Commentary and Analysis: The Sines v. Kessler Lawfare Jury Verdict

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Court Room

As I stated in my November 19, 2021 article, in my view – what I think is the view of any impartial person – the Sines v. Kessler litigation is ideological lawfare. On November 24, 2021, the jury reached a verdict in that case. I now offer some initial thoughts about that verdict, with the caveat that many critical motions and rulings will likely be made in the next few weeks that could greatly affect the future path of the litigation.

Background. On October 11, 2017, 10 plaintiffs commenced the Sines v. Kessler litigation in federal court in Charlottesville against 25 defendants. On October 25, 2021, more than four years later – four years of expensive, time-consuming, stressful litigation – the case went to a jury.  By this time, there were nine plaintiffs and 17 defendants (eight had defaulted or never been served). The nine plaintiffs alleged six claims against all or a subset of the 17 defendants, namely two federal claims under the 1871 Civil Rights Act (42 U.S.C. Sections 1985(3) and 1986) for conspiracy to commit racial violence (all plaintiffs against all defendants); a claim under Virginia state law for civil conspiracy to violate numerous Virginia state laws (all plaintiffs against all defendants);  a claim under a Virginia statute prohibiting racial, religious, or ethnic harassment or violence (two plaintiffs against five defendants); and two claims, one for assault and the other for intentional infliction of emotional distress, brought by six plaintiffs against defendant James Fields. Plaintiffs sought both compensatory and punitive damages on all six of their claims and attorney fees on their two federal civil rights claims.

On the afternoon of November 24 – one day before Thanksgiving – the jury, consisting of four Black and eight White jurors, after deliberating for more than three days (and causing concerns of a jury deadlock), rendered its verdict. It did so by means of a problematic jury verdict form that bore a resemblance to a Rubik’s Cube. The jury deadlocked on the two federal civil rights claims and left those portions of the verdict form blank.  On the third claim, for civil conspiracy under Virginia law, the jury found against all 17 defendants. As to two of the plaintiffs, however – Elizabeth Sines and the Reverend Seth Wispelwey – the jury found no compensatory damages. As to the other seven, it found $1 each in compensatory damages. It then awarded $500,000 in punitive damages against each of the 12 individual defendants and $1,000,000 in punitive damages against each of the five organizational defendants.

On the fourth count, for racial or ethnic harassment, the jury found for the two plaintiffs, awarding each $250,000 in compensatory damages and imposing $200,000 in punitive damages against each of the five defendants. On the fifth and sixth claims against James Fields, the jury awarded compensatory damages to the six plaintiffs in various amounts ranging from $0 to $318,575 and imposed $6,000,000 in punitive damages against Fields on each count.

Analysis and Comment. Articles in the mainstream media describing the verdict – stating, for example, that the jury awarded $25 million in damages – while accurate in some respects are incomplete in others. In my judgment, there are several substantial grounds for reducing the verdict to a small fraction of the $25 million amount. These grounds include:

The Virginia Statutory Cap on Punitive Damages. Section 8.01-38.1. of the Virginia Code provides as follows:

In any action accruing on or after July 1, 1988, including an action for medical malpractice under Chapter 21.1 (§ 8.01-581.1 et seq.), the total amount awarded for punitive damages against all defendants found to be liable shall be determined by the trier of fact. In no event shall the total amount awarded for punitive damages exceed $350,000. The jury shall not be advised of the limitation prescribed by this section. However, if a jury returns a verdict for punitive damages in excess of the maximum amount specified in this section, the judge shall reduce the award and enter judgment for such damages in the maximum amount provided by this section.

By its plain language, the statute caps the plaintiffs’ punitive damages claims against all defendants at $350,000.  Application of this cap would leave the two $250,000 compensatory damages award in Count Four and the compensatory damages awards against Fields in Counts Five and Six, but would substantially reduce the total damages.  My research has not yet disclosed how the $350,000 in punitive damages would be allocated among the 17 defendants and nine plaintiffs, an important question the jury verdict form does not address.

Due Process Limitations. Federal and state constitutional due process restrictions impose significant limitations on punitive damages awards. More specifically, they impose several proportionality requirements.

The first is a reasonable ratio, consistent with the purpose of punitive damage awards, between actual and punitive damages. My far-from-exhaustive research indicates that in Virginia, as in federal courts and many other state jurisdictions subject to similar due process restraints, while there is no fixed ratio, ratios above 20X – 30X draw increased judicial scrutiny. The ratios on the jury’s Count Three award, however, are astronomic:  500,000,000 to one, if I’m counting my zeros right. Even if the punitive damages award was reduced to $350,000, the ratios would still be very high, depending on how the $350,000 was allocated between the different counts and defendants. So this proportionality rule could provide a strong basis for further reducing the punitive damages award, at least as to the third count.

The second proportionality requirement is a reasonable relationship between the punitive damages award and the reprehensibility of the defendants’ conduct. Application of this requirement to the jury’s award raises difficult and important First Amendment questions. What was “reprehensible” about the defendants’ conduct? As to the third count, in which the plaintiffs were awarded only $1 in compensatory damages (or none at all) and accordingly were found to have suffered no physical harm, the “reprehensibility” must have been entirely in the defendants’ message.  But our courts recite time and again that the First Amendment protects expression that others may find reprehensible. As Justice Holmes stated in his U.S. v. Schwimmer (1928) dissent, the core purpose of the First Amendment is to protect “freedom for the thought we hate.” So awarding large punitive damages – or any at all – based on the “reprehensibility” of the defendants’ message should offend a court’s constitutional sensibilities.

A third due process ratio is between the punitive damages award and the defendants’ ability to pay. The Supreme Court has made clear that punitive damages are allowed only to admonish and chastise wayward defendants, not destroy them. In this case, large punitive damage awards could cripple many if not all the defendants.

In summary, there are many grounds for challenging the punitive damages awards. These are in addition to many other possible grounds for overturning the verdict, including the court’s evidentiary rulings.

Procedural Issues. The jury’s deadlock on the first two counts creates considerable procedural complexity in moving the case forward. Post-judgment motions – such as a motion for remittitur to reduce the punitive damages award – can be filed only after entry of final judgment and no judgment can be entered on the jury’s verdict until all claims have been resolved unless the court so directs under Federal Rule 54(b). It is not clear whether the plaintiffs would agree to a Rule 54(b) motion requesting the court to enter judgment as to the four counts that the jury did decide.

What does seem likely is that the plaintiffs will seek to refile as to the two deadlocked counts, thereby, if they succeed, adding yet another lengthy and expensive chapter to this already brutal lawfare.

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Mnemosyne and Lethe; The Culture of Remembrance and Oblivion in the Western System

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Salvador Dalí. “The Persistence of Memory” (1931)

The Culture of remembrance shapes the political foundation of every state in the world. When addressing the culture of remembrance in Germany, what crosses one’s mind immediately is the Allied-prescribed collective memory for the German people installed at the end of World War II. The psychological roots of this post-war culture of remembrance and its significance for the Germans, as well as for other peoples in Europe, go back deep into their past. Why does the culture of remembrance, as opposed to the culture of oblivion, play such a prominent role in Germany, but also to a lesser extent in the whole of the West—as if the real course of world history must have started in the aftermath of 1945?

Memory and collective memory are the foundations of the identity formation process irrespective of our hatred or love toward our opinion makers or toward our politicians respectively, or, for that matter, irrespective of the prevailing zeitgeist. One must first clarify a few terms and sort out a few names from European mythology and history, and also place this subject into a larger historical and philosophical context. Inevitably, one is bound to attempt to rescue a few poets and thinkers.

In ancient Greek mythology Mnemosyne is the name of the memory goddess; she is the symbol of omniscience and all-knowledge. Without Mnemosyne there is no human life, no language, no culture, and without her, all people are doomed to vegetate like animals stripped of their memory. In contrast to the memory goddess Mnemosyne, the goddess Lethe is portrayed as a river of forgetfulness; that is, Lethe is the stream of oblivion flowing in the notorious underworld. He who dares drink from this river forgets his previous life, but also his worries and his weltschmerz, in the hope of attaining a relatively carefree life in the underworld, or reenact a new life on earth.[i] These two goddesses are often evoked by poets, and figuratively speaking by all of us on the daily basis when struggling to suppress or obliterate embarrassing past events, including those of a political nature. Alongside, we yearn to resuscitate our beautiful memories, or better yet revive the moments of our past bliss.

There are, however, differences between individual and collective memories. Collective memories, which are usually administered on memorial days or public commemorations, or other public events, are always politically supervisedFor example, countless days of collective remembrance honoring the victims of fascism or colonialism in countries of the former communist Eastern bloc turned into political spectacles—but of a transitory nature. The day after, most of those memorial days were either collectively forgotten or were met with general disinterest. Thereafter, citizens of former East Germany or former Yugoslavia made jokes behind closed doors about those communist spectacles and their organizers. One can recall gigantic memorial events in former East Germany or in former Yugoslavia held in honor of the fallen Soviet soldiers or communist partisans in World War II. Of course, public commemorations for the victims of communism were not allowed; nameless victims of communism were shoved into the culture of oblivion. In the official communist culture of remembrance there could be no victims of communism at all, given that the terms “victim” and “memory” were only applied to selected communist heroes. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, as well as in the wake of the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991, communist memorial events had to be remodeled and replaced with new memorial words, with former communist self-promoters having to adapt themselves to the liberal zeitgeist. At these new commemorative events former communist symbolism is being replaced now by a liberal verbiage and iconography. Little has changed, however, as far as antifascist content is concerned. Incidentally, the days of collective commemoration for the victims of fascism and especially the homage to the Holocaust victims make up the foundation of the international law in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and in America.

Remembering the wishful thinking

Our individual remembrance, on the other hand, especially if it brings forth images of past happy encounters or joyful moments from good old or ancient times, often functions as a pipe dream, whereby we nostalgically project those past blissful images into the present, or the near future in the hope of having them relived one more time. Every wishful thinking, however, is a logical consequence of a disfigured memory. One can recall here the words by the poet Hölderlin in his poem “Mnemosyne,” in which he expresses his longing for the rebirth of mythical times:

And there’s a law,
That things crawl off in the manner of snakes,
Prophetically, dreaming on the hills of heaven.
And there is much that needs to be retained,
Like a load of wood on the shoulders.
But the pathways are dangerous.[ii]

To each of us his own memories, to each of others also his interpretation of his memories. My interpretation of my memories of my past encounters are differently crafted than those composed by the individuals who shared those previous encounters. Even unimaginative people have a need for imaginary memories often bordering on reality-denying wishful thinking. The contrast between reality and wishful thinking, however, plays a special role in individual memories, because wishful thinking often borders on self-deception. In order to better illustrate wishful thinking, one could enumerate countless German poets and especially German Dark Romanticists describing their memories that usually lead up to catastrophes, suicide or deaths.

Great disappointments in particular arise with memories relating to political views. Many of us know colleagues who are astute critics of the System, but whose alternative dreams about the future of Europe or the US are based on unreal judgments. Whenever we make reference to political dreams, what comes to mind is the symbolism in the novella An Incident at the Owl Creek Bridge by the American writer Ambrose Bierce.[iii] The main character is a Southern local politician who has been captured and sentenced to death in the midst of the American Civil War. He is already swinging on the gallows yet imagining how he has cleverly escaped the noose of his Yankee executioners, while at the same time relishing his return to his family within his self-overstretched timespan. The desire for his doppelganger who could trade places was a great illusion though. He was already dead and gone.

The difference between individual and collective memory is glaring. Our individual memories, even if they are not generated by a power politician, can also turn into a nightmare. Each memory, regardless of whether it is individual or collective, harbors the risk of playing itself out in a subjective notion of time extension. Mulling over those happy moments from the past devours more time than the actual timespan that it took to live those happy moments. Worse, mulling over happy moments can transform itself into the sense of a distorted self which longs for world improvement. Conversely, we also crave to ditch some of our bad memories, especially if they remind us in hindsight of our past grotesque behavior or our previous awkward encounters, or of our former political lifestyles. Ernst Jünger vividly describes the sense of the overstretched time resulting from ceaselessly pondering our memories.

Collective memory, or a memory imposed by a government or a tyrant easily generates mass psychosis, as we are experiencing today with state-decreed Covid regulations. Incidentally, one could also note a series of political-historical commemorations in the EU and America in favor of non-European migrants and their colonized history. German politicians on such occasions like to posture as role models for a self-induced wrongdoing nation (“Tätervolk”)—a nation that is expected to carry out in public and for all eternity the remembrance rituals on behalf of victims of fascism. This overkill in the German compulsion to cozy up to foreigners is very old, having its roots in the politics of self-denial extending deep into the hundreds of years of stateless German history. Erwin Stransky, a German thinker and neurologist of Jewish descent and very friendly to Germans, noticed shortly after the end of the First World War, that is, way before the post-World War II Allied brainwashing and liberal-communist re-education started. He noted how the Germans like raving about aliens and “that nowhere is it easier than in Germany to lure and confuse the spirits with cleverly “launched” pseudo-scientific or pseudo-legal catchphrases.” [iv] Such a disfigured memory has now become a hallmark of all Western peoples.

PART II

Getting high on oblivion

Where does the culture of oblivion stand? Collective forgetting is often encouraged by EU and US politicians and the media, especially in relation to millions of unknown victims of communism or countless victims of the World War II Allied aerial terror bombing. Over decades those victims have only featured as footnotes in Western media. Even more grotesque is the craving for oblivion by many US and EU establishment intellectuals and politicians with regard to the outdatedness of their former political views—views to which they were ardent standard bearers not long ago. This is the case with ex-Marxist intellectuals in the aftermath of the breakdown of their Marxist mystique. The majority of these people have by now completely switched to the capitalist free market ideology.

Sleep is an expedient tool to self-oblivion and above all it helps a lot in fighting bad memories. Dreamless sleep is the best way to pull oneself out of bad memories. Shakespeare’s protagonists often talk of sleep as the best method of salvation, whereby a good night’s sleep of a political prisoner brings more happiness than sleepless and memorable days of a tyrant. The life-weary Hamlet, always betrayed and duped by his royal family, speaks to himself:

To sleep! perchance to dream; ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time[v]

The powerful ruler King Henry IV in another Shakespeare’s drama praises even more the salvation of a gentle sleep:

How many thousand of my poorest subjects
Are at this hour asleep! O sleep, O gentle sleep,
Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down
And steep my senses in forgetfulness?[vi]

In addition to sleep, there are more vivid methods for harnessing the forgetting process and rid oneself of bad memories, or at least temporarily keeping them under control. The age-old remedy is alcohol, or better yet the drug opium, which slows down the flow of time and keeps embarrassing memories in check. Once again, one must refer to Ernst Jünger, who was not only the best observer of our end times, but also the best German connoisseur of numerous narcotics. Jünger was a refined gentleman who dealt a lot with the intake of “acid”—LSD—in order to better circumnavigate the acidic liberal-communist walls of time. In addition, Jünger was good friends with the discoverer of LSD, Dr. Albert Hoffmann. Both lived for more than one hundred years. “Acid is great!”—so would say his disciples addicted to his name.

Under the influence of narcotics time slows down. The river flows more gently; the banks recede. Time becomes boundless; it turns into a sea.[vii]

One must be cautious though with drug trips, as there is always a risk of forgetting one’s fate.[viii] Homer’s Odysseus faced this danger with his sailors on his way back home. After their long sea-wandering, one day they all ended up in the land of the lotus eaters—men who indulged in eating lotus drug, thereby acquiring the skills to rid themselves of their memories and all accompanying worries. Odysseus had a lot of trouble getting his intoxicated, memoryless comrades back on board.[ix] In fact, those mythical lotus eaters that Odysseus met are a primeval image of contemporary citizens in Germany, the EU and the USA. No more need for the System to fabricate martyrs, as was the case under communism; the System knows how to use far more elegant methods in enforcing the general will through forced mass oblivion. In Georgia, in the Caucasus, where the tyrant Stalin was born, there is fertile soil good for cannabis growth. Instead of the Gulags in Siberia, Stalin could have had more success in setting up marijuana fields in the former Soviet Union.

Later on, Odysseus ends up at the premises of the witch goddess Circe—the goddess whose powers turned his stranded sailors into pigs. These new swinish creatures, albeit endowed with human understanding, no longer complain about their new life. Quite the contrary. The process of forgetting can be good.[x] In such an oblivion-prone environment Nietzsche’s famous words sound pretty much out of date: “Blessed are the forgetful; for they get over their stupidities, too.” Remembering a previous life on Earth can be hell for many people. The System, with its world-improving tales now uses similar Homeric pig-transformation methods of mass dumbing down, promising the birth of La La Land, yet putting it off again and again until the indefinite future when all evil has been expunged. In addition, the System employs refined techniques to keep its citizens under control, either through forced forgetting or selective memorization.

And that’s nothing new in history. Damnatio memoriae or damnation of memory was a common process in ancient Rome against despicable, albeit deceased politicians. Few are those who have the courage to attack living tyrants. The same process of cursing the memory of modern heretics or dissenters continues to rage in full force in modern Germany, the US and the EU. What is new, however, is the rise in self-censorship and self-policing of the vast majority of politicians, but also of the majority of establishment academics. Censorship has always been part of state-imposed collective forgetting, having been around since ancient times. In the contemporary West, however, self-censorship means self-denial, whereby even intelligent people at some point in their career decide on relinquishing their selves. The German poet and medical doctor Gottfried Benn, along with many other European thinkers who managed to survive the Allied terror bombing and purges during and after World War II, wrote in his poem “The Lost Self” of the individual lost in time and space, without direction or values.

Lost I – blasted apart by stratospheres,
victim of ion -: gamma-ray lamb –
particle and field -: chimeras and infinity
on your great stone of Notre- Dame.[xi]

Self-Censorship and Self-Denial

It is worth remembering the much-lauded German philologist and academic, professor Harald Weinrich, who is often quoted by the System-friendly media and who has written a good book on the culture of forgetting and remembrance in European literature. As with countless establishment academics, however, he is mandated to occasionally perform atonement rites. This strikes the eye in Chapter IX of his much-championed book Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting where he chimes in on the perpetual Auschwitz remembrance. “Forgetting is no longer allowed here. There can’t be an art of forgetting here either and there should be none.” [xii] In his remarks for the media, he goes on with his virtue-signaling statements: “I can therefore only wholeheartedly agree that there should be an absolute ban on forgetting genocide.”[xiii]

Such Canossa-like confessions of guilt are today part of the political folklore in Germany. Not a word from Weinrich and other antifa fellow travelers about the forced forgetting imposed by the System in regard to millions of hunted down Germans, Croats, and other Eastern Europeans after the victorious march of the Allies in 1945. Weinrich and many of his kindred spirits, with their newly acquired religion of remembrance, fit into Nietzsche’s hyper-moralistic archetype, “where this man of bad conscience has seized on religious presupposition in order to provide his self-torture with its most horrific hardness and sharpness.”[xiv] Weinrich is only a tiny example of the majority of EU whipping-boy academics all vying for a glitzy media-academic visibility through their self-flagellation and self-denial. Long ago the allegory of this German spiritual self-emasculation was described by the German poet and painter Wilhelm Busch in his sarcastic story about Saint Anthony. The ever-repentant Saint Anthony, the great animal lover, decides to get engaged to a pig, presumably in order to better insure his transgender zoophile ascension to heaven for all eternity:

Welcome! Enter in peace!
No friend is divorced from friend here. Quite a
few sheep come in,
why not a good pig too!! [xv]

Several authors have written critically about distorted historical awareness and a selective memory process of Whites. It appears that the more one talks today about the need to remember the victims of fascism, the more these regurgitated antifascist memories turn into objects of incredulity and mass ridicule. Meanwhile, the memory of millions of victims of communism is being relegated to the realm of oblivion. Remembering the fate of expelled and killed German civilians after World War II is gradually becoming of antiquarian-archival interest only, and then only sporadically. The German, US and EU media, including the establishment historians and politicians, if and when narrating communist killing fields are extremely careful never to overshadow the memory of the Holocaust body count. For example, the Croatian post-World War II catastrophe with its hundreds of thousands of dead, known among nationalist-minded Croats as the “Bleiburg tragedy” is hardly ever referred to as part Western collective memory.[xvi] On the other hand, the overbidding in antifascist, Jewish and anti-colonial memories, where the proverbial “bad German” always features on the front stage, plays the central role in international law. Sporadic anticommunist memories that are somewhat in line with the System-sponsored memorial festivities are being downgraded to semi-mythological and folkloric events that can be observed every once in a while in today’s Eastern Europe.

Just as there are differences among the living, there must be differences among the dead. The question arises as to whether the System and its post-communist and liberal offshoots in Germany, the EU, and the US can survive at all without calling to rescue the memories of the “fascist beasts”? Without conjuring up household demons such as Ante Pavelic, Francisco Franco, Vidkun Quisling, etc.? And without constantly recalling Adolf Hitler, the timeless cosmic demon? Today’s prime time culture of remembrance, i.e., the fate of Jews in World War II, long ago morphed into the act of a religious psychodrama going far beyond historical remembrance. In addition to that, many non-European peoples are also now passionately scrambling for their own victimhood pedestal in order to highlight it as the only one worthy of world remembrance. Here we can refer to A. de Benoist’s quotation:

The favorite tool of victimhood overkill is “duty to remember”. Memory is inscribed against a background of oblivion, because one can only remember by selecting what should not be forgotten. (Such a task would be meaningless if we had to remember everything). Memory is therefore highly selective. … One of the highlights of the “duty to remember” means that there is no statute of limitations for “crime against humanity” — a notion which is likewise devoid of meaning. Strictly speaking only an extraterrestrial could commit a crime against humanity (By the way, the perpetrators of such crimes are usually depicted in the metaphorical sense as “extraterrestrials”.) — and in complete contradiction to the European cultural tradition, which by granting amnesty provides the judicial form of oblivion. [xvii]

One has to recall Nietzsche’s critical words here, when he writes about the overkill of our “monumental” and “antiquarian” memories: “The surfeit of history of an age seems to me hostile and dangerous to life….”[xviii] Nietzsche’s warning, however, applies today to all European peoples and their respective victimologies, be they of antiquarian or monumental nature. To what degree should Europeans, and especially the German people, stretch their historical memories? Up to the massacre of the Saxons at Verden in AD 782, or up to the millions of dead in the Thirty Years’ War, or up to the millions of ethnic Germans and Eastern Europeans killed in the aftermath of World War II? Mulling over the opposing memories is becoming pointless today. With or without their forgotten and resurrected dead, the whole of the German-EU-US System resembles a large, outdated, multicultural antiquarian bookshop where fake sorcerer’s apprentices keep lecturing on selective and fake memories.

NOTES:

[i] T. Sunic, Titans are in Town(A Novella andAccompanying Essays), preface by Kevin MacDonald (London, Budapest: Arktos, 2017).

[ii] Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected and translated by James Mitchell; bilingual, in German and English (San Francisco: Ithuriel’s Spear, 2007), p. 95.

[iii] Ambrose Bierce, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and other stories –Ein Vorfall an der Eulenfluß-Brücke und andere Erzählungen) (edited by Angela Uthe-Spencker), (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag,bilingual 1980).

[iv] Erwin Stransky, Der Deutschenhass (Wien und Leipzig: F. Deuticke Verlag, 1919), p. 71

[v] William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Act III, Sc 1)(Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1877) p. 210-211.

[vi] Dramatic Writings of Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2, Act III, Sc. I, London: ed. John BellBritish Library, 1788), p.60.

[vii]Ernst Jünger, Annäherungen: Drogen und Rausch (München: DTV Klett-Cotta, 1990), p. 37.

[viii] Cf. Tomislav Sunic, „Rechter Rausch; Drogen und Demokratie“, Neue Ordnung (Graz, IV/2003).

[ix] The Oddyssey of HomeBook IX,with explanatory notes by T.A. Buckley, (London: George Bell and Sons, 1891). p. 118.

[x] Ibid.,Book X, pp. 137-146. Harald Weinrich, Lethe-Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens, (München: Verlag C.H Beck, 1997), p. 230

[xi] Gottfried Benn, „Das verlorene Ich“, Statische Gedichte (Hamburg: Luchterhand Ver., 1991), p. 48. Also translated intoEnglish by Mark W. Roche: https://mroche.nd.edu/assets/286548/roche_benn_verlorenes_ich_english.pdf

[xii] Harald Weinrich, Lethe-Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens (München: Verlag C.H Beck, 1997), p. 230.

Cf. Lethe, The Art and Critique of Forgetting (Cornell University Press, 2004).

[xiii] H. Weinrich, „Bayerischer Rundfunk“ progam April 4, 1999.

https://www.br.de/fernsehen/ard-alpha/sendungen/alpha-forum/harald-weinrich-gespraech100~attachment.pdf?

[xiv]Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, Second Essay, Section 22. Transl. by Carol Diethe (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 63.

[xv] See the whole German text, Wilhelm Busch, Der Heilige Antonius von Padua, (Straßburg; Verlag von Moritz Schauenburg, no date), p. 72. Also parts in English: https://second.wiki/wiki/der_heilige_antonius_von_padua#:~:text=Saint%20Anthony%20of%20Padua%20is,anti%2Dclerical%20attitude%20Wilhelm%20Buschs.

[xvi] Cf. T. Sunic, „Es leben meine Toten! – Die Antifa-Dämonologie und die kroatische Opferlehre“.Neue Ordnung (Graz, I/2015).

[xvii] Alain de Benoist, Les Démons du Bien (Paris: éd. P. Guillaume de Roux, 2013), p. 34-35.

[xviii] F. Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, Section 5, transl. by P. Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1980), p. 28.

A verdade sobre o discurso de ódio

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Uma lei contra o ódio antijudeu marca, geralmente, o começo do fim para os judeus.
(JOSEPH GOEBBELS. In: Diary — 19ABR1943) [1]

A palavra “Ódio” é uma palavra tão feia! E seu uso revela certa infantilidade. Ela evoca a imagem estereotipada de uma menininha de oito anos que briga com a coleguinha e diz para esta: “Eu não gosto de você, feia!”. Mais comumente, o termo conota pouca seriedade, quando alguém, por exemplo, diz “Eu odeio o Fluminense” ou “Eu odeio brócolis” etc. Tarefas desagradáveis também ensejam seu emprego, como em “Eu odeio limpar o banheiro”. E o préstimo do vocábulo “Ódio” pode vir de seu estimado efeito retórico. Mas seu uso na expressão “discurso de ódio” é uma bobice, uma infantilidade, e tal expressão não tem sentido formal. Nós podemos não gostar de alguém ou de algum grupo, podemos sentir repulsa de pessoas ou categoria de pessoas, podemos desejar manter distância deste ou daqueles de quem desgostamos. Mas, odiar? Ora, seriamente falando, que pessoa madura diria hoje, aberta e ansiosamente, a frase “Eu odeio você!” para alguém? Só gente muito insegura ou perturbada faria uma coisa dessas. Esse seria sinal de fraqueza.

E, no entanto, o ódio parece ser o éthos do momento. Mais especificamente, estamos como que presos numa câmara de ressonância onde a mídia de massa reverbera ad nauseam histórias sobre os “discursos de ódio”. A julgar pelas manchetes e pelo que dizem os comentaristas progressistas, o discurso de ódio poderia ser considerado o mais grave perigo da atualidade, a par do racismo e da famosa “supremacia branca”. Tratar-se-ia de ameaça mais séria do que a corrupção política, o terrorismo internacional, a pandemia, a instabilidade financeira, a degradação ambiental, a superpopulação ou o descontrole da tecnologia industrial. A maioria dos países europeus já adota medidas legais contra várias formas de discurso de ódio, ainda que incertamente definidos, bem assim o Canadá e a Austrália. Até mesmo nos Estados Unidos cresce a pressão para a adoção de sanções nesse mesmo sentido, não obstante a Primeira Emenda.

Eu tenho com toda essa questão um envolvimento muito pessoal. Muitos sabem que venho escrevendo de forma incisiva contra os judeus e outras minorias. Não é segredo que para mim o melhor é viver numa comunidade branca em uma nação branca. Eu não sinto nenhuma necessidade de me desculpar por nada disso. E, por isso mesmo, algumas pessoas acham que devem me chamar de “odiento”. Elas dizem: “Dalton odeia os judeus”, “Dalton odeia os pretos”, “Dalton odeia os latinos”… mas não é nada disso. Eu quero declarar, para deixar registrado aqui, que nada está mais longe da verdade do que isso que falam de mim. Eu não odeio ninguém. Eu posso não gostar de alguns tipos de gente, eu posso considerar que certas categorias sociais compõem-se de elementos de má índole e mau comportamento. Então, como é natural, vem-me o desejo de estar longe deles e de que sejam punidos; mas isso não quer dizer que eu sinta ódio deles.

Nestes nossos dias, as leis dispondo sobre “crimes de ódio” e “discursos de ódio” abundam. Eis por que isso tudo está a exigir explicação. Examinemos, pois, com mais vagar, essa questão.

Como recomenda a lógica, devemos começar por conhecer o objeto de nossa discussão. O que, exatamente, significa “odiar” [to “hate”]? A etimologia da palavra [inglesa] remonta a tempos muito antigos. Ela deriva do indo-europeu Kədes, por via do grego Kedos. Originalmente, e isso surpreende, significava apenas “sentimentos fortes”, mas de forma neutra, ou seja, sem conotação negativa. Com efeito, a palavra do irlandês antigo Caiss reúne o duplo sentido de amor e ódio. Mas o significado negativo emerge com o germânico Khatis (depois, Hass), daí o alemão Haat, que eventualmente derivou para o inglês Hate.

Nos dicionários, a definição mais consagrada é esta: “Intenso ou extremo desprazer, aversão ou hostilidade para com alguém ou alguma coisa”. Assim, a palavra tem conteúdo quase inócuo; eu posso odiar meu emprego, posso odiar aspargo ou o meu chefe. Mas o fulcro da questão não é esse. Estamos mais preocupados com o ódio enquanto mentalidade, especialmente quando orientado a grupos sociais ou orientado, cada vez mais, a certas ideologias privilegiadas.

Depara-se-nos nesta altura, entretanto, sério problema: o ódio é sentimento, e sentimentos são subjetivos, indelevelmente. Ora, qualquer coisa subjetiva não pode ser quantificada de forma objetiva. Ninguém pode dizer, com certeza, que “Dalton odeia X”. Só eu posso dizer “Eu odeio X”, precisamente porque eu estaria falando de mim mesmo, de sentimento meu. Se há alguma coisa de que não abro mão, é o princípio da minha absoluta soberania sobre os meus próprios sentimentos. Ninguém nunca irá me obrigar a sentir desta ou daquela forma alguém ou alguma coisa.

E mesmo se eu disser “Eu odeio X”, como poderia alguém saber se realmente sinto o ódio? Ninguém pode. Eu poderia estar sendo sarcástico, estar brincando ou fazendo uma provocação. Ninguém saberá meu sentimento real, a não ser eu mesmo — porque se trata de meu sentimento. Ninguém saberia do meu sentir, se verdadeiro ou fingido. (E será que isso teria importância?)

Conforme venho tentando demonstrar, o ódio desaparece na turvação da subjetividade, completamente inacessível aos outros, e não pode ser quantificado ou objetivado, razão por que não se pode assentar nele nenhuma tipificação penal — pelo menos nos processos com trâmite no tribunal da razão. Donde o correspondente conceito de “discurso de ódio”, visto como expressão do ódio, desmilinguir-se na transparência do ar iluminado pelo Sol da lógica. Tal conceito, do ponto de vista técnico, é incoerente, não serve de base para o direito. O que, como se sabe, não impede legisladores corruptos no mundo todo de reprimir a liberdade de expressão a pretexto de combater o “discurso de ódio”.

Os doutores da lei aplicam a mordaça por muitas e diferentes razões. Isto, eu explicarei a seguir.

Então, vejamos como eles tentam definir o indefinível. Aqui está uma interessante “definição” do discurso de ódio no Cambridge Dictionary: “[Discurso de ódio] é um discurso público que expressa ódio ou incentiva a violência contra pessoa ou grupo com base em alguma coisa como raça, religião, sexo ou orientação sexual”.

Essa aí é uma definição das mais problemáticas sob muitos aspectos.

Primeiro: quão público é o “público”? Se eu conversar com o meu vizinho, nossa comunicação é pública? Se eu me manifestar num locutório privado do ciberespaço, minha expressão será pública? E se eu conversar em voz alta com um amigo num xópin? E se uma mensagem minha de correio eletrônico para um colega for repostada num blogue? Uma correspondência dirigida a mais de meia dúzia de contatos deixa de ser inviolável? O princípio da inviolabilidade da correspondência só se aplica a mensagens escritas em papel? Questionamentos não faltam.

Segundo: a definição envolve as noções de “expressão de ódio” e “incitação à violência”. Estas são duas coisas completamente diferentes. “Expressão de ódio” é, como eu disse, uma expressão que não expressa nada, falta-lhe qualquer sentido funcional. O que transforma uma expressão qualquer numa “expressão de ódio”? Presumidamente, se eu digo “Eu odeio X”, esta frase indicaria ódio. Mas, o que mais? A frase “Eu, realmente, mas realmente mesmo, de verdade, não gosto de X” indicaria ódio? E que tal “Eu adoraria ver o cadáver de X”? E se eu desejasse que X ficasse gravemente doente, haveria ódio em meu coração? Se afirmo que “X é um escroto”, dou sinal de odiar? Tais questões mostram os problemas da pouca consistência da definição. A “incitação à violência” é noção pouco menos ambígua, mas ainda problemática. Quem poderia, por exemplo, julgar do propósito de “incitação”? Este é outro termo altamente subjetivo. E quanta violência seria necessário incitar para a tipificação do “crime”? Um bom safanão seria violento? Uma torta na cara? Uma rasteira em alguém? Causar “desconforto emocional” é violência? E o que dizer de um calote?

Terceiro: a definição não se refere à violência em si mesma, mas à violência “com base em alguma coisa como raça, religião, sexo ou orientação sexual”. Isto é muito estranho. O que a expressão “alguma coisa como” significa aí? Os critérios de qualificação são geralmente considerados imanentes à pessoa ou ao grupo (raça, gênero) — mas a religião e a orientação sexual podem mudar da noite para o dia, não são “coisas”, elementos materiais permanentes. Por isso, as qualidades levadas em conta não precisam ser intrínsecas, como seria o caso de marcas antropofísicas. Então, qual seria, precisamente, esse critério misterioso, essa “alguma coisa” tão crucial para toda a definição?

A questão aqui é que a noção de “discurso de ódio” dissolve-se completamente no vazio da subjetividade, assim como o próprio “ódio”. Em termos objetivos, não há sentido nisso aí. Assim, como tal conceito serviria de objeto sobre o qual aplicar a força da lei?

O figurino da ONU

Como se já não tivesse muito com que se ocupar na gestão do caos no mundo, a ONU agora diz estar “preocupadíssima” com a reiteração, que se vai ampliando, do discurso de ódio em todo o mundo. Recentemente, em maio de 2019, a ONU emitiu uma curta declaração intitulada “Estratégia e plano de ação contra o discurso de ódio.” Na tal declaração, consta a seguinte passagem:

Não existe definição internacional legal para o discurso de ódio, e sua discussão não é tranquila: a caracterização do que seja o “odiento” sofre contestação. Neste documento, a expressão “discurso de ódio” é entendida como qualquer tipo de comunicação verbal, textual ou comportamental que ataca ou emprega linguagem pejorativa ou discriminatória em referência a uma pessoa ou a um grupo, por causa do que é essa pessoa ou grupo — em outras palavras, por causa de sua religião, etnicidade, nacionalidade, raça, cor, descendência, seu gênero ou outro fator identitário. Isto tem por causa e consequência a intolerância e o ódio, podendo ser divisivo e aviltante em certos contextos.

As frases-chaves a considerar aí: “sua discussão não é tranquila” e “a caracterização do que seja ‘odiento’ sofre contestação” (obviamente); “qualquer tipo de comunicação verbal” (muito ampla); “pejorativa ou discriminatória” (altamente pejorativa e indefinida; e “por causa do que é essa pessoa ou grupo” (fatores intrínsecos na maioria, com exceção da nacionalidade e da religião).

A seguir topamos com este parágrafo de “explicação”:

Em vez de proibir o discurso de ódio em si mesmo, o direito internacional proíbe o incitamento à discriminação, à hostilidade e à violência. O incitamento é um tipo de discurso muito perigoso, porque ele, explícita e deliberadamente, tem por fim desatar a discriminação, a hostilidade e a violência, o que pode dar lugar ao terrorismo e a quaisquer atrocidades. O discurso de ódio que não chega ao limiar do incitamento não é alguma coisa cuja proibição o direito internacional possa requerer dos Estados.

Assim, o discurso de ódio por si só não deve ser proibido, mas sim um tipo especial de discurso de ódio: aquele que incita a violência. Em outras palavras, o que aí vai dito, aparentemente, é que a repressão só se deve abater sobre o pior do pior. Essa tese, eles iriam desenvolver e explicar pouco tempo depois.

Também é de notar que o prefácio da declaração revela a motivação profunda por trás dela. Logo no primeiro parágrafo constam referências ao “antissemitismo”, aos “neonazistas” e à tenebrosa “supremacia branca”. Essas expressões estão sempre presentes em qualquer discussão sobre o discurso de ódio, o que é estranho. Voltaremos a essa questão mais abaixo.

Mas a ONU, insatisfeita com essa declaração muito curtinha, publicou documento mais alentado, a “orientação detalhada”, de 52 páginas, com o mesmo título da declaração anterior. Na nova “orientação”, eles estabelecem três níveis de gravidade, ou seja, três tipos de discursos de ódio. Tais tipos distribuem-se numa “escala” decrescente da “quantidade” de ódio que “irradiam”, indo do tipo 1 ao tipo 3.

Então, a gradação fica sendo a seguinte: tipo 1: o pior tipo, implica “incitamento direto e público à violência” (incluindo o genocídio); tipo 2: de gravidade intermediária, consiste na zona cinzenta dos discursos de ódio, devendo ser reprimido “na medida do necessário e de forma proporcionada” com base em “objetivos legítimos”; tipo 3: um discurso sem restrição, livre porque legalmente lícito, mas pode ser “ofensivo, chocante ou perturbador”.

O tipo 1 dos discursos de ódio, no nível 1, o nível máximo de ódio (“incitação”), tem por base as condições seguintes, que também o determinam:

1. o contexto social e político;
2. o status do manifestante;
3. a intenção do manifestante;
4. a forma e o conteúdo do discurso;
5. o alcance da difusão;
6. o potencial ofensivo.

Para sua caracterização como de nível 1, o discurso de ódio deve atender a essa meia dúzia de quesitos. No seu conjunto, esses tópicos indicam relações sociopolíticas fortemente tensionadas, um manifestante de posição importante e influente na sociedade, com má intenção e estilo provocativo, dispondo de grande audiência e razoável capacidade de causar agravo. De novo, a identificação de um discurso de ódio de nível 1 deve apontar nele essas seis marcas. Os níveis 2 e 3 podem ter algumas das marcas ou nenhuma delas. Os seis critérios constam as páginas 17 e 18 da tal “orientação detalhada”.

Depara-se-nos ainda esta interessante admissão: “Os termos ‘ódio’ e ‘hostilidade’ devem ser entendidos como referentes a emoções intensas e irracionais de opróbrio, inimizade e antipatia para com o grupo-alvo” (p. 13). Ah, que grande alívio! Isso quer dizer que nenhum antagonismo a judeus ou outras minorias, desde que racional e não emocional (isto é, baseada em fatos) conta como discurso de ódio. Por conseguinte, nenhum estudioso, acadêmico ou qualquer pesquisador sério que disserte fundamentado em fatos, baseado em história, apoiado em inferências plausíveis pode ser acusado, sob nenhuma circunstância, de envolvimento com discursos de ódio. Eu estou salvo! Esta é uma grande brecha que os censores ideológicos não perceberam. Devemos ser capazes de usar essa ambiguidade em nosso favor.

Nós (alguns de nós, pelo menos) encontramos ainda mais alívio na página onde é dito que o discurso de ódio do tipo 3 (permitido) inclui não só manifestações “ofensivas, chocantes ou perturbadoras”, mas também compreende “a negação de eventos históricos, incluindo crimes de genocídio ou crimes contra a humanidade”. Segundo a ONU, a assim chamada negação do holocausto é um tipo de discurso de ódio admissível ou, pelo menos, não punível.[2] E na figura 4 [p. 15], eles vão ainda além, afirmando que o ódio do tipo 3 “deve ser protegido” como forma de liberdade de expressão. Essa é uma notável concessão. Ah, mas existe uma pegadinha: “a menos que tal forma de expressão também constitua incitação a hostilidade, discriminação ou violência nos termos do artigo 20 (2) da International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights”. Este documento, escrito em 1966 e vigente desde 1976, traz estas palavras no artigo 20: “Qualquer apoio público ao ódio nacional, racial ou religioso, implicando incitação a discriminação, hostilidade ou violência, deve ser proibido pela lei”. Então, parece que, por exemplo, discutir a “negação” do Holocausto (seja lá o que for isso) não seja proibido, contanto que se evite qualquer tipo de “incitação”. Assim, pois, poder-se-ia questionar a veracidade historiográfica do Holocausto sem nenhum problema, mas a expressão de opinião sobre esse delicado assunto exige muita cautela. Com efeito, não se pode cometer a indiscrição de falar daqueles que hoje promovem, exploram e lucram com a história convencional do Holocausto.

“Tudo tem a ver com os judeus, sempre!”

Ataquemos agora o busílis da questão. A hipótese de trabalho que proponho é esta: o discurso de ódio é uma criação de judeus que trata de judeus e serve a judeus. (Ai, ai, ai… será que serei denunciado?) O mesmo é dizer que as leis relativas ao discurso de ódio foram forjadas e promovidas por judeus, sobretudo para o próprio bem deles. Eu vou além: sustento que os judeus são os maiores professores e praticantes do ódio já vistos na história do mundo e que eles, melhor do que qualquer outra população, compreendem o poder do ódio. Além disso, eles aprenderam a projetar seu ódio sobre outros como forma de servir a seus próprios interesses, apelando à maquinação e à fraude. Passemos à exposição das evidências indicativas do acerto de nossa hipótese.

Vamos começar falando de breve história a propósito dos judeus e do ódio. Talvez o primeiro registro mais explícito nesse sentido tenhamos recebido de Hecateu de Abdera [historiador e etnógrafo grego], que escreveu o curto relato “Sobre os judeus” no ano 300 antes de Cristo. Desse escrito restaram apenas dois fragmentos. O mais importante deles reza que, em consequência do Êxodo, “Moisés introduziu um modo de vida, em certa medida, misantrópico (apanthropon) e hostil a forâneos”. [3] Causa algum choque saber que, mesmo em tempo tão recuado, já pesava sobre os judeus a má fama da misantropia, ou seja, fazia-se deles o malconceito de que odiavam a humanidade. O mesmo tópico ressurge em 134 antes de Cristo, quando o Rei Antíoco VII foi aconselhado a “destruir os judeus, porque era o só povo que recusava toda relação com outros povos e via todo o mundo como seu inimigo”. O consiliário do rei referiu ainda que “o ódio do judeu para com toda a humanidade contava com a sanção positiva de suas próprias leis.”[4] Não apenas se fazia notável o seu ódio, como também o fato de que era “o só povo” entre outros povos a carregar tanta negatividade. Pelo que parece, os judeus de há muitos séculos já se destacavam por seu ódio excepcional.

Vale a pena considerar com mais vagar a ideia de que o ódio judeu “contava com a sanção positiva de suas próprias leis” — sendo esta uma referência dos sábios helenos ao Velho Testamento. Nós sabemos, evidentemente, que os judeus veem a si mesmos como os “eleitos” do criador do universo: “Porque tu és povo santo ao Senhor teu Deus; o Senhor teu Deus te escolheu, a fim de lhe seres o seu próprio povo, o seu tesouro, acima de todos os outros povos que há na Terra” (Dt 7,6). Aí está, pois: qualquer outro povo fica em segundo plano. Sabemos também que Deus teria agraciado os judeus com a condição de senhores das outras nações da Terra. O Livro do Êxodo afirma: “Nós [judeus] somos distintos […] dos outros povos na face da Terra” (33,16). Similarmente, a tribo dos hebreus é “o povo que habita sozinho e não se conta entre as nações” (Nm 23,9). No Deuteronômio (15,6), Moisés fala ao povo judeu: “Dominarás sobre muitas nações, porém elas não dominarão sobre ti”; ainda: “E todos os povos da Terra […] terão medo de ti” (28,10). Agora, em Gênese: “Que as nações te sirvam e os povos se curvem diante de ti” (27,29). No Deuteronômio, de novo, Deus promete aos judeus “casas cheias do que há de melhor, de coisas que não produziram, com cisternas que não cavaram, com vinhas e olivais que não plantaram” (6,11). E, fora do Pentateuco, nós podemos ler isto em Isaías: “Estrangeiros edificarão os teus muros, e seus reis te servirão […] E as tuas portas estarão abertas […] para que tragam a ti a riqueza dos gentios, e conduzidos com elas, os seus reis” (60, 10-11). Em Isaías, também: “Gente de fora vai pastorear os rebanhos de vocês; estrangeiros trabalharão em seus campos e vinhas. […] Vocês se alimentarão das riquezas das nações, e do que era orgulho delas, vocês se orgulharão” (61,5-6). O que não é tudo isso, senão misantropia explícita dos judeus, com a sanção “de suas próprias leis”? O conselheiro de Antíoco estava certo.

Acerca do ano 50 antes de Cristo, Diodoro da Sicília escreveu Biblioteca histórica. Nesta, na parte em que trata do Êxodo, o autor observa que “A nação dos judeus fez do ódio à humanidade a sua tradição” (34,1). Poucas décadas depois, Lisímaco registrou que a tribo hebraica fora instruída por Moisés para “não mostrar boa vontade a nenhum homem” e para “dar sempre o pior conselho” aos outros. E, nos primeiros anos depois de Cristo, o sábio greco-egípcio Apião notou a tendência que tem o judeu de “não mostrar boa vontade nem a um só forâneo, principalmente em se tratando de um grego”.[5] De novo, outra série de observações do ódio judeu para com a humanidade gentia pontua a história.

Porém, o mais perspicaz “discurso de ódio” dos antigos, nós o recebemos do historiador romano Tácito. Seus trabalhos Histórias (ano 100 depois de Cristo) e Anais (ano 115 depois de Cristo) trazem notas arrasadoras sobre a tribo dos hebreus. No primeiro, os judeus são retratados como “uma raça de homens que devota ódio aos deuses” (genus hominum invisium deis, V. 3). Mais adiante, ele assinala que “Os judeus são extremamente leais uns com os outros e sempre se mostram compassivos entre si, mas só sentem ódio e hostilidade (hostile odium) ante qualquer outro povo” (V. 5). Entretanto, suas mais famosas linhas estão no segundo desses trabalhos, Anais. Aí ele trata do Grande Incêndio de Roma, em 64 depois de Cristo, e da reação de Nero diante do sinistro. Nero, diz Tácito, atribuiu parte da culpa a cristãos, mas também aos judeus — “um tipo de gente detestável por seus vícios”. Os judeus “foram condenados não tanto pelo incêndio quanto por seu ódio do gênero humano” (odio humani generis, XV. 44). Este era, isso fica claro, o fator decisivo para Tácito como para toda a urbe romana: o odio humani generis dos judeus, ou seja, o ódio criminoso que tinham pela humanidade, sentimento de que o mundo só estaria livre com a proscrição ou extinção dos judeus.

Podemos parar por aqui em relação à Antiguidade. A citação poderia continuar, mas o recado está dado: o mundo antigo via os judeus como extraordinários cultivadores do ódio.

Se fôssemos continuar, citaríamos, por exemplo, Lúcio Flávio Filóstrato (c. 170-250): “Os judeus sempre estiveram rebelados não só contra os romanos, mas também contra toda a humanidade”; ou Porfírio de Tiro (c. 280), filósofo fenício da Síria romana: “Os judeus são inimigos impiedosos de todas as nações”; mas continuar seria supérfluo: a advertência necessária para uma discussão bem informada era essa.

Importa acrescentar que o tempo não mudou a imagem do judeu na Europa. Assim como visto na Antiguidade, o judeu era visto no Renascimento e na Reforma. E como visto há quinhentos anos, assim o judeu é visto na atualidade. O monumental trabalho de Martinho Lutero Sobre os judeus e suas mentiras (1543) traz esta passagem: “Agora, podeis ver quão estranhas crianças de Abraão os judeus realmente são, quão parecidos com o diabo, seu pai, eles são; pois é, vede que ‘belo’ povo de Deus eles são. Eles se vangloriam de sua origem física perante Deus, eles se gabam da nobreza do sangue que herdaram de seus antepassados, eles desprezam todos os outros povos”.[6] Dois séculos depois, por volta de 1745, Jean-Baptiste de Mirabaud escreveu que “Os judeus […] eram odiados porque odiavam outros homens”.[7] E há ainda o verbete de Voltaire sobre os judeus no seu famoso Dicionário Filosófico. Lá está escrito o seguinte:

Com certeza a nação judaica é a mais singular já vista na história do mundo e […] a mais desprezível de todas sob perspectiva política. […] Fala-se, comumente, que a marca da abominação que os judeus enxergam em outras nações tenha origem na sua aversão à idolatria; não me parece ser esse o caso. Muito mais provavelmente, seu insopitável ódio proceda da guerra de extermínio que moveram contra algumas das tribos de Canaã e do horror deles suscitado nas nações vizinhas. Como eles não conheciam outras nações além daquelas de sua vizinhança, acabaram por generalizar sua inimizade, expandindo sua repugnância pela Terra toda, com o que acabaram incorporando ao seu caráter a condição de inimigos de todos os homens. […] Em resumo, eles não passam de um povo ignorante e bárbaro, que aliou a mais sórdida avareza com a mais detestável superstição e o mais irrefreável ódio por todo povo que os tenha tolerado e enriquecido.[8]

O historiador inglês Edward Gibbon, em seu clássico trabalho de 1788, Declínio e queda do Império Romano, escreve o seguinte:

Os judeus […] emergiram da obscuridade […] e se multiplicaram de forma surpreendente […] A sombria obstinação com que mantiveram seus peculiares ritos e modos misantrópicos parece tê-los marcado como distinta categoria humana, que destemidamente professava ou sutilmente disfarçava seu implacável ódio do resto da espécie humana.[9]

Uma observação similar deixou-nos o filósofo alemão Johann Fichte em 1793:

Por quase todos os países da Europa alastra-se poderosa e hostil grei engajada em perpétua guerra contra os seus Estados, em muitos dos quais impõe terríveis cargas sobre seus cidadãos: trata-se da judiaria. Eu não acho, como espero mostrar adiante, que os judeus sejam temíveis pelo fato de formarem um Estado forte e separado, mas sim pelo fato de ser esse um Estado fundado no ódio que eles têm de todas as raças humanas […].[10]

Quem são, afinal, os maiores odiadores da história? A esta altura, essa não é uma pergunta de difícil resposta.

Particularmente chocantes são as palavras de Nietzsche. Uma longa série de comentários negativos sobre os judeus começou em 1881 com o seu livro O amanhecer do dia. Aí (seção 377) ele observa que “O mandamento ‘Ame seu inimigo’ tinha mesmo de ser inventado pelos judeus, que são a grege mais odienta que já existiu”. Assim, vê-se que os judeus são realmente insuperáveis no que diz respeito a sua aptidão para o ódio. Doutra feita, em A gaia ciência (1882), Nietzsche escreve, sarcasticamente, que os judeus são, de fato, a grege “especial”, porquanto “entre os demais povos, são eles os que desprezam o ser humano da forma mais profunda”. (seção 136)

Entretanto, Nietzsche deu a lume ainda mais marcante discurso no seu trabalho de 1887, A genealogia da moral. Neste livro, o filósofo oferece detalhada análise do ódio, visto de perspectiva judaico-cristã. Ele diz, em resumo, que o ódio judeu mostra-se mais claramente nos meios religiosos, entre rabinos e devotos. Sancionado por Deus, o ódio sacerdotal é o mais intenso e profundo; trata-se do ódio daqueles sem poder tangível. O ódio judaico, então, metastasiou-se pela Cristandade, tomando a forma nominal de seu antônimo, ou seja, o amor. O primeiro texto do livro é magistral dissertação da literatura e da filosofia. Confira na longa citação abaixo:

Como se sabe muito bem, os sacerdotes são os mais temíveis inimigos — mas por quê? Porque são eles os que menos poder têm. Da acracia deles, o ódio emerge como alguma coisa imensa e terrível, manifestando-se como veneno do espírito. Os odiadores realmente grandes na história mundial, aqueles que odeiam da forma mais espiritualizada, têm sido os sacerdotes. Em comparação com o ódio religioso que alimenta o espírito da vingança, outras expressões de antipatia nem merecem consideração.

Consideremos, brevemente, o maior exemplo disso aí. Tudo o que na Terra tenha sido feito contra “os nobres”, “os poderosos”, “os dominadores”, “os governantes” não se compara com o que os judeus perpetraram contra eles: os judeus, povo religioso, soube tirar a desforra final de seus inimigos e conquistadores, transformando radicalmente os valores de seus subordinadores, subvertendo sua cultura, — ou seja, os judeus vingaram-se espiritualmente de seus antigos senhores. Só um povo religioso seria capaz disso, quando tomado do mais profundo e represado desejo de vingança religiosa. Contrariamente à equação dos valores aristocráticos (bom = nobre = poderoso = belo = feliz = amado de deus) e com admirabilíssima consistência, os judeus ousaram empreender a inversão das coisas e à ordem virada ao avesso aferraram-se com unhas e dentes afiados pelo mais intenso ódio, o ódio daqueles sem poder […]. (seção 7)

Você não consegue entender isso? Você não tem olhos capazes de enxergar algo que levou dois milênios para se formar e emergir para a vitória? […] Não é de estranhar: todas as coisas muito prolongadas são de mais difícil percepção e avaliação. Entretanto, isto foi o que aconteceu: do tronco da árvore da vingança e do ódio, do ódio judaico — o mais arraigado e mais sublime ódio, isto é, o ódio que cria ideais e transforma valores, coisa nunca antes vista na Terra — desse tronco brotou algo extraordinário, um tipo de novo amor, o mais profundo e mais sublime dos sentimentos de amor: — de que outro tronco poderia ele desabrochar?

Entretanto, não se deve pensar que esse amor tenha consistido, essencialmente, na negação daquela sede de vingança, no oposto do ódio judaico! Não. O que se passou, de fato, foi o inverso. O novo amor surgiu desse ódio enquanto coroamento dele, como a própria coroa do ódio — coroa vitoriosa que se expande mais e mais, dotada do mais puro brilho de um sol — e buscava, por assim dizer, o reino da luz e da elevação, o objetivo daquele ódio, na ambição de vitória, troféus e sedução, com a mesma urgência com que as raízes daquele ódio cravavam-se tenazmente nas entranhas de tudo o que fosse maligno e profundo. Jesus de Nazaré, o evangelista vivo do amor, o “Salvador” que traz santidade e vitória para os pobres, doentes e pecadores — não era ele a própria sedução na sua forma mais terrível e irresistível, sedução e desvio para, exatamente, aqueles valores judaicos e ideais subvertidos? (seção 8)

Desta perspectiva, o “amor” cristão forma-se do ódio judaico, como se forma a copa das árvores de suas raízes. Os judeus (e Paulo, especificamente), os odiadores-mores, os fautores daquele que é o “mais profundo e mais sublime ódio” já visto na história da humanidade, eles criaram a ideia de um “salvador”, que ama todos os seus “irmãos” neste e no “outro” mundo. Assim o fizeram para encobrir seu ódio anti-humano e fazer parecer atraente a visão de mundo de inspiração judaica — a visão do homem-deus (Jesus), do Jeová todo-poderoso, do céu e do inferno. Estes destrutivos e niilísticos “valores e inovações” só poderiam ser impostos a uma humanidade odiada. O cristianismo foi, portanto, a maior manifestação do ódio judeu e a maior de todos os tempos.

Na seção 16, Nietzsche resume a sua tese assim:

Em Roma, o judeu foi considerado “culpado de ódio contra toda a raça humana”. E essa sentença estava correta, porque é correto ligar o bem-estar da humanidade futura à vigência incondicional dos valores aristocráticos, o mesmo é dizer valores romanos.

Esses niilísticos valores cristãos — baseados num mítico Deus e numa desconhecível e decerto inexistente vida no mundo do além — tiveram por efeito minar e, por fim, deslocar os superiores valores greco-romanos, que floresceram durante 800 anos e criaram as fundações de toda a Civilização Ocidental. A esta altura, somente a derrubada do judeo-cristianismo e o retorno aos valores clássicos e aristocráticos poderão salvar a humanidade. As palavras entre aspas na citação anterior são aquelas de Tácito, referidas antes, é claro.

Não podemos deixar A Genealogia… sem mencionar rapidamente a fascinante e jocosa alegoria sobre o ódio que faz Nietzsche na seção 13. Nessa passagem, ele compara a condição dos baixos odiadores (judeo-cristãos) com aquela dos fortes e nobres aristocratas (romanos). Os judeus e cristãos são assimilados a cordeirinhos; e os nobres aristocratas, a algum tipo de repulsivo predador (Raubvogel), tal qual uma águia. Os filhotinhos de carneiro pastam inocente e pacificamente no campo, mas vivem sempre no temor do predador, que pode, num átimo, descer do céu e arrebatá-los para cima. Os fracos anhos são odiadores; eles odeiam as aves de rapina. Mas as nobres águias são seres que não abrigam nenhum ódio. Nietzsche explica isso da seguinte forma:

Mas voltemos à vaca fria: o problema com a outra origem do “bem”, do homem bom, segundo a mentalidade da pessoa ressentida para servir a si mesma como justificação de sua condição. Para começo de conversa, o fato de os cordeirinhos ficarem transtornados sob o olhar das grandes aves predadoras não tem nada de estranho, e ninguém pode falar nada contra os caçadores alados só porque capturam os pequenos ovinos. As presas decerto fariam o seguinte comentário: “Essas aves rapinantes são malignas, e qualquer animal sem a mínima semelhança com elas, sobretudo algum que fosse o contrário delas, um cordeiro, por exemplo, esse animal não seria um animal bom?”. Não há nenhuma falha a ser apontada na instauração desse ideal, a não que as águias, olhando lá de cima para baixo, veriam os animaizinhos de forma um pouco sarcástica e talvez dissessem assim, mais ou menos, para si mesmas: “Esses bons cordeiros não nos causam nenhuma irritação. Na verdade, nós os amamos. Nada é mais saboroso do que a macia carne de um cordeiro”.

Os nobres não odeiam; eles governam e dominam. Só os fracos odeiam. Os odiadores fracos procuram, além disso, retratar os bravos e bem-nados da pior forma possível: “maldosos,” “matadores”, “pecadores”… Mas isso é ridículo, evidentemente. O comportamento dos fortes é aquele adequado à sua natureza. Os odiadores podem, então, tentar confundir os fortes, fazê-los mudar de conduta, torná-los “fracos” e “bons” como os próprios odiadores. Ocorre que isso seria mortal para os fortes, assim como consumir grama — tão apetitosa para um anho — seria mortal para as águias. Nietzsche enfatiza esse ponto:

Sem surpresa, o sentimento reprimido de raiva e de ódio que fervilha reconditamente nos fracos tem com essa crença relação que lhe serve muito bem, pois com isso os fracos passam a acreditar com fé incomparável na ideia de que os fortes são livres para serem fracos e as aves de rapina são livres para serem cordeiros. Isso tudo corresponde a uma situação na qual os fracos arrogam-se o direito de culpar as aves de rapina por serem aves de rapina.

Hoje, os odiadores fracos e inferiores — os judeus, os cristãos de inspiração judaica e os lacaios dos judeus que pululam na mídia — envidam grandes esforços para convencer os fortes e nobres de que eles são malignos, intolerantes, racistas, supremacistas…. E, no passo que avançam para a vitória, a humanidade nobre recua para o abismo, que é a catástrofe de sua extinção. Nós devemos resistir ao avanço deles com todo o nosso poder.

Os discursos de ódio no século XX

Dotada de riqueza cada vez maior, de poder financial, e com a longa experiência histórica de 2 mil anos que lhe aperfeiçoou o sentimento e a prática do ódio, a judiaria organizada começou a postular a adoção de sanções legais contra os seus oponentes. Com a torrente imigratória judaica na passagem para o século XX, talvez não deva surpreender que a advocacia judaica tenha se empoderecido e se apoderado dos EUA. Nas duas primeiras décadas, surgiram grandes grupos de apoio aos judeus, incluindo o American Jewish Committee (1906), a Anti-Defamation League (1913), o American Jewish Congress (1918) e a American Civil Liberties Union (1920). Todos esses grupos eram, de facto, bancas criadas para dar combate ao discurso de ódio, embora ainda não existisse o arcabouço legal correspondente naquela época. O foco deles estava na assim chamada “difamação de grupo” [group libel], um novo tipo penal inventado especificamente para favorecer interesses judaicos.

Entrementes, além do oceano, no território que seria a União Soviética. os judeus faziam ainda maior progresso. O ascenso dos bolchevistas judeus por volta de 1900, incluindo Leon Trotsky e o quartum judeu Vladimir Lenin, levou nova preocupação relativa ao antissemitismo para o Império Russo. Quando eles tomaram o poder na Revolução de Fevereiro de 1917, logo passaram a agir com o objetivo de melhorar as coisas para os judeus. Pinkus (1990) explica que esses bolcheviques “promulgaram um decreto anulando todas as restrições legais aos judeus” em março de 1917.[11] Ele acrescenta isto que não chega a ser nenhuma novidade: “Mesmo antes da Revolução de Outubro [1917], Lenin e o Partido Bolchevique eram contrários ao antissemitismo. Lenin atacou-o severamente em várias ocasiões”. Já em julho de 1918, o Conselho dos Sovietes publicou decreto (embora sem cominação) afirmando que “o movimento antissemitista e os pogrons contra os judeus são ameaça mortal contra a Revolução” e que todos os trabalhadores soviéticos estavam convocados “para lutar contra essa praga com todos os meios possíveis”.[12] O próprio Lenin continuou a insistir na propaganda pró-judaica; numa alocução notável em março de 1919, ele dizia:

O antissemitismo significa disseminar a animosidade em relação aos judeus. Quando a maldita monarquia czarista vivia seus últimos dias, ela tentava incitar os camponeses e operários ignorantes contra os judeus. A polícia czarista, de maranha com os terratenentes e os capitalistas, organizava pogrons contra os judeus. Esses senhores da terra e capitalistas buscaram desviar o ódio de trabalhadores e camponeses, torturados pela privação, na direção dos judeus. […] Justamente os mais oprimidos e ignorantes são os que acreditam nas calúnias e mentiras que se contam sobre os judeus. Isto é uma sobrevivência dos tempos medievais, quando os padres queimavam hereges presos a um pau, quando campônios viviam na escravidão e quando as pessoas eram esmagadas e não podiam se expressar. Essa ignorância antiga, feudal, está ficando para trás; os olhos do povo estão sendo abertos.

Não são os judeus, os inimigos do povo trabalhador. Os inimigos dos trabalhadores são os capitalistas de todos os países. Entre os judeus encontram-se trabalhadores e são a maioria. Eles são nossos irmãos e são oprimidos pelo capital, assim como nós; eles são nossos camaradas na luta pelo socialismo. […] Infame é o maldito czarismo, que perseguiu e torturou os judeus. Infames são todos os que fomentam o ódio contra os judeus e outras nações.

Quando Joseph Stalin (não era judeu) ascendeu ao poder nos anos vintes, ele julgou interessante o expediente de continuar cooperando com os judeus soviéticos e, de forma geral, ele lhes defendeu a posição. Em consequência disso, aquela década foi uma espécie de “idade de ouro” para os judeus; aquele tempo assistiu à ascensão de tipos como Lazar Kaganovich, Yakov Sverdlov, Lev Kamenev, Karl Radek, Leonid Krasin, Filipp Goloshchekin e Yakov Agranov — todos judeus de alta posição na hierarquia soviética.[13] Em parte devido ao domínio do governo pelos judeus, o antissemitismo continuava sua percolação nas massas russas. Deu-se então que, “em 1927, foi decidido que medidas drásticas seriam tomadas para combater o antissemitismo”.[14] Várias formas de propaganda foram empregadas, incluindo livros, panfletos, peças de teatro e filmes; a campanha publicitária culminou na severa responsabilização penal daqueles acusados de ódio antijudeu, que podiam ser até sentenciados à pena de morte. Em escrito de 1931, Stalin confirmou isso:

O antissemitismo é vantajoso para os exploradores, serve-lhes de para-raios para desviar as descargas da classe operária contra o capitalismo. O antissemitismo é perigoso para a classe operária, é um falso caminho alternativo que a afasta da direção correta e a conduz para a selva. Por isso os comunistas, enquanto internacionalistas consistentes, só podem ser inimigos jurados, irreconciliáveis do antissemitismo. Na URSS, a lei comina pena extremamente severa contra o antissemitismo, por se tratar de fenômeno profundamente hostil ao sistema soviético. Sob a legislação da URSS, militantes antissemitas estão sujeitos à pena capital.

A Idade de Ouro judaica na União Soviética durou até o final dos anos trintas, quando Stalin começou a desinflamar o poder judaico, aparentemente correspondendo ao que se passava na Alemanha nacional-socialista.[15]

Mas as políticas filossemíticas dos soviéticos (e bolchevistas) dos anos vintes e trintas não foram esquecidas por Hitler. Ele e Goebbels eram incansáveis críticos do “bolchevismo judeu” como a maior ameaça à Alemanha e à Europa — no que estavam certos. Goebbels, especialmente, tinha percebido o crescente impulso dado às leis contra os “discursos de ódio” e “crimes de ódio” em pró dos judeus, tanto na URSS quanto no Reino Unido; para ele, essa era a prova de (a): um profundo e iminente levantamento popular contra os judeus e (b): um abuso da autoridade judiciária dos judeus. A legislação contra o ódio é sinal de desespero; ela indica que o jogo se aproxima de seu final. Em 19 de abril de 1943, no seu diário, Goebbels escreve reveladora anotação:

Os judeus na Inglaterra agora reclamam proteção legal contra o antissemitismo. Sabemos o que é isso, nós passamos por isso antes, e foram tempos de conflito. Mas essa coisa não lhes dá muita vantagem. Nós sempre soubemos como encontrar brechas nas leis de proteção; além disso, o antissemitismo, uma vez aflorado do seio do povo, não pode ser abatido pela lei. Uma lei contra o ódio antijudeu marca, geralmente, o começo do fim para os judeus. Nós iremos garantir que o antissemitismo na Inglaterra não esfrie. Em qualquer caso, uma guerra de longa duração é a melhor matriz para o antissemitismo.[16]

No mês seguinte, no ensaio que publicou intitulado A guerra e os judeus, Goebbels comentou a situação jurídica na URSS, quanto à lei de Stalin referida acima, que estava ainda em vigência treze anos depois:

Nós recebemos, com muita frequência, notícias dando conta de que o antissemitismo está em ascensão nas nações inimigas. As acusações que se fazem aos judeus são bem conhecidas; são as mesmas que se fazem aqui. O antissemitismo nas nações inimigas não resulta da propaganda antissemítica, que a judiaria combate duramente. Na União Soviética, os judeus aplicam a pena de morte.[17]

A situação das leis concernentes ao discurso de ódio contra judeus, Goebbels considerava importante e assim pensou até o fim. No seu último grande ensaio, Os criadores das desgraças do mundo (1945), ele ainda nos advertia da importância da lei soviética:

O capitalismo e o bolchevismo têm as mesmas raízes judias — são dois galhos da mesma árvore e dão o mesmo fruto. A judiaria internacional manipula ambos no intento de suprimir nações e colocá-las a seu serviço. A profunda influência judia na opinião pública das nações inimigas e das muitas nações neutras mostra-se muito patente, justamente por isso, nos jornais, nos discursos e nas rádios, não se fala disso.

Existe lei na União Soviética que pune o “antissemitismo” — este, na verdade, em português claro, significa a educação pública sobre a Questão Judia — com a pena de morte. Qualquer estudioso dessas matérias vê sem nenhuma surpresa aquele destacado porta-voz do Kremlin, falando do ano-novo, dizer que a União Soviética não descansaria até que essa lei estivesse vigente em todo o mundo. Em outras palavras, o inimigo afirma claramente que seu intento nesta guerra é colocar a total dominação das nações da Terra por parte da judiaria sob a proteção da lei, servindo a pena de morte para tolher a simples discussão desse infame propósito. Isso se passa com pouca diferença nas nações milionocráticas [nações ocidentais].

Até o amargo fim, esse tema ainda inquietava Goebbels. Numa de suas últimas anotações no seu diário, ele escreveu:

Os judeus já estão inscritos para a Conferência de São Francisco [sobre as políticas para depois da Guerra]. Eles vão reclamar, principalmente, a proscrição do antissemitismo no mundo todo, o que é sintomático. Como seria de esperar, depois de terem cometido os mais terríveis crimes contra a humanidade, os judeus já se deleitam agora, quando podem proibir a humanidade até mesmo de pensar sobre tudo o que fizeram.[18]

E, de fato, eles lograram êxito, pelo menos em parte. Os diplomas legais do Pós-guerra Volksverhetzung e Verbotsgesetz, alemão e austríaco, respectivamente, representam a mais constrangedora capitulação judicial aos interesses judaicos já vista no Mundo Ocidental.

A esta altura, vemos claramente as origens da legislação sobre os discursos de ódio no século XX: ela consistiu num engendro dos judeus e de seus aduladores (como Stalin), tanto nos EE. UU. como na URSS, para submeter qualquer incipiente oposição à estrutura de seu poder. Tão determinados estavam os judeus a combater qualquer resistência à autoridade judaica, que se dispunham até mesmo a matar os seus opositores.

E na atualidade

Com o crescente predomínio da influência judaica no governo americano ao longo das últimas cinco décadas, a qual também prevalece na Europa, chamados para maior restrição e punição de comentários antijudaicos pelas leis dos discursos de ódio vão-se fazendo mais estridentes. O governo dos EE. UU. — ou, pelo menos, os republicanos — tem até aqui, majoritariamente, resistido às pressões, mas as grandes plataformas digitais assumiram posição filossemítica na questão. O Facebook e os seus Instagram e Twitter, a Google e o seu YouTube, todos se arvoram em censores dos discursos de ódio, especialmente aqueles da variante antissemítica. A Google modificou seus algoritmos de busca como forma de desclassificação e censura da nova mídia digital a que atribuem a propagação de ofensas e “ódio”. Tudo isso é perfeitamente compreensível, dado o grande número de judeus na direção dessas enormes corporações da tecnologia telemática: Mark Zuckerberg, Sergei Brin, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Sheryl Sandberg, Safra Katz, Susan Wojcicki, Steve Ballmer, Brian Roberts, Marc Benioff, Craig Newmark, Jeff Weiner…

Paralelamente à censura tecnológica das grandes corporações, as organizações advocatícias judaicas — como a SPLC e a ADL, continuam a explorar a indústria judiciária das indenizações. Essas bancas recorrem ao aparato institucional da Justiça para mover processos a torto e a direito contra os “odiadores”, a quem “denunciam” por violação da honra e de outros direitos das “partes” de sua clientela. A SPLC dispõe em seu portal de uma seção dedicada ao “antissemitismo e discursos de ódio”, como também faz a the ADL — coisa “normal”, eis que abolir a liberdade de expressão é a raison d’etre desses aparelhos da censura politicamente correta. Quando a militância censorina judaica não aciona a Justiça por si mesma para silenciar os críticos, ela intervém como parte interessada em processos judiciais de terceiros. A censura dos tribunais, somada àquela das grandes empresas do vale do Silício, serve ao propósito da implementação de facto das políticas pró-judaicas quanto aos discursos de ódio, fenômeno que salta aos olhos nos EE. UU., pelo menos.

Conclusão

Mas passemos ao fecho de nossa exposição: eu comecei este trabalho com aquela nossa discussão sobre a vacuidade lógica e a incoerência do conceito de discurso de ódio. É evidente, no entanto, que para muitas corporações poderosas e acedentes à influência judaica esse conceito mostra-se interessante. Os grandes oligopolistas, da velada perspectiva deles, que nem às paredes confessam, obviamente, veem a simplicidade da coisa toda, em termos mais básicos e práticos, ou seja: discursos de ódio são os discursos que os judeus odeiam. Sim, eles podem alegar que odeiam o discurso anti-islâmico ou o discurso antinegro, mas assim fazem apenas para desviar a atenção popular do alvo verdadeiro de seu ataque: o discurso de crítica aos judeus. Os judeus não são tão estúpidos a ponto de promover somente leis judaicas do que seria uma legislação exclusivamente “antiantissemítica”, pois a legislação não exclusiva disfarça o poder exclusivo deles. As leis descaradamente pró-judaicas são coisa do passado. Atualmente, as leis que mais lhes interessam são aquelas vazadas numa novilíngua de aparência universalista, a qual favorece, pelo menos em teoria, outros grupos “oprimidos”. Os judeus e a quinta-coluna a serviço deles querem parecer justos para gozar de unanimidade — quando, na realidade, devotam extremo desprezo a todos os grupos não judeus (de novo, o “ódio da humanidade” de Tácito e Nietzsche). Então, fica a lição: discurso de ódio é o discurso que o judeu odeia.

Agora, considere o seguinte: se você odeia o que eu digo, quem é o odiador? Eu ou você? Não sou eu, é você! O fato de você não gostar do que eu falo não faz de mim uma pessoa odienta. Essa pessoa é você. E se acontece de você ser um campeão, um mestre na história mundial do ódio, então o ódio é todo seu.

Referências

[1] Reeditado em Goebbels on the jews (2019; T. Dalton, ed), p. 199. Este e muitos outros livros citados abaixo podem ser encontrados em www.clemensandblair.com.

[2] Fique registrado aqui que não sou um negacionista. Eu acredito que houve um Holocausto na metade do século XX: isso foi chamado de Segunda Guerra Mundial, e 60 milhões de pessoas morreram em consequência desse conflito, inspirado e instigado pelo que fizeram os judeus aqui e na Europa. O total de judeus mortos terá sido de 500 mil, conforme os mais abalizados revisionistas. Para aprofundamento nessas questões, o leitor dispõe de meus livros The jewish Hand in the world wars (2019) e Debating the Holocaust (4. ed. 2020).

[3] Eternal strangers (2020; T. Dalton, ed), p. 16.

[4] Emilio Gabba, “The growth of anti-Judaism,” in The Cambridge history of judaism (vol. 2, 1984; Cambridge University Press), p. 645.

[5] Eternal strangers, pp. 19, 21, e 25, respectivamente.

[6] On the jews and their lies (2020, T. Dalton, ed; Clemens & Blair), p. 53.

[7] Eternal strangers, p. 68.

[8] Eternal strangers, pp. 70-71.

[9] The history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (1788/1974, vol. 2; AMS Press), página. 3. Veja também Eternal strangers, p. 59.

[10] Eternal strangers, p. 78.

[11] Benjamin Pinkus, The jews of the Soviet Union (1990; Cambridge University Press), p. 84.

[12] In Pinkus, p. 85.

[13] As semelhanças com o regime de Biden saltam aos olhos; sugiro ao leitor que leia o meu recente artigo “Confronting the judeocracy”.

[14] Pinkus, p. 86.

[15] Depois da guerra, o expurgo stalinista dos judeus de alta posição foi acelerado, resultando numa década de antissemitismo sob patrocínio do Estado, que só terminaria com a morte de Stalin em 1953.

[16] Goebbels on the jews, p. 199.

[17] Ibid., pp. 206-207.

[18] 4 April 1945, in Goebbels on the jews, p. 255.

* Dr.Thomas Dalton escreveu ou editou muitos livros e artigos sobre política, história e religião, focando especialmente o nacional-socialismo na Alemanha. Seus trabalhos incluem uma série de novas traduções de livros como Mein Kampf, Eternal stranges (2020), The jewish hand in the world wars (2019) e Debating the Holocaust (4. ed., 2020). Esses títulos estão todos disponíveis no ciberendereço www.clemensandblair.com. Os seus artigos poderão ser lidos na ciberteca pessoal do autor, aqui: www.thomasdaltonphd.com.

Fonte: The Occidental Observer. Autor: Dr. Thomas Dalton. Título original: On the True Meaning of Hate Speech. Data de publicação: 5 de julho de 2021. Versão brasilesa: Chauke Stephan Filho.

Thoughts on Kenosha

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This is being written the day after the not guilty verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse case.  I assume you know the basics of the case.  Over the past year, I paid about as much attention to the case as the average person, no more than that.  It was streaming the trial the past couple of weeks that got me thinking.   This is to share some of what has come up for me for your consideration.

I was impressed with Rittenhouse on the stand and his two defense attorneys.  This contrasted with my take on the defense attorney in the Derek Chauvin case, Eric Hanson (Chauvin didn’t testify), whom I took a close look at as part of writing a critique of his closing argument.1  I wound up concluding that Chauvin’s defense couldn’t have been worse. Taking in Rittenhouse’s lawyers’ performance was an affirmation of what I wrote about Chauvin’s defense, including the bad decision not to have Chauvin testify.

I was somewhat disappointed with Mark Richards’ closing argument in defense of Rittenhouse.  Don’t yell at a jury, don’t fume.  Positively, conversationally, respectfully, share your wisdom.  Explain that Rittenhouse had a legal right to be armed with the weapon he possessed that night.  Don’t  trash the people who died or were injured.  Calmly explain why, in accordance with Wisconsin law—and, really, human law—Rittenhouse believed he was in danger of death or great bodily harm and justifiably acted as he did.  Personalize it—show how this 17-year-old perceived this circumstance with remarkable maturity and accuracy; indeed, if he hadn’t defended himself, he would have ended up dead or severely injured.  Point out that the prosecution introduced the false notions that possession of a weapon and provocation preclude self-defense.  And pull up your pants and button your coat.

The prosecution in the Rittenhouse case piqued my interest.  I wondered what they were up to.  They charged Rittenhouse with six counts, six violations of Wisconsin law.  One of the six, that Rittenhouse had no right to possess the AR-15 he had that night, was dismissed because it was factually ungrounded.  I asked myself, how could the prosecution have missed that?  As for the other five counts, despite what I was reading and hearing about how complicated the case was—all the possible angles and verdicts—it came down to a self-defense case.  Was shooting those three people, killing two of them, self-defense as defined by Wisconsin statute?  I checked into the relevant section of that statute:

939.48  Self-defense and defense of others. 

(1)  A person is privileged to threaten or intentionally use force against another for the purpose of preventing or terminating what the person reasonably believes to be an unlawful interference with his or her person by such other person.  The actor may not intentionally use force which is intended or likely to cause death or great bodily harm unless the actor reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself.

Watching the testimony and the videos shown the jury—remarkably, all three shootings were recorded—I couldn’t figure out how the prosecution thought they could get a conviction on any of the charges.  There was no way I could envision twelve people unanimously agreeing that any of the three shootings wasn’t self-defense.  The best the prosecution could get was a hung jury, one or two jurors refusing to go along with an acquittal.  If a hung jury is the best they could do, what did the prosecution get out of bringing this case to trial?  When the jury went into a fourth day without reaching a verdict, I speculated that an outlier juror was holding up an acquittal and that there was a good chance of a hung jury.   I never imagined a conviction.

When the not-guilty-on-all-counts verdict came in, I was taken by how similar the response from those opposed to it was to that of the people who didn’t like the grand jury’s decision in the Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Missouri back in 2014, a case I wrote about.2 The Ferguson case had been headline news for three months with a strongly racial story line: unarmed Black teenager murdered by racist White cop. In the Brown case, the evidence and testimony the grand jury reviewed in the process of coming to its decision was released to the public.  It put Brown in a very unfavorable light.  Plus, there was the compelling fact—compelling to me anyway—that a grand jury of twelve local citizens had concluded that there was no probable cause to charge Officer Darren Wilson with a crime.

It intrigued me that none of that had the slightest impact on the those who had decided day one that Brown’s death was yet another instance of the murder of Black men by a White police officer, and that it was symptomatic of the pervasive racial injustice in America. These people didn’t speak to the new information from the grand jury, didn’t refute it or explain it away, didn’t incorporate any of it into how they looked at the case.  For them, the grand jury report didn’t exist, or it didn’t compute; in any case, it didn’t matter.  What did matter was a narrative, a story: from the earliest days of America, Black people have been oppressed by White people.  They simply plugged what happened in Ferguson into that narrative. They reiterated the position they held before the grand jury report: Brown had been shot with his hands up (or in the back) trying to surrender and a terrible thing is still going on in America.

In the days following the grand jury decision, protests by those outraged by it erupted in Ferguson and a number of cities across the U.S., many of them violent. Left-leaning politicians and members of the media never missed a beat: racist White America was on display in Ferguson. President Obama weighed in, pointing out that the Michael Brown case reflected “real issues” around race in this country, and that we should “not deny them or try to tamp them down.”

I won’t bore you with the details, you know them; the Rittenhouse case was déjà vu all over again, with President Biden substituting for President Obama. Let the riots begin.

*   *   *

An unpleasant truth about human beings may help us understand what’s been going on: people will do just about anything, and sincerely believe just about anything, that will get their personal needs satisfied.  And what are those personal needs?    Sustenance and safety.  Sex.  Social approval and inclusion.  Status.  Self-worth and self-respect.  Excitement and a good time.   If you are in a position to satisfy people’s basic needs, or wants—you own a movie studio, cable station, or a newspaper, control the internet, are a politician or clergyman, or you stand up in front of students seated in rows with a grade book in hand—you can get them to think and do just about anything.  If its 1938 in Germany, you can make National Socialists out of them.  If it’s 1943 in America, you can get them to cross the Atlantic and anonymously slaughter these same National Socialists.  If it’s 2020 Facebook/New York Times/CNN America, you can create woke crusaders who will proudly set cars on fire in Kenosha, Wisconsin and chase down people and beat their heads in or kill them.  Human beings are remarkably suggestible, malleable creatures.

Looking at the prosecutors and protestors in the Rittenhouse case from this satisfaction-of-basic-needs angle helps explain both.  For the prosecutors, going to trial was a winning play even if a guilty verdict was highly unlikely and would cause Rittenhouse undeserved grief.  Rittenhouse’s grief–fear, anguish, disruption of his life, and so on—was his problem; they had their own needs to satisfy.  Who knows, they might win the lottery and get a conviction, and even if they don’t, they’ll get the personal payoffs from fighting the good fight: feeling good about themselves and getting stroked and rewarded by the audience they play to.  As for a protestor, hitting the streets with a book of matches and a crowbar makes you feel in the know and righteous; you’re somebody important, and it is exciting and fun and might even get you laid.   All you have to do to make those good things happen for yourself is buy a simple story—the Rittenhouse case exemplifies White supremacy and racist, rotten-to-the-core America.  Mucking around with the particulars of the case and reason and logic isn’t the way to get your needs met.

*   *   *

If you have problems with the prosecutors and protestors—or rioters, whatever you want to call them—in the Rittenhouse case, it would be worth your time to think up ways to make the sort of things they did basic needs aversive, call it that.  As it stands now, charging obviously innocent people and setting buildings on fire are good personal moves.  (Or at least they were for the Kenosha protestors until Rittenhouse showed up.  Yell “Fuck you!’ and go for his gun and instead of him giving it to you and cowering, he shoots your ass.  Hell of a deal.)

Colorado attorney Andrew Branca suggests what he calls Kyle’s Law as a way to put a crimp in politically motivated prosecutions in self-defense cases.

Too often, rogue prosecutors bring felony criminal charges against people who were clearly doing nothing more than defending themselves, their families, or others from violent criminal attack. We’ve seen this happen in the George Zimmerman trial in Florida a decade ago, in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial just completed in Kenosha WI, and in plenty of cases in between. These are cases where there is little or no evidence inconsistent with self-defense, such that there can be no good-faith reason for a prosecutor to drag that defender to trial.3

Branca points out that in these circumstances the prosecutor very likely will not get a conviction, but he will get personal aggrandizement and political capital.  And no matter how it turns out, the defender will lose big: demonized by the media as a murderer, racist, and white supremacist; emotional stress; fear for his safety; the loss of income and educational opportunities; a failed relationship or marriage; and the prospect of never living a normal life.  It’s time, Branca declares,

to compel prosecutors to have skin in the game, to have something to lose if they bring a laughably weak, yet horribly destructive, felony prosecution in a case of self-defense.  And it’s time to provide a path for the wrongfully prosecuted defender to get compensation for his monetary, reputational, and emotional damages.

Branca argues that a prosecutor has no business bringing a self-defense case to trial unless at least 90% of the evidence counters a self-defense claim.  He proposes that in every self-defense case, the jury instruction on self-defense includes this question: “If you are acquitting this defendant on the grounds of self-defense, did you find that the prosecution failed to disprove self-defense by a majority of the evidence?”  If the answer is yes to that question, the defendant would receive compensation for losses that resulted from this prosecution. The compensation would come from both the state and the prosecutor personally.  Branca notes that Washington State already has a statute that does precisely this.  Might the prosecution in Wisconsin have decided not to proceed with its obviously unjust charges against Rittenhouse if such a statute had existed in that state?

Defense of one’s person was the central element in the Rittenhouse case.  But what about the defense of property?  What about making rioting and looting and the wanton destruction of what other people have created less personally rewarding?  In Kenosha, the rioters were free to run wild smashing and burning to their hearts content with the police parked in their cars at a safe distance.   I had always assumed that the first responsibility of government was to protect life and property from threats “both foreign and domestic,” as it was put. But this is the new America, or so those in power tell us anyway.   As for the citizenry, we have been conditioned to hide out in our basements until things blow over.

Watching the Rittenhouse trial and taking in the media coverage, I picked up the idea that we have no business defending our property.  That’s the government’s business, if they decide to take it on, which increasingly they have decided not to.  The best we can do is hope the rampagers will call it a night before they sacrifice what we have produced to what they have going that evening.  This sounds like the pussification of my country and me, if you’ll pardon the term.  There was a time in my life when there would have been outrage from the president on down at what went on in, among other places, my hometown of Minneapolis. It wouldn’t have been “Please be peaceful.” It would have been “We’re not going to stand for violence and destruction!”

While I was looking up the Wisconsin statute on the defense of one’s person, I checked the one about the defense of property and found this. 

939.49  Defense of property and protection against retail theft.

(1)  A person is privileged to threaten or intentionally use force against another for the purpose of preventing or terminating what the person reasonably believes to be an unlawful interference with the person’s property. Only such degree of force or threat thereof may intentionally be used as the actor reasonably believes is necessary to prevent or terminate the interference. It is not reasonable to intentionally use force intended or likely to cause death or great bodily harm for the sole purpose of defense of one’s property.

My reading of this statute is that, at least in Wisconsin, while you can’t use force that could cause death or great bodily injury to protect your property, you can indeed use force.  You don’t have to stand by and watch somebody burn down your house or place of business.   That got me thinking about what besides deadly force might make, say, smashing windows and burning cars at that car dealership in Kenosha an unrewarding experience.  What if the rioters were sprayed from head to toe with some kind of foam that looked and smelled like shit—stuff that wouldn’t come off easily and itched like holy hell?  Covered from head to toe in what looks like shit and stinking and itching frantically might make you look and feel less cool bashing car doors with a hammer.  You’d look like the pile of dripping diarrhea you are.

Maybe, probably, my foam idea is no good, but how about getting people with more informed and creative minds than mine to come up with non-lethal, non-great-bodily-damage–and yes, personally humiliating—negative consequences to violent demonstrations.  Perhaps a deterrent along these lines already exists (rubber bullets?).   And perhaps there is an altogether different, better way to protect property.  My hope is that you and I—maybe with the help of a few others—can successfully defend our property when our president, governor, mayor, and police chief have abandoned us, or at least go down swinging.

Endnotes

  1. Robert S. Griffin, “If I Had Made the Closing Argument in Defense of Derek Chauvin,” The Occidental Observer, posted May 13, 2021.
  2. Robert S. Griffin, “Epistemology Matters: Reflections Prompted by a Death in Missouri, in the writings section of my website, http://www.robertsgriffin.com
  3. Branca has a website. http://lawofselfdefense,com. The material on him in this article is from his publication, available on his site, “Why Kyle’s Law Matters.”

The Sines v. Kessler Lawfare Litigation: A National and Historic Disgrace

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The word and concept of “lawfare” — sometimes defined as “law as a weapon of war” — gained popular usage about three decades ago in the context of international military operations. It has, however, apt application to certain types of domestic litigation, which is surely not surprising given the increasingly bellicose and irrepressible culture wars that now beset America.  And there has never been a more paradigmatic example of this type of culture-war lawfare than the Sines v. Kessler case now before a jury in Charlottesville.

It is certainly true that litigation is nearly always adversarial, often malevolently so.  Moreover, the proliferation of state Anti-SLAPP (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation) statutes attests to the unfortunately frequent abuse of litigation by powerful elites to prevent the less powerful from exercising their First Amendment rights, e.g., on environmental issues.   Yet there is something distinctively sinister about lawfare litigation such as Sines v. Kessler, at least to those of us who cling, with increasing despair, to the idea that the law is an honorable profession.  The factors that set Sines v. Kessler apart include the following:

A Gross Disparity in Legal Resources.  In January 2018, the 10 plaintiffs in Sines v. Kessler filed a 110-page amended complaint against 25 defendants. The plaintiffs’ complaint was based on allegations that although the defendants, who had participated in the Unite the Right rallies in Charlottesville in August 2017, might have appeared to be exercising their First Amendment rights by protesting the destruction of Confederate statues amid the provocations and violent attacks of counter protestors, in reality they had organized and conspired with each other with the intent and result of violently attacking the plaintiffs.  Three large New York City law firms and 38 lawyers, led by Roberta Kaplan, entered appearances for the plaintiffs.  These three law firms comprised over 1300 lawyers altogether and had income in 2020 of approximately $1.9 billion.  Moreover, Ms Kaplan was able to fundraise an amount probably in excess of $25 million to pay for the litigation, a staggering sum by any reckoning but especially so given that many of the plaintiffs’ law firms offered their services pro bono.

The defendants, by stark contrast, have encountered huge obstacles to obtaining adequate representation.  First, given hostile media accounts, antifa threats, and the defendants’ unpopular ideology or perceived ideology, few lawyers would even consider representing them. As this case painfully illustrates, the ethical rule admonishing lawyers to provide legal assistance to unpopular defendants is honored more in the breach than the observance — unless, of course, the defendants are the right kind of unpopular defendants, which these defendants are not.  Second, even if the defendants could find willing counsel, in most cases they could not pay the high legal costs the plaintiffs intended to impose, and did impose, by their scorched earth litigation.  Few defendants had significant wealth and most found their ability to raise money through crowdfunding or other donation paths restricted or cut off by deplatforming, media hostility, and antifa harassment.  As this case has at last, after three years, reached trial, most of the original 25 defendants have defaulted or are representing themselves.

Ideological Motives and Goals. The core purpose of civil litigation should be to compensate a plaintiff, insofar as money can do it, for real, concrete harm, or to prevent such harm though injunctive relief.  But it is hard to see how the plaintiffs in the Sines case suffered any such real, substantial harm, except perhaps for some allegedly injured by James Fields (who had no, or virtually no, connection with any of the defendants). Most of plaintiffs’ claims of injury are for vague and weakly substantiated emotional injury.  Ms. Kaplan has in fact been quite explicit and boastful that her motive in creating this litigation is to “break the back of the violent white nationalist movement” and to “deprive supremacist groups of free speech protections by proving incitement to violence, and deter them with massive financial penalties in a civil suit.” (See this article for more on the lead attorney). An impartial observer could readily conclude that the named plaintiffs in the Sines case are being used as weapons in Ms. Kaplan’s war on the defendants, whom Kaplan sees as her ideological enemies.

Broad Discovery.  One effective means to crush an ideological opponent, especially one for whom confidentiality is critical, is by broad and invasive discovery — i.e., interrogatories, document requests, and depositions.  This technique was definitely in Ms. Kaplan’s playbook.  Such a technique is nearly guaranteed to have at least some success.  Even if the broad discovery requests are limited or denied, simply requesting them will alarm the defendants and others who learn of them and will impose on the defendants the often onerous, frustrating, and expensive burden of litigating discovery disputes.

Here are two examples, among dozens that could be cited, of Kaplan’s expansive discovery requests:

“All Documents and Communications concerning events, meetings, rallies, conferences, or conversations held prior to the [UTR] Events that relate to the Events in any way.”

“All Documents and Communications concerning violence, intimidation, or harassment of Persons on the basis of race, religion, or ethnicity, including but not limited to, ethnic cleansing, white genocide, a white ethno-state, or any other form of large or small scale violence.”

Aggressive Use of Expensive Experts. Litigating attorneys soon learn that an unfair advantage deep-pocketed parties possess lies in their ability to engage highly credentialed, and expensive, experts, many of whom are willing to provide dubious opinions. The well-heeled plaintiffs in Sines certainly availed themselves of this advantage, paying $30,000 for expert testimony that the defendants could not afford to counter with their own experts. Part of this expert testimony was offered to support the proposition that the defendants spoke in secret code, such that seemingly innocuous statements or crass attempts at edgy humor were actually calls to violence.

Misuse of Conspiracy Allegations.  Many distinguished judges and legal commentators have decried the misuse of conspiracy allegations, both in criminal and civil matters. Justice Robert Jackson, in his concurrence in Krulewitch v. United States, 336 U.S. 440 (1949), for example, after observing that the “crime of conspiracy is so vague that it almost defies definition” (a criticism that applies as well to conspiracy allegations in civil matters), further stated:

A co-defendant in a conspiracy trial occupies an uneasy seat. There generally will be evidence of wrongdoing by somebody. It is difficult for the individual to make his own case stand on its own merits in the minds of jurors who are ready to believe that birds of a feather are flocked together. If he is silent, he is taken to admit it and if, as often happens, co-defendants can be prodded into accusing or contradicting each other, they convict each other.

These admonitions apply with full force to the Sines v. Kessler complaint, whose causes of action are essentially glued together, so to speak, by pervasive conspiracy allegations. The many defendants named in that complaint had varied degrees of involvement in the UTR rally and, more to the point, varied degrees of involvement – often none at all – in the actions or statements of some of the other defendants that could be construed as violence or calls to violence.  Their lack of involvement, however, will avail them nothing if the plaintiffs’ conspiracy allegations stick, for each defendant will then be liable for all the actions and statements of the others.

To express my view concisely: the Sines v. Kessler case should not have been allowed to proceed beyond the motion to dismiss stage. Judge Moon, who presides over the case, seems to have been calling balls and strikes fairly at the trial.  But even in the unlikely event the jury finds for the defendants, they and more broadly the First Amendment right to free speech and assembly have been severely damaged by this lawfare litigation. Defendants have incurred crippling costs to their time, vocations, wealth, reputations, and emotional health. They, and others who have observed the litigation, will long hesitate to participate in any future demonstrations that might have even a remote chance of resulting in violence, even if that violence is instigated by antifa and similar groups. The “robust, uninhibited” right to free expression that Supreme Court cases proclaim has increasingly become a dead letter.  This case is a major landmark in its demise.

It might be objected that Judge Moon’s hands were tied and he had no legal grounds to dismiss this case at the motion to dismiss stage. Such an assertion would be a hard sell to those of us who have observed or personally experienced (I was the plaintiff in the Allen v. SPLC litigation) the lengths to which courts will go to dismiss far more meritorious claims where the political alignments are the opposite of those in Sines. Judge Moon’s inability or refusal to see the Sines lawfare for what it is has the regrettable result of enhancing the appearance, if not the reality, that our courts have become guardians of civil liberties only for favored segments of the political spectrum.

If you would like to help us continue our work, please consider making a small tax-deductible donation to the FEF. Every dollar counts in our fight to keep Free Expression free. Click HERE, and thank you!

Vampire Cartoons

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Andrew Joyce’s recent essay (“On Jews and vampires”) features two notorious anti-Jewish cartoons from the National Socialist periodical “Der Stürmer.”  They were drawn by the talented cartoonist Philipp “Fips” Rupprecht, who produced hundreds of such images between 1925 and 1945.  Recently, a skilled digital artist named Robert Penman has recovered, restored, and colorized 200 such cartoons.  These are compiled in the new book Pan-Judah!, edited by myself (available at www.clemensandblair.com).  Below are the colorized versions of two of the cartoons featured in Joyce’s article:

Penman has done a spectacular job; the colorized images are bright and vivid, and virtually leap off the page.  We can now view Fips’ cartoons as they have never been seen before.  Pan-Judah! is available in three formats: 6 x 9 paperback, 6 x 9 hardcover, and deluxe 8.5 x 11 hard cover coffee-table edition.  See the publisher’s website for purchase details.

On Jews and Vampires

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During the Halloween festivities a few weeks ago it seemed to me a timely opportunity to indulge my interest in the darker, horror-tinged aspects of European folklore concerning Jews. I’ve been intrigued in recent years by a growing literature connecting vampire tales, both early modern and modern, with the history of the European-Jewish interaction.[1] Much of this literature argues that vampires are for the most part proxy figures for European anxieties about Jews, with the vampire figure, and allegories painting Jews as vampires, acting as dehumanizing mechanisms facilitating the alleged oppression of Jewish people. While I tend to agree that vampire allegories have been weaponized against Jews, especially between the years 1880 and 1945, this is hardly interesting in itself. All groups engage in dehumanizing strategies against opposing factions, and these strategies are found as much in the Talmud as they are anywhere else.[2] My interest then, is not in the fact that Europeans may have designed, or tinkered with, the image of the vampire in order to attack the Jews, but what exactly may be said about Jews in the depiction of the vampire, and why.

The Uses of the Mainstream

Despite itself, mainstream scholarship is quite useful in answering such questions. One of the primary features of my work at The Occidental Observer over the last nine years has been an attempt to show that our ideas are not disconnected from mainstream scholarship, and that plenty of truth can be found in mainstream texts. No clearer exposition of Jewish hoaxes and lies connected with the so-called Russian Pogroms, for example, can be found outside of John Doyle Klier’s Oxford-published Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882. Klier argued that contemporary Jewish accounts of the pogroms should be treated with “extreme caution,” with many of the most popular and influential “flatly contradicted by the archival record.”[3] I have also praised the work of medievalist and folklorist Gillian Bennett, who overturned many years of Jewish portrayals of the so-called Blood Libel as a kind of mass European psychosis by arguing for their rational origin in that “where accusations of ritual murder where made in this period … it is more probable that they were cause célèbres around which anti-Jewish feeling could crystallize, rather than the cause of anti-Semitism in the first place.”[4] My theory that Jewish scholars engage in nepotism to exaggerate the importance of their co-ethnics in forming European culture is based on the work of Dutch Spinoza expert Hubertus G. Hubbeling who wrote that “there are some Jewish writers who emphasize very strongly the importance of Spinoza’s contribution to the development of democratic ideas. … According to the opinion of the present writer Spinoza’s importance is exaggerated here.”[5] Also praised in the course of my work is Hannah Johnson, another talented academic who single-handedly demolished the influential but heavily compromised pro-Jewish work of historian Gavin Langmuir and argued that his theories of anti-Semitism offered nothing more than a “one dimensional model of conflict between an intolerant Christian community and its passive Jewish victims.”[6]

I therefore find it extremely amusing when my work is characterized as anti-Semitic or bigoted, given that my four primary positions and discussion points (Jews have lied to themselves and others about significant aspects of their history; anti-Semitism has a rational basis; Jews behave in a nepotistic fashion in academia and other spheres of influence; and, Jewish historiography is little more than a one-sided story of blameless victimhood) are derived not from “neo-Nazi” pamphlets, but from leading scholars from some of the world’s best universities. You could say I was “red-pilled” by the mainstream, which, we should remember, also once included Kevin MacDonald and his trilogy on the Jews until it was decided to ostracize MacDonald and his work in every way imaginable in order to reassert the lachrymose interpretation of Jewish historical karma.

Unfortunately, mainstream scholarship appears mortally terrified of praise from our supposed “fringe,” no matter how intensively we interact with its work, as evidenced in the recent Palgrave/Springer publication of Jews in Medieval England: Teaching Representations of the Other. In the book’s introduction, a pair of editors refer to my essay on Langmuir, remarking with horror that they discovered “the work of Hannah Johnson, a contributor to this volume, quoted approvingly on an anti-Semitic white supremacist blog.”[7] The terror here is surely rooted in the earth-shattering discovery that supposed “fringe” lunatics and bigots are extremely interested in facts, logic, and research, and they often sit at the very elbow of those who thought themselves so distant and superior. Given the intimate relationship between my work and mainstream scholarship, what use are accusations of anti-Semitism when, given my intensive use of large volumes of mainstream source material (and frequent praise of the same), the charge is dangerously likely to come back, like a boomerang, to these same accusers? At the risk of terrifying more academics, then, I will present here some of the more interesting findings and arguments in mainstream scholarship connecting Jews and vampire imagery over the last century or so.

How Anti-Semitic is Dracula?

One of the clearer explorations of alleged anti-Jewish allegories in Bram Stoker’s Dracula can be found in the work of Sara Libby Robinson, especially her brief essay “Blood will tell: Antisemitism and vampires in British popular culture, 1875–1914.” While I don’t agree with all of Robinson’s conclusions, there are some interesting parallels and relationships in imagery, and I find it interesting in any case to explore Jewish paranoia and sensitivities (Robinson is based at Brandeis and almost certainly Jewish) to certain types of image (that of the gold-seeking dwarf being another that Jews are prone to focus on). For Robinson, Dracula is not like older vampire tales from Eastern Europe because it is fundamentally about a dangerous immigrant arriving in the British Isles:

At the time of publication in 1897, Count Dracula was only one in a long line of fictional vampires. However, Dracula differed from his earlier ancestors in some important ways. As described in Gordon Melton’s encyclopedia of vampires in myth, literature, and film, from Polidori’s Lord Ruthven in 1819, to Rymer’s Varney the Vampire in the 1840s, to Le Fanu’s Carmilla in 1872, whatever their menace, vampires had typically belonged to the social circles they preyed upon; no worse than a local, decadent aristocrat. Varney’s origins in particular are explicitly British. Count Dracula, on the other hand, does not belong to the society he threatens. He is an outsider, specifically an immigrant from Eastern Europe just when large numbers of Eastern European Jews were arriving on England’s shores. … The Jewish population [of Britain] more than doubled in the last quarter of the nineteenth century due to immigration from Eastern Europe. … [I]n taking jobs, money, food, and housing away from native Britons, Jews were not only viewed as competitors, but as parasites, metaphorical vampires who lived by draining away economic opportunities rather than blood.

Count Dracula himself is a kind of faux aristocrat—a member of a decaying race that can only survive by leeching on the vitality of new peoples. He is an elite of sorts, and has some of the trappings of wealth, but he remains fundamentally vile and befouls his surroundings wherever he goes, literally leaving a stench. For Robinson, Dracula is an amalgam of late twentieth-century British views of the Jews. On the one hand, Britons were confronted with an older generation of prominent Jewish oligarchs that had gradually intermarried with the British aristocracy. Like Dracula, these oligarchs sought to mimic their surroundings (Dracula is especially keen to mask his foreign accent, for example), but were essentially regarded as parasitic shape-shifters. In 1891, one newspaper, the Labor Leader, referred to the Rothschilds, a quintessential example of this Anglo-Jewish elite, as “leeches [that] have for years hung on with distended suckers to the body politic of Europe.” On the other hand, Britons were also confronted with a new generation of lower-class Jewish immigrants who brought with them the white slave trade,[8] grass-roots financial exploitation and criminality[9], mass-produced pornography[10] and moral degradation, and political terrorism (both Anarchist and Communist),[11] seen by many as literally befouling the areas they came to inhabit. Dracula, both fake aristocrat and stinking subversive, is argued by Robinson to have encapsulated both experiences.

An especially interesting argument advanced by Robinson, and which had escaped my attention when recently re-reading the novel, is Stoker’s portrayal of Dracula as having an obsession, or special relationship, with money. Robinson writes.

Count Dracula is a faithful embodiment of the caricature of Jews as greedy and parasitic, placing money above all else. Despite his supernatural abilities, Dracula is an essentially commercial character. His first action of the book (while still disguised as a coachman) is to mark the sites of buried treasure. His next is to go over deeds of purchase and other business matters with Harker, in Transylvania representing Dracula’s solicitors in Britain. While dining at Castle Dracula, Harker notes that “the table service is of gold,” an ostentatious show of wealth similar to those which Jewish bankers and nouveaux riches were accused. When Harker explores the castle, he finds a room filled with “a great heap of gold … of all kinds, Roman, and British, and Austrian, and Hungarian, and Greek[,] and Turkish.” Like the modern Jewish financier, Dracula does business and reaps profit from all over the world. The most significant scene, however, comes towards the end of the novel. In it, the heroes have cornered Dracula, and Harker lunges at him with a knife. Not stabbed, “The [knife’s] point just cut the cloth of [Dracula’s] coat, making a wide gap whence a bundle of bank-notes and a stream of gold fell out. … The next instant, with a sinuous dive he swept under Harker’s arm … , and, grasping a handful of the money from the floor, dashed across the room.” This demonstration of putting the preservation of one’s money on par with the preservation of one’s life shows that stereotypes regarding Jews and their money were alive and well in the late nineteenth century, and enacted in the fictional character of Dracula, making them seem truly monstrous.

Also interesting are Stoker’s (alleged) insinuations about Jewish loyalties. Robinson points out that Jews have often been accused of seeking after their own tribal interests rather than the interests of the nation they inhabit. She comments,

This nightmare certainly comes true with Stoker’s representation of Dracula as a symbol for supposed Jewish greed and self-interest. Dracula places his loyalty wherever it suits his convenience; speaking both German and English as easily as his native tongue. Dracula has the skills necessary to join forces with Germany, England’s chief rival, if he so wishes. In fact, when fleeing Britain, Dracula enlists the aid of a German Jew named Hildesheim, “a Hebrew of rather the Adelphi Theater type, with a nose like a sheep” who must naturally be bribed in order to aid Stoker’s heroes. Tellingly, the one overtly Jewish character in the novel is neither British nor on the side of the heroes, reinforcing the anti-Semitic charge that Jews cannot be counted upon to give help solely to aid the national interest, regardless of personal and pecuniary gain.

Like Dracula, Hildesheim’s financial transactions move across Europe, with the money leaving its country of origin, and globalizing capital. Stoker writes that Hildesheim “had been paid for his work by an English pound-note, which had been duly cashed for gold at the Danube International Bank.”

In terms of his physical attributes, Dracula has “a very strong … aquiline [nose], with [a] high bridge and peculiarly arched nostrils.” In Robinson’s view, Dracula’s nose is “labeled constantly throughout the book as hooked or ‘beaky’ [and] is [thus] simultaneously stereotypically Jewish and criminal.” Robinson connects the Count’s “bushy eyebrows, pointed ears, sharp teeth, and ugly fingers” as well as his nose to negative physical attributes commonly ascribed to Jews, as well as to the ideas of the Italian founder of criminal anthropology Cesare Lombroso which posited that the criminal face often bore a nose “like the beak of a bird of prey.”

It’s been pointed out that one of Stoker’s major source materials for Transylvania was Major E.C. Johnson’s travelogue On the Track of the Crescent, with some descriptions and incidents being reproduced so closely as to provoke accusations of plagiarism. Equally interesting, however, are some of Johnson’s descriptions of the physical characteristics of Jews he encountered in his travels, including the following:

Who can mistake them? The oval face; the ‘parroty’ beak, out of all proportion to the other features, the stooping gait and long flowing beard, the furtive glances from under shaggy eyebrows, now cringing, now vindictive. … [A]ll these show unmistakably the Hungarian branch of that race ‘against whom is every man’s hand,’ and who returns the compliment with compound interest.


In Dracula, Bram Stoker appears to have significantly increased the role of Christianity and Christian symbolism as methods of defeating vampires, another cause for Robinson to suspect anti-Semitic subtexts to the novel: “Christian iconography had not been emphasized in vampire fiction earlier in the century. Crucifixes and communion wafers, however, figure prominently in combating Dracula, at a time when a religious community that did not embrace Christianity—the Jews—was on the rise.”

While I find some of these links and allusions quite compelling, or at least entertaining to consider, Robinson stretches too far with her attempt to portray Stoker as a kind of proto-genocidal anti-Semitic eugenicist. The argument goes that Dracula’s opponents are scientifically-minded professionals (two doctors and a lawyer) who are determined to stop Dracula bringing about the degeneration of Britain through the breeding of “a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons”—in Robinson’s view, a metaphor for miscegenation. From here, in my view, Robinson departs firmly into the deep recesses of Jewish paranoia in which all roads lead to a Spielbergian Auschwitz:

Stoker’s language is very suggestive. His heroes “sterilize” Dracula’s coffins of native soil with communion wafers in order to prevent him from finding refuge during the day. Next, they travel back to Transylvania to destroy Dracula’s castle, the source of the vampire infestation. They do to the Count what Social Darwinists advocated doing to hereditary criminals—sterilization through applied eugenics. All of the evil and danger suggested by fears about alien immigrants, as embodied by Dracula, are chased out of England and destroyed. In the words of one reviewer, Dracula is “exterminated.”

The Breed and The Tribe

Robinson’s theories on vampires as a kind of persecuted pseudo-Jewish population hunted to extinction by Christians or Fascists are echoed in the 2001 movie The Breed, directed by South African Jew Michael Oblowitz. In the film, vampires are a marginalized and persecuted race literally living in former Jewish ghettoes. Jeffrey Weinstock, in The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema, writes:

The film in a variety of ways equates vampires with Jews. The vampires, living in a fascist state that has been working towards a vampire ‘final solution,’ are ghettoised in an encampment ironically named ‘Serenity.’ Subject to anti-vampire sentiments from the bulk of the vampirophobes who know of their existence, they are represented as poor immigrants. … Most tellingly, the innocent vampires are attacked by government troops while attempting to sneak out of the country. The Breed thus enacts a series of generic inversions that clearly correlated vampires with social outsiderdom and then, rather than expelling the other as a threat to social stability, foregrounds the injustice of bigotry.[12]

The approaches of Robinson and Oblowitz, and several other Jewish scholars whose work I’ve read on this matter, are more or less the same since they both involve a kind of empathy with the figure of the vampire. Yes, it’s an uneasy empathy, and Jews are clearly fearful and uncomfortable with the prospect of being linked with the negative traits associated with the myths and fictions involving the creature. And yet it is also a strong affinity, one that accepts certain commonalities and even produces a kind of dual apologetic. This Jewish affinity for the vampire is surely one of the most remarkable and telling sociological quirks of the modern European-Jewish interaction.

Concluding Remarks

How anti-Jewish are vampire tales, and were any of them ever deliberately constructed that way? That’s open for discussion. A more interesting question, perhaps, is why Jews so readily and heavily read themselves and their history into these fictional creatures. And why, also, do they see themselves in Tolkien’s dwarves, in J.K. Rowling’s goblins, and Tim Burton’s Penguin from Batman Returns?

The rich, quasi-aristocratic, stinking, and beak-nosed Penguin

The answer may lie in an acknowledgment, on some level, that anti-Jewish complaints have some basis in fact, and when these complaints (or traits strongly associated with them) are manifested in fiction or other cultural products as sinister characters or plot devices, they are instantly recognized by Jews on a deep level. Because of this recognition, where the character may inspire horror and disgust among the majority of readers, the Jewish response involves a level of sympathy and a sense of shared fate. Such a divergence in perception illustrates, if nothing else, a deep and ongoing gulf in understanding between two peoples, one fearing a deadly nocturnal parasite and the other believing it the victim of mere bigotry.

[1] See, for example, Reed, Clare. “Vampires and Gentiles: Jews, Mormons and Embracing the Other.” In The Modern Vampire and Human Identity, pp. 128-145. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2013; Gardenour, Brenda. “The Biology of Blood-Lust: Medieval Medicine, Theology, and the Vampire Jew.” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 41, no. 2 (2011): 51-63; Zanger, Jules. “A sympathetic Vibration: Dracula and the Jews.” English literature in transition, 1880-1920 34, no. 1 (1991): 33-44; Dan, Peter. “How Vampires Became Jewish.” Studia Hebraica 9-10 (2009): 417-429; Harrison, Lori B. “Bloodsucking Bloom: Vampirism as a Representation of Jewishness in” Ulysses”.” James Joyce Quarterly 36, no. 4 (1999): 781-797; Bacon, Simon. “The Vampiric Diaspora: The Complications of Victimhood and Post-memory as Configured in the Jewish Migrant Vampire.” In The Modern Vampire and Human Identity, pp. 111-127. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2013; Davison, Carol. Anti-semitism and British gothic literature. Springer, 2004.

[2] See also the Jewish folk creation the ‘Golem,’ which serves oftentimes to fulfil revenge fantasies against Europeans.

[3] J. D. Klier, Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82, 401

[4] G. Bennett, “William of Norwich and the Expulsion of the Jews”, Folklore 116:3, 311-314, 313.

[5] H.G. Hubbeling (ed) Spinoza’s Methodology (Royal Van Gorcum, Netherlands), 103.

[6] H. Johnson, Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation at the Limit of Jewish History (Detroit: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 61.

[7] Krummel & Pugh (eds) Jews in Medieval England: Teaching Representations of the Other. (Germany: Springer International Publishing, 2018), ix.

[8] Gartner, L. P. (1982). Anglo-Jewry and the Jewish International Traffic in Prostitution, 1885-1914. AJS Review, 7/8, 129–178.

[9] Jaffe, A. J., and Saul D. Alinsky. “A comparison of Jewish and non-Jewish convicts.” Jewish Social Studies (1939): 359-366.

[10] Hearne, S. (2021). An Erotic Revolution? Pornography in the Russian Empire, 1905–1914. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 30(2), 195-224.

[11] Knepper, P. (2008). The other invisible hand: Jews and anarchists in London before the First World War. Jewish History, 22(3), 295-315.

[12] J. Weinstock, The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 120