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Solzhenitsyn’s “The February Revolution”: Chapter 13 of 200 Years Together

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Chapter 13 of 200 Years Together recounts the period of the February Revolution of 1917—the revolution that toppled the czar and led to a period of instability followed in October by the Bolshevik Revolution. (See here; donations are of critical importance for finishing this important project.) Solzhenitsyn is critical of the radical slogans of the period—e.g., “All Russian life must be rebuilt from the roots.” Solzhenitsyn responds as a cultural conservative, aware of the danger of uprooting ancient institutions because they do not conform to an ideal as decreed by an intellectual elite: “A thousand-year life! — why, all of a sudden from “the roots”?

There was a consensus that Jews must have the same legal status as any other citizen. Quotas in education were repealed, as were restrictions on land ownership. For example, Jews were allowed to serve as military officers and as full-fledged attorneys. Those with a reputation of having anti-Jewish views were targeted for prosecution or dismissal. For example, the chief investigator of the Menahem Beilis ritual murder trial was dismissed because he had allowed testimony of an expert witness for the prosecution, not only for the defense.

Given Solzhenitsyn’s views on the restrictions on Jews discussed in Chapter 5, his quoting Jewish sources describing the old regime is presumably meant to suggest Jewish hypersensitivity and over-dramatization of their plight under the Czar; for example, a Jewish commentator:  “Like hard labor camp prisoners on their way to camp, all Jews were chained together as despised aliens…. The drops of blood of our fathers and mothers, the drops of blood of our sisters and brothers fell on our souls, there igniting the inextinguishable revolutionary fire.”

The revolution did indeed improve life for the Jews. But “as for the rest of the country, falling, with all its peoples, into an abyss — that was the unpredictable way of the history.”

Solzhenitsyn notes that the American Jewish financier Jacob Schiff had long had a prominent role in opposition to the Russian government.

[After the February Revolution, Schiff wrote,] “I was always the enemy of Russian absolutism, which mercilessly persecuted my co-religionists. Now let me congratulate … the Russian people for this great act which they committed so perfectly.” Schiff was quick to provide credit and financing for the new Russian government. “Later in emigration, the exiled Russian right-wing press published investigative reports attempting to show that Schiff actively financed the Revolution itself. Perhaps Schiff shared the short-sighted Western hope that the liberal revolution in Russia would strengthen Russia in the war. Still, the known and public acts of Schiff, who had always been hostile to the Russian absolutism, had even more effect than any possible secret assistance to such a revolution.”

The role of Schiff in financing the revolution is acknowledged by mainstream historians:

In fact, American Jewish capitalists like Jacob Schiff did finance Russian radical movements directed at overthrowing the Czar and may well have had considerable impact (Goldstein 1990, 26–27; Szajkowski 1967). The leaders of Western Jewish communities were highly committed to the overthrow of the czar. For example, in 1907 Lucien Wolf wrote to Louis Marshall of the AJCommittee that “the only thing to be done on the whole Russo-Jewish question is to carry on persistent and implacable war against the Russian Government” (in Szajowski 1967, 8). “Western Jewish leaders actively participated in general actions in favor of the liberal and revolutionary movements in Russia both during the revolution and after its downfall” (Szajkowski 1967, 9). (Separation and Its Discontents, Ch. 2, p. 37.)

Although traditional Jews reacted with caution to the revolution, the secular Jews who created the dynamic energy of the Jewish community were “eager to build ‘the happy new world.’” Jews quickly achieved important offices in the new regime. Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn blames the Russians themselves for what happened:

No, the February Revolution was not something the Jews did to the Russians, but rather it was done by the Russians themselves, which I believe I amply demonstrated in The Red Wheel. We committed this downfall ourselves:  our anointed Tsar, the court circles, the hapless high-ranking generals, obtuse administrators, and their enemies — the elite intelligentsia, the Octobrist Party, the Zemstvo, the Kadets, the Revolutionary Democrats, socialists and revolutionaries, and along with them, a bandit element of army reservists, distressingly confined to the Petersburg’s barracks. And this is precisely why we perished. True, there were already many Jews among the intelligentsia by that time, yet that is not basis enough to call it a Jewish revolution.

Solzhenitsyn sees the February Revolution as a Russian ethnic revolution, but one that in the long run most benefited the Jews, whereas the Russians “got nothing but harm and destruction.”  With the revolution, the Jewish community had attained everything it wanted, so that “the October Revolution was altogether unnecessary for them, except for a small slice of young cutthroat Jews who, with their Russian internationalist brothers, accumulated an explosive charge of hate for the Russian governing class and burst forth to ‘deepen’ the Revolution.” Solzhenitsyn acknowledges that in his earlier work he had exaggerated the role of the Russians and minimized the Jewish role—not wanting the Russians to deceive themselves on what happened by blaming others. He makes the important point that “the ideology [of the February Revolution] was permeated and dominated by intransigent hostility to the historical Russian state.” Such an ideology did not characterize “ordinary Russians” but it did characterize Jews and the Russian intelligentsia. The character of the revolution was therefore determined not by popular attitudes but by the attitudes of an intellectual elite and by ethnic outsiders—the forerunner of the hostile elite that came to power with the Bolsheviks.

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Solzhenitsyn places particular importance on the ethnic composition of theExecutive Committee of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies — a powerful committee that became an important focus of power outside the Kerensky government. “It was precisely this Executive Committee, and not the judiciary, not the timber industrialists, not the bankers, which fast-tracked the country to her doom.”  Not counting soldiers placed on the committee to give it a Russian face, of the 30 people “who actually wielded power, more than half were Jewish socialists. There were also Russians, Caucasians, Latvians and Poles. Less than a quarter were Russians.”

Solzhenitsyn claims to resist the temptation “to look for a guilty party” in this, but the implication is clear: Russia had fallen into the hands of foreigners. Worse, they were foreigners with a grudge against the entire fabric of traditional Russian society — holding views quite at odds with the vast majority of Russians. The grudge was not only against the government of Czar, but against all social strata and all manifestations of traditional Russian culture.

In any crime, there is a perpetrator and a victim. One can always blame the victim for not resisting sufficiently, for not understanding the gravity of the situation, or for having illusions about the consequences of the crime. But clearly, the moral onus is on the perpetrator—the individual or groups that commit the crime. Solzhenitsyn is being very clear where the onus of guilt for the direction of the February Revolution lies, especially given his views that the restrictions on Jews were nowhere near as oppressive or unreasonable as claimed by Jewish activists. Thus there was no legitimate motive to rebuild all of the thousand-year Russian life “from the roots.” Given the totality of Solzhenitsyn’s view, the blame lies with the Jews and other foreigners who together made up the great majority of the most revolutionary elements that propelled the country into the abyss.

One can certainly blame the Russians for losing this battle, as Solzhenitsyn hints. But in the end, what mattered is that losing the battle unleashed a torrent of murderous hostility not only against the previous elites but against millions of ordinary Russians.

It is a lesson that Whites throughout the West would do well to ponder. Alliances among non-White ethnic groups, led by Jews as an element of the elite, are already a reality of politics of America, centered around the Democratic Party; similar phenomena exist in other Western countries. As was the case in the February Revolution, the motive for multiculturalism is fear and loathing of the traditional peoples and cultures of the West. Although a sudden anti-White revolution on the model of the February Revolution is unlikely in the near term, the long term trends are clear. The ultimate folly for any ethnic group is to give up political power.

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

The American Legal System is a Fraud

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The governing philosophies that rule the legal system are: (a) “legal realism” by which is meant that the judge decides whom he wants to prevail (or who “should” prevail as the legal theorists would claim, not wanting to let the cat out of the bag that the judge is not a philosopher king and is likely to rule for his former law partner or for the utility companies); and (b) “critical legal studies” which is an basically a Marxist theory that mirrors “legal realism” but is even nastier because the criteria by which the judge is supposed to decide who should prevail is based on which litigant belongs to the “victim class” and which one belongs to the “oppressor class.”

These two philosophies work very well upon a foundation of the “common law system” which we in Anglo-Saxon countries “enjoy” as opposed to the code system most European countries use.

When I was in law school, the professors would tout the benefits of the common law system especially its “flexibility.”

What has happened is that on most issues there are contradictory so-called “precedents” from which the judge can choose much like an artist chooses which color to use from his palette.

I followed the cases of several White dissidents who were prosecuted in trumped up claims that they incited someone else to commit a crime.  (The SPLC’s Morris Dees specializes in such cases and such claims.)

Some decades ago a White businessman won a lawsuit against the NAACP arising out of a boycott of White-owned stores in a small town in Mississippi.  The local Blacks had ignored the NAACP’s calls for the boycott.  Enraged by the failure of the brothers and sisters to obey instructions, the NAACP sent the brother of Medger Evans to speak in the local Black churches.

In his sermons Evans warned the local Blacks that the NAACP was going to be taking down the names of Blacks who shopped with White merchants and that they were “going to break your necks.”

Sure enough the houses of Blacks who didn’t obey were burned down.

This was the case of Claiburn Hardware vs. NAACP.

The U.S. Supreme Court indignantly overturned the judgment against the NAACP and said that the 1st Amendment protected such speech.  In order for speech to constitute an incitement and to give rise to liability the speech had to be a direct and immediate incitement.

This “precedent” has been cited by attorneys defending White activists over and over again.  Never has any Judge cited it or relied on it.  Instead, the Judges have chosen other precedents and have allowed Dees to get judgments against White activists whose statements really did not threaten any violence at all.  Dees and his witnesses were allowed to deconstruct the text of the statements and to explain to the jury that when a White racist tells an audience “we are non-violent” and things like this, that such statements are “code” for “go out and commit crimes.”

The fact that not one court has ever cited Claiborne Hardware vs. NAACP in cases brought against White activists even if only to distinguish it shows just how fixed the system is.

The icing on the cake is a little known “rule of court” in the federal courts which allows the Judges to make a ruling and include in the ruling a holding that the decision will not be precedent on any other case and to order that the decision never be published!

This was done in the Georgia case of Carver vs. State so the federal courts could uphold a kangaroo court conviction of a Klansman in which — among numerous other outrages in the conduct of the trial — the trial judge denied the defendant the right to subpoena evidence in violation of Mapp vs. Ohio and the Fourth Amendment.

Almost no lay Americans are aware of this unspeakable star chamber rule and the vast majority of lawyers don’t know about it either.

There was a proposal a few years ago to change this rule and the federal judges vehemently opposed taking their “discretion” away from them.

The American justice system is held in awe by its victims who haven’t got a clue about how it works.  Its filth and corruption are made all the worse by its hypocrisy.

Obviously, there are many judges who are fine men and women and do follow the law.

But they are very much in the minority.

As Montesquieu said there is no crueler tyranny than one in which the forms of the law and justice are maintained without the reality.

Thorborne Richardson is an attorney.

Recent research on Individualism/Collectivism

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In cross-cultural perspective, the unique thing about European culture is the tendency for individualism. Individualism is the basis for Western modernization — for why the West has dominated the rest of the world. It is intimately linked with a suite of traits, including democratic and republic forms of government, relatively high status for women, relatively low ethnocentrism, moral universalism, and science.

Research on Individualism/Collectivism has become a rather large academic industry. Recent research has found genetic differences between individualist and  collectivist societies and has linked this dimension to economic growth and innovation. Several of these strands come together in a paper by Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Gérard Roland, “Culture, Institutions, and the Wealth of Nations” put out by the Center for Economic Policy Research (short online version: “Does Culture Affect Long-run  Growth.”)

The long version of the article notes that individualism/collectivism is “the main dimension of cultural variation.”

Individualism emphasizes personal freedom and achievement. Individualist culture therefore awards social status to personal accomplishments such as important discoveries, innovations or great artistic achievements. On the other hand, individualism can make collective action more difficult because individuals pursue their own interest without internalizing collective interests. Collectivism makes collective action easier in the sense that individuals internalize group interests to a greater degree. However, it also encourages conformity and discourages individuals from standing out. This framework implies that individualism should encourage innovation, everything else equal, but collectivism should have an advantage in coordinating production processes and in various forms of collective action.

Their model relies on the idea that collectivist cultures are better at producing goods but that individualist cultures are better at creating innovations required for new products. Individualist cultures are therefore proposed to be better at producing growth, but not as good for efficiently producing goods once the technology is in place. In support, they note several anecdotal examples where technological innovations originating in Western societies led to products that were produced more efficiently in Japan. As another example, they note that General Motors was unable to introduce the Toyota culture based on teamwork and consensus into the United States.

This figure in the upper left below shows world-wide variation in individualism-collectivism ranging from yellow (individualist) to red (collectivist).

individualism

Geographical coincidence between serotonin transporter gene diversity and cultural traits of individualism–collectivism across countries. Gray areas indicate geographical regions where no published data are available. (a) Map of frequency distribution of Individualism-Collectivism. (b) Map of frequency distribution of S alleles of 5-HTTLPR. (c) Map of frequency of global prevalence of anxiety. (d) Map of frequency of global prevalence of mood disorders. Yellow to red colour bar indicates low to high prevalence. From Chiao and Blizinsky (2009).

Notice anything? Quite clearly, individualism is a European phenomenon.

Gorodnichenko and Rolandin essentially measure Europeanness  genetically, using Cavalli-Sforza’s (1994) data on genetic distance based on blood groups and corrected for the percentage of an ethnic group in country. Although the authors see the genetic data as mere proxies for the cultural differences, needless to say, they are also proxies for underlying genetic differences between these culture regions that go well beyond genes for blood type.  By their measures, the US is the most individualistic country in the world, so that the closer countries are genetically to the US, the more individualistic they are. This is a strong correlation: “The strong negative correlation between genetic distance (computed relative to USA, which has a highly individualistic culture) and individualism suggest that genetic distance may be a strong instrument.”

The article also plugs into recent research indicating a genetic basis for individualism/collectivism. Collectivist cultures are associated with two genetic markers  both of which make people more prone to stress in the absence of the kind of social support found in collectivist cultures. Chiao and Blizinsky (2009) found a strong correlation between collectivism and the presence of a short (S) allele in the polymorphism 5-HTTLPR of the serotonin transporter gene SLC6A4 in 30 countries. This allele is known to put individuals at greater risk for depression when exposed to life stressors. The idea is that that collectivist cultures protect individuals from these risks by embedding them more strongly in communities with strong social links thus providing strong psychological support networks. Therefore the gene is more adaptive in collectivist cultures and probably selected against in individualist cultures.

Here’s another figure from Chiao and Blizinsky (2009) again showing the rank order of cultures on individualism-collectivism but also showing the correlation with the percentage of the 5-HTTLPR allele.

rspb20091650f02

Another (compatible) explanation is that people with the short form of the allele are more sensitive to social disapproval, as found in a recent paper by Thomason et al. People with the short form of the allele reacted more strongly to frowning faces — not a good trait if one is adopting non-conformist positions. It’s a gene that those of us subjected to public opprobrium for politically incorrect views would do well to be without.

Another genetic marker for collectivism is the G allele in polymorphism A118G in the μ-opioid receptor gene that leads to higher stress in case of social rejection.Way and Liebermann (2010) reason that this gene and the other genes linked thus far to individualism/collectivism operate by making people more socially sensitive. This in turn makes them more prone to depression in the absence of the strong social support available in collectivist cultures. For example,  adults who have had a serious personal loss have less activation in the μ-opioid system, suggesting that it is sensitive to social inclusion. They also point to a genetic variant in the monoamine oxidase system that is activated under conditions of social exclusion, although to date this gene has not been correlated with individualism/collectivism.

Relying on a paper by Fincher et al., Chiao and Blizinsky propose that ultimately worldwide differences in genes for individualism/collectivism were favored by natural selection because collectivism is better for combating pathogens such as infectious diseases and parasites. The basic idea is that collectivist cultures would be less open to new people and hence less likely to be infected; retaining the status quo is adaptive because change may allow diseases and parasites to enter the  culture.

However, it should be noted that Fincher et al. simply find a correlation between pathogen presence and collectivism. Their proposal for why such a correlation should occur is not based on any data. The authors note that the basic correlation is with latitude: Warmer climates have fewer pathogens and are more likely to be collectivistic. This correlation is also compatible with my argument that the European tendency toward individualism is the result of lessened importance of group-based competition during the Ice Ages for the ancestors of Europeans because large kinship-based groups would not have been supported because of the ecological constraints imposed by a cold climate. Indeed, the explanation of collectivism as involving its utility in group-based competition has far more surface plausibility than an explanation based on the putative benefits of collectivism for avoiding pathogens.

Although not included in the Gorodnichenko and Roland study, another gene linked to non-conformity is the 7R allele of the D4 dopamine receptor gene associated with novelty seeking, impulsivity, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. This allele is absent in China, although alleles derived from the 7R allele are common. Cochran and Harpending (2009, p. 112) suggest that this pattern may be due to high levels of social controls weeding out non-conforming individuals. “The Japanese say that the nail that sticks out is hammered down, but in China it may have been pulled out and thrown away.”

This scenario of actively suppressing non-conformists does not fit well with the pathogen prevention explanation of non-conformity but fits well with the importance of getting rid of such a gene in the interests of promoting cohesive groups. Similarly, I have argued that there was strong selection for social conformity within traditional Jewish communities. People who were less ethnocentric were ultimately excluded from the gene pool.

In any case, getting back to the Gorodnichenko and Roland paper, innovation was measured by the number of patents per million of population. The figure below shows a strong correlation.

RolandFig2

Individualism versus Patents per Million Population

However, G&R do not correct their results for IQ — a rather amazing omission considering that Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen’s IQ and the Wealth of Nations (2002) found strong associations between economic development and measures of average national IQ. Notice in the  figure that Japan with a high average IQ has the highest level of patents as measured by G & R but they score in the middle on individualism/collectivism. Israel is another society that, compared to Western norms, is relatively collectivist (~60 on Hofstede’s index) but relatively high on patents. We may anticipate that as China continues its spectacular development, they will also have increasing numbers of patents per capita, given its huge commitment to education in basic science and engineering.

On the other  hand, it has often been noted that because of the increasing dominance in the West of the financial sector, smart people are increasingly going into investment banking rather than engineering and basic science. Unlike engineering and basic science, the financial sector does not contribute to growth or innovation. Indeed, the recent financial collapse resulting from malfeasance in the  financial sector shows that this sector is quite capable of having a negative effect on economic growth.

Moreover, because of free trade policies, individualist  cultures are prone to exporting jobs to collectivist cultures with a strong sense that economic policy should be designed in the national interest. As a result of an unholy alliance between ethnic lobbies and business interests, individualist cultures are also prone to massive immigration of both skilled and especially low-IQ unskilled labor without regard for effects on national cohesiveness or any other costs.

European-derived cultures are committed to multiculturalism, and they are being swamped by economic refugees from collectivist cultures, dispossessing their founding peoples. In the long run,  in the absence of a political revolution against non-European immigration, it is highly doubtful that individualist cultures can survive. The research reviewed here indicates that predispositions to individualism/collectivism are genetically based. The biological basis of individualism/collectivism combined with an official ideology of multiculturalism means that people prone to collectivism will likely continue their collectivist ways even as citizens of individualist cultures. Certainly the lack of integration of Muslims in Western societies is a prime example of lack of integration. And, although Jews have certainly assimilated in many ways, they retain strong ties to other Jewish communities and they are highly organized in opposition to the interests of Europeans. As noted elsewhere, Jews would not matter except that they have a strong sense of fear and loathing of erstwhile European majorities. Jews are particularly important because of their elite status in terms of wealth as well as their influence on the media and on the political process.

As non-Europeans become the majority in traditionally European societies, there is no reason to suppose that they will retain individualist political and cultural institutions. As they say, demography is destiny.

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

Solzhenitsyn’s “During the Civil War” — Chapter 16 of 200 Years Together

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Chapter 16 of 200 Years Together covers the pivotal period of the civil war (1918–1921)—pivotal because the Bolshevik victory was a disaster for the Russian people and for Europe generally. (The translation is available here; donations are of critical importance for finishing this important project.) Once again, Solzhenitsyn highlights the role of Jews as instruments of state terror, particularly their role in the Cheka and in the Red Army. The perception that this was a “Jewish terror” was widespread: “Why was the perception that Chekists and Jews were all but the same so widespread among both the Reds and the Whites alike and among the people in general?”

At least part of the reason is because of the Jews’ “ardent service on the highest posts in Cheka.” Jewish Chekists “at that time were supreme, by status and rank, representatives of Russian Jewry.” He quotes a Jewish observer (also quoted by Yuri Slezkine; see here, p. 85):  “we were astonished to find among the Jews what we never expected from them — cruelty, sadism, unbridled violence — everything that seemed so alien to a people so detached from physical activity; those who yesterday couldn’t handle a rifle, today were among the vicious cutthroats.” Slezkine quotes another Jewish observer: 

The formerly oppressed lover of liberty had turned into a tyrant of “unheard-of-despotic arbitrariness”…. The convinced and unconditional opponent of the death penalty not just for political crimes but for the most heinous offenses, who could not, as it were, watch a chicken being killed, has been transformed outwardly into a leather-clad person with a revolver and, in fact, lost all human likeness (pp. 183–184).

It is a cautionary tale on what kinds of behavior we can expect from current multi-cultural elites when Whites become a minority: Present-day platitudes about the future world of multicultural harmony and the moral imperative of Whites giving up power may be replaced very quickly by a quite different set of attitudes of revenge and hatred — the image of the kindly, tolerant Jewish professional quickly replaced by the image of a brutal perpetrator of torture and mass murder motivated by revenge against the old order. Images of hatred and estrangement from the White, Christian majority are commonplace among Jewish leaders — the Jews as a hostile elite theme of much of my writing (see, e.g., here andhere).

Indeed, Solzhenitsyn suggests that Jewish revenge against the Cossacks was a motive for “the genocide on the river Don, when hundreds of thousands of the flower of Don Cossacks were murdered …. What should we expect from the Cossack memories when we take into consideration all those unsettled accounts between a revolutionary Jew and a Don Cossack?”

Indeed, the Cossacks were strongly identified with state power during the 19thcentury, and for Jews they were hated because of their role in assaults on Jews (for example, during the Khmelnytsky Uprising in the 17th century) andpopularized in stories by Jewish writer Sholem Aleichem. As I noted elsewhere:

The Cossacks served the Czar as a military police force, and they used their power against Jewish communities during the conflicts between the government and the Jews. After the Revolution, the Cossacks were deported to Siberia for refusing to join the collective farms. During the 1930s, the person in charge of the deportations was an ethnic Jew, Lazar Kaganovich, nicknamed the “wolf of the Kremlin’ because of his penchant for violence. In his drive against the peasants, Kaganovich took “an almost perverse joy in being able to dictate to the Cossacks. He recalled too vividly what he and his family had experienced at the hands of these people…. Now they would all pay — men, women, children. It didn’t matter who. They became one and the same. That was the key to [Kaganovich’s] being. He would never forgive and he would never forget” (Stuart Kahan, The Wolf of the  Kremlin, 1987, 164). Similarly, Jews were placed in charge of security in the Ukraine, which had a long history of anti-Semitism (Albert Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, 1997, 443) and became a scene of mass murder in the 1930s. (See here, pp. xxiv–xxv.)

It was payback time for ethnic hostilities that long preceded the Bolshevik Revolution. While Jews were vastly overrepresented among the perpetrators of mass murder, Solzhenitsyn “can’t help noticing that almost all names [of the victims] were Slavic – it was the ‘chosen Russians’ who were shot. In Kiev, a key area because of its long history of tensions between Jews and Slavs, 75% of the staff of the Cheka were Jews, including 70% of the top officials.

His account of the murders is particularly chilling:

An executioner (and sometimes “amateur” Chekists) escorted a completely naked victim into a shed and ordered the victim to fall facedown on the ground. Then he finished the victim with a shot in the back of the head. Executions were performed using revolvers (typically Colts). Usually because of the short distance, the skull of the executed person exploded into fragments…. The next victim was similarly escorted inside and laid down nearby…. When number of victims was exceeding … the capacity of the shed, new victims were laid down right upon the dead or were shot at the entrance of the shed…. Usually the victims went to their execution without resistance.

It’s not surprising therefore that the opposition to the Bolshevik regime often had strong anti-Jewish overtones. Examples from 1921 are the Kronstadt Uprising, where photos of prominent Jewish Bolsheviks were destroyed, and labor strikes, whose slogan was “Down with Communists and Jews!”

Solzhenitsyn wrestles with the question of whether the Jewish community as a whole supported the Bolsheviks: “Thus it looked as though not only Bolshevik Jews, but all of Jewry had decided to take the Red side in the Civil War. Could we claim that their choice was completely reactive? No. Could we claim that they didn’t have any other choice? Again, no.”

As evidence on Jewish attitudes toward the Bolsheviks he cites a writer who noted that as Kiev was about to surrender to the Bolsheviks, the Jews remained, while “it was an entirely Russian exodus, people were leaving on foot with knapsacks, across the bridges over the Dnepr river. … And all of those rich and very rich Jews – they didn’t leave, they chose to stay and wait for arrival of Bolsheviks. ‘The Jews decided not to share their fate with us. And with that they carved a new and possibly the deepest divide between us.’” Throughout Russia and in Poland during the Soviet invasion of 1920, Jewish communities greeted the Bolsheviks with celebration, while the Slavic population was terrified of its future.

The special role of Jews in the Soviet government was common knowledge, to the point that some Jews pleaded for Jews to fight Bolshevism because Jewish behavior was leading to intense anti-Jewish attitudes; however, this was not the view of the organized Jewish community:

And yes, there were Jews then who appealed to their compatriots looking back on the tragedy that had befallen both Russia and Russian Jewry. In their proclamation To the Jews of all countries!, this group wrote in 1923 that “overly zealous participation of Jewish Bolsheviks in the oppression and destruction of Russia … is blamed upon all of us … the Soviet rule is identified with Jewish rule, and fierce hatred of Bolsheviks turns into the equally fierce hatred of Jews…. [We] firmly believe that Bolshevism is the worst of all evils possible for the Jews and all other peoples of Russia, and that to fight tooth and nail against the rule of that international rabble over Russia is our sacred duty before humankind, culture, before our Motherland and the Jewish people.” Yet the Jewish community “reacted to these declarations with great indignation.”

Solzhenitsyn spends a great deal of time on the anti-Jewish pogroms of the period and the role of the White army and Symon Petiliura’s Ukrainian nationalist forces. In general, he denies that Jews sided with the Bolsheviks because of the pogroms. For example, the Jewish dominance of the Cheka in the Ukraine happened in 1918, before the pogroms of 1919.

Interestingly, he foregrounds his discussion by noting that wars and revolutions are nasty affairs, and, quoting a Jewish writer, they are “especially gruesome and dangerous for a minority, which in many ways is alien to the bulk of population.” This is especially so when there is a long history of mistrust and hostility toward the minority because of traditional economic relationships and Jewish hostility toward the culture of the outgroup.

During this period, Jews suffered far more than they did under the Czar, with estimates of Jewish dead ranging to 200,000. The main force was the Ukrainian separatist movement. Rather than seeing the hostility of the separatists toward Jews as irrational anti-Semitism, Solzhenitsyn shows that Jews did not support Ukrainian nationalism—a familiar theme in modern anti-Jewish attitudes, present also in Germany, were Jews were often seen as insufficiently enthusiastic about German nationalism. For example, the prominent 19th-century intellectual Heinrich von Treitschke strongly opposed what he perceived as “alien” Jewish cultural influence on German life, because of Jewish tendencies to mock and belittle German nationalistic aspirations (see here, p. 140). Similarly, Solzhnenitsyn describes “Jewish philistines … making fun of the Ukrainian language and shop-signs.” They were “afraid of Ukrainian nationalism, and believed in the Russian state and Russian culture.”

The opposition to Ukrainian nationalism had a Jewish face. When the Soviet government moved against the Ukrainian nationalists,

There was no shortage of Jewish names among the top Bolsheviks … in such centers as Odessa and Ekaterinoslav. That was sufficient to fuel talks about “Bolshevik Jews” and “Jewish Bolsheviks” among the troops loyal to the [Ukrainian parliament]. Verbal cursing about “traitorous Jews” became almost commonplace.

When a nationalist government led by Petliura came to power, his newspaper wrote, “The birth of the Ukrainian State was not expected by the Jews. The Jews did not anticipate it despite having an extraordinary ability of getting the wind of any news. They … emphasize their knowledge of Russian language and ignore the fact of Ukrainian statehood … Jewry again has joined the side of our enemy.”

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Solzhenitsyn juxtaposes Jews being blamed for Bolshevik military successes in the Ukraine with accounts of pillaging and pogroms directed against Jews — the implication being that Jews were being repaid in kind.  Nevertheless, the pogroms were not official policy. Even commanders who were sympathetic to the Jews, such as Nestor Mahkno, were unable to control the anti-Jewish actions of their troops. A result was that Jewish parties quickly began to radicalize toward the Left, thus inevitably turning their sympathies to Bolshevism.

Pogroms occurred despite the best intentions of the leaders of the White army, such as General Anton I. Denikin. The misbehavior of the troops cannot be completely explained by resentment about the Jewish role in Bolshevism or traditional anti-Jewish attitudes. There was also the raping and pillaging that has always been part of the culture of undisciplined armies. Solzhenitsyn provides several sources corroborating this perspective. For example:

A top White general, A. von Lampe, claims that rumors about Jewishpogroms by the Whites are “tendentiously exaggerated”, that these pillaging “requisitions” were unavoidable actions of an army without quartermaster services or regular supplies from the rear areas. He says that Jews were not targeted deliberately but that all citizens suffered and that Jews “suffered more” because they were “numerous and rich.” “I am absolutely confident that in the operational theaters of the White armies there were no Jewishpogroms, i.e., no organized extermination and pillaging of Jews. There were robberies and even murders … which were purposefully overblown and misrepresented as anti-Jewish pogroms by the special press…. Because of these accidents, the Second Kuban Infantry Brigade and the Ossetian Cavalry Regiment were disbanded…. All peoples, be they Christian or Jewish, suffered in disorderly areas.” [The exception was that] there were executions (on tip offs by locals) of those unfortunate commissars andChekists who did not manage to escape and there were quite a few Jews among them.

One way that Jews aided the Bolsheviks was financially. Jews contributed little to the White cause, “yet whenever the Bolsheviks showed up and demanded money and valuables, the population obediently handed over millions of rubles and whole stores of goods.” The Whites even rejected some Jewish support because of “the prominent involvement of other Jews on the Red side.” While the White army was originally free of anti-Jewish attitudes, “the situation dramatically changed by 1919” when Jews were seen as the main base of support for Bolshevism, exaggerated by the intense local anti-Jewish attitudes in areas like the Ukraine with a long history of hostility between Jews and Slavs, now exacerbated by the prominence of Jewish support for the Bolsheviks. “The Whites perceived Russia as occupied by Jewish commissars — and they marched to liberate her.”

The fate of the White cause also was sealed because of failure to obtain Jewish support in the West. Solzhenitsyn states unequivocally that “the White Movement was in desperate need of the support by the Western public opinion, which in turn largely depended on the fate of Russian Jewry.” Churchill appealed to Denikin to stop the pogroms, but he also quotes a historian who notes that Churchill feared the reactions of “powerful Jewish circles within the elite.” Jewish elites throughout the West threw their support to the Bolsheviks, aided by idealistic perceptions of “grandiose plans” for a New World under communism.

Solzhenitsyn is scathing in his condemnation of the Western powers: “And yet, the behavior of the former Entente of Western nations during the entire Civil War is striking by its greed and blind indifference toward the White Movement — the successor of their wartime ally, Imperial Russia.” This inaction and indifference led to an incalculable tragedy for Russia.

Both the general sympathy of Russian Jews toward the Bolsheviks and the developed attitude of the White forces toward Jews eclipsed and erased the most important benefit of a possible White victory — the sane evolution of the Russian state.

And because of its long term reverberations in the history of the 20th century, the result was a disaster for all European peoples. The prominent role of Jews in the Soviet government dovetailed not only with the warm welcome by Jews for the Soviet invasion of Poland of 1921, but also with Jewish involvement in revolutionary movements in Hungary and Germany. The result was a deepening of anti-Jewish attitudes, especially in Eastern and Central Europe. A historian comments, “the intensity and tenacity of anti-Semitic prejudice in both the east and the center of Europe was significantly influenced by Jewish participation in the revolutionary movement.” “The fact that the leaders of the suppressed Communist revolts were Jews was one of the most important reasons for the resurrection of political anti-Semitism in contemporary Germany.”

And in Hungary, “While Jews played a ‘quite conspicuous’ role in the Russian and German communist revolutions, their role in Hungary became central…. Out of 49 People’s Commissars there, 31 were Jews.” “Granted, the prime-minister was a gentile, Sandor Garbai, but [Mátyás] Rákosi later joked that Garbai was elected because someone had to sign execution orders on Sabbath days.” As was typical wherever communists gained power, the traditional culture was eradicated: “Statues of Hungarian kings and heroes were knocked off their pedestals, the national anthem outlawed, and wearing the national colors criminalized.”

The Jewish role in Bolshevism and in the abortive revolutions in Hungary and Germany cast a long shadow on later events:

For long after the Revolution, conservatives throughout Europe and the United States believed that Jews were responsible for Communism and for the Bolshevik Revolution. The Jewish role in leftist political movements was a common source of anti-Jewish attitudes among a great many intellectuals and political figures. In Germany, the identification of Jews and Bolshevism was widespread in the middle classes and was a critical part of the National Socialist view of the world. As historian Ernst Nolte has noted, for middle-class Germans, “the experience of the Bolshevik revolution in Germany was so immediate, so close to home, and so disquieting, and statistics seemed to prove the overwhelming participation of Jewish ringleaders so irrefutably,” that even many liberals believed in Jewish responsibility (Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism [1965, 331]). Jewish involvement in the horrors of Communism was also an important sentiment in Hitler’s desire to destroy the USSR and in the anti-Jewish actions of the German National Socialist government. Jews and Jewish organizations were also important forces in inducing the Western democracies to side with Stalin rather than Hitler in World War II.

The victory over National Socialism set the stage for the tremendous increase in Jewish power in the post-World War II Western world, in the end more than compensating for the decline of Jews in the Soviet Union. As [Yuri] Slezkine shows, the children of Jewish immigrants assumed an elite position in the United States, just as they had in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe and Germany prior to World War II. This new-found power facilitated the establishment of Israel, the transformation of the United States and other Western nations in the direction of multiracial, multicultural societies via large-scale non-white immigration, and the consequent decline in European demographic and cultural preeminence. The critical Jewish role in Communism has been sanitized, while Jewish victimization by the Nazis has achieved the status of a moral touchstone and is a prime weapon in the push for massive non-European immigration, multiculturalism, and advancing other Jewish causes.

The Jewish involvement in Bolshevism has therefore had an enormous effect on recent European and American history. It is certainly true that Jews would have attained elite status in the United States with or without their prominence in the Soviet Union. However, without the Soviet Union as a shining beacon of a land freed of official anti-Semitism where Jews had attained elite status in a stunningly short period, the history of the United States would have been very different. The persistence of Jewish radicalism influenced the general political sensibility of the Jewish community and had a destabilizing effect on American society, ranging from the paranoia of the McCarthy era, to the triumph of the 1960s countercultural revolution, to the conflicts over immigration and multiculturalism that are so much a part of the contemporary political landscape. (See here, pp. 95–96 and references therein; see also here, pp. xxx–xxxii)

Solzhenitsyn’s treatment once again hits all the right notes. While staying squarely within mainstream scholarship, he succeeds in laying bare the ethnic conflict that is at the heart of the fraught relationship of Jews and Europeans.

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

9/11: Burning Bibles, Burning Qurans and the Victory Monuments at Ground Zero

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September 11 has become a milestone in modern America and is both the symbol of the War on Terrorism, the symbol of America attacked, and of the Cordoba Mosque, a symbol of the Muslim triumph over both Spain and the United States. September 11 is a monument to the comprehensive defeat of the Euroepan-American people, the founding people of the United States, a people now dispossessed of every measure of political, cultural, religious, and economic power.

September 11 has become an occasion for Muslims to express their hatred of us in the name of preventing their victimization by “islamophobia”.  Friday night (September 10), on KIRO-TV in Seattle, half a dozen Muslim leaders and Muslim women were interviewed and the main word they had was hate. They were victims of hate, hate, hate. They are liars.

Seattle schools have prayer rooms for Muslims, allow Jewish religious organizations to operate in high schools, and ban Christian groups from meeting after school even in the playing fields. New York schools celebrate Jewish and Muslim holidays and ignore Christian holidays.

Like the manufactured controversy over the Cordoba Mosque, which celebrates both the Muslim conquest of Spain and of… Manhattan, manufactured by oligarchs like Michael Bloomberg (who has backed both the Cordoba Mosque in Manhattan and the burning of Qurans in Florida), the oligarch-controlled mass media gives us Pres. Obama honoring the service of Muslims in American uniforms fighting in Afghanistan: He pointedly honors no one else. (No wonder some Pakistanis are demanding he reveal himself to be a Muslim and declare the World Caliphate.)

Of course, the European-American Christian majority has no right to oppose the building of the Cordoba Mosque, has no right to defend its borders, has no rights to control its neighborhoods, its schools, or its cities; it simply has no rights at all.

There is a very real Clash of Civilizations going on, despite the hopeful Alliance of Civilizations advanced by Spain and Turkey, and Russia and Iran, and shunned by the United States and Israel. The Clash of Civilizations is not just between Christians and Muslims, since the war in Iraq was an Israeli war, fought for Israel by American mercenary armies (in the tradition of the Middle East): With Jewish militants shouting about the rise of Jewish Civilization on the ruins of Christian and Muslim civilizations it seems as if people would realize that at least three civilizations are involved: Christian, Muslim and (still inchoate) Jewish. Of course, in Huntington’s terms (and I do not fully agree with all of his parsing of the world), certainly Iran’s Shiite civilization (which Jews seek to destroy) and India’s Hindu civilization are involved in this Clash…. but the inchoate Tamil civilization has just been defeated and will not rise again for at least a generation.

In Seattle, a Christian priest who works in a foolish interfaith effort with a Jew and a Muslim made a true observation: He said that Islam may not be a religion of peace, but it is no more violent than Christianity or Judaism. This is basically true, since no successful religion refuses to defend itself. But his comment certainly doesn’t apply to contemporary Christianity. For generations Christians have unilaterally disarmed. In the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and western Europe this has coincided with the rise of an intolerant (the term is “zero tolerance”) oligarchic, substantially Jewish ruling class and a class of political syncophants who obey them. That’s why 70% plus of Americans oppose illegal immigration while the Attorney General, in one federal lawsuit after another, is outlawing anything that creates obstacles for the invasion of illegal aliens.

Any democracy in which supermajorities are routinely ignored is no longer a democracy: It is an Oligarchy. The Oligarchs have ruled the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and western Europe for generations to centuries and their control of the mass media ensures that no one even knows their name.

There are several clear indications of the powerlessness of Christian supermajorities in all of our homelands. (The only exceptions are certain states of the former Soviet Union; others, like Georgia, have simply become colonies of Israel.)

  • The failure to rebuild the only place of worship destroyed on 9/11: an Orthodox Church;
  • Oligarch Bloomberg setting Christians and Muslims at each other’s throats by backing both the Cordoba Mosque in New York and the Quran burning in Florida (echoing George Soros’ support for Bosnia and Kosovo, aimed at making conflict between Christians and Muslims in Europe permanent);
  • The burning of Bibles by the US Army to please Muslims in Afghanistan (see Military Burns Unsolicited Bibles Sent to Afghanistan);
  • Routine Bible burning in Israel which has been going on for decades but is ignored in the Christian world because of Zionist influence on the media (see below: Bibliography of Bible Burning in Israel). Neo-cons never mention Israelis burning Bibles, but focus on episodes of Bible burning by Muslims (see below: Muslim Burn Bibles Routinely and Often).

9/11 is an appropriate kind of “Holy Day” for the European-Christian people who built America because the fall of the two towers is a major defeat. Ten years later they remain confused and manipulated, stumbling towards mass graves, through a cloud of smoke from the burning of Bibles by Muslims and Jews. In a brutal three way war, they are leaderless and disarmed. A people whose monuments celebrate only their victories are a childish people.

Like Southern Whites whose history began again with defeat, European-Americans are destined to know defeat. 9/11 has not resulted in most European-Americans realizing the nature of the game that is afoot, and their lack of awareness will allow their rulers to inflict new defeats on them. The defeats will come until we as a people are able to stand up and explicitly advance our own interests: Smashing a country like Iraq as ordered by Israel is no victory for us. It is simply a measure of our slavery.

Burning Qurans in Gainesville, Florida does not help the cause of European Christians.  (I noticed on CBS News today that the sign for the Dove World Outreach Center was smashed by terrorists last night, but no one is concerned by terrorist attacks on Christians.) However, building the Cordoba Mosque at Ground Zero is a lot like the mass colonization of the United States by Somali illegal aliens after the military defeat of the United States by Al-Itihadd Al-Islamiyah in Somalia (the precursor of today’s Al-Shabaab). It is planting the flag of Somali conquest in our cities and of the Arabs at the site of the great Muslim victory in Manhattan.

And we are powerless to do anything to oppose it, so far, even as a multitude of Muslims in the United States seemingly spending every waking hour seeking an excuse to scream: Racist! Islamophobe!

I have often said that the War on Terrorism has two parts: The fun part, where the United States has infinite Chinese money to do anything it wants to do with impunity—smash their cities, slaughter their wedding parties, machine-gun their children, even as Affirmative Action Sub-Prime Mortgages gave millions of houses to minorities and illegal aliens.

And then there is the unfun part, when we lose interest in the war, have no more Chinese money to fight it, are paying $500 million in interest a day to China, and the Muslims begin the same kind of conquest the Somalis have waged against our cities and communities for 15 years.  (Here in Seattle, the Mayor is planning to lay off city workers to meet increased welfare demands by the myriad Somali illegal aliens living free in vast new blocks of public housing.)

My Spanish ancestors fought for 700 years to free Spain of Muslim (and Jewish) rule. In that struggle, the first great Holocaust in history, the mass murder of Mozarabs (Spanish Catholics culturally assimilated by Islam) in Spain was undertaken by Muslims: One third of the Spanish nation was exterminated. (In the last thousand years, only the Qing extermination of the Dzhugarians was more complete.) The reconquest of Spain for Christendom secured it for half a millennium, a period of security that has ended with the collapse of Christendom and the triumph of the ideology of Cultural Marxism known as Multiculturalism, everywhere in the West.

Time is running out for European-Americans, even as their Afrikaner kin in Black South Africa are starving to death in virtual concentration camps in South Africa.

So 9/11, with its planned Israel victory monument at Ground Zero, and the Cordoba Mosque, both to celebrate their respective victories over European-America, are just symbols for a defeated people. The real question is whether European-Americans even want to have a future—even when the alternative offered to European-Americans by the Cultural Marxists is slavery.  Slavery, even with drugs, video games and cable television, will not live up to the hopes of  the many degenerate people craving it. Voluntary Extinction, as advocated by Asian-American terrorist James Lee who attacked the Discovery Channel a few days ago, does not have to be our fate.

Our future lies in what made our ancestors great. Live your life as if you believe in the future and bring your family and friends with you. We only have to be willing to fight for the future of our children.

Bibliography

Acharya S. Orthodox Jews a Classy Lot – NOT! Free Thought Nation (www.freedthoughtnation.com), November 28, 2009.

AmiOrtiz.com [An amazing website on Ami Ortiz, the son of a Messianic Jewish minister; Ami was targeted in a Jewish terrorist bombing. The website deals with the incessant Jewish terrorist attacks and Bible burnings targeting Messianic Jews in Israel.]

Answers Yahoo. Why Are They Burning the Bible in Israel? Answers Yahoo (www.answers.yahoo.com), N.D. [August 2008].

Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Press Release: ADL Condemns Bible Burning in Or Yehuda. New York: Anti-Defamation League (ADL) (www.adl.org), May 22, 2008.

Atzmon, Gilad. The Complete Guide to Killing Non-Jews. Information Clearing House (www.informationclearinghouse.info), November 18, 2009.

Bannoura, Saed. Chief Rabbinate In Israel Demands Not Displaying Christian Symbols; As The Christian World Celebrates Christmas, And As Christians In Palestine And In Israel Celebrate The Birth Of Jesus Christ In Bethlehem, The Chief Rabbinate In Israel Recommended That Hotels And Restaurants In The Country Should Refrain From Displaying Christian Symbols. Palestine: IMEMC News (International Middle East Media Center) (www.imemc.org), December 25, 2009.

—–. Messianic Jews In Israel Demand Inquiry Into Burning Of Bibles By Orthodox Jews; After A Massive ‘Bible Burning’ By The Deputy Mayor And Orthodox Jewish Students In The Town Of Or Yehuda, In Israel, A Group Of Messianic Jews, Have Called For An Inquiry Into The Incident. Palestine: IMEMC News (International Middle East Media Center) (www.imemc.org), May 25, 2008.

BBC News. Israel Hit By Bible Burning Row; Proselytizing To Ethiopian Jews Is An Historically Sensitive Issue. London: BBC News, May 21, 2008.

Bixler, Mark. Hundreds Of New Testaments Torched In Israel; Israeli Police To Probe Recent Burning Of New Testaments In Or-Yehuda; Deputy Mayor Admits Collecting ‘Messianic Propaganda,’ But Did Not Support Burning; Anti-Defamation League, Other Groups Criticize Burning. CNN News (www.cnn.com), May 28, 2008.

Book Of Mormon Found Burning Outside Littleton Church. Rocky Mountain News, November 13, 2008.

Bos, Stefan J. Outrage Over US Military Bible Burnings In Afghanistan. Worthy Christian News (www.worthynews.com), May 22, 2009.

Chayas. The Seven Point Plan To Eliminate Christian Missionary Activity An Ancient Solution? Israel: Chayas (ww.chayas.com), N.D. [2010].

Cline, Austin. Religious Extremists Burn Bibles in Middle East. Atheism.about.com, June 4, 2008. [Jewish atheist]

CWN.org. Bible Burning Targeted at Messianic Jews. CWN.org, June 2008.

Derek4Messiah. Ultra-Orthodox Jews Burning New Testaments in Israel. Derek4Messiah.wordpress.com, May 21, 2008.

El-Sherif, Heba. Christian Supremacists Promote Quran-Burning on 9/11. Daily News Egypt (www.thedailynewsegypt.com), July 21, 2010.

Ezzedeen Al-Qassem Brigade. Orthodox Jews Set Fire To Hundreds Of Copies Of The New Testament In The Latest Act Of Violence Against Christian Missionaries In The Holy Land. Al-Qassem English Forum; Ezzedeen Al-Qassem Brigade (www.almoltaqa.ps), May 20, 2008.

Fox News. Orthodox Jews Burn New Testaments Given by Christian Missionaries in Israel. Fox News (www.foxnews.com), May 20, 2008.

Gad, Emad. Editorial: Bible Thumping To Bible Burning; Israel’s Religious Right May Not Mind The Zealous Support Of The Religious Right In America. They Certainly Have No Liking For Their Religion, However. Emad Gad Surfs The Israeli Web. Al-Ahram, August 5, 2008.

Gee, Robert W. Missionaries Draw Fire In Israel; Burning Of 200 New Testament Bibles Underscores Growing Tensions In The Jewish State Between The Mainstream Religion And Christian Zionists. Austin Statesman, June 15, 2008.

Glenn, Mark. Book Burnings in the Holy Land are Considered ‘Kosher’ Provided the Books are Christian. Peoples Voice (www.thepeoplesvoice,org), June 7, 2008.

Government of Israel. Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Israel). Press Release: Foreign Ministry condemns burning of New Testament in Or Yehuda. Jerusalem, May 29, 2008.

Government of United States. Federal Government. Department of State. 2008 Human Rights Report: 2008 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Israel and the Occupied Territories. District of Columbia: Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (www.state.gov), February 25, 2009.

Irish Nationalism. Orthodox Jewish Youths Burn New Testaments in Or Yehuda. Irish Nationalism (www.irish-nationalism.net), May 24, 2008.

Jewish Israel. Halacha Discussion: Is It Permissible to Burn Missionary Bibles? Jewish Israel (www.jewishisrael.ning.com), December 31, 2008.

Koren, Yehuda; Shahak, Israel [trans.]. Burning the New Testament by Orthodox Jews in Israel. [Reprinted: Radio Islam (www.radioislam.org)] Yediot Ahronot, March 30, 1997.

Lieberman, Mark. Book Patrol: A Haven for Book Culture: Violence Against Books: Is There an Acceptable Form? Seattle, Wash.: Seattle Post-Intelligencer (www.blog.seattlepi.com), May 30, 2008.

One Jerusalem. ‘Where They Burn Books, They Will Ultimately Also Burn People’. One Jerusalem (www.onejerusalem.com), June 2008.

Pike, Ted, Rev. Israel: A History of Hate Crimes. National Prayer Network, May 27, 2010.

—–. United States Government, Talmud Mock New Testament. National Prayer Network, April 17, 2008.

Press TV. Iran Rabbi Yitzhak Shapiro Urges Jews To Burn Controversial Book. Tehran: Press TV (www.presstv.ir), November 17, 2009.

Rosh Pina Project: (www.roshpinaproject.wordpress.com)

Rosh Pina Project. Love is a Burning Thing. Rosh Pina Project January 5, 2010.

—–. Rabbi Amnon Yitzhak Oversees Burning of a New Testament. December 4, 2009.

—–. Shiloh Musings: Rabbi Shlomo Riskin is a Bible-Burner. December 31, 2009.

Sero, Zev. Bookburning. [Burning Bibles] Mail.Jewish (www.ottmall.com), April 10, 2000.

Shahak, Israel [trans.].

Stricherz, Mark. Jews Burned Books. Interested? Tough. Get Religion (www.getreligion.org), May 27, 2008. [Jewish support for burning Bibles]

Taylor, Penina. Harrassed By Christian Missionaries, Israelis Take Out The Trash. [Bible burning in Israel] Israel Insider (www.israelinsider.com), May 21, 2008.

True Torah Jews. Ultra-Zionist Settler Rabbi Publishes Controversial Book. Jews Against Zionism (www.jewsagainstzionism.com), December 20, 2009.

Truth Hugger. Violent Clash of Dogma In Israel – Messianic Jews Targeted. Truth Hugger (www.truthhugger.com), June 8, 2008.

Wikipedia. Bookburning: Burning of New Testaments By Orthodox Jews in Israel (1984). Wikipedia, August 27, 2010.

—–. Bookburning: New Testaments in City of Or Yehuda, Israel. Wikipedia, August 27, 2010.

—–. Religion in Israel: Anti-Christian Discrimination. August 27, 2010.

George Washington Plunkitt on the Sausage Factory of American Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roots: The Prequel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I quote:

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

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

But again, I quote:

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

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

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

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

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

Again, I quote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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