Neoconservatism

Lawrence Auster Gets Unhinged

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I made a resolution to not to waste time and energy on Internet squabbles with people like Lawrence Auster. Auster’s agenda is pretty clear. As I said in some previous comments on him, “Auster’s comments, posted on his website, are first and foremost an attempt to place me beyond the realm of legitimate discourse. By titling the article ‘The idiocy of Kevin MacDonald,’ Auster is saying, “Don’t go near MacDonald—he is off limits.” Auster continues to draw lines, now trying to anathematize anyone who is remotely associated with me.

For awhile, it seemed that Auster had decided not to bother with any arguments at all. His complaints about my review of Norman Podhoretz’s Why are Jews Liberals? referred to “MacDonald-style Jew-hatred” and then had long quotes from the article. Not exactly an overwhelming argument.

Now Auster has taken to calling me an “exterminationist anti-Semite,” again with the aim of drawing boundaries for acceptable discourse and again without much of an argument:

Since Kevin MacDonald sees the Jews as a group that are genetically determined by Darwinian evolution to subvert and destroy white gentile societies wherever they encounter them, in the same way that rattlesnakes are genetically determined to sink their venomous fangs into the flesh of mammals wherever they encounter them, we must conclude that he doesn’t want Jews to exist in America and Europe. Further, as I explain here with regard to MacDonald’s recent article at Alternative Right, it is clear that he doesn’t want Jews to exist in Israel either. So MacDonald doesn’t want Jews to exist anywhere.

If anyone has a reasonable interpretation of MacDonald other than that he is an exterminationist anti-Semite, I’d like to hear it.

There is a whole lot wrong with this, starting with interpreting me as saying that “Jews as a group … are genetically determined by Darwinian evolution to subvert and destroy white gentile societies wherever they encounter them.”

I certainly do think I have shown that Jews have a powerful sense of groupness. This is apparent throughout history and can be seen today in pretty much any statement put out by organizations like the ADL. And I do think that there are conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews in a wide range of areas — my writing has focused on immigration policy, policy toward Israel, and the construction of culture generally.  Whenever I discuss these issues I always qualify my remarks by noting that not all Jews hold the same opinions. Making a case for Jewish influence is a matter of looking at where the great mass of Jewish money and influence is being brought to bear and trying to determine if their efforts are effective. For example, in the case of immigration policy, it matters little if Auster and Stephen Steinlight oppose our anti-White immigration policy when the organized Jewish community and the vast majority of Jews (including a great number of Jews with influential positions in the media and in politics) are in favor of it. (Here‘s a recent example: the ADL condemning the Arizona law that attempts to rid the state of illegal immigrants.) My argument is that Jewish influence was a critically necessary condition for the passage of the disastrous 1965 immigration law.

But this is a far cry from saying that Jews are “genetically determined by Darwinian evolution to subvert and destroy white gentile societies wherever they encounter them.” Even a casual reading of my work would show that it’s all about culture–why else write a book titled The Culture of Critique. (This is a recent academic version of my theory of culture.) Genetic determinism plays no role in my theory.

When it comes to why the organized Jewish community and most Jews have supported policies that oppose the interests of people of  European descent, I implicate Jewish ethnocentrism combined with their lachrymose view of their own history among Europeans — summarized in my review of Podhoretz. Briefly stated, Jews have a historical grudge against Europeans and their culture.

Besides the historical grudge that has fueled so much Jewish hostility toward European-descended peoples and their culture, the rise of a Jewish elite in 20th-century America is a story of ethnic displacement. No evolutionist is surprised at the desire to achieve elite status and displace previously dominant elites, and Jews are certainly no exception. Jews are doing what pretty much any ethnic group would do if they could. In today’s column, Pat Buchanan writes, “The Chinese of 2010 call to mind 19th-century Americans who shoved aside Mexicans, Indians and Spanish to populate a continent, build a mighty nation, challenge the British Empire — superpower of the day — and swiftly move past her in manufacturing to become first nation on earth.”

Yeah, we shoved aside other peoples. And now it’s happening to us — mainly, in my opinion, because of the  power of the new Jewish elite. The Indians didn’t like it when  it happened to them. I don’t like it as it’s happening to me and people like me. The Palestinians don’t like it either.

The only thing is that I suspect that everyone would have assumed that a 19th-century American Indian complaining about what was happening was being entirely rational. But now someone like me is treated as a raving lunatic and moral reprobate — ignored by the  elite media and vilified by the lavishly funded Jewish activist organizations like the ADL and the SPLC. We are not supposed to put up a fight. We are supposed to simply accept our displacement and pledge fealty to our new elite.

But I am not an exterminationist. Since when is someone who calls attention to conflicts of interest between groups necessarily advocating the extermination of one of the groups? By that logic, a historian documenting the influence of, say, Christian Zionists  and noting how their interests conflict with those of others would necessarily be advocating their extermination. By that logic Mearsheimer and Walt are exterminationists. Auster’s comment is nothing but an attempt to have any discussion of Jewish interests and Jewish influence be completely off the table–unlike the interests and influence of any other group.

I am perfectly happy for Jews to live where they want. I just wish they would not continue to oppose the interests of people like me.  Obviously, in saying this, I am implying that  I don’t believe in genetic determinism in the area of political choices. It is within the power of Jews to change their political behavior. In fact, rather than behaving like mindless robots acting out of a genetic imperative, Jews have always been flexibly responsive to historical contingencies, and this agrees with everything we know about human psychology.

It really doesn’t matter if groups with little power and influence oppose the interests of White Americans. But it matters greatly if a substantial component of the elite in terms of wealth as well as political power and media influence opposes our interests and brings to economic ruin and political oblivion anyone (Jew or non-Jew) who comes to our defense.

Nor do I have any conceptual problem with Jews living in Israel. As I wrote in my previous comments on Auster, I would be willing to make a quid pro quo with the organized Jewish community: If you support white ethno-nationalism in the US and provide intensive, effective support for ending and reversing the immigration policy of recent decades (i.e., something approaching the support you presently provide Israel), I would be willing to go to the wall to support Jewish ethno-nationalism in Israel, even at substantial cost for the US. The fact that a minuscule number of Jews — none of them part of the main Jewish activist organizations that have been so destructive to White ethno-nationalism — are immigration patriots and see value in America as ethnically and culturally European is certainly not a reason for someone like me to support Jewish ethno-nationalism in Israel.

But I don’t see the organized Jewish community getting behind a White America any time soon — from which I infer that they continue to believe that it is their self-interest to oppose the interests of White Americans (not that they are the victims of some phantasmagorical genetic imperative). The fact is that Israel is costing the US dearly in terms of blood and treasure at the same time that the Jewish community in the US opposes the interests of White Americans. I really don’t see why I should support it.

However, that’s not the same as wishing Israel would be wiped off the map — only that they should fend for themselves. I do not believe that it is in my ethnic interests nor is in the interests of the United States to antagonize the Arab and Muslim world in the interests of an expansionist, apartheid, ethno-nationalist Israel. It’s simply not our fight.

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Robert Satloff and the Jewish Culture of Deceit

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Stephen Walt had the audacity to suggest, given Dennis Ross’s close ties to WINEP, that Ross should not have a policy-making position on Middle East issues in the Obama Administration. Neocon Robert Satloff responded with outrage, claiming that Ross has been doing nothing but promoting “U.S. interests in peace and security for the past quarter-century.” And he disingenuously asks, “To which country do we allegedly have a ‘strong attachment’?  Our foreign-born scholars hail from virtually every country in the Middle East — Turkey, Iran, Israel, and at least a dozen different Arab countries.”

The best response is by MJ Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum, an organization that advocates a two-state solution to the conflict:

Steve Rosen [who was acquited on charges of spying for Israel in 2009] … cleverly came up with the idea for an AIPAC controlled think-tank that would put forth the AIPAC line but in a way that would disguise its connections.

There was no question that WINEP was to be AIPAC’s cutout. It was funded by AIPAC donors, staffed by AIPAC employees, and located one door away, down the hall, from AIPAC Headquarters (no more. It has its own digs). It would also hire all kinds of people not identified with Israel as a cover and would encourage them to write whatever they liked on matters not related to Israel. “Say what you want on Morocco, kid.” But on Israel, never deviate more than a degree or two.

In other words, Satloff’s claims that WINEP is not tied to any particular lobby or country are part of an ongoing subterfuge that fools no one except the mainstream media: “It matters because the media has totally fallen for this sleight of hand and WINEP spokespersons appear (especially on PBS) as if WINEP was not part of the Israel lobby. Some truth-in-labeling is warranted.”

This sort of subterfuge is central to Jewish efforts at influencing policy in a wide range of areas. Because they are a small minority in the US and other Western societies, Jews must recruit support from the wider community. Their positions cannot be phrased as benefiting Jews, but as benefiting the interests of the society as a whole. As a result, these movements cannot tell their name.

A great example is the $PLC, an organization that we now know is funded by Jews and, apart from the sociopathic Morris Dees, is also largely staffed by Jews. Yet whenever there is a story about “immigrant rights” or angry White people, the SPLC is called on by the mainstream media as a “respected civil rights organization” rather than for what it is: A Jewish activist organization actively attempting to further the ethnic  interests of Jews, typically at the expense of White Americans.

This sort of subterfuge was true of all the Jewish intellectual and political movements discussed in The Culture of Critique. As I noted in Ch. 6:

It is thus not surprising that although these theories were directed at achieving specific Jewish interests in the manipulation of culture, they “could not tell their name”; that is, they were forced to minimize any overt indication that Jewish group identity or that Jewish group interests were involved …. Because of the need for invisibility, the theories and movements discussed here were forced to deemphasize Judaism as a social category—a form of crypsis discussed extensively in SAID (Ch. 6) as a common Jewish technique in combating anti-Semitism. In the case of the Frankfurt School, “What strikes the current observer is the intensity with which many of the Institute’s members denied, and in some cases still deny, any meaning at all to their Jewish identities” (Jay 1973, 32). The originators and practitioners of these theories attempted to conceal their Jewish identities, as in the case of Freud, and to engage in massive self-deception, as appears to have been common among many Jewish political radicals. Recall the Jewish radicals who believed in their own invisibility as Jews while nevertheless appearing as the quintessential ethnics to outside observers and at the same time taking steps to ensure that [non-Jews] would have highly visible positions in the movement (pp. 91–93). The technique of having non-Jews] as highly visible exemplars of Jewish-dominated movements has been commonly used by Jewish groups attempting to appeal to gentiles on a wide range of Jewish issues (SAID, Ch. 6) and is apparent in the discussion of Jewish involvement in influencing immigration policy. …  [Chap. 7]: Beginning in the late nineteenth century, anti-restrictionist arguments [on immigration]  developed by Jews were typically couched in terms of universalist humanitarian ideals; as part of this universalizing effort, [non-Jews] from old-line Protestant families were recruited to act as window dressing for their efforts, and Jewish groups such as the AJCommittee funded pro-immigration groups composed of non-Jews (Neuringer 1971, 92).

It’s an old technique, arguably present (see also here)  from the origins of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. The sad thing is that people who should know better continue to be deceived.

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Kevin MacDonald: Review of Podhoretz, Part II

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Kevin MacDonald: Part II of my review of Podhoretz is now posted on Alternative Right. Quite a bit of it relates to the current discussion of Jewish intellectual style on this site. I agree with Podhoretz that Jews are attracted to religious thinking in which they accept theories that explain everything but are incapable of disconfirmation. The problem is that Jews have advanced these religious theories as “scientific” not only in the social sciences and humanities, but also, perhaps, in theoretical physics, as some have argued here.

The other point is to underline the fact that the only theory that can account for Jewish political behavior in the Diaspora is that it is motivated by ethnic conflict with the White, Christian majority seen as the historical enemy. I note that the status as an elite outsider has grave moral implications. In fact, Jews are actively engaged in making alliances with the soon-to-be non-White majority. Whites should be deeply concerned about what this portends for the future.

It’s interesting that in the Comments section Paul Gottfried agrees with my analysis but also points to White guilt as a critical factor. I agree with that and have written about it several places. For example, White predispositions to guilt and the manufacture of White guilt by prominent Jewish intellectual and political movements is the topic of my review of Eric Kaufmann’s The Rise and Fall of Anglo America. (see also here.)

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Review of Podhoretz, Part I

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I have a rather longish review of Norman Podhoretz’s Why are Jews Liberals? posted at AlternativeRight.com. I thought I would post a summary here to encourage commentary. Part I is “Remaking the Right: Liberals, Jews, Conservatives” and deals with how Jews see their history in Europe — the lachrymose view of European history in which Jews have been the victims of irrational hostility ever since the origins of Christianity. The take home point is:  “It’s a very short jump from blaming the culture created and sustained by Europeans to the idea that Europeans as a people or group of peoples are the problem. Ultimately, this implicit sense that Europeans themselves are the problem is the crux of the issue.”

This then feeds into the Jews as a hostile elite theme that is so apparent today. What’s really scary is that the Jewish Republican branch of the hostile elite represents itself as conservative. A conservative elite hostile to the traditional people and culture of the US. Orwell would love it.

The other theme is how neocon Jews like Podhoretz displaced true conservatives from the Republican Party in the interests of aiding Israel. However, they have not shed any of their hostility toward Europeans and their culture. Indeed, they have been complicit in the movement for massive non-White immigration. As I note, “With conservatives like these, who needs liberals? ”

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Kevin MacDonald: Charles Dodgson on Stratfor

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Kevin MacDonald: Charles Dodgson’s current TOO article “Stratfor’s Global Forecast: Myopia or Neoconservative Manipulation?” is a real eye-opener. I have often seen Stratfor’s forecasts distributed on email lists and other venues as representing objective, hardheaded analysis. Now it turns out that Stratfor is run by a strongly identified Jew who sees the world through a typical neoconservative Jewish lens — biased toward Israel. And, by emphasizing the benefits of immigration into Western countries but not the ethnic costs to Whites, Stratfor is an effective cheerleader for White dispossession in Europe and America.

Because they are tiny minority in Western societies, all  successful Jewish intellectual and political movements  must appeal to non-Jews. This has certainly been true of the Jewish movements of the left that dominate so much of contemporary thinking in the West. This is also true of neoconservative movements, and Dodgson’s analysis shows that Stratfor appeals to non-Jewish conservatives because  it emphasizes national sovereignty and other hot button conservative issues. But, in the end, Stratfor is yet another illustration of neoconservative Jews  reinforcing the fundamentally leftist, multicultural, anti-White status quo in the West while simultaneously advocating Jewish ethnic nationalism in Israel.

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Should Haiti be Rebuilt?

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It’s impossible to turn on television these days without messages to donate to Haitian relief by Michelle Obama and others. Or we read a newspaper article and find that there is an outpouring of concern about Haiti — leading not only to financial donations but to offers of adoption by American, presumably White, parents of the estimated 380,000 Haitian orphans:

Tammy Gage of Stanberry, Mo., cries every time she turns on the TV and sees the devastation in Haiti. And though she already has three daughters, she didn’t hesitate when her husband suggested that they adopt from Haiti.

“That’s all he needed to say,” she said.

Gage and her husband, Brad, are among many Americans expressing interest in adopting children who have been left orphans from the quake last week. Adoption advocacy groups are reporting dozens of calls a day.

Patrick Cleburne points out that 37% of Americans say they or someone in their family has donated to Haitian relief.

This altruism on behalf of genetically unrelated people who have created the quintessential dysfunctional society is pathetic and shows how far we have to go to get people to think rationally about this issue.

It is yet another example of the power of the media. Imagine if the media simply framed this as what you would expect from a people with an average IQ of 72 and a 200-year record of economic failure and inability to govern themselves. Imagine if the media messages were informed by ethnic genetic interests and if adopting parents were made aware that they would feel less psychological involvement with their African children than to genetically similar others. Imagine if there were no high-status figures on TV advocating Haitian relief  and thereby appealing to our evolved psychology of emulating high-status people. (By adopting a Haitian refugee or making a donation, I can get the approval of people like George Clooney, Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera.)

Altruistic Whites who contributed to the relief effort would be scorned as naïve and misguided  — and they would be made aware that they will likely be unhappy in the long run. The aid would dry up. Our explicit processing mechanisms (human rationality) could easily overcome the natural empathy that we feel when we see human suffering. On the other hand, Whites would not at all be surprised that Blacks and other non-Whites (including presumably President Obama given his strongnon-White identity) strongly support the immigration of Haitians because in doing so they are supporting their own ethnic genetic interests in a non-White America. Indeed, 70% of Black Americans favor Haitian immigration compared to 45% of Whites.

A recent TOO article is an anecdote to all that. As it notes, the left has a “profoundly Eurocentric” belief that other peoples are the same. It adds that the result is a campaign for ever more aid and development, fuelled by the belief that, given enough money, education, and opportunity, the Third World (including even Haiti) will eventually converge with Europe.

From the standpoint of the multicultural left, societies like Haiti can’t be allowed to fail because the failure challenges their whole belief system.

It’s interesting that one of our favourite neocons, Elliott Abrams, wants to increase Haitian immigration to the US so that they can send money back to Haiti. This is a twist on the leftist theory that everyone is equal and that Haiti, given enough support, will be just like Sweden. Abrams’  implicit theory is that Haiti cannot possibly be expected to make itself into a viable society unless it can siphon off wealth from the US. As he points out, this is already happening for a great many countries, prototypically Mexico, Honduras, and, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic.

As a charter member of the Israel lobby, he knows all about siphoning off wealth (not to mention the lives of US military personnel) from the US on behalf of a foreign country. And as a Jew, he is certainly well within the Jewish mainstream when it comes to immigration policy generally. The implicit model of the US for Abrams is exactly the model advocated by Jewish activists for the last century: A proposition nation composed of different cultures and ethnicities, each with an allegiance to their own people wherever they may live.

Needless to say, this vision of American is profoundly antithetical to the interests of European-descended people in the United States.

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The Ilya Somin Conspiracy

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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.

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