Jewish Influence

The academic left’s involvement in politics

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In today’s LA Times, the op-ed page was dominated by comments on Howard Zinn (“An experts’ history of Zinn”), who by all accounts was a leftist political activist as well as a professor of political science at Boston University. Zinn, who probably deserved a chapter in The Culture of Critique as an exemplar of a leftist Jewish intellectual activist, was involved in all the leftist causes of the last 60 years. He wore his political beliefs on his sleeve and was proud of his lack of neutrality in his writing, titling his memoir You can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train.  As one of the commentators, Sean Wilentz, notes,

He saw history primarily as a means to motivate people to political action that he found admirable. That’s what he said he did. It’s fine as a form of agitation — agitprop — but it’s not particularly good history.

To a point, he helped correct mainstream popular conceptions of American history that were highly biased. But he ceased writing serious history. He had a very simplified view that everyone who was president was always a stinker and every left-winger was always great.

But other historians are much more sympathetic to Zinn. Eric Foner, who is described by one reviewer as the “sainted PC commissar for US history and Reconstruction fabulist” is, like Zinn, an academic radical activist. Foner says about Zinn:

The idea that historians have to be neutral about everything they study is the death of history. Every historian has beliefs and feelings about what they’re studying. Howard made them very explicit. The teachers you remember are the ones with a passion for history who made it clear what they thought. They were not polemicists. They respected the canons of historical scholarship, as Zinn did, but they cared deeply.

Well, I’m not sure how much Zinn respected the canons of scholarship in creating what one commentor called an “eternal struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.” The print version of the Times op-ed provides some quotations from Zinn’s work A People’s History of the United States. The Western culture = evil, native peoples = good theme is obvious. Europe of the Renaissance was “dominated … by the religion of the popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western Civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.” The natives, on the other hand, are all about hospitality and sharing, and they have no concept of war. (Imagine the horror if someone made blanket assertions about Jews as having a frenzy for money.)

As an evolutionist, the idea that Western culture is uniquely evil is ridiculous, but the idea that it is uniquely evil has been common among Jewish intellectual activists, most notably the Boasian anthropologists. As I noted in The Culture of Critique,

one consequence of the triumph of the Boasians was that there was almost no research on warfare and violence among the peoples studied by anthropologists (Keegan 1993, 90–94). Warfare and warriors were ignored, and cultures were conceived as consisting of myth-makers and gift-givers [or, as hospitable, loving, and sharing people, as Zinn would have it]. (Orans [1996, 120] shows that Mead systematically ignored cases of rape, violence, revolution, and competition in her account of Samoa.) Only five articles on the anthropology of war appeared during the 1950s. Revealingly, when Harry Turney-High published his volume Primitive Warfarein 1949 documenting the universality of warfare and its oftentimes awesome savagery, the book was completely ignored by the anthropological profession—another example of the exclusionary tactics used against dissenters among the Boasians and characteristic of the other intellectual movements reviewed in this volume as well. Turney-High’s massive data on non-Western peoples conflicted with the image of them favored by a highly politicized profession whose members simply excluded these data entirely from intellectual discourse. The result was a “pacified past” (Keeley 1996, 163ff) and an “attitude of self-reproach” (p. 179) in which the behavior of primitive peoples was bowdlerized while the behavior of European peoples was not only excoriated as uniquely evil but also as responsible for all extant examples of warfare among primitive peoples. From this perspective, it is only the fundamental inadequacy of European culture that prevents an idyllic world free from between-group conflict. 

The reality, of course, is far different. Warfare was and remains a recurrent phenomenon among prestate societies. Surveys indicate over 90 percent of societies engage in warfare, the great majority engaging in military activities at least once per year (Keeley 1996, 27–32). Moreover, “whenever modern humans appear on the scene, definitive evidence of homicidal violence becomes more common, given a sufficient number of burials (Keeley 1996, 37). Because of its frequency and the seriousness of its consequences, primitive warfare was more deadly than civilized warfare. Most adult males in primitive and prehistoric societies engaged in warfare and “saw combat repeatedly in a lifetime” (Keeley, 1996, 174).

Howard Zinn was obviously in this tradition. But because he plugged into the anti-Western zeitgeist of the academic left, he had a long and happy career at Boston University — untroubled by student activists trying to get him fired.

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Kevin MacDonald: Minnesota's German Studies Disaster

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Kevin MacDonald: My fate in life is to work at a university. What that means right now is to be completely immersed in the culture of the left. Trudie Pert’s current TOO article shows that in the humanities right now it’s all about queer theory and the Frankfurt School, with supporting roles for psychoanalysis and Marxism. Prof. Ruth Joeres describes her course:

In this course the contributions of ‘German’ women of ethnic heritage such as Afro-German, Turkish-German, Japanese-German women are studied. What does it mean to be called, ‘German”? 

We can guess that it has nothing to do with being ethnically German. In the eyes of these people, Germany too has doubtless become yet another proposition society.

And then there’s professor Morris (Moskowitz) and her idea that fraudulent Holocaust memoirs are to be preferred to the real thing because they are more moving. (Why does a Jewish activist in a department of Jewish/German Studies use a non-Jewish sounding name? I can understand why Jewish communists did it in the 1930s or post-WWII Eastern Europe, but why now?) And Prof. Zipes and his campaign to  the minds of young children. My favorite title: “Down with Heidi, Down with Struwelpeter: Three Cheers for the Revolution: Towards A New Socialist Children’s Literature in West Germany.” In other words, down with every vestige of traditional German culture. 

The academic food chain is starkly obvious here. Pert notes that the professors at Minnesota received their doctorates at elite Eastern universities, and their students will staff the second-level colleges, universities, and K-12 schools throughout the mid-West. It’s a top-down system, with zombie-like grad students emerging to carry on the revolution of the left at the lower levels of the educational system.

What’s striking is that Jews and other non-Europeans wear their ethnic identity and sense of victimhood proudly and explicitly. The Whites typically have their own sense of victimhood — as gays or as women. In my experience, the heterosexual White males become adept at effusive expressions of guilt in order to be accepted into the system. In this culture of victimhood, all the rewards go to those who make alliances with other victims.

It’s easy enough intellectually to point out that gays and women have ethnic interests too, and that White identity and interests are entirely legitimate. But getting academics to think and act on that basis means disrupting mutually reinforcing networks where all the rewards come from allying oneself with the culture of victimhood.

And it means that real change must start at the top of the academic food chain. In the social sciences, one clings to a hope that this could happen because there is still a scientific tradition with some power. But in the humanities, it’s a lost cause. The triumvirate of the Frankfurt School, psychoanalysis, and Marxism is impervious to scientific findings and is intensely political; it will strenuously resist significant change. The revolution will have to happen without a very large part of the educational system.

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Wilhelm Marr’s The Victory of Judaism over Germanism: Viewed from a Nonreligious Point of View

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I decided to mention current TOO articles in the blog as a general policy, thereby facilitating discussion in this forum. I just posted an article based on a recent English translation of the 1879 edition of Wilhelm Marr’s  The Victory of Judaism over Germanism: Viewed from a Nonreligious Point of View. My article attempts to hit the high points of Marr’s presentation, with a bit of commentary thrown in. Marr’s pamphlet is a provocative and prophetic read.

Wilhelm Marr

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Martin Webster: Fabrication published by the London Times

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Martin Webster: In my recent TOO article “Is there a revolt against the Israel Lobby brewing in Britain?” I noted that The Times (London), like all of Rupert Murdoch’s media properties, had become a mouthpiece for Zionism. The Times editor, Richard Harding, is Jewish and a strong Zionist, as is his assistant editor and chief leader-writer Danny Finkelstein, as is his chief political columnist David Aaronovitch, as are a large and increasing number of his editorial staff in all departments and at all grades. Finkelstein, Aaronovitch and other Times journalists write guest columns in the Jewish Chronicle, while the JC‘s editor Stephen Pollard often writes a column in The Times. (See Kevin MacDonald’s blog on a particularly loathsome article by Pollard published recently in The Times.)

It’s a wonder the two papers don’t merge.

It’s therefore not surprising that on December 14 The Times published an article (“Secret document exposes Iran’s nuclear trigger“) on an Iranian report describing plannedwork on a “neutron initiator” for an atomic weaponhead. The article asserts that “independent experts confirm [the neutron initiator] has no possible civilian or military use other than in a nuclear weapon.” Former CIA official Philip Giraldi now claims based on his sources in the US intelligence community that US intelligence has determined that the report is a  fabrication, most likely by Israeli intelligence. Giraldi notes that “The Rupert Murdoch chain has been used extensively to publish false intelligence from the Israelis and occasionally from the British government.”  

The article goes on to note that “The Times is part of a Murdoch publishing empire that includes the Sunday Times, Fox News and the New York Post. All Murdoch-owned news media report on Iran with an aggressively pro-Israeli slant.”

The publication achieved its intended aim: “The story of the purported Iranian document prompted a new round of expressions of U.S. and European support for tougher sanctions against Iran and reminders of Israel’s threats to attack Iranian nuclear programme targets if diplomacy fails.”

US intelligence has not made any pronouncements on the authenticity of the document despite its being out for more than a year. Interestingly “foreign intelligence sources” (presumably Israel) dated the document to early 2007. The article suggests this dating was motivated by an attempt to  “discredit the U.S. intelligence community’s November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran had discontinued unidentified work on nuclear weapons and had not resumed it as of the time of the estimate.”

One can only imagine the intense pressure on US intelligence not to release its findings if they do in fact implicate Israel — and its willing minions in the media.

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Gabriel Schoenfeld exists in an alternate universe

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Gabriel Schoenfeld’s The Weekly Standard  article “Back to the Future: British Anti-Semitism Returns with a Vengeance” is the sort of thing that makes you want to bang your head against a wall. The idea is that those virulent anti-Semites John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt managed to “peddle” their vicious article on the Israel lobby to the London Review of Books when it was sensibly rejected by American publishers. It then metastasized into a book that was much admired in the US by the likes of David Duke and pretty much no one else. The “respectable middle” were on page with Leslie Gelb’s authoritative review in the august New York Times which accused them of “shoddy scholarship” that promoted anti-Semitism. As I noted in an earlier blog, “Some of Gelb’s charges might even seem reasonable—if you haven’t read the book.”

The fact that Mearsheimer and Walt managed to first publish their monstrosity in England is no accident. After all, the Brits are a bad lot and always have been. “Anti-Semitism has deep roots in England. In the 12th century, many of the country’s Jews were put to the sword in a wave of massacres. The 13th century began with the introduction of the yellow badge, the mandatory marking that Jews were compelled to wear, and ended with the mass expulsion of the Jews.”

There you have it. Nothing much has changed in England since the 12th century when it comes to the Jews. Anti-Semitism remained rampant in England throughout the 20thcentury, going underground when the Brits were fighting the Nazis (who were even more anti-Jewish), but re-emerging now into the open. In its latest incarnation, it manifests itself as hatred toward Israel.

According to Schoenfeld, this irrational anti-Jewish hate is more obvious than ever.  You can tell that because Britain is now “a congenial home” where radical Muslims “preach their genocidal doctrines.” (Never mind the role of Jewish organizations in facilitating immigration into England and opposing nationalist parties like the BNP that want to keep England English. See Ch. 7 of Culture of Critique.)

In fact, right now Parliament is considering a law to force Jews to report to concentration camps.

No wait. Actually, it’s an inquest into how Tony Blair made the decision to join in the Iraq invasion. Not only that, but a newspaper columnist had the temerity to complain that two of the panelists were Jews. Another chimed in that this complaint was “helpful” because the war was “initiated .  .  . by a group of influential American neocons .  .  . nearly all of whom were ardent Zionists.” And the London Times didn’t even label all of this “anti-Semitic.”

And then there was Peter Oborne’s program (see Martin Webster’s TOO article) on the influence  of the Israel Lobby: “With shades of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and shades of Mearsheimer-Walt, the program conveyed a picture of a nefarious conspiracy to plunge Britain into war in Iraq.”

The last straw is the court decision that an Orthodox school is guilty of discrimination for insisting on matrilineal descent as a criterion of admission. Schoenfeld puts ‘discrimination’ in quotes because, you see, it’s not discrimination if Jews do it. Surely it’s obvious that Jews (and no one else) ought to be able to discriminate on the basis of biological descent.

Obviously, Jews like Schoenfeld (and they’re the ones we keep hearing from in the media) are out of touch with reality. This is Abe Foxman on steroids. In Scheonfeld’s eyes, the inquest into the Blair government’s actions and the Oborne program are nothing more than updated examples of centuries-old anti-Jewish hatred. No need to look at what actually happened.

Indeed, the very thought that Jews might be biased against finding that Jews whose main allegiance is to Israel were the major force behind the decision of the British government to join the Iraq invasion is so obviously wrongheaded that even asking the question betrays vicious hatred of Jews. By their very nature Jews are impartial and completely uninfluenced by their ethnic identification. Schoenfeld doubtless sees himself as an exemplar of evenhandedness — completely above the fray and able to judge Israel’s actions and all things Jewish with brutal, impartial honesty.

Schoenfeld and the rest of these Jewish spokespeople are living in an alternate universe — a universe where mundane things like facts and truth are irrelevant. It’s an absolute article of faith that Jewish behavior is always — always —completely irrelevant to anti-Semitism. No matter how much money Jewish activists and organizations shower on politicians and no matter now much media they own and influence, Jews never actually influence anything. And if they do happen to have a slight influence, they only want the best for everyone. There could not possibly be legitimate conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews.

There is simply no way to communicate with people like Schoenfeld. And that’s a big part of the problem.

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Kevin MacDonald: The Myth of Pure Science

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Kevin MacDonald: The brouhaha over climate change science has prompted an op-ed in the LA Times  “Climate change e-mail scandal underscores myth of pure science.”  It’s interesting to substitute race science rather than climate science when pondering their comments. Some quotes:

The East Anglia controversy serves as a reminder that when the politics are divisive and the science is sufficiently complex, the boundary between the two may become indiscernible.

Race science is also complex — complex enough for obfuscation by politically motivated parties. It’s not like the double helix structure of DNA where someone who doubts it can be safely relegated to the Flat Earth Society.

Yet both parties have agreed, although tacitly, on one thing: Science is the appropriate arbiter of the political debate, and policy decisions should be determined by objective scientific assessments of future risks. This seductive idea gives politicians something to hide behind when faced with divisive decisions. If “pure” science dictates our actions, then there is no need to acknowledge the role that political interests and social values play in deciding how society should address climate change.

Politicians (and academics and journalists) often hide behind the idea that science has absolutely proved that IQ is not a valid measure or that race differences in academic success are due to White racism, etc.  No need to mention the political commitments of the people who have produced this “knowledge” — people like S. J. Gould, Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin.

In practice, science is competitive, backbiting, venal, imperfect and, indeed, political. Science, in other words, is replete with the same human failings that mark all other social activities.

For sure. I think pretty much every scientist starts out thinking science is way purer than it is. By the end of their career, they are less idealistic. In my case, it came as a result of writing The Culture of Critique. A more recent example of my disillusion is evolutionary psychology.

What is the solution? Let politics do its job; indeed, demand it. … Better to recognize that decision-makers, depending on their political beliefs, will weigh the evidence and risks of climate change differently when evaluating policy options. Voters should evaluate the decisions on that basis, rather than on the false notion that science is dictating the choices.

The problem with this is that it’s no solution at all. We are supposed to simply accept the fact that race science is politicized and that politicians are politicized in what they say about race science. Then somehow the voters are supposed to wade through all this when they decide how to vote on issues such as anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives.

But voters are completely unqualified for evaluating any of the evidence. And in any case, surely voters’ politics will affect their choices in the same way politics  influences everyone else’s choices. 

Of course, the media will weigh in heavily and predictably to convince voters against race realism because we all know they are politicized. The media will be effective because when it comes to race science, the realists are completely marginalized. So in the end, clueless voters who read the New York Times or watch Fox News will end up making these decisions. 

I think that Jewish intellectuals have always known about the politicization of truth. And if truth is politicized, all that’s left is to try to establish consensus and delegitimize everything else –forcibly if need be. This is from Ch. 6 of The Culture of Critique:

A fundamental aspect of Jewish intellectual history has been the realization that there is really no demonstrable difference between truth and consensus. Within traditional Jewish religious discourse, “truth” was the prerogative of a privileged interpretive elite that in traditional societies consisted of the scholarly class within the Jewish community. Within this community, “truth” and “reality” were nothing more (and were undoubtedly perceived as nothing more) than consensus within a sufficiently large portion of the interpretive community.

People who dissent from the manufactured consensus are simply marginalized from polite society. So the closest we can come to truth in race science is consensus and the consensus simply reflects the politics of the people with more power.

I think a lot of race scientists have had an idealistic conception of science. Until we change the people who have the power, especially in the media, there is no chance for their ideas to become mainstream.

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