Jews as a Hostile Elite

“Bad Santa” and Eli Plaut’s “A Kosher Christmas”

[This article was originally posted on Dec. 24, 2013; it is a comment on an article that appeared in Tablet on Dec. 17, 2013. Tablet has seen fit to repost it in 2014, on Christmas eve, so I thought I would repost my comment.]

Billy Bob Thornton and Tony Cox in Bad Santa.

It’s that time of year again. Time for Jewish angst about Christmas. The Tablet has a revealing article by Adam Chandler that gets at the Jewish view of the season (“All-Star Team of Jews Defiles Christmas in Billy Bob Thornton’s ‘Bad Santa’: How the Coen brothers and Terry Zwigoff helped create a holiday classic that angers gentiles“). Described as “the greatest Christmas movie of all time,”

ten years after its release, Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa, a rail whiskey blend of Brecht and Bukowski, has become a holiday standard. Brought to life by a Jew from Wisconsin (Zwigoff) and four Jewish brothers (two Coens and two Weinsteins), it is regarded as a classic send-up of Christmas culture gone awry. The crude, brilliant movie is a staple of Comedy Central’s December line-up.  …

With an assault of impiety, the film makes Christmastime in America seem an impossible place to be if you live at the margins. The way that message is conveyed throughout the movie, however, is more fluid than solid. After his introductory monologue, Willie stumbles into the alley behind the bar where, with the Chopin nocturne still lilting, he upchucks loudly into the snow. It’s a beautiful shot, retching Santa and all, that ends with the postcard appearance of the movie title in red lettering.

Uplifting stuff for the holidays. The artistic contribution of the Coen brothers is critical:

In an interview last year, director Terry Zwigoff explained how the Coen Brothers turned Bad Santa from holiday pastiche into scorched earth. “Like the kid would ask Santa, ‘Do you and Mrs. Santa ever think of having kids?’ And in the original script it was just, ‘No, thank God.’ And the Coens made that into, ‘No, thank the fuck Christ.’ That’s their gift. They have a gift for dialogue.”

Such an improvement! The gleeful desecration of all that is held dear by the hated and resented outgroup.

Read more

The Way Life Should Be? Vol. VIII: In Case the Cleaning Lady Has Found My Head

 

“According to neo-classical economic theories, income inequality is not a problem — ‘because the rich can invest in new business that generates more jobs and so on’ — and thereby everybody gains. … Problem is — This is not what has happened. To a very large extent the 5% very rich have instead invested in speculation within the finance sector or credit-activity for the other 95% and thus only increased the debt — creating, more or less, a ‘Perpetuum-Mobile’…When looking at the income gap it is almost ‘scary’ how well the macro-economic model used for the last 30 years fits with the income-gap development during the same period. Productivity per employee has increased considerably during this period, but wages have not. Profits and remunerations to corporate executives on the other hand have increased enormously and the income gap has never been wider.” — Soren Andersson

“Just heard there’s an ICE checkpoint in Hollywood, just a few blocks from where I live. Everyone better give their housekeepers, nannies, and landscapers a ride home tonight…”-Amber Heard

The most vociferous supporters of mass immigration into the United States are almost to a person among the nation’s most privileged. The advocates who proclaim their support for “social justice” in Maine are no different, but far from their motives being pure, they desire the importation of a new serf class of hyper-consumers with lower IQs, high time-preference, and a greater willingness to work for low wages in poor conditions. As we shall see in an upcoming installment of this series, however, the latter isn’t always the case, which creates a problem the ruling class has, for now at least, the ability to solve. The establishment machinery is entirely geared toward the entrenchment, perpetuation, and expansion of neo-liberalism, which necessitates breaking down any obstacles to the free movement of people, goods, and capital. Along with the exponential growth model, this is the defining characteristic of neo-liberalism. Any appeals to humanity or compassion or invocations of the Holocaust are mere sophistry. In addition to the profit motive, the Jewish contingent of the “elite” has the added motivation to enact their bizarre revenge fantasies on Whites through immigration, certainly, but also through other mechanisms such as legal warfare, censorship, and various other anarcho-tyrannical practices. We now continue to investigate the Gordian knot of Jewish ethno-religious in-group advancement at the expense of cohesive White societies and the false god of neo-liberal capitalism, using Maine as a microcosm. Read more

Failed Crypsis and Its Discontents: Past and Present

“Some accuse me of being a Jew; some excuse me for being one; some even praise me for being a Jew. But all think about it.” Thus wrote the nineteenth-century writer and journalist Judah Loew Baruch (1786—1837) who, after ostensibly converting to Christianity, assimilating, and renaming himself Ludwig Börne, struggled to understand why Germans insisted on seeing him as a Jew.

Börne’s lament is a classic of failed Jewish crypsis, and one of my personal favorites. Looking back, one wonders how Börne could ever be surprised. The reasons of the Germans were surely not that difficult to surmise. Börne was an acerbic ethnic activist who used his journalism to pour sarcastic scorn on German Romanticism and folk nationality that he clearly feared and despised. He was a key figure in the Junges Deustchland (Young Germany) movement, a social reform and literary movement in nineteenth-century Germany (c.1830—50), influenced by French revolutionary ideas, which acted as a vehicle for culturally hostile Jewish ideas and opposed the German Romanticism and nationalism then current. Members of Young Germany considered themselves to possess formidable intellectual and literary gifts, and they engaged in a scathing culture of critique. But they failed to inspire much enthusiasm, instead exciting widespread animosity. This is because “Young Germany” was more like “Young Israel,” being intellectually inspired by the Jewish converts Börne and Heinrich Heine, and given a European face by a ‘social justice’ gang of philo-Semites and Leftists who had married Jewish women (e.g., Georg Herwegh). In the words of one Young Germany leader, Karl Gutzkow, “It needed two Jews— Heine and Börne — to overthrow the old ideology and shake all illusions.”[1] Many Germans agreed, which resulted in the movement being discussed colloquially as “Young Palestine,” and the banning of many of its publications. When it came to Jewishness, much to Börne’s despair, all thought about it.

Ludwig Börne

This early alliance of Leftists and Jews, each aware of the destructive power and potential of the other, would result in the promotion of Young Germany novels like Wally, die Zweiflerin, (Wally, the Doubter) that attacked marriage and preached “sexual emancipation.” Such activities, now all too familiar to us, marked an initial confluence of interests between Jews and non-Jewish radicals, since both were keen, as Gutzkow put it, to “overthrow the old ideology and shake all illusions.”

We are now almost two centuries removed from the Young Germany-Young Palestine controversy of 1835, and this confluence of perceived interests seems to have sustained the Left-Jewish alliance for almost the entirety of the intervening years. And yet, if recent events are anything to go by, this alliance appears to be fraying at the edges. The main reason for this fraying, I suggest, is that the initial goal of overthrowing the old cultural and political status quo has now been largely achieved. As we progress into a Cultural Marxist endgame, the alliance is being revised by some, and the most radical on the Left are reassessing their erstwhile partners. What are they getting out of this? Who exactly are these people and what are their interests? How valid are their victimhood credentials? Most important has been the apparently novel discovery that far from being among “the oppressed,” Jews are incredibly influential and bear all the hallmarks of an elite. The mask slips and crypsis fails. The resurgence of Börne’s crisis — the lament of failed crypsis — and with it a revision of perceptions of interests, is thus an old/new characteristic of present-day politics.  Read more

Perceptions of Jewish History Drive the War of the Hostile Elite Against the Trump Presidency

I begin with a thumbnail sketch of Jewish perceptions of their own history as a prologue to thinking about why a long-term goal of the organized Jewish community has been to make alliances with other groups with grievances against the traditional American nation. Jewish perceptions of their own history reflect traditional Jewish fear and loathing of outgroups with power, particularly given their perceptions of their “lachrymose history” among Europeans as nothing but a vale of tears.

This lachrymose view has major implications for understanding contemporary Jewish political behavior in the Diaspora. It proposes that, beginning with an unfortunate theological belief (that Jews killed God), Jews have been passive, innocent victims of marauding non-Jews. The lesson that Jews learned from the Middle Ages carries down to today: [According to Norman Podhoretz,” the Jews

“emerged from the Middle Ages knowing for a certainty that — individual exceptions duly noted — the worst enemy they had in the world was Christianity: the churches in which it was embodied — whether Roman Catholic or Russian Orthodox or Protestant — and the people who prayed in and were shaped by them. It was a knowledge that Jewish experience in the ages to come would do very little, if indeed anything at all, to help future generations to forget” (Review of Norman Podhoretz’s Why Are Jews Liberals?, p. 29).

These perceptions are fundamental to Jewish education and to Jewish identity. Jews therefore—far more than non-Jewish Europeans—have an overwhelming sense of their own history. From far left to the neoconservative right, Jews socialized in the Jewish community imbibe a history of what they see as vicious persecution of blameless Jews in the West going back even prior to Christianity—to the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D.

Within this worldview, the Middle Ages were a period of completely unjustified expulsions from many areas on Western Europe, motivated not at all by Jewish behavior but by vicious, fundamentally anti-Semitic Christian theology. The Enlightenment resulted in “Jewish emancipation” in the sense that the paradigm had shifted from a corporate Christendom with its anti-Jewish theology to an individualist model of society where each citizen was to be stripped of group allegiances.

Jews were welcomed into these newly reconstructed Western societies, but the tensions remained. Jews were now accused of remaining Jews in societies of individualists—of remaining a “state within a state,” failing to shed their ethnic identities, and continuing to engage in ethnic networking, not only in business and professional relationships, but also establishing organizations in the West dedicated to helping Jews in foreign lands, at times against the perceived interests of the nations they were residing in. Read more

An Academic Book on Jewish Subversion of Christmas

Editor’s note: Originally posted in 2012, this article gets at the Jewish ethnic angle behind the “War on Christmas.”

A new book, Joshua Eli Plaut’s A Kosher Christmas: ’Tis the Season to Be Jewish, documents what we have known all along: The Jews did indeed subvert Christmas.  This book deserves a full review, but Ethan Schwartz’s summary and comment (“Twas the night after Christmas“) deserve scrutiny. First the summary:

Jews have been the vanguard of an effort to “transform Christmastime into a holiday season belonging to all Americans,” without religious exclusivity.  The most important Jewish mechanisms of secularization are comedy and parody, for laughter undermines religious awe.  Take, for example, Hanukkah Harry from “Saturday Night Live”, who heroically steps in for a bedridden Santa by delivering presents from a cart pulled by donkeys named Moishe, Hershel, and Shlomo.  Remarkably, Hanukkah Harry has emerged as a real Santa-alternative for many American Jews.  Plaut sees such things not as attempts at assimilation but as an intentional subversion of Christmas traditions.  “Through these parodies,” he writes, “Jews could envision not having to be captivated by the allure of ubiquitous Christmas symbols.”  And it isn’t just Jews: for Americans in general, Jewish parody helps ensure that Christmas “not be taken too seriously” and that the celebrations of other traditions “be accorded equal respect and opportunity.”

There seem to be two messages here. One is the message of subversion utilizing ridicule among other methods. The other is that Jews are seen as high-mindedly making Christmas  “into a holiday season belonging to all Americans.” The end result is that Christmas is not “taken too seriously” and the Christian religious aspect central to the traditional holiday is de-emphasized.

People who take their religion seriously do not allow their religion to be ridiculed. One need only think of the Muslim reactions to cartoons ridiculing Mohammed. The fact that Jews have been able to ridicule Christianity without any serious negative consequences is an important marker of Jewish power and an equally strong indication of the decline of Christian religious belief. I suspect that the organized Jewish community would react in outrage if non-Jews ridiculed religious Judaism. Indeed, any criticism of Jews as Jews is off limits in the mainstream media. (A topical short list of verboten topics: the loyalties of neocon Jews and their role in promoting the war in Iraq, the Jewish aspect of the Ivy League admissions scandal, how Jewish control of Hollywood influences media content.) Read more

Jews and Jewish organizations lead the gun control campaign

Given the Parkland shootings, I thought it appropriate to rerun this article, originally posted on January 1, 2013. See also Andrew Joyce’s article, “Jews and gun control: A reprise.” 

In Cooper Sterling’s TOO article (“Guns, profiling and White males“), he notes

The Left’s irrational obsession with gun control goes beyond the latest mass shooting. It is endemic among the cosmopolitan literati, who loathe Middle America, to dwell on the risks associated with firearms while disregarding or minimizing the benefits of firearm ownership. …

Anyone monitoring the national scene since Newtown is witnessing an emotional antipathy toward the last trace of political leverage among an identifiable demographic: an overwhelmingly White male gun culture. What the MSM and gun control advocates ultimately detest is the gun culture in America, which is too White, too male, and too conservative. …

The tradition of gun ownership is as old as the Republic. It reflects the pre-1965 demographic of America as an overwhelmingly White—and more civilized—nation. As a native Midwesterner, guns were rampant in our neighborhoods where few homes didn’t have some sort of firearm. We came of age hunting with our fathers, uncles and cousins, acquiring rifles and shotguns in our mid-teens.

An article from The Forward notes that the Jewish community has taken the lead in gun control and that part of it is hostility toward the  gun culture of White America that is especially apparent in rural White America. Jews “instinctively recoil” from this culture (“After Newtown Jews lead renewed push on guns“).

Jewish organizations pride themselves on gun control stances that date back to the early days of the debate, following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and of President Kennedy. Most played a supportive role in passing legislation then limiting access to weapons, and have since reaffirmed their commitment to reducing the availability of guns.
One reason for broad Jewish support of gun control, Mariaschin said, has to do with the community’s sense of security, “which perhaps leads us to feel that the possession of assault weapons is completely unneeded.”
Rabbi Eric Yoffie, former head of the Reform movement, listed in a recent Haaretz article several reasons for Jews siding with supporters of gun control: the community’s affiliation with the Democratic Party; the fact that Jews are urban people and detached from the culture of hunting or gun ownership, and suspicion toward the NRA, which is “associated in the minds of many Jews with extremist positions that frighten Jews and from which they instinctively recoil.” Read more

Agobard of Lyon and The Origins of the Hostile Elite


As part of the introduction to my forthcoming volume of essays, Talmud and Taboo, I’ve included an overview of key developments in the historical relationship between Jews and Europeans. During the course of this overview I emphasize the historical suppression of European responses to Jewish group behavior, an important and perennial aspect of Jewish-European interactions. This suppression/taboo, as a thing in itself, tends to be less explored and understood when compared to the attention devoted to more obvious manifestations of Jewish influence (e.g. assertive action in influencing immigration control), but consideration of it is crucial to a complete understanding of Jews as a hostile elite. A working theoretical definition of what is meant by “Jews as a hostile elite” is of course also necessary, and is taken here as the implication not only that Jews have historically been opposed/hostile to the interests of the European masses, but also that Jews have had direct access to political power, or significant levels of influence over European elites in possession of it. While writing the introduction to Talmud and Taboo I was primarily concerned with the origins of the Jewish acquisition of this power or influence in Europe, the mode of its expression, and its evolution over the course of centuries. Due to restrictions of space in the introduction to Talmud and Taboo, I want to take the opportunity here to expand on one such example.

To date, our best understanding of modern Jewish political strategies in the context of the “taboo” can be found in Chapter 6 of Kevin MacDonald’s Separation and Its Discontent: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, titled “Jewish Strategies for Combatting Anti-Semitism.” One section deals with “Political Strategies for Minimizing Anti-Semitism.” MacDonald notes that Jews have been flexible strategizers in the political arena, buttressed by an IQ substantially above the Caucasian mean, and argues that the foundations for Jewish influence are wealth, education, and social status.[1] Today, Jews apply this influence in order to stifle negative discussion of their group, and at times to stifle any discussion of Jews at all. MacDonald points out that this is normally done via extensive communal support for “self-defense committees,” which are a feature of every Diaspora population. These committees invariably lobby governments, utilize and influence legal systems, produce pro-Jewish and pro-multicultural propaganda, and fund pro-Jewish candidates or initiatives. Another of their vital functions has been to monitor and expose “anti-Semites,” and to use legal systems in order to exact individual punishments, thereby making an example of individuals and thereby imposing a deterrent atmosphere on the rest of the population. Read more