Jewish Influence

Jews as a hostile elite–again

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Peter Brimelow ends his recent article (“Redneckophobia”? Why Obama Is Attacking Arizona“) by noting : “Our political class may live in a fantasy world, but the motive for its immigration enthusiasm is all too real: a relentless hatred of the historic American nation.”The immediate object of his ire is one Klejda Gjermani, described by Brimelow as “an Albanian expatriate of Jewish descent” who stepped off the boat and pretty much immediately realized she suffered from redneckophobia.  She works for Commentary, so I am sure she feels quite at home there.Bookmark and Share

Writing in Takimag, Paul Gottfried (The Death of the WASP) also raises the issue of Jews as a hostile elite, claiming that although I am generally an “over-the-top critic of Jewish power” (specifics would be nice),  on this particular issue I have “hardly scratched the surface”:

Even that over-the-top critic of Jewish power, Kevin MacDonald, has hardly scratched the surface in delineating the nastiness with which the children and grandchildren of Eastern European Jewish immigrants clawed their way to the top of the academic-media industry, on the backs of those they often despised. And all the while they appealed with brilliant success to a guilty WASP conscience.

I’ll really try to work on this problem, maybe check my Thesaurus for some good synonyms for “despised.” Memo to self: Must stop being polite.

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

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

A very traditional part of Jewish culture was to despise the Russians and their culture. (Even the Jewish literati despised all of traditional Russian culture, apart from Pushkin and a few literary icons.) Indeed, one wonders what would motivate the Jewish commissars to revenge apart from motives related to their Jewish identity. Traditional hostility toward non-Jews and their culture forms a central theme in the writings of Israel Shahak and many mainstream Jewish historians, including Slezkine,  and I have presented summaries of this material elsewhere…. hatred toward the peoples and cultures of non-Jews and the image of enslaved ancestors as victims of anti-Semitism have been the Jewish norm throughout history—much commented on, from Tacitus to the present.  (review of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century)

In other words, this is a problem that is endemic to Diaspora Judaism. Hostility and loathing toward the people and culture they live among is a very long and tragic theme of Jewish history and a potent source of historical anti-Semitism.

And speaking of “redneckophobia,” the above passage continues:

It is easy to imagine which sectors of American society would have been deemed overly backward and religious and therefore worthy of mass murder by the American counterparts of the Jewish elite in the Soviet Union—the ones who journeyed to Ellis Island instead of Moscow. The descendants of these overly backward and religious people now loom large among the “red state” voters who have been so important in recent national elections. Jewish animosity toward the Christian culture that is so deeply ingrained in much of America is legendary.

Gottfried notes that the Jews who deposed the WASP elite “appealed with brilliant success to a guilty WASP conscience.” Why the WASPs are so guilt-prone is an important question, but it’s ironic that Shelby Steele recently appealed to White guilt to explain why the West can’t muster the moral courage to condemm Israel’s enemies (WSJ, “Israel and the surrender of the West“). Leaving aside the monstrosity of what he says about Israel, this is the gist of the argument:

One reason for [Israel being seen as the bad guy] is that the entire Western world has suffered from a deficit of moral authority for decades now. Today we in the West are reluctant to use our full military might in war lest we seem imperialistic; we hesitate to enforce our borders lest we seem racist; we are reluctant to ask for assimilation from new immigrants lest we seem xenophobic; and we are pained to give Western Civilization primacy in our educational curricula lest we seem supremacist. Today the West lives on the defensive, the very legitimacy of our modern societies requiring constant dissociation from the sins of the Western past—racism, economic exploitation, imperialism and so on.

When the Israeli commandos boarded that last boat in the flotilla and, after being attacked with metal rods, killed nine of their attackers, they were acting in a world without the moral authority to give them the benefit of the doubt.

So the conclusion is that the Jews who deposed the WASP elite by appealing to their guilt proneness to the point that the new Jewish hostile elite has carte blanche to displace them by importing a new people (opposition would be “racist”) now find themselves with a West unable to defend the moral legitimacy of whatever Israel does. I suppose there is a certain justice in this, but the loss for the traditional people of America is incalculable. And given what happened in the USSR, White people should be very afraid of what the future may hold.

Kevin MacDonald: Translation of Solzhenitsyn's "In the Camps of GULag" — Chapter 20 of "200 Years Together"

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Kevin MacDonald: Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s important 200 Years Together has unfortunately not been translated into English. However, this process is now beginning with the posting of Chapter 20, “In the Camps of GULag.” As the title suggests, the chapter discusses the role of Jews in the Gulag. There are several important themes.

Despite apologetic claims by Jews, in fact Jews lived better in the camps. Obviously, it’s a touchy subject–just like everything else about the role of Jews in the Soviet Union.

If I wished to generalize and state that the life of Jews in camps was especially difficult, then I would be allowed to do so and wouldn’t be peppered with admonitions for unjust ethnic generalizations. But in the camps, where I was imprisoned, it was the other way around – the life of Jews, to the extent of possible generalization, was easier.

Jews also looked out for each other–yet another example of ethnic networking. Free Jews were often in positions of authority and they favored their own people. For example:

A Lett Ane Bernstein, one of my witnesses from Archipelago, thinks that he managed to survive in the camps only because in times of hardship he asked Jews for help and that the Jews, judging by his last name and nimble manners, mistook him for their tribesman – and always provided assistance. He says that in all his camps Jews always constituted the upper crust and that the most important free employees were also Jews (Shulman – head of special department, Greenberg – head of camp station, Kegels – chief mechanic of the factory), and, according to his recollections, they also preferred to select Jewish inmates to staff their units.

The few Jews who did share in the common labor did so out of principle–in order to avoid the stereotype of Jews who did not work. They were rewarded for their efforts by being rejected by “both sides” — indicating that everyone in the camps was aware of the ethnic divide–just as American prisons are organized along ethnic fault lines. But Solzhenitsyn optimistically describes Jews who countered the common tendencies: “I try not to overlook such examples, because all my hopes depend on them.”

Nevertheless, the resentment and hatred of the Jewish position in the camps was real. Solzhenitsyn realizes that all humans are prone to these tendencies, but he also understands that the ethnic divide exacerbated the “heavy resentment”:

When an alien emerges as a “master over life and death” – it further adds to the heavy resentment. It might appear strange – isn’t it all the same for a worthless negligable, crushed, and doomed camp dweller surviving at one of his dying stages – isn’t it all the same who exactly seized the power inside the camp and celebrates crow’s picnics over his trench-grave? As it turns out – it is not, it has etched into my memory inerasably.

The Russians did not show ethnic networking and accordingly suffered. Notice that he sees the mass murder involved in collectivization as a personal loss to his ethnic group.

Those who know about terrific Jewish mutual supportiveness (especially exacerbated by mass deaths of Jews under Hitler) would understand that a free Jewish boss simply could not indifferently watch Jewish prisoners flounder in starvation and die – and not to help. But I am unable to imagine a free Russian employee who would save and promote his fellow Russian prisoners to the privileged positions only because of their nationality, though we have lost 15 millions during collectivization: we are numerous, you can’t care about everyone, and nobody would even think about it.

The White Sea canal, completed in 1933, has gone down in history as a particularly brutal forced labor project in which thousands of workers died. Solzhenitsyn points out that all six of the people in charge of the project were Jews:

Genrikh Yagoda, head of NKVD.

Matvei Berman, head of GULag.

Semen Firin, commander of BelBaltlag (by that time he was already the commander of Dmitlag, where the story will later repeat itself).

Lazar Kogan, head of construction (later he will serve the same function at Volgocanal).

Jacob Rapoport, deputy head of construction.

Naftaly Frenkel, chief manager of the labor force of Belomorstroi (and the evil daemon of the whole Archipelago)

Solzhenitsyn’s observations fit well with the findings of historians like Yuri Slezkine showing that Jews were a political and cultural elite in the Soviet Union. Slezkine draws special attention to Jews as Stalin’s “willing executioners” supervising the greatest crimes of the 20th century.

Throughout the chapter Solzhenitsyn’s brutal honesty shines through. He bends over backward to give examples of Jews who behaved in ways contrary to the general tendencies he and others observed. Nevertheless, he recounts how he was often accused of anti-Semitism simply for recording his observations. It’s okay to depict an evil person as a Russian, but never identify him as a Jew.

Solzhenitsyn’s observations add to the growing evidence of the role of Jews as a hostile elite in the USSR–hostile to the native Russian population and willing to engage in the most brutal crimes against them. This translation is very important for bringing this message to the English-speaking world, if only to dispel the common representation of Jews as always and inevitably historical victims.

White Americans should think long and hard about what these observations imply for them as they become a minority in a country dominated by hostile minorities, including Jews as a hostile elite.

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The burden of Israel

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The Obama administration continues to insist that Israel is not a burden to the US, but even the LA Times came out with an article showing describing the problems that Israel presents to the US. (Print version headline: “Raid throws a wrench in U.S. agenda“). The article  lists several current foreign policy problems exacerbated by the raid:

  • US-sponsored peace talks in the region (despite the fact that Israel has no interest in peace);
  • US drive for new U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iran (in other words, Israel has made it more difficult for the US to advance Israel’s agenda);
  • Complications with the US relationship with Turkey which is “a NATO member and has been important to U.S. military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan” (several Turkish nationals were killed in the raid, and the ships sailed under Turkish flags);
  • Difficulties in the US push for nuclear non-proliferation given that Israel is well-known to have nuclear weapons: “other countries demanded that Israel take a more active role in the effort to reduce nuclear arms, a reference to the atomic arsenal Israel has never acknowledged possessing.”

The article also highlights comments from a prominent foreign policy expert and from General David Petraeus:

“The costs of alignment with Israel are becoming ever more apparent, and the benefits are becoming harder to identify,” said James Dobbins, who was an envoy for both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations and now heads Rand Corp.’s International Security and Defense Policy Center. …

This week’s raid underscored concern expressed in recent congressional testimony by Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. forces in the Middle East, who said perceived U.S. bias toward the Jewish state was a negative factor in the Muslim world.

What’s remarkable about this article is that it doesn’t quote the usual well-placed Zionist fanatics in the media who claim that Israel is a great asset to the US. Glib talk about the benefits of Israel to the US will be more difficult to maintain with a straight face. But of course those concerned about their political future will continue to do so:

U.S. officials say they do not view their relationship with Israel as a burden, regardless of criticism from the Middle East, Europe or elsewhere.

“Let me be clear here,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Tuesday. “We have a trusted relationship. They’re an important ally. And we are greatly supportive of their security. That’s not going to change.”

 


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The New Elite Doesn’t Officially Exist

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In my last blog I suggested that the new elite will not be as prone to surrendering its position as  the old one was.  One big difference is that Jewish activist organizations go ballistic over any mention that Jews are a disproportionate portion of American elites–truth is irrelevant. Those who stray into this forbidden territory soon learn that their lives have just gotten a lot more complicated. The result is that people behave like well-conditioned rats in a psychology experiment and keep their mouths shut no matter how obvious Jewish overrepresentation is.

The latest instance  is the reaction to Pat Buchanan’s column “Are Liberals Anti-WASP?” where Buchanan wrote: “If Kagan is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats. Is this the Democrats’ idea of diversity?”

Jewish activists immediately went to work. The National Jewish Democratic Council complained about Buchanan’s “over-the-top, conspiratorial screeds.” Abe Foxman was at his most colorful, calling Buchanan a “recidivist anti-Semite who doesn’t miss an opportunity to show his fangs.” Foxman also gave his expert, unbiased opinion that Kagan “is a highly qualified candidate for the judiciary, an exemplary Solicitor General and a great legal mind.”

Liberals are fond of making arguments that ethnic and religious diversity affect people’s judgments and therefore we should do everything we can to promote diversity. For example, Sonia Sotomayor’s famous “Wise Latina” comment was doubtless a huge asset for her among her liberal supporters. But Foxman is implying that Kagan’s  Jewishness will have no influence at all on her judgments and anyone who says otherwise is a rabid anti-Semite.

Of course, this is ridiculous. There are a whole lot of reasons to believe that Kagan’s Jewishness will indeed affect her judgments. The fact that Elena Kagan is the product of New York’s Jewish leftist sub-culture makes a huge difference in what we can expect from her — particularly given her views on the First Amendment and executive power that are in line with the mainstream Jewish community. All the research shows that Jewish attitudes are far different from the American majority on a wide range of hot button issues, particularly social issues such as immigration, homosexuality, controls on sexual behavior, abortion, Christianity in the public square, and gun control. Particularly when there is such a thin paper trail (contrary to Foxman, there is no tangible evidence that Kagan has a “great legal mind”), the most rational expectation is that Kagan’s views reflect the views of the wider Jewish community.

Foxman is exercised because he is well aware that there is a recurring pattern in history in which Jews become highly overrepresented among elites. This then feeds into anti-Jewish sentiment from people who feel underrepresented, especially if they think that the elites are opposing their interests in other ways. Patrick Cleburne was hinting as much when he noted that “all three of Obama’s recent nominations to be Federal Reserve Governors were Jews, bringing their representation on that body to 5 out of 7″ (his emphasis). The Abe Foxmans of the world see this coming and hope to nip the process in the bud by squelching any mention of Jewish overrepresentation.

Notice that  Foxman could have responded by saying “Yeah, three Jewish Supreme Court justices are probably a bit much, given that Jews are already vastly overrepresented among all American elites–media, academic, financial, etc. Kagan should discreetly take herself out of the process.”

But instead, the reflex is to suppress such expressions. The strategy is that people may well be thinking that three Jews on the Supreme Court is too much, but we will win if we can keep such thoughts out of the media.

Again, this is an old pattern. I collected several examples in Chapter 2 of Separation and Its Discontents. My favorite is from Joe Sobran, who lost his position with National Review because of his views on the influence of American Jews on U. S. policy toward Israel. Appropriately, he mentions Pat Buchanan:

The full story of [Pat Buchanan’s 1996 presidential] campaign is impossible to tell as long as it’s taboo to discuss Jewish interests as freely as we discuss those of the Christian Right. Talking about American politics without mentioning the Jews is a little like talking about the NBA without mentioning the Chicago Bulls. Not that the Jews are all-powerful, let alone all bad. But they are successful, and therefore powerful enough: and their power is unique in being off-limits to normal criticism even when it’s highly visible. They themselves behave as if their success were a guilty secret, and they panic, and resort to accusations, as soon as the subject is raised. Jewish control of the major media in the media age makes the enforced silence both paradoxical and paralyzing. Survival in public life requires that you know all about it, but never refer to it. A hypocritical etiquette forces us to pretend that the Jews are powerless victims; and if you don’t respect their victimhood, they’ll destroy you. It’s a phenomenal display not of wickedness, really, but of fierce ethnocentrism, a sort of furtive racial superpatriotism.

The result is that there is an ever increasing gap between people’s thoughts about Jewish influence and what they can say about it.  It reminds one of the USSR where people were well aware that there were a whole lot of things that were routinely left out of the news.

I think there comes a point, however, where Jewish power is so obvious that people will start discussing it, at first furtively and anonymously. But the historical pattern is that eventually there is some push back.

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Christopher Donovan: Ignoring the Jewish Lesbian in the Room

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Christopher Donovan: Kevin MacDonald has done great blogging about Elena Kagan, who’s now known to be Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court.  She is, of course, Jewish, and stands as a spectacular example of the “Good Ol’ Jews Network” — her main qualification seems to be that everyone (as in, fellow power-Jews) gushes praise for her, which in turn causes more gushing.  Everyone wants to comment on the king’s fine new clothes.  This type of thing happens to wealthy Jews from the Upper West Side.  It does not happen to White Protestants from Oklahoma, no matter how smart they are.

Speaking of which, there are now no Protestants on the Supreme Court. One might think that white Protestants would bemoan this fact.  But they aren’t.  They’ve been trained not to, of course.  Which stands in sharp contrast to, say, the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor.  She’s supposed to be the Hispanic representative.  The Hispanic complaint was that they didn’t have anyone on the Supreme Court.  Obama fixed that.

So, all things being equal, white Protestants would have just as much of a complaint now that they’re on the outs.  But we all know that racial politics in America today aren’t about actual equality, they’re about pushing Whites off the stage. Elena Kagan will turn the Supreme Court into a “Sanhedrin”, in the phrase of some associates — 1/3 Jewish.  This reflects the shift in America’s powerbase from white Protestant to Jewish.

This has consequences:  policies that hurt whites are enacted, and Whites suffer.  It’s that simple, and that monumental. Yet the conservative legal blogosphere is completely silent on this point.  It is even censoring comments of anyone who mentions it.

At National Review — long discredited in any event, but worth noting as a gauge of the absurd — says nothing about it. Some of them are taken in by Kagan’s having reached out to the Federalist Society as a sign that she’s “not hostile” to conservatism.

This is a complete crock.  Kagan just grasps that it’s “hip” to hang with the Federalist Society because it shows your open-mindedness, but the Federalist Society has absolutely nothing to say on issues that affect Whites.  In fact, it’s a tool for the promotion of Israel-friendly “war on terror” policies.

Most “conservative” legal bloggers are, of course, themselves Jews, so they make sure to keep the focus on silly details.  Ted Frank and Eugene Volokh are good examples. See here, here, and here.

America no longer belongs to whites.  Its machinery is controlled by those hostile to their interests.  We need to recognize this fact and respond.

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

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Does Jewish financial misbehavior have anything to do with being Jewish?

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As expected, the fraud charges brought against Goldman Sachs by the SEC and now the Senate hearings are producing a lot of anxiety in Jewish quarters. Back in January, Michael Kinsley wrote an article telling us how to think about the Jewish angle in the financial meltdown (“How to Think About: Jewish Bankers”). The question for Kinsley isn’t whether negative qualities of Jewish bankers or the bad behavior of Jewish firms like Goldman have anything to do with being Jewish.

The question is whether anyone who criticizes Goldman is an anti-Semite:

Because Goldman is thought of as a “Jewish” firm, and because it dominates the financial industry, criticism of Goldman, or of bankers generally, is often accused of being anti-Semitic. Commentators including Rush Limbaugh and Maureen Dowd have been so accused. When, if ever, are such accusations fair?”

So Kinsley passes his Geiger Counter over non-Jews like Limbaugh and Dowd and passes judgment on their moral worthiness. Any link between Jewishness and misbehavior is automatically out of bounds for serious discussion: “Certainly any explicit suggestion that Goldman’s alleged misbehavior and its Jewishness are related in any way is anti-Semitic.”

This statement draws on a general reluctance to ascribe negative traits as being reasonably associated with a certain group. But this can easily be seen to be just another example of political-correctness think. What if indeed a particular group is more likely to engage in some sort of bad behavior? For example, J. Philippe Rushton and Glayde Whitney have claimed on the basis of a rather powerful theory and a considerable amount of data that Blacks are prone to criminality and this is true wherever there are Blacks — whether in Africa, North America, South America, or the Caribbean.

If indeed that is true or at least reasonable, then it would also be reasonable to say being Black contributes to the likelihood that a certain group of Blacks are criminals — that a considerable part of the explanation for the criminality of these particular Blacks stems from their group membership. It would certainly not imply that all Blacks or even anywhere near all Blacks are criminals. Just that Blacks are more likely than other groups to be involved in certain kinds of crime — Rushton and Whitney would argue for a strong role of their common genetic ancestry.

Or take a presumably benign example: It’s well known that the Ashkenazi Jewish mean IQ higher than the European mean. If then one finds that Jews are highly overrepresented in a particular high-IQ occupation, say among mathematicians, then it is certainly reasonable to explain this as partly due to the general traits of the group, as writers ranging from Charles Murray, Henry Harpending and Greg Cochran, and I have argued

Can such an argument be made Jewish involvement in financial scandals has something to do with being Jewish? Back in the 1980s a major financial scandal revolved around Michael Milken. Much of the discussion of the Jewish role in this financial scandal centered around the book Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart. Jewish activist Alan Dershowitz called Den of Thievesan “anti-Semitic screed” and attacked a review by Michael M. Thomas in the New York Times Book Review because of his “gratuitous descriptions by religious stereotypes.”  Thomas’s review contained the following passage:

James B. Stewart . . . charts the way through a virtual solar system of peculation, past planets large and small, from a metaphorical Mercury representing the penny-ante takings of Dennis B. Levine’s small fry, past the middling ($10 million in inside-trading profits) Mars of Mr. Levine himself, along the multiple rings of Saturn — Ivan F. Boesky, his confederate Martin A. Siegel of Kidder, Peabody, and Mr. Siegel’s confederate Robert Freeman of Goldman, Sachs — and finally back to great Jupiter: Michael R. Milken, the greedy billion-dollar junk-bond kingdom in which some of the nation’s greatest names in industry and finance would find themselves entrapped and corrupted.

Thomas was attacked as an anti-Semite simply for mentioning so many Jewish names all in one paragraph. His defense was to note that “If I point out that nine out of 10 people involved in street crimes are black, that’s an interesting sociological observation. If I point out that nine out of 10 people involved in securities indictments are Jewish, that is an anti-Semitic slur. I cannot sort out the difference. . . .”

I can’t sort out the difference either. And once again, the current financial meltdown has revealed a large role for Jewish companies and Jewish money managers who engineered the meltdown and profited handsomely from it.

Kinsley acknowledges that Jews predominate on Wall St. and it’s okay to criticize a Jewish firm like Goldman Sachs — but only if there is no mention that Jewishness has anything to do with it.

Sometimes the stereotype about Jews and money takes a harsher form: Jews are greedy, they lie, cheat and steal for money, they have undue influence with the government, which they cultivate and exploit ruthlessly, and so on. In recent weeks, many have said this sort of thing about Goldman Sachs, but with no reference to Jews. Are they all anti-Semites? No. It ought to be possible to criticize Goldman in the harshest possible terms–if you think that’s warranted–without being tarred as an anti-Semite.

So is it possible to frame an argument that bad behavior in the financial realm does indeed have something to do with Jewishness? Note that this is quite different from showing that Jewishness is involved in the creation of culture — the argument of The Culture of Critique. There it was only necessary to show that a movement was dominated by Jews who identified as Jews and saw their work as advancing Jewish interests.

As I see it, the argument has two parts:

1.)    Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy has always had a strong element of ingroup/outgroup thinking. Entirely different moral standards are applicable inside and outside the group. The result is that the Jewish moral universe is particularistic and the attitude toward non-Jews is purely instrumental — aimed at maximizing personal benefit with no moral concerns about the consequences to non-Jews. For example, a common pattern in traditional societies was that Jews allied themselves with exploitative non-Jewish elites.

The evolutionary aspects of this situation are obvious. Jews were the ideal intermediary for any exploitative elite precisely because their interests, as a genetically segregated group, were maximally divergent from those of the exploited population. Such individuals are expected to have maximal loyalty to the rulers and minimal concerns about behaving in a purely instrumental manner, including exploitation, toward the rest of the population. (A People that Shall Dwell Alone, Ch. 5)

2.)    One would then have to show that actual Jewish behavior reflected the double moral standard that is ubiquitous in Jewish religious writing. There is in fact a long history of anti-Jewish attitudes focused around the charge that Jews are misanthropes with negative personality traits who are only too willing to exploit non-Jews. This history is summarized in Ch. 2 of Separation and Its Discontents, beginning with the famous quote from Tacitus, “Among themselves they are inflexibly honest and ever ready to show compassion, though they regard the rest of mankind with all the hatred of enemies.” Among the more illustrious observers are the following (see here for the complete passage, p. 46 ff):

  • Immanual Kant: Jews are “a nation of usurers . . . outwitting the people amongst whom they find shelter. . . . They make the slogan ‘let the buyer beware’ their highest principle in dealing with us.”
  • Economic historian Werner Sombart: “With Jews [a Jew] will scrupulously see to it that he has just weights and a just measure; but as for his dealings with non-Jews, his conscience will be at ease even though he may obtain an unfair advantage.”
  • Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz: “[The  Polish Jew] took a delight in cheating and overreaching, which gave him a sort of joy of victory. But his own people he could not treat in this way: they were as knowing as he. It was the non-Jew who, to his loss, felt the consequences of the Talmudically trained mind of the Polish Jew.”
  • Sociologist Max Weber: “As a pariah people, [Jews] retained the double standard of morals which is characteristic of primordial economic practice in all communities: What is prohibited in relation to one’s brothers is permitted in relation to strangers.”
  • Zionist Theodor Herzl: Anti-Semitism is “an understandable reaction to Jewish defects” brought about ultimately by gentile persecution: Jews had been educated to be “leeches” who possessed “frightful financial power”; they were “a money-worshipping people incapable of understanding that a man can act out of other motives than money.”
  • Edward A. Ross: “The authorities complain that the East European Hebrews feel no reverence for law as such and are willing to break any ordinance they find in their way. . . . The insurance companies scan a Jewish fire risk more closely than any other. Credit men say the Jewish merchant is often “slippery” and will “fail” in order to get rid of his debts. For lying the immigrant has a very bad reputation. In the North End of Boston “the readiness of the Jews to commit perjury has passed into a proverb.”

Edmund Connelly has reviewed the work of two academic historians, Paul Johnson (A History of the Jews) and Albert Lindemann (Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews), who “have shown that this pattern of Jewish deception and fraud in pursuit of wealth and its legitimacy within the Jewish community have a long history.”

The key point is the legitimacy of fraud within the Jewish community. Successful fraudsters are not shunned but rather become pillars of the  community:

Reflecting the legitimacy of white collar crime in the wider Jewish community in the contemporary world, [Michael] Milken is a pillar of the Jewish community in Los Angeles and a major donor to Jewish causes. Indeed, this is part of a pattern: Ivan Boesky donated $20 million to the library at the Jewish Theological Seminary. And the notorious Marc Rich has donated millions of dollars to a wide range of Jewish causes, including Birthright Israel, a program designed to increase Jewish identification among young Jews. The list of people supporting Rich’s pardon by Bill Clinton was “a virtual Who’s Who of Israeli society and Jewish philanthropy.” A rabbi concerned about the ethics of these practices notes, “it is a rare Jewish organization that thinks carefully about the source of a donor’s money. … The dangerous thing is not that people make moral mistakes, but that we don’t talk about it.”

The idea is that the Jewish financial elite sees the non-Jewish world in instrumental terms — as objects with no moral value. As I noted earlier,

there is a strong suggestion that the financial elite behaved much more like an organized crime syndicate than as an elite with a sense of civic responsibility or commitment to the long term viability of the society. Whereas organized crime stems from the lower levels of society, this meltdown was accomplished at the very pinnacle of society — the Ivy League grads …, the wealthy financial firms and investment rating agencies, the strong connections with government that facilitated the bailout and failed to provide scrutiny while it was happening. It seems highly doubtful that all this would have happened with the former WASP elite.

In psychological terms, these Jews are behaving in a sociopathic manner toward the non-Jewish world. That is, they have no concern for the moral consequences of their actions — no empathy or concern for victims. Recent neuroscience data shows that people are quite capable of having a great deal of empathy and concern for people in their ingroup while having no empathy at all toward outsiders, especially if they are highly ethnocentric. This implies that a strongly identified Jew could be the epitome of a well-socialized, empathic group member when he is among Jews, but treat the rest of the world in a cold and calculating manner and have no remorse or empathy for the victims.

Nor would such a person have any concerns about the long-term future of the society he lives in. Richard Spencer discusses the fact that so many of our politicians are sociopaths (my favorite example is Winston Churchill), noting that “Aristocrats governed with a healthy, long-term goal in mind: they wanted their great grandchildren to inherit a prosperous, powerful realm.”

It can safely be asserted that concerns about the long-term health of the society are not uppermost in the minds of our financial elite.

Concerns that Wall Street is socially irresponsible are widespread now. Just last week I saw CNBC reporter David Faber asking Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs whether Wall Street was good for America. Is it serving any positive social function? — with the implication that it’s at least reasonable to think it isn’t. Such a question would have been inconceivable a couple years ago. Rather than producing any tangible goods or allocating financing in a way that benefits good businesses, Matt Taibbi’s analogy seems to hit home:  “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

As Kinsley notes, this analogy was immediately deemed anti-Semitic by the usual thought police: “This sentence, many have charged, goes beyond stereotypes about Jews and money, touches other classic anti-Semitic themes about Jews as foreign or inhuman elements poisoning humanity and society, and—to some critics—even seems to reference the notorious ‘blood libel’ that Jews use the blood of Christian babies to make matzoh.”

It also conjures up a strong image of economic parasitism, another ancient anti-Jewish theme: the financial sector as not producing products or wealth, but extracting wealth to the detriment of the society as a whole.

The problem for Kinsley and like-minded people is trying to seriously rebut the claim that the socially destructive behavior of the  predominantly Jewish financial elite does in fact fit a strong historic pattern of Jewish ethical behavior vis á vis the non-Jewish society — behavior that is well grounded in Jewish religious ethics.

In any case, it is a very troubling sign indeed for the  US that the financial sector is vastly outpacing the rest of the economy in corporate earnings as well as in executive compensation — especially when it’s being run by a group of people who have sociopathic attitudes toward non-Jewish America.

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The Dissolution of the Family among Non-Elite Whites: Review of “Red Families v. Blue Families” by Naomi Cahn and June Carbone

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I heard Naomi Cahn and June Carbone talk about their book, Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture (Oxford, 2010), on Commie Radio Pacifica, so you can be sure there is a “progressive” message. As summarized in their op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor, the idea is that families in Blue State America are thriving, while families in Red State America are failing because they are too hung up on old fashioned ideas like sexual abstinence.

There is an obvious dishonesty in this approach because it completely ignores race in the analysis in an effort to pin the blame on traditional sexual beliefs and customs. Blacks and Latinos who live in urban areas and in very Blue States exhibit high rates of teenage pregnancy, non-marriage, and dropping out of the education process — much higher than Whites in Red State America.

So what they are really trying to explain is variation in family patterns among White people. And there they have a point. Red State White America is in a crisis. (Indeed, it’s no accident that Red State America is where most of the much-commented-on White anger is coming from.) The data they are summarizing really relate to some of the correlates of education which are in turn linked to IQ. But we have known at least since The Bell Curve that higher IQ people not only are more likely to go further in the  educational system, they are more likely to have stable marriages, they don’t have babies outside of marriage, and they begin child bearing later. These people are more likely to live in large urban and suburban areas where there are jobs for educated people.

The Whites in non-urban Red State America have a lot to be angry about. The present economic crisis is just the most recent disaster in the long pattern of dispossession of Whites who are less educated. Good jobs in the private sector have pretty much evaporated — the unions are gone and the jobs have been shipped overseas. These people see their communities invaded by racial and cultural aliens, many of them illegal, making a middle class life impossible. They see themselves losing political power to the coalition of minorities and elite Whites that has become the Democratic Party.

As The Bell Curve emphasized, since World War II the cognitive elite are pulling away from the rest of America. Hard economic times only make it worse.

And hard times are always difficult on families. As Cahn and Carbone note, “the latest studies show that as the economy has gone south, teen and nonmarital births and abortions have all increased. … Employment figures also demonstrate that male employment has fallen even further than female employment, making youthful weddings that much riskier.”

In evolutionary terms, the high-investment style of reproduction becomes non-viable as men are unable to provide for their families. Women start having babies sooner and don’t expect to receive support from males over a long period of time, especially where welfare programs are available.

Being on the left, however, C & C use this opportunity to propose that the real culprit is traditional family values. If we could just get rid of those Bible Belt ideas, all would be well:

Missing from this debate is recognition of the bankruptcy of traditionalist family values as policy for the postindustrial era. …

In the United States, states that emphasize abstinence-only education, limit public subsidies of contraception, restrict access to abortion – and, yes, oppose gay marriage – have higher teen birth and divorce rates.

Yet the failure of the family values movement simply produces another round of moral panic and calls for more draconian restrictions.

Their solution combines typical leftist utopianism with a very real program of lowering the birth rate of people with traditional values.

The solution? As we outline in great detail in our book “Red Families v. Blue Families,” there are three critical steps we can take: (1) promote access to contraception – within marriage as well as outside it; (2) develop a greater ability to combine not only work and family, but family and education; and (3) make sure the next generation stays in school, learns the skills to be employed, and cultivates values that can adapt to the future.

This is a nice distillation of the bizarre idea that all Americans have the potential to be college graduates with lots of skills suitable for a post-industrial economy. IQ never enters the equation. But this utopian future is just not going to happen. A far better program would be to provide better economic opportunities for White people, especially White males, whose prospects have been blunted by the present regime.

The fact is that traditional sexual attitudes worked perfectly well in the West to produce a very adaptive culture of high-investment parenting combined with individualist social institutions. C & C attempt to tar traditional values with the stigma of Muslim and African societies where female virtue is prized: “We are entirely sympathetic with those inclined to lock up their daughters from puberty until marriage, but we do recognize that the societies abroad most insistent on policing women’s virtue are locked into cycles of poverty.”

But there is no reason to suppose that the problem with Muslim and African societies is policing the sexual behavior of women. Other traits of these cultures are far more likely culprits,  including low average IQ and social institutions like cousin marriage and clan-based social and political systems.

The reality is that social support for high-investment parenting has always been a critical feature of Western social structure until the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Since then, all of the markers of family stability have headed south  — including divorce rates and births out of wedlock for all races and ethnic groups. (Nevertheless, there are very large differences between races and ethnic groups in conformity with Rushton’s lifespan theory of race differences.)

But this relative lack of social support for marriage has had very different effects depending on traits like IQ. For example, a well-known study in behavior genetics shows that the heritability of age of first sexual intercourse increased dramatically after the sexual revolution of the 1960s. In other words, after the social supports for traditional sexuality disappeared, genetic influences became more important. Before the sexual revolution, traditional sexual mores applied to everyone. After the revolution, genes mattered more. People with higher IQ were able to produce stable families and marriages, but lower IQ people were less prone to doing so, and these trends have been exacerbated by the current economic climate. Hence the Red State/Blue State dichotomy among White people observed by C & C.

And this brings me to thinking about Jews and particularly Jewish influence on sexual culture. In their book, C & C note that Jews tend to exhibit  the Blue State pattern— an unsurprising result given Jewish IQ patterns. A theme of Chapter 4 of The Culture of Critique is that the psychoanalytic assault on traditional Western sexual culture had a disparate impact on different IQ groups and benefited Jews:

Jews suffer to a lesser extent than [non-Jews] from the erosion of cultural supports for high-investment parenting, and Jews benefit by the decline in religious belief among [non-Jews]. As [Norman] Podhoretz (1995, 30) notes, it is in fact the case that Jewish intellectuals, Jewish organizations like the AJCongress, and Jewish-dominated organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union … have ridiculed Christian religious beliefs, attempted to undermine the public strength of Christianity, and have led the fight for unrestricted pornography. The evidence of this chapter indicates that psychoanalysis as a Jewish-dominated intellectual movement is a central component of this war on [non-Jewish] cultural supports for high-investment parenting. …

Although other factors are undoubtedly involved, it is remarkable that the increasing trend toward low-investment parenting in the United States largely coincides with the triumph of the psychoanalytic and radical critiques of American culture represented by the political and cultural success of the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s.

I then go into the academic version of the ideas presented here, especially the greater importance of social controls and traditional religious beliefs for people on the left side of the Bell Curve. (See here, in the  Conclusion).

There is nothing wrong with traditional Western sexual codes. C & C are trying to rationalize the destruction of the last vestiges of that culture by noting that people with traditional religious ideas on sexuality increasingly behave in ways that are contrary to those beliefs. But the problem is not the traditional culture. Rather it is the economic dispossession of non-elite Whites combined with a media culture that glorifies expressive individualism and uninhibited sexuality (i.e., drugs, sex, and Rock ‘n’ Roll) — a media culture that, in my view, was critically shaped by the Jewish intellectual movements reviewed in The  Culture of Critique.

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