Two weeks ago, I showed that deceiving non-Jews was normative behavior for the Jewish community historically. As I wrote, “illegal activities involving deception and deceit are tolerated within the Jewish community. . . . The only ethical principle involved here is the age old ‘Is it good for the Jews?’”

I focused on financial crimes because they have been in the news for so long now and have involved Jews to a degree that most astute people can’t miss. Of course no human group is entirely free of deception or financial misdeeds but, as I argued, there seems to be a greater likelihood of financial crime among Jews (again, see here for an academic treatment that tiptoes around the issue). More importantly, I continued, Jewish white collar criminals do not face censure within their own communities.” For instance Moshe Rosenberg, an Orthodox rabbi, lamented that “Unfortunately, unethical and even illegal behavior too often does not face serious censure in our communities.”

From financial fraud and manipulation, I moved on to literary deceit, pointing to specific instances of Jewish deception by some of the most esteemed authors of our time. I did this because I hoped to show that it is not merely the desire for money that motivates Jewish deception. Rather, as I seek to illustrate, deceit is a normative aspect of Jewish culture. That is, it is not censured as it commonly is among, say, Christians. Instead, it is sanctioned as long as it is directed toward outgroups.

Today I would like to focus on another area in which American Jews have attempted to hoodwink their fellow Americans into believing that Jews have made more sacrifices than in fact they have — military bravery and sacrifice.

Valor on the battlefield and recognition of that valor are central to many cultures, including most Western cultures. As our last “Good War,” World War II occupies an important place not only in American history but in American mythology as well. In that war, the story goes, we reluctantly set out to smite forces of pure evil that threatened the entire world, from the Pacific theater to Europe.

Perhaps more remarkable is the fact that the question of Jewish valor in that war still makes the headlines. For instance, during the Clinton Administration, Larry Lawrence, U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland, died and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

One of America’s richest men, Lawrence owned the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego, where his friend President Bill Clinton vacationed. Lawrence’s claim to the right to be buried in Arlington hinged on his assertion that he had had served in the Merchant Marine during WWII and had been injured. In fact, he had avoided the draft and never served.

The U.S. Army is in charge of Arlington Cemetery, so Army personnel carefully checked Lawrence’s story but found nothing to support it. Richard Holbrooke, who also happens to be Jewish, was Assistant Secretary of State at the time and appealed to the White House on Lawrence’s behalf. His request was granted, and Clinton presided over the 1996 burial.

As the New York Times reported, however, “Confronted with mounting evidence that M. Larry Lawrence, the late Ambassador to Switzerland, had fabricated a heroic World War II record, his widow decided today to have his remains exhumed from Arlington National Cemetery, where he was granted burial under an unusual waiver.”

Another Jewish WWII soldier, Sgt. David Rubitsky, claims to have accomplished superhuman feats. He was serving in New Guinea in 1942 when the Japanese attacked. As Joseph Farah reported in 2001:

Rubitsky watched the Japanese soldiers move small artillery pieces, heavy machine guns, mortars and anti-aircraft armaments into the area. He watched as more and more soldiers gathered. Anticipating a surprise attack by the Japanese on his 2nd Battalion, Rubitsky decided to lead his own surprise attack.

He opened fire. As Japanese soldiers advanced toward his bunker, Rubitsky used every weapon in his arsenal for nine grueling hours of intense fighting. He alternated between firing his .30-caliber water-cooled machine gun with 3,000 rounds of ammunition, a Browning automatic rifle with close to 600 rounds, his M-1 rifle, a pistol and tossing some of his 35 hand grenades.

Rubitsky spent a total of 21 hours in the bunker — including nine under heavy siege. The Japanese army attacked from three different directions – the north, south and west. . . . When Lt. Col. Herbert Smith came up to the bunker the next day, he estimated that Rubitsky had single-handedly killed 500 to 600 Japanese soldiers, thereby saving his own battalion from being decimated in a surprise attack.

Rubitsky made strenuous efforts to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor but insists it was denied because of anti-Semitism. The Anti-Defamation League initially aided Rubitsky’s campaign, as did the media generally. For example, as one researcher noted, “Newspaper and magazine articles, with references to ‘anti-Semitism’ [related to the Rubitsky campaign], appeared in such prestige publications as TIME and the New York Times.”

This researcher then added that “Because of the lobbying efforts of the ADL, including a resolution signed by 92 members of Congress, in 1987 the U.S. Army undertook a two-year review of David Rubitsky’s story. On December 8, 1989, after obtaining evidence from forensic specialists and taking statements from Rubitsky and 20 others who served alongside him, the U.S. Army concluded that Rubitsky’s claim was unfounded.”

To date, it is not known if Hollywood plans a bio-pic of Sgt. David Rubitsky.

As you can see, there are varying levels of spin used in these accounts. Of note is the support given by the (heavily Jewish) media and by Jewish activist organizations to validate these accounts. They create a narrative where Jews have allegedly performed valiantly, yet anti-Semitism, blatant or otherwise, has once again dogged these deserving Jews.

Steven Spielberg has contributed to this perception. In his film Saving Private Ryan, for instance, from the very beginning he visually insinuates that Jewish G.I.s made sacrifices comparable to that of their non-Jewish fellow soldiers. As the now-aged Mr. Ryan walks into the American cemetery in Normandy, his all-White family trailing him, director Spielberg fills the screen with a white cross, followed immediately by a grave with a Star of David (see the 1:50 mark on this YouTube outtake). That is a rather transparent bias when we next observe Ryan walking among a sea of Crosses over the graves of dead non-Jews. Spielberg repeats the scene at the film’s close (0:25 and 1:37 from this clip).

A Spielbergian View of the American Cemetery at Coleville-sur-Mer, Normandy

This brings to mind the story of former Congressman and now White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Unlike, say, Larry Lawrence, who did not serve during WWII, Emanuel did serve his country during the first Gulf War — as an Israeli soldier in Israel. In his book Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire: Bankers, Zionists and Militants, scholar James Petras notes that “less than 2/10 of one percent (0.2 percent) of the US soldiers in Iraq were Jewish and probably very few of those were on the front lines. More young American Jews volunteer to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces.” Of course this recalls Pat Buchanan’s 1990 claim that should America prosecute the first war on Iraq in favor of Israeli interests, the fighting would be done by kids “with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales, and Leroy Brown.”

In any case, let me return to my central argument that deception is central to Jewish behavior — and it is not something they are ashamed of. As evidence of this, look at one of the founding myths Jews have of themselves, the biblical story of Jacob and Esau:

And the Lord said unto Rebecca, “Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one people shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger.”  And when her days to be delivered were fulfilled…the first came out all red, all over like a hairy garment; and they called his name Esau.  And after that came his brother out, and his hand took ahold of Esau’s heel; and his name was called Jacob. (Gen. 25:23-26)

Historian Albert Lindemann unpacks the meaning of this story in Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews:

Indeed, the division between Jew and Gentile goes to the very origins and structures of western civilization. It predates the advent of Christianity and may be found in the earliest texts of the Old Testament . . . In those texts of the Hebrew Bible the mythical origins of the division between Jews and others are described, and a thought-provoking explanation for the antagonism of the two groups is offered. The account in Genesis of Esau and Jacob, twin brothers born to Rebecca and Isaac, has evoked a seemingly endless cycle of interpretations. Already in the earliest Jewish commentaries on the text in Genesis one encounters not only the rich layers of meaning but also the elusiveness, the profound ambiguity in the relationship between Jew (in archetype, Jacob) and Gentile (in archetype, Esau).

What is the archetype of the Jew in the Jews’ own founding myth? It is that of the liar or trickster. Recall what happened in Genesis 27:5-45. Nearing death, the elderly Isaac sent Esau out to trap game in order to prepare a meal appropriate to the blessing Isaac was to bestow upon his first son. With Rebecca’s participation, Jacob deceived his father into believing that he was in fact Esau. Numerous times Isaac suspected a ruse, finally asking, “Are you really my son Esau?” “I am,” Jacob lied. Jacob was ultimately successful in deceiving his father and received his blessing.

This passage is a stark instance in which we see one origin for the still-common Jewish belief that others (goyim) are to serve them. “Let peoples serve you, and nations bow down to you. Be lord over your brothers.”

Also of note is Isaac’s ambivalent blessing to his deceived son Esau: “Behold, away from the fatness of the earth shall your dwelling be, and away from the dew of heaven on high. By your sword you shall live, but your brother you shall serve.” About the only hopeful note comes when Isaac concludes: “But when you break loose you shall break his [Jacob’s] yoke from your neck.”

If one prefers to put a positive spin on the value of deceit, turn to Yuri Slezkine’s exposition of the Mercurian archetype in his book The Jewish Century. He explains that the Mercurians, including Jews, “possess a quality that the Greeks called metis, or ‘cunning intelligence.’” Thus Jews, as descendants of “tricksters,” are proud to possess such a trait, one that non-Jews (“Apollonians” in Slezkine’s dualism) deplore. Host cultures see Jews and other Mercurians as “devious, acquisitive, greedy, crafty, pushy, and crude.” Sounds familiar.

The bottom line is that non-Jews need to be realistic about this Jewish trait and not entertain notions that Jews can be shamed out of such belief and behavior. For example, the biblical story of Esther, which I related last week, captures Jewish pride in defeating their non-Jewish enemies by using deception. As with other Jewish biblical stories, Esther begins with deception and ends with the Israelites slaughtering their enemies and achieving high status and power.

Again, these messages appear repeatedly in the Old Testament. In the Book of Genesis, for example, God promises his Chosen People: “May God give you of the dew of heaven, and of the fatness of the earth, and plenty of grain and wine. Let peoples serve you, and nations bow down to you.” Later, in Deuteronomy 6:10–11, God promises to give great and goodly cities “which you did not build, and houses full of all good things, which you did not fill, and cisterns hewn out, which you did not hew, and vineyards and olive trees, which you did not plant.“

In Joshua 24:12–13, God tells the Jews: “I gave you a land on which you had not labored, and cities which you had not built, and you dwell therein; you eat the fruit of vineyards and oliveyards which you did not plant.”

How do you think they accomplished this? People do not simply hand over their cities to invaders. If in fact God did intervene and perform a miracle, well, that’s one thing. Still, it suggests something we keep seeing throughout history — Jews becoming a dominant elite over native populations.

I hope readers will accept that part of this success indeed stems from Jewish use of deception, a practice that is not going to go away. In closing, I’ll turn to Canadian poet David Solway, who mockingly wrote recently, “We Jews are a sly and surreptitious people. It pains me to admit this, but candor compels.” But here, of course, Solway is using deception, for in fact he is simply telling the truth. Do not be fooled by the trickster’s resort to mockery to veil the truth.

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

It has been suggested that we live in an era of postmodern moral panics — bouts of moral horror directed, inter alia, at contraventions of elite values related to race, racism, and ethnic and gender identity politics. Kenneth Thompson has pointed out the “increasing rapidity in the succession of moral panics” and “the all-pervasive quality of panics that distinguish the current era.” Amplifying and sensationalizing collective anxieties, moral panics become a vehicle for the reassertion of consensual societal values and moral boundaries in a de-traditionalized cultural climate — a climate characterized by the politics of spectacle and simulation, “manufactured uncertainties,” mediatized crises and unprecedented mass migrations of non-Europeans.

In the course of its historical evolution, as Ingolfur Blühdorn has pointed out, democracy seems to be moving away from the theoretical ideal of rule of the people by the people. Throughout the West, mainstream political parties struggle to hold back the tide of growing disillusionment of electorates, reflecting a transnational, post-democratic exhaustion of the emancipatory-progressive project, accompanied by a shift to the politics of simulation.

Postmodernism has, since its inception in the 1960s, been associated with the assumption of a breakdown of the distinction between fact and fiction and the denial of an extra-linguistic reality. The changed conditions of the 1980s, most visible in the debates about race, gender and creed, the practice of multiculturalism, and the fervor of political correctness, have — according to Gerhard Hoffmann and Alfred Hornung — brought about a form of “emancipatory postmodernism,” intensifying the urgency of moral conduct. Moral panic about racism has sometimes been routinized and institutionalized into ongoing, long-lasting campaigns in an attempt to reshape the entire normative, attitudinal, and axiological landscape, leading to the construction of an entirely euphemistic, media-saturated society, expurgated of every sort of “evil.” The final outcome is a hackneyed world of surfaces ,— an era marked by sanitization of language, “hate crime” laws, a post-democratic cult of minorities, and mainstream “anti-Whiteism.”

The Media: Ritualized Manufacture of Moral Virtue

As Nick Couldry points out, ever since information and communication technologies such as television and computers were domesticated – that is, “inserted into lasting positions within everyday routines” – the media have taken their place “alongside other domestic technologies such as central heating systems and the car … the dynamics of family life, education, etc.” Media discourses tend to be highly ritualized, ideological, and fundamentally moral. As Simon Cottle observes, the politics of race and racism have often been refracted and publicly enacted “in dramatic, ritualized and performative ways.”

Performing Anti-Racism

According to Roger Silverstone, the world’s media are “an increasingly significant site for the construction of a moral order.” The mass media are capable of manufacturing consent, enacting and performing conflicts as well as reporting and representing them. Media representations, thus, are not politically innocent or outside the action; the daily infusion of journalism — delivered 24/7 into the fabric of everyday existence via real-time modes of communication — often define the situation influencing public behavior, thus often becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. Simon Cottle observes that “the media rarely contribute to an area of democratic engagement and public deliberation but to a distorted realm of communication in which propaganda and dominant views and values are disseminated largely unopposed.” Media representations do not simply ”reflect” society but can play an active part in constituting what the nature of that society is and in defining what its future may be. As John Fiske notes in his article “Radical shopping in Los Angeles: race, media and the sphere of consumption”:

The term media event is an indication that in a postmodern world we can no longer rely on a stable relationship or clear distinction between a ‘real’ event and its mediated representation. Consequently, we can no longer work with the idea that the ‘real’ is more important, significant, or even ‘true’ than the representation. A media event, then, is not a mere representation of what happened, but it has its own reality, which gathers up into itself the reality of the event that may or may not have preceded it.

The social antagonism at the heart of “media events” and their captivating, sometimes mesmerizing fascination for audiences seem to suggest that media spectacle is becoming one of the organizing principles of the economy, polity, society and everyday life. As Fareed Zakaria observes, the immediacy of the images and the intensity of the twenty-four-hour news cycle combine to produce constant hyperbole: ”Every weather disturbance is ‘the storm of the century.’ Every bomb that explodes is BREAKING NEWS.”

Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1893

The Media: Constructing an “Us versus Them” Climate of Fear

Part of the moral panic induced by the media is that issues are represented as extremes of Good and Evil. Autonomous thought is decapitated by being reduced to a Schmittian concept of the political, gravitating towards friend-enemy dichotomies. As Jean Baudrillard observed, the world of the media is “sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium,” to “radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis.”

Professor Kevin MacDonald has drawn attention to Jewish aggressiveness,psychological intensity and powerful influence in the media. These qualities and traits — lubricated with the “Puritan moral intensity” of previously dominantintellectual elites in America — may well have inspired or set off a chain reaction leaving a lasting mark on the style and noise level of journalism; e.g. in the widespread journalistic righteousness and hectic aggressiveness, the “prophetic journalism” of passion, polemic, and moral opinion — sometimes resembling the rule-bound sanctimony of the Pharisees. As Doug Underwood has noted:

Many elements of the prophetic tradition — the spirit of righteousness, the indignant moralism, the effort to maintain purity of values, the call for spiritual and ethical renewal, the fierce sense of corruption abounding everywhere — are as typically found in today’s best investigative reporters or crusading editors as they were in the prophetic voices who tried to keep alive Jewish faith and morality during the Israelite empire and the Jewish exile in Babylon. The image of the investigative reporter as the heir of the prophetic tradition is exemplified by I. F. Stone, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, who spent almost twenty years mining federal government documents for examples of waste and duplicity that he published in his widely circulated newsletter. Described as a ‘cheerfully angry man’, Stone impressed people with his ‘permanent sense of outrage’, as the Washington Post reporter Peter Osnos put it.

Underwood describes the way in which “the prophets of the Bible loom behind the writing that today we would call advocacy or adversarial journalism.” Although the religious overtones may not always be evident in contemporary journalism, the prophecy of moral indignation rings loudly. According to Underwood, the elements of Jewish prophetic expression are most clearly evident in the “journalism of outrage,” as modern investigative journalism has been described. This strong tendency to claim the moral high ground has been one of the key features of Jewish intellectual and political movements, and a hallmark of moral panic:

[Moral panic] is not about pluralism but about virtue. It is not about doing the right thing, but doing the righteous thing. It is not about public policy, but about setting affairs in order. It is about cleansing, rectification. It is about holy war.

The intense ingroup morality of activism makes the population susceptible to vigilant campaigns, endless processes of excommunication and never-ending cycles of censorship initiatives from political claims-makers, moral entrepreneurs and inquisition-style agencies of indoctrination and intimidation. Moral crusades and ‘stigma contests’ are continually launched by the use of highly emotive and rhetorical language, reflecting, as John Fekete observes, “shifting or collapsing boundaries in the meanings, values, codes, and institutions that make up our cultural world.”

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In an age of uncertainty, as W. Hollway and T. Jefferson emphasize, “discourses that appear to promise a resolution to ambivalence by producing identifiable victims and blameable villains are likely to figure prominently in the State’s ceaseless attempts to impose social order.” Elite-manufactured panics can help to divert attention from deepening crises — as a response to an “exhaustion” of public consent to a crumbling civilization. While the impact of more short-term panics is usually restricted to reaffirming moral boundaries, a series of panics focused on the same threat over a long period of time can bring about institutional change in the criminal justice system, the education system, politics, etc. The consequences of the contemporary “moral administration” of the public sphere is political correctness, orthodoxy and decorum. As John Fekete points out: “Panic thinking makes panic politics, and panic politics have panic implementation.”

Beginning in January 1989, Professor J. P. Rushton was exposed to years of abuse, and to the threat of job loss and even criminal incarceration after reading a paper at a science symposium in San Francisco: According to John Fekete, Rushton examined social-science data related to social behavior, physical characteristics, and numerous other traits, and concluded that the data clustered in such a way that three different racial groups — Negroids, Caucasoids, and Mongoloids — could be distinguished. He did not claim that his hypotheses about the evolution of races could predict individual variation or that they can serve as the basis for any social, legal, or political policies that would single out members of a racial group for discriminatory treatment. Nevertheless,

on February 2, 1989, David Peterson, former premier of Ontario, denounced Rushton’s work as ‘offensive to the way Ontario thinks’ and demanded that he be fired.  Rushton was pilloried in the press, and linked by metaphor with the Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Anti-Christ. A month later, the Ontario Provincial Police launched a six-month investigation, questioning him and his colleagues, to determine whether he had violated the Criminal Code by promoting “hatred.”  The Attorney General of Ontario decided that his scholarship was incompetent but not criminal.[emphasis in original]

Rushton’s department ordered that he be removed from direct contact with students, and lecture only by videotape, and that students be permitted to watch the tape only individually, under supervision at a location in the psychology department.

Similar punitive trends and ostracism of non-conforming belief or behavior have also been observed in the campaign against Kevin MacDonald by the $PLC. As Professor MacDonald reports:

Someone not connected to CSULB sent an email to the entire Psychology Department—except me—asking why they allowed an“anti-Semite” to teach there. The result was an uproar, with heated exchanges on the faculty email list, a departmental meeting on what to do about me and my work, and intense meetings of the departmental governing committee. Cold shoulders, forced smiles and hostile stares became a reality. Going into my office to teach my classes and attend committee meetings became an ordeal.

Prof. MacDonald has been listed as one of the “13 worst people in America” and “The scariest academic”. Obviously, the guiding principle of moral panic is: guilty if accused. As Prof. Fekete points out, a zero tolerance strategy is employed “to automate the implementation of its own program”:

Zero tolerance is about enforcement. Often, its proponents pretend to be unaware of the born-again authoritarianism that is concealed behind the moralistic subject matter of zero tolerance.  They speak virtue, but they prepare to do vice.  Zero tolerance is the dark side of utopian absolutism; it is tyranny militant, even if it views itself only in the mirror of its intentions, and not pragmatically, in the mirror of its actions and their consequences.

A prime example of moral panic is the Matthew Shepard case which led to years of moral angst in the media and pressure by activist groups that ultimately resulted in the passage of expanded “Hate Crime” laws. Numerous songs have been written about the murder, as well as three narrative movies and a documentary. Simon Cottle reports that the Stephen Lawrence case in Britain — principally played out and enacted in the media — led to a “raft of wide-ranging, and consequential, legislative reforms … aimed at, inter alia, changing policing practices, increasing ethnic minority recruitment and instituting social reforms designed to tackle ‘institutional racism’ … within police services as well as over 44.000 separate public institutions throughout British society.”

The ”self-immunizing techniques” used by anti-racist elites and pro-immigration activists in their point-blank refusal of any criticism of the ongoing suicidal project, are often rooted in the stereotypically retold events of World War II, from whose ashes and ruins the gospel of liberal immigration policy emerged – preached, wrapped and marketed as moral penance. In both Europe and America the Holocaust can be seen as a central icon of victimology (often accompanied by a correspondingly antagonistic demonology) and a powerful weapon of the forces advocating — more or less implicitly — the displacement of European-derived peoples.

In accordance with this dualistic Good-versus-Evil Weltanschauung, Hitler, racists and the Holocaust become useful secular mental images of Satan, demons and hell. The world is thus perceived as a stage for a mythic “struggle between two forces … a manifestation of good and evil locked in an archetypal battle that must be re-fought and re-won.” In a society gradually becoming completely operational, euphemistic and “hyperreal,” the symbolic duality of Good and Evil undergoes a fundamental mutation: Good becomes a utilitarian value judgement.

Exorcising Negativity and Manufacturing Positivity

Steve Macek reminds us of the fact that “the deviant, threatening, or troubling objects of a panic are social constructions, produced by particular social agents in particular contexts for specific purposes.” Quite often, the panic is aimed at eradicating from public discourse negative portrayals of Blacks or other groups favored by the postmodern elites. On July 8, 1996, the school board in Lindale,Texas, voted to ban thirty-two books on an advanced placement (AP) reading list because a trustee said the books conflicted with the values of the community. Prominent among the titles banned by the Lindale board was Huckleberry Finn due to the fact that some of the book’s characters use the racial epithets common to the Mississippi Valley thirty years before Emancipation.

This taste for banning all expressions of “heresy” and negativity is widespread. As noted in Banned in the USA,

In July 1996, Superintendent Dr. Claire Brown, Jr., told eighty people at a school board meeting that Huckleberry Finn would be dropped from the required reading list at Upper Dublin (Pennsylvania) High School.  Black parents and students had protested the book because the frequent use of the word “nigger” made black children uncomfortable. In February 1997, the Reverend Charles Sims and about twenty members of the African American community in Columbus, Indiana, attended a school board meeting to protest the use of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer in the local high school’s classrooms. Sims said exposing African American children to the books was “degrading, insensitive, and oppressive.”

In January 1998, the Pennsylvania NAACP added its voice to the debate over Huckleberry Finn by passing a resolution calling on school districts to remove the book from required reading lists, but not school or public libraries, because of its offensive racial language. The NAACP said it would target school districts that insist on having the book read aloud to students.

Baudrillard warned against this kind of “uninterrupted production of positivity” in which only positive statements are allowed: “Whereas negativity engenders crisis and critique, hyperbolic positivity for its part engenders catastrophe, for it is incapable of distilling crisis and criticism in homeopathic doses. Any structure that hunts down, expels or exorcizes its negative elements risks a catastrophe,” says Baudrillard. The utopia of Human Rights “begins in enthusiasm, but when the system truly arrives at the point of the universal, to the point of saturation, it produces a terrible reversion, and all the accidents we’re seeing now, in the form of virulence, which has in a way replaced historical violence.”

Managing Political Discourse: Toward the Soft-Totalitarian State

Baudrillard describes the transpolitical as “the passage from growth to excrescence … from organic equilibria to cancerous metastases.” The paradoxical outcome of the late-modern “trans-political” situation — in which everything becomes political as the political domain loses its boundaries and distinctness — is a depoliticization of society. This is sometimes called the third transformation of democracy (the second triggered the transition from direct city-state democracy to modern, representative nation-state democracy) — a move towards presidentialized leader democracy, in which electorates become merely “re-active” in top-down political processes.

These top-down processes define what the issues are and the limits of legitimate debate. Colin Crouch emphasizes that Western societies “are increasingly moving towards the post-democratic pole” as politics and government “are increasingly slipping back into the control of privileged elites in the manner characteristic of pre-democratic times”:

[In post-democracy] public electoral debate is a tightly controlled spectacle, managed by rival teams of professional experts in the techniques of persuasion, and considering a small range of issues selected by those teams. The mass of citizens plays a passive, quiescent, even apathetic part, responding only to the signals given them. Behind this spectacle of the electoral game, politics is really shaped in private by interaction between elected governments and elites.

The result is that many of the most important issues facing Western countries, such as the wisdom and fairness of massive non-White immigration, are never debated by political candidates or discussed in the mainstream media in a balanced, intellectually honest, rational and informed manner.

Kevin MacDonald has emphasized the genesis of “soft totalitarian” regimes, i.e. regimes “maintained less by brute force than by an unrelenting, enormously sophisticated, and massively effective campaign to contain political and cultural activity within very narrow boundaries.”

The regime is maintained by a consensus that has become part of the furniture of life, repeated endlessly in the major media and reassuringly affirmed by wise-looking professors at prestigious universities. To dissent from this consensus removes one from the mainstream and stigmatizes one as immoral and quite possibly suffering from a psychiatric disorder. … [D]emocracy is identified not with the power of the people to pursue their perceived interests. Rather, government is to be the province of morally and intellectually superior elites who have no commitment to the ethnic interests of the European majority; and in an Orwellian turn, democracy is defined as guaranteeing that majorities will not resist the expansion of power of minorities even if that means a decline in their own power.

The aim of this totalitarian tendency, says Zygmunt Bauman, “is not so much to stop individuals from thinking —  since that would be impossible even by the most fanatical of standards; but to make that thinking impotent, irrelevant and of no consequence for the success or failure of power.” Giorgio Agamben has noted that “the declaration of the state of exception has gradually been replaced by an unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government.” Global risks produce authoritarian “failed states” — even in the West, as the state structure in what Ulrich Beck has termed “world risk society” bear signs of post-democratic authoritarianism. In the 1990s, Heribert Prantl observed a “new policy of a strong state”:

Politics is in the process of developing a new state. In the security state of the year 2000, the point will no longer be to prosecute crimes and prevent concrete dangers, but instead to avoid even conceivable risks.  In this state, therefore, every individual citizen will be viewed and treated as a risk factor.  Such a state, which conceives of itself as a risk-avoidance organization, will permit fewer and fewer freedoms to the people. … The people in such a state will at first believe they are in a well-patrolled holiday resort, and will not notice until it is too late that this is a posh prison.

As Beck points out, risk society is a catastrophic society —  characterized by a stream of emergencies — in which fear “determines the attitude towards life”:

Security is displacing freedom and equality from the highest position on the scale of values. The result is a tightening of laws, a seemingly rational ‘totalitarianism of defence against threats’.  The ‘fear business’ will profit from the general loss of nerve.  The suspicious and suspect citizen must be grateful when he is scanned, photographed, searched and interrogated ‘for his own safety’. Security is becoming a profitable public and private sector consumer good like water and electricity.

The Media: Producing Generalized Fear and Anxiety

Brian Massumi has emphasized low-level fear — “naturalized fear … the discomfiting affective Muzak” — as the organizing concept or trademark of contemporary America.  The “cancer of fear has taken over,” according to William Upski Wimsatt: “We have government by fear. We have a fear economy. We have a landscape of fear. We have a mass media that sells it.” As the columnist Martin Jacques, noted in The Guardian over a decade ago:

Far from living in less moral times, we now live in a more demanding moral climate. When I was a boy in the fifties, child abuse, the sexual division of labour, violence against women, paedophilia and environmental awareness, to name but a few, were undiscussed and largely unrecognised. Our moral repertoire has expanded enormously.

What we are dealing with in the everyday, mediatized techno-cinema world is the “game of affect-by-design”, or, in Jamie “Skye” Bianco’s words, reality-by-design: “Technoscience and new mediated digital ecologies make futures without loyalty to any past(s), all while charging themselves on the affects of histories.”

The shaping of perception becomes a shaping of reality. As Prof. Fekete observes, panic shapes “an anxiety-ridden world of meanings and values. …Anxiety information today travels at electronic speeds —  what Marshall McLuhan once called the speed of angels —  and creates instantaneous communication and community. A community of electronic panic: our special gift to the millennium.” As summarized by Elayne Rapping, the general mass media message usually fits into a ritualized, formulaic panic design:

The world is out of control; we are at the mercy of irrational forces, of deranged, sex- and drug-crazed criminals, of heroes and leaders who are degenerate, corrupt, and powerless against their own inner demons and outer temptations — Call the police!

Next: Signs of the Times, Part II: Post-Democracy in the Age of Simulation

E. R. E. Knutsson (email him) is a freelance writer.

No  word  in  the  modern  Western   parlance  is  as scary as the word   ‘race.’   It is avoided like the plague by contemporary opinion makers, except when they gleefully use its verbal  derivative “racist” against right-wingers,  White nationalists, forever looming ‘neo-Nazis’ and their proverbial  bed fellows ‘anti-Semites.’In modern science, let alone in the social sciences, the word and the concept of race is denounced as a social construct, not being admitted as biological reality, despite overwhelming evidence that race is not just skin deep and that different races world-wide show marked differences in  behavior, cultural achievements, and in IQ. As professor Daniel A. Beach recently noted: “Race pervades a great deal of social and interpersonal issues with which we must contend, yet we have no effective way of talking about it.”

Unlike their colleagues in the social sciences, many Western biologists and geneticists are well aware of differences among races, yet they prefer to resort to esoteric verbiage and expressions, such as “mapping the genome,” or “different gene pools” or “different haplotypes,” when doing research on the tricky subject of race.

Prior to the early 20th century the words ‘race’ and ‘racist’ were rarely used in the English, French, or German languages in Europe. Everybody knew which race he belonged to.  The etymology of the word ‘race’ is still unclear, although most likely it derives from the old Latin word ‘radix,’ meaning roots, or the German ‘reiza, meaning family lineage. Its significance became ideologically loaded only in the late 1920s. Over the last 50 years, it has undergone a total semantic distortion. Indeed, if one were to follow the logic and discourse of professional antiracists, peoples of European ancestry must be all certified racists. Why? Because it is still an unwritten rule that White males and females all over the West mate and date solely within their own race.

European “Gestalt”: In Quest of Order and Form

The concept of eugenics is now associated with National Socialism and has come to be understood among the educated classes as the epitome of evil. In fact, however, eugenic measures were a standard family practice from time immemorial among European tribes. Undoubtedly, each family had to be prolific with a multitude of children able to work on the land or to guard the household. This meant allowing and frequently facilitating the death of children who were sickly or had disabilities.

Until recently in the European countryside when a young girl and boy were about to start dating, parents first inquired about whether their respective fathers or mothers were alcoholics, whether somebody in their family tree had some serious illness, such as diabetes, tuberculosis, or some nervous disorder — or even inborn proclivity to criminal behavior. A semi-literate, yet intelligent European peasant or farmer did not have to be versed in sociobiology or have a degree in molecular biology in order to realize that hereditary diseases of the unfortunate partner could easily be transmitted to the newborns, with deadly social consequences for the entire family.

In France it is still common to hear the expression “elle est de bonne  race” (“she is of good breed or character”)  for a good looking and healthy woman. In the Croatian or the Serbian language one can hear among young adults the colloquial adjective ‘rasna’ (‘raceful’) when depicting a good and healthy looking woman.  In such particular instances ‘race’ is more a synonym of good health and good looks and less a scientific term for a distinctive European appearance.

After 1945 everything changed. The whole hell of moralizing and do-good pontificating broke loose. The more degenerate, the more maladaptive and the uglier — the better. The role of the environment became a sacrosanct dogma of liberal and communist world improvers, while blind faith in progress became a shining path for a promiscuous end of history. Especially the German word ‘Rasse,’ which was commonly used in the 1920s,  30s and the early 40’s,  came to be highly uncomfortable for postwar German politicians who were themselves to be groomed by the Allies in self-hate and guilt feelings about their race.’Rasse’ is a sharp monosyllabic word whose consonant ‘s’ requires the speaker to emit a hissing sound.

Hence the reason that the legacy of National Socialism and thousands of German titles dealing with race, racial hygiene, racial studies, racial mixing, etc., had to disappear from library shelves, only to reappear as a subject of criminal proceedings in modern Germany. The German ruling class today is quick to raise the red flag against scholars who dare to use this word in a normative and value free manner. Shortly after WWII, thousands of books dealing with race and racial differences were burned and destroyed by the Allies. Institutes specializing in racial hygiene, such as Deutsche Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene or the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Anthropologie,  were closed down. Hundreds of European doctors and specialists in genetics and biology — if not spirited out furtively to the USA or the USSR — were hunted down as war criminals, or denounced  as proverbial Nazi quacks. (See Manfred Heinemann, Hochschuloffiziere und  Wiederaufbau des Hochschulwesens in Westdeutschland,1944–1952. See also Reinhard Grohnert,  Die Entnazifizierung in Baden 1945–1949.)

In Gods We Trust: Ancient “Ethnic Profiling”

The word ‘race’ did not exist but the sense of racial beauty and racial awareness was firmly grounded in the minds of ancient Europeans. In Homer’s Iliad most gods and goddesses are fair skinned and light eyed. Athena is described by Pindar as as the “blond and blue eyed goddess,” whereas tricksters or fickle persons, personified by satires and centaurs had repulsive Levantine features with wooly hair, thick lips and hooked noses.  (R. Peterson, The Classical World, 1985, pp 30–31).

In the Middle Ages one encounters those grotesque images of ugliness on basilicas and cathedrals where gargoyles were used as ornamented water spouts projecting from roofs or water fountains. Those negative images displaying non-European racial traits would be banned today, as our modern multiracial pontiffs do not tolerate racial stereotyping, or what they euphemistically call ‘ethnic profiling.’ Likely, many out-group individuals in modern American or European cities would detect in those figures strange resemblance to their own non-European facial traits.

Gargoyle from Westminster Abbey, London

In a well-researched, yet forgotten book, Professor Allen G. Roper (Ancient Eugenics, 1913) provides a great many citations from ancient Greek and Latin texts describing eugenic practices by the old Greeks and Romans. Infanticide was not considered a barbaric act, but a paramount political necessity for a city-state in perennial crisis and warfare. They did not have a luxury of feeding genetic misfits, potential crooks, or the dregs of racial outgroups. The Spartan leader  Solon drafted the first eugenic laws, and the Stoic Roman philosopher  Seneca encouraged infanticide for misfits. “We drown the weaklings and the monstrosity. It is not passion but reason to separate the useless from the fit.”

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In ancient Rome of the Republic, racial purity and close-knit bonds among kin were extremely valued. The whole concept of the city-state was premised on a small family unit, with the typical pater familias at the helm. Even today in popular unwritten culture in Europe, a saying goes that a “person’s character can best be recognized in his facial features.” Conversely, “a person’s distorted character follows his distorted countenance,” a saying that was common in ancient Rome(“Distortum vultum sequitur distortio morum.”).

It is a dangerous mistake, very widespread among White European American nationalists that the ancient Greeks were all of Nordic ancestry. As I have written elsewhere, the blond dolichocephalic faces that one finds painted on old Greek murals  or pottery, or even bronze busts  of Roman and Greek leaders, had primarily normative value; they were meant as the enhanced ideal type for what White Europeans should be — not the reflection of what  they looked like in real life.

This is particularly relevant because of childish quarrels among European and American Whites nationalists and self-proclaimed Aryans. Such people often imagine ancient Spartan warriors as blond giants — or even picture the Waffen SS as superhuman extraterrestrial  beings.

It should come as no surprise that the concept of beauty and race in prewar Europe, and particular in prewar Germany, witnessed a return to romanticized classicism. Models from antiquity and the Renaissance were adapted to the prevailing spirit of the times. Numerous German sculptors worked on their projects while benefiting from the logistic and financial support of the National Socialist political elite. Their sculptures resembled, either by form, or by composition, the works of Praxiteles or of Phidias of ancient Greece, or those executed by Michelangelo during the Renaissance. The most prominent German sculptors in the Third Reich were Arno Breker, Josef Thorak,  and Fritz Klimsch, who although enjoying the significant logistical support of the National Socialist regime, were never members of the NSDAP.

“Partei” (The Party”) on the left and “Wehrmacht” (“The Army”) on the right, by Arno Breker, at the New Reich-Chancellery, 1939

The Wave/Die Woge, Fritz Klimsch, 1942

Das Urteil des Paris, Haus des Deutschen Kunst, Josef Thorak, 1941

After the Second World War, as the result of pressure from the Allies, Europe — and to a large extent America itself — were forced to open its doors to abstract art (Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian, etc) and, consequently Euro Americans and in particularly the Germans had to stifle the production of their traditional figurative art. A large number of paintings and other works of art executed during the Third Reich were either removed or destroyed. Several hundred sculptures were demolished or trashed during the Allied air bombardments. After the war, a considerable number of works of art were confiscated by the Americans, because of “their pornographic character.” In the spring of 1947, 8,722 paintings and sculptures of German artists were transported to the United States. Of these, only a small number have been returned to the Federal Republic of Germany.

Arno Breker’s work thrown in a backyard, 1945

The concept of racial beauty in ancient Greece or during the Renaissance in the 15th century Italy was often used as a pedagogical and graphic tool to provide the sense of order and form (Gestalt). In traditional Europe and America the vast majority of citizens were never ever the replicas of these hyperreal beauties represented on busts or sculptures.

Paintings of women by the late Italians Botticelli or Titian, or sculptures by the modern Germans Breker or Thorak, did  not suggest that that all Italian and German women have elongated Gothic limbs, thin noses and Nordic cranial index.

The whole purpose of classicism and neoclassicisms, particularly in plastic art, but also in philosophy and literature suggested that Europeans had to abide by the cosmic rules of  racial form and order. Whatever and whoever departs from order — brings in decadence and death.

Go to Part 2.

Tom Sunic (www.tomsunic.info; http://doctorsunic.netfirms.com/) is an author, former political science professor in the USA, translator and former Croat diplomat. He is the author of Homo americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age ( 2007). Email him.