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The Tribe, the Outsider and the Scapegoat

The leftist Mommy State now growing like a cancer in the U.S. wants to force all the boys and girls to share and get along. That may sort of work with five-year-olds, although not very well as any parent will attest, but it doesn’t work at all with adults.

These days, forcing the boys and girls to “share” and “get along” is called “multiculturalism.” It has never worked in the past, anywhere. It doesn’t work now, anywhere, and it won’t in the future, ever. There are many reasons why it doesn’t work, but I think the simplest is what I call the Tribe, the Outsider and the Scapegoat.

Human nature is such that people instinctively gather into tribes. Every living creature, from ants to elephants, does it; why should people be any different?

This tribalism will never go away, so there is no way around accepting it, although many try not to. People want community, and that community involves being with people like them, or who they like. This has to be dealt with, which is something libertarians rarely do because of their obsession with “the individual.”

“Tribes” may be a primitive term, but it was applicable not only in the past but also certainly today. You might want to call them “ethnic groups” or “nations” instead. It doesn’t matter. They’re still tribes, whether they’re big or little, powerful or weak.

Problems arise because every tribe in the past has, with monotonous regularity, because of our inborn narcissism, grandiosely called itself “the People” or “the Humans.” Anyone outside the tribe was, obviously, devalued into being non-People and non-Human. That gives a foot in the door to murdering them.

All tribes today still consider themselves “the Humans,” even though they use different words. No country today is going to call itself “the United States of All Humans” or “The Union of All People, and Everyone Outside Isn’t,” but all countries will say God has chosen them and is on their side, which logically means the Other Guy is on the other tribe’s side. That’s saying the same thing as “We’re human, and you ain’t.”

During World War II, for example, the Russians spoke of “Holy Mother Russia,” which implied that God had chosen Russia. Their opponents, necessarily, had to have the Devil on theirs. We’re the People; you’re the Unpeople!

Their opponents, the Germans, did the same thing the Russians did, when they talked of the “Fatherland” (and today, for us, ominously, it’s the “Homeland”).

German soldiers used to march into battle with “Gott mit uns” on their belt buckles, I suppose as a magic talisman to stop bullets. The question is: on whose side was God during the battle of Stalingrad, where both sides lost, combined, more soldiers than America has lost in all of its wars? The answer: neither.

It’s painfully obvious that a grandiose certainty that God is on your side does not equal God being on your side, even if Jerry Falwell believes it. Neither does it mean your tribe is human and the other is not, even if you think God told you that. A movie example that comes to mind: I remember watching a Japanese officer, in The Last Emperor, exclaim, “The Japanese are the only divine race!” Later, when Russian soldiers closed in on him, he scrambled his brains with a pistol bullet. Self-proclaimed divinity always has a price, never a good one.

People in the U.S., cultural differences aside, are in some essential ways no different than people anywhere else. All people have a shared human nature, and in some ways it’s not such a good one.

People say, “God bless America.” It’s never, God bless another country; it’s always, God bless America. God should keep America’s soldiers safe, but never any other country’s. Our soldiers should be saved by God; their soldiers should die. Is that any different than those German soldiers with their talismans? Why should God bless America if America does not follow God’s laws? It should be so simply because we, in our magical thinking, believe it should be so?

It’s all pretty grandiose. It’s assuming Americans are the Chosen, just as every tribe in the past has thought it was the Chosen. They weren’t, and neither are we. Other tribes are full of humans, even if we pretend they aren’t and act as if their deaths mean nothing and are just the “collateral damage” that always happens in war.

The biggest problem, though, is that every tribe projects its problems onto the outsider. There are, not surprisingly, two archetypes in literature called the Scapegoat and the Outsider. Often — maybe always — they are the one and the same.

The most famous, or maybe infamous, story about the Outsider and the Scapegoat is Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, which everyone in the recent past had to read in middle school. Every year, someone was chosen as a scapegoat, which made them an outsider to be stoned to death. It was an example of scapegoating always leading to human sacrifice, of projecting “badness” on someone and then killing them, in order to “save” the tribe.

The human sacrifice in Jackson’s story is also a fertility rite, which scapegoating and sacrifice always are: once we kill them, our culture will be renewed and reborn, since the “evil ones” will have been eradicated. This is why to the Greeks Dionysius was a fertility god, and why the Aztecs ripped the hearts out of hundreds of thousands of people. They thought it made their crops grow.

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The well-known novel that best illustrates the Tribe, the Outsider and the Scapegoat (and fertility rites) is that psychopathology textbook known as Atlas Shrugged. Rand’s grandiose and god-like heroes withdraw into their retreat and, being perfect, have to project their unacknowledged flaws onto the Outsiders and Scapegoats — her “looters” and “parasites.”

These Outsiders/Scapegoats then collapse into a Dionysian frenzy of self-destruction, and after it’s over, Rand’s heroes come out into a plowed-under world where they can plant their seeds of reason, selfishness and capitalism.

Since every tribe grandiosely considers itself “good,” all “evil” must be projected elsewhere. If one tribe considers itself human and good and chosen by God, then the other tribe, the outsider, must necessarily be evil, sub-human, and of the Devil.

Maybe we don’t consciously believe it, but emotionally we do. It’s why many people don’t care — indeed sometimes even cheer — if foreigners die in wars. Then we act shocked when foreigners cheer when we die, the way some cheered about 9-11. How dare they act like us! Since we are good, they must be evil!

It was horrible that nearly 3000 innocent people were murdered on 9-11, but was it was a good thing the federal government murdered all those people in Vietnam, Panama, Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq? But since they were outside our tribe, they don’t really count, and sacrificing and killing them doesn’t matter because it was to “liberate” them.

Today in the U.S. you can see our tribe projecting certain of its problems on the outsider. The U.S. attacked Iraq twice when it didn’t attack us, then blockaded the country and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It then placed troops in Saudi Arabia, and supported Israel uncritically no matter what it did. We did this because we are “good,” at least in our tribe’s collective groupthink mind, if not in the mind of other tribes.

And since scapegoating and human sacrifice are always fertility rites, bombing and destroying other countries is of course supposed to make them be reborn and “grow” right — usually by trying to seed them with democracy and feminism.

When resentment, envy, anger and hate sent blowback our way on 9-11, we denied the bad things we had done to others, and instead claimed our attackers had to be “evil,” and attacked us because we are “good.” Maybe things are that simple in the childish, Black-and-White fantasy of Bizarro World, but certainly not in reality.

It’s bad enough to have different tribes in different countries get into wars, but when tribes in the same country fight, that is a prescription for national suicide. And multiculturalism, if it is anything, is several ethnically-different tribes warring over the same land and for political power, which is power over others. It is therefore an attempt at national suicide.

Each tribe is going to grandiosely call itself “the Humans” in some form, then deny its flaws and instead project them onto the devalued other, which it will want to remove or murder. Each tribe will also try to use other tribes as fertilizer, to make their own tribe and its culture grow and prosper.

Every empire in the past has fallen not because of attacks from the outside, but because of attacks from the inside. Once the barbarians are inside the gate it’s harder to remove them. They may claim they’re not barbarians, but apparently the Greek story of the Trojan Horse isn’t taught to Americans in school anymore.

Some examples of tribal warfare? How about “Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan,” whose motto is “Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada.” It translates as, “Everything for the race. Everything outside the race, nothing.” That’s clearly grandiose, and fits exactly the idea of one tribe denying its flaws and projecting them onto a devalued other. It is projection/scapegoating leading to human sacrifice. They’re the cause of our problems, not us. Remove them or rub them out!

Another example in the U.S.? In the original teachings of the Nation of Islam (related to Islam in name only) Blacks are gods, the original men, and Whites are devils. Guess who’s completely to blame for the problems of the former? You’ve got it. It’s just another example of “Since we are good, you must be evil and the cause of our problems, so we must eradicate you.” Denial and projection. Lies (to oneself and to others) followed by scapegoating and human sacrifice.

People will always define themselves not just as individuals but as part of family, nation, religion. If large enough different groups of people try to share the same land and vie for political power, each is going to define itself as good, the others as bad, then deny its own flaws and instead project their problems on those defined as outsiders. Leftists who support multiculturalism don’t merely misunderstand human nature but instead don’t understand it at all, not when they believe several large tribes can co-exist peacefully on the same land.

The only way that different tribes can occupy the same land is if one is tribe is 95% of the population, and the other tribe is five percent. But four tribes that are each one-fourth of the population – say, Black, White, Yellow and Brown? There has never been a society in the history of the world that has survived such an attempt.

The problem is made far worse when the State gets involved, because each group will fight for political power to protect itself and hurt the other. Each group will try to capture the State to use for its own purposes, which involves removing the others, or, ultimately, killing them.

State-sponsored “multiculturalism,” a misguided attempt to force different tribes to get along on the same land, will, as it always does when the State gets involved, have the exact opposite effect: it will make them fight even more, to the detriment of those involved, and, ultimately, the nation. Not only are the boys and girls not going to share and get along, they’re going to get into constant vicious, bloody, murderous brawls.

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.

Chapter 5 of 200 Years Together: “After the Murder of Alexander II”

Solzhenitsyn’s Chapter 5 (“After the Murder of Alexander II”) recounts the important period after the assassination of Tsar Alexandar II in 1881. (See here.Donations for the translators are much needed.) The assassination inaugurated a period of anti-Jewish pogroms, restrictions on Jews, and an upsurge of Jewish involvement in revolutionary activities. Solzhenitsyn’s treatment is highly reminiscent of Albert Lindemann’s treatment in Esau’s Tears and in his The Jew Accused in its dismissal of the apologetic accounts written by Jewish historians and in his portrayal of the very real difficulties faced by the Russian government in dealing with its Jewish population. In general, the tensions between Jews and non-Jews recounted here reflect traditional anti-Jewish themes, particularly Jewish economic domination, but there are also themes peculiar to the rise of the Jews as an educated elite that were widespread in Europe at the time. We also see here the theme of Jewish involvement in revolutionary political radicalism which culminated in the revolution of 1917.

Apologetic accounts of the period by Jewish activist historians and organizations have painted the Russian government as the epitome of evil. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration that the entire organized Jewish community in Western Europe and America acted to thwart Russian interests throughout the entire period from 1881 to 1917—most notably the role of Jacob Schiff in financing the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905.

Solzhenitsyn points out that there was no government complicity in the anti-Jewish actions, although the government response was limited by the small number of Russian police at the time. Indeed, the official government view was that pogroms were the result of agitators bent on revolution and therefore naturally viewed negatively by the government. Alexander III is quoted in reaction a report of leniency toward pogromists by the authorities that “This is inexcusable.” Records unearthed after 1917 revealed that Alexander III “demanded an energetic investigation.”

Nevertheless, the myth that the Russian government had organized the pogroms was propagated and can still be found in Jewish publications — along with the slander that Alexander personally hated the Jews.

Jewish sources also exaggerated the number of victims — one “frequently published” source claiming the “rape of women, murder, and maiming of thousands of men, women, and children.”  These sources claimed that “these riots were inspired … by the very government [that] had incited the pogromists and hindered the Jews in their self-defense.” Goldwin Smith, a prominent 19th-century historian with decidedly anti-Jewish views (not cited by Solzhenitsyn), noted that a publication distributed by the Jewish community in England contained claims of many atrocities for which there was no evidence. (The publication was influential in swaying British opinion.) These alleged crimes included roasting infants alive and mass rapes, including some in which Christian women held down Jewesses being raped by Christian men. The leaflet claimed that entire streets had been razed and entire Jewish quarters put to the torch. Smith states that based on reports of British consuls in the area, “though the riots were deplorable and criminal, the Jewish account was in most cases exaggerated, and in some to an extravagant extent. The damage to Jewish property at Odessa, rated in the Jewish account at 1,137,381 rubles, or according to their higher estimates, 3,000,000 rubles, was rated, Consul-General Stanley tells us, by a respectable Jew on the spot at 50,000 rubles, while the Consul-General himself rates it at 20,000” (Goldwyn Smith (1894). Essays on Questions of the Day, 1894, 2nd ed. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press; reprinted in 1972, p. 243).

The agitators were motivated by Jewish economic domination. A well-known leaflet from 1881 read:

Who seized the land, forests, and taverns?—The Yid—From whom, muzhik (peasant), do you have to ask for access to your land, at times hiding tears?…From yids.—Wherever you look, wherever you ask—the yids are everywhere. The Yid insults people and cheats them; drinks their blood”…and it concludes with the appeal: “Honest working people! Free yourselves!

Another leaflet explained that the pogroms were “not against the Jews as Jews, but against Yids; that is, exploiter peoples.” Rather than simply rejecting this explanation, Solzhenitsyn presents a sympathetic portrayal of I. S. Aksakov, a contemporary defender of the pogromists, who ascribed their actions as stemming from “a kind of simple-hearted conviction in the justness of their actions”; the question is “not about Jews enjoying equal rights with Christians, but about the equal rights of Christians with Jews, about abolishing factual inequality of the Russian population in the face of the Jews.”

A government minister, Nikolay Ignatyev, described the problem:

“Recognizing the harm to the Christian population from the Jewish economic activity, their tribal exclusivity and religious fanaticism, in the last 20 years the government has tried to blend the Jews with the rest of the population using a whole row of initiatives, and has almost made the Jews equal in rights with the native inhabitants.” However, the present anti-Jewish movement “incontrovertibly proves, that despite all the efforts of the government, the relations between the Jews and the native population of these regions remain abnormal as in the past,” because of the economic issues: after the easing of civil restrictions, the Jews have not only seized commerce and trade, but they have acquired significant landed property. “Moreover, because of their cohesion and solidarity, they have, with few exceptions, directed all their efforts not toward the increase of the productive strength of the state, but primarily toward the exploitation of the poorest classes of the surrounding population.” And now, after we have crushed the disorders and defended the Jews from violence, “it seems ‘just and urgent to adopt no less energetic measures for the elimination of these abnormal conditions…between the native inhabitants and the Jews, and to protect the population from that harmful activity of the Jews.’”

This is an excellent encapsulation of the traits of Jewish groups in traditional societies: Tribal exclusivity, religious fanaticism, and group cohesion (ethnic networking) resulting in economic domination, especially over the poorer classes and often in collusion with elites. Together these traits amount to a group evolutionary strategy. In this case, however, the Russian government refused to ally itself with the Jews and attempted “to protect the population from that harmful activity of the Jews.” Hence the conflict between the Russian government and the international Jewish community from 1881 to 1917.

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Solzhenitsyn vigorously defends the claim that the motive of the government was to protect the rural population from the Jews. The May Regulations instituted in the wake of the pogroms prevented further settlement of Jews in non-Jewish towns (the ones already there could remain) and restricted Jewish economic activity, particularly the wine trade. The government’s protective motive is clear: “The government stood before a difficult choice: to expand the wine industry in the face of peasant proneness [to drunkeness] and thus to deepen the peasant poverty, or to restrict the free growth of this trade by letting the Jews already living in the villages to remain while stopping others from coming. And that choice—restriction—was deemed cruel.” Indeed, “today these May Regulations are portrayed as a decisive and irrevocably repressive boundary of Russian history.”

Notice particularly the claim by the minister (and supported by Solzhenitsyn) that Jews “directed all their efforts not toward the increase of the productive strength of the state, but primarily toward the exploitation of the poorest classes of the surrounding population.”Jewish economic activity was exploitative and destructive, resulting in impoverishing the peasants and exploiting their weakness for alcohol. A common Jewish attitude is that Jews made great contributions to the economic well-being of the society wherever there were large numbers of Jews. Whatever the plausibility of such a view in different times and places, it was certainly not the case here. As I noted elsewhere,

many examples of historical anti-Semitism involved animosity resulting from the oppressive nature of economic relationships between the ethnic groups—from a perceived need for greater reciprocity and less exploitation. Having merchants and moneylenders may be necessary, but lowering the fraction of total income of moneylenders and their aristocratic patrons would be in the interests of debtors and may also conform to normative notions of economic justice (especially if these are well-paid occupations). Historically, Jews were often concentrated in ethnic niches such as moneylending, tax farming, and estate management—occupations that were exploitative. In traditional societies these activities were not part of a market economy but an aspect of exploitation by elites. … In the Middle Ages and down to the twentieth century in much of Eastern Europe, the great majority of loans were made to people living at or near subsistence, and they were made at exorbitant rates. There was often no free market in moneylending; typically, moneylenders obtained the right to engage in these activities as a result of being granted a franchise by a nobleman or a city which received a portion of the profits. The moneylenders then charged whatever they thought they could obtain from their customers, with the exception that interest rates were sometimes capped because of complaints by ruined debtors.

Loans made at interest rates common in the Middle Ages (oftentimes 33%–65%) are simply exploitative, and there is little wonder that they caused hatred on the part of ruined debtors and deep concern on the part of the Church. Moneylending under these circumstances did indeed benefit moneylenders and their aristocratic backers, but, as with loan-sharking today, it simply resulted in destitution for the vast majority of the customers—especially the poorer classes—rather than economic growth for the society as a whole. Loans were made to the desperate, the unintelligent, and the profligate rather to people with good economic prospects who would invest their money to create economic growth; they were made “not to the prosperous farmer…but the farmer who could not make ends meet; not the successful squire, but the waster; the peasant, not when his crops were good, but when the failed; the artisan, not when he sold his wares, but when he could not find a market. Not unnaturally, a century of such a system was more than any community could stand, and the story of Jewish usury is a continuous alternation of invitation, protection, protestation and condemnation.”

Another exploitative Jewish economic niche was the arenda system in Eastern Europe, in which Jewish estate managers were motivated to exploit their subjects as much as possible during the period of the lease. In the arenda system, a Jewish agent would lease an estate from a nobleman. In return for a set fee, the leaseholder would have the right to all the economic production of the estate and would also retain control of the feudal rights (including onerous forced labor requirements) over its inhabitants:

In this way, the Jewish arendator became the master of life and death over the population of entire districts, and having nothing but a short-term and purely financial interest in the relationship, was faced with the irresistible temptation to pare his temporary subjects to the bone. On the noble estates he tended to put his relatives and co-religionists in charge of the flour-mill, the brewery, and in particular of the lord’s taverns where by custom the peasants were obliged to drink. On the church estates, he became the collector of all ecclesiastical dues, standing by the church door for his payment from tithe-payers, baptized infants, newly-weds, and mourners. On the [royal] estates…, he became in effect the Crown Agent, farming out the tolls, taxes, and courts, and adorning his oppressions with all the dignity of royal authority.20

Such a system approximates slavery, the only difference being that serfs are tied to the land while slaves can be freely bought and sold. In such systems, there is little motivation to work, and productivity is relatively low.21

The May Regulations resulted in Jewish hatred toward the government and an upsurge in Jewish revolutionary activity culminating in the Bolshevik Revolution. “Although the pogroms originated mainly with the Ukrainian population, the Russians have not been forgiven and the pogroms have always been tied with the name of Russia.” Jewish organizations in the rest of the world therefore opposed Russia, often resulting in charges of disloyalty because the Jewish desire to improve the treatment of Russian Jews conflicted with the national interests of several countries, particularly France, which was eager to develop an anti-German alliance in the wake of its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. In England during World War I, Jews who had immigrated from Russia often refused military service because England was allied with Russia (see here, p. 67). Loyalty issues, which in our own day are centered on the neocon push for wars in the Middle East on behalf of Israel, are certainly not simply canards, as typically claimed by Jewish organizations.

Solzhenitsyn also points out that the government wanted more control over the Jewish population because of the “constant shortfall of Jewish conscripts for military service; it was particularly noticeable when compared to conscription of Christians.”

Although Jews avoided the draft, they were highly overrepresented in higher education, and the government was concerned about the rise of revolutionary sentiments among students, especially Jewish students. Quotas of 5–10% were established in universities, motivated partly by concern about Jewish revolutionary activity.

Finally, Solzhenitsyn correctly rejects the idea that the May Regulations were the main cause of mass emigration from Russia. More important was Jewish overpopulation. Jews had the highest rate of population growth of any European group in the 19th century, and they simply overshot their economic niche, resulting in a great deal of poverty among Jews.

This increasing economic domination went along with a great increase in the population of Jews. Jews not only made up large percentages of urban populations, they increasingly migrated to small towns and rural areas. [The May Regulations were designed to limit this.] In short, Jews had overshot their economic niche: The economy was unable to support this burgeoning Jewish population in the sorts of positions that Jews had traditionally filled, with the result that a large percentage of the Jewish population became mired in poverty. The result was a cauldron of ethnic hostility, with the government placing various restrictions on Jewish economic activity; rampant anti-Jewish attitudes; and increasing Jewish desperation.

The main Jewish response to this situation was an upsurge of fundamentalist extremism that coalesced in the Hasidic movement and, later in the nineteenth century, into political radicalism and Zionism as solutions to Jewish problems. Jewish populations in Eastern Europe had the highest rate of natural increase of any European population in the nineteenth century, with a natural increase of 120,000 per year in the 1880s and an overall increase within the Russian Empire from one to six million in the course of the nineteenth century. Anti-Semitism and the exploding Jewish population, combined with economic adversity, were of critical importance for producing the sheer numbers of disaffected Jews who dreamed of deliverance in various messianic movements—the ethnocentric mysticism of the Kabbala, Zionism, or the dream of a Marxist political revolution. (See here.)

In conclusion, Solzhenitsyn’s views are well-documented and fit well with the work of historians like Albert Lindemann. There is definitely an edge to his views. He portrays Jews as an exploitative class over the peasantry, defends government actions, and notes that Jews presented invidious portraits of Russian actions which they used to rally their own people and influence Western governments against Russia. In taking on the biased statements by Jewish commentators, the emotion comes through, as in his reaction to the idea that Jews were forced to emigrate because of the May Regulations

Wait a second, how did they throw the Jews out and an entire million at that? Didn’t they apparently only prevent new arrivals? No, no! It was already picked up and sent rolling: that from 1882 the Jews were not only forbidden to live in the villages everywhere, but in all the cities, too, except in the 13 guberniyas; that they were moved back to the shtetls of “the Pale”—that is why the mass emigration of Jews from Russia began![i]

Well, set the record straight.

Like his intellectual opponents, Solzhenitsyn is an ethnic nationalist — but one with the facts on his side.

[i] Yu. Larin. The Jews and Anti-Semitism in the USSR, p. 52-53.

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

Is the Madoff Scandal Paradigmatic?

Too Good to Be True

Erin V. Arvedlund

New York, NY: Portfolio/Penguin, 2009

Betrayal

Andrew Kirtzman

New York, NY: Harper, 2009

No One Would Listen

Harry Markopolos

New York: Wiley, 2010

Madoff With The Money

Jerry Oppenheimer

New York: Wiley 2009

The Madoff Chronicles

Brian Ross

New York, NY: Hyperion, 2009

Catastrophe

Deborah and Gerald Strober

Beverly Hills, CA: Phoenix Books, 2009

Madoff’s Other Secret

Sheryl Weinstein

New York, NY: St Martin’s Press, 2009

Reviewed by John Graham and Kevin MacDonald

[Note: A print version of this article will appear in the Summer, 2010 issue of The Occidental Quarterly. Click here for a pdf version of this article.]

Abstract: Initially Bernard Madoff’s record-breaking $65 billion Ponzi scheme was reported in terms of how much harm he had done fellow Jews. Subsequently discussion focused on the ineptitude of the Securities and Exchange Commission in not detecting and shutting down this fraud much earlier.

We contend here that the now extensive literature reveals that the Madoff phenomenon was in fact a massive shift of resources from non-Jews to Jews. Prime beneficiaries extended beyond the Madoff family to a number of other members of the Jewish elite. The scam utilized familiar Jewish social traits to reach the size it did. Far from being protected by SEC ineptitude, it was Madoff’s perceived position as part of the Jewish Establishment that put him beyond the law — by intimidating the SEC. This was accentuated by traditional Jewish inhibitions on reporting Jewish criminality. We suggest that Madoff’s self-destructive as well as socially damaging behavior stemmed ultimately from the conditionality inherent in the Jewish attitude to society at large — and is not unique to him.

*   *   *

In December 2008 the astonishing news broke of Bernard Madoff’s immense Ponzi scheme — the biggest in history, apparently, with a notional value approaching $65 Billion. This was very rapidly followed by loud complaints by prominent Jewish leaders such as the Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxmanand the American Jewish Committee’s David Harris, to the effect that the media coverage of this scandal was facilitating anti-Semitism by repeatedly noting that Madoff is Jewish.

To the uninvolved observer, these claims appeared paranoid. The news channels were choked with pitiful and chilling stories of elderly Jews discovering they had been flung into destitution by Madoff, and of Jewish Charities reeling from the blows he had struck them. The well-known among the victims — such as Stephen Spielberg, Mort Zuckerman, and New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg’s family — seemed invariably Jewish. Initially the presence of non-Jewish victims was not very apparent. The obvious question was: How could someone do this to his own people? That question could not be asked without acknowledging Madoff’s ethnicity.

For most, probably, the conclusion will have been that this event resembled the depressing procession of stories about clergymen of every creed being involved in pedophilia. Society generates these positions involving trust and power, and from time to time they get occupied by perverts who abuse them.

Subsequently, much fascinating detail has come to light, including the seven books cited above. We suggest here that the Madoff affair does in fact offer important lessons as to the nature of the Jewish community, its relationship with the non-Jewish community, and its influence on Public Policy.

The Madoff facts need to be established.

  • Madoff founded Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities right out of Hofstra College (later University), in November 1960. He focused on dealing in the shares of small firms, not listed on any Exchange — “Over-the-Counter” or “Pink Sheet” stocks (the latter from the color of the daily publication which listed the broker-dealers willing to quote prices in particular equities over the phone). In 1971 a computerized communications network was established which made the quoted prices easily visible (NASDAQ). This evolved through several phases to the point at which it is now arguably as efficient a marketplace as any. Bernard Madoff was in the thick of this development, serving on many industry bodies including as Chairman of NASDAQ itself. In the late 70s Madoff began offering competitive markets in stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange (which he never joined). By 1989 Arvedlund (45) reports Madoff’s firm was handing 5% of the NYSE volume (others say it reached as high as 10% [Weinstein, 166]). In 2002 there was talk of it being worth $1 billion (Kirtzman, 131).
  • This firm was a genuine business and a considerable technological achievement. There seems to be no evidence that the many non-family professionals employed there ever had any inkling that the investment side of the business was a fraud. It also provided perfect cover.
  • As soon as he was able, Madoff began taking in “discretionary” accounts from the public. These are accounts where the broker is authorized to act without first consulting the client. Initially, funds were attracted by promising high returns, but in the later years the pitch was fairly modest returns with a very high degree of confidence (“low volatility” — the “Jewish T Bill”). From raising money among New York-area relatives and friends, he moved on to using agents to tap the wealthy across the country. Ultimately, over the last two decades, Madoff was able to use some of the professional fund-allocating operations which have developed with the hedge fund boom (“Funds of Funds”). Unlike the previous contributors, many of the owners of this money were not American and not Jewish.
  • This operation may well have been a fraud right from the start. There is no evidence of trades for the investors for many years. The long number of years involved and the power of compounding means that many of the accounts were bloated with fictitious profits. Some suggest that something around $20 Billion may have been paid in over the years, of which a good deal was paid out, so that most of the $65 Billion investors thought they had at the end was fantasy.
  • Madoff’s claimed returns were intrinsically implausible, and in later years numerous investment professionals believed that his activities were fraudulent. This point of view was repeatedly and forcefully brought to the attention of the SEC, in particular by a Boston-based analyst, Harry Markopolos.  In a fascinating response, in 2006 the agency finally launched an investigation which scrupulously ignored the investment operation and in November 2007 “found no evidence of fraud” (Arvedlund, 217). Why this absurdity happened is the Public Policy question addressed in this essay.

Transferring Wealth from Non-Jews to Jews

From a sociobiological point of view, the first thing to grasp about the Madoff phenomenon is that it was a large scale transfer of wealth from non-Jews to Jews. This is because of the shift in the Ponzi scheme funding basis at the beginning of the 1990s. The big professional fund raisers (and consequently the biggest creditors) entered then or later: Fairfield-Greenwich ($7.9B), Banco Santander ($3B), Banco Medici ($2.1B), Access International ($1.4B), Tremont/Rye/Kingate ($5.8B) and others. Arvedlund (142) reports these outfits in aggregate were owed some $20 Billion; because of their comparatively late entry and accelerating contributions, a much higher proportion of this loss would represent real cash invested. In addition, the $659 million the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC) has paid out to Madoff account owners should be included — the SIPC is funded by its member broker-dealers, and so ultimately by its customers.

Fairfield-Greenwich and Access International were focused on the ultra wealthy jet-set/titled European crowd, but most of the other European conduits accessed the general European public. Some Jewish money may have been added via Bank Medici, the Vienna-based vehicle established by one-time US resident and Orthodox Jewess Sonja Kohn, who is rumored to have brought in some Russian Oligarchs (as a result of which she is now in hiding). But even here, via complex arrangements with various banks, the main contributions came from the general public in Europe.

Markopolos asserts that the European losses were substantially more than losses in the United States(114). His book has among its illustrations a charming two-page map detailing the location of the 255 foreign funds of funds in over 40 countries who were Madoffed.

This has effectively put the early investors with Madoff in a strange position. Over the past 20 years, as Kirtzman (140) notes: Hundreds of Bernie Madoff’s investors were retiring early, moving into bigger houses, on the money they madeWhatever else Madoff may have thought about his large entourage of elderly early small investors and their descendents, as Kirtzman says, he couldtake the view that he was taking care of all of them in their old age(251).

It is simply a fact that many people lived very well for many years from the proceeds of Madoff’s depredations.

This is not to suggest that they had the faintest idea their life styles were in any sense illegitimate and were rooted in fraud. Nor does it mitigate the appalling shock they went through in late 2008, discovering that their Guardian Angel had devoured them. And while the Trustee may have legal logic behind his stance that no recoveries can be obtained in the many cases (reported as over 83% of the direct Madoff Securities accounts) where cash withdrawals exceed the amount paid in, had their money been honestly invested, most could have expected substantial gains, given the securities markets of the last generation. So they have enormous opportunity losses and very real grievances.

But, nevertheless, they were beneficiaries too.

The Jewish Ethnic Nexus That Enabled Madoff’s Fraud

Several writers have discussed the arresting idea that the genetic mutations which supply Ashkenazi Jews with their high intelligence are also those which cause the ravaging of this group with cruel and lethal ailments such as Tay-Sachs and Gaucher’s disease (see herehere, and here). Bernard Madoff was like a Tay-Sachs occurrence within the Jewish community: The characteristics which make them such formidable competitors for resources also rendered them pathetically vulnerable to a Madoff.

Most salient of these was the practice among this otherwise skeptical and independent community to coalesce around rabbinical/guru figures, who are treated virtually as gods, revered, unquestioned, and fiercely defended. Obvious examples are found to this day among the Hasidim. Kevin MacDonald has demonstrated in The Culture of Critique how this pattern imposed itself on Western intellectual life, as seen in the rise of Freudianism, Boasian Anthropology, and the Frankfort School, among others, all equipped with their prophet. “Flying wedge” tactics and conscious intra-group loyalty has made this characteristic exceptionally valuable in seizing control of professional entities such as university departments from the disorganized and atomistic non-Jews.

To many, Madoff was such a deity. “He was like a God” Kirtzman quotes professional Holocaust victim Elie Wiesel saying of Madoff (96). (Wiesel lost most of his savings and his foundation’s endowment to Madoff.) There was a myth that he created around him. That everything was so special, so unique(Kirtzman, 96). Oppenheimer reports a member of an extended family long involved with and heavily damaged by Madoff saying that they regarded Bernie like a messiah. He was spoken of as if godlike(93). The accounts of the stir he created attending Jewish gatherings are almost comic: He was received like visiting royalty, mysterious and unapproachable(Kirtzman, 89).

The consequence was an extremely useful suspension of disbelief.

Infatuations of this type are rare among whites generally, and usually mild and fleeting. This makes them more difficult to organize — but less vulnerable to a Madoff.

A consequence of this ethnocentric infatuation was that would-be whistle-blowers were subject to savage attack, if they were not simply tuned out. Laura Goldman, an investment advisor now resident in Israel, had come to negative conclusions about Madoff and liquidated her own exposure to him. The Strobers relate how when in 2001 both Barrons and the trade publication MAR/Hedgepublished stories (here and here) insinuating Madoff’s returns were incredible, she mailed copies to contacts in Palm Beach (where the ultra-wealthy Jewish community had become a major funding source for Madoff): “They said that the publications were anti-Semitic — that Jews have more faith in Bernie Madoff than they do in God” (81).

In her own book, the author of the Barrons article (Arvedlund) reports that as a result of her efforts Goldman “was promptly accused of being anti-Semitic by Palm Beach residents… “And I live in Israel!” she noted” (252). This response is a factor to remember when we consider the behavior of the SEC. (The author of the MAR/Hedge article, Michael Ocrant, is Jewish.)

Until quite late in the history of his fraud, Madoff relied on drawing in funds from (wealthier and wealthier) individuals. Mechanically, this was a remarkable achievement. A value in the Madoff literature is the documentation it supplies on the characteristic group loyalty from which Madoff benefitted. Kirtzman notes:

He was a member of the tribe. Jews of his generation were brought up to think of other Jews as extended family members, with a shared responsibility to look out for one another. They felt more comfortable going to Jewish doctors, Jewish lawyers, Jewish accountants. Madoff became known as “the Jewish T-bill.” (73–74)

Kirtzman quotes from a contemporary from Laurelton, Madoff’s home district of Queens:

The Jewish world was very tight and highly networked. … Everything was done through “the phone call”. My brother wanted to go into retailing, so a call was made to Mr. Temona on the board of Lerners. I wanted to transfer to NYU and live in one dorm: a call was made to Professor Levine. (74)

Of course, from the point of view of a non-Jew, this kind of cohesive efficiency makes the Jews lethal competitors in the zero-sum struggle for resources. In the case of Madoff, however, the efficiency turned out to enable the fraud to spread more widely and to be more damaging to the Jewish community itself.

Other characteristics of his victims tended to amplify the Madoff damage. As a broker, rather than a hedge fund, he supplied his clients with pages and pages of transaction history — all fabricated — rather than an overview. Over the years, thousands of hours were evidently sunk by his clients into going through these statements looking for errors — Sheryl Weinstein, the CFO of Hadassah had an assistant committed to the task (Weinstein, 97). A good deal of fanatical seriousness about the investments was thus sublimated. The modest, low double-digit but extremely reliable returns offered in later years were accurately pitched to rational and careful investors. And, sadly, it has to be said that the attitude many brought to middle age from their upbringing increased their vulnerability. As Kirtzman’s Laurelton informant said of her and Madoff’s hometown, “The more money, the better your things…The more money, the more esteem. The more money, the more people looked up to you” (27) — a revealing comment on the importance of financial success within the Jewish community. Like Weinstein, many long-standing Madoff clients refinanced their homes in the easy credit conditions of recent years to maximize their Madoff investments. Many apparently had virtually all their liquidity with Madoff — hence the tales of desperate sales of jewelry in Palm Beach after the arrest.

This passionate intensity about money has worked well historically — but in the Madoff situation, it led to utter disaster.

So did lack of scruple. Kirtzman recounts how a Palm Beach Madoff client, dubious about Madoff’s success, asked his accountant in the early 90s to investigate. The accountant concluded that Madoff was most likely doing something fraudulent, probably front-running (trading ahead of client orders). The client’s response: “I don’t want to hear anything about it” (Kirtzman, 75–77). Clearly, many Madoff accounts thought they were safely benefitting from illegal activity — and did not care.

Jewish networking was also crucial, perhaps ironically, to the Madoff financial Black Hole spreading beyond the Jewish community. Fairfield-Greenwich Group, the biggest funds allocator caught by the implosion, is generally presented as haute WASP because of founder Walter Noel’s social image: but FGG was brought to Madoff by Noel’s partner Jeffrey Tucker, who is Jewish. Arvedlund suggests Tucker met Madoff via his in-laws the Schneiders of Allentown, Pennsylvania, wealthy garment manufacturers (114). Similarly, she says, access to the US annuity product and general hedge fund market came through Tremont Capital Management and its affiliate Rye Investment Management, run by Sandra Manzke and Bob Schulman (83–84). Manzke had other similar interests, one of which, Kingate Global, brought in wealthy Italian families. And also in Europe, besides Sonja Kohn of the imaginatively-named “Bank Medici” already mentioned (Arvedlund, 129–137), there was Union Bancaire Privee and the Safra Banking group run by Edgar de Picciotto and Edmond Safra. Arvedlund says:

De Picciotto and Safra shared similar backgrounds. They were both Sephardic Jews…and…more than just bankers — they were gatekeepers to billions…Once these men had signed off on someone, … the rest of the Swiss banking world would line up to invest, practically without question. (139–140)

What Kirtzman sneeringly describes as “the princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses” (254) who invested with Madoff through FFG and Access International (the founder of which, Rene-Thierry Magnon de la Villehuchet, actually was a French nobleman) and the other members of the “Swiss banking world” who trusted Madoff’s prestigious endorsements were in fact following the old European tradition of the court Jew — “a general financial confidant of a territorial sovereign” (see here, p. 102; see also here). For centuries it was customary for aristocratic landowners, particularly in Eastern Europe, to delegate the task of managing the businesses operations on their estates to Jews, sometimes using the same families for generations. Similarly, throughout German-speaking areas, court Jews typically managed the financial affairs of the nobility, provisioned the military, arranged for loans through Jewish banking families and collected revenues in the form of taxes. Using a Madoff to manage their interests on America’s financial steppes and interface with the barbarous Americans was quite consistent with the long-standing behavior pattern of this social group.

Arvedlund notes that the European capital FGG attracted was of a type known in the hedge fund world as “dumb money” because of its herding habits (117). Of all the feeder fund leaders involved with Madoff, only Magnon de la Villehuchet has committed suicide. Bertrand de la Villehuchet commented, “Madoff wouldn’t understand the reaction of my brother. It was…honor, a word that’s not in his vocabulary” (Ross, 160–161).

Another pattern noted by MacDonald in his study of Jewish social organization is a structural tendency towards the enrichment of its elite. Wealth tended to flow upward within the Jewish community to the upper, scholarly, rabbinical class.While these groupings can be plausibly argued to promote the overall interests of the Jewish community as a whole, they also involve heavy transfers of resources within the community from the mass of Jews to a self-selected few — the Rabbinate, in the case of traditional society.

This was dramatically so in the case of the Madoff operation. Health Care entrepreneur Jeffrey Picower holds the prize: Arvedlund reports he and his family over many years withdrew “at least” $5.1 billion of phantom profits as part of a total of $6.7 billion of disbursements (237) (more recently the Madoff Trustee has claimed $7.2 billion). According to Oppenheimer, West Coast “money manager” Stanley Chais and his family are accused by the SEC of pulling out $500 million more than they ever put into Madoff themselves (77–78). (Chais did not tell his clients he was simply placing their money — some $1 billion — with Madoff.) Both Picower and Chais notionally had access to these funds partly because of extraordinarily high un-Madoff-like returns which conveniently appeared in their personal accounts. They also apparently were able to use their Madoff accounts to generate fake tax losses when needed.

The late Norman F. Levy, a New York real estate mogul who died in 1995, is a particularly colorful case. A long time intimate of Madoff’s, he was, according to Kirtzman for some prolonged time getting a daily visit from a Madoff driver carrying a check “usually for millions of dollars. Every now and then they’d be for tens of millions.” What kind of legitimate transaction necessitated this is hard to see. As Kirtzman says, “it’s…plausible that Bernie was using his friend’s bank account to park stolen money” (126–127). (In January, 2010 Levy’s daughters agreed to pay $220 Million to the Madoff liquidator to settle his claims against “the family and its entities.”)

On October 25, 2009 Jeffrey Picower drowned in his Florida swimming pool after a heart attack. This is eerily similar to the 1991 drowning death of Robert Maxwell, the Ruthenian-born Jew and UK publishing entrepreneur, who was shortly afterwards discovered to have looted the pension funds of his public companies of hundreds of millions of pounds.2 As the result of his death, the investigation into Picower’s activities is likely to be crippled. (Recent reports suggest the Picower estate is getting ready to pay the Madoff trustee $2 billion or more to settle.)

Whether Ezra Merkin, the long-time President of the socially elite Fifth Avenue Synagogue, was a member of this small circle of massive Madoff beneficiaries is no doubt a question of considerable interest to his fellow congregants. They are reported to have $2B of exposure to Madoff, much of it through Merkin’s hedge funds. Kirtzman reports that Merkin had $2.4B of his client’s money with Madoff — including that of 30 Jewish charities — but “Of the $470 million in fees he earned from Madoff, Merkin allegedly invested just $9 million back” (Kirtzman, 98).

If not an “insider,” Merkin would belong to a group that immediately came under fire in the aftermath of the collapse — the fundraisers. Besides the professional operations mentioned previously, these included a number of individuals like Robert Jaffe of Palm Beach and the late “Mike” Engler of Minneapolis-St Paul who in Kirtzman’s words

were usually prominent members of the Jewish community, working out of exclusive country clubs. While investors thought they were just friends…they were actually getting a percentage of the business. (89)

Because the apparent inside beneficiaries generally controlled substantial charities which reported large losses to Madoff, they initially escaped much of the opprobrium directed at the money raisers. Possibly the concept of a rogue being a large charitable donor is counterintuitive. But in principle there is no reason why a rogue would not fund charities. Being a philanthropist is in a sense a luxury good and a status symbol — a public marker of having arrived, particularly within the Jewish community.

Jewish Ethnic Networking Props Up Madoff’s Fraud

A remarkable fact that emerges from surveying the literature on Madoff was how widespread the belief was within the professional investment community that the Madoff operation was crooked. This opinion was spread far beyond the saga’s whistle-blowing hero, Harry Markopolos who noted, “The industry knew, there’s no question about that” (176) and his friends, about whom more later.

There were two Madoff theories. One was that intelligence derived from watching the firm’s order flow to its large trading operations gave the investment activity a crucial advantage (Graham remembers being told this — by an ultimate victim — more than 25 years ago.) If true, this would be front-running (taking advantage of a client’s business) and quite illegal. Concern about being exploited in this manner was doubtless why, according to Ross, such big brokerage firms as Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley would not do business with Madoff Securities (80).

As it happens, this theory was wrong. Since Madoff did not trade for his investment clients, he did not need this type of inside information. So the SEC was quite safe to focus on this question in its final investigation of 2006–7.

The other theory was that the Madoff Investment arm was crooked because it was to some degree at least a Ponzi scheme. Options specialists were led to this conclusion by realizing that Madoff’s alleged “Collar” or “Split strike” activities

  • could not be replicated to produce the results he claimed.
  • needed to be conducted on an impossibly large scale to accommodate the size of money Madoff was employing
  • mysteriously left no trace at all in the close-knit world of options dealing.

This view was apparently widely held. The Strobers report the above-mentioned David Harris of the American Jewish Committee saying after the arrest

the Madoff name had come up here in the AJC’s investment committee some months ago when someone suggested we ought to explore investing … with Madoff. And the chairman of our investment committee actually said, “No, I think it’s a Ponzi scheme.” He actually used those words to the ten or fifteen people in the meeting. (42)

Arvedlund reports an account by Harry Markopolos of a meeting with Leon Gross, Citigroup’s global head of equity derivatives. Gross told him that “Bernie is a fraud and there’s no way his purported stock and options strategy can possibly beat Treasury bill returns. [Gross] also can’t believe the guy hasn’t been exposed yet” (218).

The famed Jewish co-founder of the Odyssey Partners hedge fund, the late Jack Nash, and his son, Joshua, seem to have had a hobby of denouncing Madoff. Jack Nash liquidated a less-than-two-year investment with Madoff in the early 90s after his son reviewed the Madoff statements and smelled a rat. Arvedlund reports they repeatedly told Ezra Merkin this over several years, to no avail (258–259).

Wall Street, of course, is an environment which encourages intense and exclusive concentration on one’s immediate financial activity. Furthermore, challenging Madoff was predictably dangerous. Arvedlund reports a meeting between the head of Lehman Brother’s alternative investment division and Merkin:

The Lehman guy fired first.

“C’mon, Ezra. You know what’s behind Madoff’s operation, don’t you? Don’t act like you don’t” he said.

Merkin and the man nearly got into a fistfight … and Merkin left Lehman Brothers in a huff. Not long after…the man at Lehman Brothers lost his job. (98)

Sheryl Weinstein, CFO of Hadassah (The Women’s Zionist Organization of Amerca) when it invested with Madoff, has a similarly informative story. In 1995, after several years of Madoff managing their money, new members of the investment committee became restless. “They were implying that maybe Bernie’s methods weren’t quite kosher” (166). A meeting was held in which Madoff succeeded in pacifying the all the board members except one, who apparently himself ran some Hadassah capital.

He later tested Bernie’s investment technique with some of Hadassah’s money. With results in hand, he told the board he could not replicate Bernie’s rate of returns.

The board’s response was to stop using him (Weinstein, 168–169) — not because his performance in his own style of investing was poor, but apparently for having the temerity to question this lion of the Jewish Establishment, Bernard Madoff.

(Hadassah’s case illustrates the arithmetic of long-time Madoff investors. The charity invested some $40 million in the late 80s and early 90s. It withdrew a total $130 million and thought it had $90 million when the end came.)

With so many prominent Jewish investment industry figures apparently aware that something was wrong with Madoff, the question arises: Why did they not turn him in? After all, a big scandal raising doubts about the integrity of independent investment advisors would be bad for everyone’s business, Jew or non-Jew (as it indeed proved to be). Because of Madoff’s high-level social-networking fund-raising techniques, many must have been aware that a great many fellow Jews were likely to be vulnerable (one third of the elite Jewish Palm Beach Country Club are reported to have been Madoff investors (Kirtzman, 245).  Some might even have thought such a scandal would best be headed off by the Jews themselves for the sake of their community. (David Harris and the Investment Committee of the American Jewish Committee could also have taken this line — but they did not.) Furthermore, the standing of some of these men was such that action by them would have necessitated a serious response by the authorities.

MacDonald has demonstrated that group strategies forged in the stressful climate of Medieval Europe continue to be highly influential in determining modern Jewish social behavior. For centuries, it was absolutely forbidden to tell the Civil Authorities about law-breaking by a fellow Jew, an offence known asMesirah (informing). Some took the view that informing should be punishable by death. The concept of mesirah is alive and well amongst strongly traditional Jewish communities to this day — for example recently, in  the community of Syrian Jews centered in Brooklyn where a prominent rabbi renounced his son after the son had informed on illegal financial activities within the community. A perusal of their web sites suggests that while there is some thought that, in the modern environment, informing about crimes of violence might be permissible, for other “lesser” offences (such as financial wrongdoing) it is still forbidden. There seems to be no concept that it might actually be a citizen’s duty to report criminal behavior.

Harry Markopolos Exposes Corruption in High Places

Deeply ingrained traditions fade slowly. The clear message of the facts of the Madoff scandal is that Americans generally cannot rely on American Jews to halt financial fraud by someone who is Jewish.

There was, however, a group who simply could not have tried harder to secure action by the authorities on Madoff. The fate of their efforts opens the most important public policy matter pertaining to the Madoff story.

Professional competiveness was what drove Harry Markopolos, a Boston-based options expert, to challenge Madoff. In 1999, he was asked by his employer, which managed options strategies similar to those claimed by Madoff, to figure out how Madoff was getting consistently superior returns. Within hours he decided that the Madoff claims were fraudulent.

Gathering around him an informal group of like-minded professionals, Markopolos spent most of the next decade trying to get the Securities and Exchange Commission to act. Numerous meetings with different officials as well as providing extensive documentation and apparently scores of phone calls and emails produced almost no response. Finally in November 2005 Markopolos submitted a report titled “The World’s Largest Hedge Fund is a Fraud” (on linehere [PDF]).

This 19-page document is a nuclear bomb. No one even slightly used to reviewing serious discussions of complex matters could fail to see that it is written by an expert, very carefully thought out, and devastatingly cogent. (Kirtzman — who appears to dislike Markopolos — is quite wrong to describe it as “a dense, rambling thicket … of mathematical formulas, and Wall Street jargon” [197].) One would have thought anyone in the line of responsibility for regulating Madoff would have been absolutely terrified.

The SEC did act. As noted above, in 2006 an investigation was launched. Markopolos was not consulted in any way and Arvedlund quotes a former SEC staff member:

When you look at the closing documents, it seems clear that the Markopolos allegations of Madoff being a Ponzi scheme were never even investigated. (216–217)

In the end the SEC paid itself a kind of fee by demanding that Madoff register as an investment advisor, and in November 2007 terminated the probe — barely a year before the collapse.

What happened?

It has to be said that the SEC compliance operation has evolved into a classicalrent-seeking bureaucratic monster, happily and expensively papering files in cooperation with a symbiotic tribe of functionaries inside investment operations and their law firms. A parasite, it is not designed to actually do anything substantive.

Furthermore, dark suspicions are increasingly common that large targets are exempt.  Arvedlund quotes Markopolos recounting the remarks of a former SEC official: “The SEC is bureaucratic and political and turns down slam-dunk cases all too often” (199).

But the Madoff case was obviously enormous and the SEC had been presented with a very concrete and serious accusation — which was not difficult to test. And this was only the last and most elaborate of a series of investigations which inexplicably stopped (Ross, 34).

Now it is true that Madoff had ingratiated himself deeply with the SEC. And he was prominent: already he had served 2 terms as NASDAQ chairman. Quite possibly this explains the very odd lack of interest the SEC  showed in the Madoff investment management activity after having shut down, in 1992, the unregistered fund-raising operation — exclusively for Madoff — run by the accounting firm of Avellino & Bienes. Over the previous 30 years, this outfit had developed into being Madoff’s main funding source. Ross says:

According to a person involved with the firm at the time, SEC investigators were looking into allegations that Avellino & Bienes were involved in a Ponzi scheme. The investigators discovered that Madoff was handling the investments … but they did not or would not connect the dots that would have exposed Madoff’s role as the true master of the scheme. (134)

Instead, the SEC allowed A&B investors to switch their funds to Madoff Securities directly — rendering nugatory the settlement which required the pool to be returned to the investors.

In the 80s and early 90s, Bernard Madoff was popular with the SEC because of the central role his firm was playing in automating stock trading and competing with the New York Stock Exchange. But by the late 2000s, that was ancient history. Furthermore, the SEC had almost ten years of presentations from Harry Markopolos to consider — and, Markopolos reveals, tips from others too. The scale of the matter was of the first magnitude. Why was there no effective action?

We submit that the answer to this question is the same as to why America is engaged in an unpopular war with the Muslim world with no Congressional dissidence, and why nation-breaking immigration continues — in the midst of recession — with only a little more dissent — and that after the topic had been virtually driven out of public debate for several years. The Bernard Madoff matter was one about which a significant segment of Jewish America cared very much — some for financial reasons, others, perhaps, because of community pride and loyalty. Challenging this group was well known to be extremely dangerous. As in other matters, they awarded themselves a veto, and they used it — as it happened in this case, to their cost. All in all, the Madoff affair and the cover-up is another indication of Jewish power in America.

An insight into this process arose during the 2006–7 SEC investigation. Harry Markopolos, accurately sensing a cover-up, contacted John Wilke, a Wall Street Journal investigative reporter with an exceptionally fine record. Kirtzman reports:

With characteristic overkill, Markopolos bombarded the reporter with documents, contacts, questions for him to ask ….

But the Journal never did investigate Madoff. Markopolos believed it was the fault of “senior editors” at the Journal who “respected and feared” Madoff. (208)

Sadly, Wilke died on May 1st 2009 at 54, of pancreatic cancer. Oppenheimer reports the then WSJ Managing Editor, Paul Steiger, flatly denying having heard of the approach (157). Steiger now heads the heavily Jewish Propublica Foundation, set up by Herb and Marion Sandler who sold their Golden West mortgage operation to Wachovia Bank with ruinous consequences for the latter. Ironically, Propublica, established to promote investigative journalism, has done some valuable work on the Madoff story, particularly the Picower angle(although nothing recently).

In his book, Markopolos reveals that he actually met with and had extensive discussions with Wilke, who seemed very responsive. Throughout 2006, Wilke gave him to believe he was about to start on the story. As late as November Markopolos wrote his “team” that “John told me that his editor has read my Madoff analysis and is very, very excited to start their investigation in January” (166).

But early in 2007 Wilke abruptly cooled off, never actually refusing the story but now raising quibbles. Markopolos (who continued to have a working relationship with Wilke on other stories) says

In my mind, at least, I was convinced that someone high up at the Journal had decided it was too dangerous to go after Bernie Madoff. … I was finally beginning to consider the possibility that Bernie Madoff was untouchable — that he was simply too powerful to be brought down.” (Markopolos, 166–167)

This analysis — as a practical matter effectively true in our opinion — is very different than the cover story generally presented that Madoff survived because of SEC incompetence. And it is not plausible that the Wall Street Journal’s management did not know what was absorbing so much one of their best reporter’s time.

A remarkable insight into how this power works appears in Markopolos’ No One Would Listen. When, in the aftermath, Markopolos was interviewed by David Kotz, the new Inspector general of the SEC, he was surprised to be told that the meeting was part of a criminal investigation and told to take an oath. He was then asked what he knew about Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) calling the SEC about their Madoff investigation (243).

Markopolos knew nothing, but as he points out “for a middle level SEC employee with ambitions, any case in which an important politician is involved is a case he or she wants to stay far away from” (141).

Bernie Madoff and his sons Andrew and Mark generally maxed out contributing to Schumer’s campaigns. In more recent years Bernard had also contributed significantly to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and some other Democratic candidates, mainly, like Schumer, Jewish.

But it gets stranger — and more ominous. In September, 2009, Markopolos appeared before the Senate Banking Committee, scheduled to follow H. David Kotz, SEC Inspector General, who was there to discuss his recently-publishedinvestigation (PDF) of the SEC’s Madoff failure. There was a recess between the two testimonies and then:

Only Senators Chuck Schumer, who had made a phone call to the SEC, and Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Washington, returned. Schumer took over the questioning …. The entire room was filled with SEC staffers …. The victims had been shunted to a hearing room … to watch the proceedings on closed circuit television. We couldn’t have picked a more adverse audience. (Markopolos, 261)

Schumer (who apparently felt no need to recuse himself or even disclose that he had intervened on Madoff’s behalf) then ran the session so that Markopolos would be able to speak as little as possible. This became so extreme that the lawyer Markopolos had brought “started handing me cards urging me, ‘Jump in whenever you can’” (Markopolos, 262).

There is nothing to suggest Schumer was actually involved with or even knew Madoff: yet No One Would Listen makes it clear he treated Markopolos with rudely dismissive curtness. Why deprive this genuine public hero of his moment in the sun?

Similarly strange things had happened when Markopolos went (voluntarily) in March 2009 to brief the newly appointed chief of the SEC, Mary Schapiro. David Becker, the career Wall Street lawyer imported the previous month as SEC General Counsel, picked a quarrel over extraneous trivia and threw a tantrum so violent that Markopolos’ lawyer “thought that he was about to come right over that table and go for my throat” (Markopolos, 249). Consequently, the meeting was terminated.

In 1977 the actor Cliff Robertson, seeking to correct an erroneous report to the IRS of income from Columbia Pictures, inadvertently triggered the discovery that the (inevitably Jewish) head of the studio, David Begelman, was a large scale embezzler. As a result, Robertson, then at the height of his career, wasblacklisted and got no major movie roles for several years. Evaluating Andrew Kirtzman’s Madoff book Betrayal purely subjectively, one would think Harry Markopolos was the villain. The Schumer and Becker performances are in the same tradition: unrestrained rage against someone deemed to have caused damage to a community member — quite regardless of the ethical facts.

Written after the Kotz report on the SEC/Madoff fiasco was published, Markopolos’ No One Would Listen conveniently adds to the evidence presented in the report, thereby destroying the idea that only ineptitude and dislike of Harry Markopolos protected Madoff.  In fact, the SEC had had quite independent and very plausible inputs suggesting Madoff was fraudulent:

  • “In 2003 … an unidentified fund of hedge funds manager alerted the SEC … explaining during a conference call he … ‘couldn’t figure out how he was earning his returns’ …. This was lost in the bureaucracy.” (our emphasis)
  • An intelligent SEC examiner in 2004 looking (as was his right) at internal correspondence at the fearsomely quantitative Renaissance Technologies Hedge Fund pool headed by James Harris Simons found a discussion concluding Madoff’s activities were “inexplicable.” Evidently he forwarded this to his superiors with no result. (Renaissance Technologies itself did nothing either.)
  • In 2005 an anonymous tipster claiming to have withdrawn $5 million said he was “deeply concerned that Madoff is running a very sophisticated fraudulent pyramid scheme.” They even got an anonymous letter in 2008 alleging Madoff was keeping two sets of books! (Markopolos, 257–258)

Quite apart from all this, the SEC 2006–7 investigation itself did produce the information that Madoff had lied about the number of clients he was handling — an issue which drastically alters regulatory requirements. Markopolos says:

“What really bugs me is that the SEC caught Madoff lying to its investigators repeatedly and making false statements to a federal official. This is supposed to carry a five year … maximum sentence; yet they never referred him to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution.” (161)

Nothing was done.

We submit that the SEC failed to stop Madoff not because it was incompetent, but because it was afraid — of the Jewish Establishment.

Looking Like a Goy: Growing Up in the Jewish Community

While we are focused on the way the Madoff case illuminates and reflects the relationships between Jews and non-Jews, there is also the question of how Madoff the man related to the Jewish people.

Looking back, his childhood contemporaries have realized Madoff could well have come to resent his own people — that he had, in the words of an Oppenheimer informant, an “inner need to screw the system” (87).

In the competitive, upwardly mobile Jewish society of Laurelton, Queens in the 1950s, the Madoff family did not command much respect. They were not prosperous, nor were they involved in a prestigious profession. Bernard himself won no academic laurels — Kirtzman quotes a middle school girlfriend recalling a poignant occasion with him sitting silently through a school lunch at which his circle were comparing and boasting about their report cards (21). He had nothing to boast about. Shortly afterwards she broke up with him: “I didn’t think he was smart enough” (23).

In fact, Madoff had a concrete reason to feel alienated — what Weinstein describes as his “beautiful blue eyes(25). These are not necessarily appreciated in Jewish circles — Graham recalls being curtly told they represented a fault in the bloodline when once asking a Jewish friend about her eye color. Weinstein reports Madoff’s grandmother disliked his High School girlfriend and future wife: “She thought she was a “shiksa”…because Ruth was blond and had blue eyes” (61).

There was no doubt about Ruth Alpern’s Jewishness — the two families were in the same town, virtually neighbors — but Oppenheimer reports a school friend remembering of Ruth that a candy store proprietor was ““shocked — shocked —to learn she wasn’t a gentile because of her goyish look.” Ruth Alpern “looked like a shiksa. She did, absolutely…extremely shiksa looking” (34).

Madoff’s choice of such a partner may have said more about his attitude to his own community than his circle realized. Weinstein reports the Madoffs were not at all observant, and in fact frequently used Yom Kippur as a day to fly to their villa in France (47).

When the British tried to figure out what caused the socially elite and privileged Burgess/Maclean/Philby circle to damage their country so much by spying for the Soviet Union, they found that anguish about minor status blemishes could be argued to have triggered this murderous resentment. Being on the margin of a highly judgmental group can apparently cause extremely anti-social behavior.

Postscript: Where’s the Rest of the Money?

What will be the aftermath? Ross reports that “Investigators believe there could be a billion dollars or more that Madoff had stashed in foreign bank accounts” (207). He also quotes an investigator who noted that

someone who plans ahead so well that he pre-positions his clothes around the world, don’t you think he has some hidden bank accounts around the world too? (89–90)

(Besides wardrobes at his four homes, Ross notes, Madoff maintained steamer trunks of clothes at six hotels around the world.) A recent story in the New York Post quotes a former fellow prisoner alleging Madoff claims to have $9 billion squirreled away.

Beyond the question of the Madoff loot, there is the — if anything even more interesting — question of the apparent enrichment of the non-family insiders, Picower, Chais, Levy — and perhaps others. (The Wall Street Journal has reported a total of “at least eight.”) What was going on here? How did these men come to cooperate? What was Madoff’s motive for cutting them in?

Our prediction is that nothing significant will ever emerge on these questions. Observation of a long list of scandals, from 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty to the dropping of the espionage prosecutions against the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last year, leads inevitably to this conclusion. Thoroughly investigated, the Madoff scandal has the potential to illuminate the economic and political prerogatives usurped in late 20th-century America by what can only be described as the new ruling class. That will not be allowed to happen.

Indeed, an article that appeared too late to include in the print version questioned “whether anyone will be charged with being an accomplice to the fraud….Given the slow pace of the investigation, it is questionable whether the government will ever be able to show that there was anything more than a few willing enablers.” This is despite the fact that in at least some of these cases the defendants knowingly committed fraud. For example, in one case, “each woman ‘knowingly perpetuated the fraud,’ but there is no claim that they helped to perpetrate it. This means that once again the government accuses defendants of enabling Mr. Madoff’s fraud but not with having any responsibility for it. It is a bit puzzling why this is only a civil case, and not a criminal indictment.”

If Bernard Madoff has a redeeming quality, it must be the unflinching courage he has shown in refusing to implicate his family in any way. Sheryl Weinstein, his mistress for some years, knew the score: “From our very first lunch, I understood that Bernie was very wrapped up in his family” (57).

So the question is, how could he do this to them?

Absent the almost unprecedented financial crisis of late 2008, Madoff’s fraud might never have been revealed, as Arvedlund reports (265). Markopolos told the House Subcommittee on Capital Markets that Madoff could have gone to $100 Billion (Markopolos, 228). It would probably have outlived him. With the remarkable renaissance in confidence in Hedge Funds in 2009, he very likely would indeed have gone on to new heights. But, eventually, the piper would have had to be paid — especially, as seems plausible on the basis of the literature, if the sons did not know exactly what their father was doing.

Was Madoff so extremely present-oriented that some years in a very warm sun were worth decades of obloquy for his descendents?

Perspective is supplied by the case of one of the most outspoken skeptics about Madoff in Florida, named by Arvedlund as Salomon Konig, a “Fund of Funds” manager who “also hails from the Florida Jewish community.” Konig’s penetrating critique of Madoff was well informed for good reason, as Arvedlund discovered: he left Venezuela in 1993 and is under indictment there for running a Ponzi scheme. Yet he has been able to establish himself in his new country in the financial business (239–240).

Perhaps in the back of Madoff’s mind was the idea — possibly the instinct — that after a few years, perhaps in a different country, maybe speaking a different language, his family would live on, possibly with a new name (surname changes are under way among the Madoff kin) and perhaps with some portion of the loot.

Americans need to ask themselves if parties with this larcenous and nomadic tradition are appropriate stewards of our national institutions.

John Graham (email him) is retired after a career in the financial sector.

Kevin MacDonald (email him) is professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach and editor of the Occidental Quarterly andthe Occidental Observer.

1. Good marriages and business opportunities flowed to individuals with scholarly ability. However, wealthy individuals were also expected to contribute to communal charity for the less able, although indolence was not tolerated.

2. Robert Maxwell.” Ketupa.net: A Media Industry Resource. The report begins, “Robert Maxwell, aka the Bouncing Czech, demonstrated that you can have a lot of fun in publishing … especially if you are using other people’s money and are not inhibited by ethics or concern about legality.”

Predators All

Recently, I went to see Predators, a sequel to the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Predator, about a group of American Special Forces commandos in the Central American jungle who find themselves being hunted by an extraterrestrial, the Predator.

Predator was not that good a movie, but the premise was interesting. It was ripped off and developed nicely in Star Trek: Voyager with the Hirojan race of hunters. I thought Predators might further develop the premise because I had heard that it was set on the Predator planet and because it was directed by the versatile and talented Robert Rodriguez.

Unfortunately, I was mistaken. Rodriguez was not the director, and the movie was a disappointing waste of time: just your standard diverse cast (two Jews, three Whites, two Blacks, a Mexican, a Japanese) running around in the jungle dodging traps and rubber-headed monsters.

There is not much by way of plot or characterization, and the suspense and scares are pretty lame as well.

The cast of Predators is remarkably ugly, and I am not talking about the monsters. I am talking about Adrien Brody, Laurence Fishburne, and Danny Trejo. (The only head worth hunting belongs to Topher Grace.)

Adrien Brody (left) and Topher Grace in Predators

But the ugliest thing about this movie is its subtext of Jewish hatred for non-Jews, which is the reason I am bothering to write about it at all. Be warned: I am going to summarize the whole story. But don’t worry: it is impossible to “spoil” a movie as rotten as this one.

The movie opens in free fall. Literally. A heavily armed mercenary, Adrien Brody, is plunging to the jungle. His parachute deploys at the last minute. On the ground, he finds seven others in the same situation: a female sniper from the Israel Defense Force (one of the morally different people who wear t-shirts like the one below, bragging of the killing of a pregnant Palestinian woman), a Black death squad member from Sierra Leone, a White Russian Special Forces soldier, a Mexican drug cartel enforcer, a White American psychopath on death row, a Japanese gangster, and a White American doctor. All of them are armed except the doctor, who is rather out of place.

Adrien Brody immediately recognizes the female sniper as a member of the IDF. She seems to have J-dar as well. They sync up better than the other murderers and miscreants, and they appoint themselves the leaders.

Brody is both intelligent and ruthless. By following him, the band determines that they have been spirited away from earth and dumped on an alien planet where they are being hunted by three hideous aliens.

When the Mexican is wounded, Brody decides to leave him behind because he senses a trap. (The IDF sniper shoots him. It is all the help he can expect.)

Brody then tracks the aliens to their camp to get a look at them. He uses the rest of the party as bait. The Black mercenary is killed, but Brody deems it a small price to get a look at the enemy.

Later, Brody uses the doctor as bait to hunt down an alien that is also being hunted by the Predators.

The implicit message: They are goyim, after all. They deserve to die.

The party then runs into Laurence Fishburne, a Black American soldier who has been stranded and hunted for so many years that he has lost his mind. He gives them some useful information on the Predators, including the location of one of their spaceships.

The IDF sniper also has some useful information, gleaned from the no doubt Top Secret files of the US military about the 1987 incident in Central America. (What? Do you think that the US government has any secrets that a humble IDF sniper can’t access?)

Fishburne then tries to kill his guests, but Brody attracts the attention of the Predators who dispatch Fishburne. Two other members of the party are also killed by the Predators: the White convict and the Russian Special Forces soldier, who kills one of the Predators as well. But they are goyim. Their lives aren’t worth Adrien Brody’s hangnail.

The two Jews, the White doctor, and the Japanese gangster flee Fishburne’s lair in search of the Predator ship. They are pursued by the two remaining Predators.

For some inscrutable Oriental reason, the Japanese decides to fight one of the Predators with a samurai sword. Hey, swordfights sell popcorn! The Predator is killed, and so is the Japanese.

The two Jews and the doctor run on, pursued by the last Predator. The doctor is injured and can’t walk. This makes him useless to Brody. But then an idea dawns on him. Perhaps he can be useful after all.

In the presence of the injured doctor, Brody suggests to the IDF sniper that they booby trap him, so that when the Predator comes to collect a trophy, he gets blown up. Of course the doctor will blow up too. But he is a goy. His life has no value.

The doctor, of course, is horrified, and the IDF woman refuses to go along with the plan. Brody leaves them behind. They hobble along together and are snared by the Predator, who tosses them in a pit and then goes after Brody.

Brody, in the meantime, has reached the camp. When they were in the camp before, they noticed a Predator being held captive. Fishburne has explained that there are two different groups of Predators who are at odds with each other. The captive is a member of the oppressed group.

Exploiting divisions among enemies is something that comes naturally to Brody. He thinks that he can make a deal with the captive. If Brody frees him, the captive will help him get back to Earth.

It is a preposterous notion, given that he has no way of communicating and no reason to trust the prisoner. But I guess the director reasoned that anyone stupid enough to still be watching would not care.

Brody’s plan seems like it is working. He races to the ship. Apparently it is on autopilot. It will just take him home. (Gee, I hope it can land itself too!) The freed Predator fights its former captor, buying Brody time, but is killed. The victor then blows up the ship by remote control.

Meanwhile, down in the pit, we discover that the cute helpless White American doctor is really a serial killer. He paralyzes the IDF sniper with a neurotoxin, telling her that it will not impair her ability to feel all the horrors she is going to suffer. She is beginning to regret her decision to save him.

I am beginning to regret the time I have wasted, the $11 for the ticket, the fare for the street car.

And why would the doctor decide to paralyze his only possible chance for survival?

But then Brody appears. He missed the space ship. He saves the sniper, wounds the doctor, and booby-traps his body with grenades. When the Predator turns him over, they blow up together.

Lesson to the IDF sniper: don’t get sentimental about the goyim. Treacherous they are. Regret it you will. Plan A (booby trapping the wounded goy) was the right way to go all along.

The Predator is wounded but not killed. After a brutal fight, Brody dispatches it.  The only ones left are the Jews. Talk about survivors! After exchanging names, the two Jews, wounded and exhausted, fall asleep in each other’s arms.

The next morning they stand in the jungle watching more parachutes falling from the sky. Brody rasps out that they are going to “find a way off this fucking rock.”Roll credits

I smell sequel.

I first sensed that this movie was not directed by Robert Rodriguez when the J-dar between Brody and the Sniper went off. It is just not his style.

Then, a few minutes later, as two Jews are discussing why they were dumped on this planet, Brody says “We were chosen.” An hour later, the two Jews say “We were chosen” again. I was not the only person snickering at the obviousness of it.

When the credits started to roll, the screen went bright blue, and in a totally jarring, stupidly incongruous touch, an obnoxious R&B “oldie” started blasting out of the speakers. Was it an attempt at irony? What kind of Nimrod directed this movie anyway?

Then I saw the director’s name: Nimrod Antal. Now the sort of Christians who name their children Zebediah and Melchizedek would not use a name like Nimrod. But since the founding of Israel, Jews have dusted off even Old Testament names like Nimrod, which does not refer to a historical individual and was probably never even used as a name in antiquity.

According to Wikipedia, Nimrod Antal is a Hungarian.  A Hungarian born in Los Angeles who works in the film business. Maybe he is a Hungarian in the same way that Steven Spielberg is an American. But if Antal is not a Jew, he is one of their faithful servants, a self-hating non-Jew.

I wish that Predators were an unusual movie, but it is not. Jewish hatred of non-Jews is part of the text and subtext of practically every Hollywood film. Predators is just a drop in an ocean of racial hatred, just a drip of the poison that Hollywood has been pumping into the cultural veins of western man for nearly a century. Time to pull the tubes.

Trevor Lynch is a film critic. Some of this other writings appear at http://www.counter-currents.com/.

What Would It Take?

I believe Whites are willfully denying the clear and present danger we face. Whether it is through late or broken marriages, lackluster efforts at having replacement-level families, or feeble efforts at keeping the governing elite from importing a new (non-White) people, demographically, White Americans are in free fall. About this, the numbers speak clearly; there is no ambiguity. 

The National Policy Institute, for one, has an excellent set of free publicationsone can (and should) order. Here’s one of their presentations showing how Whites are faring demographically in the Great Darwinian Race for Survival:

NPI: Global White Population to Plummet to less than 10% by 2060

A short video of this is available at YouTube.

The message of this decline is everywhere.  For instance, The Atlantic Monthly, that most American of magazines, founded in Boston in 1857 and featuring such luminaries as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell, was once as White as they come. Now they revel in the dispossession of White men.

Readers no doubt saw the collectors’ cover photo of President-Elect Barack Obama in the Jan-Feb, 2009 issue of the magazine last year:

The cover story read: “The End of White America?” I suppose we exiting Whites should be grateful for the softening question mark attached to the title, though of course the essay itself reads as a elegy for White America.

Hua Hsu

Written by one Hua Hsu, an instructor at Vassar, it aptly points to the 1993 Michael Douglas film Falling Down. There Douglas “plays Bill Foster, a downsized defense worker with a buzz cut and a pocket protector who rampages through a Los Angeles overrun by greedy Korean shop-owners and Hispanic gangsters, railing against he eclipse of the America the used to know.”

In the dénouement, this White character faces a policeman, gun drawn, on the Santa Monica Pier. To his great astonishment, just before he is gunned down and falls into the sea, he learns that this is a new America. Shocked, he stammers, “I’m the bad guy?” And then he’s gone.

Fittingly, the story that follows Hsu’s account of America is one on First Lady Michelle Obama by Ta-Nehisi Coates (I’ll let readers ponder the race and gender of writer Coates). Accompanying it is a two-page photo of Mrs. Obama dancing with her husband.

Further, it’s hard to escape the impression that editors at The Atlantic aren’t begging advertisers to create ads that minimize the exposure of White men. Microsoft, for instance, ran a series in the magazine that imagined a future in which non-Whites and women would replace the White men who built America and sent rockets out into space. Here’s a sample:

Or my favorite, Lockheed Martin’s vision of America’s future:

Recently, after teaching an American culture class where I yet again illustrated the scripted decline of White men because — according to the Hollywood films in question — they were evil, I began to wonder if I had laid it on a bit too thick. Then I went down to the university mailroom and picked up my mail. In it was the July/Aug 2010 Atlantic.  Here’s the cover:

Yes, below the title “The End of Men,” the subtitle reads “How Women are Taking Control — Of Everything,” by Hanna Rosin.

The story, by the Jewish Rosin (“I’m Jewish, and I was born in Israel, and my whole family is Israeli“), begins:

Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way — and its vast cultural consequences.

The two-page illustration accompanying it, with its outsized image of the Asian woman in blue, reminded yet again of Kevin MacDonald’s observation: “The United States is well on the road to being dominated by an Asian technocratic elite and a Jewish business, professional, and media elite.” Indeed.

Interspersed throughout the article are snarky pictures showing the petulant beings American men have become due to their loss of status.  As one enlarged Rosin quote reads, “Dozens of college women I interviewed assumed that they very well might be the ones working while their husbands stayed home. “Guys,” one senior remarked to me, “are the new ball and chain.”

Contributor Pamela Paul even gets a little room to ask “Are Fathers Necessary?” A paternal contribution may not be as essential as we think.”

(By the way, last summer The Atlantic published the sizzling anti-male essay

Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off :

THE AUTHOR IS ENDING HER MARRIAGE. ISN’T IT TIME YOU DID THE SAME?

To work, to parent, to housekeep, to be the ones who schedule “date night,” only to be reprimanded in the home by male kitchen bitches, and then, in the bedroom, to be ignored—it’s a bum deal.

Male kitchen bitches.  Ouch.  Then again, any male that so bought into the Alan Alda-inspired demasculinization of the seventies probably deserves a few bad names thrown his way.)

In any case, this summer’s issue is a cultural treasure trove of visual evidence that the White race in America is being shown the door. Upon opening the cover — which, recall, asserts the End of Men — we are greeted with this two-page ad from Shell Oil:

Turn the page and there’s another two-page ad for Altria Group illustrating their support for educational programs aimed at “empowering” students to stay in school and picturing a racially diverse student population. Immediately following this is an ad for Dow Chemical featuring a Black woman stating that she is the “human element” in the “duty to put healthy, abundant food on the world’s table.”

Back in the days when Blacks had no power in America, we never saw them in ads either. What does it say, then, that we don’t see a White man’s face until page 8? (It’s the Pope and the caption reads: “Is the Catholic Church finished?”)

The issue closes on the inside back cover with Shell stepping up to the plate again. Their focus: Japan.  (Opposite it, there’s a column by the sort of person who functions as a stand-in for a “White male”: Jeffrey Goldberg. The implicit message: Don’t worry; with writers like Rosin and Goldberg, it’s obvious that we Whites still run the show.)

Readers won’t be getting a new issue of The Atlantic until September, so make this thick one last. And be sure to interact on the Internet with Hanna Rosin, her husband David Plotz and their three children.

As for me, I am no Hanna Rosin fan.  Her December 2009 cover story most certainly rubbed me the wrong way.  After a year of mind-boggling economic swindles and bailouts that have used up a significant portion of the universe’s zeroes, who gets blamed? Christians. Now that’s why Jews are so often credited with chutzpah.

Recall that Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi wrote in his essay The Great American Bubble Machine that

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

I just didn’t get the impression he was appealing to a stereotype about Christians. I did an article on the Jewish nature of massive financial swindles over the years in Take the Money and Run. Of course Israeli Rosin was just doing her part in the old Jewish game of blaming the victim. Kevin MacDonald explained this tactic in a recent blog when he observed, “In contemporary human societies, a large part of group competition becomes intellectual warfare over the construction of culture.” I knew deflecting the blame from Jews was on the Sanhedrin “to do” list when I watched the remake of The Taking of Pelham 123.

In the new version, Travolta’s character is a New York ethnic Catholic very interested in guilt. He was also a high-rolling Wall Streeter who skimmed millions of dollars until he was caught and sent to prison. Between then and now, he has also gone mostly insane, though he’s still canny enough to cook up a scheme to make a killing on stocks when he induces panic in the city with his subway hijacking. Now go back and read James Stewart’s excellent account of the savings and loan swindles of the Reagan ‘80s, Den of Thieves. The thieves were ethnic New Yorkers alright, but they sure weren’t Catholic. Sadly, this concerted media effort to blame others will likely work.

Another area in which White displacement advances is in government favoritism shown toward non-Whites. This was highlighted last year during the nominating process of Sonia Sotomayor for a position on the Supreme Court. She had famously ruled against White firemen, but still had no trouble become a Justice. Quoting TOO editor Kevin MacDonald again, the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor “is yet another marker in the march toward the dispossession of Whites in America.” (She’ll likely soon be joined by another woman— this one Jewish — when  Elena Kagan gets appointed this summer.)

Speaking of women, it was Michelle Malkin who just stood up to defend Whites against government neglect. As she wrote,

This week, Justice Department whistleblower J. Christian Adams came forward with damning public testimony about how Obama officials believe “civil rights law should not be enforced in a race-neutral manner, and should never be enforced against blacks or other national minorities.”

I guess we Whites can use all the help we can get, though. Turning again to MacDonald, we have his commentary on the English translation of a chapter from Solzhenitsyn’s book 200 Years Together, which is about Russians and Jews. MacDonald has often written about the murderous hostility of Jews toward Russians, millions of whom were murdered. He also draws parallels to the situation for Whites in America today. Reporting on how Jews displaced Gentiles in Russia, he concludes that

This is a speeded up version of what is happening via affirmative action in America and other Western societies now. There is discrimination against higher IQ Whites in favor of lower-IQ groups. Jews, however, continue to be overrepresented in elite academic institutions on the basis of IQ, so they are not suffering a similar level of discrimination.

I’ve written about this, too. Recall my graph on the student makeup at Harvard:

To put a human face on such dispossession, let me share a letter from a reader:

Your observation that Jews have constructed walls to protect their fields such as government and academia is correct. They have also erected barriers to defend other fields which they claim to be their own. One of these is medicine. You would be surprised at the number of Jews running selection committees and medical education departments in hospitals and universities. There they have developed control of who may enter residencies and how residents are evaluated. The acceptance of white males into medical education at this level has sunk to a low. Preferred are Jews, Asians, Mexicans and females.

Another way in which they enforce a leadership role is by the assignment of labor in residency programs, where Jewish chief residents assign work  so as to favor their own kind and put white males at a disadvantage. Jewish physicians also seem to prefer to run organizations and to control the distribution of funds.

Everything in this article written thus far describes the non-violent dispossession of Whites, but there remains the possibility of the process speeding up through mass slaughter. MacDonald is explicit in comparing the heavily Jewish Bolshevik takeover of Russia to the situation here today: “Again, the analogy is striking. Asemphasized repeatedly on TOO, Whites can expect to be increasingly victimized by non-Whites with historical grudges as they sink to minority status and lose political power.”

I don’t need to repeat myself because I’ve written about the potential for such abloody future for White Americans before. Instead, I’ll try to appeal to readers’ visual sensibilities. Below is a chess set made by Italian Jewish glassblower Gianni Toso. In 1969 he created a stunning set called “Jews vs. Catholics.”

I strongly suspect most Christians are ignorant of the fact that so many Jews still think in these terms. They’ll soon learn, however.

Let me leave readers by revisiting the issue of The Atlantic I addressed above. The writer I noted, Ta-Nehisi Coates, is an African American male. I found out because he has a three-page article in this summer’s issue. There he gives a short biography, noting that as one of seven children, he was less than a scholastic standout. “My roller-coaster ride through the Baltimore-area schools included two suspensions, two expulsions, and an arrest by school police. In 11th grade . . . I was kicked out of the local magnet school.” Still, he (somehow) made it into college, where he proceeded to do little work and failed to graduate. In an America that gave us Obama, however, that’s not always a hindrance.

In 2005 TIME magazine saw fit to hire him as a journalist, and now he has a solid career going. “I had an office 23 floors in the air, in Midtown Manhattan. I used to look down on Sixth Avenue and wonder about the distance between my scholastic and professional lives. How could I utterly fail in practice and then succeed in the game?”  Gosh, I wonder.

Perhaps it has something to do with the program of removing White men from the newsroom (and fire stations and NASA offices and the Oval Office, etc.)  and replacing them with non-Whites who will never threaten those with real power in America today: Jews.

What would it take to make this dispossession process more clear to people? Until they recognize what is happening, there is no hope of confronting it. The loss of the White race would be a true blow to humanity.

Is Racial Purism Decadent?

“Those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them.”

—Oswald Spengler

Recently I spent a good deal of time re-reading the great Oswald Spengler: for general enlightenment, but also with an eye to criticizing his teachings about race, which seemed at first reading confused, bizarre, and dangerous. Much to my surprise, however, I have come to see much sense and truth in Spengler’s views.

Biological Race

Although Spengler speaks dismissively of Darwinism, he does not deny that race is a biological phenomenon. For Spengler, races are extended families, people who share the same “blood” (i.e., genes). Spengler even speaks of a race as a vast collective body of individuals through which the same genes circulate.

But Spengler denies that biology is all there is to race. Race, it turns out, has both psychological and cultural aspects as well.

Like Darwinists, Spengler believes that biological races are mutable. They change over time. According to Spengler, the principal force that shapes races is “landscape,” i.e., environment. This is consistent with the biological view that a distinct race emerges when a human population is isolated and subjected to unique environmental conditions. These conditions select for certain genetic variations. These variations then spread throughout the entire population through inbreeding. (If there are barriers to breeding between different parts of the population, then multiple new races or subraces will emerge.)

Where Spengler departs from sound biology is his belief that landscape can shape a population independent of genetic change, and that different races, when placed in the same landscape, will converge in their traits without genetic blending. Spengler even refers to Franz Boas’s false and probably fraudulent claims that in America, the offspring of different European racial stocks had convergent biological traits that were products of environment alone. But none of Spengler’s conclusions about race depend on these false assumptions, which can be excised without changing his overall viewpoint.

Psychological Race

What is “psychological” race? Spengler often speaks of “having race” and being “of race.” But having race is not merely having certain genes. It is a matter of having a certain feeling: a primitive, vital urge to propagate oneself. It is the drive to immortalize oneself through one’s progeny. In The Hour of Decision, Spengler writes:

A woman of race does not desire to be a “companion” or a “lover,” but amother; and not the mother of one child, to serve as a toy and distraction, but of many: the instinct of a strong race speaks in the pride that large families inspire, in the feeling that barrenness is the hardest curse that can befall a woman and through her the race. Out of this instinct arises the primitive jealousy which leads one woman to take away from another the man whom she covets as the father of her children. The more intellectual jealousy of the great cities . . . betrays the waning of the race urge to permanence; and that instinct for permanence cannot be reawakened by speeches and writing. . . . A man wants stout sons who will perpetuate his name and his deeds beyond his death into the future and enhance them, just as he has done himself through feeling himself heir to the calling and works of his ancestors. That is the Nordic idea of immortality. These peoples have known no other and desired none. It is the source of that tremendous yearning for fame, the wish to live on among posterity through one’s work, to see one’s name perpetuated on monuments or at the least held in honourable memory. (Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, Part One: Germany and World-Historical Evolution, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934], 220–21)

This feeling of race is not “racial consciousness,” i.e., awareness of belonging to a certain race. The feeling of race is forward-looking. Racial consciousness is backwards-looking. The feeling of race impels us to create new life. Racial consciousness is merely awareness of life that has already been created, the life handed down to us. The feeling of race is the stirring of the same creative force in ourselves.

Race and Culture

How, then, is race also “cultural”? If a race is a collective body that exists and propagates itself through individual bodies, a culture is a collective mind that exists in and through individual minds, propagating itself by means of language.

Race shapes and limits culture. But once culture arises, it turns back on and reshapes its racial substratum in the light of ideas that are not dictated by biology. These ideas include conceptions of beauty and fitness that guide mate selection, myths and religious beliefs that regulate sexual behavior, moral ideals that promote the propagation of certain types, etc.

Cultural selection may be eugenic, dysgenic, or both, but if exercised over a long enough period of time, it can produce human populations as varied as different breeds of dog.

Race Change

Spengler puts great stock in the mutability of races.

He denies what might be called “race Platonism,” namely the idea that races are immutable kinds that are more or less well-instantiated by particular individuals. For Spengler, a race is just a collection of individuals with common blood. If a race can be likened to a collective organism, this organism does not exist over and above its individual members. Instead it exists only in and through them.

Spengler also denies what can be called “race Traditionalism,” the idea that in the distant past, a godlike super-race existed, which has since declined because of miscegenation with inferior races or spiritual transgressions or both.

Race Platonism sees every concrete, living organism as an imperfect reflection of its ideal archetype. Race Traditionalism sees all change as degeneration. Both views see change as metaphysically inferior to timeless perfection, and the Traditionalists think that as time rolls on, things usually go from bad to worse.

But if race Platonism and race Traditionalism are false, then change is notnecessarily a bad thing. Life is constant change, and stasis—even frozen perfection—is death.

In Spengler’s view, a race just is a constantly changing group of individuals who share the same genetic traits at any given point in time. But these traits are not timeless and permanent either. (That would be just a sneaky, immanent form of Platonism, i.e., Aristotelianism.) Genetic traits also change over time. This means that if we go far enough back in our family trees, we will find people quite unlike ourselves.

The unity of a race, therefore, is ultimately not defined by the persistence of something that remains unchanged in time, but merely the continuity of an ever-changing process, one of the strands of the ever-changing process that is nature itself.  

Race Preservation?

What is race preservation? Most race preservationists will answer that it consists of maintaining a certain set of genes. This is, for instance, the core of Frank Salter’s concept of Ethnic Genetic Interests.

But if Spengler’s view of race is correct, then this is tantamount to the demand that time stop. It is tantamount to taking a snapshot of a moving process and demanding that no further change take place.

Yet if a race is a constantly changing collective organism, then the demand to “preserve” it at a certain arbitrarily chosen moment is actually the demand to kill it. It is analogous to “preserving” a bird at the height of its beauty—by shooting it and taking it to the taxidermist.

Every generation of a race is shaped in part by the conscious and unconscious choices of its forbears. Each new generation will be slightly different, and when we compare our remote ancestors and our remote descendants, they will hardly resemble one another.

At one end of the family tree, there will be the ape-like primitives of 2001: A Space Odyssey. At the other end, there might be something like the macro-cephalic, telepathic “butt heads” of the original Star Trek series. But they will still be “one” race, one extended family.

Allowing that story to unfold is the only genuine form of race preservation that is possible.

The false race preservationist, however, decides that his generation—or some previous generation—is the “right” generation to preserve. Then he seeks to hold onto—or “get back” to—a particular genetic snapshot or cross-section of the race’s life.

All generations before that point were not just shaped by previous generations, they also shaped subsequent generations. But the race preservationist decides that from a certain point on, every generation will be made by previous generations. But they will not be allowed to make future generations in their turn. They will no longer be agents of change, but merely agents of preservation.

Who are they to change anything?

Racial Purism as Decadence

Spengler regards such a mindset as decadent. Consider the following passage from The Hour of Decision:

In speaking of race, it is not intended in the sense in which it is the fashion among anti-Semites in Europe and America to use it today: Darwinistically, materially. Race purity is a grotesque word in view of the fact that for centuries all stocks and species have been mixed, and that warlike—that is, healthy—generations with a future before them have from time immemorial always welcomed a stranger into the family if he had “race,” to whatever race it was he belonged. Those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them. What is needed is not a pure race, but a strong one, which has a nation within it.

This manifests itself above all in self-evident elemental fecundity, in an abundance of children, which historical life can consume without ever exhausting the supply. God is, in the familiar words of Frederick the Great, always on the side of the big battalions, and now if ever this shows itself. The millions who fell in the World War were the pick of all the white world had in the way of race, but the test of race is the speed with which it can replace itself. A Russian once said to me: “The Russian woman will make good in ten years what we sacrificed in the Revolution.” That is the right instinct. Such races are irresistible. (The Hour of Decision, 219–20)

Following Nietzsche, Spengler holds that positive values and a healthy culture are the products of “ascending life.” Negative values and a decadent culture are products of declining life.

Ascending life is active, conscious of what it can do, of its power to change the future. Declining life is passive, conscious of what has been done to it and cannot be undone.

Ascending life is vital and life-giving. Declining life is devitalized and devitalizing.

Ascending life is forward-looking and hopeful; it creates and embraces change; it pursues gain rather than avoids loss; it is motivated by love and passion, not fear; it is warlike, willing to risk life for higher gains.

Declining life is backwards-looking, fearful of the future, fearful of change, fearful of loss, fearful of risk and conflict, conservative, stinking of senility, hemmed by shrinking horizons, chilled by looming death.

Ascending life is aware of the past, but selectively so: it remembers what is empowering and forgets what is not. When the past becomes restrictive, it sloughs it off like a snake discards an old skin.

Declining life is less selective. It has a long memory, brooding over old mistakes and picking at old wounds. Declining life is defined by the past, which it carries as an ever-growing burden, like a snail adding to its lifeless shell even as its living substance wanes, until finally it is crushed under the dead weight.

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According to Spengler, when the healthy man thinks of race, he is less concerned with the race we have been than the race we will become. He may feel grateful to his ancestors for the positive gifts—the strengths—they have bequeathed him. He gives no thought to their mistakes and imperfections, even those that mark him. It is enough to be aware that they were not perfect, that there is room for improvement. And a healthy man thinks that he can make improvements. He thinks that he can bequeath more to his progeny than his ancestors bequeathed to him.

Thus the healthy man “of race” is not concerned with racial purity—defined as the preservation of a certain set of gene frequencies, whether his own or his ancestors’. He is pleased with the good traits he has received, and he would like to pass them on. But, as Spengler says, he is more concerned with strong sons than pure ones, and he would not hesitate to breed with an outsider if he thought this would improve his progeny.

For Spengler, a concern with racial purity is a sign of racial decadence, of a lack of racial vitality. The racial purist looks to the past, not the future, because he does not have the vitality in him necessary to create a future. He is defined by the past and feels that he does not have the power or the right to change it, only to repeat it (or talk about repeating it, and urge others to repeat it).

As Spengler writes, “Those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them.” This means that the people who talk the most about reproduction do it the least. And, Spengler might add, that is a good thing. Let the sapless branches rattle in the wind all they want, as long as they spare us their shriveled fruit.

White Nationalism: A Degenerate Movement?

Racial purists often claim that their intellectual opposition to miscegenation is merely a healthy “instinct.” They also claim that there is something biologically sick about the instincts of miscegenators.

Spengler thinks that the exact opposite is true. He would predict that those who intellectually oppose miscegenation and advocate racial purity and preservation would be, on average, less virile, less fecund, and less mentally and physically healthy than the average person, including the average miscegenator.

Based on ten years of experience in the American White nationalist movement, I have to say that Spengler’s prediction is absolutely correct. White nationalism in America is an overwhelmingly degenerate movement, and I do not exempt myself from this judgment.

But what does this mean, exactly? It means merely that, from the point of view of biological vitality, a White man who preaches racial purity but has no children is less healthy than a White man who chooses to have children with a non-White woman.

It does not mean that the White nationalist is wrong in his convictions about biology and politics. It does not mean that, from a eugenic point of view, Whites have anything to gain from mixing with other races. (As a matter of fact, I think we do not.)

Decadent people can be right, and healthy people can be wrong.

But there is a lot more to politics than simply being right.

And from the point of view of practical politics, we White nationalists need to take a good hard look at ourselves. Can such a degenerate movement win?

Should it win? For the sake of all that is holy, shouldn’t we want to keep nostalgia-addled kooks away from any power over the future of life, lest they murder and mummify the race in their quest to preserve its purity?

Vitalizing White Nationalism?

What would a vital White nationalism look like?

This is where Spengler’s views of how culture shapes race come in. I also take inspiration from Michael O’Meara’s essays on myth and politics in his Toward the White Republic and Alex Kurtagić’s “Learning from the Right” and related essays.

White nationalists love sobering facts, so let’s begin with one. The White nationalist movement, which seeks the salvation of nature’s fairest and most talented race, is less capable of motivating real world activity than Star Trek, a silly but entertaining set of movies and TV shows about multiracial and miscegenating liberals who live in Tupperware, dress in pajamas, and fly around the galaxy preaching high-minded, hypocritical twaddle about tolerance and pluralism and diversity.

Even if we correct for the differences in the size of audiences, Trekkies accomplish more in the real world than an equal number of White nationalists.

Why is that? It has nothing to do with idealism. Both movements are highly idealistic. It has everything to do with animal vitality. For all its silliness, there is something about Star Trek that motivates human action and creativity—that taps into pure animal vitality—better than White nationalism.

Present-day White nationalism is conservative: backward looking, devitalized, decadent, and gloomy. Star Trek is progressive: forward-looking, optimistic, and hopeful. (Nauseatingly so.)

With this in mind, ask yourself who is more likely to preserve the White race: (1) the present White nationalist movement, or (2) a group of kooks who, taking Tolkien as their bible, decide that through eugenics, they are going to mold every successive generation of their progeny closer to the archetype of the elves: the fairest and wisest race?

The elves have it. Why? Because, kooky though it may be, creating a race of elves far better captures the imagination and mobilizes human vitality than dark predictions about the rising tide of color.

A vital White nationalist movement would be a utopian, progressivist, eugenicist mythical-cultural phenomenon. It would not be founded on empirical studies of how race influences culture. It would not propagate itself through academic conferences and policy studies. It would be founded on a grand culture-creating, race-shaping myth, propagated through art and religion, that enthralls and mobilizes a whole people. (No, I don’t have one handy.)

It would be less concerned about the race we were or the race we are than about the race we can become. It would not brood over whether the Finns or Armenians or Sicilians are White enough. It would not obsess over the odd Jew or Amerindian in someone’s ancestry, as long as he or she makes a net contribution to the coming race. (No, this is not special pleading on my part.) Besides, eventually, we will be able to just edit out undesirable genetic code, although I hope we will be more concerned with the perfections we can write in.

Most importantly, a vital White nationalist movement should require its leaders to lead by example, by marrying wisely and fruitfully. No, the movement should not and cannot turn away talented people who have the misfortune of being unwilling or unable to reproduce. But the movement should definitely have a hierarchy, and anyone who wants to rise to the top needs to do more than talk about a future for White children. He needs to contribute White children to the future.

This article is also posted at Counter-Currents.com with a section for readers’ comments.

Greg Johnson is the Editor-in-Chief of Counter-Currents Publishing, Ltd. He can be reached at editor@counter-currents.com.

Life at Fifty

I am now in my third year of writing articles for this site, and they have added up: today’s is my 50th (review them here). Much of my writing here (and at The Occidental Quarterly print journal) has addressed the way Hollywood film has subtly and not so subtly attacked Whites, particularly White males.

One phenomenon I’ve focused on is the role reversal between Black and White male characters. In the old days, White were usually the heroes; now it almost seems evenly matched, despite White males outnumbering Black males by about seven to one.

Of course I don’t believe this is “just happening.” Rather, I think it is a conscious strategy employed by the Jews who dominate Hollywood, yet another part of their relentless  culture of critique. I’ve argued that two African Americans — Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington — have been chosen to lead this image transformation. In other words, they have been used to create the mold for “The Numinous Negro.”

I should have been more on top of this development, but I wasn’t. Thus I was caught off guard when I read the excellent TOO articleHijacked on the Way to the Apocalypse by Penelope Thornton. In it, she discusses three new films and their White and non-White bearings.

First comes the Mayan doomsday story 2012, where Thornton observes that the U.S. President “elects to stay with the un-elect and disappears with the rest of us, under the USS John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier as it flattens what’s left of Washington DC. The image of the wise, altruistic Black president who, as a member of the elite could have saved himself but goes down with the ship is, one of the most striking images of the film.” (Unfortunately, Thornton identifies the actor as Morgan Freeman — “St. Morgan (aka America’s Spiritual Presence-in-Chief) for most of us” — but it is actually Danny Glover. Still, the visual message remains the same. The confusion is understandable: When Americans think numinosity, they think Morgan Freeman.)

She continues: “The political messages are interesting. We are led by a saintly Black president to our inevitable demise. The two structures that you see toppled completely are the U.S. Congress and St. Peter’s in Rome. The United States of America and the Catholic Church have got to go?”

Ah, the old Jewish desire for revenge on Rome again. Remember when Steven Spielberg indulged himself by having a Catholic Church steeple tumble over in War of the Worlds? (Scroll down to the 1:20 mark.) Freud had the same fantasy, too.

Thornton outlines the plot and players:

The movie is pitched to White people, with the main characters, played by John Cusack and Amanda Peet, and their family life providing most of the human element of the story. But the Whites are living in a world where Indian scientists discovered the problem, the Chinese have the technology to escape the disaster, and there’s a Black president of the United States. Although they have a central place in whatever emotional pull the story has, in the big picture, they are bit players.

Next comes the film Legion, in which “Mother Mary who is with child is a slutty waitress. . . . And Mary is a whore, of course.” Sounds like modern Hollywood.

Finally comes The Book of Eli, starring Denzel Washington.  Thornton describes his role in this movie as “a kind of Black Jesus Figure.”  Why not, Morgan Freeman has twice played a Black God, first in Bruce Almighty and then Evan Almighty. Naturally, the bad guys are all vicious White men. As Thornton writes, “besides having a Black Christ figure, the Whites in the movie are uniformly subhuman, savage, and beyond salvation. To a man they are absolutely repulsive. No subliminal programming here! Hollywood’s war on the White male continues unabated.”

Thornton sums up the message:

Denzel Washington wrote the movie with Joel Silver, a Jewish screenwriter and producer. Once again we are treated to a favorite theme: A noble Black man will lead us out of the darkness of the White man with the words of God’s Chosen People. Jews and Blacks working together to destroy evil White men in the interests of producing a morally uplifting civilization.

As luck would have it, the story I read immediately after Thornton’s was a Los Angeles Times article called A Hollywood Whitewash? In this story, Asian Americans complain about Whites being cast as Asians in two of this year’s big films. Noah Ringer, for example, plays Asian martial arts savant Aang in The Last Airbender.

Then there’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The L.A. Times notes that “None of its principal cast members are of Iranian, Middle Eastern or Muslim descent. And playing Dastan, the hero and titular heir to the Persian throne in the $200-million tent-pole film, is none other than Hancock Park’s own Swedish-Jewish-American prince, Jake Gyllenhaal.” 

That one’s got to gall Arabs and Persians/Iranians as well. Gyllenhaal’s mother is Ashkenazi Jewish, so according to Jewish law, he is Jewish. Given the Persian conquest of Jewish tribes over two thousand years ago, this is a nice little piece of cinematic revenge.

Asian Americans have been most active in challenging how they (and Asians) are portrayed. This issue gained exposure twenty years ago when the Madam Butterfly-derived Miss Saigon opened with White actors playing Asian roles. As Wikipedia tells us:

Originally, Pryce and Burns, white actors playing Eurasian/Asian characters, wore eye prostheses and bronzing cream to make themselves look more Asian, which outraged some who drew comparisons to a “minstrel show.”

In the London production of Miss Saigon, Lea Salonga originally starred as Kim, with Jonathan Pryce as the Engineer. When the production transferred from London to New York City, the Actors’ Equity Association (AEA) refused to allow Pryce, a white actor, to recreate the role of the Eurasian pimp in America. As Alan Eisenberg, executive secretary of Actors’ Equity explained, “The casting of a Caucasian actor made up to appear Asian is an affront to the Asian community. The casting choice is especially disturbing when the casting of an Asian actor, in the role, would be an important and significant opportunity to break the usual pattern of casting Asians in minor roles.”

Despite being a far smaller and historically newer minority group in American than Blacks, Asian Americans have constructed a solid apparatus for critiquing images of Asians and Asian Americans. It is largely university-based and features such pioneers as Elaine Kim and Ronald Takaki. The L.A. Times article was over half a page long and there was no shortage of Asian American activists and groups to quote from. Can you name any such White activist groups that would get quoted defending White interests?

I suspect many college students still get exposed to the ritual accounts of endless Asian victimhood at the hands of racist Whites. The documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin? probably still gets screenings on college campuses around the country. Then there is the critique of the feminization of Asian peoples, led by eroticization of Asian women. This can be seen in the films Slaying the Dragonand Picturing Oriental Girls: A (Re)Educational Videotape.

Quite frankly, I sympathize with Asian Americans and their efforts to exercise a greater degree of control over how they are (mis)portrayed. Given the power and pervasiveness of modern media, all too often perception IS reality. In other words, images have consequences. And if your image if bad, your group is likely to suffer the consequences.

I am not aware of any specifically White groups that defend the image of Whites in our media — and get media exposure. David Duke, Michael Hoffmann, and your humble scribe have striven to raise the consciousness of Whites about the very deliberate campaign to paint us as evil racists. But of course we get only the exposure we ourselves generate.

Gone are the days when mainstream White Christian groups such as the Legion of Decency or the Breen Office could cow the Hollywood moguls by threatening boycotts. Today, William Donohue, the head of the Catholic League for Civil and Religious Liberties, does some work toward defending the image of Catholics, but this is minor and only implicitly White.

I won’t make a call for the White masses to rally to their own defense because I know that will not happen under current conditions. Far too many Whites have internalized the images our “hostile elite” has created for them. This is unfortunate, for they are in grave danger indeed.

At best, the danger is one of White dispossession and replacement with non-Whites. This is happening apace and is nearing the point of no return. At worst, Whites may face persecution and massacre on a scale similar to that seen in Russia and Eastern Europe when Jews became a hostile elite there. This is a theme I’ve emphasized and written about unambiguously, so I’m reluctant to repeat myself. But our survival demands it.

As luck would have it, the TOO blog for June 21 has Kevin MacDonald writing on this threat as explicitly as he ever has. Called Jews as a hostile elite—again, it begins with a quote from VDARE.com’s founder Peter Brimelow: “Our political class may live in a fantasy world, but the motive for its immigration enthusiasm is all too real: a relentless hatred of the historic American nation.”

MacDonald then argues:

It really wouldn’t matter much that Jews have become an elite except for this relentless hatred and loathing. After all, all societies have elites. What is toxic is that such a substantial portion of our elite—especially that part of the elite that is ensconced in the media, the financial, and the academic world — hates (loathes, despises)  the traditional people and culture they rule over.

We should never forget what happened when Jews were a hostile elite in the USSR. The loathing and contempt for the traditional people and culture of Russia was a major factor in the avid Jewish participation in the greatest crimes of the 20th century.

So the conclusion is that the Jews … deposed the WASP elite by appealing to their guilt proneness to the point that the new Jewish hostile elite has carte blanche to displace them by importing a new people (opposition would be “racist”) . . . [T]he loss for the traditional people of America is incalculable. And given what happened in the USSR, White people should be very afraid of what the future may hold.

Since this is my 50th column, I’ll address the venue in which I’ve most consistently explored this Jewish hatred of European Americans: Hollywood film. Much of this writing appears in the print journal The Occidental Quarterly. (See here, here,here, and here, for example.)

In essence, the danger is simple to explain. Let’s start with a lie commonly propagated in American universities today. A professor begins a course by writing on the board “Power + Prejudice = Racism.” He then asserts that only White men have such power and prejudice, so racism is a White male problem, the unstated solution to which is eradication of White males.

The more accurate application of this formula would be this:

“Jewish Power + Hostility = Displacement of Whites”

Or, possibly:

“Jewish Power + Hatred = Eradication of Whites”

Limiting myself to Hollywood, this power is easily proved. For instance, take this August 1996 cover story from the Jewish magazine Moment:

What I have addressed in my writing is the “So What?” in this equation. Just like Asian Americans do not control the images created about them, and consequently have to deal with negative and harmful imagery, we Whites too have lost the power to control images of ourselves. This has allowed our enemies to destroy our self confidence, even to trigger altruistic punishment among Whites.

Further, it teaches non-Whites that they have been horribly victimized by Whites and have a moral right to exact revenge. Again, I’ve written about example after example of this. The narrative for Black revenge is already firmly in place, so now Hollywood has moved on to the fast-growing Hispanic population. See my“Machete”: A new front in the war on Whites for how this is being treated cinematically.

I can’t reverse this trend. At best, I can only provide these analyses with the hope that discerning readers will learn how to read the scripted racial codes appearing in so many movies. Once able to decipher them, the effect should be far less potent. I must assume non-Whites will continue to be influenced by the themes of racial revenge, however.

This is not a happy way to celebrate my fiftieth. But of course there is no reason to celebrate. We Whites have allowed this racial assault to go on for far too long. And now the bill is about to come due.

Edmund Connelly (email him) is a freelance writer, academic, and expert on the cinema arts. He has previously written for The Occidental Quarterly.