Jews as An Elite

Our Unethical Financial Elite

/49 Comments/in , /by

Writing on Jewish involvement in the ongoing financial disaster is not something I relish. It’s not really my cup of tea because financial issues are not my area of expertise. But I do think the issues should be discussed at TOO.

When the meltdown began, the Internet was full of angry comments blaming Jews, much to the chagrin of the ADL. This is because it is common knowledge that Jews are vastly overrepresented among Wall Street executives. In the 1990s, Benjamin Ginsberg noted that 50% of Wall Street executives were Jewish, and it’s doubtless at least that high now.

As Kevin Phillips has pointed out, since the 1990s, economic expansions have not benefited the middle class; rather, they have benefited the financial elite. Financial services and complex financial products have assumed an ever larger percentage of the American economy, while manufacturing has steadily declined to the point where their relative percentages of the American economy have reversed.

And the entire pyramid is erected on a house of cards. Phillips writes:

My summation is that American financial capitalism, at a pivotal period in the nation’s history, cavalierly ventured a multiple gamble: first, financializing a hitherto more diversified U.S. economy; second, using massive quantities of debt and leverage to do so; third, following up a stock market bubble with an even larger housing and mortgage credit bubble; fourth, roughly quadrupling U.S. credit-market debt between 1987 and 2007, a scale of excess that historically unwinds; and fifth, consummating these events with a mixed fireworks of dishonesty, incompetence and quantitative negligence.

In the public mind, the firm most closely associated with Jewish financial power is Goldman Sachs. Ever since the financial meltdown, GS has been defending itself (e.g., here) against an avalanche of charges focused not only on financial improprieties but also on its ties to the government (e.g., Matt Taibbi and a series of articles in the New York Times, e.g., here.)

A document placed into the Congressional Record by Rep. Darryl Issa (R-CA), described in an article on Bloomberg.com strongly suggests corruption at the pinnacle of the financial profession. GS underwrote $17.2 billion of the $62.1 billion in the Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO’s) that were insured by AIG — more than any other firm. Essentially, banks underwrote toxic securities and then bet against them. An observer notes, “It sounds to me a little bit like selling a car with faulty brakes and then buying an insurance policy on the buyer of those cars.”

Even worse, according to the article, they knew the car had faulty brakes. Managers of the CDO’s were substituting bundles of mortgages that they knew full well were deeply troubled. Unethical behavior is strongly implicated. An observer notes that the banks should have to explain how they managed to buy protection from AIG primarily on securities that fell so sharply in value. “If these banks had insight into the underlying loans because they had relationships with banks, originators or servicers, that’s at the least unethical.”

GS received $14 billion from the government when AIG was bailed out; the New York Times also reportedthat GS also received substantially more money from the AIG bailout as a result of a prior agreement with Societe Generale, a French bank that also received AIG bailout money from the US government. Finally, the New York Fed promoted a cover-up that prevented this information from coming out sooner.

The article makes clear that there are still many details that remain unknown about these transactions.

David Brooks noted in the NYTimes,

Fifty years ago, the financial world was dominated by well-connected blue bloods who drank at lunch and played golf in the afternoons. Now financial firms recruit from the cream of the Ivy League. In 2007, 47 percent of Harvard grads went into finance or consulting. Yet would we say that banks are performing more ably than they were a half-century ago?

Quite clearly they are not. The rise of a Jewish elite in the US is problematic for a great many reasons — most obviously because the Jewish elite remains motivated by ethnic paranoia and hostility toward Western cultural traditions, particularly Christianity. However, the behavior of the financial elite in the case of the recent meltdown is not something one would expect to see in a healthy society. Quite a few of the details remain unknown, so that it is difficult to get a clear image of how individual Jews and Jewish networking contributed to the meltdown. (By all accounts [e.g., here], Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Alan Greenspan were instrumental in getting rid of regulations on trading derivatives that would have prevented the meltdown.) The indications that Goldman Sachs was at the center of the meltdown strongly suggests that the Jewish role was important. GS has not commented on Issa’s document or the Bloomberg article.

Nevertheless, at this point 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 mentioned by Brooks, 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 elite — the people whom Brooks disdainfully describes as “well-connected blue bloods who drank at lunch and played golf in the afternoons.”

Phillips concludes with a quotation from British colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, made in 1904 to a gathering of his country’s financiers:

Granted that you are the clearinghouse of the world, [but] are you entirely beyond anxiety as to the permanence of your great position? . . . Banking is not the creator of our prosperity but is the creation of it. It is not the cause of our wealth, but it is the consequence of our wealth.

That is the problem going ahead. The US has sacrificed wealth-production in favor of finance, and this has doubtless resulted in huge financial rewards to a few people at the very top. But it’s really hard to see how most of us are going to benefit from this transformation in the long run. A society without a healthy, civic-minded elite is doomed.

Bookmark and Share

Edmund Connelly: Steve Sailer gets it

/63 Comments/in , , /by

Edmund Connelly: Now I’ve got more reason to like Steve Sailer. He recently showed again on his VDARE blog why I’ve recommended him so strongly. Recall my two columns last year recommending his work—see here and here. I really think he does a great job at quantitatively showing how Jews have become the new elite in our society. And he does a pretty good job at pointing to some Jewish behavior that the MSM doesn’t always want to acknowledge. 

His blog here paints a pretty clear picture again. His column is a coment David Brooks NYTimes column extolling the virtues of the new meritocracy compared to the bad old days when the WASPs ran the country. Brooks claims that “we have opened up opportunities for women, African-Americans, Jews, Italians, Poles, Hispanics and members of many other groups.”

In reality, however, the big winners from this “meritocracy” are Jews. Sailer points out that 

 In 2009, 35% of the Forbes 400 are from one ethnic group that makes up only 2% of the population. So, is “The Power Elite” really that much more diverse today?

If you break down Brooks’ list — “African-Americans, Jews, Italians, Poles, Hispanics”– by membership in the 2009 Forbes 400, you come up with:

African-Americans: 1 (Oprah)
Jews: 141
Italians: 14
Poles (and all other Eastern Europeans): 6
Hispanics: 2

Similarly, if you look at the 2009 Atlantic 50 ranking of most influential pundits, it’s half Jewish, versus 2% black and 0.5% Hispanic.

In other words, this increased “meritocratic diversity” among the elites that Brooks is writing about essentially consists of the rise of Jews over the last century.

The fact is that the new order is reasonably seen as less of a meritocracy than a new form of clubbiness where ethnic ties among Jews ease the way into top positions. Ethnic cohesion is certainly the main story of the Jewish academic and intellectual elite that constructed the Culture of Critique in the academic world, and the vast overrepresentation of Jews in the media elite mentioned by Sailer suggests it’s the same story there. Indeed, Jews are vastly overrepresented as students in elite academic institutions even controlling for IQ.

This new elite based on ethnic networking is at least as corrupt as the old WASP elite and its family ties. The new elite reacts with angry aggression and charges of “anti-Semitism” if one even mentions that they are in fact an elite.

The old elite had a sense of civic responsibility and national interest. As Sailer notes, the new elite seems to care nothing about the long term success of the society as a whole:

The unspoken implication of Brooks’ analyses is that American Jews should start thinking of themselves less as oppressed outcasts who need to go for whatever they can get while the getting is good, and start thinking of themselves more realistically as the core of the New American Establishment. Thus, American Jews should realize that, like the Protestant Establishment of yore, their privileged position as a de facto leadership caste bestows upon them corresponding duties to conserve the long-term well-being of the overall nation rather than to indulge in personal and ethnic profit and power maximization.

But the terrifying reality is that the Jewish ascendancy remains hostile to the traditional people and culture of America. Jews continue to earn like Episcopalians (actually more than Episcopalians) and vote like Puerto Ricans. They are the financial backbone of the Democratic Party and its coalition of non-White ethnic groups. (83% voted for Obama.) The organized Jewish community is a major pillar of support for massive, non-White immigration that will add 100 million non-Whites to the US in the next few decades.

The new elite is definitely not about conserving America for the long term success of the society as a whole. It’s about ethnic paranoia, ancient hatreds, and the desire to completely transform the society at the expense of its traditional people –elite and non-elite alike — at whatever the cost to the society as a whole. Hey, when it falls apart, just take the money and run to Israel.

Sailer makes it pretty clear that Brooks was not connecting the obvious dots: Since Jews took over America, things have definitely changed for the worse for White Americans.

Bookmark and Share

Edmund Connelly (email him) is a freelance writer, academic, and expert on the cinema arts. His most recent TOO article is “Farewell, My Dear WASP“

"It’s Not the Arguments"

/38 Comments/in , , , , /by

A recent TOO piece offered an argument for the importance of solid funding for the success of any media venture, TOO included. The basic idea is an important one to discuss — that high status confers influence. Indeed, the importance of high status is a critical ingredient of theories of influence in sociology, and psychologists have argued that attraction to high status is part of our evolutionary heritage.

We see this repeatedly in the key institutions throughout the West, including the media and the academic world. Jewish influence basically stems from their influence on all of the high ground of the culture. The revolution of the Left was a top-down revolution that began in the most prestigious academic and media institutions and then spread to the lower reaches of the media and the K-12 educational system.

For all its espousal of egalitarianism, the academic world is a hierarchical system in which the highest levels are rigorously policed to ensure ideological conformity because any leak in the system would mean that non-conformists would benefit from institutional prestige. This, of course, is exactly why John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt caused such a panic attack in the ranks of the Israel Lobby. Mearsheimer and Walt weren’t just two easy-to-ignore guys from some college no one heard of; nor were they members of an easily marginalized group, such as Arabs. They were well-known and academically productive professors from prestigious institutions — the University of Chicago and Harvard respectively. This resulted in a full-fledged smear campaign emphasizing “shoddy scholarship” (typically made by Jewish activist organizations or others without the least experience as scholars) and charges of being anti-Semites on a par with the authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. When all else fails, …

Another example is E. O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist who in 1975 stunned the academic left with the publication of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Wilson included a chapter applying evolutionary thinking to humans — a topic that had been expunged from the social sciences ever since the triumph of Boasian anthropology in the 1920s. Wilson was already well-known as an entomologist and ecologist, and his position at Harvard gave him immense authority.

The Left went into full-fledged moral panic mode, led by high-profile attacks from Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould — both of whom were also at Harvard and were discussed in Chapter 2 of Culture of Critique as examples of leftist Jewish intellectuals who undermined evolutionary and biological approaches in the social sciences.

The Israel Lobby and the Left won these battles ultimately. Politicians are loathe to cite Mearsheimer and Walt, and it is unthinkable that they could attain positions in the government where they could directly influence US foreign policy. Tamer versions of evolutionary psychology are tolerated, but arguments related to ethnic interests (Salter), the reality of ethnic and racial differences (Jensen, Lynn, Rushton), and my writing on Jewish influence on culture have been expunged from the mainstream media. I have sometimes thought that my ideas would be more influential if I held a position at Harvard. But the reality is that occasional lapses from decorum have been managed quite effectively.

The result is that Whites are intellectually and culturally insecure. Any cultural confidence they have must buck the tide of elite opinion which is constantly telling them they are racists who owe whatever success they have in life to “White privelege” or other inventions of the Left. As I noted elsewhere, “one of the greatest triumphs of the left has been to get people to believe that people who assert white identity and interests or who make unflattering portrayals of organized Jewish movements are morally degenerate, stupid, and perhaps psychiatrically disturbed. Obviously, all of these adjectives designate low status.”

The revolution may well begin because of the rage of non-elite Whites. But it won’t be successful until the elite bastions of anti-White opinion are breached. And that will not be an easy fight to win.

Bookmark and Share

What’s gotten into Rush Limbaugh?

/14 Comments/in , , , , /by

The ADL reports that Rush Limbaugh “raised the possibility that liberal Jews were having ‘buyer’s remorse’ with President Obama in light of the outcome of the Senate election in Massachusetts.” Limbaugh:

To some people, banker is a code word for Jewish; and guess who Obama is assaulting?  He’s assaulting bankers.  He’s assaulting money people.  And a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish. So I wonder if there’s – if there’s starting to be some buyer’s remorse there.

Abe Foxman responded as follows:

Rush Limbaugh reached a new low with his borderline anti-Semitic comments about Jews as bankers, their supposed influence on Wall Street, and how they vote. 

Limbaugh’s references to Jews and money in a discussion of Massachusetts politics were offensive and inappropriate.  While the age-old stereotype about Jews and money has a long and sordid history, it also remains one of the main pillars of anti-Semitism and is widely accepted by many Americans.  His notion that Jews vote based on their religion, rather than on their interests as Americans, plays into the hands of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists.           

This is classic ADL-talk. Anything said about Jews as Jews is anathema. No need to actually look at the evidence that indeed Jews are vastly overrepresented in the Wall Street elite and that they gave vastly disproportionate amounts to Obama.

What’s surprising is that Limbaugh would go there, given the long track record of the ADL in condemning any mention of Jews as influencing anything at all. Unless he’s living under a rock (and he isn’t), Limbaugh must have known of the consequences and did it anyway. Perhaps things really are changing for the better.

This is from a previous article reacting to ADL angst about anti-Jewish comments that were appearing in a great many of the comment sections of news articles on the internet in the wake of financial meltdown in 2008:

The problem is that we all know that there is more than a grain of truth to the claim that Jews run Wall Street, just as there is more than a grain of truth to the claim that Jews run Hollywood. In fact, as we previously pointed out, Benjamin Ginsberg, a prominent social scientist, noted during the 1990s that 50% of Wall Street executives were Jewish.

Nevertheless, the immediate reaction of the ADL is to attempt to stifle any such comments and simply label them as “anti-Semitism.” …

Such heavy-handed attempts to squelch discussion of Jewish influence can be seen on a wide range of issues, most notably the role of the Israel Lobby in influencing US foreign policy in the Middle East. When John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt published their work on the Israel Lobby, organizations like the ADL were quick to condemn them as anti-Semites and compared their writing to classic anti-Jewish themes in writings like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

But the bottom line is that there is no attempt to soberly and rationally determine the real extent of Jewish involvement in this disaster. The  entire topic of Jewish involvement in the financial system is taboo. It is not surprising that the police-state tactics favored by the ADL fuel the flames of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories when all attempts to raise the issue of Jewish influence in the financial system or other areas of American life are met with powerful efforts to enforce silence.

The situation is similar to a previous financial scandal — the one involving Michael Milken, the notorious 1980s junk bond king. As a 1989 National Review article noted, Milken “is Jewish, as were many of his partners and peers. (Indeed, about the only sympathy he has gotten is from those who see his prosecution as an instance of anti-Semitism.)”

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 Thieves an “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.”

Sounds like a Jewish cabal to me. Thomas later noted 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. . . .”  …

The difference between the current  crisis and the Den of Thieves debacle is that the consequences to the financial system of the current Wall Street disaster are far greater and they are far more likely to have a negative effect on pretty much everyone. When a new version of Den of Thieves describes in detail the Jewish involvement in the current catastrophe, perhaps not even Alan Dershowitz or the ADL will be able to keep the lid on the bottle.

Bookmark and Share

Lasha Darkmoon: Germany Then — America Now!

/83 Comments/in , , , , /by

Lasha Darkmoon:  Kevin MacDonald’s recent review of William Marr’s 1870s pamphlet, The Victory of Judaism over Germanism,  raises many interesting questions. “Marr sees himself as a soldier fighting a lost cause,” MacDonald notes at one point, without making it clear if he agrees with Marr that it is indeed a lost cause.  

Since the parallels between Germany then and America now are too glaringly obvious to ignore, one is tempted to ask MacDonald: “And what about you, Kevin? Do you consider yourself a soldier fighting a lost cause?” 

MacDonald’s article ends with Marr’s chilling two-word prediction: FINIS GERMANIAE. (The end of Germany) 

We have seen it happen. Germany’s cadaver lies rotting. Exactly a year ago the state of Israel demanded from Germany a further 1 billion euros ($1.4 billion) in Holocaust reparations for its endlessly traumatized Jewish survivors. Sixty-five years after World War Two, the grim extortion racket continues unabated. 

Forget that. The thing we need to consider now is the parallel situation with America. Is it time to write America’s obituary? Or is it too early to say, FINIS AMERICAE — the end of America? 

*   *   *  

A confession of ignorance: I had no idea things were so bad in Germany in the 1870s when Marr wrote his prophetic treatise, only recently translated from German into English and now available in pdf format. I had been under the false impression that the notion of Jewish world domination came much later — after the publication of the Protocols (1903) and the Russian Revolution (1917). 

Here is a pertinent, relatively modern quotation which will serve as a useful coda to the doomladen citations from Marr that MacDonald presented. Read it carefully. It will not only hammer home the points made by Marr several decades earlier, it will also provide the reader with a sharp reminder of the parallel situation in which America finds itself today. 

With one significant difference: America is in a far worse condition.

Under the Jewish heel in pre-Hitler Germany :

 It was the Jews with their international affiliations and their hereditary flair for finance who were best able to seize such opportunities…They did so with such effect that, even in November 1938, after five years of anti-Semitic legislation and persecution, they still owned, according to the Times correspondent in Berlin, something like a third of the real property in the Reich [my emphasis]. Most of it came into their hands during the inflation… But to those who had lost their all, this bewildering transfer seemed a monstrous injustice. After prolonged sufferings they had now been deprived of their last possessions. They saw them pass into the hands of strangers, many of whom had not shared their sacrifices and who cared little or nothing for their national standards and traditions…

The Jews obtained a wonderful ascendancy in politics, business and the learned professions [in spite of constituting] less than one percent of the population [my emphasis]… The banks, including the Reichsbank and the big private banks, were practically controlled by them. So were the publishing trade, the cinema, the theatres and a large part of the press — all the normal means, in fact, by which public opinion in a civilized country is formed… The largest newspaper combine in the country with a daily circulation of four millions was a Jewish monopoly…

Every year it became harder and harder for a gentile to gain or keep a foothold in any privileged occupation [my emphasis]. … At this time it was not the ‘Aryans’ who exercised racial discrimination. It was a discrimination that operated without violence. It was exercised by a minority against a majority. There was no persecution, only elimination. … It was the contrast between the wealth enjoyed — and lavishly displayed — by aliens of cosmopolitan tastes, and the poverty and misery of native Germans, that has made anti-Semitism so dangerous and ugly a force in the new Europe. Beggars on horseback are seldom popular, least of all with those whom they have just thrown out of the saddle.

—   Sir Arthur Bryant, Unfinished Victory, 1940, (slightly edited for brevity).

*   *   * 

MacDonald notes elsewhere in his thought-provoking review of Marr’s pamphlet: “Marr correctly believed that societies centered around a strong collectivist religious core (e.g., medieval Christianity) or a strong sense of ethnic nationalism are more able to defend themselves against Jews.” 

We cannot help asking at this point: So how does America hope to protect itself against the Jews? (Or “organized Jewry”, to be more precise). Is there any hope for the beleaguered majority whose traditional values are now being destroyed by an alien elite who view their new subjects with hostility and contempt?   

Consider the two factors that are seen as an antidote to the Jewish poison: “a strong collectivist religious core” (i.e., Catholicism in some historical eras) and “ethnic nationalism” (e.g., the sense of being an American of European heritage). 

Ethnic nationalism in America, assuming it ever existed to the same degree as British or French nationalism existed, is now clearly in its death throes — thanks to multiculturalism and malignant immigration policies enacted as a result of Jewish activism — an activism that has helped to produce a polyglot mélange of multicolored folk forever at each other’s throats.

So what about Christianity as a cohesive countervailing force?  Why has Christianity failed so abysmally to counteract this spiritual virus? 

This is a question I am unable to answer.  Others, I am sure, will have their theories — and I wish them good luck. 

Despite its history as the only Western institution that has been able at times to stand up to Jewish power, the Catholic Church, of which I am a hopelessly dysfunctional practising member, has proved to be an acute disappointment. It has been thoroughly subverted from within and without. It offers neither guidance nor leadership.

So forget the Catholics—a spent force—many of them, I regret to say, almost as daft and deluded as their competitors in folly, the evangelical Christians.  

I am also forced to conclude, with a heavy heart, that there is little hope that American Protestants could come to the rescue. Its infatuated legions — namely, the 50-70 million Christian Zionists who constitute the most influential group of American Protestants — are as rabid in every way as the fanatical Jews who have infected them with their zealotry, egging them on to find solace in eschatological ecstasies and millenarian mumbojumbo. 

Life is indeed so empty and sterile for these wretched lumpengoyim that the only thing that excites their sluggish sensitivities is the prospect of Armageddon and the thought of universal and catastrophic death — the quicker the better.  

Whipped into a frenzy of religious fervor by the Grahams and the Robertsons, the Falwells and the Hagees, the Lindseys and the La Hayes, these Christian Zionists have become imitation Jews almost indistinguishable from Jabotinski and Baruch Goldstein. They believe in a Greater Israel — entailing further conquests of Arab Land — and in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. They have “adopted” illegal settlements and directly finance with their donations the bulldozing of Palestinian homes, the uprooting of olive trees, and the daily oppression of the rightful owners of the Holy Land. They pray every Sunday in their vast soulless churches for the destruction of Iran. And if push came to shove, they would gladly give their blessings to genocide — and call it “the will of God.”     

There are now 80,000 fundamentalist pastors and clergy preaching their message of madness to these ill-educated Christian masses — in many ways as gullible and gormless as medieval peasants.  The pernicious views of their “pastors” are disseminated by 1000 local Christian radio stations as well as 100 Christian TV stations. See here. 

*   *   * 

Consider the unimaginable war crimes committed by the state of Israel exactly a year ago in Gaza. The world saw it happen. Judge Goldstone saw it happen. His meticulously documented report makes it abundantly clear that Israel is a criminal nation and that its politicians and generals are as steeped in criminality as their Nazi persecutors and recent role models in racism ever were. 

Yet here is Christian Zionist Grace Halsell, like a character straight out of Alice in Wonderland, preaching to the starry-eyed Christians who offer incense to Israel: “Every act taken by Israel is orchestrated by God, and should be condoned, supported, and even praised by the rest of us.” 

The American government appears to agree with this demonic drivel.   

Enthralled by organized Jewry, mercenary and corrupt to the core, this shambolic apology for a government — this psychopathocracy masquerading as a democracy — recently came out in overwhelming condemnation of the Goldstone Report. 

America is dead.  

Behold the New Zion!

Bookmark and Share

The Ilya Somin Conspiracy

/7 Comments/in , , , /by

Ilya Somin’s blog at the Volokh Conspiracy, “Confusing Overrepresentation with Domination” raises some interesting issues that are at the heart of my work. His purpose is to claim that Jews may be overrepresented in various movements, such as neoconservatism, without Jews dominating these movements. He also claims that Jews involved in various movements do not differ from non-Jews involved in these movements, so that the idea that Jews involved in these movements are pursuing Jewish interests is a non-starter. For example:

In the 1920s, Jews were indeed overrepresented (relative to their percentage of the general population) among both Bolshevik leaders and international capitalists [in Weimar Germany]. At the same time, non-Jews still greatly outnumbered Jews in both groups. A closely related fallacy was the assumption that overrepresentation in a field proved that the Jews involved in it were using it to promote some specifically Jewish interest. In reality, Jewish capitalists tended to behave much like gentile ones, focusing primarily on maximizing their profits. Jewish communists such as Leon Trotsky were brutal totalitarians. But their gentile counterparts, such as Lenin and Stalin, were much the same. There was no real evidence that either Jewish capitalists or Jewish communists were promoting specifically Jewish interests in any systematic way. Indeed, Jewish communists in the USSR actually supported the regime’s suppression of Jewish culture and religion.

I don’t dispute this argument when it comes to capitalists, although there is good evidence that the political attitudes of Jewish capitalists were not interchangeable with non-Jewish capitalists — the  latter more inclined to liberal internationalism than their non-Jewish counterparts. But when it comes to leftist politics, one must deal with the data in Chapter 3 of The Culture of Critique — that Jewish Bolsheviks retained a Jewish identity and saw Communism as good for Jews — as indeed it was. As Yuri Slezkine exhaustively describes, Jews became an elite in the USSR, their influence declining only after WWII. As I concluded in CofC, “Clearly, Jews perceived communism as good for Jews: It was a movement that did not threaten Jewish group continuity, and it held the promise of power and influence for Jews and the end of state-sponsored anti-Semitism.”

Responding to Somin’s point about the suppression of Jewish culture and religion, I also show that Jewish communist activists produced a secular Jewish culture within the communist system, concluding:

Despite their complete lack of identification with Judaism as a religion and despite their battles against some of the more salient signs of Jewish group separatism, membership in the Soviet Communist Party by these Jewish activists was not incompatible with developing mechanisms designed to ensure Jewish group continuity as a secular entity. In the event, apart from the offspring of interethnic marriages, very few Jews lost their Jewish identity during the entire Soviet era (Gitelman 1991, 5), and the post–World War II years saw a powerful strengthening of Jewish culture and Zionism in the Soviet Union.

Somin goes on to dispute the importance of Jewish identity in the neoconservative movement (Mearsheimer and Walt to the contrary) and the recent financial crisis. Again, I don’t  want to dispute this with respect to the financial crisis because I have not seen a good article showing differences between Jews and non-Jews in the financial industry. (On the other hand, there is evidence, soon to be presented in TOO, that Bernie Madoff’s scheme likely could not have happened apart from his Jewish connections.)

But in the case of neocons, it’s simply not enough to claim “that the views of Jewish neoconservatives differ little from those of gentile ones, that neocon hawkishness on the Arab-Israeli conflict is just one facet of their hawkishness on other foreign policy issues unrelated to Israel (and therefore not likely to be a specifically Jewish agenda), and that the overrepresentation of Jews among neocons is similar to that in many other intellectual movements (including plenty that were opposed to neoconservatism on most issues).”

I agree that non-Jewish neocons typically hold the same views as Jewish neocons (otherwise they wouldn’t be neocons!). The question is whether Jewish and non-Jewish neocons have different motivations, and there is overwhelming evidence that they do. In my article on neocons, it quite clear that Jewish neocons typically have close family connections to Israel (e.g., Douglas Feith’s father was a member of a Jabotinskyist terrorist group), are involved with Israeli think tanks, and are on personal terms with Israeli political and military leaders. Many have ties with Jewish activist organizations such as the Zionist Organization of America. Several have been credibly charged with spying on behalf of Israel (Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Bryen, Douglas Feith, and Michael Ledeen). When not working in the government, they often work for overtly pro-Israel organizations such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. It’s simply not credible that their Jewish identity is not a critical factor in explaining their behavior.

I also try to fathom the motives of non-Jews involved in neoconservatism, noting “Because neoconservative Jews constitute a tiny percentage of the electorate, they need to make alliances with non-Jews whose perceived interests dovetail with theirs. Non-Jews have a variety of reasons for being associated with Jewish interests, including career advancement, close personal relationships or admiration for individual Jews, and deeply held personal convictions.” But whatever these motives are, they are not the same as the motives of the Jewish neocons.

It’s also true that Jewish neocons are generally hawkish, but this certainly doesn’t imply that their attitudes about anything affecting Israel are not affected by their Jewish identifications. Again, neocons have to make alliances with non-Jews; one  way to do this is to adopt a generally aggressive foreign policy stance that appeals to non-Jewish foreign policy hawks. Further, hawkish Jewish interests extend beyond directly aiding Israel. For example, the role of neocon Jews in the Cold War fit well not only Jewish interests in weaking an ally of the Arabs, but also with improving the status of Jews in the USSR.

And finally, it doesn’t follow from the fact that Jewish neocons are motivated by their attachment to Israel that Jews who are opposed to neoconservatism are not motivated by their own conception of Jewish interests. In the same way, before the establishment of Israel there was real debate within the Jewish community over whether Zionism was a good idea. The point is that both factions in the debate viewed their perspective as better for Jews. Right now we have the conflict between AIPAC and J Street. (Granted, the conflict may be more apparent than real). But in any case, both sides see their perspective as good for Jews.  Even Mearsheimer and Walt argue that their approach to Israel policy is good for the Jews. But M&W are surely correct in seeing Jewish neocons as motivated by their perception of Jewish interests.

Bookmark and Share

Christopher Donovan: Sullivan & Cromwell's Jewish Elite

/5 Comments/in /by

Christopher Donovan: Once upon a time, power-hitting New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell was as WASP a bastion as Princeton or the CIA.  Today, the Jews have taken over. 

The managing partner title recently passed from H. Rodgin Cohen, a Jewish lawyer, to Joseph C. Shenker, who’s not only Jewish, but a rabbi. 

To read through the cast of characters upon whom their success is built — like the overwhelmingly Jewish client Goldman Sachs — is to observe the Jewish power structure writ large.  Would the New York Times in its fawning coverage of Shenker’s clever deal-making poke around any connections to the mortgage collapse?  Probably not.  Would it talk about a “Jewish power structure”?  Certainly not. 

A good question to ask is whether men like Cohen and Shenker do Whites any good, and why we’re so unthinkingly ceding power positions to Jews.

Bookmark and Share