If you’ve been around Jews for any period, you’ve likely discovered their tendency to exaggerate whatever they feel passionately about. Hyperbole seems to come easy to them. The sky is always falling. Doom is right around the corner. And, of course, it’s always directed at them because of their ethnic identity.

This powerful sense of group endangerment and historical grievance is associated with a hyperbolic style of Jewish thought that runs repeatedly through Jewish rhetoric. Chernin’s comment that “any negativity, criticism, or reproach, even from one of our own, takes on exaggerated dimensions” is particularly important. In the Jewish mind, all criticism must be suppressed because not to do so would be to risk another Holocaust: “There is no such thing as overreaction to an anti-Semitic incident, no such thing as exaggerating the omnipresent danger. Anyone who scoffed at the idea that there were dangerous portents in American society hadn’t learned ‘the lesson of the Holocaust.’ ”23 Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, a premier neoconservative journal published by the American Jewish Committee, provides an example:

 [M]y own view is that what had befallen the Jews of Europe inculcated a subliminal lesson. . . . The lesson was that anti-Semitism, even the relatively harmless genteel variety that enforced quotas against Jewish students or kept their parents from joining fashionable clubs or getting jobs in prestigious Wall Street law firms, could end in mass murder.24

This is a “slippery slope” argument with a vengeance. The schema is as follows: Criticism of Jews indicates dislike of Jews; this leads to hostility toward Jews, which leads to Hitler and eventually to mass murder. Therefore all criticism of Jews must be suppressed. With this sort of logic, it is easy to dismiss arguments about Palestinian rights on the West Bank and Gaza because “the survival of Israel” is at stake. (“Background Traits for Jewish Activism,” p. 12).

As an example of this, it’s common for Jews to view all personal criticism of them as individuals as collective criticism of them as a people. It’s not that other ethnic groups don’t also engage in exaggeration and overreach at times, but only that Jews seem to have uniquely strong proclivities toward this sort of thing. One could say they have even perfected it.

There’s a long history of non-Jews noticing it too. Many Jews even concede this habit of theirs. They make no apologies for it either. It’s perfectly natural to them.

Yet like the Old Testament proverb that describes the evil man who is in continual fear that someone is chasing after him even though there isn’t (28:1), so also Jews often make whatever negative circumstances they find themselves in to be worse than they are or turn out to be. Their paranoia invariably leads them to faulty conclusions about the motivations of others. They are quick to impugn the character of anyone at the slightest perceived offense. This often leads to the most unfair and grossest of accusations, “anti-Semitism” being the most common.

For instance, the Jewish host of Democracy Now! (Amy Goodman) in 2002 asked the former Israeli Minister, Shulamit Aloni, what she thought about people in the U.S. who are critical of the Israeli government being called “anti-Semitic.” Her response illustrates precisely my point: “Well, it’s a trick. We always use it. When from Europe somebody’s criticizing Israel, then we bring out the Holocaust. When in this country people are criticizing Israel, then they are anti-Semitic . . . They are not ready to hear criticism.”

This reaction and strategy among Jews are perhaps understandable due to their tiny demographic in the U.S. comprising only about 1.8% of the overall population. This leads them to use their historic victim status and small numbers to blow things out of proportion in order to gain sympathy and approval from a gullible public.

Jews can be confident that their strategy will be supported by the U.S. government because “the Tribe” disproportionately influences much of the federal government, including society’s most important secondary institutions such as the news media, Hollywood, academia, and an array of social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Congress on both sides of the political aisle is unabashedly committed to the Jewish people and Israel.

In fact, Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, has even gone on record to declare: “I have said to people when they ask me if this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid — and I don’t even call it aid — our cooperation with Israel. That’s fundamental to who we are” (Conference of the Israel-American Council, December 2, 2018).

History for at least the past 140 years is replete with examples of Jewish hysteria and overreach. Let’s look briefly at a few of them.

(1) Jews have claimed that great atrocities were committed against them in both Russia and Poland simply because of their Jewish ethnicity or religion. These ‘pogroms’ were instituted by the Russian and Polish governments, and they targeted Jews in the most inhumane ways. The persecutions were also carried out by local villagers. As a result, Jews were driven from their homes and businesses, and it’s claimed they suffered greatly at the hands of Russian and Polish Christians.

An article published in The Occidental Observer written by Andrew Joyce carefully examined such claims and found them in large part to be unfounded (“A Critical Look at the Polish ‘Pogroms’ of 1914–1920,’ May 1, 2022). Joyce cites the words of William Hagen (Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914–1920 [Cambridge University Press, 2018]) who assiduously investigated the matter: “Jewish reports tended toward exaggeration” (p.173).

Joyce notes that “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 minimize bias.” He later argues that “resentment-laden animosity colored many such [Jewish] reports, which tended, in an atmosphere heavy with collective paranoia and hysteria, to exaggerate Jewish losses.” He even cites one brief but telling remark from Henry Morgenthau himself, who, although promoting atrocity propaganda, once admitted that “there is also no question but that some of the Jewish leaders [in Poland] had exaggerated” (A Critical Look at the Polish ‘Pogroms’ of 1914–1920).

This is not merely Hagen’s investigative conclusions, but also that of several other authors who discovered that Jewish reports of intense sufferings and prolonged mistreatment by the Polish people against them to be largely inflated and embellished.

The common assumption is that persecution of Jews always stems from irrational hatred when, in fact, the evidence strongly suggests that most of it is due to tensions between competing ethnic groups. Usury, fraud, various forms of thievery, and the multiple financial schemes that Jews engage in invariably provokes a backlash, one that sometimes leads to violence. Jews like gypsies are parasitical, and both groups often get the boot when people are angered and fed up with their deceitful ways. There is nothing irrational about it.

Andrew Joyce addressed the so-called Russian ‘pogroms’ in a series of articles also published in The Occidental Observer in May of 2012 (“Revisiting the 19th-century Russian Pogroms“). Joyce pulled his information from a wide variety of sources. One author stood out—the late John Doyle Klier and his monumental works: Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History [Cambridge University Press: 2004] and Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–82 [Cambridge University Press: 2011]. Like the previously mentioned author, William Hagen, Klier is led to the same conclusions – namely, that Jews grossly exaggerated the events they declared to the world.

(2) Jews claim that “six million” of their people were murdered in the Holocaust and that this ‘liquidation’ of Jews was allegedly official Nazi policy ordered by Hitler himself. Jews were then systematically rounded up and forced to live in “death camps” where millions of Jews were gassed, tortured, and medically experimented on.

Given the exaggerations apparent in other Jewish claims of persecution, it would not be surprising to find similar exaggeration for the holocaust. Comparably few people are aware that the “six million” figure does not have its origin exclusively in the events of the Holocaust. The expression, in fact, was repeatedly employed by Jews as having symbolic, mystical, and kabbalistic significance prior to the outbreak of WW1. Interestingly, while Jews are allowed to interpret the “six million” number in a symbolic or allegorical way, this is not permissible for non-Jews. They must interpret it literally. No deviation is permitted. The double standard should be obvious.

The expression was routinely used by Jews beginning in 1850 among various newspapers, articles, and books which sought to highlight the sufferings of Jews in Russia. Over 250 separate pre-WW2 references to the “six million” can be documented in The New York Times, The Jewish Criterion, and a plethora of other American and Jewish newspapers and periodicals. American-Zionist leader, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and Zionist pressure groups such as The World Jewish Congress and The American Jewish Congress made sure that Jews were always portrayed as innocent victims and just on the verge of complete annihilation.

The constant call was for the world to recognize the plight of Jews and to rescue them from the hands of their oppressors. For those interested in reviewing the documentation for this, two books are, in my opinions, required reading: Don Heddesheimer, The First Holocaust: The Surprising Origin of the Six Million Figure (Castle Hill Publishers: 2021); and Arthur Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry (Castle Hill Publishers, 2015).

Whether one agrees with the Jewish narrative of the Holocaust or not, there is little doubt that the “six million” figure is but one more example of Jewish exaggeration and overreach.

(3) Along with the “six million” number, there are also numerous outrageous claims made by Jews during and after World War II. For instance, that the Nazis made  bars of soap and lampshades from Jewish skin. Nazis were alleged to have routinely committed the most unimaginable atrocities against Jews. Only later was much of it discredited and shown, once again, to have originated from Allied and Jewish propaganda.

Some of the most bizarre and unbelievable claims made by Jews as to what occurred inside the Nazi work camps are common (portable gas chambers, throwing Jewish babies into the air and bayoneting them, “masturbation machines” in which Jewish males were masturbated to death, etc.).

Jewish survival stories tend to be particularly fanciful, and many of them have been discredited upon closer examination. Behind them all are motives of greed and gaining sympathy for Jewish people. One such story involves Misha Defonseca (real name: Monique de Wael): “Desperate to be reunited with her parents, Misha travelled through war-torn Europe, becoming trapped in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. After escaping over a wall, she travelled thousands of miles to Ukraine, Romania, Yugoslavia, Italy, France and back to Belgium. During her arduous journey Misha said she stayed with a pair of wolves she named Maman Rita and Ita. . . . I was like the wolves — a hunted animal, and one that would be killed on sight. . . . Later she said she joined a pack of six adult wolves and four pups” (Grant Rollings, The U.S. Sun [8/4/2021]).

Turns out her wolf pack story was just a pack of lies. Misha reluctantly confessed her fakery when the matter was later investigated. She also had to return the millions she had profited from the story she weaved.

A good many of these Holocaust stories are so far-fetched that it’s hard to believe that intelligent people would take them seriously. Yet when it comes to the industry and religion of the Holocaust, one must bypass all critical thought and exercise only blind faith.

The Holocaust and spreading its message to the world is so important to Jews, in fact, that many of them believe it’s the key to their ethnic solidarity. It’s integral to who they are. Their belief in it is what holds them together, perhaps for some of them even more so than their belief in Yahweh and the Talmud.

Again, fanciful stories and claims about the Holocaust serve as examples of typical Jewish hyperbole. Mind you, I’m not saying that many Jews did not suffer and die during WW2 (so also did many non-Jews – even more so!). There were atrocities committed by almost all the involved parties (some more than others). Yet the Holocaust illustrates how deeply wedded Jews are to propaganda, and how they are largely unable to restrain themselves from spreading the most hysterical claims to the world that we are expected to believe without question. A good many Jews are offended when the same reviews and critical investigations that are applied to other historical events are applied to the Holocaust story. This event alone cannot be challenged. It’s not subject to the critical eye, and those who think otherwise soon discover the power of influential Jews. It shows again the religious nature of the Jewish Holocaust narrative.

(4) Additional examples of Jewish hysterical claims can be seen in more recent events, such as the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how it’s reported in the pro-Jewish American press. Israelis are almost always portrayed by Western media as innocent victims, while the Palestinians are always portrayed as terrorists and instigators. Since Jews largely control and influence our media, there is little nuance and context given.

(5) The Israeli government has claimed for over a decade that Iran has manufactured nuclear weapons and that a strike against Israel and America is surely imminent. Remember when Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, addressed a joint-meeting of congress in March of 2015 – you know, the one where he was given 29 standing ovations? He warned against what he called a “bad deal” that was being negotiated at the time between the Obama administration and Iran to freeze Iran’s nuclear program.

Netanyahu argued that any deal with Iran would lead it to create nuclear weapons within “about a year by U.S. assessment, even shorter by Israel’s.” Well, almost eight years has elapsed since that speech, and there is still no proof that Iran has nuclear weapons and intends to use them against Israel or any other nation. Netanyahu’s exaggerated claims and congress’s willingness to lap it up validated the former Israeli prime minister’s claim in 2001 when he said, “America is a thing you can move very easily.”

(6) That same level of Jewish-fueled hysteria occurred after 9-11 when a brood of Jewish neocons in the Bush administration persuaded President Bush that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction.” It was later discovered to a be bold-faced lie, one that led to the complete ruin of the Iraqi nation and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. These same Jewish neocons along with their compliant stooge, George W. Bush, led the U.S. to also invade Afghanistan. The foolishness and devastation of that two-decade quagmire should be obvious to all. Our withdraw from Afghanistan in August of 2021 leaving behind billions in military weapons only served to confirm it.

Israel and its subservient puppet, the U.S., has also engaged in a series of unjustified military strikes against Syria. The U.S. opposes Syria not because it poses a threat to the American people, but because the Israeli government perceives it to be an enemy-state, a regional threat to them.

The pattern seems to always be the same in all these conflicts. Anytime Israel feels threatened, it declares to the world a series of hysterical allegations all which spell doom to the Jewish people. Same as the hyperbolic claims by Jews prior to and during WW2, Jews are again about to be annihilated. It’s another Holocaust, but this time nuclear bombs will be used instead of poisonous gas.

(7) Consider also how Jews react to even slightest attempt on the part of Whites to unify in terms of their racial identity and cultural interests. Jews have always responded negatively to this sort of thing because they view it as potentially leading to the rise of another leader like Hitler who might unite Whites. Those same Whites could, as a result, turn against Jews and ‘voila!’ we’ve got another Holocaust on our hands. When you peel back the many layers of sophistry by Jews on why they oppose White people racially uniting, this is what you eventually discover.

This explains partly why Jews will never support even the mildest forms of White Nationalism. Politically conservative Jews might agree that illegal immigration is bad for the U.S., and they may even speak out now and then about Black criminality, but don’t ever expect them in any large number to declare that Whites have a right to be the dominant demographic in their own countries; that Whites have legitimate racial and cultural interests that ought to be preserved.

It should come as no surprise, then, why Jews will engage in the most extreme hyperbole and lies when assessing White racial identity. They are unable to treat the subject fairly because discerning Jews realize that when the goyim begin to grasp the ‘Jewish Question’ and its implications, it will invariably have an impact on Jewish hegemony over Europe and America. And so Jewish advocacy groups such as the ADL will continue to publish articles on its website and other platforms such as what Jonathan Greenblatt wrote in March of 2019: “White Supremacy is a Transnational Threat. Here’s why.”

Our current U.S. Attorney General who not-so-surprisingly happens to be Jewish, Merrick Garland, has recently parroted the same nonsense before Congress describing white supremacists as “the most dangerous threat to our democracy.” Such a statement would be laughable if it wasn’t so false and contrived.

(8) Consider also the gross exaggerations by our Jewish-dominated media when it comes to the current Russia-Ukraine conflict. Once again, complete lies, distortions, half-truths, and mythology abounds in reporting these events. The U.S. news media simply cannot be trusted, and it staggers the mind when one considers how many Americans are still unaware of this.

That overreach is such a prevalent trait among massive numbers of Jews suggests that it’s deeply rooted in their psyche, their character, and how they see the world around them. It’s largely part-and-parcel of who they are. One can reliably predict how Jews will react and what sort of extreme claims they will make when non-Jews start to wake up and ‘notice’ certain patterns about them. A circle-the-wagons reaction is almost always their collective response.

Yet we must ask ourselves: What kind of people are these who have such a habit of overreacting and grossly inflating every perceived criticism into something it’s not? Why would so many Jews react in this way? How does it help them or even work against their collective interests?

A couple of possible reasons could be given to such questions, but I must admit that these are only opinions drawn from historic patterns and are largely anecdotal in nature. Still, I believe those who are perceptive of Jews will mostly agree with the following two points:

Firstly, it’s the kind of response indicative of liars and conmen who discover that they are about to be exposed. More lies are compounded, and the hysteria ramps up in order to throw off their opponents or anyone else who might be observing. This helps to explain why Jewish advocacy groups like the ADL come down hard on any person or group that dares to challenge Jewish power structures in America. Noticing the same patterns of conduct by the same ethnic group — and then making it known to others — threatens America’s entrenched Jewish cabal. If too many were to discover it, uncomfortable questions would arise that could have devastating monetary consequences.

One must remember that Jews largely succeed and maintain disproportionate influence and power because they keep a low profile (at least mostly). They tend to work behind the scenes. They are not quick to draw attention to their ethnicity. Their last names are often no different than that of non-Jews so it’s not always readily apparent who they are.

This is, admittedly, not always the case. There are occasions when Jews speak openly of their ethnic and collective motives against their host country and its people. They will sometimes get caught boasting of who and what they control. This occurs when their ‘chutzpa’ is unable to restrain itself, and they more or less spill the beans.

Joel Stein in an L.A. Times article published in 2008 is one such example: “As a proud Jew, I want America to know about our accomplishment. Yes, we control Hollywood. Without us, you’d be flipping between “The 700 Club” and “Davey and Goliath” on TV all day. So, I’ve taken it upon myself to re-convince America that Jews run Hollywood by launching a public relations campaign, because that’s what we do best. I’m weighing several slogans, including: “Hollywood: More Jewish than ever!”; “Hollywood: From the people who brought you the Bible”; and “Hollywood: If you enjoy TV and movies, then you probably like Jews after all . . . But I don’t care if Americans think we’re running the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or the government. I just care that we get to keep running them” (‘Who Runs Hollywood? C’mon’).

But for the most part, Jews prefer to work in ways that are not so obvious, choosing instead a more low-key and subtle approach, yet still retaining their same power and influence over society.

Secondly, Jews have a long history and persistent pattern of engaging in fraudulent monetary schemes and in creating vice industries. If it were widely known, for example, that Jews played a disproportionate role in the modern porn industry, including their dominant role in Weimar Germany in the years 1918-1933, it would not look favorable for them. Their reputation could be tarnished. An excellent book by Benjamin Garland, Merchants of Sin (2017), extensively documents this intriguing history. Jews were also major players in the gay rights movement as well as the recent Transexual movement in America. This includes the Civil Rights and the Feminist movements, all of which helped to destroy the social and moral fabric of the country.

Thus, for the public to discover that Jews were the main promoters of so much of the over-sexualization of this once great nation, it would certainly raise some eyebrows – although little would be done about it now when one considers how morally bankrupt the nation has become.

Most Americans generally perceive Jews as people who are deeply religious with a strong moral base (actually, great numbers of Jews are secular atheists). Such realities as noted above would be troublesome for many Americans. Jewish success, it must be remembered, is in large part due to the kind of image they project upon society. They are masters of propaganda, and this must always be remembered when dealing with them. Jews could not have created the motion picture industry in Hollywood if they did not have a seemingly innate ability to deceive, to create smoke and mirrors, and distort reality.

Their long history of relying on deception, trickery, including endless monetary schemes to get them through the centuries has perhaps given Jews an upper hand in some ways over gentiles. Thus, the kind of social problems and hysteria that Jews create in the U.S. should serve as a warning to other western countries. When Jews are allowed to burrow into a nation’s most important institutions and gain a permanent foothold, it’s just a matter of time before societal strife and division takes root. The pattern is undeniable.

These days, very near the end, images from long ago pop into my head, seemingly on their own; I don’t know what prompts them, and I let them take me where they will.  A couple of days ago, it was of a moment from the mid- to late-1980s in Burlington Vermont.

In another life, I did a lot of theater as a director and actor.  At the end of a play, you’ve seen it, the actors come down stage (near the audience) and form a line and take bows for thirty seconds or so.  During curtain calls. as they are called, I would scan the audience, quickly moving from one face to the next.

It was a final-bows moment that came to mind a couple days ago—I don’t remember the name of the play.  There was an elderly, balding man in the middle of the house (audience) of around one hundred people looking straight at me and smiling and applauding.  He radiated gentility and peacefulness, and kindness and respect and affirmation directed at me or so it seemed.

I stopped scanning.  For me, it became just the two of us; he was in focus and everything else out of focus. I nodded to him, though he didn’t nod back, or I didn’t pick it up.

Those few seconds at the end of the play, that special human connection, stayed with me and later that same night it hit me, “Oh, I know who that man in the audience was.  He’s aged, but that was David Dellinger!”

I don’t know if David Dellinger’s name means anything to you, but for a time back in the late 1960s, he was very prominent in the national news as one of the Chicago Seven, as they were called.  The Chicago Seven were anti-Vietnam war protestors put on trial for conspiring to incite a riot and crossing state lines to incite one at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago that nominated Hubert Humphrey as its presidential candidate. (President Lyndon Johnson had declined to run for a second full term amid the national upheaval over the legitimacy of the war.)  The riot, to call it that—the term may not fit—was marked by live television coverage of Chicago police ferociously clubbing demonstrators or rioters, whatever the best term for them.  I watched it on television in Minneapolis horrified.

The trial became a highly publicized platform in which the seven defendants managed to put the war itself on trial.  The proceedings were tumultuous, with one of the defendants, Bobby Seale, a Black Panther Party leader, put in shackles by the judge, Julius Hoffman, for being disruptive.  (Seale’s case was eventually separated from the others and the Chicago Eight became the Chicago Seven.) There was intense and personal sparring between the defendants and Judge Hoffman, with Dellinger prominent in that. All seven were acquitted of the conspiracy charge; five, including Dellinger, were convicted of crossing state lines to incite a riot.

Here is a picture of the Chicago Seven.  Jerry Rubin seated (I don’t know who the woman is) and standing from our left to right, Abbie Hoffman, John Froines, Lee Weiner, Dellinger, Rennie Davis, and Tom Hayden.

Only Froines and Weiner are still alive.  You might want to check out the 2020 movie, “The Trial of the Chicago 7.”  John Carroll Lynch plays Dellinger.  I’m not a fan of its writer and director Aaron Sorkin but gave it a try.  I didn’t connect with it.

In 1993, Dellinger, then 77, wrote his autobiography, From Yale to Jail: The Life Story of a Moral Dissenter.¹   It was around this time when I read it.  From the book, it turns out that this is David Dellinger.

He was imprisoned twice during the World War II period, before and during the war, for refusing to register for the draft.  A divinity student at the time, Dellinger was eligible for a deferment, but he rejected preferential treatment.  While in prison, he was abused to the point of torture, force-fed when he went on hunger strikes, and for weeks at a time put in a tiny pitch-black “hole” with only a toilet, but he never broke.

I don’t remember the details of the Yale-to-Jail book, but I was strongly affected by it, that I know.  One major influence, and it remains with me to this day, was Dellinger’s anti-war posture.  A recent example of it, in a 2019 article I wrote on Calvin Coolidge, U.S. president from 1924–1929:

Something close to my heart, The Kellogg-Briand Pact was formulated during Coolidge’s years.  Frank B. Kellogg was Coolidge’s Secretary of State and Aristide Briand was the French Minister of Foreign Affairs.  It was also known as The Pact of Paris.  Its official title gets at its thrust, The General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy.   I say close to my heart, because I’ve had it up to here with one government program in particular: mass destruction and killing.²

Incidentally, as a boy, Dellinger met Coolidge in the White House; his Republican Party bigwig father was a friend of Coolidge’s.  Coolidge is reported to have rubbed David on the head and said, “He’s a smart one.  He’ll go places.”

In 2006, Canadian academic Andrew E. Hunt wrote a biography of Dellinger, David Dellinger: The Life and Times of a Nonviolent Revolutionary, which I read around the time of the book’s publication and liked.³

To set the stage for my commentary on Dellinger, here’s The New York Times obituary of him by Michael T. Kaufman, dated March 27, 2004.  It does a much better job that I could summarizing Dellinger’s life.

 

David Dellinger, whose commitment to nonviolent direct action against the federal government placed him at the forefront of American radical pacifism in the 20th century and led, most famously, to a courtroom in Chicago where he became a leading defendant in the raucous political conspiracy trial of the Chicago Seven, died Tuesday in a retirement home in Montpelier, Vt. He was 88.

His death was reported by Peggy Rocque, the administrator of the home, Heaton Woods. An avuncular figure among younger and more flamboyant mavericks, Mr. Dellinger emerged in the 1960’s as the leading organizer of huge antiwar demonstrations, including the encirclement of the Pentagon that was immortalized in Norman Mailer’s account ”Armies of the Night.” At the same time, making use of his close contacts with the North Vietnamese, he was able to organize the release of several American airmen held as prisoners and to escort them back from Hanoi.

In the often-turbulent world of the American left, Mr. Dellinger occupied a position of almost stolid consistency. He belonged to no party, and insisted that American capitalism had provoked racism, imperial adventures and wars and should be resisted.

A child of patrician privilege, he had since his days at Yale learned and practiced strategies of civil disobedience in a variety of causes, steadfastly showing what he called his concern for ”the small, the variant, the unrepresented, the weak,” categories he cited from the writings of William James.

In the federal courtroom in Chicago in 1969, when Judge Julius J. Hoffman presided over the trial of opponents of the Vietnam War charged with criminal conspiracy and inciting to riot at the Democratic National Convention a year earlier, Mr. Dellinger loomed over his co-defendants in age, experience, heft and gravitas.

The next oldest of the defendants, Abbie Hoffman, was 20 years his junior. Mr. Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were Yippies who mocked authority in star-spangled shirts; Mr. Dellinger favored quiet business suits. Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John R. Froines and Lee Weiner had led student movements; Mr. Dellinger had not.

Within this radical bouquet of representatives from what was called the New Left, Mr. Dellinger stood out as a link to a homegrown pacifist strain that had its roots within America’s Old Left.

Paul Berman, who wrote about the radicals and revolutionaries who rose to prominence in the years around 1968 in ”Tale of Two Utopias,” said that Mr. Dellinger ”came of age in one of the tiniest currents of the American left — the Rev. A.J. Muste’s movement for World War II pacifism, a movement based on radical Christian values and vaguely anarchist instincts. No rational person observing that movement during the 1940’s would have predicted any success at all, and yet during the next two or three decades, Mr. Dellinger and his pacifist allies transformed whole areas of American life.”

Mr. Berman said that they ”did it by supplying crucial leadership in the civil rights revolution and by playing a central role in the mass movement against the war in Vietnam.”

”Dellinger, himself,” Mr. Berman said, ”became the single most important leader of the national antiwar movement, at its height, from 1967 through the early 1970’s. You could quarrel with some of his political judgments, but he was always sober, always resolute, always selfless and always brave.”

If his co-defendants in Chicago captured most of the attention of the news media, in the eyes of Judge Hoffman, it was Mr. Dellinger who had been the most guilty. The jury had acquitted all seven on conspiracy but found all but Mr. Weiner and Mr. Froines guilty of inciting to riot. Of the convicted, Mr. Dellinger was given the harshest penalty by Judge Hoffman, five years in jail and a $5,000 fine. He was also sentenced to two years and five months on the basis of 32 citations of criminal contempt for comments he made during the five-month trial, which ended in February 1970.

Two years later, with all the defendants free on bail, an appellate court, citing prejudicial conduct by Judge Hoffman, voided the convictions for inciting to riot. The next year another court upheld Mr. Dellinger’s contempt conviction, but declined to impose sentence.

Mr. Dellinger was by his own lights more radical than many of his like-minded compatriots, a figure who often found the strategies and tactics of close colleagues like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mr. Muste, his mentor in radical pacifism, too conciliatory.

When Mr. Dellinger was a young man, he had, for the experience, ridden boxcars with hobos during the Depression. Soon after, he drove an ambulance behind Loyalist lines in the Spanish Civil War and he traveled through Germany to witness the rise of Nazi power. He resisted the draft and in prison took part in hunger strikes to integrate the mess hall of Danbury prison. He edited Liberation magazine, which Mr. Mailer once described as ”an anarchist-pacifist magazine of worthy but not very readable articles in more or less vegetarian prose.”

In the 1940’s Mr. Dellinger met Elizabeth Peterson at a Christian students’ meeting, and they married. She survives him, as do two sisters, Nancy Marshall, of Massachusetts, and Elizabeth Cushman, of Sarasota, Fla. Also surviving are three sons, Patchen, of Seattle, Daniel, of St. Johnsbury, Vt., and Howard Douglas, of Nazareth, Pa.; two daughters, Natasha Singer, of Schnevus, N.Y., and Michele McDonough, of Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.; nine grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

David Dellinger was born in Wakefield, Mass., on Aug. 22, 1915. His father, Raymond, was a lawyer and chairman of the town Republican Party, influential enough to take his son to a private White House lunch with Calvin Coolidge. His grandmother was active in the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Like his father he went to Yale, where he did well in his studies and was elected captain of the cross-country team. He also became close friends with Walt W. Rostow, who years later would face him from the other side of the barricades as a senior adviser on Vietnam to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. He was drawn to pacifism through readings of Tolstoy and most particularly of ”The Power of Nonviolence,” by Richard Gregg, an American who had spent years working with Mahandas K. Gandhi.

But his personal commitment to nonviolence came after a football game in which Georgia beat Yale. New Haven ”townies,” who resented the Yale students, swarmed onto the field and tore down the goal posts. Mr. Dellinger joined in the melee and chased one young man, whom he hit and knocked unconscious. He recalled: ”I shall never forget the horror I felt the instant my fist struck solid flesh. When my victim fell, I dropped to my knees, lifted his head and I cradled him until he came to. I walked him home. I never saw my enemy again.”  He pledged he would never hit anyone again and forswore all violence.

In ”Armies of the Night,” Mr. Mailer’s account of the famous antiwar protest march on the Pentagon in 1967 that Mr. Dellinger helped to organize with Mr. Rubin, the writer compared the radical leader in nonviolent action to an alumni officer at a Yale reunion. ”He had the hard-working, modestly gregarious, and absolutely devoted sense of how mission and detail interlock, which is so necessary to good class agents, that rare vintage mixture of New England incorruptability and good fellowship.”

Mr. Dellinger graduated magna cum laude from Yale in 1936 with a degree in economics. He received a fellowship that enabled him to attend Oxford, where his interest in pacifism deepened. Returning to the United States, he entered Union Theological Seminary in New York, intent on becoming a minister, though he never got around to choosing a denomination. In 1940, as war clouds gathered, the United States required men to register for the draft. Mr. Dellinger and seven other seminarians announced that they would refuse to do so, despite assurances that as candidates for the ministry they would not be inducted into the Army. He wrote that accepting such a de facto exemption would in Gandhian terms amount to complicity with violence.

Mr. Dellinger, who was president of his class at the seminary, was expelled with the other dissenters and denounced from the pulpit by prominent churchmen across the country for what they contended was his doubtful patriotism. Mr. Dellinger had been living in a black neighborhood in Newark with several other draft resisters. Mr. Dellinger was tried for draft evasion, convicted and sent to Danbury prison for a year. In 1943, with America at war, Mr. Dellinger returned to Newark and was again summoned to report for a preinduction physical examination. Again he refused to report. He was arrested and convicted of draft evasion and sent to Lewisburg, a maximum security prison, for two years.

In 1956 along with Mr. Muste and Dorothy Day, the Catholic anarchist, he founded Liberation, eventually becoming its editor and publisher. It was the escalating war in Vietnam that brought Mr. Dellinger into heightened prominence. In 1965, he helped to sponsor the first major antiwar demonstration in New York, which took place in October, involving liberal and radical groups. Mr. Dellinger, along with a few other opponents of the war, sent invitations to antiwar groups to join in another protest against the war during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968, focusing on what was anticipated as the renomination of President Johnson. Although Johnson declined to run again, groups massed in Chicago, where violent clashes with police led to the indictments of the Chicago Seven and Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers. For a while it was the Chicago 8, but Judge Hoffman had Mr. Seale removed from the trial and the courtroom after ordering him bound and gagged after he insisted that he was being denied his right to a lawyer of his own choice.

Even before the trial ended, Mr. Dellinger, who had earlier established close contacts in North Vietnam, flew to Hanoi in August 1969 to escort home three American servicemen who had been held as prisoners. He made a similar trip in 1972, and during much of the war he served as a conduit to North Vietnam, advising the Hanoi government which Americans should be permitted to visit there and making travel and visa arrangements. During the peace talks in Paris, he was a consultant to the North Vietnamese delegation.

In the 1970’s, Mr. Dellinger and his family moved to a house on a dirt road in Peacham, Vt., where he made what he described as a precarious living teaching in the adult education program at Vermont College in Burlington and writing. In addition to his autobiography, he wrote ”Revolutionary Nonviolence” (Anchor Books, 1971), ”More Power Than We Know” (Anchor Books, 1975) and ”Vietnam Revisited” (South End Press, 1986).  The dedication of this last one read, ”To all veterans of the Vietnam War; those who fought in it and those who fought against it.”

I’ve spent time the last couple of days making sense of what difference my contact, limited as it was, with David Dellinger has made to my life.  This is what I came up with:

I’ve noted how seldom in my life I have experienced affirming, loving connections with people and concluded it was too seldom.  If I had the chance to do it over, I would have made it a priority to seek out positive, uplifting contacts with other people.

Connecting with Dellinger has discouraged a simplistic us-them, good-guys/bad-guys mindset I can get into.  Understandably, particularly in recent years when my leaning-right views have solidified, I could write off Dellinger, a left-wing radical, as the other, them, the enemy.  Coming to know him, even indirectly through reading about him, while I don’t see him as a comrade in arms, still, he is basically us to me.  While I don’t agree with Dellinger in a lot of ways (which means in some ways I agree with him), I acknowledge that he wasn’t a fool or evil.  In racial terms, he was a White man and a good, laudable, one.  I was around Jerry Rubin when I was in California in the ‘70s working with George Leonard, a prominent figure in what was called the human potential movement.  Rubin was married to Leonard’s daughter at the time.    Little guy.  Bright.  Funny.  Well-intentioned.  Refreshingly candid (he wrote about his small penis).  He was Jewish, as was Leonard.  I liked and admired them both then and hold them in high esteem now.  Life is complicated, and I’ve concluded that I will do best by it if I ground myself in that complexity.

Looking into Dellinger’s life got me clearer on what I consider to be the measure of a man.  From an affluent background, educated at Yale and Oxford, Dellinger had every advantage, but he gave them up for principle and what he saw as justice, enduring financial hardship, prison terms, hunger strikes, physical assaults, and death threats for what he believed in.  I picked up on how others described Dellinger: “Sober, resolute, selfless, always brave.” “Hard-working, modestly gregarious, an absolutely devoted sense of how mission and detail interlock.”  “A gentle man of great courage and rare integrity.”  “He treated everyone with respect, including his adversaries.”  He affirmed a skittish and hurting actor thirty-five years ago who remembers it to this day.  Dellinger married a woman in 1942 and stuck with her through thick and thin until the end.  He was a devoted parent to his five children. In sum, Dellinger’s example keeps me from putting someone on a pedestal just because they have a  successful podcast, if you get my drift.

Engaging Dellinger’s outlook helped me get me out of my intellectual comfort zone.   Alain Benoist’s ideas are fine, don’t get me wrong.  But the Sermon on the Mount, which greatly influenced Dellinger, might have something important to say too.   Being encouraged to learn about Christian pacifism and secular anarchism and A.J. Muste and Dorothy Day has been healthy for me.

Looking into Dellinger’s life underscored that I can learn from those whom I consider to be on the other side of major issues   For example, he was very effective in organizing, direct action, and getting tangible things accomplished.   Especially with the 2006 biography, it was helpful to get a sense of how someone unfriendly to my outlook might see me.  In a 2018 article, I advised the reader (and myself) to

do less talking and more listening, including to people who disagree with you.   Hear them, see things from their side, see yourself from their perspective.  If somebody is accomplishing something you’d like to achieve—such as approval, encouragement, support, and good results—look into how they are doing it.⁴

Reading about Dellinger’s (sorry to report) intellectual narrowness, shallowness, and rigidity has invited me to think about my own tendencies in those directions.  He kept things at a superficial level—America is a racist, sexist, oppressive place, case closed—and ran with it, albeit effectively.   As far as I can tell, it never crossed his mind that Whites might have issues, that Jews and gentiles might be adversaries, or that problems might have individual as well as collective causes and solutions.  He remained entirely confident that he had things figured out; no need for self-analysis and self-criticism.  Observing Dellinger’s life has prompted me to be vigilant against thinking I’ve got everything wired.  With reference to the White racial movement, I questioned

the degree to which white racial activism links the wellbeing of Western culture and white people to certain immutable and unquestioned orthodoxies in religion, ideology, politics, sexuality and gender relations, art, lifestyle, work and leisure, and schooling.  Are we overly collectivist, authoritarian, male-dominated, closed-minded, hero-worshipping, exclusionary, and intolerant of anybody who is different from our central spokesmen?⁵

Reading Dellinger’s biography reminded me that this isn’t going to last.   Dellinger, so engaged with life, busy here, there, and everywhere, ended up in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s.   He’s gone, forever; eternity is a long time.   Life doesn’t end well.   I have one shot at getting whatever it is done—work, love, pleasure, responsibility to others—and the clock’s ticking.

---

Endnotes

1. Poseidon Press.
2. Robert S. Griffin, “Where is Calvin Coolidge When We Need Him?” The Occidental Observer, posted March 19, 2019.
3. New York University Press.
4. Robert S. Griffin, “Don’t Give People a Club to Hit You Over the Head With,” The Occidental Observer, posted March 11, 2018.
5. Robert S. Griffin “The White Racial Movement and Gays,” The Occidental Observer, posted May 20, 2018.

I’d like to introduce “Comrade Krieger,” a soldier who was deployed into Ukraine in the early days of the special operation. Comrade Krieger is, quite obviously, a nom de guerre of this young man. I spoke to him to get his account of what went down during the push to Kiev. He is currently not deployed and filling up on shashlik and Vitamin D at his dacha. Like many of the young men who actually serve Russia, he does not hail from a big city and his attitudes and beliefs are fairly consistent with what you would expect from young patriotic Russians in the hinterland. I’ve broken up his story into parts, and I’ve tweaked it here and there to make the story flow, while trying to translate the Russian tone as much as the actual Russian words used. Comrade Krieger is an unapologetic Russian nationalist patriot.

My name is Comrade Krieger, and I serve in the National Guard, the internal army as it were, and my story begins on the 12th February in Russia, when I was called up to take part in a military training exercise. These are fairly standard practice, and most of the time we get together to brush up on old skills and learn a few new tricks as well.

This time around, we spent our days learning how to set up field camps, doing routine ammo checks, cleaning our kits, “yes sir, no sir.” go over there and fetch that and come back — just getting into the rhythm of regular army life and that sort of thing.

But then, suddenly, we were told to load up the vehicles and to move out. Where to? We didn’t know, but we took it all in stride.

As we were driving along, we couldn’t help but notice that we’d crossed the border into Belarus. There was no checkpoint or anything, it was as smooth and easy as pulling into a parking lot, really. It was my first time in Belarus, and even if we hadn’t seen the sign, we certainly noticed that the weather was warmer, and everything was generally better maintained and cleaner.

At this point, no one had told us where we were going, but we had started to suspect that this wouldn’t be a routine drill when they started handing out real ammo. We stopped in a field somewhere in Belarus, near a large forest and set up camp. The OMON guys and the Chechens had already started fires and we followed suit, getting as comfy as we could. Our commander dropped a hint that things were about to get very interesting.

Night came and we finally got confirmation that at 5am the next day we were heading into Ukraine and that at 8pm we’d be in Kiev. We tried to sleep as best we could, but you know how that goes. Anyways, morning came and we got into our vehicles and rolled out.

We were supposed to cross some pontoon bridge along the border with Belarus and Ukraine, but it turned out that it was blown up before we got there, so we returned to camp and spent the day there. The next day, another attempt was made to cross a river, possibly the same one. We got into our vehicles as usual, but turned back halfway — the bridge had been blown up again. When we returned to camp, we were amused more than we were disgruntled or anything like that. Finally, the decision was made that we would simply cross at another point, across the land border. We re-entered our vehicles and set out and got about 100 kilometers behind us before we had a blowout.

We fixed the wheel soon enough and, finally, after many false starts, started our adventure in Ukraine.

I sat in the back and watched from the back window, where I saw a shot-up and abandoned car — one of ours — come into view. It turns out that the advance column had gotten hit by sniper fire and the driver of the vehicle had been killed. Shortly after, our commander decided to play it safe and told us to close up the windows. The car started getting incredibly hot and we started sweating and cooking in our seats. To make matters worse, because of all the false starts, we were now running low on water.

It was an armored car, by the way. I had trained in the Urals before, but this was a newer version – an Ural VV, 2019 model.

Soon after, our commander relented and the windows reopened just in time for us to see the first villages and towns, some which were on fire and a smattering of corpses along the road.

“How are you feeling?” I asked my friend sitting next to me.

“I’m a bit shook,” he replied. “And you?”

“Me, I’m not. I’m excited,” I replied and gave him a grin.

We pulled over to let some columns pass ahead of us because, technically, we weren’t supposed to be on the front lines. After all, we were just the National Guard. The rules of this special operation were a bit unclear, and no one seemed to understand how exactly this whole thing was supposed to work out. But that didn’t bother us much.

We ended up camping in the field for a few days where we had pulled over to let the column pass.

We found some water at a well, which was a relief and shared rumors that had passed up from the front from the people who had gone on ahead. The column that we had just seen had gotten shot up by 40mm guns (АГС) and those were the first losses from our side that I personally heard about.

We weren’t far from a village and as we began to dig in, we were given more equipment. I was given a sniper rifle and told to do my best with it.

I should probably say a few words about my kit at this point. I had a ВСС Винторез (VSS Vintorez):

And a СВД (Dragunov sniper rifle):

Also, I had a standard Ярыгина (MP-443 Grach):

I decided to get my sleeping bag and put it on the BTR as a cushion so that I could be comfy while also perched at a higher vantage point. But just as I finished setting up, the commander told us that we have to move out, and that people in black were seen nearby. The problem with this information was that we didn’t know what to make of it. See, our OMON guys also wear black. So no one knew who it was and the commander, after some deliberation, ordered a few of us to go out and to ask them, “hello, who are you?”

Our lads jogged off in the direction that the commander had indicated and then came hurrying back.

It wasn’t OMON. And it turns out that the Ukrainians had been sitting on the other side of the same village where we had made camp since we arrived — we simply hadn’t noticed one another. Both sides began firing at each other soon after. I ran to the BTR and got up on the side to get a view of the forest and the clearing. I couldn’t see anything, but the shooting continued. Eventually, I had to hop off as the BTR rolled out to take some shots at the men in black from the other side of the village.

I quickly realized that I had a slight problem to deal with. See, we had these regular, standard-issue helmets and I had a sniper rifle. That meant I couldn’t use the optics while wearing it because the visor got in the way. So, naturally, I took my helmet off and lowered my eye to the scope. My sergeant, who was running by my position saw this and ordered me to put my helmet back on immediately. I told him, “yes, sir,” but as soon as he had finished dressing me down I took it off again, and propped my gun on it.

Almost as soon as the shooting started, it came to a stop though. It was unclear what had happened, but new orders came through. We were told to move on to a new village, so we packed up and rolled out again. This time around, as soon as we reached the village, we began knocking on doors and asking the locals if they saw any soldiers in their village or nearby. They said no, and we left it at that. We didn’t bully or harass them in any way. Soon after, we left again.

Next, we rolled into a small town still further south. We were running low on supplies and so we went looking in the stores, but found that they were already thoroughly looted. There were no products left except frozen mush in the freezers that had spoiled. The town had lost its electricity and gas and the people were suffering from this worse than we were. Luckily, we found some potatoes and pickles and ate our fill.

We didn’t stay in the town and moved back into the fields. While we were setting up a camp, news filtered in that the forward columns had moved away to a different sector and that we were the only ones left in the area. To make matters worse, we were told that a counterattack was coming. We asked many questions, but got even fewer answers. One thing we did learn was that the counterattack was expected that night. So we dug in as fast as we could, and did the best we could with our defenses. Evening came and we sat in our foxholes and near our vehicles with our weapons ready, stressed out, sure that the fighting would start soon. Every second felt like the moment when the war would finally begin for us.

But we heard only silence and the regular noises of the field as the night dragged on.

Finally, the order was given to go check out what was going on in the forest near our position from which we expected the counter-attack to come and we rose to make our patrol. Just as we did so, the locals in the village about 300 meters away from us decided to launch some fireworks. We thought it was a signal to commence an attack and we rushed back to our positions and gripped our weapons tightly.

But nothing came.

We started to relax ever so slightly until we noticed a red glow coming from the village. “This is it,” I thought to myself and sweated some more. But it turned out that a fire had started in someone’s house. Possibly from the fireworks.

Another false start.

Some of the soldiers began to nod off, but then an explosion ripped through the night and we jolted back to readiness. “This time for sure,” I thought. But we got word that a boiler in that same village had exploded.

So again, nothing.

Night passed into morning and no counter-attack came. We sat in our positions, blinking and yawning and waited impatiently for new orders.