Jewish History, Jewish Religion: A Review

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Jewish History, Jewish Religion
Israel Shahak
Pluto Press, 1994

For a thorough airing of Jewish dirty laundry, one cannot do much better than Israel Shahak’s  Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years (JHJR). First published in 1994, JHJR, represents a humanist critique of classical and modern Judaism which extends to the pervasive anti-gentile attitudes of Jews throughout history. Much of Shahak’s critique leads to his condemnation of Israel’s current treatment of the Palestinians, but he also offers the gentile’s perspective whenever discussing historical conflicts between Jews and gentiles. Most importantly, however, Shahak underscores the blatant hypocrisy, the niggling legalism, and the chauvinistic ethnocentrism behind classical Judaism, as expressed in the Talmud and other post-biblical writings. While he focuses his ire on the fanatical rabbis—mostly in Israel—who still adhere to these antiquated doctrines and exert influence in the Israeli military, modern dissidents can implement Shahak’s historical and Talmudic analysis whenever countering the historical complaints Jews continually levy against gentiles, especially the white ones.

Shahak begins by demonstrating how the Jewish state of Israel exists to serve the interests of Jews first and foremost. Jews are protected and encouraged by the law in ways that non-Jews are not, especially when it comes to residency and commercial discrimination. Shahak recognizes that many of these discriminatory laws go unenforced in Israel, but they remain on the books. And some are enforced, or at least were as of the book’s publication. Shahak offers the example of Jews—but not gentiles—being legally allowed to lease an orchard from a Jew for harvest. He also describes the financial incentives Israel provides for its Jewish citizens to return to Israel after they leave, while not making similar offers to its non-Jewish citizens in similar circumstances. Further, Kibbutzes exclude Arabs and require that all non-Jews convert before joining. Underlying these double standards is what Shahak calls “the ideology of redeemed land.” Israeli land is considered “redeemed” when it belongs or is sold to a Jew. The same land in gentile hands would be considered “unredeemed.” The logical extension of this, as Shahak points out, is the ultimate redemption of all Jewish land. As of the 1990s at least there was debate as to how far outside Israeli’s current borders unredeemed Jewish land actually stretches.

Shahak connects this double standard to the closed society many religiously zealous Jews want Israel to be. Despite having great knowledge of Judaism, Shahak laments this, and wishes Israel be an open society. But achieving this will require some painful decisions on the part of Jewish Israelis. The following passage, I think, sums up his intentions with JHJR:

A Jewish state, whether based on its present Jewish ideology or, if it becomes even more Jewish in character than it is now, on the principles of Jewish Orthodoxy, cannot even contain an open society. There are two choices which face Israeli-Jewish society. It can become a fully closed and warlike ghetto, a Jewish Sparta, supported by the labour of Arab helots, kept in existence by its influence on the US political establishment and by threats to use is nuclear power, or it can try to become an open society. The second choice is dependent on a honest examination of its Jewish past, on the admission that Jewish chauvinism and exclusivism exist, and on a honest examination of the attitudes of Judaism towards non-Jews.

And if there are any positive attitudes towards non-Jews in Judaism, Shahak studiously does not mention them.

One of Shahak’s main contentions regarding classical Judaism is its totalitarian nature. He mentions how eighteenth-century Jews burned books, persecuted dissidents, banned non-Jewish education, and were absorbed in mysticism. Tolerance was not part of the equation, and Shahak quite cheekily points out how at times even unfriendly gentile societies were kinder to the Jews than the Jews were to themselves. He states bluntly that when Jews were liberated or emancipated throughout the nineteenth century, they were in many cases freed from “the tyranny of their own religion” rather than from any gentile oppression. He offers as an example the Metternich regime in Austria in the 1840s, which actually enforced laws protecting Jews from being murdered. Shahak makes a similar point regarding Tsar Nicholas I:

Nicholas I of Russia was a notorious anti-Semite and issued many laws against the Jews of his state. But he also strengthened the forces of ‘law and order’ in Russia—not only the secret police but also the regular police and the gendarmerie—with the consequence that it became difficult to murder Jews on the order of their rabbis, whereas in pre-1795 Poland it had been quite easy.

Shahak characterizes pre-emancipated Jewish societies as “sunk in the most abject superstition, fanaticism and ignorance” and describes how in the first Hebrew work on geography (published in 1803), the authors complained about how a great many rabbis were still denying the existence of America. He even cracks a joke about how these classical Jewish societies prohibited the study of secular material—except while on the privy:

One can imagine that those few Jews of that time who – no doubt tempted by Satan—developed an interest in the history of the French kings were constantly complaining to their neighbours about the constipation they were suffering from.

Shahak stresses how official Jewish histories of this period which ignore or deny any of this “bear the unmistakable marks of their origin: deception, apologetics or hostile polemics, indifference or even active hostility to the pursuit of truth.” As evidence of this duplicity, Shahak describes how before emancipation, rabbis continually subverted Christian censorship whenever Christians became aware of virulently anti-gentile passages in the Talmud and other writings. For example, terms such as “non-Jew” or “gentile” would be replaced with seemingly less offensive terms such as “idolator” or “Samaritan” which then served as euphemisms for the goyim. Shahak calls these efforts “a calculated lie” since once the rabbis felt secure enough in Israel centuries later, the original anti-gentile passages reappeared in modern editions of their holy books.

And as for anti-gentile language, there is a lot of it, and not just in the Talmud. The Hebrew word shaqetz refers both to unclean animals and to gentile children. In a work known as The Book of Knowledge, Jews are instructed to exterminate gentiles with their own hands (a passage wholly expunged from the book’s English translations). In the Hasidic text known as Hatanya, gentiles are considered Satanic creatures. The Halakhah, which outlines the legal system of classical Judaism and springs from the Babylonian Talmud, openly approves of war crimes (i.e., the killing of ostensibly good gentile civilians during war). In Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed, Blacks and some other nomadic races are likened to “mute animals” and “are not on the level of human beings.” (In the 1925 American translation, editors obfuscated this embarrassing detail by replacing the Hebrew word Kushim, meaning Blacks, with the nonsensical  “Kushites”). There is a morning prayer in which Jews thank God for not making them gentiles. In another prayer, the worshipper declares, “and may the apostates have no hope, and all the Christians perish instantly.” Devout Jews are enjoined to utter a curse whenever passing a gentile cemetery or upon seeing a large gentile population. The fourteenth-century work called The Book of Education reinterprets seemingly universalist verbiage from the Bible into chauvinistic, pro-Jewish exhortations. For example, according to The Book of Knowledge, the verse “Thou shalt love thy fellow as thyself,” really means “Thou shalt love thy fellow Jew as thyself.” Finally, according to the Talmudic Encyclopedia, the intricacy of the law regarding adultery with gentile women reveals that, to devout Jews, all gentile women, even the ones who convert to Judaism, are presumed to be whores.

Keep in mind that while devout Jews were praying for the death of gentiles and while Jewish leaders were fully aware of the hidebound aspects of their own religion, they pressured the Catholic Church during the mid-20th century to remove the line about God forgiving Jews in one its Good Friday prayers; because, of course, to say such a thing would be anti-Semitic.

Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of JHJR is how petty and legalistic Shahak reveals Judaism to be. It seems that Judaism, as interpreted and re-interpreted over the centuries in the Talmud and other texts—down to the most trivial details—has provided the evolutionary bottleneck through which the Jews have become the world’s heavyweight champions of lawyers. In some cases, it’s as if God laid down the law in the Torah, and it’s up to His chosen people to find ingenious loopholes around these very laws—as if the All-Powerful Creator of the Universe were too obtuse to notice.

On the proscription against milking cows on the Sabbath, Shahak writes—hilariously—that according to Zionist rabbis:

the forbidden milking becomes permitted provided the milk is not white but dyed blue. This blue Saturday milk is then used exclusively for making cheese, and the dye is washed off into the whey. Non-Zionist rabbis have devised a much subtler scheme (which I personally witnessed operating in a religious kibbutz in 1952). They discovered an old provision which allows the udders of a cow to be emptied on the Sabbath, purely for relieving the suffering caused to the animal by bloated udders, and on the strict condition that the milk runs to waste on the ground. Now, this is what is actually done: on Saturday morning, a pious kibbutznik goes to the cowshed and places pails under the cows. (There is no ban on such work in the whole of the Talmudic literature.) He then goes to the synagogue to pray. Then comes his colleague, whose ‘honest intention’ is to relieve the animal’s pain and let their milk run to the floor. But if, by chance, a pail happens to be standing there, is he under any obligation to remove it? Of course not. He simply ‘ignores’ the pails, fulfills his mission of mercy and goes to the synagogue. Finally a third pious colleague goes into the cowshed and discovers, to his great surprise, the pails full of milk. So he puts them in cold storage and follows his comrades to the synagogue. Now all is well, and there is no need to waste money on blue dye.

This is funny. But when rules are laid down and then interpreted to not only benefit Jews but also to necessarily harm gentiles, it’s not funny. In Chapter Five, “The Laws Against Non-Jews,” Israel Shahak wrote it all down.

According to Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, the Talmudic Encyclopedia, and R. Yo’el Sirkis’ Bayit Hadash, Jew-on-Jew murder is a capital sin, but Jew-on-gentile murder is not, and is therefore not punishable by any Jewish court. R. David Halevi declares in his seventeenth-century text Turey Zahav which comments on the Shulhan ‘Arukh that a Jew must not directly harm a gentile, but he allows for indirect harm of gentiles. Maimonides himself proscribes Jewish doctors treating gentiles. Basically, a gentile life must not be saved. For example, a Jew would not be allowed to shove a gentile down a crevice, but if the gentile is already in the crevice, the Jew is under no obligation to pull him out. Indeed, if there is a ladder which could facilitate the gentile’s rescue, the Jew may also remove the ladder.

Unless, of course, such indirect harm would then bring hostility upon the Jews as a whole. Then, and only then, would a Jew not be permitted to indirectly harm a gentile. This, I call “the hostility exception,” and Shahak brings it up a lot. Jews respect power, and this power more than any universal set of values informs their jurisprudence. When gentiles (or heretic Jews) are weak, they are afforded no mercy in the law. However, when gentiles are strong, then Jews are required to do the very minimum to not increase their hostility. One crass and recurring example of this was how Jewish doctors would be encouraged to treat wealthy gentiles, including kings, nobles, lords, and the like. But poor gentiles, never. Obviously, such self-serving codification defies any absolute sense of Right and Wrong—moral particularlism at its most egregious, and is one of the aspects of classical Judaism that Shahak finds so offensive.

This next one might be the worst of them all. According to the virulently anti-gentilic Maimonides in his “Prohibitions on Sexual Intercourse” (emphasis mine):

If a Jew has coitus with a Gentile woman, whether she be a child of three or an adult, whether married or unmarried, and even if she is a minor aged only nine years and one day—because he had willful coitus with her, she must be killed, as is the case with a beast, because through her a Jew got in trouble.

Get that? According to one of greatest Jewish scholars of all time, a Jew has license to murder, rape, and molest children as long as the victim is a gentile. And of course, the sanctity of gentile marriages amounts to nothing.

Here are a few more anti-gentilic laws, all of which adhere to the “hostility exception” described above:

  1. Gentiles are forbidden to bear testimony in rabbinical courts, since all gentiles are presumed liars.
  2. Jews must not offer gifts to gentiles.
  3. Jews must exact interest when lending money to gentiles.
  4. Jews must never return items lost by a gentile.
  5. Jews shall not deceive other Jews in business, but may practice “indirect deception” when doing business with a gentile.
  6. Jews shall not steal without violence from anyone, gentiles included. However, there are certain circumstances under which they may steal with violence from gentiles under their control.
  7. Jews are forbidden to sell unmovable property (i.e., structure and land) to gentiles in Israel.

Towards the end of JHJR, Shahak bluntly states something that most counter-Semites know as fact:

It must be emphasized that the explanations quoted above do represent correctly the teaching of the Halakhah. The rabbis and, even worse, the apologetic ‘scholars of Judaism’ know this very well and for this reason they do not try to argue against such views inside the Jewish community; and of course they never mention them outside it. Instead, they vilify any Jew who raises these matters within earshot of Gentiles, and they issue deceitful denials in which the art of equivocation reaches its summit.

Shahak states further that Judaism is imbued with both hatred and ignorance of Christianity, and that this is largely independent of any Christian persecution of the Jews. Thus, he often takes the gentile perspective when reviewing Jewish history in JHJR. He makes it clear that even the poorest Jews were better off than serfs. He also points out that Jews, as agents of kings or nobility, often exploited the peasantry, especially in Poland. He doesn’t deny that European peasants triggered anti-Jewish uprisings throughout history, but he also lists historical peasant uprisings that had nothing to do with Jews. Clearly then, what Jews call “anti-Semitism” is not inherent to European peasants. Shahak says the quiet part out loud when concluding that Jewish influence declines when gentile nations assume a more nationalistic (read: ethno-nationalistic) attitude and have a greater political connection between the rulers and the people—what it now termed populism in American political culture. There is a long history going back at least to the 1930s of Jewish anti-populist writing (Chapter 5 of The Culture of Critique)—writing that eventually penetrated American academic and media culture with the rise of Jewish power.

Most damningly, Shahak states:

Before the advent of the modern state the position of the Jews was socially most important, and their internal autonomy greatest, under a regime which was completely retarded to the point of utter degeneracy.

In other words, Jews readily made alliances with oppressive, degenerate non-Jewish elites and participated with these elites in exploiting the non-Jewish population.

Certainly, viewing the Jewish Question through the lens Israel Shahak provides us in JHJR makes things much clearer. He provides cogent reasons why gentiles oppressed Jews in the past or evicted them from their nations. Still, we should remember that Shahak was no fellow traveler of the Dissident Right. Like any good liberal humanist, he opposed all race-based policies, laws, and nations. He opposed ethno-nationalism in toto and often chided Jews (for example, Rabbi Schneurssohn of New York city) for having anti-Black attitudes—the same anti-Black attitudes that many race-realist White dissidents have today. White people founding pro-White nations would have been just as odious to him as the Zionists who had founded Israel. Most questionably, Shahak on multiple occasions in JHJR expresses a high regard for the ideas behind the French Revolution without mentioning any of its concurrent chaos and atrocities. This should give a clear indication of where he stands as a pollical thinker.

Most importantly, we should keep in mind that Jewish History, Jewish Religion does not condemn modern Jews for the overt racism of their classical religion (excluding those instances when classical Judaism informs their treatment of the Palestinians). Nor should it—since no people is without historical sin. However, the best take from this important and fascinating book is the underscoring of the present sin being committed by most Jews today; that is, blaming gentiles, especially the white ones, for bad things in their past, while astutely ignoring similar bad things in the Jewish past.

A critical mass of Jews who stop doing this will do much to lift the burden of three thousand years.

A Critical Look at the Polish ‘Pogroms’ of 1914–1920

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“Jewish reports tended toward exaggeration.”
William Hagen, Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914–1920, 173.

“All the methods of malevolent propaganda are a menace from which Poland is a notable sufferer.”
Major General Edgar Jadwin, U.S. Army, 1920

Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914–1920
William W. Hagan
Cambridge University Press, 2018

I recently had the good fortune to read William Hagen’s Cambridge-published Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914–1920, one of the most interesting books I’ve read on Jewish-European relations since John Doyle Klier’s Oxford-published work on the Tsarist pogroms. It’s always refreshing to see scholars of European heritage tackle this subject matter, which has been dominated for too long by Jewish academics offering a one-sided, lachrymose, and propaganda-laden approach. Now eighty years old, Hagen, like Klier before him, has started publishing his most incisive work on the Jews only in the deep twilight of his career. Also echoing Klier’s work on the pogroms, Hagen’s Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland offers an unflinching look at the causes of inter-ethnic friction, often using novel or previously ignored source material, as well as a balanced and careful approach to the true extent of any violence that occurred. The result is a text that doesn’t just attempt to get to the bottom of what exactly happened, but also why it happened. The following essay is a hybrid work involving a partial review of Hagen’s work and some of my own thoughts and research on the subject.

Context

Hagen’s text offers strong support for Kevin MacDonald’s argument in Separation and Its Discontents that anti-Semitism is a reactive phenomenon very closely related to Jewish dominance in certain spheres of public life, especially the economy. In fact, in Separation and Its Discontents MacDonald cites on several occasions Hagen’s only previous work on anti-Semitism, a 1996 prize-winning article published in the Journal of Modern History.[1] The focus on socio-economic factors in both works indicates that Hagen’s understanding of anti-Semitism has been settled for some time.

Hagen’s Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland opens by giving voice to some fascinating Polish contemporaries, opening up an avenue of discussion often closed off in lachrymose Jewish histories which overwhelmingly focus on the putative suffering of the Jews rather than the difficult experiences of those they lived among. One of the more interesting examples is Hagen’s exploration of the works of Jan Słomka, Habsburg Polish mayor of Dzików and author of From Serfdom to Self-Government: Memoirs of a Polish Village Mayor. Słomka’s memoirs offer insight in the origins of Polish antipathy towards the Jews, and depict Jews as “cynical exploiters of Christian villagers’ weaknesses and ignorance.” (11) Mimicking tactics employed under the Russian tavern system, Jewish merchants in Poland often used alcohol to drag peasants into debt and keep them there. Słomka explained how Jews

would begin from harvest-time to buy up provisions from the farmers, mostly paying them with vodka: and these they would sell during the hunger period at huge profit. They would set things out on market days in sacks; and around these sacks would wander a hungry throng … buying grain in pots or quart measures. (13)

Słomka was a teetotaler and castigated his fellow Poles for the reckless drinking and lack of forethought that allowed them to fall into the hands of Jews who were systematically “bankrupting the emancipated peasantry and foreclosing on their minuscule farms.” In his own town of Dzików, Słomka remarked that most of the land had at one time been in Jewish hands and had only been “bought back with a lot of toil.” The Jews, according to Słomka, “have never wanted to till the soil, they have preferred to live by their wits, to profit by trading in the lands peasants have had to pay for [in compensation for receiving post-emancipation freeholds].” For the Jews, of course, it was a very successful strategy. In the 1860s, Słomka looked on as the prestigious houses ringing the central square of his chief market district, Tarnobrzeg, passed into Jewish hands.[2]

Hagen places Słomka’s concerns in the context of a wider Polish discourse on a slow national dispossession carried out by Jews. Słomka is a particularly interesting writer because he focuses as much on Polish weaknesses as on Jewish strategic competence. Słomka, for example, was irate that rural Poles had neglected to develop a keen acumen in business that would enable them to at least compete with Jews on an ethnic level rather than simply acting as prone or passive victims of unanswered economic exploitation. Słomka was later full of praise when such an answer did materialize, in the form of cooperatives that emerged in the 1880s. Due in part to increased assistance from the priesthood and sympathetic aristocrats, the decade witnessed the creation of a significant number of these ethnically based marketing and retail consortiums that defeated the economic strategy of the Jews, often via boycott, and enabled the supply of “villagers with their purchased necessities at Jewish merchants’ loss.”[3] A side-effect of growing awareness among Poles that they were engaged in a multi-front ethnic competition with Jews prompted some to engage in petty violence and robbery, which Słomka condemned as unhelpful. Słomka believed that “the struggle against Jewish capital was a contest … of morality, self-control, and will power.”[4]

Hagen demonstrates the uniformity of Polish thought on the Jews by comparing the relatively uneducated and rural Słomka’s views with those of the more cosmopolitan academic Franciszek Bujak, author of the 1919 pamphlet “The Jewish Question in Poland.” Like Słomka, Bujak argued that Polish anti-Semitism was largely a result of Jewish socio-economic dominance and the exploitation of the lower classes. In fact, Bujak argued that it was wrong to focus on Polish attitudes at all since

we may speak with more truth about Jewish antipolinism than about Polish antisemitism, which is not an aggressive movement displaying itself in consequent deeds, but merely a psychic reaction against damages suffered by the Polish nation from their [Jews] part. (19)

Bujak posited that Jewish clannishness gave them certain advantages over the trusting Poles, and suggested that the resulting exploitation was worsened by the Jews’ biblically based sense of superiority and adherence to a system of dual morality. When Jews did decide to leave the life of the ghetto-dwelling exploiter they invariably assimilated only “in an intruding way” into Polish society, where they “veered toward radicalism and revolution” as a result of their “inclination towards analysis and criticism.”(19) For Bujak, as for Słomka, the solution to Jewish strategic success was for Poles to heighten their sense of ethnocentrism and ethnic co-operation and engage in a process of ethnic exclusion—a social, political, and economic boycott of the Jews. Bujak viewed the prospect of violence as entailing a moral and strategic failure on the part of the Poles.

The only significant dissent from this prevailing view appears in the writings of the linguist and Slavist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay. Baudouin thought that exclusionary efforts were doomed to failure given the deeply embedded nature of Jewish involvement in Polish life, which extended even to the psychological:

I recognise the Jews’ power, i.e., the power of Jewish tradition’s influence on other human groups’ mentality. For at the base of our thinking, our beliefs about fundamental matters, we encounter a Jewish source [the Old and New Testaments]. We are ourselves but ‘modified’ Jews. Principled ‘mercilessness,’ unforgivingness, readiness to exterminate, raised to ideological level — all this we imbibed from literary monuments [the Christian Bible] of Jewish descent. Thanks to the ‘Judaization’ of our thinking even those who rush forward into wholesale attacks on Jews call themselves servants of him born in Bethlehem and profess Jehova, God of Israel. (25)

Baudouin’s proposed solutions couldn’t have been more representative of extremes. On the one hand he suggested an attempt to smother Jews with love and tolerance in the hope they would become excellent allies of the Polish nation. On the other, he mused about the prospects of “extermination, expulsion, starvation.” His ideas were, however, very much in the minority, and the position of the new Polish state was to tacitly permit the slow exclusion of the Jews from their prior positions of influence while condemning any and all instances of violence.

Violence and Exaggeration

Hagen has an excellent section looking at the slow build-up of verbal and physical provocation between the two populations. Unlike Jewish-authored texts on historical anti-Semitism, Hagen isn’t shy when it comes to including information that shatters the myth of the Jews as the passive and innocent victims of irrational European hatred. One hears about Jews taunting Polish villagers with “the streets are yours, the houses ours” and “the keys to the churches will be ours.” (38) With physical violence being an extremely dangerous strategy for a minority population, such taunts are emblematic of the much more common rhetorical, financial, and otherwise abstract character of historical Jewish aggression. Faced with this aggression, Europeans throughout history have often relied on the ease and simplicity of their numerical superiority in the form of varieties of “physical force” responses ranging from pranks and vandalism to boycotts, small-scale evictions, and mass expulsions. Quite where on this spectrum the events of 1914–20 fall is the primary concern of Hagen’s text.

One of Hagen’s central primary sources for his investigation of anti-Jewish violence in Poland between 1914 and 1920 is a rather dubious 1920 book, Poland and Its Minority Races, produced by Arthur Lehman Goodhart, a Jewish academic and lawyer. The origins of the book lay in a series of protests against “wholesale killing of Jews in Poland” organized by Jewish groups in several American cities in 1919. Although the Polish government denied any such atrocities had taken place, and despite the lack of clear objective evidence, American-Jewish agitation was sufficient for President Wilson to appoint a small commission “to ascertain the facts.” A commission was also sent by Great Britain, in the context of similar protests in London, led by the senior diplomat Sir Horace Rumbold. The American commission was composed of Goodhart and Henry Morgenthau (infamous author of the Morgenthau Plan), and of two non-Jews, the U.S. army officer Edgar Jadwin and his colleague Homer H. Johnson. Although not mentioned in detail by Hagen, the ethnic difference between the Jews Goodhart and Morgenthau on the one hand, and the Anglo-Saxons Jadwin and Johnson on the other, resulted in two different reports (the former more or less affirming atrocity propaganda and the latter emphatically denying, or at least heavily qualifying, it) on the return of the group to the United States, with the National Polish Committee of America even publishing “The Jadwin and Johnson Report” as a separate document entirely.[5] Both the Goodhart text and the document produced by the National Polish Committee are available in complete form from archive.org and can be read in full here and here.

From the outset, Hagen is skeptical of contemporary Jewish accounts that alleged spontaneous mass shootings. He opens the book by making it clear the documentary record has “gaps or blindspots” and “doubtless exaggeration occurred … I have sought out multiple accounts so as to minimise bias.”[6] He later argues that “resentment-laden animosity coloured many such [Jewish] reports, which tended, in an atmosphere heavy with collective paranoia and hysteria, to exaggerate Jewish losses.”[7] He even cites one brief but telling remark from Henry Morgenthau himself, who, although promoting atrocity propaganda admitted once that “there is also no question but that some of the Jewish leaders [in Poland] had exaggerated.”[8]

Patterns of Propaganda

In 1920 the National Polish Committee of America published a statement outlining the origins of atrocity propaganda against Poland:

From the very first moment, when at the beginning of November 1918, Poland regained her independence, day after day, month after month, news of dreadful Jewish pogroms were spread over the whole world. … This news found the more credit because nobody contradicted it. And nobody could contradict it. The Polish Government could not, because there was no Polish Government. … And so the news of dreadful ‘pogroms’ penetrated everywhere, spread systematically via Berlin and Vienna, and by special bureaux in Stockholm and Copenhagen, which from day to day furnished Zionist organisations possessing sufficient means and influence to give it a world-wide publication. And the news was frightful. It told of thousands of Jews not only beaten and robbed, but murdered and burned alive. As these facts were confirmed by “eye-witnesses” it is no wonder they aroused general indignation. And when Mr. Israel Cohen, the Secretary of the London Zionist Organisation, after investigating the matter on the spot published in England papers and at a meeting at Queen’s Hall in London that such atrocities had taken place in Poland in 130 towns, indignation meetings and funereal processions began all over the world.[9]

The Chicago Jewish weekly, The Sentinel, reported on July 23 1920 that:

Polish people are crazy with Jew-hatred and are busily engaged in pogroms. … The outrages perpetrated by old Russia against the Jews are child-play in comparison with the appalling crimes perpetrated by the Polish government and the Polish people against the Jews. … The Polish representatives abroad know that even the Spanish Inquisition has not committed so many crimes against the Jews as Poland is committing now. … Poland, born in crime and sin, will go under in a sea of crime and sin.

Newspapers in America were also flooded with lurid tales penned by local Jews claiming to have first-hand knowledge of what was happening in Poland. One “eye-witness” claimed to have counted 2,300 corpses. A “Charles Golosman” had a letter published in the New York Globe on August 18 1920 in which he writes of “massacres of the Jews by the Polish military” and adds:

A bloody pogrom was organised in my own native town, Bobruisk, with every home pillaged and the women ravaged in the open in broad daylight by the blood-thirsty Polish beasts. My own people may have become victims of some Polish assassin’s hands.

This account of the media origins of the pogrom myth, and in fact everything discussed thus far, is remarkably consistent with Klier’s findings regarding the Russian pogroms of the 1880s. As with agitation against Poland, in the 1880s the West was rocked by massive Jewish protests against “the mass killing of Jews” in the Russian empire, and (mirroring Goodhart’s book) the production of books and pamphlets on Russia’s putative ill treatment of the Jews. This followed, in Russia as in Poland, an increasingly assertive peasantry or lower class that began to act against Jewish economic exploitation through cooperatives or other non-violent methods. Atrocity propaganda may therefore be seen as an attempt to avenge or ameliorate a Jewish loss of influence in a given nation. In both cases, Western governments (Britain in the 1880s, America in 1919) sent official delegations to discover the truth of the situation. In both cases (unanimously in the case of Britain, and with divided opinion in the American group) the resulting reports cast great doubt on the Jewish narrative.

After many years of searching archives and reviewing contemporary reports produced by all sides, Klier concluded that Jewish accounts should be treated with “extreme caution,” that some were “flatly contradicted by the archival record,” and that some claims of pogroms are attached to cities where it is certain “there were no significant pogroms and no fatalities.” Klier noted that while the Jewish atrocity narrative dominated cultural discourse via the power of media, almost no government agency took it seriously once it had been investigated. The British government investigation, published as a “Blue Book,” presented, to use its own words, “an account of events at great variance with that offered by The Times.” The most notable aspect of the British Blue Book is the outright denial of mass rape, a prolific propaganda device. In January 1882, investigator Consul-General Stanley objected to all of the details contained within reports published by The Times, mentioning in particular the unfounded “accounts of the violation of women.” He further stated that his own investigations revealed that there had been no incidences of rape during the Berezovka pogrom, that violence was rare, and that much of the disturbance was restricted to property damage. In relation to property damage in Odessa, Stanley estimated it to be around 20,000 rubles, and rejected outright the Jewish claim that damage amounted to over one million rubles.

Vice-Consul Law, another independent investigator, reported that he had visited Kiev and Odessa, and could only conclude that “I should be disinclined to believe in any stories of women having been outraged in those towns.” Another investigator, Colonel Francis Maude, visited Warsaw and said that he could “not attach any importance” to atrocity reports emanating from that city. At Elizavetgrad, instead of whole streets being razed to the ground, it was discovered that a small hut had lost its roof. Accusations of murderous intent among the masses were simply unfounded and unsubstantiated by the evidence.

What Happened in Poland?

Although clear in its expression of skepticism, a crucial weakness of Hagen’s text is that it shows a willingness to attach some credence to flamboyant and discredited Jewish atrocity narratives about mass killings by mobs of Polish peasants or soldiers, and it doesn’t make full use of compelling counter-narratives such as that produced by Jadwin and Johnson, or by the National Polish Committee of America, a group that very studiously compiled and published a variety of independent reports into events in Poland. (Hagen does cite the NPC report twice in his book but otherwise demonstrates little evidence of having actually read it.) Nor does Hagen’s text incorporate other valuable material, such as testimony from Colonel C.A. Gaskill, the U.S. Army’s Relief Administration worker and technical adviser in Poland between 1919 and 1921. Gaskill and Jay P. Moffatt, Secretary of the American Legation in Warsaw, both testified that Jews had been engaged in sniper activity against Polish troops in several key locations and that Polish officers had actually issued orders against retaliating even when Polish casualties resulted from Jewish attacks.[10] I regard it as imperative that Hagen should have noted somewhere in his book that Jews were active in most of the relevant war zones as guerrilla combatants, particularly during the Polish-Soviet war of 1918̶-1921 in which many Polish Jews were Soviet partisans, and that Jadwin and Johnson concluded their own investigations by arguing that Poland was the victim of an international smear campaign orchestrated via the media:

The coloring, the suppression, and the invention of news, the subornation of newspapers by many different methods, and the poisoning by secret influences of the instruments affecting public opinion, in short all the methods of malevolent propaganda are a menace from which Poland is a notable sufferer. This applies to propaganda both at home and from abroad.[11]

Although Morgenthau and Goodhart were quite happy to repeat lurid tales of mass shootings of civilians, Jadwin and Johnson offered a report that has an entirely different feel and, in their own words, offers “conclusions which differ from those of Mr. Morgenthau.” In terms of details, most official accounts seem to agree that only around 348 Jews could be confirmed as having died from violence in relevant areas between 1914 and 1920, but this is clarified further in the official British report on the violence, written by Sir Horace Rumbold. Rumbold pointed out that even if we accepted this figure of 348, only 18 of these deaths would have occurred on actual Polish territory with the rest occurring in established war zones where civilian casualties among all ethnic and national groups were commonplace.[12] In these war zones, according to Jadwin, some shootings were the result of guerrilla tactics by Jewish civilians known to be sympathetic to the Bolsheviks. In one town, entering Polish soldiers were fired upon from a “certain meeting house in which Jews had congregated,” resulting in the execution of five Jewish men.[13] Captain P. Wright, a member of the British investigating team summed up the circumstances of Jewish deaths as involving not Polish prejudice but “only the expression of a mutual animosity,” and that these “excesses have been so small.”[14]

A very modern parallel to the incorporation of these war zone deaths into atrocity propaganda would be declaring a gunshot fatality a “Covid death” so long as the corpse can produce a positive PCR test. In this case we have an “anti-Semitic murder by Poles” simply because a Jew dies violently anywhere near Poland and under any conditions, including active warfare. Goodhart even includes the testimony of one Jewish mother who reported the “anti-Semitic” death of her son to the American commission even though she admitted her son was a member of the Bolshevik militia:

I tried to explain to her that there was a difference between the case of a man murdered in cold blood and the death of her son who had been shot while fighting for the Bolsheviks. She simply could not understand the difference and kept on repeating “He was such a fine boy.”[15]

Since both the British and American missions concluded that violence against Jews was never endorsed or encouraged by Polish authorities, and thus meant it could not technically be classed as a pogrom, it can be said that an international diplomatic crisis and mass propaganda campaign about “mass killings” in 130 towns involving in some cases mass graves of 2,300 corpses, was provoked by the violent deaths of just 18 Jews over a six-year period. Jadwin, moreover, argued that only five Jewish deaths could be confirmed to have resulted from mob violence “since the establishment of a stable government in the Republic.”[16] Captain Wright explicitly stated that “though pogroms in Krakow were reported, this was not the case,” and that any violence targeting Jews in Polish territory was “small and trivial.”[17]

Motivations

Of course, the campaign was about revenge more generally, and more so in terms of the loss of economic power and influence than the 18 (or 5) deaths. Rumbold himself concluded that violence and antagonism between the groups was probably inevitable given the economic situation of the Jews: “it is only natural that separatism should have manifested itself.” Rumbold noted the relatively recent awareness of the Poles that they could engage in their own ethnically-based economic strategies, and the non-productive nature of the Jewish population, was the real source of animosity: “Competition between the Poles and the Jewish population commenced. … The co-operative movement is becoming very strong and will undoubtedly form an important factor in the development of economic relations in Poland, so that indirectly it will be bound to affect the position of the small Jewish trader.”[18] Jadwin and Johnson were equally insistent that there were economic factors behind any inter-ethnic tension, and they were adamant that religious issues played a negligible role in the development of anti-Jewish attitudes:

We are convinced that religious differences as such play therein a very slight role, and that the Polish nation is disposed to religious tolerance and self-control in religious disagreements. … The relation of the Jew to the eventual political disposition of these territories is still an irritating element. These same problems are to some extent inherent in every other country where the Jewish character and habits develop a racial solidarity, necessarily accompanied by an economic and social intermingling with the other elements of the population.[19]

There are some indications that the atrocity propaganda campaign against Poland was explicitly designed to protect Jewish interests by preventing contested territories from being granted to the Poles (then operating the peasant co-operatives against the Jews) in peace treaties. Goodhart, for example, mentions Jewish leaders in Bialystok who told him that “if Bialystok should be given to the Poles, the Jewish merchants would be ruined, because the Polish boycott would come into force.”[20] Smearing the Polish reputation internationally with accusations of mass murder and mass shootings could thus have been intended to sway the decision of the major international powers in deciding the allocation of disputed territory, potentially preventing Jews from being absorbed into a state where they would be forced to abandon non-productive ethnic economic strategies based on mass exploitation.

Finally, despite enormous economic and religious differences between Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Romania, during the 1930s, it should be noted that all of these countries developed policies in which Jews were excluded from public-sector employment, quotas were placed on Jewish representation in universities and the professions, and government-organized boycotts of Jewish businesses and artisans were staged. From Hagen’s 1996 paper:

[Anti-Semitism was] a broad regional phenomenon rather than . . . [a] set of nationally bounded histories. In this view, modern anti-Semitic ideology and politics in both Germany and Poland figure as pathologies of middle-class formation or, in an alternative formulation, as accompaniments of embourgeoisement in a setting, unlike western and southern Europe, where a relatively large (or very large) and economically very significant urban Jewish population appeared to constitute an impediment to Christian advancement. In both countries, anti-Semitism served to justify assaults on Jewish-owned or Jewish-occupied business enterprises and medical, legal, and other professional practices, as well as bureaucratic positions, which were widely seen to block the path of upward mobility to non-Jewish aspirants to bourgeois respectability and security. In both countries, more or less sporadic anti-Semitic violence fomented by political organizations of the radical right, particularly in the 1930s, elicited considerable popular support or acceptance, reflecting widespread though normally mostly latent hostility to the Jews. . . . Similar policies were also being implemented in Hungary and Romania, the other major homelands of the central European Jews. (Hagen 1996, 360, 361)

Conclusion

The fabricated Polish pogroms of 1914-20 offer a remarkable glimpse into patterns established decades earlier in the Russian empire. The basic pattern appears to be that attempts on the part of a majority population to protect their interests as an ethnic group, especially economically, will result in the utilization of media influence to create a flamboyantly exaggerated atrocity narrative about that state or locality, often involving accusations of mass shootings and mass graves. Because of their entrenchment in popular consciousness via mass communications, these narratives are incredibly difficult to overturn, even with highly critical official government reports. The Russian pogrom myth is an excellent example given that it was repeated during the Polish hoax (The Sentinel: “The outrages perpetrated by old Russia against the Jews are child-play in comparison with the appalling crimes perpetrated by the Polish government and the Polish people against the Jews”). The reality, of course, was that the Russian and Polish ‘atrocities’ were equally baseless and fraudulent. And yet, look hard enough today, and you will certainly see some Jewish Twitter personality inevitably claim a distant relative mass murdered in the Russian pogroms. These are deeply engrained fictions that are internalized by Jews and go some way to generating fear, antipathy, and aggression towards majority White populations who are always said to have the same potential for mass violence.

Atrocity narratives remain an important strategic device, and the tactic is visible even on the small scale in events like Charlottesville. The actual events of Charlottesville are by any consideration, to borrow Captain Wright’s words, “small and trivial,” involving no more petty violence and vandalism than any other major protest of recent years (arguably much less), and one death of ambiguous cause. And yet hasn’t Charlottesville adopted the air of a “Kishinev” in the way it has been transformed, via propaganda, into a kind of pogrom, perpetrated by an angry White mob? Journalist David Greenberg reported on “the siege of a Charlottesville synagogue during the right-wing rampage there in 2017” during an article scaremongering about “America’s Forgotten Pogroms.” But for the presence of modern recording technology, one can easily imagine that tales would have emerged from Charlottesville of all manner of killings and assaults.

As a final note, I should say that we are all perfectly aware of the creeping attempts in all of Europe and the rest of the West to silence any questioning of that ultimate Jewish atrocity narrative. In our attempt to defend the Western position, we could do well to start with the approach of any good defense lawyer — to critique the credibility of the accuser. Looking at the Russian and Polish cases, do we see a record of truth or fabrication? Is there a case for believing such narratives, or asking further questions?

I’ll conclude with remarks made by Rupert Hughes in the New York Times Book Review, July 18 1920:

Has everybody forgotten the procession in New York and in other cities where mourning was worn and dirges were sung for the slaughtered multitudes of the Polish pogroms? Has anyone apologized to Poland for accusing her of rivalling Turkey, in Armenia? I have not seen the apologies.

[1] Hagen, William W. “Before the ‘Final Solution’: Toward a Comparative Analysis of Political Anti-Semitism in Interwar Germany and Poland.” The Journal of Modern History 68, no. 2 (1996): 351–81. MacDonald cites this work on pages 53 and 55 of the paperback edition of SAID.

[2] Hagen (2018), 14.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, 18.

[5] The Jews in Poland: Official Reports of the American and British Investigating Missions · Volume 1, National Polish Committee of America, 1920, 11.

[6] Hagen (2018), xvii.

[7] Ibid, 124.

[8] Ibid, 359.

[9] The Jews in Poland: Official Reports of the American and British Investigating Missions · Volume 1, National Polish Committee of America, 1920, 55.

[10] New York Times, July 2, 1920.

[11] The Jews in Poland: Official Reports of the American and British Investigating Missions · Volume 1, National Polish Committee of America, 1920, 18.

[12] The Reports of the British Mission, included in The Jews in Poland: Official Reports of the American and British Investigating Missions · Volume 1, National Polish Committee of America, 1920, 19.

[13] The Jadwin and Johnson Report, The Jews in Poland: Official Reports of the American and British Investigating Missions · Volume 1, National Polish Committee of America, 1920, 15.

[14] Report of Captain P. Wright in The Jews in Poland: Official Reports of the American and British Investigating Missions · Volume 1, National Polish Committee of America, 1920, 33.

[15] Goodhart, 52.

[16]The Jews in Poland: Official Reports of the American and British Investigating Missions · Volume 1, National Polish Committee of America, 1920, 10.

[17] Ibid, 47.

[18] Ibid, 20.

[19] Ibid, 13 & 17.

[20] Goodhart (1920), 45.

“The Default Hypothesis Fails to Explain Jewish Influence”

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Nathan Cofnas published a paper in the Israel-based academic journal Philosophia: Philosophical Quarterly of Israel in February of last year titled “The Anti-Jewish Narrative.” Andrew Joyce wrote a masterful reply, “The Cofnas Problem,” while I decided to try to  publish a response in Philosophia. My paper went through two rounds of peer review and was finally accepted. It was the lead article in the January issue of Philosophia,  and is available as an open-access paper on Springer Nature [The two links in the previous sentence go to the original paper but now with the retraction notice.] I provide a local version due to [well-founded] concerns the article will be pulled by Springer Nature.

This is the first time I have attempted to publish an article on Jewish influence in the mainstream academic literature since The Culture of Critique was published in 1998 by Praeger, so it is something of a milestone. I have updated quite a bit of the material, particularly the scholarly writing on Jewish involvement in influencing U.S. immigration policy—Chapter 7 of The Culture of Critique. I have always felt that Chapter 7 was the most important chapter in the book. Intellectual movements can decline drastically in influence. This was the fate of psychoanalysis—but not Boasian anthropology, and the intellectual descendants of the Frankfurt School remain influential throughout postmodern academia. Moreover, at least in Western democracies, even political movements, as embodied in the Jewish subculture of radical leftism, can be reversed at the ballot box—unless the people against whom the 1965 immigration law was directed are replaced by a new electorate with no attachment to the people and culture of the West. As argued in the paper, this is exactly what the 1965 immigration law was intended to accomplish in the minds of the Jewish activist community that was by far the most influential force in enacting the law.

Besides updating some critical aspects of The Culture of Critique, the paper emphasizes the point that the enactment of the 1965 immigration law did not occur in a vacuum and cannot be understood apart from the wider context of the rise of a new Jewish elite with influence in a wide range of areas. As I note in the article, the rise of this new elite “implies that vital issues of public policy, including immigration, the civil rights of African-Americans, women’s rights, religion in the public square (Hollinger’s “secularization of American society”), the legitimacy of white racial identity and interests, cosmopolitanism [identifying a “citizen of the world”], foreign policy in the Middle East, and many others will be affected by the attitudes and interests of this new elite.” The post-World War II era saw the emergence of a new, substantially Jewish elite in America. This new elite exerted influence on a wide range of issues that formed a virtual consensus among Jewish activists and the organized Jewish community, including immigration, civil rights, and the secularization of American culture” The 1950s saw the decline of the old WASP elite, recounted in Eric Kaufmann’s The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America. By the 1960s this new elite was flexing its muscle, resulting in a cultural and demographic revolution which is ongoing and indeed accelerating. This new, substantially Jewish elite was (and remains) centered in academia and the media, and, because of Jewish wealth, this new elite has been able to have decisive influence in the  political process via donations to political causes.

The abstract:

The role of Jewish activism in the transformative changes that have occurred in the West in recent decades continues to be controversial. Here I respond to several issues putatively related to Jewish influence, particularly the “default hypothesis” that Jewish IQ and urban residency explain Jewish influence and the role of the Jewish community in enacting the 1965 immigration law in the United States; other issues include Jewish ethnocentrism and intermarriage and whether diaspora Jews are hypocritical in their attitudes on immigration to Israel versus the United States. The post-World War II era saw the emergence of a new, substantially Jewish elite in America that exerted influence on a wide range of issues that formed a virtual consensus among Jewish activists and the organized Jewish community, including immigration, civil rights, and the secularization of American culture. Jewish activism in the pro-immigration movement involved: intellectual movements denying the importance of race in human affairs; establishing, staffing, and funding anti-restrictionist organizations; recruiting prominent non-Jews to anti-restrictionist organizations; rejecting the ethnic status quo as a goal because of fear of a relatively homogeneous white majority; leadership in Congress and the executive branch.

Chip’s Diaries

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Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries, 1918–38
Edited by Simon Heffer.
London: Hutchinson, 2021

In his 2008 book Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War[1] Pat Buchanan suggests that with a bit of prescience and a steadier hand at the tiller Britain could have avoided World War II. If the policies supported by American-born MP and diarist Henry ‘Chips’ Channon had been adopted, that devastating European war would have been averted and Soviet communism might have been destroyed half a century before its fall.

Channon was born in Chicago in 1897 to a wealthy American family. His grandfather had started a Great Lakes shipping company. The young Channon spent two years at the University of Chicago before going to France to help with the war effort as a volunteer with the American Red Cross. He fell in love with Europe and never spent much time in America thereafter.

After the war he enrolled at Christ Church, Oxford where he received a degree in French and the nickname ‘Chips.’ Being a gentleman of that era Channon had no need to work for a living. As editor Simon Heffer notes “until he became a Member of Parliament in 1935 Channon seems to have had no job that paid him a salary” (XI). Not only did he have a family fortune, in 1933 he married money—Honor Guinness, an heiress to the brewing company.

Although very wealthy, Channon was not idle. He published three books between 1929 and 1933, two novels and a history, and was one the leading diarists of the twentieth century. The book considered here, 950 pages with thousands of footnotes supplied by editor Simon Heffer, is the first of a three-volume set of Channon’s journals. It covers the years 1918–1938. The second volume will cover the war years, and the third the post-war period until Channon’s death in 1958. There are three main areas of interest within these diaries. In ascending order: Chips’ personal life, his political ideology and views on Jews, and his involvement in British foreign affairs, especially with regard to relations with Nationalist Socialist Germany.

One puzzling aspect of Channon’s character was his sexuality. Editor Heffer describes him as bisexual. This is troubling because the authentic Right considers sexual deviance to be a serious social problem. There is little in this edition to indicate that Chips was other than heterosexual. He had an eye for feminine beauty and expressed that he was physically attracted to women. “Honor’s appearance was really fantastic . . . like a tousled Garbo” (656). He was deeply in love with his wife, at least during the early years of their marriage. He adored his son and wanted more children, though Honor did not. It is alleged that later in life, after his marriage failed, that he had several homosexual relationships. That period is not covered in this volume.

His sexuality aside, Channon’s diaries convey a lifestyle of European high society that is as gone with the wind as that of the antebellum South. It was a nearly all White, Eurocentric world populated by princes and princesses, lords and ladies. Even in the French Third Republic and the German Weimar Republic aristocrats and former royalty still used titles as part of their legal name. Though these titles conveyed no official privileges, those who possessed them formed a distinct social class. Money from commerce, if it was several generations old, could—but would not necessarily—permit one to enter. One example is Chips’ wife, Lady Honor Guinness daughter of Rupert Guinness, 2nd Earl of Iveagh. Though divided by politics and personalities, this was a society united by a general agreement on cultural norms. It was also a society of endless formal luncheons, dinner parties, elite entertainment, and trips aboard. Incidentally, if one has the means, entertaining is a great way to win friends and influence people. These people were privileged. It is ludicrous for the Left to speak of today’s struggling middle-class White families as privileged.

Channon’s political and social views were probably typical of right-wing Tories between the wars. He did not harbor an animus towards Blacks or Jews He occasionally socialized with Jews and had some commercial relationships with them, but he had a strong ethnic/cultural identity that viewed them as other. The expression of this consciousness was enough to cause consternation for those involved with the publication of these diaries. “The Trustees, editor and publisher deliberated at length whether to include or exclude such passages from this edition. After careful consideration, and consultation with external authorities [who might they be?] it was decided to leave them in, while seeking through the footnotes, to contextualize them” (XIV).

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon

The dreaded N word does appear once. In 1927, during one of his infrequent trips to America, Channon witnessed firsthand the so-called Harlem Renaissance. He writes, “New York is black mad.” He attends the new Broadway play “Porgy,” later turned into the musical “Porgy and Bess.” Chips notes, “a wonderful cast, all negroes.” In a footnote editor Heffer writes that the play portrayed the “culture of black Americans with what for the time was unusual sympathy and respect” (289). The play was based on a book by the same name written by a White southerner Edwin DuBose Heyward. Channon also mentions a book, Nigger Heaven that was published about this time. Also written by a White man, Carl Van Vechten, it did much to publicize the new urban Black culture of the 1920s. Certainly none of this suggests a deep antipathy towards Blacks.

There are examples of Channon’s mild “anti-Semitism” sprinkled throughout his diaries.  For instance, in January 1935 he remarks that Hannah Gubbay, ‘old black Hannah,’ had “hitched her wagon to cousin Philip Sassoon’s star—they are inseparable and always up to God knows what plots and plans and social schemes. A mysterious dark brace of Semites” (378). Three years later: “Poor Professor Loewenthal called here this afternoon to give us the crystal medallions of [his wife and son] Honor and Paul. He is dreary, gloomy, but the greatest artist since Benvenuto Cellini. He looks like one of the Pharaohs and carves in metals and precious stones. He is a refugee Jew” (900). As we will see below, Channon’s disapproval of Jews was principally political, but also cultural and aesthetic.

So what were Channon’s politics?  Today he might be considered a paleoconservative, but reactionary may be a better description. He was a vehement anti-communist at a time when Soviet-styled communism posed a real threat to Europe. He admired German culture, but was definitely not a Nazi. National Socialism was a revolutionary ideology and Channon supported the monarchy and aristocracy. This is why Chips was a firm Tory, not swayed in the least by Oswald Mosley’s fascism. Channon knew Mosley personally. He was a guest at a Channon dinner party in January 1935. The host writes, “Tom [Oswald Mosley] was charming and gentle and affectionate as he always is, except on the platform where he becomes the demagogue” (379).  Mosley’s ideology was too populist for Channon’s taste. Editor Heffer believes Channon simply “discounted as ineffectual” Mosley’s Blackshirts (543).

Channon was a strong believer in national sovereignty. Thus he had a poor opinion of the League of Nations, “a cursed body of busybodies” (486). He attended a League session in Geneva in September 1938. He saw the assembly as “an anti-German organization. The bars and lobbies of the League building are full of Russians and Jews who intrigue and dominate the press” (920). One of the Jews that Chips was referring to was Comrade Litvinov. “Meir Henoch Wallach-Finkelstein, who later took the nom de guerre Maxim Maximovich Litvinov (1876–1951), was the Soviet Union’s People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs from 1930 to 1939. . . From 1941 to 1943 he was Soviet Ambassador to the United States” (780n).

Channon considered Litvinov a loathsome creature, but later that month he dines “at Maurice de Rothschild’s, a dinner of seventeen—a rich congestionné house. . . . He lives with a young Jewess who is either his daughter, or adopted child, or mistress or all three!! [She was his mistress] . . . Everyone a touch tipsy with Rothschild wine . . . Even Maurice, our fat, sensual, slobbery, lecherous host is relieved that war is off! Or at least postponed” (924).

It is obvious that the common Jewish phenotype does not appeal to Channon’s aesthetic. While visiting his friend and former classmate at Oxford Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, he dines with the King of Bulgaria. “He looks a Jew, but is really trés Coburg, trés Orleans with the unpleasant traits of both houses” (931).  So in appearances, manners and politics, Channon and his crowd find Jews objectionable, but they offered little resistance to their growing wealth and power.

During the mid to late 1930s, British elites and the public generally were divided in their attitudes toward the Third Reich. The pro-German group that Channon supported became known as appeasers. Appeasement was an unfortunate label. It implies weakness and acquiesce. Rapprochement, realignment, readjustment, or reconciliation would have been better terms. As today, the Left possesses greater language skills and have been able to weaponize words, while the Right often has little feeling for language. In any case by the mid-30s many on the Right saw a powerful, prosperous Germany in central Europe as an asset. Channon believed that an alliance with Germany would be the best policy for Britain and for Europe. In September 1935 he wrote: “My secret [poorly kept secret] sympathies are ever with autocracies, and I’d rather have the Nazi-ism and Fascism on my side than Russian Soviets or tense, nervy croaking French Frogs. We seem not to know where our interests lie” (470). It is a bit ironic that Channon, who spent 1917–18 in France aiding the Allied war effort and who majored in French at college, had become anti-French by the mid-30s.

The era of good feeling between Britain and the Third Reich perhaps peaked during the Berlin Olympic Games in August 1936. The Channons and a number of other MPs and their wives were guests of the German government. Chips was not much of a sports fan, but he loved the lavish parties and the mass spectacles the regime provided. On August 6, their first day at the games, the crowds at the stadium were enthusiastic—ecstatic when Hitler arrived. Although the Fuhrer was physically unimposing, “One felt one was in the presence of some semi-divine creature” (557).

That evening the Channons attended a state banquet at the Berlin Opera House. The official hostess “Frau Göring, a tall, nearly naked, handsome woman was the principal figure and moved about amongst an obsequious crowd of royalties and ambassadors” (558). Two days later, Chips and Honor were the guests of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador to Great Britain, later foreign minister. Attendees at the large luncheon included Lady Chamberlain, wife of the future prime minister.

On August 10, Channon’s trip included a visit to a “labour camp.”  As far as I can tell, this is the only instance where editor Simon Heffer’s scholarship fails him. Heffer, a well-known British journalist and historian, is considered a conventional conservative by UK standards. His thousands of footnotes are indispensable in identifying the people and events referred in the diaries. In a footnote Heffer suggests that Channon visited a Nazi prison camp that had been fixed up, a sort of Potemkin village, for the benefit of foreign visitors. It is obvious from Chips’ description that what he visited was a Reich Labor Service camp. Such a camp was comparable to a Civilian Conservation Corps camp established during the same period in America.

Channon writes that “the camp looked tidy, even gay, and the boys, all about 18, looked like the ordinary German peasant boy, fair, healthy, and sunburned. They are taught the preliminary military drills, gardening, etc., and health and strength are built up. They were all smiling and clean. . . . For 6 months they lived there, and all classes are mixed, which is an excellent system, its purpose is to wipe out class feeling, which has become practically non-existent in Germany” (563). Heffer claims that “The impression Channon had from his visit was entirely manipulated and bogus” (footnote, 562). Incredibly, none of the mainstream reviews picked up on Heffer’s editorial mistake.

Channon is in love with the new Germany. The next day, after another excursion to the countryside, he writes: “In Germany joys are simple, sun and water bathing, Wurst and beer, all pleasant, all attainable for little. What a country. It stirs me so sharply” (563). He has a “preference for the Teutonic races. . . . There is a common blood affinity between us and the Germans and Austrians. I like their lusty warm-blooded love of country, children, dogs, power—and a thousand other reasons” (563). In the following days the Channons attend formal dinners at the Ribbentrops, the Görings (with 700-800 guests), and Dr. and Magda Goebbels’ Sommerfest. The closing ceremonies were on August 16. “The crowds were enormous, and really amazingly well controlled . . . there were processions, the orchestra played, Hitler rose, the great torch faded out, the crowd 140,000-strong sang ‘Deutschland über Alles’, with arms uplifted. There was a shout, a speech or two, night fell and the Olympic Games, the great German display of power and bid for recognition, was over. Mankind has never staged anything so terrific, or so impressive “(569).  Exhausted from all parties and ceremonies the Channons left Berlin on August 18th and headed for the Austrian Alps for a quiet vacation.

While Chips was wowed by National Socialist Germany what he really wanted was a Hohenzollern restoration! The ideal scenario for him was for Hitler to be given a green light to move east and smash Bolshevism. Then, after the Fuhrer’s death or retirement, Channon’s friend Fritzi, Friedrich of Prussia, Grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II, would become ruler of an enlarged German empire.

It is not possible to tell from the diaries how strong and widespread pro-German sentiments were at the time. Obviously Winston Churchill and some other MPs were opposed to a resurgent of Germany. From 1936 onward Channon notes Churchill’s increasing animosity towards the Third Reich. Was he working for Jewish interests as some have charged? Or did he simply not want a strong state in central Europe to rival British influence on the continent? In May 1936, after attending a play the Channons, Churchill, and some French and German guests had “sandwiches and drinks. The French Ambassador, Durckheim [a German diplomat] and Winston Churchill had a conversation which was really rather unpleasant, as Winston attacked Germany” (516). In July of 1937 Channon writes that Churchill’s “fear and dislike of [Germans] amount to an obsession, and threaten to seriously to undermine his judgement” (728). It is not an exaggeration to say that by 1938 Churchill wanted war.

A few additional words on Churchill: Already in early 1936 Channon identifies him as a prime mover in the anti-German group. Pat Buchanan, in the work cited above, also sees Churchill as the one most strongly pushing for confrontation with Germany. Churchill, of course, was not a man on the Left. He was a Tory, a conservative, an aristocrat, and an imperialist. Despite his skillful rhetoric he, at times, exercised monumentally poor judgement as the graves at Gallipoli attest. Channon wrote in 1938: “Is my world collapsing? Winston as PM would be worse than war. The two together would mean the destruction of civilization” (933). To paraphrase Buchanan, Churchill’s Pyrrhic victory over Germany in 1945 lost Britain its empire and lost the West the world. It is poetic justice that in 2020, a woke mob that he helped make possible, vandalized his statue in Parliament Square.

In March 1938 Channon “had a sparring match with [fellow MP] Harold Nicolson who was in a rage. Like all old women, he is having a change of life. His hatred of Germany is fanatical” (832). Several months later Channon reports that “Simon Harcourt-Smith [a career diplomat] tells me the Foreign Office is red, is trying to sabotage Halifax” who is trying to accommodate Germany. More about Lord Halifax below. At one point, Channon sees more grassroots support for Germany than elite support. “The Foreign Office, the ‘intelligentsia’, London society, Bloomsbury and a very large section of the [House of Commons] are pro-French, but the country as a whole is pro-German” (543).

The diaries record many pro-German contacts Channon had during the 1935–1938 period. To start at the top, Channon was friends with King Edward VIII who had a very positive attitude toward the new Germany. Unfortunately, he also had a very short reign, and abdicated in December 1936 in order to marry Wallis Simpson, a twice divorced American woman—another instance of a royal insisting on marrying an unsuitable mate. Earlier that year Chips had lunch with Joachim von Ribbentrop and his wife at a “pan-German festival” (519). He notes that Frau von Ribbentrop wore no makeup in the new German style. A few weeks later: “The Londonderrys [Charles Stewart, 7th Marquis of Londonderry] are very pro-German; and, indeed who isn’t?—except the Coopers [Alfred Duff Cooper, 1935 Secretary of State for War, 1937 First Lord of the Admiralty]” (519).  Another of Chips’ friends, Arthur Charles Wellesley, 5th Duke of Wellington, “was a committed pro German, and a member of the Anglo-German Fellowship” (528n).

In November 1937 Edward Wood, Lord Halifax, attended the International Hunting Exhibition in Berlin hosted by Hermann Göring. Incidentally, the racial ecologist and sportsman Madison Grant was also invited and planned to attend this event, but sadly fell ill and died shortly before the opening.  Although born with only one hand, Halifax, with the help of a prosthetic, became a skilled equestrian and marksman. He went to Germany as unofficial deputy foreign secretary (he became Foreign Secretary the following year). After the exhibition, he met with Hitler at Berchtesgaden. There he told the Führer that Prime Minister Chamberlain would not be opposed to Anschluss with Austria or to the transfer of Sudetenland and Danzig to Germany as long as it was accomplished peacefully. A couple weeks after his return Halifax told Chips that “he liked all the Nazis, even Goebbels! whom nobody likes. He was much impressed, interested, and amused by the visit” (786).

The diary identifies a number of other pro-German personalities of the time. Neville Meyrick Henderson, who was British ambassador to Germany (1937–1939) was supportive of the new Germany. Channon writes: “He is pro-German, anti-French, anti-Jew, pro-Italian, and, indeed thinks along the lines I do” (746). There was also some support from the British press such as George Ward Price, foreign correspondent for the Daily Mail, and Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times. From the pulpit there was Dean William Ralph Inge of St. Paul’s Cathedral and former professor of divinity at Cambridge. “He was a strong advocate of eugenics and nudism and rejected democracy, fearing it would bring mob rule” (877n).They don’t make clergy like that anymore!

So what happened? Why did Britain declare war on Germany in September 1939? This journal ends on September 30, 1938 with the signing of the Munich Accords. The next volume is due out later this year. A very rough sketch of the path to war sees Germany occupying Prague in March 1939. In response, Britain pledges to guarantee Poland’s sovereignty. Britain knew they did not have the means to protect Poland, but they hoped to deter German expansion. If not, the treaty would be a tripwire for war. Hitler wagered that his invasion of Poland would not trigger a wider war which he did not want.  Both sides gambled, both sides lost.

Channon, as mentioned earlier, wanted Britain to ally with Germany, giving the latter a free hand in the east. But he was a backbencher with little official authority. He did, however, have connections. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, was his wife’s uncle. Chips was also parliamentary assistant to Rab Butler, Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Butler opposed war in September 1939 and was willing to sacrifice Polish independence to avoid a wider conflict. On the other side, Hitler’s mistake was to force the pace of events, to press forward too far too fast, and to risk everything on one roll of the dice. Commentators as diverse as Sir Arthur Keith and Henry Kissinger believe that if the Fuhrer had had a little more patience and played the long game he would have achieved his goals.

Although many academic historians would disagree, most laymen believe that the study of history should have some utility. So what is useful in reading Channon’s diaries? Besides moaning about what the leaders of the time should have done to avoid a disastrous internecine struggle, we can see from these journals that the values espoused by National Socialist Germany resonated with a significant segment of British society. Today the establishment considers these values be to so reprehensible as to be indications of extreme moral depravity.

As for a recommendation: These diaries are most suitable for serious students of interwar Britain. Much of the partisan politics of the era are of limited interest today. There is quite a bit of material on Edward’s abdication for royal watchers. A good deal of the text is taken up with Channon’s personal and social life. At times his relationship with Honor has a soap opera quality. As for Henry Channon the man, I found it hard not to have a certain affinity and admiration for him. Sure, he was a snob, a social climber, a name dropper, but he was no dilettante. He knew history and was a perceptive observer of people and events.

[1] Patrick J. Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World (New York: Crown Books, 2008).

EO Wilson: RIP

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Some tweets on E.O. Wilson, who died two days ago at the age of 92.

EOW’s Wiki article emphasizes the role of Gould and Lewontin in the hostility toward Sociobiology—a major inspiration for Chapter 2 in The Culture of Critique:

Sociobiology was initially met with substantial criticism. Several of Wilson’s colleagues at Harvard, such as Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, were strongly opposed to his ideas regarding sociobiology. Gould, Lewontin, and others from the Sociobiology Study Group from the Boston area wrote “Against ‘Sociobiology'” in an open letter criticizing Wilson’s “deterministic view of human society and human action.” Although attributed to members of the Sociobiology Study Group, it seems that Lewontin was the main author. In a 2011 interview, Wilson said, “I believe Gould was a charlatan. I believe that he was … seeking reputation and credibility as a scientist and writer, and he did it consistently by distorting what other scientists were saying and devising arguments based upon that distortion.”

Gould and Lewontin correctly realized that Wilson’s work was really an attempt to pull off a counter-revolution—to undo the work of Boas and the other Jewish anti-evolutionists from earlier in the century. They smeared it relentlessly.

After EO Wilson’s work, all aspects of human behavior were up for a fresh evolutionary understanding, including politics, the arts, ethnicity, morality, and yes, altruism, although EOW totally emphasized natural selection at the individual level. (Much later he accepted the importance of group selection.) Nevertheless, he put altruism at the absolute center of evolutionary thinking—the controversy continues to this day between people who emphasize groups as a unit of selection like me (cultural group selection) and people who view groups as just concatenations of individuals.

Finally, it’s noteworthy that Wilson wrote a positive blurb for Frank Salter’s On Genetic Interests, a book that validates the reality that individuals have a genetic interest in the fate of their ethnic groups in the same way that parents have a genetic interest in nurturing their children. Wilson: “[This] is a fresh and deep contribution to the sociobiology of humans, combining genetics and social science in original ways.”

The Logic of Leftist Lies: How the Ideas of a White Genius Can Expose the True Intentions of the Left

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Globohomo is the vast system of anti-White, minority-worshipping leftism that wants to control and suffocate the entire world. And if you want a good example of the “globo” in globohomo, just consider this. At school in the UK, White British students are taught all about the Black American non-entity Rosa Parks (1913–2005) and nothing about the White British genius George Boole (1815–64).

Whites as oppressors and exploiters

In other words, British leftists import globohomo propaganda from America to instil guilt in White children and resentment in non-White children. At the same time, they suppress the huge achievements of the White British. Leftists don’t want White children to feel pride in their ancestry, but shame. They want children to see Whites only as oppressors and exploiters, not as innovators and inventors. That’s why they plug Parkes and ban Boole, even as children inhabit a world shaped by his genius:

Boole’s legacy surrounds us everywhere, in the computers, information storage and retrieval, electronic circuits and controls that support life, learning and communications in the 21st century. His pivotal advances in mathematics, logic and probability provided the essential groundwork for modern mathematics, microelectronic engineering and computer science. (Who is George Boole? The mathematician behind the Google doodle, Sydney Morning Herald, 2nd November 2015)

The White genius George Boole

Boole has had a “Google doodle,” but Google and other leftists celebrate him only as an isolated and exceptional individual, not as an exemplar of White genius and the heir to millennia of separate and special evolution on the European continent. Leftists certainly do not acknowledge that he contributed more to mathematics and technology in his short life than all Blacks who ever lived. If White children were taught about him in that light, they would begin to question minority-worship and the colonization of Britain by non-Whites who over-achieve only at crime, corruption and nation-wrecking.

Knights and knaves

Even worse, from the leftist point of view, is that learning about Boole can be a lot of fun. Imagine White children enjoying themselves as they learn about a White world-shaper! Leftism wants Whiteness to be associated with pain, not pleasure. And so, when leftism is defeated, pro-White education ministers should ensure that children learn about knights-and-knaves, not about Rosa Parks. Not only are knight-and-knave logic puzzles an enjoyable introduction to Boolean ideas about truth-values and logic, they’re also a good way to understand leftism.

Some Boolean logic

You can learn the truth from leftist lies if you apply Boolean ideas. To see how, let’s start with one of the knight-and-knave puzzles invented by the Jewish mathematician Raymond Smullyan (1919–2017). The puzzle is set on an island inhabited by two kinds of native: knights, who always tell the truth, and knaves, who always lie. Suppose you visit the island and decide to take a walk to the beach. Soon you come to a fork in the road where two natives of the island are standing. You want to ask them how to get to the beach, but you don’t know whether they’re knights or knaves. And there’s no point asking them directly, because, as you quickly realize, all natives will claim to be knights.

However, suppose you ask each of the two natives what the other one is. And suppose that each of them replies: “He’s a knave.” Now you know that one of them must be a knight and one must be a knave. If they were both knights or both knaves, both would reply: “He’s a knight.” But when both claim that the other is a knave, you know a knight has truthfully identified a knave and a knave has falsely identified a knight. But you don’t still know who is who. However, you can now learn the right way to the beach by asking either of the natives a simple question. What do you ask?

The logic of leftist lies

You use an indirect question and ask one of the natives to tell you which way the other native would point if you asked him the way to the beach. Suppose the righthand fork in the road leads to the beach. If you asked the knight directly which fork led to the beach, he would point to the right; if you asked the knave directly, he would point to the left. So a direct question is no good to you. But if you ask the indirect question of the knight, he will truthfully point left, because this is the way the knave would indeed point. And if you ask the indirect question of the knave, he will lie and also point left, because this is not the way the knight would point. Therefore, whether you ask the indirect question of the knight or the knave, you will learn the wrong direction to the beach. And if you know the wrong direction, you automatically know the right direction.

Attorney General Merrick Garland speaks at the Justice Department in Washington, on Tuesday, June 15, 2021. (Win McNamee/Pool via AP)

If the sinister Jewish leftist Merrick Garland opposes “white supremacy,” it must be a good and essential thing

Knight-and-knave puzzles are a lot of fun to solve, but there are serious and important mathematical and logical ideas behind them. Boolean ideas, because they come from the work of George Boole. Using Boolean logic, you can learn the truth from falsehoods. And that’s I want to do to leftist ideas. We know that leftism is an ideology built on falsehoods, so we can apply Boolean logic to understand what leftists really mean when they use terms like “white supremacy” and “white privilege.” Leftists are liars, so what they pretend to mean and what they really mean are different things. Indeed, entirely opposite things.

So let’s examine how leftists use the term “white supremacy.” Merrick Garland, the sinister Jewish Attorney-General in Biden’s Bolshevik cabinet, has said that “Domestic violent extremist groups, particularly white supremacists, pose a growing threat to the United States.” Carol Anderson, a Professor of African American Studies at Emory University, has said that “American democracy’s most dangerous adversary is white supremacy. Throughout this nation’s history, white supremacy has undermined, twisted and attacked the viability of the United States.” And Jennifer Ho, a Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Colorado, has responded to Black violence against Asians by blaming it all on Whitey. She says that “White supremacy is the root of all race-related violence in the US.”

The power of propaganda #1: ever-increasing use of the term “white supremacy” (from Google Ngrams)

So what do leftists mean by the term “white supremacy”? You have to start by recognizing that leftists are liars, so their language inverts the truth. If leftists say that “white supremacy” is “a growing threat to the United States” and “American democracy’s most dangerous adversary,” they must mean that “white supremacy” is the opposite of a threat to the United States and the opposite of an adversary to American democracy. Therefore they must mean that the United States and American democracy depend on “white supremacy” in some way. So what can “white supremacy” mean but “white autonomy” and “white achievement”? That is, when leftists condemn “white supremacy,” they are condemning the civilization built by Whites and the ability of Whites to act in their own interests and possess their own nations, institutions and property.

The power of propaganda #2: ever-increasing use of the term “white privilege” (from Google Ngrams)

But it gets worse. Leftists don’t merely condemn “white supremacy”: they want to overturn and abolish it. But if they want to abolish “white supremacy,” that is, White autonomy, this can only mean that they want to destroy White civilization and enslave ordinary Whites. If you don’t have autonomy, can’t act in your interests, and don’t possess your own nations, institutions and property, what are you but a slave? “Abolishing white supremacy” can only mean enacting White enslavement.

Leftism is doomed to die

The same reasoning applies to the leftist concept — and condemnation – of “white privilege.” If “white privilege” is a bad thing to leftists, it can only be a good thing in reality. And it is: “white privilege” means the entirely natural and just way in which the White creators and sustainers of White nations act in their own interests to maintain those nations for the benefit of themselves and their children. When leftists say that they want to abolish “white privilege,” they really mean that they want to take White nations away from ordinary Whites. As before, “abolishing white privilege” means enacting white enslavement.

In effect, leftism presents us with a simple knight-and-knave puzzle. We know that leftists always lie, so we simply turn what they say on its head to discover the truth. From leftist lies we can learn the truth about leftist intentions. When leftists say “Abolish white supremacy!”, they mean “Enact white enslavement!” Leftists don’t want to end injustice but to impose it on ordinary Whites in ever-harsher ways. And at the heart of that anti-White leftism are genuinely “supremacist” Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). If we apply leftist-lie logic to the name of the ADL, we can see that it must really be the “Anti-Description League.” The ADL campaigns against the objective and truthful description of reality, which is why it wants truth-tellers like Tucker Carlson to be silenced:

The Anti-Defamation League has called for Fox News to fire prime-time opinion host Tucker Carlson because he defended a white-supremacist theory that says whites are being “replaced” by people of color. In a letter to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott on Friday, the head of the ADL, Jonathan Greenblatt, said Carlson’s “rhetoric was not just a dog whistle to racists – it was a bullhorn.”

The civil rights group listed numerous instances Carlson has used anti-immigrant language. Those include saying immigration makes the U.S. “poorer and dirtier” and questioning whether white supremacy is real. Greenblatt said that “given his long record of race-baiting, we believe it is time for Carlson to go.”

The white-nationalist “great replacement theory,” otherwise known as “white genocide,” says people of color are replacing white people through immigration in the Western world, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center [SPLC]. Some white supremacists also say that Jews and progressive politicians are furthering this change, the civil rights group says. (ADL: Fox should fire Carlson for white-supremacist rhetoric, WSBTV, 9th April 2021)

The ADL and SPLC are supreme practitioners of the Jewish-leftist principle of inverting reality and morality. They claim that truth is lies and that lies are truth, that good is evil and evil is good. Accordingly, you can learn the truth by reversing what the ADL and SPLC say. If they deny that “immigration makes the U.S. ‘poorer and dirtier’,” you can be sure that immigration does exactly that. If they deny that “Jews and progressive politicians … are replacing white people through immigration in the Western world,” again you can be sure that this is exactly what is happening. And if they oppose “white supremacy” and claim that it is a dire threat to Western civilization, you can be sure that “white supremacy” is a good thing and essential for the survival of Western civilization. Leftists live by lies, which is why leftism is doomed to die.

The Siege on Christmas: A Time-Honored Kosher Tradition

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Introduction

If there’s one American tradition that’s lasted well over one century, it is the persistent, serious, subtle, highly organized, and even insidious attack on Christmas. As we read the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper archives from 1907, we discover a full page devoted to this subject, and an article titled “Church Mass Meeting Wants Christmas Songs”, which frames a reactionary measure by the Christian community to defend the singing of Christmas songs in the public schools. When we read characterization of the meeting as “radical anti-Semitic addresses [by two of the reverends]…which betokened discomfort and dissent”, it is not surprising that this paragraph ends, “This feeling was finally voiced by Dr. Cadman, who admonished the speakers that the meeting was not intended as an attack on the Jews”. For it was Jews in the spotlight of school boards, engaged on a mission to enforce separation of church and state. We invite the reader to enter a time capsule, and discover the controversy here:

https://www.newspapers.com/clip/49250485/the-brooklyn-daily-eagle/

Even as late as 1907, this particular Brooklyn community considered themselves culturally a Christian nation, where the Christian religion and lessons of Christ grounded their people with wholesome morals and values. They would soon find that their First Amendment would be their Achilles’ heel, a tool for Jews to perform Nikkur (deveining performed in kosher slaughter) on all matters Christmas-related in the public institutions and square.1

Indulge our perceptive curiosity: We do not easily find leaders from the Hindu community raising a stink. With all the U.S. propaganda that China is an imminent threat, we do not hear ferocious calls from the Taoist or Buddhist community challenging the festivities of the winter season. And even after the 9/11 attack on our homeland, we do not detect loud reverberating echoes of Muslims denouncing the last vestiges of Christian culture that may still be present. Instead, the relentless siege appears almost exclusively a “kosher affair,” and when the activists are atheists or agnostics, often they too are ethnically Jewish. In fact, we must conclude that the predominance of Jews challenging Christmas in the American media correlates to a time honored tradition that is probably part of their greater service to humanity, Tikkun Olam, repairing the world. The rumblings within the public Boards of Education in 1907 have graduated to the cultural acceptance of mainstream comedy hammering away, like the 2005 standup act by Sarah Silverman stating that “I hope the Jews did kill Christ! I’d [expletive] do it again in a second!,” to HBO’s reprehensible desecration of Christmas found in the heavily Jewish production “Santa Inc.,” a cartoon TV series that undoubtedly will corrupt some children along the way. We are witnessing today the “progress” that Rev. Allan Douglas Carille and Rev. James M. Farrar feared most. Can you blame them?

Parallels

But an interesting development paralleled this siege on Christmas. You see, there was no such thing as mass kosher certification in 1907, and there was no circled “U” kosher seal (Hebrew: “hekhsher”) stamping the products of most everything purchased for sustenance. There were “blue laws” restricting commercial activities on Sundays, making it a day of rest, and making it pretty damn difficult to buy goods or services on that day. That was a Christian thing. But one hundred and fourteen years later we find ubiquitous kosher seals in our marketplace and everything and anything open for business on Sunday, with the exception of Chick-Fil-A.2 For anyone familiar with old, culturally Christian America, this swap signifies quite an impressive display of power, influence and change.

Other developments with predominantly Jewish influence included the motion picture industry, television, advertising, consumerism, sports, entertainment, gambling, “civil rights,” “social justice,” and even legalized pornography. The train had left the station while taking in mass immigration, and it wasn’t long before easy divorce, even easier abortions, drug-infested youths, organized crime, Sackler-family-aided opioid destruction, and total war would affect our families and transform our nation further.  It’s as if the software to our Christian culture had been hacked. America was hijacked!

We’ve previously highlighted “The Double Standards of Kosher” that prevail in the labels and certification seals found on our packaged food at “secular” supermarkets vis-à-vis the typical kosher markets.3 Kosher certification is so dominant that our supermarkets may as well be renamed koshermarkets. We’ve also posted social media challenges to the ongoing use of tax payer dollars funding kosher (and halal) programs in the public schools, ironically in the same city where purging Christmas began in 1907.

The New York Board of Education has no problem with this injection of religious particularism

In fact, we challenge any American parent out there to produce a milk carton from a public school that IS NOT under rabbinical control, NOT bearing a kosher seal! And so it is becoming blatantly clear that double standards and hypocrisy are not things that the Jewish community are concerned about. We have found that when we have ironclad examples that “embarrass,” the trolls simply go away, and they employ censorship or silent treatment to maintain the status quo and quash our awareness efforts. Any Christian constituency looking for fair treatment should themselves reflect that even in this old newspaper article it was mentioned that the Christians were greatly divided. That is the score: a disunited Majority against a persistent Minority. Today, all we can do is document our grievance. So let this essay be a lesson for our collective future.

But how do they feel about Christmas songs?

Winter Solstice

Winter Solstice has bequeathed a warm and cozy feeling to the cultural heritage of Europeans, complete with all the Yuletide spirit that celebrated the return of the sun in pagan traditions. Evergreen boughs reminded the ancient Europeans of everlasting life, or of all the green plants that would flourish in the summer. The transition to a Christian Europe would keep intact these early cultural practices in December. Yuletide festivities would not only remain, but even grow. Evergreen trees would soon be brought into the homes, and those who claim Europe as their ancestral homeland probably consider these traditions the most cherished of all. The majority of Americans fall into this group, and one man from Maine found inspiration from this winter décor.

“When Merrill Worcester, a wreath-maker from Maine, started a tradition of placing thousands of wreaths on veterans’ headstones in Arlington National Cemetery nearly 30 years ago, he couldn’t have known that out of his sense of honor and duty this mission would be born”, starts Karen Worcester, Executive Director of Wreaths Across America (WAA), as she welcomes new supporters and thanks them for taking interest in her organization. For in all the verbiage explaining the details of WAA, there is no hint of a religious association.

Instead, we see the following:

Basic mission statement of Wreaths Across America

The Siege Continues: Christian Gang Signs

With all the preceding as a background, it should be no surprise that we come across one Michael “Mikey” Weinstein, President of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), featured on a Fox News story dated December 14, 2021: “Religious Freedom Groups Says Wreaths Across America Violating Veteran Religious Liberties.” Mr. Weinstein, “a Jewish agnostic who prays three times a day in Hebrew,”4 is an Air Force Academy graduate and former JAG attorney who has been very active taking on cases that enforce the separation of church and state within the military. While his Senior Research Director at MRFF and Contributor to HuffPost, Chris Rodda, exclaims that their organization is not conducting a “war on Christmas,”5 a perusal of his major cases appear to involve Christians.

From the Fox News story, Mr. Weinstein: “Fine if you want your wreath, but then you make sure that you’ve either requested one from Wreaths Across America or that…Wreaths Across America has had express or explicit approval to do it. We’re not saying you can’t, but you cannot blanket it like that! That’s like carpet bombing! And to many of us that are not Christians and our clients, you know we don’t look for this ourselves, that looks like a Christian gang sign…that you’re creating territory, that is a Christian territory.”

Mr. Weinstein compares this to “Carpet Bombing”

Mr. Weinstein continues:

“Our view is that if you want to put a wreath on veteran’s grave, that’s fine. But then you must first request that, or you make sure that (in this case) Wreaths Across America has absolute empirical and express approval to do so.”

Karen Worcester, Executive Director of WAA (2018 reportable compensation for her 40 hours per week: $0) defends her mission in this Fox News story: “You have to be respectful for other people’s culture…and come together and teach our children. Our children are watching us. It’s important to teach with respect and that’s part of our mission: to teach kids to care and to learn the history and heritage.”

And Ms. Worcester continues: “We’ve always had a policy since the first wreaths were laid in 1992 to not place wreaths on the graves with the Star of David to show respect.”

And that’s where Mr. Weinstein is shown insinuating that WAA is nothing but a grift. Ms. Worcester responds: “We have been audited by the IRS several times. We’re up to snuff. We are probably the most transparent organization you’ll ever see!”

So in the course of this video interview on mainstream “conservative” television, we have witnessed the continued siege on Christmas, this time within the military milieu. Wreaths are equated to Christian gang signs. Wreath laying on gravestones is equated to carpet bombing, and a popular national non-profit is hinted as being a less-than-transparent racket of some sorts.

The KosChertified Take

Since 1923, the food, kitchen supply, and detergent industry has been inundated with obscure  kosher seals. We counted 635 agencies in the United States alone, and many of them use trademarked certification symbols that are mysterious to most shoppers. Our surveys indicate that maybe as few as ten percent savvy shoppers can even recognize the most popular hekhsher, that of OU Kosher, which certifies over one million items as “fit and proper for Jews”. There may be plenty of lawyers of Weinstein’s ilk ready to defend this pervasive practice despite our consumer research pointing it to a deceptive trade practice, but when we look at how the scheme has pervaded the military commissary, we find ourselves wondering if Mr. Weinstein would call these mysterious symbols Judaic gang signs?

A sampling of probably hundreds of trademarked kosher seals, these being the most common

Large wreaths placed on the front of military grave stones are a very transparent activity, allowing MRFF an easy time to analyze which graves have received the seasonal accents, in case there was a mistake. But our Quantitative Study on Kosher Certification revealed that on thirty percent of labeling with kosher seals, the certification was found on the back or sides, not readily apparent to consumers. Since the military commissary sells mostly mainstream brands, we would expect the same results there. Transparency was the primary focus of our research, and we doubt that many young recruits can spot kosher seals found where they least expect one, such as inedible detergents, or without the use of a magnifying glass! Yes, we have shown that the hekhshers found on package labels sharing other certification seals (e.g. NON-GMO, Gluten-Free, Good Housekeeping, etc.) average just ten percent the measurable seal area of the others.

Kosher-certified dishwashing detergent; Arrow points to the tiny hekhsher (kosher seal), and few consumers know that most name brand dish soaps are under rabbinical supervision

We have surveyed several large sections of packaged food found at the commissaries, and too many were 100% kosher-certified! Take for instance the dry pasta section, where we found the military offering the following: Barilla, Mueller’s, Ancient Harvest, Ronzoni, and Freedom’s Choice. Given that each and every brand listed was under rabbinical control and supervision, the only choices for the service member or their family would be kosher certified or certified kosher! This is hardly a choice that reflects freedom of religion in a government operation that is not supposed to show bias towards any one religion, in this case Judaism. It is especially surprising that the Freedom’s Choice brand, a Defense Commissary Agency product, would not be neutral to religious oversight of food, as kosher certification submits to the Torah and Talmud, granting rabbis the ultimate say over ingredients, sourcing, and production methods…even the machinery lubrication!

The entire dry pasta section of this military commissary is kosher certified; There is no choice outside of supporting Judaism and the Talmud
Kosher seals (see bottom right of package) are not yet required by Fair Packaging Law to be conspicuous, as the “NET WT 16 OZ” is

The same religious bias was found in canned vegetables at the commissary, a product that would likely be considered a common or essential purchase for many consumers. And when we examined the kosher seal on the government agency’s Freedom’s Choice (all certified by OU Kosher), what did we find? Suspiciously low symbol transparency! Can they print that hekhsher with any fainter ink? We would ask Mr. Weinstein if MRFF considered this an unfair scheme for our soldiers and sailors to decipher? It appears that rejecting indirect contributions to Jewish programs and inconspicuous strange markings is not practical, or even feasible on a military base.

We found all canned vegetables at the military commissary were kosher-certified, including Defense Commissary Agency products; There were no religiously neutral offerings
That kosher seal looks very faint; No “KOSHER CERTIFICATION SERVICE” displayed. Why not?
kosher
When kosher seal areas are measured against other certification seals and objects found on package labels
The circled “U” seal for OU Kosher (as seen on their Twitter page)

Now we get to the juicy part where we know MRFF will jump in with patriotic fervor to bring justice. Yes, we know that the manufacturers are complicit in hiring these kosher agencies for their religious services, and so this would equate to Mr. Weinstein insisting that WAA receive “express or explicit approval to do it.” But the difference we make is with the end user: Wreath laying is extremely transparent, deceased soldiers can’t check a box on a Terms of Service, and finding their living family members may prove impossible. Meanwhile, the existing kosher scheme keeps commissary consumers unaware of the religious stranglehold over their purchases. And where does all that kosher revenue flow? We just don’t know for sure because the IRS grants exemptions for disclosing the accounting numbers for such religious organizations. We may never know how much the directors at OU Kosher earn in this current system, but we’ll presume it’s not as high as Mr. Weinstein’s 2018 compensation at MRFF: $368,393. This president, putting in 105 hours per week (i.e., 15 hours per day, seven days per week) is one hard working guy! With type “A” motivation like that, we are sure he will help our cause to bring true separation of church and state when it is revealed that OU Kosher’s umbrella group, the Orthodox Union of Jewish Congregations, was resolutely supporting the most damaging spy our nation has convicted in recent times!

OU Kosher is a program of this religious mega organization
Multiple “Resolutions” of OU have listed support for convicted spy Jonathan Pollard; OU employs a powerful Advocacy program with “open door” access to key congressional influencers

We must wonder how our military service members would feel if they knew that government commissary agencies were wholeheartedly patronizing non-profits that support those that subverted our nation? And if they are staunch advocates of convicted spies, are they currently supporting spies that haven’t been caught yet?

We would be curious if Mr. Weinstein, growing up in a Jewish family, was always well aware of how pervasive kosher certification had become in the general supermarket? And while Gentile or Christian Americans, regular citizens or military personnel have much of this phenomena concealed from easy noticing, the same industry in Israel has fallen under great scrutiny for its high levels of corruption.6 Can we assume the same is happening on U.S. soil?

Does advocating for Israel have to include support for spying against the United States? Also, should a non-profit enjoying generous IRS exemptions be allowed to publicly advocate for a foreign nation?

Conclusion

In our opinion, religious freedom begins with the living, not the dead! While MRFF can arouse mainstream media to give them a platform to chip away at Christmas amidst cemeteries and wreaths, we have brought to light important religious freedom issues that affect our currently serving troops and veterans every day. We agree that countless American Jews might cringe at the thought of a wreath accidentally placed before the gravestone of their deceased war veteran. Similarly, Non-Jews may want their First Amendment freedom to avoid kosher certification for the myriad reasons we’ve listed, and the intrigue of kosher certification serves as a slap in the face to our patriots who may be too naïve, too apolitical, unconcerned, or simply not informed enough to objectively analyze the products that are offered on a military base. They deserve a choice of products that are religiously neutral. Lastly, rabbis have been collecting great sums of money for these kosher certification services for nearly one century, and we are long overdue to witness a public audit! Consumers are afforded absolutely zero transparency in the kosher costs and money flow, and so calling this underhanded enterprise “the ultimate grift” would not be beyond the pale. Wreaths Across America, on the other hand, looks like Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity in comparison! We applaud their benevolent volunteerism and beautifying of our military cemeteries.

Mr. Weinstein continues his people’s time-honored tradition, one that began no later than 1907, and Christmas is further eroded by means of pilpul, losing its authentic meaning while the season sheds more of its evergreen needles and European ties to nature. We invite the Military Religious Freedom Foundation to take up our case with government authorities, helping defend our military troops against the carpet bombing by kosher seals (and yes, you can quote us on that). But as a modicum of compromise, perhaps MRFF can force the military to issue, along with their rifle, one Kosher Supervision Guide and the KosChertified? App for every enlistment. Anything otherwise might be tacit approval of Kosher Supremacy, ceding every military base to Judaic rule, creating ever more Jewish territory.

This Kosher Supervision Guide can help our military troops and their families identify any of the hundreds of obscure symbols they may come across
The KosChertified? App addresses The Kosher Question, and offers a unique database of NKC products – NOT Kosher Certified – so our military troops and their families can “Exercise Their Dietary Free Will”

Reposted from KosChertified?, with permission.

1Nikkur: The procedure contained within the Jewish practice of Shechita of removing the major blood vessels, nerves, and forbidden fats from a kosher-slaughtered animal. In Yiddish, this process is called “treibering”. The basis for this practice is found in Leviticus 7:23, and it is usually performed by the Shochet. Due to the particularism of Jewish law, “Only about 30 percent of slaughtered animals can be used for kosher distribution.” (Source: https://kosherquest.org/is-it-kosher/shechita/)

2http://thekosherquestion.com/#!our-blog/chick-fil-a-cares

3https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2021/09/24/the-double-standards-of-kosher/

4https://www.huffpost.com/entry/no-megyn-kelly-mikey-wein_b_5240896

5https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mikey-weinstein-a-traitor_b_1172823

6https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4891347,00.html