Featured Articles

Who is an anti-Semite?

/2 Comments/in /by

Someday the word “anti-Semite” will be studied as an example of distorted political discourse — as a signifier attached to somebody who advocates the reign of demonology. How does one dare critically talk about the extraordinary influence the Jews in the West without running the risk of social opprobrium?

We certainly cannot expect that Jewish intellectuals will think critically about Jewish influence. As a French author Hervé Ryssen writes, “internationally-known Jewish authors, haunted by the either real or surreal specter of anti-Semitism, consider it a sickness, which enables them to avoid any form of introspection.”

While it is a commonplace for White Europeans and Americans to critically talk in private about Arabs, Mexicans, Africans or, for that matter, deride their fellow White citizens, a critical comment about the influence of Jews, even if founded on empirical facts, is viewed as an insult to Jews. If a serious European and American scholar or a politician ventures into this minefield, his gesture is interpreted as a sign of somebody who writes his obituary.

Such a schizophrenic climate of self-censorship in the West will sooner or later lead to dramatic consequences for both Jews and non-Jews. The lack of healthy dialogue can last for decades, but feigned conviviality between opposing groups cannot last forever.  Mendacity carries the germ of civil war.

While many authors in the West sport staggering erudition in unabashedly challenging modern myths, the most sensitive point of reference of the twentieth century — Jewish influence — is carefully avoided. If the subject of Jews is ever brought up in a European or American public forum, it is in a laudatory fashion — a clear indication of the morbid desire of White ruling elites to curry favor with the Jews.

In the same vein, many intelligent White American and European racialists frequently decorate themselves with their “token Jews” in hopes of achieving some legitimacy in the mainstream media and seeking some camouflage in their opposition to non-European immigration or to various other myths of multicultural ideology. These individuals will likely be the first to declare themselves anti-Semites if the wind changes and critiques of Jewish influence become part of a new Zeitgeist.

The lack of open discussion about Jewish influence corroborates the thesis that Jews play a crucial role in opinion making in Western societies.  True power shows itself by not being open to discussion. Hypothetically speaking, if Jews, by some miracle, were to play a marginal role in Europe or America — as they publicly claim they do, then logically, they would not object to being the subjects of critical discussion, or for that matter derision — just as it is legitimate to discuss the power of other groups. But Americans are far more likely to read books about the nefarious power of Christian conservatives or “white racism” than they are to hear about the far greater power of the organized Jewish community.

[adrotate group=”1″]

A common trait among many liberal Whites is intellectual servility — to look up to Jews as paragons of intelligence and moral rectitude. In the beginning of the 21st century there is no worse insult than qualifying a White politician or a White academic as an “anti-Semite.”

This intellectual servility of the Western political and academic class toward Jewry provides legitimacy to Jews in their endless search for a real or surreal anti-Jewish straw man. Organizations like the ADL trumpet even the most minor and deranged bit of anti-Semitism as heralding the next Holocaust.

The strange compound noun ‘anti-Semitism’ only gives Jews an additional alibi to project themselves as victims of prejudice. If anti-Semitism were non-existent it would have to be invented. The buzzword ‘anti-Semitism’ bestows upon the Jews a role of the moral and intellectual super-ego for White Europeans and Americans and by proxy for the entire world.

The frightened attitude of American and European intellectuals, who often extol the concept of “intellectual freedom,” is best seen in their schizoid attitude toward Jews. This was noted a long time ago by Wilmot Robertson, in his The Dispossessed Majority: “the pro-Semite has …made himself a mirror image of the anti-Semite.”  The danger of this fatal embrace lies not with Jews, but with Whites. An American anti-Semite must appear in the eyes of Jews as a very bizarre species. On the one hand, he hates this alien Jew; yet on the other, he lugs behind himself the Levantine mindset of hatred toward outgroups that is not of European cultural origin.

A prominent Jewish-French politician and author, Jacques Attali, in his much acclaimed book Les Juifs, le monde et l’argent, writes: “As Russian Jews invented socialism, and as Austrian Jews invented psychoanalysis, American Jews in the forefront, participated in the birth of American capitalism and in the Americanization of the entire world.” Because he is Jewish, Attali can make such comments without incurring the wrath of the Jewish activist organizations. If a White racialist author made a similar comment, he or she would be immediately shouted down as an “anti-Semite.”

That is why when a Jewish author talks openly and critically about Judaism — especially the strong Jewish role in social and political affairs in the postmodern West, his prose will elicit awe and respect. His words may be sometimes met with apprehension and irritation by his fellow Jews, as witnessed by Norman Finkelstein or to some extent Noam Chomsky, but his words will nevertheless find their place in the ears and eyes of mainstream audience.

The Necessity of ‘Kulturvolk’

A Jewish author, preferably of liberal or leftist pedigree, who tackles this greatest taboo of all times, will have a safe passage to media success. Such is the case with the liberal Jewish-Russian-American scholar, Yuri Slezkine, whose research does not reveal anything new regarding the Jewish role in the  ex-Soviet Union and elsewhere. Yet Slezkine has the privilege of saying what is forbidden to the goyim.

Slezkine notes that America, unlike Europe, with its relatively strong tribal allegiances, knew only “vestigial establishment tribalism.” From its inception, America was far more propitious for Jews than Europe; it became a laboratory of ideas for diverse multicultural and academic experiments — be they of infra-, intra-European, or extra-European nature. ”What Jewish intellectuals could not attain in Europe, or later in the Soviet Union, was at hand in America where Jewish power, economic status and cultural influence have increased dramatically since 1960.”

It should not come as a surprise that similar views about Jews were elaborated much earlier by many German scholars affiliated with the Institut zum Studium der Judenfrage in National Socialist Germany, but who for obvious reasons are squarely denounced as proverbial Nazis and anti-Semites. The Institute, whose director was Eberhard Taubert , had a large number of scholars whose goal was the detailed anthropological, political and psychological research of the Jewish question. Taubert, after WWII, was not purged but worked for a while for US intelligence.  In passing, it is worth noting that unlike the English and the French language, the rich German language does not have a single vulgar or slang word for the word “the Jew” (“Jude”).

Many Jewish scholars are aware of the schizoid White European mentality.  As Shmuel Trigano noted, while setting itself up as “new Israel,” the West recognized in Judaism a factual, if not a juridical jurisdiction over itself. And this boils down to saying that the West has become Jewish to the extent that for centuries it kept forbidding to Jews their own identity. It follows from this that the strange verbal construct “Judeo-Christianity” is an elusive oxymoron; it imprisons the West, which by its own act of submission accepts a different mindset — which is not its own.

One could argue that the West is subconsciously anti-Semitic to the extent that it has always yearned — be it in a theological or ideological fashion — to become Jewish. The thesis can be put forward that the West will cease to be obsessed with Jews and anti-Semitism once it leaves this neurosis, once it returns to its own local European traditions, and by stopping to be what it is not and allowing the “Other” to continue what he is.

What has been missing in the West, and particularly in America over the last 50 years is a strong sense of cultural identity. The German word Kulturvolk, stands for a rooted cultural and national community (and not just the adherence to White race), and it is a prerequisite for a sound White identity. In contrast to Germans, Russians, French, etc., the weak cultural identity among White elites in America was a major flaw among American nationalists, racialists and conservatives who, while being aware of Jewish influence, were unable to muster up cultural energy to counter it. However, with rapid racial changes in America there are signs that the common cultural identity among Whites in America is on the rise.

The feigned fraternity between the postmodern Euro-American “shabbos goyim” and American Jews is veiled in mendacity and mutual make-belief mimicry which can be spotted in the Western political establishment and the media at all times. It is too grotesque to last forever. Admittedly, it only gives rise to proverbial Jewish hubris which will continue to grow as long as it receives servile fodder from self-censored European academics and politicians.

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).

Elena Kagan: Jewish Ethnic Networking Eases the Path of a Liberal/Leftist to the Supreme Court

/1 Comment/in , , /by

A recent LA Times article, “Supreme Court Nominee has admirers left and right,” by David G. Savage and James Oliphant, although masquerading as news, is a brief for the candidacy of Elena Kagan for the position on the Supreme Court vacated by David H. Souter.  The article notes that she is well connected to top people in the Obama Administration, and there is effusive praise from two legal bigwigs, Laurence Tribe and Charles Fried, both of Harvard.

Kagan’s candidacy raises a number of issues. If nominated and confirmed, there would be three Jewish justices on the Supreme Court — all on the left. Jews are of course always overrepresented among elites — especially on the left, but 33% is high by any standard given that Jews constitute less than 3% of the US population. This is much higher than Jewish representation in the US Senate (13%) and the House of Representatives (~7%).  The last time I checked, if there were three Jews on the Supreme Court, the percentage would be about the same as the percentage of Jews among the wealthiest Americans.

Jews as one-third of the Supreme Court seems sure to raise the eyebrows among people like me who think that Jewish identity often makes a big difference in attitudes and behavior. And if there is one area where mainstream Jewish political identity has had a huge effect (besides anything related to Israel), it’s in attitudes and behavior related to multiculturalism. This is true of the Jewish mainstream across the entire Jewish political spectrum, from the far left to the neoconservative right. A major theme of The Culture of Critique is that Jewish identities and interests were apparent in all the Jewish-dominated intellectual movements of the left that have rationalized multiculturalism, massive non-White immigration, and the general displacement of Europeans:

Viewed at its most abstract level, a fundamental agenda is thus to influence the European-derived peoples of the United States to view concern about their own demographic and cultural eclipse as irrational and as an indication of psychopathology. (Ch. 5 of The Culture of Critique; emphasis in original)

Kagan seems to have lived a charmed life, with perhaps a whiff (or even a stench) of ethnic networking. At least one of the journalists writing the LA Timespanegyric is Jewish (David G. Savage), and the two legal scholars who are quoted in the article (Fried and Tribe) are both Jews. In addition, Kagan was appointed Dean of Harvard Law by Lawrence Summers — also Jewish and with a strong Jewish identity. Summers and Kagan covered for Laurence Tribe when he lifted a passage from another scholar’s book without attribution. Ethnic networking is nothing if not reciprocal.

While Jewish activists are doing all they can to promote a Jew for this position, we don’t hear a peep from White Protestants — a group that dominated the Supreme Court for 150 years.  With Souter’s departure, the only White Protestant left on the court is the superannuated Stevens, who is 89 and will doubtless be replaced by an ethnic minority if he retires during the Obama administration. (White males need not apply.)  When it comes to playing help-my-tribe battles, White Protestants are completely inept — in fact, they don’t even play at all.

Tribe’s praise for Kagan is particularly interesting: “She has an excellent chance, and she would be terrific. … She has a masterful command of so many areas of law. And she’s been vetted and recently confirmed. Her writing is not voluminous, which is also a plus.”

Indeed, her writing is not voluminous at all. In her entire career at the University of Chicago and Harvard — the very apex of elite academic institutions — she has written a grand total of 9 articles. Actually, her scholarly output is even less than that because two of these publications are book reviews and one is a tribute to Thurgood Marshall. When she received tenure at the University of Chicago in 1995, she had exactly two scholarly articles published in law journals — a record that would ordinarily not get her tenure even at quite a few third tier universities much less an elite institution like the University of Chicago.

But on the basis of this record and later work in the Clinton Administration, in 2003 she became the dean of Harvard Law School, the most prestigious law school in the country. She has yet to publish any articles or books since becoming dean. But now her lack of scholarship is called a plus by Laurence Tribe, presumably because her positions on many issues are unknown. (Doubtless if Kagan had a stellar scholarly record, Tribe would have seen it as a major plus.)

Not only does she have a weak record as a scholar, she has yet to argue a case as Solicitor General even though she had the opportunity to do so. Her next opportunity to argue a case will not happen until after the Supreme Court nomination process is over, so we will have no information on how effective she would be in fending off the arguments of the conservative intellectual heavyweights on the Court before this weighty decision is made. On the basis of the arguments she endorsed in the Solomon Amendment case (see below), one must assume that she would not fare well.

Nor are there any other discernible positives. As Savage and Oliphant note, “Kagan does not have the ‘real world’ experience in politics. …  It is not clear whether she has the “quality of empathy” Obama has said he wants in a nominee. But she has had an uncanny knack for winning important admirers and avoiding enemies in a series of top legal jobs.”

The only thing Kagan has going for her seems to be that important people admire her. She’s good at networking, and it would seem that many of her most prominent admirers are other Jews — liberal and conservative. (Tribe and Summers are liberals; Charles Fried is considered a conservative. Fried was Solicitor General in the Reagan Administration but voted for Obama.) Ethnic networking indeed!

This points to corruption in the Jewish sector of the American academic elite. Kagan’s path to the academic heights of the legal profession and perhaps to a position on the Supreme Court is not based on a solid record of scholarship or any other relevant experience, but on ethnic boosterism from other Jews. As I noted elsewhere, Jews are represented in elite American academic institutions at levels far higher than can be explained by IQ.

[adrotate group=”1″]

Kagan is a poster girl for Jewish affirmative action. Not only does she have no discernible skills that would warrant her high position as dean of Harvard Law — much less an appointment to the Supreme Court, she is boosted by another Harvard professor (Laurence Tribe) who plagiarized another scholar’s work. (Plagiarism seems to run rampant at Harvard Law. Norman Finkelstein provides a credible case that Alan Dershowitz plagiarized others’ work in writingThe Case for Israel. Charles J. Ogletree Jr., an African American, was involved in double plagiarism: foisting off the plagiarized work of his assistants as his own.) And Kagan was appointed dean of Harvard Law by then-Harvard President Lawrence Summers who has massive ethical problems of his own related to shielding another Harvard professor, his friend and protégé Andrei Shleifer. Shleifer  was found liable by a federal court in 2004 for conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government for his activities during the transition to capitalism in Russia in the 1990s. Summers also accepted $2.7 million in speaking fees from companies that received government bailout money when he later became head of the National Economic Council.

What could we expect from Kagan on the Supreme Court? Kagan has been flagged by conservatives because of an amicus brief she and other law professors wrote seeking to strike down a law that prohibited colleges and universities that ban military recruiting on campus from receiving federal funds. The motive behind the brief signed by Kagan was to protest the military’s policy on homosexuality. Their arguments were rejected 8-0 by the Supreme Court, indicating that even the Court liberals thought it was completely outside the mainstream.

This strongly suggests that Kagan would be quite willing to fashion her legal arguments to attain her liberal/left policy goals, and that is exactly what her other writings show. Her 1993 article “Regulation of Hate Speech and Pornography After R.A.V,” (60 University of Chicago Law Review 873; available on Lexis/Nexis) indicates someone who is entirely on board with seeking ways to circumscribe free speech in the interests of multicultural virtue: “I take it as a given that we live in a society marred by racial and gender inequality, that certain forms of speech perpetuate and promote this inequality, and that the uncoerced disappearance of such speech would be cause for great elation.” She acknowledges that the Supreme Court is unlikely to alter its stance that speech based on viewpoint is protected by the First Amendment, but she sees that as subject to change with a different majority: The Supreme Court “will not in the foreseeable future” adopt the view that “all governmental efforts to regulate suchspeech … accord with the Constitution.” But in her view there is nothing to prevent it from doing so. Clearly, she does not see the protection of viewpoint-based speech as a principle worth preserving or set in stone. Rather, she believes that a new majority could rule that “all government efforts to regulate such speech” would be constitutional. All government efforts.

And until that day comes — doubtless speeded by her arrival on the court, she advocates finding ways to rationalize restrictions on free speech within the current guidelines of the court.  Her article proposes a variety of ways that “hate speech” may be restricted without running afoul of current Supreme Court guidelines. For example, she supports the constitutionality of “hate crime” laws that enhance penalties for crimes motivated by racial bias — precisely the sort of law recently passed by the House and now being considered by the Senate. Such laws have been strongly promoted by the organized Jewish community and condemned by conservative legal scholars as creating special victim categories and destroying federalism because they punish acts that are already illegal in the states.

Kagan’s conclusion shows where her heart is:

[Efforts to draft restrictions on speech] will not eradicate all pornography or all hate speech from our society, but they can achieve much worth achieving. They, and other new solutions, ought to be debated and tested in a continuing and multi-faceted effort to enhance the rights of minorities and women, while also respecting core principles of the First Amendment.

For Kagan, the crusade to restrict speech is motivated by her feminist and leftist political attitudes. Indeed, her 1993 paper was originally presented at a conference titled, “Speech, Equality, and Harm: Feminist Legal Perspectives on Pornography and Hate Propaganda.” She sees her job as a legal scholar to find a way to ensure that these goals are achieved while paying lip service to the legal tradition of the First Amendment. Indeed, she sees heavy-handed attempts to restrict free speech, such as the Stanford speech code, as counter-productive because they make “the forces of hatred into defenders of Constitutional liberty” and because they are so unreasonable they invite criticisms of the rest of Stanford’s race and gender policies.

In a revealing comment, she notes that those who want to restrict speech in heavy-handed and unconstitutional ways are motivated by the stubborn failure to close the racial gap:

The magnitude and duration of these inequalities may make them impervious to political (let alone to academic) efforts. We do not know how to solve these problems; we may not even know how to talk (or perhaps we are afraid to talk) about them. So some succumb to the allure of sideshows such as the one involving the Stanford Policy.

Given what many believe is the biological basis of these racial differencesand recent reports that the racial gap in education is not narrowing despite the No Child Left Behind law aimed at raising the scores of Blacks and Latinos, I suspect that this temptation to restrict speech will be increasingly irresistible in the future. And if Kagan is on the Supreme Court, we can certainly expect that she would vote for such restrictions. Her heart, as I am sure Obama must know, is definitely in the right place.

They say politics is the art of the possible. For Kagan, law is also the art of the possible. There are no principles. Only better or worse tactics for achieving her policy goals.

Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach.  Email him.

Small Towns, Football and Close-Knit Whites: Monolith of Evil to the New York Times

/in /by

Last August, I wrote about CNN’s predictably biased coverage of the beating death of Luís Ramírez, an illegal alien in the small Pennsylvania town of Shenandoah.

The young White men prosecuted beat some of the charges, leading to yet another round of predictable media coverage.  Most stories I read began with that most ominous of phrases:  “An all-White jury…”

Of course, to a media that considers itself Atticus Finch, nothing good can ever issue from “an all-White jury.”  A Google News search reveals endless hits for “all-White jury”;  none for “all-black jury” or “all-Hispanic jury.”  Really, you needn’t read the rest of the story.  I’ll finish off the paragraph for your convenience:  “An all-White jury today ignored all evidence presented at trial and handed down an utterly racist verdict that totally affirms the incurably backward, bigoted nature of American society.”

If an “all-White jury” decided to award slavery reparations to all living blacks, it wouldn’t be “an all-White jury” — it would simply be “a jury.”  And a sensible, fair-minded one at that.

The media telegraphs a lot by using “all-White jury.”  If a few blacks or Hispanics had been on it, the media is saying, they naturally would have been able to appeal to the Whites’ better angels, and thus come back with the correct decision.

The media is barely interested in such trivialities as the burden of proof or the evidence presented at trial — otherwise, it would announce a shocking verdict by saying “despite overwhelming evidence of innocence, Tom Robinson was convicted of rape.”  Whites are presumed to be defective jurors.  And anything “all-White,” whether a barbershop quartet or local school, is of course illegitimate.  An “all-White jury” may be the most illegitimate thing going.

These presumptions guided the coverage by Ian Urbina, the New York Times reporter sent to sniff out and send up for mockery the White reaction to the verdict in Shenandoah.

Urbina goes at his task with gusto, starting off with a claim by a Hispanic student that Whites threatened him with the next beating.  It would be easy for a Hispanic student to falsify such a claim, and I wonder whether Urbina followed up with a request for the names of those White students.  Probably not — minority claims of victimization usually go unchallenged by reporters.  The claim might be true, but the New York Times would never allow a similar claim by a White to serve as the lead sentence of a story, even if it were confirmed by multiple sources.  (Later on in the story, we see that the student himself was suspended after being given “permission” by his father to respond to the Whites with violence, a scenario description that cries out for deeper questioning.)

Good Guys: The Bermejo family. The boy in the background claimed that  White students told him he would be beaten next.

Naturally, Urbina quotes Hispanic advocacy groups, but does not bother reaching out to a White advocacy group like the National Policy Institute.  He quotes a Hispanic advocacy attorney as saying that “this case is not just about what happened to Luis;  it’s about what Latinos nationally are facing.”  Needless to say, Mr. Urbina is not interested in what Whites nationally are facing, nor does he question the sense of shared racial fate felt by Hispanics.

Urbina quotes Hispanics — by name, of course (see my earlier column for a discussion of this) — trumpeting that the Whites only dislike them because they represent “change” and are “different.”  They thus channel back to the reporter exactly what he believes about White attitudes toward Hispanics or illegal immigrants — kind of like a Mobius strip message circuit.  White advocates, take note:  When speaking to a reporter, it’s best to frame your message in terms of things the reporter already believes.

Urbina winds up with a sucker punch.  He quotes a White man, Ed Rolko, on his reaction to the verdict as follows:

“‘This is a tight-knit place, and everyone knows each other,’ said Mr. Rolko, adding that he, like everyone else in town, knows the defendants personally.

Asked whether he knew Mr. Ramírez, Mr. Rolko said no.” 

Bad Guy: Ed Rolko at his styling salon

It’s doubtful that any of the happy-to-talk Hispanics knew any of the White defendants, but Mr. Urbina doesn’t pose this question to them.  He’s only interested in setting up Whites like Ed Rolko as close-minded bigots.  We can safely assume this:  If Mr. Urbina had information that the Hispanics in town knew the White defendants, he would have happily put it out there — further proof of White wickedness in comparison to Hispanic friendliness.  So he either asked the question and got the same answer, or didn’t ask the question at all.

[adrotate group=”1″]

Such is the power of a reporter to shape a story.  Ian Urbina instinctively feels that small towns, football and close-knit Whites are bad things, and he narrates accordingly.  Having moved from one much-hated career to another (journalism to law), I can testify to the dirty tricks of both.

But the law, at least, has accounted for the tendency of a particular party to shape the story to advance his interests:  the trial, with objections, cross-examinations and separate opportunities to present evidence.

Sadly for Whites, they sit in the defendant’s chair with the media as prosecutor — and no defense counsel in sight.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist. Email him.

On the Visual Displacement of the White Race

/in /by

I’ve been observing and studying the fall of Western man for about two decades now. For a number of years I could not really understand the process, but eventually I caught on. I’ve shared my fears and observations about our displacement with friends and family in a haphazard way but it was not until this winter that I systematically reached out to try to warn them. More than the election of the first African American president last fall, it was the sudden implosion of the economy that convinced me that my minimum duty was to at least pass on my estimation that a few basic measures of preventive self defense were in order.

Before talking to anyone, however, I pondered the likely response to my warnings. Like almost every White racialist out there, I’ve experienced rejection from nearly every White I’ve talked to. Why this is so remains a mystery to me, for the evidence of White decline is everywhere. Sure, humans are prone to denial, but how can it continue this far past the obvious?

Denial or not, I resolved to go one step beyond the writing I’ve been doing to actually talk to specific friends and family members about the elevated risks they face simply by being a White person in today’s America. Of particular concern are the naïve young women in my family.

Looking back on it, the impetus for this personal campaign probably came from a column by the editor of The Occidental Quarterly, Greg Johnson. Mr. Johnson used the occasion of the release of a low-keyed video about race in America to ponder precisely what I’m talking about. In his words: “When a White person awakens to our race’s peril, the first impulse—and the first duty—is to try to awaken others. But where to begin?”

His decision was to “highly recommend Craig Bodeker’s masterful 58 minute documentary A Conversation about Race. It is an ideal first step on the road to racial awakening.” Taking this advice, I started there, ordering a copy for my brother in Virginia. A blue collar man, he’s been hard hit his whole life by stagnant or declining wages, in part due to the massive immigration—legal and illegal—of laborers with little education. Since he’s a nice guy who is at least superficially willing to listen to my ideas on race, I figured he’d react favorably.

A Conversation about Race

I sent him a copy of the documentary, which he acknowledged receiving, but in subsequent e-mails and phone conversations, he’s never brought up the subject. I have to assume then that he simply has chosen not to watch it. And it’s not that he doesn’t like to watch TV. On the contrary, he’s one of those guys who watches hours and hours of it after work and on weekends. I can always get a pretty good idea of what the latest popular sayings or phrases are just by listening to him.

Well, my brother was just a start. Being Irish America of a certain generation, I’ve got a good number of relatives both back in my hometown and spread out across America. Cousin Mike, for one, is about as good as they come. A few years younger than me, he never went to college but has worked hard enough all these years to allow his horse-loving wife to be a stay-at-home mom. (It helps that land and home prices in small town America are still low.)

As a self-employed businessman—a guy who works with his hands but also has to focus on the bottom line—Mike is probably a little more serious about events than the average guy his age. That’s why I approached him in a unique way. In essence, I made him an offer: “Mike, I’ve got cash in a bank that might be going under someday soon and I can’t be sure federal insurance will mean a lot at that point. Thus, I’d rather use some of that money to buy something here and now that could make a big difference in our lives: I’m willing to pay for whatever firearms and ammo you would feel comfortable owning.”

Because Mike knows how to use dangerous tools and has a fairly sharp sense of what human beings can be capable of in a pinch, I thought it better that he rather than more innocent relatives be in charge of legal firearms. Unfortunately, I never heard back from him.

Now before you get worried about this talk of firearms, let me state directly what worries me most: the chance that our society will even more extensively allow our underclass to blame Whites for whatever perceived misdeeds the underclass feels we are responsible for, and worse, to tacitly allow them to act on their sense of resentment or vengeance more than they already do. And it’s not even the carjacking or street crime that most worries me; it’s the rape. 

If you’re reading this column, you don’t have to be reminded of the sources for statistics on this kind of thing. We’ve got the hard science from the likes of Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn, and Richard Hernnstein and Charles Murray. Further, we have the aggregated figures on the highly elevated rates of Black crime as documented in The Color of Crime, which comes from the same team that has consistently brought us the race realism writing of Jared Taylor and his writers at American Renaissance.

VDARE.com has a veritable stable of race realist writers, while the more courageous individual can go to a place like David Duke’s website for unvarnished discussions of the problems we Whites face—and the people who are mainly responsible for our plight. Or you could visit Western Voices World News or maybe Ziopedia. (For the more aurally oriented, one might turn to James Edwards’ radio show The Political Cesspool, which was just mentioned in a front-page story in The London Times.)

My point is this—there are many good sources for finding out about the scourge we Whites generally face today in America (and Canada, England, etc.) And like I said, one of the most fearful is Black-on-White rape. In addition to a brother, I have four sisters, and among the six of us we have a lot of young White girls, mostly blondes. Maybe now you can see why I’m worried.

We race realists all have something that triggered our escape from the imposed lies about racial equality and the ideology of unique White wickedness. For me, it was certainly the Wichita Massacre, in which five young Whites were raped and/or murdered by two Black men in a horrendous attack—one which our national media utterly ignored. For others it may have been the Knoxville slayings, or maybe the way the news media focus far more on the alleged crimes of White men, as in the Duke Lacrosse rape hoax or the Jena 6 fraud.

In any case, you readers know the score about interracial crime, which, as Greg Johnson tells us, Bodeker discusses openly in his race documentary:

In the United States in 2005, 37,000 White women were raped by Blacks, while in the same period “fewer than ten” Black women were raped by Whites. (The odd locution “fewer than ten” rather than a specific number leads me to think that the number could be zero, but that the statistical margin of error is ten.) Bodeker then makes another brilliant point: according to the conventional wisdom on racism, we are supposed to be worried if, on any given day, a White person somewhere in America is harboring racist attitudes towards Blacks; but if one is concerned that, on the very same day, one hundred White women are being raped by Blacks, that is racism most foul.

What I’m trying to do here is understand why what is obvious to me and other race realists is so stubbornly resisted by my friends and family. I mean, what more than is already happening will it take to wake them from their stupor? As an academic, my approach has been through the written word, often in ways that might test the patience of the general reader. Still, I think even my academic prose is accessible and, because it is almost exclusively focused on popular culture, of interest to a wide audience.

For instance, my thirty-something columns at this site cover a broad range of popular culture. My longer works in The Occidental Quarterly do the same but in far more depth. The most popular essay to date seems to be one on television—The Jews of Prime Time. Others can be read here, here and here (this year expect three more essays in my “Understanding Hollywood” series).

My focus on Hollywood comes from the common assumption—heavily supported by an immense body of scholarship—that media influence the way a population thinks and acts. For example, a major thrust of Kevin MacDonald’s recent work (see also here and here) is on showing the power of culture to shape attitudes and control behavior. As he says, “It’s the culture, stupid.”

And it is not only media like film, television and newsprint that do this. It can also be advertising, even in ways that are not directly related to the bottom line.

For instance, the blatantly anti-White male series run by Washington Mutual Bank (WaMu) a few years back is unmistakable in its disdain for traditional White society. The conceit is that a nonthreatening and personable Black man in khaki trousers is superior to the crowd of stuffy White (non-Jewish) male bankers who are “from the last century.” Have a look. As we are introduced to a series of White male faces, the narrator intones, “They’re out of touch. They’re old fashioned. They’re greedy.” In contrast, the audience consists of “regular people.” You know, Black women, Pakistani immigrants, and most of all our Black male emcee.  The White males are imbeciles — one stating “I’m clueless and rich.”

Another commercial in the series has the herd of White male bankers threatening to jump from the roof of the bank because super banker Bill (the African American) has introduced wildly successful new banking products that the White bankers had never dreamed of. The ad closes with the bankers’ wives being hydraulically lifted to the roof to berate their emasculated banker husbands.

In perhaps the most offensive version, our Black banker Bill explains the source of WaMu’s success. Taking a secret elevator down into the basement, he reveals his secret: “Here at WaMu we have the bankers’ pen. It’s simple—If these stodgy old bankers think an idea is wrong, then we know it’s right.” When the pen of White bankers gets riled up over the new business practices Bill has overseen, he placates them by having a large champagne dispenser lowered into the cage, just as baby calves are bottle fed out in the barn.

(Far be it from me to gloat over the failures of multiculturalism, but I did notice that last fall WaMu went bankrupt. I guess Black banker Bill’s ideas were not that applicable in the real world.)

I know my friends and relatives are watching such advertising all the time. In addition to a similar message of White displacement being preached at all levels of education (ever look at the textbooks your kids are assigned?), the meaning is crystal clear. Why the denial, then?

Honestly, this kind of image is now part of the furniture that is found in the American living room. Think about Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show for starters. For many Americans — especially young adults, he sets the stage for viewing reality. Now, I know what the response of the vast majority of Whites is to anti-White images: as long as they are funny, anything goes. It doesn’t’ matter how vile, untrue or damaging the images are, just as long as they are funny. Needless to say, Blacks, Jews, women, and a string of other minorities long ago learned that humor was one of the most effective ways to attack, belittle and disenfranchise a target group. Whites in general, however, are clueless.

For instance, The Daily Show recently ran a skit called White in America—the Children, which operated on a number of levels. The most basic message was that Whites’ days as majority Americans were numbered. Stewart opens the skit by announcing that “President Obama was elected on a message of change. But is that change good for everyone?” Light-skinned Black Larry Wilmore adopts the role of reporter, introducing one set of Americans at risk: “There is one group of Americans who are now facing the biggest challenge in their history: White people.”

This “once proud race” faces dispossession at the hands of Blacks, Asians “and most rapidly, Latinos” (the transition being represented in the skit by White minivans being replaced by Black cars, Asian motorcycles and low-rider Mexican American cars). In a faux-serious interview, Wilmore faces a group of eight White children and tries to make them understand that their future is bleak. The children—brainwashed already by a steady diet of multiculturalism—are not only in denial about their prospects, they positively welcome the coming change.

The only blonde young girl, for instance, testily responds to observations about her group’s decline, blurting out “We’re not upset in any way, shape or form.” More realistic about race realities, interviewer Wilmore solemnly informs them: “You will be.”

Of course he is absolutely right. Displacement and loss of power have been utterly devastating to groups throughout history. Think how well Americans Indians have fared. Or modern Palestinians. To fail to be upset by such a prospect goes far beyond mere denial, it seems to me. To give up power in a situation where the groups who inherit power (particularly Jews, Blacks, and Latinos) have historical grudges against Whites seems the ultimate folly.

Showing his well-rehearsed multicultural response to the “inevitable” coming changes in America, a White boy quizzes Wilmore, asking “What if this happens and only good change occurs in America?” What kind of Kool-Aid are such young White children already drinking? Perhaps it’s understandable that White children believe these things. The truly pathetic part is that such childish fantasies of about the future of Whites in multicultural America are believed by White adults.

Again, I want to stress the pervasiveness of such images of White dispossession. As mentioned, I’ve written extensively about Hollywood’s scripted replacement of Whites, but you can find it just about everywhere. The venerable Atlantic Monthly, for instance, has for some years now been running prominent ads from the top corporations in America—Microsoft, UPS, Lockheed Martin, etc.—that visually celebrate the coming diversity they see in our future.

Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, for example, envisions their future rockets being built by a whole range of races — completely unlike the real history of rocketry, where White males did all the thinking, designing and building.

Lockheed Martin ad with future rocket scientists

Microsoft took an even more blatant approach to the same idea, announcing: “We see a rocket scientist.” In the picture, a Black youth is the future rocket scientist. (The odds of someone from a population with an average IQ of 85 producing a rocket scientist are miniscule.) Around him are an Asian boy, a presumably Hispanic boy, a mulatto girl, and two White girls. Real White male rocket scientists and astronauts need not apply.

Microsoft ad: “We see a rocket scientist” (I don’t)

To be sure, NASA itself has been part of this lunge toward diversity, scrapping its all-White male pool of Apollo astronauts for a predictably diverse cast, such as we see here in a crew photo of the space shuttle astronauts who died in the 1986 Challenger explosion:

Space Shuttle Challenger Crew

Space Shuttle Columbia Crew, with Israeli flag

(Nearly two decades later, the multicultural look was still in force at NASA, though the second time a shuttle orbiter was lost, an Israeli was among the crew. This made for a good photo op with both nations’ flags.)

My favorite ad is another Lockheed Martin creation, this one celebrating the joys of diversity in (allegedly) fostering unique perspectives and innovation — which is why the world has seen such stunning fighter jets conceived and produced in places ranging from Mozambique to Polynesia to Ecuador. Here are the people who will be responsible for Lockheed Martin’s future jets. You go, girls!

Lockheed Martin ad featuring non-White female space scientists

The gauntlet laid down for the White race is formidable: demographics, immigration, affirmative action, White self-hate, and the relentless efforts of Jewish groups to eliminate Whites as rivals for world domination.

But I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there is room for optimism, such as that displayed by VDARE’s Steve Sailer, who recently wrote, “The interaction of government-sponsored non-traditional immigration and “disparate impact” affirmative action constitutes a doomsday machine the will rapidly dispossess, and probably seriously radicalize, White America. It’s a recipe for revolution.”

Obviously, I don’t see our dispossession as positive, but I sure would be happy if Sailer is right about a coming White revolution. Sadly, I just don’t see it—and the non-responses of my friends and family discussed above strikes me as typical.

No doubt what really turns people off is when I persist in discussing what I see as the root cause of White dispossession: Jewish activism. We at The Occidental Observer have focused on this cause since the inception of the website last year. I insist on this because I believe political philosopher Carl Schmitt was right: “It’s not only you who chooses your enemy, it’s more often your enemy who chooses you.”

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

Money Talks

/in /by

Never has money been so important in human relations. Never has it so much affected the destiny of so many Americans and Europeans. Today money has become a civil religion that makes it the centerpiece of discourse in all cultures and subcultures. At European and American cafes, on the Champs Élysées, or on Sunset Boulevard, at concert halls, and even in parliaments, one hears and smells its verbal derivatives such as “moulah,” “dough,” “fric,” “Kohle,” “pognon.”  It is a language understood by all. In all segments of their lives Western citizens invariably talk about money and what money can buy. The great respite may come with the current financial crisis, which is finally undoing the liberal system with all its conventional wisdoms and lies. The ongoing economic depression may be the sign that the reign of money and the dictatorship of well-being are coming to an end.

Sounds familiar? No, it does not.  In ancient European traditions money and commerce were looked down upon and at times these two activities were in principle forbidden to Europeans. Merchants were often foreigners and considered second class citizens.

The famous English poet and novelist D. H. Lawrence — a “revolutionary nationalist” — talks about “money madness” in his collection of poems Pansies. His poem “Kill money” summarizes best this facet of 20th-century mores: Kill money/put money out of existence/It is a perverted instinct/A hidden thought /which rots the brain, the blood, the bones, the stones, the soul.

Similar views were held by the long forgotten American Southern agrarians in the 30’s, who viciously attacked American money madness and the belief in progress. They had dark premonitions about the future of America. As noted by John Crowe Ransom, “Along with the gospel of progress goes the gospel of service. Americans are still dreaming the materialistic dreams of their youth.” And further he writes: “The concept of Progress is the concept of man’s increasing command, and eventually a perfect command over the forces of nature: a concept which enhances too readily our conceit and brutalizes our life.”

Thousands of book titles and thousands of poems from antiquity all the way to early modernity bear witness to a tradition of deep revulsion Europeans had for money and merchants. Charles Dickens’ description of the character Fagin the Jew in his novel Oliver Twist may be soon cut out from the mandatory school curriculum. Fagin’s physical repulsiveness, his strange name, and most of all his Jewish identity do not square with modern ukases on ethnic and diversity training in American schools. The crook Fagin illustrates boundless human greed when he sings to himself and his young  captive boys: “In this life, one thing counts / In the bank, large amounts / I’m afraid these don’t grow on trees, / You’ve got to pick-a-pocket or two / You’ve got to pick-a-pocket or two, boys, / You’ve got to pick-a-pocket or two.”

Already Ezra Pound, a connoisseur of the English language and a visionary on the methods of usury, and his contemporary,  Norwegian Nobel prize winnerKnut Hamsun, have disappeared from library shelves. Their fault? They critically examined the crisis of financial capitalism, or what we call more euphemistically today “global recession” and the main movers and shakers behind it.

In medieval times, money and the merchant class were social outcasts solely needed to run the economy of a country. Yet today they have morphed into role models of the West represented by a slick and successful banker dressed in an Armani suit and sporting a broad smile on his face. What a change from traditional Europe in which an intelligent man was destined for priesthood, sainthood, or a military career!

[adrotate group=”1″]

It is with the rising tide of modernity that the value system began to change. Even nowadays the word ‘merchant’ in the French and the German languages (marchand, Händler) has a slightly pejorative meaning, associated with a foreigner, prototypically a Jew. The early Catholic Church had an ambiguous attitude toward money — and toward Jews. Well known are St. Luke’s parables (16:19–31) that it “is easier for a camel to go thru the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

But the Church chose a less pious way to power. In 1179, the Third Lateran Council forbade Jews from living in Christian communities and exiled them to ghettos — with full rights to practice usury and tax collecting. To a large extent the Church, while providing the best shelter for Jews against frequent bouts of popular anti-Jewish anger, also greatly amassed wealth — courtesy of Jewish tax collectors.

The father of the Enlightenment, the 18th-century French philosopher Voltaire, is often quoted as a first spokesman of tolerance and human rights in Western civilization. But it is often forgotten that Voltaire was also an unabashed anti-Semite. Voltaire’s critical remarks about Jews and their love for money were recently expunged from his books, or simply not translated. But some still thrive such as “always superstitious and greedy for the good of others, always barbarous, crawling when in misfortune and insolent in prosperity, that is what the Jews were in the eyes of the Greeks and Romans..”  (Essais sur les mœurs) 

The ancient European ruling class certainly had its share of corruption and greed. But in principle, until the Enlightenment, the social roles of money and merchants were subjugated to the role of the prince and power politics. Until then, the entire value system had been based on spiritual transcendence and not on economic growth — at least in its appearance. In ancient Greece, King Midas who was a kind man, could not resist the temptation of turning everything into gold with his magic fingers, until he ruined his family, turned water into undrinkable metal, and his face assumed the shape of a donkey. King Croesus went berserk after amassing so much wealth that he could not devote his time and his thoughts to the impending war with the Persians.

In the ancient European tradition, revulsion against money pervades the sagas and the old popular legends, teaching everybody that piety prospers over prosperity. Material wealth brings disaster.

Today, by contrast, official advocacy of frugality and modesty is perceived as a sign of the early stage of lunacy. If a well-educated and well-cultivated man comes along and starts preaching modesty or rejects honoraria for his work, he is considered a failure, a person who does not respect his own worth. How on earth can some well-read and well-bred person offer his services for free?  How on earth can a well-educated man refuse using his mental resources to generate the almighty dollar? The answer is not difficult to discover. In capitalism everything has its price, but nothing has value.

The modern liberal capitalist system is a deeply inhuman system, based on fraudulent teaching that everybody is equal in economic competition. In reality though, it rewards only those whose skills and talents happen to be marketable. Those rare Whites who decide to retain some vestiges of old European traditions are squarely pronounced incompetent.  Liberal capitalism both in America and in Europe has turned all humans into perishable commodities.

Nobody summarized this better than the Italian philosopher Julius Evola,another revolutionary nationalist who wrote: “Facing the classical dilemma ‘your money or your life,’ the bourgeois will answer: ‘Take my life but leave me my money.’”

Greed, passionate greed eclipses all elements of human decency. Until relatively recently avarice was laughed at and its chief protagonists were considered immoral people, so well represented in Molière’s comedy L’Avare. Today the greedier the better: The money maker is the ultimate role model.

Both East and West participate in this ethic of greed. The richest people in post-communist Eastern Europe are former communist hacks who converted themselves in a twinkle of an eye from disciples of Marx into acolytes of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. Finance capitalism provides the perception of limitless possibility of how to get rich out of the blue. This is a typical Bernie Madoff syndrome, namely that affluence can be created by sheer speculation. The entire banking system in Eastern Europe has been sold to foreigners over the last 10 years.

Modern capitalism and a penchant for finance owe much to Judaism.  Werner Sombart, a German disciple of Max Weber, who can in no way be called an anti-Semite wrote in The Jews and Modern Capitalism that “money was their sole companion when they were thrust naked into the street, and their sole protector when the hand of the oppressor was heavy upon them. So they learned to love it, seeing that by its aid alone they could subdue the mighty ones of the earth. Money became the means whereby they — and through them all mankind — might wield power without themselves being strong.”

Money changes social mores too. Young White couples put off having children until they achieve their economic dreams, while Mexicans and Blacks begin having children as impoverished teenagers, and Muslims place a high value on fertility. This is one of the main causes of our malaise, as White societies with declining fertility are inundated by highly fertile non-White populations with value systems that prize fertility over the accumulation of the accouterments of economic success.

And in this economic recession these Whites are not interested in a pay raise but rather in how to keep their job — security at all cost, even if it means working for lower wages. Neither are young job market entrants interested in saving money. Instead they live on credit in their petty little niche with their petty little pleasures and without incurring any risks.

What a difference from early American pioneers described by Jack London, who braved the vagaries of weather and who totally ignored the meaning of “hedge funds”! The attractions of money and the necessity of making money mean that everybody in our postmodern world becomes prey to the system.

It is a fundamental mistake among many so called right wingers and racialists to assume that capitalism is the only answer to communism. Both systems are in fact similar because they preach the same religion of progress and the unfolding of earthly paradise — albeit in different gears.  But this time liberal capitalism has nobody to hide behind in order to conceal its vulgar depravity. The likely hypothesis is that the crumbling capitalist system will fall apart as a result of its own victory. One dies always from those who give him birth.

Tom Sunic (http://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).

The Big Dog Wins Another One: Why Weren’t Pollack and Satterfield Prosecuted?

/in /by

The acquittal of former AIPAC operatives Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman on espionage is yet another victory for the Israel Lobby.  As happens so often these days, stories that are much discussed in some sectors of the Internet are pretty much ignored in the MSM. The New York Times buried it and the LA Timesignored it entirely. It was missing from network news and from cable TV talk shows of all political leanings.

Lobbies, it is said, live in the dark and die in the light of day. And here the media cooperates with a bit of self-censorship.

One of the major points made by the defense was the following argument:

Highlighting the curious underpinnings of this prosecution, the high-level government officials with whom Rosen and Weissman regularly met and who, according to the Indictment, illegally disclosed classified NDI [national defense information], have not — with but one exception — been charged criminally. Indeed, one of the disclosing officials has since received, not charges or reprimands, but a series of promotions to one of the highest, most sensitive positions in the government.

The “one exception” is former Pentagon official Lawrence A. Franklin, who has been sentenced to a 12-year prison term.  The two other high-level government officials were given coded names in the original indictment, but they are now known to be Kenneth Pollack and David Satterfield. The indictment indicates that both Pollack and Satterfield gave classified information to Rosen and/or Weissman.

Despite the wording of the indictment, Pollack claims that he “could not imagine having relayed classified information.” I guess we are supposed to take his word for it.

The indictment also mentions two Department of Defense employees who put Rosen in contact with Franklin. Neither of these has ever been named, but it would be interesting to find out their names as well. One of these employees was at a breakfast meeting with Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman when Franklin provided the AIPAC employees with classified information.

Rather than being indicted as Franklin was, life has been good for Satterfield (and Pollack; see below). Satterfield has been promoted — three times:  to Principal Deputy in the Department of State’s Mideast Bureau, then to Deputy Chief of Mission with the rank of Ambassador in Iraq  and most recently to Principal Adviser to the Secretary of State on Iraq.

All of these are sensitive assignments and all of them relate to the area of AIPAC’s main concern. AIPAC is doubtless quite happy that there are high-level US government officials who are stationed in just the right areas and who cooperate in giving them classified information.

The point of the defense, of course, is that since Satterfield and Pollack have never been indicted, Rosen and Weissman were not doing anything out of the ordinary. That is, they were talking with government officials who were not seen as doing anything wrong because nothing was done to them. And if the government officials weren’t doing anything wrong, then how could the defendants possibly be doing anything wrong? It’s all part of business as usual in Washington.

This is an excellent argument. The government’s prosecution seems to have been capricious at best. And at worst, one might speculate that the prosecution decided to sacrifice a non-Jew so that it would not be seen as exclusively targeting Jews.

So the question is: Why weren’t Pollack and Satterfield indicted? And why was Lawrence Franklin targeted as the fall guy while two high-level Jewish officials —officials that the government claims gave Rosen and Weissman classified information — were not charged at all?

From the standpoint of the government, it should make much more sense to go after the ethnic Jews who are providing classified information to AIPAC than to go after a hapless non-Jew who seems to have been seeking to advance his career by doing what his Jewish peers are doing — providing information to AIPAC. What better way to ingratiate oneself into the power structure?

Indeed, in the indictment, Franklin asks Rosen “to put in a good word for him” for a position on the National Security Council (NSC), and Rosen replies “I’ll do what I can.” Quite clearly, Franklin was seeking to advance his career in the national security establishment by cooperating with AIPAC. What a statement on the power of AIPAC in the eyes of people trying to get ahead in Washington!

On the other hand, during his trial Franklin portrayed himself as seeking to get information to people on the NSC. He had nothing but the highest motives.

But this implies that Franklin thought that it was reasonable for him to believe that by giving information to Rosen and Weissman he could influence the NSC. This shows that Franklin viewed AIPAC as having extraordinary access to the NSC — more access than he had as an employee of the Defense Department going through regular channels. Obviously, this does nothing to diminish one’s estimate of the power of AIPAC in the US government.

[adrotate group=”1″]

But the big point is that if the government really wanted to end the funneling of classified information to AIPAC and to Israel, it would go after the ethnic Jews in the government who are providing the classified information. The “passionate attachment” of ethnic Jews to Israel is the stuff of legend and is an obvious motivation that any reasonable person concerned about security issues should be aware of and try to eliminate.

The question is important because Pollack and Satterfield are exactly the types of people whose presence at high levels of the US government illustrate the power of the Israel Lobby and its ability to get information from the highest levels of the US government.

Indeed, there is now a long list of Jewish patriots who have been credibly charged with spying for Israel. Jonathan Pollard and Ben-Ami Kadish were convicted or pled guilty, but there is also a top drawer list of neoconservatives in that category who were not convicted: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Bryen, Douglas Feith, and Michael Ledeen.

Satterfield has kept a fairly low profile in terms of his associations, but Pollack is a classic Jewish activist who has gone back and forth between high positions in the government and high positions in pro-Israel activist organizations. In particular, he was working for the NSC at the time when he was mentioned in the indictment of Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman — presumably indicating that Rosen and Weissman did indeed have a close contact at the NSC and would be able to put in a good word for the ambitious Mr. Franklin.

At the end of the Clinton administration, Pollack moved seamlessly to hardline pro-Israel advocacy as Director or Research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. In this role he has been a strong advocate for the war in Iraq. Whereas the Iraq War was definitely a project of the neocons, Pollack is a Democrat who used his influence to successfully promote the war among liberals. New York Times columnist Bill Keller noted “Kenneth Pollack, the Clinton National Security Council expert whose argument for invading Iraq is surely the most influential book of this season, has provided intellectual cover for every liberal who finds himself inclining toward war but uneasy about Mr. Bush.”

And liberal columnist Matthew Yglesias pointed to Pollack’s influence among liberals in creating a bi-partisan agreement in favor of the war. He describes himself as among those “who read Pollack’s celebrated 2002 book, ‘The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq,’ and became convinced as a result that the United States needed to, well, invade Iraq in order to dismantle Saddam Hussein’s advanced nuclear weapons program (the one he didn’t actually have).”

Pollack therefore is a good example of how the Israel Lobby plays both sides of the aisle. The neocons take over the Republican Party, while the liberals are swayed by the likes of Pollack.  And wealthy activists like Haim Saban are there to endow the Saban Center so that people like Pollack can have good jobs and a prominent platform for their ideas.

As noted in my previous column, dual citizen Saban’s love for Israel knows no bounds. Indeed, one aspect of Saban’s commitment is that he seems to be involved in yet another AIPAC scandal as the person who asked Rep. Jane Harman to use her influence to get the charges against Rosen and Weissman reduced.

Saban and Pollack obviously have a lot in common. Like Pollack, Saban is a Democrat. Saban is a huge donor to the Democratic Party — he gave over $10,000,000 in 2001–2002. But he’s a liberal who loves war if it’s in Israel’s interests, and he obviously got the right man in Pollack to head his center.

Finally, Judge T. S. Ellis III forced the government to have a very high standard for conviction. The government had to prove that Rosen and Weissman “had a bad faith reason to believe the disclosures could be used to the injury of the United States or to the aid of a foreign nation; and … intended that such injury to the United States or aid to a foreign nation occur.”

This is a very high standard and would make it pretty much impossible to convict anyone of spying on behalf of Israel. Indeed, the first line of defense for neocons against accusations of dual loyalty is to claim that they sincerely believe that are advocating policies that are in the interests of the United States. As I noted elsewhere,

One need not be a professional psychologist to realize that sincere beliefs can be influenced in subtle ways by one’s ethnic commitments. The neocons may not be consciously disloyal, but there is every reason to suppose that their beliefs are tailor-made to conform to their perception of ethnic interests. And in the case of the neocons … there is overwhelming evidence for deep ethnic commitments among neoconservative Jews.

Jewish organizations have every reason to celebrate this victory. Not only were the AIPAC operatives acquitted, the Jewish activists  inside the US governmentwho are alleged to have given AIPAC classified information were not even indicted.

True to form, their reaction is to take full advantage of their victory. Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Vice Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations hinted darkly that the investigation was motivated by anti-Semitism: “Hoenlein questioned ‘the justification’ for the case and the decision to bring charges under a law that had barely been used in more than 90 years.” As one activist rabbi noted, “We are very, very happy this has been dismissed,” But “for us this is not over, this is the beginning.” “The government should not be able to get away with this.”

The effects of this are obvious. US government personnel will be very reluctant to mount such investigations in the future. They will be intimidated — afraid to investigate any espionage on behalf of Israel because of effects on their own career.

The result will be a repeat of what happened to the State Department. In the bad old days (from the standpoint of the organized Jewish community), the State Department, and especially the Near East Desk, was run by people who were not sympathetic to Israel. All that has changed as a result of a major push by Jewish activists to assume positions in the State Department and to shift policy their way. David Satterfield seems to fit this profile, and it is certainly the case with Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk, both of whom have had long careers shuttling back and forth between influential positions in the diplomatic corps related to Israel and high-profile positions within pro-Israel activist organizations.

Jewish activists may not be able to influence the security establishment to quite the same extent. But they surely will use the results of the current case to do what they can to make the people who were responsible for this case pay a very high price. And they may well succeed.

Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach.

Hollywood Watch — Morgan Freeman: America’s “Spiritual Presence-in-Chief”

/2 Comments/in /by

I’ve just finished researching and writing a long essay on a two decade-old phenomenon in which the film image of African American males has improved dramatically. It now rivals that of white males, who outnumber blacks by about seven to one. (We might also mention that it was white males who ruled and largely built the nation we know as America.) Like others, I do not believe this process has “just happened.” Rather, I believe it is the result of a determined effort of elites to displace whites—especially males—from positions of status and power, if not to eliminate them altogether.

J.B. Cash, who is associated with the website Caste Football, describes this process about as well as anyone:

There are various names for the ideology of the elite. Some call it “political correctness.” Others call it “Cultural Marxism.” But the labels don’t matter as long as one understands what is going on: the ruling elites are waging a cultural and racial war against Western values, Western civilization, and particularly Western man, i.e., the white man. In the name of the feel-good mantras of diversity and multiculturalism, all the values of traditional white civilization have been declared bad and everything opposed to them declared good. Every idea, attitude, and institution that protects the white race and promotes its continued existence is being destroyed, as a precondition for the physical destruction of the race itself. No arena of life is spared this agenda’s icy grip. Every movie, television show, news story, book, and sermon must advance it, under the watchful eye of an army of censors and snitches demanding unyielding fidelity to the agenda. No argument or evidence is allowed to challenge it.

(For those so interested, William Lind’s Who Stole Our Culture adds further useful discussion.)

As my main area of academic research is film and its influence on society, I am naturally interested in the changing portrayals of various ethnic, racial, and gender groups in American society. Toward this end, my recent research involved the image of the noble black man, or, as Richard Brookhiser dubs him, the Numinous Negro.

Brookhiser tells us that the word ‘numinous’ is a Roman term for “the presiding divinity . . . of a place.” It also means “spiritually elevated.” According to Brookhiser, the Numinous Negro presides over America, “and contact with him elevates us spiritually.” The most obvious example comes in the person of Morgan Freeman in films such as The Shawshank Redemption, Deep Impact (U.S. president) and Bruce Almighty, where he plays, well, God. Though Brookhiser adds that “the Numinous Negro need not be a man — Toni Morrison and Oprah are Numinous Negroes (Ms. Morrison is a seer; Oprah is a sage)” — the vast majority of recent films featuring the Numinous Negro star male characters. I’ve already written about Denzel Washington, another excellent example of the genus.

Morgan Freeman Expressing his Numinosity as God in Bruce Almighty

Previously, I had done more work on the films of Washington than those of Morgan Freeman, so my latest essay saw me delving into the filmography of Mr. Freeman. Though I’ve emphasized how positive the Hollywood version of the Numinous Negro has become, even I was surprised by how extensive Freeman’s oeuvre is in that respect.

My general understanding was that Freeman’s public emergence as a Numinous Negro came in 1989 as the aw-shucks chauffeur in Driving Miss Daisy and was cemented by his role as the redeemed prisoner in The Shawshank Redemption (1994). Of course, film critics point out the irony that the tall Tennessean’s first big role in film was as the cruel pimp Fast Black in Street Smart (1987), for which he was nominated Best Supporting Actor. This exception aside, the point remains that Freeman’s characters have marched in lockstep with the multicultural ideology that increasingly elevates blacks in the American imagination.

I could easily go on to describe how by 1998, when Freeman played the role of kindly U.S. President in Deep Impact, his film persona was fixed as the intelligent moral center of each of his films. Steve Sailer, the film critic for The American Conservative and VDARE’s special Sunday columnist, aptly dubs Freeman America’s “Spiritual Presence-in-Chief.” Just go to the Wikipedia page on Freeman’s filmography to confirm this.  

For example, a year after The Shawshank Redemption, he played brilliant police mentor to Brad Pitt’s rash character in Seven, followed by his role as savant Dr. Alex Cross, a forensic psychologist, in Kiss the Girls. Having written tomes on the psychology of (presumably white) serial killers, he is unusually expert in following ambiguous clues. Freeman reprised his role as Dr. Cross in Along Came a Spider (2001), where once again Cross is an agent of deliverance to a young white woman.

In The Sum of All Fears, Freeman played Director of Central Intelligence to Ben Affleck’s young white Jack Ryan character (is anyone noticing a pattern here?) A year later, in 2003, Freeman appeared as God in Bruce Almighty (the 2007 sequel was Evan Almighty).

The following year saw Freeman team up with Clint Eastwood in the drama Million Dollar Baby, where Freeman won Best Supporting Actor for his performance as former prize fighter Eddie “Scrap-Iron” Dupris, a washed up, blind-in-one-eye boxer who manages to get by with a job as janitor at a local gym.

While Freeman’s main persona in Hollywood films is that of the wise and kindly mentor, generally to the young white star, in Batman Begins (2005) he is also elevated to the pinnacle of technological sophistication. Playing Lucius Fox, he is a scientist in biochemistry and mechanical engineering, supplying Bruce Wayne with the fabulous equipment he needs as a flying crime fighter. (He reprises the role in the 2008 sequel The Dark Knight.)

(Steve Sailer unravels the opening Hollywood conceit in Batman Begins, referring to the opening murder of Bruce’s parents: “As an old Chicagoan, I can assure you that one aspect of Batman Begins is standard-issue Hollywood hokum: the murderous mugger is blond. Blond bad guys are a lot more common in movies and television than in real life.”)

I could go on, but this is a mere website column, not a book. After all, by 1995 Freeman was starring in about two films a year, increasing to an average of three by 2005. In any case, my attention during my research turned in the other direction, to what Freeman had been doing in the decades prior to his Hollywood stardom. My discovery there was a surprise.

Freeman did not simply emerge fully formed as a great actor in the late 1980s. Rather, he honed his skills as a main character on the children’s educational program, The Electric Company, which was a product of The Children’s Television Workshop and ran on the Public Broadcasting Service. Clearly, this was a concerted effort at social engineering, following as it did the earlier success of Sesame Street. Funds came from the usual cast of liberal suspects, such as the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, The Corporation For Public Broadcasting, and the Office of Education, U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Both Sesame Street and The Electric Company were the very models for what was to become multiculturalism in America, introducing the tolerant cast of mixed races and genders that later became the official norm throughout the country, as NASA did with space shuttle astronauts, etc. etc.

Freeman’s roles included Easy Reader, a “smooth hipster who loved to read at every opportunity and every printed thing he saw.” (Ironically, in the 1989 Academy Award-winning film Driving Miss Daisy, Freeman’s character was originally illiterate.) He also did Mel Mounds, a hip disc jockey who introduced songs, where his signature phrase was “Sounds righteous, delightious, and out-of-sighteous! Heavy, heavy!” Vincent the Vegetable Vampire was another of his roles.

Morgan Freeman: Before the Numinosity — The Vegetable Vampire

So for most of the Seventies, millions of American children were made to feel comfortable watching a dark African American with an afro sing ditties and spell words. Then, over a decade later, when he had aged and his hair grayed somewhat, he becomes America’s “Presence-in-Chief.” Interesting.

Morgan Freeman: Before the Numinosity — The ‘Fro Years

I may be reading too much into this, but the whole process reminds me of what author Jeff Gates discusses in his new book Guilt by Association: How Deception and Self-Deceit Took America to War. (I reviewed it here.) On matters far more serious than spelling, Gates outlines a strategy where a target audience is prepared for accepting future beliefs. This “preparing the minds” allows a displacement of facts with beliefs. The result is that the audience can be manipulated by inducing self-deceit, and pop culture plays a large role.

While I don’t believe that back in 1971 someone consciously set out to prepare Morgan Freeman to be, say, Dr. Alex Cross the brilliant psychologist, it would still be true that his appearances on The Electric Company succeeded in “laying the mental threads” of the image of a helpful and non-threatening black man.

What I am talking about, then, is sophisticated propaganda. One of my favorite accounts of the effects of propaganda come from Jacques Ellul’s ground-breaking 1965 work, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, where he states that

once the individual has been filled with and reshaped by propaganda, the smallest dose now suffices. It is enough to ‘refresh,’ to give a ‘booster shot,’ to repaint, and the individual behaves in striking fashion — like certain drunks who become intoxicated on one glass of wine. The individual no longer offers any resistance to propaganda; moreover, he has ceased to believe in it consciously. He no longer attaches importance to what it says, to its proclaimed objectives, but he acts according to the proper stimuli. The individual is arrested and crystallized with regard to his thinking.

An obvious example, used by Gates and many others, is the propagation of the media image of a threatening Arab. Using our Electric Company illustration, we see that even that “educational” show featured a stereotype of the evil Arab. As media scholar Jack Shaheen tells us in his study The TV Arab, there was a character known as the evil Spell Binder, “a short, grubby-looking villain who resembles those turbanned Arabs in the escapist Arabian Nights’ films of the fifties and sixties.” (He also notes that most other children’s shows had negative images of Arabs, too—Popeye, Bugs Bunny, Scooby-Doo, Speed Racer, Tennessee Tuxedo, Jonny Quest . . .)

Shaheen is wise to point to the selective framing of Arabs and the repetition of that framing. “You cannot deny the reality—there are people who really want to kill Americans. But those are basically the only images we see.” Naturally, such repetition has a goal, one captured in an old Arabic saying: “Al tikrar biallem il hmar. By repetition even the donkey learns.”

The donkey in this case is presumably the American people, who, as we all know, are pliable to sustained manipulation.

The real world consequences of Hollywood’s image of Morgan Freeman is obvious: We have our first black president. Given the long history of depicting black presidents as “calm, earnest, utterly decent and way, way cooler than white presidents,” who is surprised at this outcome?

Freeman continues apace in his work. Rumor has it that he has long wanted to do a film based on Nelson Mandela. Now that dream has come true, as Freeman again works with Clint Eastwood, who will direct the Mandela bio-pic titled The Human Factor. Tough guy Clintwood used to stand for the average white man, but lately he’s gone multicultural on us, especially with his latest, Gran Torino, in which he mentors a Hmong youth. Thus, I suspect that watching Freeman as hero Nelson Mandela will not exactly make my day.

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