Foreign Parts: Trafficking in Women in Israel and you will read harrowing accounts of Israel’s contemporary sex-service industry. Innocent young girls, many of them underage, are kidnapped in Russia and Eastern Europe and forced into a life of prostitution in Tel Aviv. Locked up without food, subject to threats and violence by their Jewish pimps, these wretched girls are sometimes expected to sleep with up to sixty customers a day. Their most assiduous clients, sporting black hats and bushy beards, are “religious” Orthodox Jews taking a sabbatical from their wives.

Here is the kind of eye-popping revelation we come across in Hammerman’s shocking book:

I had a very famous rabbi who would come and order a girl to have sex with him in the doggie position, and would ask her to bark,” a former brothel owner testified at a [Knesset] parliamentary committee. One of the working women, presented as a devout Christian, expresses an aversion to her religious clients: “They had a big black hat and under it [another] little black hat and they were real perverts. (See here).

According to a CNN report in 1998, Israel now has the highest per capita consumption of prostitute services in the world. One million visits are paid to prostitutes each month, making brothel hopping one of the nation’s most popular pastimes. Thousands of women are  abducted annually — mostly from Russia, Ukraine, Moldavia, Uzbekistan and China  —  and sold into sex slavery in Israel. “The situation,” Jewish author David Weinberg wrote in a 1998 article about prostitution in Israel, entitled Not So Holy Land, “is enough to make you cry in despair — or vomit from shame.”

*          *          *

Jews certainly have sex on the brain.

“I’m such a sex machine,” Radio talk show host Howard Stern boasts. “I could take a piece of wood and turn it into something erotic.”

Woody Allen, loyal supporter of pedophile Roman Polanski, was accused by his estranged wife Mia Farrow of sexually abusing their 7-year-old daughter Dylan. Woody is best known today for his brilliant witticism: “Don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with someone I love.”

Hope Weissman, a Jewish professor at Wesleyan university in Connecticut, was the first to give a course on pornography in which her students were expected to “study” the most obscene pornographic magazines and witness a striptease performance by (Jewish) porn star Annie Sprinkle which may have included her famous routine of letting people peer up her vagina with a flashlight.

In  2001, Jewish professor Peter Singer put in a good word for bestiality at Princeton university, suggesting in an essay called Heavy Petting that one might like to get it on with a dog. Again in 2001, a Jewish community in England made big news when three strippers were invited to perform sexually explicit acts in a synagogue, possibly with the resident rabbi in full attendance.

In 1998, Israeli commentator Jonathan Rosenblum, noting that a CNN documentary had revealed that Israel now had the highest rate of prostitution in the world, had this to say: “Once again anti-Semites portray us as sexual libertines and perverts to undermine our moral authority. Today we cheerfully admit the charges.” (See here).

Of one thing we can be reasonably certain: any society that attracts large numbers of Jews can expect within a few years to enter a spiral of decadence. Moral anarchy sets in. Sexual promiscuity throws open its Pandora’s box of evils. We saw it in Weimar Germany. We see it gathering pace in America today. We see it above all in Israel, a society of fanatical settlers and rabid right-wing rabbis: a country surely doomed to implode from within, sooner or later, under the pressure of its own moral and military excesses.

I cannot help feeling that a great storm is brewing and that only a military coup or revolution can now save America. Save it from what?  From the spiritual cancer that is consuming it from within, and from the foreign wars into which it is being lured — Afghanistan, Iraq, and soon perhaps Iran — on behalf of another nation and its indefatigable agents in America.

Unless a miracle soon occurs and some charismatic leader comes to our rescue, an unimaginably bleak future surely awaits us: a future in which the only consolations left to us will be mindless entertainment, drugs, alcohol, sexual intoxication — and suicide.

Sincere best wishes, Victoria, and good luck to you in the days of terror and tribulation that lie ahead.

Lasha Darkmoon

Armageddon (see here and here)

Dr Lasha Darkmoon (email her) is an academic, age 32, with higher degrees in Classics. She is also a published poet and translator whose verse can be sampled here. “Lasha Darkmoon” is a pen name.