Evil Genius: Constructing Wagner as Moral Pariah—PART 1

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Note: This is a greatly expanded and updated version of an essay that first appeared on TOO in 2012.

A long line of books and documentaries have explored Richard Wagner’s anti-Semitism and his putative role as the spiritual and intellectual godfather to Adolf Hitler. In the Jewish-dominated cultural milieu of the contemporary West, this meme has taken on such a life that Wagner’s name is seldom mentioned today without the obligatory disclaimer that, while admittedly (and unfortunately) a musical genius, his reputation is forever sullied by his standing as a morally-loathsome anti-Semite. A consequence of this is that, for many people, Wagner “has become symbolic of everything evil in the world.”[1]

Richard Wagner was a one-man artistic and intellectual movement whose shadow fell across all of his contemporaries and most of his successors. Other composers had influence; Wagner had a way of thinking named after him. A significant biographical feature of the composers that followed Wagner was how they grappled with his legacy. Some, like Bruckner and Strauss, imitated him; some, like Debussy and Bartok, rejected him; and some, like Hugo Wolf were almost paralyzed by the immensity of his achievement. Wagner’s influence extended to writers and intellectuals like Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Mann, Baudelaire, Eliot, Nietzsche and Shaw. Given his huge impact on Western culture, Bryan Magee has strong grounds for his contention that “Wagner has had a greater influence than any other single artist on the culture of our age.”[2]

Wagner was a deeply polarizing figure in his lifetime, and no other composer has provoked such extreme antipathy or adulation. It has been said that his music has been loved and hated more immoderately than that of any other composer. Wagner was notoriously unscrupulous in his personal life—but his sexual and financial misdemeanors pale into insignificance beside the vastness and originality of his compositions. Even the anti-Wagnerites have had to acknowledge the enormity of his achievement, and his most fanatical detractors (a great many of them Jewish) have reluctantly agreed with the Russian composer Tchaikovsky, who wrote of the Ring: “Whatever one might think of Wagner’s titanic work, no one can deny the monumental nature of the task he set himself, and which he has fulfilled; nor the heroic inner strength needed to complete the task. It was truly one of the greatest artistic endeavors which the human mind has ever conceived.”[3]

The essence of Wagnerian opera lies in the music which deepens and subtilizes the overt meaning of the storyline. Profound, far-reaching psychic changes are accomplished through the music with little or no help from the words, and Wagner’s oeuvre includes some of the most powerful scenes in all opera. Wagner’s music dramas are notable for their use of leitmotifs, musical phrases associated with an idea or character. Not simply accompanying the libretto, they reveal the subconscious feelings of the characters or anticipate what will happen later in the story. There is no one-for-one correspondence between a leitmotif and the concept, idea or emotion that is first attached to it. The leitmotif has a potential to develop—but to develop musically. Scruton observed how “by implanting the principal of musical development in the heart of the drama Wagner is able to lift the action out of the events portrayed on the stage, and to endow it with a universal, cosmic and religious significance.”

One hundred and forty years after his death, Wagner retains a cultural prominence that surpasses any of his contemporaries. The excellence of his music has ensured its popularity has never waned, and Wagner is still well represented on recordings, on radio, and in the theater. Wealthy Wagner devotees travel the world in pursuit of live performances of his fifteen-hour, four-night opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen. Every year thousands still make a pilgrimage to the small Bavarian town of Bayreuth where in 1876 he inaugurated a festival devoted to his own music. The appeal of Wagner’s music, libretti and stagecraft have ensured his music dramas remain useful to opera companies around the world as a reliable income source, even in straitened economic times.

It is, however, Wagner’s standing as “a notorious anti-Semite,” and the intellectual establishment’s obsession with him on this basis, that has increasingly shaped his image in the popular consciousness. Wagner’s reputation is now so thoroughly tainted that one almost never encounters a serious examination of his ideas. For some, Wagner’s anti-Semitism diminishes or even invalidates his accomplishment as a composer. As the commentator Adrian Mourby noted: “The notion that artists don’t have to be as beautiful as the works they create is a commonplace now—except in the case of Wagner. ‘Judaism in Music’ is what has made him the unforgivable exception.”[4]

Judaism in Music

Kevin MacDonald observes in Separation and its Discontents that Richard Wagner is perhaps the best known intellectual who focused on the Jewish domination of culture.[5] Wagner first expounded on what he saw as the pernicious Jewish influence on German art and culture in his 1850 tract Das Judenthum in der Musik (usually translated as Judaism in Music or Jewishness in Music), which was published under pseudonym in 1850.[6] Wagner’s essay took up the theme of a previous article by Theodor Uhlig in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik that was critical of the “Hebraic art taste” that Uhlig thought manifest in Jewish composer Giacomo Meyerbeer’s grand opera Le Prophète.

Wagner attempted in his essay to account for the “popular dislike of the Jewish nature,” and “the involuntary repellence possessed for us by the nature and personality of the Jews.” He concludes that Germans instinctively disliked Jews due to their alien appearance, speech and behavior, noting that “with all our speaking and writing in favor of the Jews’ emancipation [i.e., the result of German high-mindedness and dedication to abstract principles of human rights], we always felt instinctively repelled by any actual, operative contact with them.”[7] Wagner here simply stated an obvious fact: that Germans, like all other racial and ethnic groups, were ethnocentric, and this colored their interactions with a fiercely-competitive, immensely ethnocentric resident outgroup like the Jews. According to Wagner, “We are deliberately distorting our own nature if we feel ashamed to proclaim the natural revulsion aroused in us by Jewishness. … Despite our pretended liberalism we still feel this aversion.”[8]

A 1910 English language edition of Judaism in Music

Wagner argued in Judaism in Music that Jewish musicians were only capable of producing music that was shallow and artificial because they had no connection to the genuine spirit of the German people. He observed that: “So long as the separate art of music had a real organic life-need in it down to the epochs of Mozart and Beethoven, there was nowhere to be found a Jewish composer. … Only when a body’s inner death is manifest, do outside elements win the power of lodgment in it—yet merely to destroy it.”[9] Jews had not fully assimilated into German culture, so did not identify with and merge themselves into the deepest layers of that culture, including its religious and ethnic influences—the Volksgeist. According to Wagner, “our whole European art and civilization … remained to the Jew a foreign tongue.” The Jews “through an intercourse of two millennia with European nations” had never fully abandoned the posture of “a cold, nay more, a hostile looker-on.” The entry of the Jews into nineteenth-century European society was, for Wagner, the infiltration of an alien and antagonistic group whose success symbolized the spiritual and creative crisis of German and European culture.

The same thesis was advanced by Zionist intellectuals like Ahad Ha’Am (the pseudonym of Asher Ginsburg). Kevin MacDonald notes that both Wagner and Ginsburg “developed the idea that Jews could not have their own artistic spirit because they failed to identify completely with the surrounding culture.”[10] In Wagner’s view, higher culture springs ultimately from folk culture. In the absence of Jewish influence, German music would once again reflect the deeper layers of German folk culture. For Wagner, “Judaic works of music often produce on us the impression as though a poem of Goethe’s, for instance, were being rendered in the Jewish jargon. … Just as words and constructions are hurled together in this jargon with wondrous inexpressiveness, so does the Jewish musician hurl together the diverse forms and styles of every age and every master. Packed side by side, we find the formal idiosyncrasies of all the schools, in motleyest chaos.”[11]

For Wagner, Jewish art was characterized by imitativeness, and therefore, by shallowness and superficiality. This was exemplified by the compositions that dominated the music scene of his time. From the depth and intensity of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, the music of the concert hall had descended to the comparative superficiality of Mendelssohn—who had diverted the “tempests of revolution” into soothing salon music. Similarly, opera had fallen from the musical-dramatic peaks of Gluck and Mozart to the barren flatlands of Meyerbeer and Halevy. For Wagner, all that was meretricious in Grand Opera could be ascribed to the Jewishness of its composers—whose work amounted to a series of glib surface effects. He writes: “Of necessity what comes out of attempts by Jews to make art must have the property of coldness, of non-involvement, to the point of being trivial and absurd. We are forced to categorize the Jewish period in modern music as the period of consummate uncreativeness—stagnation run to seed.”

Writing in 1988, philosopher and cultural historian Bryan Magee observes that “to write works of this kind was to make use of art as a mere means—a means of entertainment, a means of giving pleasure and getting to be liked, a means of achieving status, money, fame. For Jews it was a means of making their way in an alien society.”[12] It certainly worked for Meyerbeer, with the first hundred performances of Le Prophète in Berlin alone netting him 750,000 marks—almost 200,000 marks more than the entire sum Wagner received over nearly two decades from his patron King Ludwig II of Bavaria.[13]

Wagner’s thesis has been roundly condemned by Jewish commentators, and yet the Jewish academic David Rodwin, while labelling Wagner’s essay “a vile anti-Semitic screed,” admits there is substantial truth in the “aesthetic eclecticism” that Wagner identified as a unifying feature of Jewish composers.[14] Regarding Wagner’s attribution of “imitativeness” as a particularly Jewish trait, Jacob Katz likewise acknowledges that: “Jewish qualities may quite naturally appear—for better or for worse—in artistic creations of Jews, even of those who have joined non-Jewish culture. It would therefore be preposterous to dismiss categorically all observations from the mouths of anti-Semites as prejudicial misconceptions.”[15] Magee calls Wagner’s thesis “unbelievably original” and notes:

One does not need to share Wagner’s view of Mendelssohn, who came from a Christianized and highly assimilated family, to see that his argument is substantially correct. … A really great creative artist is one who, in freely expressing his own needs, aspirations, and conflicts, articulates those of an entire society. This is made possible by the fact that, through his earliest relationships, mother tongue, upbringing, and all his first experience of life, the cultural heritage on which he has entered at birth is woven into the whole fabric of his personality. He has a thousand roots in it of which he is unaware, nourishing him below the level of consciousness, so that when he speaks for himself he quite unconsciously speaks for others. Now in Wagner’s time it was impossible for a Jewish artist to be in this position. The ghettos of Western Europe had only begun to be opened in the wake of the French Revolution, and their abolition was going on throughout the nineteenth century. The Jewish composers of Wagner’s day were among the very first emancipated Jews, pastless in the society in which they were living and working. They spoke its language with, literally, a foreign accent.[16]

According to Magee, Wagner failed to notice that he was describing a transitional phenomenon—that the creations of Jewish composers would inevitably become “deeper” and more culturally authentic as the descendants of emancipated Jews assimilated into their host societies. Magee cites the emergence of Mahler and Schoenberg in the late nineteenth century to illustrate his point.

Richard Wagner

Drawing on the thesis of Heinrich Laube’s book Struensee, Wagner argued in Judaism in Music that Jews had also degraded German art by introducing their commercializing spirit into it. In February of 1848, at the funeral of Wagner’s mother, Laube had commiserated with his friend Wagner, equating the sadness of the hour with their mutual despair at the state of German art and culture, noting that “On the way to the station, we discussed the unbearable burden that seemed to us to lie like a dead weight on every noble effort made to resist the tendency of the time to sink into utter worthlessness.” As the preface to Struensee makes clear, this “worthlessness” consisted in the flowering of Jewish commercial values. Wagner’s only remedy was to “plunge dully and coldly into the only thing that could cheer me and warm me, the working out of my Lohengrin and my studies of German antiquity.”[17] Regarding the Jewish tendency to convert art into a branch of commerce, Wagner writes:

[All] is turned to money by the Jew. Who thinks of noticing that the guileless looking scrap of paper is slimy with the blood of countless generations? What the heroes of the arts … have invented … from two millennia of misery, today the Jew converts into an art-bazaar. … We have no need first to substantiate the Jewification [Verjudung] of modern art. It springs to the eye and thrusts upon the senses. … But if emancipation from the yoke of Judaism appears to us the greatest of necessities, we must hold it crucial above all to assemble our forces for this war of liberation. But we shall never gain these forces by merely defining the phenomenon [of Judaism] in an abstract way. This will be done only by accurately knowing the nature of that involuntary feeling of ours which utters itself as an instinctive repugnance against the Jew’s prime essence. … Then we can rout the demon from the field … where he has sheltered under a twilit darkness … which we good-natured humanists ourselves have conferred on him.[18]

For Wagner, Judaism was the embodiment of the bourgeois money-egoist spirit, and he observes that: “When our social evolution reached that turning-point at which the power of money to bestow rank began to be openly admitted, it was no longer possible to keep the Jews at bay. They had enough money to be admitted to society.” Wagner believed that Jews “will continue to rule as long as money remains the power to which all our activities are subjugated.” He later confessed to his fellow composer friend (and future father-in-law) Franz Liszt, “I felt a long-repressed hatred for this Jewish money-world, and this hatred is as necessary to my nature as gall is to blood. An opportunity arose when their damnable scribbling annoyed me most, and so I broke forth at last.”[19] In Judaism in Music Wagner finds the plea for Jewish emancipation to be “more than commonly naive, since we see ourselves rather in the position of fighting for emancipation from the Jews. The Jew is in fact, in the current state of the world, already more than emancipated. He rules.”

While stressing the harmful effects of the Jewish financial domination of German society, Wagner believed that the Jewish manipulation of language and art was infinitely more pernicious than their control over money. In his essay “What is German?” (1878, but based on a draft written in the 1860s) he states that culture, not economy, lies at the heart of German identity, and that Jews had bought the German soul and turned German Kultur into a sham, a mere image; and in doing this had destroyed “one of the finest natural dispositions in all the human race.”[20]

Wagner believed that the German people had been endowed with a uniquely rich inner life which had been forged during the crucible of the Thirty Years War. The body of the nation had almost been annihilated, “but the German spirit had passed through,” and amidst the physical ruins the Germans once again realized they were a nation of the spirit. This spirit had been preserved in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and the German spiritual mission in the world was to proclaim “that the Beautiful and the Noble came not into the world for sake of profit, nay, not for the sake of even fame and recognition.”[21] Wagner thus viewed the new festival theater he built in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth in 1876 as the Grail Castle of a reborn, spiritual Germany. Far from the cosmopolitan theaters owned and operated by city-dwelling Jews, Bayreuth would allow the German nation to regain a sense of its true self by experiencing the mythic force of its own ancient epic—the Nibelungen. Through Bayreuth, Wagner wanted to reclaim German art and culture from that “race of mediators and negotiators whose influence was … to spread its truly ‘international’ power more and more widely over Germany.”[22]

Wagner repeatedly observed (and lamented) the fact Jews had stormed the fortress of German high culture and had successfully “brought the public art-taste of our time between the busy fingers of the Jew.”[23] A host of Jewish middlemen had gained a hold over the critical press, publishing, theaters, operas, orchestras, art galleries and agencies.  This Jewish cultural ascendancy in Germany was, of course, to reach its zenith in the Weimar Republic. Despite his stated views, Wagner twice refused to sign the “Anti-Semites Petition” of 1880 (presented to Bismarck) which complained about the very economic domination that so troubled him. The Petition, which quickly won 225,000 signatures, stated:

Wherever Christian and Jew enter into social relations, we see the Jew as master, the indigenous Christian population in a subservient position. The Jew takes part only to a negligible extent in the heavy labor of the great mass of the nation. But the fruits of his [the German’s] labor are reaped mainly by the Jew. By far the largest part of the capital which national labor produces is in Jewish hands. … Not only do the proudest palaces of our large cities belong to Jewish masters whose fathers and grandfathers, huckstering and peddling, crossed the frontiers into our fatherland, but rural holdings too, that most significant preservative basis of our political structure fall more and more into the hands of the Jews. … What we strive for is solely the emancipation of the German Volk from a form of alien domination which it cannot endure for any length of time.[24]

Cosima Wagner gave several explanations for her husband’s refusal to sign the petition, among them that he had already done as much as he could for the cause, that a petition he had signed against vivisection had failed, and that the new appeal was addressed in servile language to Bismarck, who by this time Wagner loathed.[25] Wagner deplored the “Jewishness” of the new German empire, which he thought, thanks to Bismarck, had turned out to be a real-politischer state, rather than a truly German one. In 1878, Wagner wrote that “Bismarck is creating German unity, but he has no conception of its nature. … His conduct is a disgrace for Germany … his decisions have brought forth from the Jews a petition of thanks.” When Bismarck spoke out against the Anti-Semites Petition it only confirmed Wagner in his conviction that Bismarck had “a pact with the Jews.”[26]

For Roger Scruton, central to Wagner’s genius was his determination to use his art to escape from the increasingly commercialized world of art he detested—a world “where value is price and price is value,” and where entertainment is considered more important than art. Wagner escaped “to a garret, high above the market place” in conscious reaction against the sentimentality and disingenuousness of the art and music at his time.

The operas of Wagner attempt to dignify the human being in something like the way he might be dignified by an uncorrupted common culture. Acutely conscious of the death of God, Wagner proposed man as his own redeemer and art as a transfiguring rite of passage to a higher world. The suggestion is visionary, and its impact on modern culture so great that the shockwaves are still overtaking us. … In the mature operas of Wagner our civilization gave voice for the last time to its idea of the heroic, through music that strives to endorse that idea to the full extent of its power. And because Wagner was a composer of supreme genius, perhaps the only one to have taken forward the intense inner language forged by Beethoven and to have used it to conquer the psychic spaces that Beethoven shunned, everything he wrote in his mature idiom has the ring of truth, and every note is both absolutely right and profoundly surprising.[27]

Wagner fled from the commercialized world of art into the inner realm of the imagination. He believed the idealism and heroism of a bygone age could be rekindled again. He strove to create a new music public that would not just identify with the Germanic heroic ideal, but embrace it as part of an idealistic nationalism that eschewed the bourgeois values of the mid-nineteenth century. In this endeavor, he strived to connect at an emotional rather than a rational level with his audience. As Wagner once wrote of his Ring cycle: “I shall within these four evenings succeed in artistically conveying my purpose to the emotional—not the critical—understanding of the spectators.”[28] This was in keeping with his dictum that art should be “the presentation of religion in a lively form.”

It was precisely this quality in Wagner’s works that most repelled the Frankfurt School music theorist and leading Wagner critic T.W. Adorno, who likened Wagner’s famous system of leitmotifs to advertising jingles in the way they imprinted themselves on the memory. For Adorno, Wagner’s musical innovations led to feelings of disorientation and intoxication that seduced audiences and rendered them docile and dangerously susceptible to political persuasion. In every crowd applauding a Wagnerian work, Adorno insisted, lurked “the old virulent evil” of “demagogy.” Elizabeth Whitcombe notes that

Adorno believed that Wagner’s work is “proselytizing” and “collective-narcissistic.” Adorno’s complaint about the “collective-narcissistic” quality of Wagner’s music is really a complaint that Wagner’s music appeals to deep emotions of group cohesion. Like the Germanic myths that his music was often based on, Wagner’s music evokes the deepest passions of ethnic collectivism and ethnic pride. In Adorno’s view, such emotions are nothing more than collective narcissism, at least partly because a strong sense of German ethnic pride tends to view Jews as outsiders—as “the other.” It is also not surprising that Adorno, as a self-consciously Jewish intellectual, would find such music abhorrent.[29]

Adorno’s jaundiced assessment of Wagner was encapsulated in Woody Allen’s quip that: “When I hear Wagner I have the irresistible urge to invade Poland.” Scruton points out that Wagner’s attempt to engage his audiences at the emotional level of religion (which so perturbed Adorno) was already doomed when Wagner first conceived it. The main problem being that:

[Wagner’s] sacerdotal presumptions have never ceased to alienate those who feel threatened by his message. Hence modern producers, embarrassed by dramas that make a mockery of their way of life, decide in their turn to make a mockery of the dramas [in so-called Regietheater/Eurotrash productions]. Of course, even today, musicians and singers, responding as they must to the urgency and sincerity of the music, do their best to produce the sounds that Wagner intended. But the action is invariably caricatured, wrapped in inverted commas, and reduced to the dimensions of the television sitcom. Sarcasm and satire run riot on the stage, not because they have anything to prove or say in the shadow of this unsurpassably noble music, but because nobility has become intolerable. The producer strives to distract the audience from Wagner’s message, and to mock every heroic gesture, lest the point of the drama should finally come home.

As Michael Tanner has argued, in his succinct and penetrating defense of the composer, modern productions attempt to “domesticate” Wagner, to bring his dramas down from the exalted sphere in which the music places them, to the world of human trivia, usually in order to make a “political statement” which, being both blatant and banal, succeeds only in cancelling the rich ambiguities of the drama. In contemporary Wagner productions we see exactly what the transition from modernism to the “post-modern” world involves, namely, the final rejection of high culture as a redemptive force and the ruination of the sacred in its last imagined form.[30]

In the conclusion to Judaism and Music, Wagner asserts of the Jews that “only one thing can redeem you from the burden of your curse: the redemption of Ahasverus—going under!”[31] Although this has been taken by some commentators to denote actual physical annihilation, in the context of the essay it refers to the eradication of Jewish separateness and traditions. Wagner advises Jews to follow the example of the German-Jewish political writer and satirist Ludwig Börne by abandoning Judaism. In this way Jews will take part in “this regenerative work of deliverance through self-annulment; then we are one and un-dissevered!”

Wagner was calling for the assimilation of Jews into mainstream German culture and society. He thus offered to take Hermann Levi, the first conductor of his last opera Parsifal, to be baptized. Under the influence of Darwinian thinking (promoted in Germany by Ernst Häckel), Wagner later came to favor expulsion over conversion, and thus paralleled the trajectory of German anti-Semitism over the course of the nineteenth century, which “shifted from demands for Jewish assimilation by intellectuals such as Kant and the young Hegelians in the early part of the century, to an increasing emphasis on the ethnic divide separating Germans and Jews.”[32]

Wagner republished Judaism in Music under his own name in 1869 with an extended introduction, leading to several protests by Jews at the first performances of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. In the introduction he writes: “Whether the downfall of our culture can be arrested by a violent ejection of the destructive foreign element I am unable to decide, since that would require forces with whose existence I am unacquainted.”[33] In that year Wagner wrote a letter to the French philosopher Edouard Schoure in which he lamented that the assimilation of Jews into French society was preventing the French people from discerning the “corrosive influence of the Jewish spirit on modern culture.”

The second edition of Judaism in Music was published in the same year as Wilhelm Marr’s influential Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum (The Victory of Jewishness over Germanism). Historian Richard Evans claims that by the end of the 1870s Wagner had read Wilhelm Marr’s essay and had “broadly agreed with it.”[34] In 1878, Wagner confessed that “It is distressing to me always to come back to the theme of the Jews. But one cannot escape it if one looks to the future.” In his late essay “Religion and Art” (1881), he described the Jews as “the plastic demon of the decline of mankind,” and declared: “I regard the Jewish race as the born enemies of humanity and everything that is noble in it; it is certain we Germans will go under before them, and perhaps I am the last German who knows how to stand up as an art-loving man against the Judaism that is already getting control of everything.”[35]

Brenton Sanderson is the author of Battle Lines: Essays on Western Culture, Jewish Influence and Anti-Semitism, banned by Amazon, but available here and here.

Go to Part 2.

[1] William Berger, Wagner Without Fear: Learning to Love—and Even Enjoy—Opera’s Most Demanding Genius (New York, Viking, 1998), 373.

[2] Bryan Magee, Aspects of Wagner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 56.

[3] Quoted in Martin Kitchen, The Cambridge Illustrated History of Germany (London: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 195.

[4] Adrian Mourby, “Can we forgive him?,” The Guardian, July 21, 2000. http://www.guardian.co.uk/friday_review/story/0,3605,345459,00.html

[5] Kevin MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (1st Books Library, 2004), 60.

[6] Richard Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 3 (London: 1894; repr. 1966), 79-100. http://www.jrbooksonline.com/PDF_Books/JudaismInMusic.pdf

[7] Ibid.

[8] Bryan Magee, Wagner and Philosophy (London: Penguin, 2001), 349.

[9] Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” op. cit.

[10] MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents, 184.

[11] Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” op. cit.

[12] Magee, Aspects of Wagner, 27.

[13] Jonathan Carr, The Wagner Clan (London: Faber and Faber, 2007) 83-4.

[14] David Rodwin, “Wagner Was Right: Eclecticism and the Jewish Aesthetic,” (Los Angeles: 2011). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkfGEqo3YjQ

[15] Quoted in MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents, 98.

[16] Magee, Aspects of Wagner, 24.

[17] Paul Lawrence Rose, German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Anti-Semitism from Kant to

Wagner (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992) 360.

[18] Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” op. cit.

[19] Richard Wagner, letter of April 1851 trans. by W. Ashton Ellis, In: Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt 1841-1853, (London: 1897; repr. 1973), 145.

[20]Richard Wagner, “What is German?” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 4 (London: 1894; repr. 1966), 151-69. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagwiger.htm

[21] Ibid. (Italics in the original)

[22] Rose, German Question/Jewish Question, 376.

[23] Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” op. cit.

[24] Quoted in MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents, 52.

[25] Jonathan Carr, The Wagner Clan, 75.

[26] Rose, German Question/Jewish Question, 372.

[27] Roger Scruton, Modern Culture (London: Continuum, 2000), 69.

[28] Richard Wagner, “A Communication to my Friends,” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 1 (London: 1895; repr. 1966), 269-392. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagcomm.htm

[29] Elisabeth Whitcombe, “Adorno as Critic: Celebrating the Socially Destructive Force of Music,” The Occidental Observer, August 28, 2009. http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2009/08/adorno-as-critic/

[30] Scruton, Modern Culture, 69.

[31] Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” Ibid.

[32] MacDonald, Separation and its Discontents, 165.

[33] Richard Wagner, “Some Explanations Concerning ‘Judaism in Music,’” trans. by William Ashton Ellis, In: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 3 (London: 1894; repr. 1966), 77-122. http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagjuda2.htm

[34] Richard Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin, 2005), 33.

[35] Rose, German Question/Jewish Question, 377-8.

 

 

Identity politics: On the edge of self-destructing chaos?

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Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe
Niall Ferguson
Penguin, 2021

What could be less surprising than a mainstream academic, a pop historian at that, who misunderstands the social revolution? Niall Ferguson’s pandemic-inspired book Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe looks at a range of disasters past, present, and possibly future while downplaying the upheaval all around us. But he unwittingly reinforces an interesting perspective on the fragility of the multi-faceted coalition intent on destroying the West.

Before addressing that, however, it’s worth looking at the insights Ferguson offers for the apocalyptically preoccupied. Whether catastrophes are biological, political, social, economic, geological, environmental, or even inter-stellar, he maintains, “at some level all disasters are man-made.” Regardless of cause, humanity has a way of aggravating circumstances.

He writes about the Spanish flu that started in 1918, killing 40 to 50 million, more than World War I but less than the catastrophe of communism. After typhus killed up to three million in the Russian Civil War, the victors unleashed two man-made famines on Ukraine, from 1921–1923, and 1932–1933. The latter spilled into Russia and especially Kazakhstan, killing about five million people altogether. “Stalin’s conception of class war implied not just terror but mass murder,” Ferguson states.

The agricultural disaster imposed by China’s Great Leap Forward from 1959 to 1961 killed between 30 and 60 million. Ethiopian communists caused their 1984–1985 famine, an atrocity overlooked by pop fans swooning over the Live Aid music fest.

Ferguson surveys epidemics from fifth-century BC Athens, through the bubonic plague in the early modern period, to the recent outbreaks of Asian flu, AIDS/HIV, SARS, MERS, and Ebola, up to the current pandemic. China, he says, responded to Covid-19 as it did to SARS. The difference this time: they did it with the “acquiescence” of the World Health Organization, with the WHO’s China-backed Ethiopian director-general “supine, if not sycophantic.”

About seven million people left Wuhan in January 2020. When China finally restricted travel, the country imposed tighter controls on movement between Wuhan and the rest of China than between Wuhan and the rest of the world. Let that sink in.

This planet’s history of disasters includes “an infinity of non-events” too. Only luck has (so far) prevented a meteor strike of existential proportions. Other possible threats might include an alien invasion (although the distances are incomprehensibly vast), solar activity, planet-swallowing black holes, or an exponential expansion of the universe.

Humanity’s contribution to its demise might come from nuclear war, terrorism or accidents, biological weapons, cyber warfare, genetic engineering, or nanotechnology—any of which could cause “some self-perpetuating and unstoppable process that drowns us in gloop.” Artificial intelligence can be used to enhance totalitarianism or justify its creation. Or AI could turn against us.

Ferguson notes AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky’s warning: Every 18 months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point. (Ferguson doesn’t provide the minimum starting point. Yudkowsky said that in 2008, nearly nine points ago.)

Ferguson completed this book before the vaccine controversies. Yet in discussing “science and the revival of magic,” he writes of “that vague deference to ‘the science,’ which proves, on close inspection, to be a new form of superstition.”

As for the obsessions of Greta Thunberg, “the child saint of the twenty-first-century millennialist movement,” Ferguson says an eruption of Wyoming’s Yellowstone supervolcano “would render discussion of man-made climate change superfluous in the brief period before mass extinction ensued.”

Comparing the near-catastrophe of Cold War I with the potential catastrophe of Cold War II, he mentions that America’s allies the first time around prefer to remain non-aligned in the second. He points out that Western pop culture helped undermine Soviet power in CW I, but doesn’t acknowledge that it’s now undermining the West. Nor does he mention that, while the Soviets had Cold War spies, agents, and sympathizers working abroad, as China does now, Beijing also has fifth columns across the West in CCP-loyal immigrant spies and potential spies who are welcomed by universities, corporations, and even as government employees throughout the West.

As at least some of Ferguson’s previous 15 books indicate, he finds fascination in networks—social, political, economic, cultural, communications, infrastructure, and so on. Each can be described as a complex system with many components held together only through a delicate equilibrium. The networks also intertwine into an even more complex entity.

As Ferguson explains, “Some such systems operate somewhere between order and disorder—‘on the edge of chaos,’ in the phrase of the computer scientist Christopher Langton.”

Bernice Cohen’s 1997 book The Edge of Chaos: Financial Booms, Bubbles, Crashes and Chaos applies that perspective to a highly technical but often fascinating analysis of economic disasters dating back to the 1630s Dutch Tulip Mania. Ferguson points out how American subprime mortgages shattered the delicate equilibrium of global finance to crash the world economy in 2008. Lionel Shriver refers to complex systems in The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047, a 2016 novel that wonderfully expresses the human element of a financially induced societal collapse. (Ferguson’s survey of sci-fi and dystopian fiction ignores this American classic, yet he praises Margaret Atwood and the equally lame TV series Survivors.)

A very delicate equilibrium might be seen in the current social revolution. Certainly not a movement of reform, it proposes nothing remotely realistic to replace the society and culture it’s destroying. That will delight the many activists who simply hate normality. But they themselves could be threatened by ensuing chaos.

As a complex system, the social revolution shows what Ferguson would call phase transitions. Some examples include the 2016 election of Donald Trump, the 2017 Charlottesville confrontation, the 2020 George Floyd martyrdom, and probably the 2021 Jan. 6 Capitol Hill protest. Canada took these American events to heart and experienced an additional phase transition this year with sudden allegations that unmarked native graves that had long been publicly known indicate mass burials of atrocity victims. Each of these transitions brought a wildly disproportionate and seemingly irreversible escalation of activism, mainstream propaganda, and sometimes official policy.

In addition to phase transitions, the revolution features a more fluid radicalization that continues through almost every aspect of Western society and culture. For example increasing levels of weirdness become mainstream with public celebrations of homosexuality, then homo marriage, homo adoption, sex change operations, and now gender fluidity and hormone injections for children.

Could all this constitute an overly complex system doomed for self-destruction?

The delicate equilibrium might face infighting. Some early indications came from Blacks who delayed the 2016 Toronto Pride Parade and forced cancellation of its 2021 Boston counterpart, as well as the CCP-loyal Chinese who disrupted the 2019 Montreal Pride Parade. Of course those actions would be considered intolerable hate crimes were they not committed by privileged minorities—and supposed allies with homosexual culture in the war on the West.

It doesn’t take a chaos theorist to imagine where this might lead. How long will BLM get along with antifa, anti-Zionists with the old guard Jewish left, feminists with transgendered “women,” Muslims with feminists, immigrant Hutus with Tutsis, Shiites with Sunnis, Blacks with Hispanics, Blacks with Asians, Blacks with other Blacks, and Whites with all of the above? Meanwhile resource-hungry China watches for opportunity in chaos, as might some regional cartels and maybe an up-and-coming caliphate.

The delicate equilibrium applies to institutions too. Schooling and academia have already collapsed under the Gleichschaltung of identity politics. Law enforcement and justice don’t have far to go. As medical care (staffed through affirmative action) prioritizes patients from a hierarchy of group identities, the spoils system should provoke greater resentment. And if education and employment denigrate merit, who’ll keep complex infrastructure running? “Traditional indigenous knowledge” somehow seems inadequate to provide nuclear power.

Comparisons can be made with some aspects of the French Revolution’s Great Terror, the USSR, the Maoist Cultural Revolution and other eras of madness. Vicious as they were, they lacked the complexity of today’s morass. A question for our time might be whether we endure a period of total chaos before a totalitarian regime imposes order, or whether we slide straight into totalitarianism.

Ferguson misses these possible scenarios, although he does mention some quasi-religious aspects of what he calls the “Great Awokening.” Examples include White cops washing the feet of Black marchers, White BLM supporters displaying wounds (real or fake) from self-flagellation, and Whites kneeling on the pavement praying to Blacks for forgiveness.

But in downplaying the extent of these manifestations, Ferguson seems oblivious to our possible oblivion. The cover photo for one printing of his book shows a golfer intent on his game while a raging wildfire approaches. That image might serve as a metaphor for academics like Ferguson himself.

Wayne Northrup is a pen name for the author of  a novella, You Can’t Say That (http://youcantsaythat.ca/), a racial dystopia set in Canada.

 

Soul Man: The Genesis of Cancel Culture

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On October 24, 1986 (35 years ago this week), the American comedy Soul Man was released in theaters. The film was a box office success, as it debuted at No. 3 on its opening weekend (behind only Crocodile Dundee and The Color of Money). It ultimately grossed $35 million on a $4.5 million budget. The movie instantly became entangled in controversy, and was canceled almost immediately because the plot depicted a White actor in blackface:

Mark Watson (Howell) is the pampered son of a rich family who is about to attend Harvard Law School along with his best friend Gordon (Gross). Unfortunately, his father’s neurotic psychiatrist talks his patient into having more fun for himself instead of spending money on his son. Faced with the prospect of having to pay for law school by himself, Mark decides to apply for a scholarship, but the only suitable one is for African-Americans only. He decides to cheat by using tanning pills in a larger dose than prescribed to appear as an African-American. Watson then sets out for Harvard, naïvely believing that black people have no problems at all in American society.

However, once immersed in a black student’s life, Mark finds out prejudice and racism truly exist. He meets a young African-American student named Sarah Walker (Chong), whom he first only flirts with; gradually, however, he genuinely falls in love with her. In passing, she mentions that he received the scholarship she was in the running for at the last minute. Due to this, she not only has to handle her classes but work as a waitress to support herself and her young son George.

Slowly, Mark begins to regret his deed since he has landed in jail under suspicion of stealing his own car, been the subject of stereotypes of black men and pursued by his landlord’s daughter and classmate Whitney (Melora Hardin) simply because he’s not white.

After a chaotic day in which Sarah, his parents (who are not aware of his double life) and Whitney all make surprise visits at the same time, he drops the charade and publicly reveals himself to be white. Most people he has come into contact with realize this makes sense, but Sarah is furious.

Once the charade is over, Mark speaks to his professor (Jones). He has learned more than he bargained for since he admits that he didn’t know what it was like to truly be black because he could have changed back to being white at any time.

Because Mark must forfeit his scholarship, his father agrees to loan him the money for school, but with exorbitant interest. He goes to Sarah and begs for another chance, to which she agrees after Mark stands up for her and George when two male students tell a racist joke in front of them.

The movie is a comedy, so obviously it’s going to try to make people laugh. Different comedies do that in different ways, but there is usually some degree of ridiculousness involved. Soul Man‘s shtick was to grossly exaggerate stereotypical behaviors in the hopes of being funny. The depictions presented in the film were intended to make fun of both Black and White people, with the idea of highlighting the cultural misconceptions that each group held of the other, then present them in an outlandish way, so that the audience could laugh at the ignorant nature of racist generalizations. In doing so, the movie could moonlight as a tool of social justice, which would also help debunk racism by showing the stupidity and evil associated with racial stereotypes.

As an illustration of the aforementioned humor, the following clip is perhaps the most memorable scene of the movie and illustrates why the movie could never be made today—for a lot of reasons, including that most people would find the “humor” forced and awkward. It’s also reminiscent of the goofiness of 80s comedies, which also included movies such as Airplane, Spaceballs, and Police Academy:

However, not everybody thought the comedy was funny. A young filmmaker named Spike Lee became the biggest spokesperson against the movie. Lee had just made his directorial debut with She’s Gotta Have It, and was making rounds on the talk show circuit in support of his project. During one of the interviews, Lee went into a tirade about Soul Man‘s portrayal of Black people as “idiots.” He admitted that he had never actually seen the movie, but “watched clips.” He insisted that the movie was “so phony” that it had to be maliciously mocking the intelligence of Black people by implying that Black people were so dumb that they couldn’t tell that it was actually a White guy in blackface:

“The whole premise is that he’s passing as Black, and it’s so phony, that means all the Black people in the movie are idiots … that they could think that this guy is Black,” said Lee, who had watched clips from the movie but refused to see it in full.

“They’re trying to pass it off as an attack on racism. I really don’t see it that way. That’s not funny to me.”

Of course, the filmmakers and actors denied the film was racist (yes, White people groveled to Blacks in the 80s, too). But, as we all know, “sorry” and “actually,….” never suffice.

Thus, it became futile when the film’s creators posited that “a white man can’t understand racism until he’s the one being discriminated against.” Or, that they intended “to use comedy as a device to expose racial stereotyping.”

Nor did it matter that the star of the movie (C. Thomas Howell) reiterated the producer’s message of anti-racism when asked about his decision to play the blackface character (the role had been offered to, and turned down by, several popular actors of the time, including: Anthony Micheal Hall, Tim Robbins, Val Kilmer and John Cusak):

“A white man donning blackface is taboo. Conversation over, you can’t win,” said Howell. “But our intentions were pure: We wanted to make a funny movie that had a message about racism.”

Even though there is no reason to suggest the creators or Howell were lying, it didn’t matter. Lee had the moral high ground because he was Black. He then used his black skin morality to determine what was supposedly funny. And if anybody wanted to contest his definition of humor, he would’ve slandered them with epithets (e.g., “racist”). Hence, there was no other choice but to cancel a movie that people evidently thought was funny and were willing to pay to watch.

Lee added clarity to his primary critique of the movie. It wasn’t just that it wasn’t funny to him, he also insisted that the ulterior motive was that it was “really an attack on affirmative action.”

Interestingly, during the clearly uncomfortable interview, Lee failed to comment on the intellectual stereotypes (and realities) associated with affirmative action. It would seem if he was opposed to Black people looking like “idiots,” he would be adamantly against affirmative action—especially considering that affirmative action was/is a real thing and not just some ignorant stereotype in a movie. Non-Black people actually did/do lose out to intellectually inferior Blacks who can’t compete without special privileges. If Lee were seriously concerned about the intellectual image of Blacks, he would’ve been the one leading the “attack on affirmative action.”

Furthermore, affirmative action programs are racist by design. Consequently, by the mere existence of such programs, they create negative stereotypes on their own. If Lee (or the creators of the movie) were actually hoping to eliminate racial stereotypes associated with Black people, they would’ve advocated for the elimination of affirmative action programs. Instead, they are allowed to exist, which give us more fodder to laugh at. Like Rachael Dolezal, who pretended to be Black so she could be the leader of her local NAACP chapter. And Dave Wilson, who pretended to be Black so he could win an elected position in a predominately Black district. Or Vijah Jojo Chokal-Ingam, who pretended to be Black to get into medical school.

Just recently a survey found that 34% of White college applicants lied about their race in order to get admitted or to get financial aid, and 77% were accepted. A whole generation of college students is using Elizabeth Warren as a role model. Amazingly the Black activist Ibram Kendi tweeted the story, presumably because it makes these Whites look dishonest—forgetting that it also demolishes his narrative about systemic racial oppression. He quickly deleted the tweet.

Each of these Whites presented a real-life version of Soul Man as a direct result of unequal privileges that come with being Black in America. That “privilege” is explicitly based on the intellectual inferiority of Black people (although of course the advocates claim it’s about making up for that  elusive “systemic racism”). If Lee really cared about the stigmas associated with Black intelligence, he would use his skin color powerful privilege to point out how dumb affirmative action programs make Black people look.

Ironically, Ronald Reagan’s son played a minor role in the film. Reagan was President at the time and was openly opposed to affirmative action programs. The President and First Lady screened the movie from Camp David and a White House spokesman reported that they “really enjoyed the film and especially enjoyed seeing their son Ron in the movie.”

The film’s co-star was Tommy Chong’s daughter, Rae Dawn Chong. Chong played the “Black” love interest of Howell (Howell and Chong later married after meeting on the film). Chong (who is White, Black, Chinese and Indian) and Howell both remained staunch supporters of the movie years later—albeit from an anti-racist/anti-White perspective. Chong even publicly blamed Lee for making the film controversial, and said if he had actually watched the film, he would’ve seen that the film was really just “making white people look stupid”:

“It was only controversial because Spike Lee made a thing of it,” the actress said in a 2016 interview with The Wrap. “He’d never seen the movie and he just jumped all over it… He was just starting and pulling everything down in his wake. If you watch the movie, it’s really making white people look stupid.”

Imagine that. A mulatto actress defended her position that the movie she starred in wasn’t really racist, because if anyone actually took the time to watch it they would’ve seen that it was “really just making White people look stupid.”

Isn’t it funny how everyone’s feelings matter until you get to White people?

All joking aside, the actors and filmmakers said their comedy was an attack on racism, and some whiny anti-racist Black guy said it wasn’t. So, who was right?

Therein lies the foundational problem of multiculturalism, abstract isms (e.g., racism) and feelings-based social hierarchies (e.g., cancel-culture). When those dynamics become the arbitrators of society, the feelings of a few determine the social norms of the many. Those social norms become revolutionary, to the degree that they redefine truth and reason. They do this using social-engineering techniques (i.e., censorship) that ultimately reconstruct reality, in the sense that reality becomes a social construct.

What started with a whiny Black guy who didn’t like the humor in a movie paved the way for a Jewish man in a dress to not only be the nation’s leading authority on public health, but also the nation’s first female 4-star admiral.

Now do you get it?

David Ray Griffin and the Demonic

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The individual most responsible for my high degree of confidence that the official 9/11 story is blatantly false is a most unlikely character for the job — a mild mannered, retired theology professor long ensconced in the pleasant Mediterranean region of Southern California. His name is David Ray Griffin, now 82 years old. For a variety of reasons, Prof. Griffin ended up writing a book called The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11 (2004).

Personally, I find it fitting that not just a theology professor, but one who has written extensively on God and His relation to Evil, used his dedication to morality and an extensive background in science to convincingly challenge the official US Government narrative. Further, he also situated the likely 9/11 cover-up and subsequent attack on Iraq in terms of a cosmic encounter with a demonic American empire.

Though Griffin would be horrified to hear it — and almost certainly would deny it — his lifework on theology and 9/11 points to the most pressing existential issue facing the entire world today — and inadvertently names the group that threatens the world.

Let’s get to work exploring that story.

From early in his academic career, Prof. Griffin was drawn to a corner of Christian theology known as process theology, in which a new conception of God and the nature (and limits) of His powers are envisioned. In short, the traditional Christian view that God was omnipotent and could alter the physical world and humans at will was amended in light of ideas that had grown out of the Enlightenment era and the rise of science. In addition, there remained the thorny contradiction that if God is omnipotent and wholly Good, how do we account for the obvious presence of Evil?

The traditional response, as well as the amended response from process theology, was that God created man with free will, and to maintain that free will, man must always have the choice to pick Evil. The traditional Christian dogma, however, maintains that God has greater power than Evil or Satan, so how could we reconcile the presence of so much Evil in history?

Griffin, his predecessors and his colleagues formed a rational though radical response, arguing that “divine power is persuasive, not coercive.” That is a beautiful way of condensing rather sophisticated arguments, the upshot being that “God influences every finite event, but God cannot wholly determine how any event will use its own creativity and thereby its twofold power to exert self-determination and causal influence on others” (Christian Faith, p. 132).

I was initially exposed to such thinking when we studied the philosophy of British intellectual giant Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), who (I’m cribbing from Wikipedia) “argued that reality consists of processes rather than material objects, and that processes are best defined by their relations with other processes, thus rejecting the theory that reality is fundamentally constructed by bits of matter that exist independently of one another.”

Whitehead’s analytic philosophy, however, like that of many other British philosophers, left me cold, so I focused far more on modern Continental thinkers such as Sartre and Camus. In the course of such study, we began to touch on the ideas of French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who — to me at the time — seemed to be working on a parallel path of emerging processes in his thoughts on Darwinian evolution. Further study on Teilhard and Whitehead came to an end for me, though, when I made the choice to downplay study of more abstract philosophy for the concrete field of intellectual history (in the course of which it was impossible to miss the outsize role of Jewish thought in the development of the modern world).

Fast-forward decades, past 9/11, and considering Griffin’s numerous books on that event, and I found myself reading Griffin’s 2006 shortish book Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11. The first half is a revisit to the physical claims about 9/11 and logical flaws in the official story, subjects I was intimately familiar with after reading Griffin’s longer books on these matters. The second half of the book, however, introduced me to a novel side of the 9/11 Truth Movement, as Griffin incorporated his own theology into a deeper understanding of the consequences of purported inside government participation in the implementation of 9/11.

In an approach totally new to me, he situated his views in the second half, called “A Christian Critique of 9/11 and American Imperialism,” in five chapters which are titled:

• Imperial Motives for a “New Pearl Harbor” (familiar to me)
• Jesus and the Roman Empire (new material to me)
• The Divine and the Demonic (blew my mind)
• The American Empire, Demonic Evil, and 9/11 (more shocking ideas)
• A Call to Reflection and Action (what Christians should do)

I won’t rehash the familiar parts of the 9/11 story because I can trust that a healthy majority of readers are already familiar with the evidence, proofs, theories and arguments. Also, most of us know about the work of Richard Perle and many others (heavily Jewish) in imagining what could entice the majority of Americans to exercise global hegemony in a more robust fashion. The events of 9/11 were an absolute boon to this group and (coincidentally, of course) advanced Israeli interests in the Middle East immensely. (A shout-out here for the book edited by Mark Green, Persecution, Privilege, & Power: Reconsidering the Zionist Narrative in American Life (2008), with essays by Kevin MacDonald and James Petras, among many others.)

With Griffin’s chapter “Jesus and the Roman Empire,” however, I was in new territory. Certainly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I’d long heard of the comparison of the United States and Rome as unrivaled imperial powers, but I’d never read Christian theological accounts of either.

With the chapter “The Divine and the Demonic,” I was immediately faced with seminal ideas — and connections — that I’d never anticipated. Griffin was taking the traditional Christian belief in “The Evil One” as seriously as many of us did growing up, hearing it constantly repeated in church every Sunday, in the Bible, etc. By 1970, however, these literal beliefs were quickly falling out of favor even in much of America, as secular humanism was establishing its reign in education and the popular mind with the help of TIME Magazine and countless other outlets. Honestly, who was taking the Devil and his temptations and misdeeds literally anymore (other than comedian Flip Wilson’s with his catchphrase “The devil made me do it.)?

Well, Griffin and those in his circles were. And I had not expected in the twenty-first Century to be one of those who suddenly considered taking the existence of “The Evil One” literally. But by then I’d seen growing evidence that the world was indeed in the presence of and under the growing control of Actual Evil, which is very serious stuff.

Though I was profoundly influenced at the time by this section of Griffin’s book, other priorities took me away, though I always knew I would return to these two chapters of the book. This year became that time because I could now see where Griffin’s discussion on Evil fit in toward a reconciling of Kevin MacDonald’s evolutionary approach to Jews and E. Michael Jones’ traditional (though shocking to modern minds) Catholic critique of Jewish behavior since the crucifixion of Christ over two thousand years ago.

Further, Griffin and his fellow process theologians charge that previous Christian thinkers were guilty of “supporting a doctrine of absolute divine omnipotence, giving Christians an insoluble problem of evil,” and — here’s a critically key point — undermining the New Testament’s conviction “that our world is the scene of a deadly battle between divine and demonic power” (p. 128).

Since reading those lines ten or more years ago, I slowly began to observe the growing evidence that we humans were not going to work our way out of our many metastasizing predicaments through politics, argumentation, social engineering, donating money, and all the other secular human methods of protecting and promoting our interests in this world. At first, more tongue in cheek than seriously, I’d say that “Only God can help us now,” but particularly over the last few years the shape of a literal “deadly battle between divine and demonic power” took form right in front of me. As I more and more began to believe in this battle, I grilled myself: Was I being intellectually lazy? Superstitious? Defeatist as the White world increasingly succumbed to attacks that always achieved their destructive goals?

No, I had to conclude, we were indeed operating in a realm that secular humanism had too long denied and we in fact find ourselves now in the midst of “a deadly battle between divine and demonic power.” This seems to me the most rational conclusion.

In order to keep this argument from Griffin’s work criminally brief, I will again refer to the concept that divine power is not as literally omnipotent as long supposed and that human free will is in fact an indispensable factor in the process of the world unfolding. In short, to quote A. N. Whitehead, “the divine element in the world is to be conceived as a persuasive agency and not as a coercive agency,” a claim that should be considered “one of the greatest intellectual discoveries in the history of religion” (p. 132).

From this segment of Griffin’s chapter onward, his arguments fairly cry out that demonic elements increasingly exercise control over our world, and most importantly indicate who the actors involved in the demonic sphere are. Yet Griffin entirely misses this. Completely. Thus, I would like to offer a speculative account of the reality we could be facing today.

Obviously, serious readers should get a copy of Christian Faith and carefully read the chapters under discussion here. For now, I will pick quotes that make the conclusions Griffin missed far clearer. First, unlike many Christian theologians before him, Griffin accepts the temporal evolution of primates, writing that “the greatest single increase in freedom, however, occurred when one line within the simians gave rise to human beings.” (Note that acceptance of such evolution is common also to MacDonald’s thought.) The second powerful clue claims that “the divine influences upon us … are always calling us to truth, beauty, and goodness.” Historically, this is undeniably true of some races, particularly East Asians and Whites. Yet this is consistently the exact opposite direction toward which one important other group heads.(Note 1)

And because — in this view — God’s creation of beings with free will constitutes a grave risk should powerful enough beings choose Evil, God’s mission could be a failure. In Griffin’s words, “Because of the distinctive capacities of human beings, their emergence meant the rise of creatures who could, over time, come to exercise forms of power that could threaten God’s present purposes for our world” (p. 133). I see the world at that critical inflection point now.

Next, Griffin’s insights increasingly crescendo toward a nearly biblical revelation. “Therefore, demonic power would involve creaturely creativity that is exercised on the basis of hate or indifference and therefore without the intent to promote the welfare of all those affected by it (italics in original, p. 137). “Now that demonic power exists, accordingly, it cannot be unilaterally controlled. The battle between divine and demonic power is therefore a real battle, with the outcome still undecided” (my emphasis, 137).

Griffin continues: “Through this process … demonic power, which the rise of human existence made possible, actually came to dominance on our planet. … Civilization has been significantly shaped by the drive to produce coercive power that would be used with hate or at least indifference” (141).

At this point, I find it informative to note that the same year Christian Faith came out (2006), the indefatigable Griffin also published 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out, Vol. I, with Canadian Peter Dale Scott, a scholar and diplomat often credited with the term “The Deep State.” And what, if nothing else, is today’s Deep State but an agent of Evil and the very demonic force about which Griffin is writing?

Yet from here onward, Griffin follows the wrong trail completely, arguing on p. 142 that the West (and Whites implicitly) are the authors of all the evils we read about just about everywhere in modern education and media. Whites are morally culpable for “the market economy, European colonization of the globe, the ideologies of Nationalism and Capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, and various late-modern ideologies, such as Social Darwinism.” Griffin entirely misses the role of another distinct group and in fact elsewhere explicitly defends this non-white group when the evidence is overwhelming the opposite.

Finally comes the short passage Griffin wrote that stopped me in my tracks: “I begin with the notion that the demonic involves an objective symbolic structure, which presupposes the idea … that creativity as embodied in humans is capable of becoming demonic in large part because of our linguistic power[!]” [bold] (143, emphasis mine).

Who that has read Kevin MacDonald’s trilogy on a Jewish group evolutionary strategy could not have immediately recognized the import of what Griffin was saying? After all, superior verbal intelligence is an indispensable component of Jewish success and power, a factor absolutely central to MacDonald’s arguments. In the first book, A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, MacDonald notes in the Preface that “Judaism has been characterized by assortative mating and by cultural and natural selection for intelligence . … Jewish populations have higher average intelligence than their gentile counterparts” (xi). A result has been that “Jews have been able to compete successfully with gentile members of many societies for positions in which literacy and intelligence are important” (18). This is then developed at length in Ch. 7, “Judaism as an Ecological Strategy: Selection for Phenotypic Traits Related to Intelligence, High-Investment Parenting, and Social Cohesion.”

Beginning on p. 188, MacDonald writes under the subheading “Differences Between Jews and Gentiles in Psychometric Intelligence” that “Given these phenomena [success in intellectual achievement, social status and money, for example], it is expected that Jews will tend to exceed gentiles in intellectual ability and particularly in what psychologists term verbal intelligence. As Levinson notes, traditional Jewish education emphasizes verbal knowledge, verbal concept formation, and ability to understand abstract ideas — exactly the abilities tapped by modern measures of verbal intelligence.” This section examines a wide range of evidence showing that Jewish verbal IQ exceeds that of their gentile neighbors while coming in lower on other segments of IQ.

In Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, MacDonald devotes time to Jewish conceptions of their racial uniqueness, one component of which is their sense of intellectual superiority, such as Freud’s beliefs in this respect (159). This theme often appears in Jewish humor, such as the quip from The Jewish Daily Forward about the Yiddish translation of Shakespeare — “Translated and improved by A. Cahan.” The common use of “goyishe kop” (a dull mind, or one who thinks like a non-Jew) is another example of this.

Finally, in the third book of the trilogy, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements, the topic of superior Jewish verbal and intellectual intelligence is so prominent that it has its own index entry as “Intellectual superiority: as characteristic of Jewish-dominated movements,” with multiple pages listed. For instance, MacDonald repeats from A People That Shall Dwell Alone the evidence that “the mean Jewish IQ in the United States is approximately 117 and verbal IQ even higher.” (MacDonald now defers to (Richard Lynn’s estimate of 111).

Of the many results of this higher verbal IQ, a representative one is that “Jews were prominently represented as leaders of the Bolsheviks,” and within the Bolshevik movement, according to historian Albert Lindemann, “citing the absolute numbers of Jews, or their percentage of the whole, fails to recognize certain key if intangible factors: the assertiveness and often dazzling verbal skills of Jewish Bolsheviks.” (95) Needless to say, this dominance worked out terribly for non-Jews caught in that murderous regime, as many of us at The Occidental Quarterly and Occidental Observer have consistently emphasized.

Returning to Griffin, we read that he goes on to note that power, including that emanating from linguistic power, constitute “destructive, enslaving powers that seem to come ‘from beyond all human agency.’” To buttress this claim, Griffin quotes Ephesians 6:11-12:

Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places. (143)

When Griffin goes on to describe “the demonic soul of a culture,” then, we can immediately equate that with the decay of the West from roughly the 1960s, where “the individuals whose souls are formed in that society will tend to be ready servants of demonic evil.” How Griffin can miss the import of this next part is a mystery to me:

…by being warriors they are obeying the will of, and even imitating the behavior of, the deity of the universe; … it will lead them to believe that by dying in the service of this deity, they will be especially rewarded; it will lead them to hate. … it will convince them that they are a chosen people, so that by subjugating others they are actually bringing about divine rule on earth (emphasis added, 145–47).

In the following chapter, “The American Empire, Demonic Evil, and 9/11,” Griffin indicts today’s America in no uncertain terms: “The conclusion that the American empire is evil, and in fact the principal location of demonic power in our time,” follows from its policies related to nuclear weapons, global warming and the events of 9/11. Of course only the latter issue concerns us in the present essay.

Griffin fairly enough points to neoconservatives as the main force in promulgating Middle Eastern policies that (conveniently) benefitted them and their favored foreign state once the events of Sept. 11, 2001 transpired. He then blithely goes on to discuss members of that group, completely ignoring their identities. I now list the names we read beginning on p. 151: Charles Krauthammer, Ben Wattenberg, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Dinesh D’Souza (non-Jewish), Max Boot and Joshua Muravchik.

He can be this blind because sixty pages earlier he had unilaterally absolved Jews from responsibility for any of this, arguing explicitly that “The term ‘neoconservatism’ is, in any case, used here to refer to an ideology, not to any biographical facts about those who hold this ideology” (p. 87). Griffin allows that “many of the prominent neoconservatives have been Jewish” but he fails to pursue that telling pattern at all, which is a pity because his own theology and biographical evidence about neocons strongly supports the central role of Jews as Jews.(Note 2)

This is more than a missed opportunity; it is practically a moral and intellectual crime. And never once in reading books by Griffin have I sensed that he understands the Jewish role but is deliberately coy for practical, career or other reasons. He just seems blind to his own citation of glaring facts. Take, for example, his discussion of executive director Philip Zelikow’s role in what Griffin identifies as deliberate deception in the official 9/11 Commission Report. Never noting that Zelikow is Jewish, Griffin writes that Zelikow had coauthored in 1998 an essay on “catastrophic terrorism,” showing that Zelikow “had been thinking about the World Trade Center and a new Pearl Harbor several years prior to 9/11.”

The quote Griffin uses from Zelikow reads: “Like Pearl Harbor, this event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force.” While we can forgive Griffin for not seeing the future where these things have come to pass in spades (high tech surveillance from “private companies,” deplatforming of government critics, and most of all policies revolving around Covid-19 and its attempts at amelioration), we can only remain stunned that as brilliant and courageous as Griffin is on so many other fronts, he completely drops the ball on this main issue.

Returning to the chapter on Demonic Evil, we reach Griffin’s conclusion: “The attacks of 9/11, understood as a false-flag operation orchestrated by forces within the U.S. government, can be taken, I suggest, as the chief revelation of our time. Not a divine relation, to be sure, but the chief revelation of the demonic — of the extent to which it has taken control of the American government” (180–81).

OK, but since his 2006 book, has Griffin asked “Who DID 9/11?” Nowhere have I seen Griffin consider anything more specific than “forces within the U.S. government” led by neocons to account for 9/11 and its long, long aftermath. But in the current year, two decades after the initial event, we have strongly suggestive evidence, as well as a compelling narrative, about the responsible parties to this portion of our “demonic” history.

So “Who DID 9/11?” The most expedient way to answer this question is to visit and follow The Unz Review, where French writer Laurent Guyénot submitted an 8,500-word article called “9/11 was an Israeli Job,” where the very title gives you Guyénot’s conclusion.(Note 3) Three years later, Jewish American Ron Unz offered a similar conclusion in “American Pravda: Seeking 9/11 Truth After Twenty Years.”

For the best account supporting this thesis of Israel’s guilt (actually, it would more properly be considered as world Jewry’s guilt and complicity), see journalist Christopher Bollyn’s Solving 9-11: The Deception That Changed the World (2012), a version of which is available online.

This explanation of 9/11 alone would constitute demonic Evil, but one must think of the vast, vast litany of other Jewish crimes, genocides and foul deeds rather than just the span of the last twenty or so years. No other group in history remotely approaches this level of Evil, possibly because, as Griffin notes, “America has by far the most extensive empire ever created” (p. 106). And what have writers from TOO and Unz Review shown over those years but that America is effectively ruled by Jews?

We have seen how this empire helped destroy Germany, followed by a steady attack (often through subversion and financial manipulation) on the “victorious” Western nations such as Great Britain and America. The acceleration of this attack since the 1960s has been well documented on TOO, by various writers and by E. Michael Jones, who also sees a cosmic dimension where God’s benevolent will is being contested by the Jews who rejected Christ’s divinity at the foot of the cross and thereby, as told by Jones in his magisterial The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, also rejected the Logos at the core of God’s plan. Jones expanded on his understanding of Logos in Logos Rising: A History of Ultimate Reality (2020), a book which strongly buttresses Griffin’s theological perspective, but one that takes into account the critical conjunction of Jews and Evil.(Note 4)

l hope that by identifying Prof. Griffin’s lacuna in his analysis of Evil in the modern world, I am not at the same time undermining the value of the work he’s done with theology or with 9/11. Rather, I am taking his work and building on it through synthesis and the addition of more current relevant details. Taken together with my last long essay on the work of Kevin MacDonald and E. Michael Jones, I hope I am properly outlining the broadest possible picture of the state of our world at present.

Sadly, the picture I have discovered is an apocalyptic one in that “our world is the scene of a deadly battle between divine and demonic power.” Currently, the forces arrayed on the side of the divine are in indisputable retreat, possibly fatally so. God remains remote and silent, it seems, though E. Michael Jones rallies us with cries of “Reversal is in the air.”

Perhaps — and this is a desperate stretch — Jones is right that traditional Church fathers unravelled the truth that God uses evil to produce good, for that is the conclusion of Jones’ Logos Rising book. Is there anything, however, that we humans, endowed with free will according to the theologians and philosophers Griffin and Jones discuss, can do to prod God to produce good? I’m getting nervous.

TOO writer Thomas Dalton offers advice to the United States that could apply to the entire White world (as currently it is almost exclusively the White race that is under sustained Jewish attack):

Unless and until White America is willing to collectively acknowledge its responsibility for its own well-being, and to acknowledge the fundamental role of Jewish supremacy in the many crises of our nation, our problems will never end. We must use this moment to turn the tide against the Jews, to reclaim our country, and to secure, for the first time in many decades, a vastly brighter future.

In closing, let me say that we need to get very, very serious about the current world situation. As E. Michael Jones writes in his October issue of Culture Wars, the Jewish Question is the main issue facing the world in our day. He is right. So I strongly advise putting away talk of all other topics to focus exclusively on the JQ. The near-term fate of the world hangs in the balance.

1. If there is one abiding topic of discussion about Jews in the modern world, it is how they persistently attack other groups’ concepts of truth and beauty.
Lucian Freud’s portrait, “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping”

This theme has also been addressed by E. Michael Jones in his discussions on Jewish architecture, for example, that of Frank Gehry:

Frank Gehry’s Experience Music Project|Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, Seattle

2. In contrast to Griffin’s insouciance with respect to the critical presence of Jews in the government working on and around 9/11 issues, fellow liberal scholar James Petras has taken similar Jewish identities and followed them to their logical conclusions to quite dramatic and opposite effect. See, for example, my scholarly Petras review in TOQ, as well as TOO essays here and here.

3. I can confidently assume that if Griffin were also to blame Israel and Jews in America for a false flag attack on Americans on 9/11, along with the subsequent destruction of Iraq based on 9/11, he would find even more evil in such actions and would likely come to a conclusion similar to my own. In addition, in the books noted above, there are references to the Holocaust that show that Griffin and those around him accept the conventional story of the Holocaust and its associated six million murdered Jews. For some decades, however, that number has been under credible attack, as has the entire Holocaust narrative. See, for instance, “Debating the Holocaust: A New Look at Both Sides” (2010) by Thomas Dalton, as well as his recent essay “Jasenovac: The Latest Holocaust Embarrassment” here on TOO. I also endorse the title of his essay “We Must Dismantle Jewish Supremacy: Silence Is Not an Option,” which can be read here. Were Griffin also ever to doubt the Holocaust narrative and find that Jews were responsible for creating and propagating the story, as well as the hideous abuse heaped on Germans defeated after the Second World War, he would possibly conclude that the case for Jewish evil and the demonic is overwhelming.

4. I realize that I am suggesting that Jews across time are intrinsically evil, but in fact I am equivocal about this point. What tempts me to make the general assertion of Jewish evil is the evidence we have going back as far as written history itself that Jews consistently behave in a way considered as evil by the surrounding communities. Further, the expanse of this behavior among Jewry in general also reinforces the point. And while we can often identify Jewish leaders who act in an evil way, it is vanishingly rare that others Jews stand up to not just condemn such behavior but to actually stop it; mere words are somehow not effective.

For example, Israel Shamir, a Jewish convert who in theory could be one who stands up to Jewish evil, shows the extent of the agreement to support group behavior when he writes that blame cannot be ascribed merely to the Jewish elites but to the “quite ordinary Jews who fully identify with their community.” While there may, Shamir notes, be “many Jewish media-lords, even more editors,” it is the ordinary Jews, he argues, who make enforcement of an agreed-upon policy effective. “These willing executioners of our freedom, the foot-soldiers of the media lords, automatically defend ‘the Jews,’ i.e., the organised Jewish community at any price.”

James Petras is even more blunt, as he turns to the Hebrew term “sayanim” to refer the “overseas networks” of the Israeli state. “From the height of the [media] network to the lawyers’ boardrooms, and the doctors’ lounges, the pro-Israel supporters of the network aggressively attack as ‘anti- Semites’ any critical voices. Through local intimidation and malicious intervention in the professions, the zealots defend Israeli policy . . .” (The Power of Israel in the United States [2006], p. 37). These zealots and ordinary Jews in the Diaspora can be of great use to Israel, as Petras explains, as they comprise a “huge worldwide network of Jews in strategic or useful places (real estate, mass media, finance, car dealerships, etc.) who have agreed to help Israeli Mossad activities within their own countries” (p. 141). Others offer help in more informal ways as they can appear to be non-political, innocuous citizens such as professors, doctors, dentists, lawyers, or just car dealers. In short, as Petras writes, “there is no crime, no matter how terrible and perverse, that Israel commits, which will not be supported by the respectable professors, investment bankers, journalists, surgeons, policy advisers, real estate moguls, lawyers, school teachers, and other ordinary folk who make up the activist base of the Major Organizations” (p. 102). Thus, it is reasonable to conclude that evil is widely spread in the Jewish community.

Of course the greatest dissent to this belief in the intrinsic evil of Jews comes from the Catholic Church itself and its unwavering mission to convert all Jews to Christianity, in which case they would improve their behavior based on following the precepts of Jesus Christ. This view is firmly grounded in the idea of human free will, which accords Jews the ongoing opportunity to voluntarily change their behavior, a view which clearly denies any intrinsically evil nature.

2030 Vision: Conclusion 

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Fortunately, the World Economic Forum is obsessed with digitization, so their entire website features linkages and graphics outlining the various networks and how they intersect (for instance, that of COVID-19). This is highly useful for many reasons and shows in stark visual detail how exactly they are trying to shoehorn humanity into programmable “realities.” Strategic planning and war gaming scenarios allow the ruling class to try to predict outcomes, aided in their endeavors by evermore powerful artificial intelligence and algorithms. They then craft a narrative to pre-plan our behavior and focus it where they need it to go.

Consider Vasee Moorthy of the World Health Organization writing for the World Economic Forum in August 2020, “Back-casting is a method to work backwards from alternative future scenarios, and determine actions which can be taken now that influence which scenario comes to pass.” So it is less about “preparedness” and more about trying to fix outcomes. This makes the kabuki theater of “democracy” all the more obvious once you understand that. You don’t have a say, but it is important for the power structure that you believe that you do. These self-styled masters of humanity are, quite literally in fact, trying to play God, from the scripting of reality, to artificial intelligence, to cloning, and even creating chimeras. As Nicoletta Lanese reported in August 2019:

An international team of researchers has created embryos containing both human and monkey cells. … The controversial project was conducted in China, rather than in the US where the project leader is based, “to avoid legal issues,”[1] according to the newspaper [El País], and ultimately aims to grow viable organs for transplantation into humans. Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte of the Salk Institute in San Diego is spearheading the project with scientists from his own lab and those from the Murcia Catholic University in Murcia, Spain. The team wants to develop chimeras—organisms composed of cells from two or more species—capable of growing human organs. … In July, Japanese researchers—including Hiromitsu Nakauchi of the University of Tokyo and Stanford University—first received permission from the government to create human-animal embryos to be transplanted into surrogates.[2]

This is not the stuff of science fiction, this is reality, and the mad scientists are determining the global agenda with us as their guinea pigs. Creating walking abominations is not being done “for the good of humanity.” Is this the future we want for ourselves? It’s certainly what the “elites” want. They are incapable of pausing to consider whether just because something can be done, should it be done? Instead, they are invested in creating a global Panopticon, an artificial intelligence overlord with whom they aim to merge, and untold other hybrids and horrors (such as scientists growing a human ear on a rat).

Hebrew University in Jerusalem announced in December 2019 that it had “reinvented the concept of the periodic table but for artificial atoms.” Already in 2019, MIT researchers announced that they had created an embeddable ink that would be injected along with a vaccine and visible using a smartphone app and filter. The research into this quantum dot tattoo—specifically geared toward children in the promotional press releases—was funded in large part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which in 2010 at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting called for a “decade of vaccines.” Yissum, the Technology Transfer Company of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and licenser of an extensive quantum dot technology patent portfolio to Nanosys, has partnered with companies such as Google, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Microsoft, and Novartis. Nanosys has hundreds of patents related to quantum dot construction and component and manufacturing design. This quantum dot technology will almost certainly form an integral part of the future vaccination identification program—a “green card” for personal carbon credits or purely digitized finances tied to biometric data.

The World Economic Forum is indicative of the general thrust of the globalist-transhumanist agenda, addressing the totality of its world-shaping project with its all-encompassing Great Reset. Connecting to the various strands of globalism feeding into the rotten center, WEF’s myriad Global Future Councils include those on: Media, Entertainment, and Culture (featuring representatives of ADDO AI, the Media Development Investment Fund, and McKinsey); Cybersecurity (featuring representatives of Human Rights Watch, Credit Suisse, S&P Global, the Netherlands Cyber Security Council, PayPal, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and the Cyber Security Programme at the Organization of American States); Development Finance, Digital Economy, and New Value Creation (“Themes include digital stewardship, shaping new value pools and emergent industries, rethinking business models and business fundamentals, building new ecosystems, creating sustainable value from data, investing for digital inclusion and assessing the disruptive impact of new technologies such as 5G and AI.” It includes numerous well-connected individuals, companies, NGOs, and government agencies,[3] as does the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Cities and Urbanization features.[4] The latter includes Mastercard—which has also rolled out a carbon footprint tracker[5] and is partnered with the ID2020 Digital Identity Alliance.

In 2018, ID2020 Alliance Partners, working in partnership with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), drafted a “formal articulation of our perspective on ethical approaches to digital identity,” which includes in its Manifesto the statement that “The ability to prove one’s identity is a fundamental and universal human right,” and that “For some, including refugees, the stateless, and other marginalized groups [who often discard their identity cards before illegally entering Western countries so they won’t be deported], reliance on national identification systems isn’t possible,” once again creating another globalized, trans/supra-national alternative. ID2020, according to its website, “is coordinating funding for identity and channeling those funds toward high-impact projects, enabling diverse stakeholders—UN agencies, NGOs, governments, and enterprises—to pursue a coordinated approach that creates a pathway for efficient and responsible implementation at scale.” In addition to Mastercard, some of its other partners include Microsoft, Accenture, GAVI (“The Vaccine Alliance”), the Rockefeller Foundation, and iRespond.

iRespond, another NGO “dedicated to using biometrics to improve lives through digital identity,” in turn also partners with organizations such as the World Health Organization, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the IOM, the International Rescue Committee (IRC), and the CDC. Whitney Webb notes that iRespond:

has begun piloting a new biometric program for newborns among the predominately Karen refugee population along the Myanmar-Thailand border, a program it soon hopes to “quickly deploy” at a greater scale and make available to the general global population. The pilot program is being conducted as part of the controversial ID2020 alliance. … The pilot program is being conducted at the Mae Tao clinic, which is largely funded by the CIA cut-out USAID as well as the governments of Germany and Taiwan, the Open Society Foundations and the International Rescue Committee (IRC). … Having a “digital identity” would allow refugees “to access improved, consistent healthcare within the camp” with plans for the same system to eventually “electronically document both educational attainment and professional skills to aid with employment opportunities.” … This program is remarkably similar to the World Food Programme’s recently implemented “Building Blocks” initiative, which  is funded by the US, German, Dutch and Luxembourgian governments. … iRespond’s system, not unlike Trust Stamp’s, is also slated to serve as a vaccine record.[6]

Trust Stamp, according to its website, “is an artificial intelligence company that primarily develops proprietary identity solutions to help determine whether an individual is who they say they are and that they can be trusted, including Trust Stamp’s AI-powered facial biometrics.”[7] The Trust Stamp system is a prototype for dispensing with cash altogether and the uniting of all types of credit (including social) in one digital format; as Raul Diego reports, it is

set to be introduced in “low-income, remote communities” in West Africa thanks to a public-private partnership between the Bill Gates-backed GAVI vaccine alliance, Mastercard and the AI-powered “identity authentication” company, Trust Stamp. The program, which was first launched in late 2018, will see Trust Stamp’s digital identity platform integrated into the GAVI-Mastercard “Wellness Pass,” a digital vaccination record and identity system that is also linked to Mastercard’s click-to-play system that powered by its AI and machine learning technology called NuData. Mastercard, in addition to professing its commitment to promoting “centralized record keeping of childhood immunization” also describes itself as a leader toward a “World Beyond Cash,” and its partnership with GAVI marks a novel approach towards linking a biometric digital identity system, vaccination records, and a payment system into a single cohesive platform. The effort, since its launch nearly two years ago, has been funded via $3.8 million in GAVI donor funds in addition to a matched donation of the same amount by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. … Mastercard announced that Trust Stamp’s biometric identity platform would be integrated into Wellness Pass as Trust Stamp’s system is capable of providing biometric identity in areas of the world lacking internet access or cellular connectivity and also does not require knowledge of an individual’s legal name or identity to function. The Wellness Program … will be coupled with a Covid-19 vaccination program.[8]

There are state efforts along these lines (such as in Lithuania, where they’ve restricted “non-essential services” to only those who possess the grotesquely-named Freedom ID) and supra-state efforts such as the European Union’s Digital COVID Certificate. Meanwhile the media is pushing antidepressants as a COVID-19 treatment and the non-practicing Muslim Sajid Javid has assured us you can have Christmas—if you get vaccinated.

Mastercard is  also intersecting with the climate change agenda. Jo Ann Stonier, Chief Data Officer of Mastercard and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption writes for the WEF’s website that “responsible data use can accelerate a sustainable society.” In a July 27, 2020 piece for the WEF website entitled “We need to talk about big data and genomics. Here’s why—and how,” the authors write:

DNA (genomic data) is sometimes seen as the purest and most personal kind of data, fundamental to our identity and existence. As part of the global endeavour to understand human health and address suffering, we would be right to expect our scientists, clinicians and academic institutions to be gathering, storing, analysing, and to some extent sharing, our DNA and medical information. … Whilst data might be de-identified — that is, with names and addresses removed — an issue people should be aware of is that anonymity cannot be absolutely guaranteed. Health information, for instance, can always be linked to other personal information that is also available on the web – and in our increasingly data-connected world, it becomes entirely feasible that people could, in theory, be identified from their DNA alone. Do people mind? What could happen?[9]

These are the exact questions I am also asking, and though the authors state that this DNA/data should be shared “within the context of research and discovery,” at this point, it is fair to ask if even that is something we are comfortable with, especially given the outcomes of this “research and discovery.” If you know your Ted Kaczynski, your Doctor Faustus, or your scripture, you know where this is going and, indeed, where it is originating from, particularly in the case of the latter two.

In late 2020, Turkey announced the launch of its Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Network, becoming the latest member of the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR) Network of the World Economic Forum (WEF). With centers in thirteen countries, “the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Network works with governments, leading companies, civil society, innovators and experts from around the world to pilot new approaches to technology adoption and governance.”[10]

With the apparent need for a global final solution to the human problem, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF), “With countries experiencing unprecedented challenges and impact under the COVID-19 pandemic, the Forum has launched the COVID Action Platform in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO)” to further their agenda by using the man-made COVID-19 to continue to turn the world into a giant laboratory.[11]

Particularly germane in the modern context and especially as prelude to the measures imposed to ostensibly combat coronavirus—plus the UN’s Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset “green” hogwash—is the research of one John B. Calhoun. Calhoun, it should be noted, worked on the Rodent Ecology Project at none other than Johns Hopkins University, that incubator of transgenderism and a vital institution in the genesis of the COVID-19-related tyrannies (see: Event 201, a pandemic simulation in October 2019 in conjunction with the World Economic Forum and the Gates Foundation),[12] among many other extremely critical aspects of the ruling class’s agenda. Calhoun also spent a year at the Stanford University Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

In a nutshell, Calhoun’s research essentially showed what would happen to a mouse population if all of its needs except one were provided for. This lack of one critical ingredient—space—had catastrophic consequences; in his most famous experiment begun in July 1968 under the auspices of the National Institute of Mental Health, the “mouse universe” had all of the population’s needs provided for and a lack of natural predators. Soon, the mouse population began exploding exponentially, but eventually the population growth slowed down and peaked before a precipitous decline, a decline that was preceded by an extended period of social breakdown and a proliferation of aberrant behaviors including the abandonment of their young by mothers and the attacking and abuse of their offspring, odd outbursts of aggression often of a predatory nature coupled with a lack of will by many males to defend their territory, self-isolation defined by psychological withdrawal, and deviant sexuality.

With all of their needs met, the rodents never learned resource-procurement and survival skills, instead turning to what Ted Kaczynski would define as surrogate activities, mostly those pertaining to self-gratification and extensive (excessive) self-grooming. These “beautiful ones” stopped reproducing, and eventually the utopia turned dystopic, corpses clogging the living quarters and the demise of the population despite there still remaining an abundance of resources and, indeed, more space.

Today, the global human population is still exploding in much of the Third World, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, artificially subsidized by Western “elites,” while the populations in the Occident and to a lesser extent the Orient are maintained by immigration of outsiders—which we are told we “need.” Although the lies are increasingly wearing thin, the rhetoric generally revolves around compassion and the acceptance of refugees from conflict and “climate change” refugees. All birth rates in the First World with the exception of Israel are now below replacement-level.

It is the perception of over-crowding, however, that leads to humans’ crowding in vast metropoles and the resultant deviant and destructive behaviors that inevitably proliferate. This is the legacy of neo-liberalism as we embark on this new era of social and biological engineering. Perhaps we are not witnessing city streets clogged with corpses, but certainly the desire to propagate and live meaningful lives has collapsed. “Social distancing” measures do not undermine the phenomenon, but rather exacerbate the total alienation needed to break down the population completely and mold them into new shapes. This is obviously by design, as the “elites” not only understand this research but have actively funded it themselves. This includes the efforts to create Hive cities with their pods and bug burgers as ostensibly combatting climate change. There remains plenty of space and resources on our planet provided there is proper management and stewardship, but some real factors—drought and poor yields—have conjoined with intentional mismanagement and an artificial scarcity that has gripped the globe, with crops being left to rot in fields and an intentional move to all things “green” in the global Green New Deal/Great Reset/Agenda 2030 in tandem with COVID-19 lockdowns and other gross over-extensions by the powerful. Labor issues that dovetail neatly with coronavirus restrictions and mandates are another major factor. It is both manipulation and coercion on multiple fronts in order to produce the desired result.

The “elites” have turned the entire globe into one of Calhoun’s rodent universes and we are now living in a downward trajectory as top-down measures are implemented to maneuver the collapsed and demoralized populations into their new post-human existence, a new world where they reign not just like gods but as God. As Calhoun wrote in “Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population”:

I shall largely speak of mice, but my thoughts are on man, on healing, on life and its evolution. Threatening life and evolution are the two deaths, death of the spirit and death of the body. Evolution, in terms of ancient wisdom, is the acquisition of access to the tree of life. This takes us back to the white first horse of the Apocalypse which with its rider set out to conquer the forces that threaten the spirit with death. Further in Revelation (ii.7) we note: ‘To him who conquers I will grant to eat the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God’ and further on (Rev. xxii.2): ‘The leaves of the tree were for the healing of nations.’ This takes us to the fourth horse of the Apocalypse (Rev. vi.7): ‘I saw … a pale horse, and its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed him; and they were given power over a fourth of the earth, to kill with the sword and with famine and with pestilence and by wild beasts of the earth.’ … This second death has gradually become the predominant concern of modern medicine. … Perhaps we might do well to reflect upon another of John’s transcriptions (Rev. ii. 1): ‘He who conquers shall not be hurt by the second death.’[13]

As we have seen in the words and deeds of the transhumanists, they want to live forever. In order for this to occur, there must be a “global software upgrade” as Tom Kaczynski calls it is. And how will this upgrade be accomplished?

This ceaseless desire for “upgrading” the race has been a major preoccupation of at least one faction of the “elites” for quite some time, Whitney Webb and Jeremy Loffredo report, “One particular Operation Warp Speed vaccine…has not only had a host of safety issues but was also developed by researchers with deep ties to the British Eugenics Society, which changed its name in 1989 to the Galton Institute.”[14] The transhumanist Julian Huxley was a President of the British Eugenics Society (1959–1962). Arthur Balfour, of the infamous Balfour Declaration, was also a member. There are deep ties between the Galton Institute, the Wellcome Trust, and the developers of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 “vaccine.” So the desire to “upgrade” humanity via eugenics is the through-line, but it has adapted as technology has developed and medicine has advanced.

The American counterpart of the British Eugenics Society/the Galton Institute, which is now called the Society for Biodemography and Social Biology, is currently helmed by Hans-Peter Kohler; his University of Pennsylvania biographical description, where he is the Frederick J. Warren Professor of Demography, Professor of Sociology, and Co-Director of the Population Aging Research Center, states:

Hans-Peter Kohler’s primary research focuses on fertility and health in developing and developed countries. A key characteristic of this research is the attempt to integrate demographic, economic, sociological and biological approaches in empirical and theoretical models of demographic behavior. For example, Kohler has been investigating the bio-social determinants of fertility,…the importance of social interaction processes for fertility and AIDS-related behaviors, and demographic methods for measuring and forecasting fertility trends.

One of the co-founders of the American Eugenics Society and a British Eugenics Society member to boot, Frederick Osborn, concluded that their particular vision would have to take place under a different name because eugenics is routinely seen as Nazi by the left. Osborn ended up becoming the president of the Population Council, succeeding founder and eugenics enthusiast John D. Rockefeller III. The Population Council is still active; it is funded by a host of establishment organizations.[15] Showing the interconnectedness of the global system, Aga Khan Foundation, affiliated with the Population Council, is in turn, for example, partnered with a wide range of organizations and governments.[16]

Returning to the motives of men like Rockefeller and Osborn, they clearly understood that overpopulation hysteria would certainly sell better than forceful sterilization, and eugenics had become a dirty word after World War II. As an interesting side note, Pfizer and BioNTech finalized the Phase 2/3 study protocol of their COVID-19 “vaccine” in response to feedback from global regulators, including the FDA and the German Paul-Ehrlich-Institut. Though this institute is not named for the same Paul Ehrlich, it is an intriguing coincidence (if you want to call it that) that the Jewish Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 book The Population Bomb and Bing Professor Emeritus of Population Studies of the Department of Biology of Stanford University and President of Stanford’s Center for Conservation Biology, is one of the primary popularizers of the over-population hysteria coinciding with not just the first significant public concerns about climate change. (Ehrlich actually mentioned global warming from greenhouse gases as an antidote to the feared cooling effect of aerosols in 1968. Uh oh!).

The Rockefeller Foundation was, along with the Ford Foundation, integral—and continues to be integral—to the engineered globalist vision, including the “Green Revolution” that contributed to the population boom in the first place and pushed so many small-scale agrarian farmers off their farms and into the factories and cities, replete with mass use of pesticides, pollutants, and bio-engineered (genetically-modified/GMO) crops. Though over-population remains an occasionally-voiced concern, its morphing into general climate hysteria in the latter third of the 20th century has certainly borne fruit as justification for a variety of measures associated with the present agenda. The Rockefeller Foundation has made climate change one of their central issues (and note the ubiquitous but ill-defined connection to the pandemic):

Mike Muldoon, Managing Director of Innovative Finance at The Rockefeller Foundation added, “The private sector is needed now more than ever to tackle the growing divergence between the developed world where vaccines and economic stimulus are bountiful, and the developing world where they are not. … These recommendations provide a clear path towards increased private sector mobilization as we collectively seek to respond to the pandemic and drive a green and equitable recovery.”

What do vaccines have to do with climate change?

This is the same Rockefeller Foundation that simulated the Lock Step lock-down pandemic scenario in their May 2010 report with the Global Business Network and now wants to sell us the pre-planned solution. In fact, they had one ready-made in 2020 with its COVID-19 National Testing and Tracing Action Plan, which will, naturally, expand the use of data and surveillance and which incorporates “racial equity” data as rhetoric of transhumanism becomes inextricably intertwined with that of neo-liberalism:

  • Speed integration of testing and tracing data systems.
  • Consistently collect and act on racial equity data.
  • Plan for the arrival of home and employer testing. We’ll need these technologies to get to 30 million tests per week, but many states do not have a robust approach to integrating these results into their public health surveillance systems.
  • Moving from descriptive analytics to predictive analytics and policy modeling.

The document also states that “human behavior will increasingly become the limiting factor in the efficacy of these systems.” Thus we see here hints of the transhumanist religion of Dataism where the systems themselves and especially the algorithms driving them become sovereign and humans as they once were become—should they not find themselves committed to the Singularity—superfluous.[17]

Also of significance is the fact that WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’s Chief Advisor Senait Fisseha was appointed as the director of International Programs at the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, described by Influence Watch as having been “founded in 1964 by investor Warren Buffett, reportedly to address Buffett’s ‘Malthusian dread’ of population growth among the global poor.” Its president is Buffett’s daughter’s ex-husband Allen Greenberg, a former legal aide to Chuck Schumer. The organization has donated millions of dollars to the World Health Organization and John D. Rockefeller III’s Population Council, a partner with the Ford Foundation (a major donor itself to the Population Council) and the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) “on large-scale IUD programs throughout the 1960s in India, Pakistan, South Korea, and Taiwan.” Additionally, Buffett announced in 2006 a “philanthropic merger” with the Gates Foundation. As Joseph D’Agostino writes:

Gates has put his money where his mouth is. His foundation gave $2.25 million to Johns Hopkins to train Third World experts in population control in 1997. In 1998, his foundation–which is controlled by Gates, his wife, and his father–gave $1.7 million to a United Nations Population Fund program for controlling population growth. Buffett has given millions to pro-abortion and population control efforts over the years…How much of a priority is it for him? Reported the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Nov. 13, 1997, about his wife’s foundation, “One of the foundation’s directors, Mr. Buffett’s daughter, Susie, told The Chronicle that she did expect that population control would be the foundation’s top priority. ‘That’s what my father has always believed was the biggest and most important issue, so that will be the focus,’ she said. ‘I feel as his child that it’s important to carry out his wishes. It’s his money.’”

It should be readily apparent by now that the ruling class is beyond redemption in its lunatic designs to fundamentally re-shape humanity and, indeed, the very fabric of reality. While not uniform in its ultimate aims (we should certainly applaud efforts to control the Third World population), as competing factions of slightly competing visions appear to exist, in orientation all endeavor to subjugate the mass of humanity and/or re-engineer it beyond recognition. As regards the “vaccines” in particular, there is some discussion that they may in fact be the delivery system for the necessary material for humans to become integrated with Klaus Schwab’s Internet of Things/Internet of Bodies, with humans and their devices no longer fully separate entities. I must stipulate here that this is at present conjecture and should be treated as a hypothesis. It is, however, a compelling one that bears further research and consideration. Certainly, at minimum, we are right to question the heavy push for injecting the totality of the population where such a scheme is logically and medically unwarranted for a relatively benign virus, one that, despite promises of Christmas for good behavior, is being positioned to forever be the boot stomping on humanity’s face—provided humanity doesn’t merge with its machines.

What is clearly not benign are the designs of the “elites.” The “vaccines” are already known to have awful side effects and may well represent a “poison death shot” and “potentially the biggest genocide in the history of humanity”—especially given this background of eugenics we’ve discussed. It is the working hypothesis of this author, however, that the immunosuppressive qualities of the “vaccines” are a by-product of needing a weakened immune system so as to not reject what’s being carried within the injection. The connections to HIV/AIDS research and the figures involved (such as Anthony Fauci) raise major alarms (should the reader want additional context I cover the HIV/AIDS aspect as it connects to transgenderism and other aspects of the globalist/transhumanist agenda at length in my book The Transgender-Industrial Complex—which one “reviewer” who didn’t read the book called “dangerous to trans and Jewish people,” so you can be sure I was on the mark). It may well not be an either/or proposition, as it may be a calculated risk that some large percentage of people will surely die on the way to “upgrading” humanity. It may also be “just” that COVID-19 is the best opportunity for direct control the “elites” have been presented with, and they are running with it to create their very own hybrid of 1984 and Brave New World. The time, for whatever reason, has been decided is now, and the acceleration is on. If you value liberty and human sovereignty, then it is incumbent upon you to resist this agenda with all your might. We all must.

[1] Well that sounds awfully familiar…

[2] Lanese, Nicoletta, “First Human-Monkey Chimeras Developed in China,” August 5, 2019. The Scientist.

[3] For example: Titi Akinsanmi (Government Affairs and Public Policy for West- and Francophone Africa for Google in Nigeria); Energy Technologies; Europe (includes Karen Donfried, President of the German Marshall Fund of the US and  Mark Leonard, Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations; their website includes a mention of “contagious ideas”); Financial and Monetary Systems (includes representatives of the IMF, Facebook, Infosys, Visa, Citi, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the China National Gold Group); Geopolitics (includes representatives of the RAND Corporation, the Brookings Institution, Chatham House, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs- Harvard Kennedy School of Government, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a pair of UAE government officials, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Iraq and Head of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq, the Blavatnik School of Government-University of Oxford, and the Center for International Political Economy-Peking University); Global Public Goods in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (includes representatives of the UNDP, Mozilla, and Alphabet); Health and Healthcare (includes representatives of Lazard, Harvard Medical School, Bayer Pharmaceuticals, IBM, Kaiser Permanente); Mobility; the New Economic Agenda (features representatives of the Omidyar Network, BlackRock, Salesforce, Novartis, and the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute); the New Education and Work Agenda; the New Equality and Inclusion Agenda; Space Technology (includes representatives of Airbus, Virgin Galactic, MIT, and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs); and Longevity (includes representatives of the National Academy of Medicine, AARP, the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, the Harvard School of Public Health, Mohammed Bin Rashid University of Medicine and Health Sciences in the United Arab Emirates, The Financial Times Group, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization).

[4] The SENSEable City Laboratory at MIT, HSBC Holdings, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Development Research Center of the State Council (DRC)-People’s Republic of China, UN Habitat, the OECD, the African Development Bank (AfDB), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), Housing and Urban Development of the Inter-American Development Bank, and various “global cities” like Dubai, Melbourne, New York City, and Amsterdam. Miguel Gamiño of Mastercard is also on the Council.

[5] A key part of this initiative with co-developers Doconomy—“an impact-tech start up investing in new measures to help tackle climate change” in Sweden also partnered with the Finnish Ålandsbanken and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—is the Priceless Planet Coalition, which includes partners such as: Barclays, American Airlines, the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank, BMO Financial Group (“Inspired by the UN Sustainable Development goals and grounded in its values of integrity, empathy, diversity and responsibility”), Expo 2020 Dubai, Eurobank, Hellenic Bank, GLS Bank (“sustainability is in our DNA”), JetBlue, LL Bean, HSBC, the London Transport Museum, the PGA Tour, Major League Baseball, the MTA, Saks Fifth Avenue, and A1 Telekom Austria AG, among many others.

[6] Webb, Whitney, “‘Charity’ Accused of Sex Abuse Coordinating ID2020’s Pilot Program For Refugee Newborns,” July 29, 2020. Unlimited Hangout.

[7] Their Advisory Board includes individuals such as: James Gaughran (Department of Defense; a Special Agent with the US Secret Service; Deputy Assistant Inspector General at the Department of Homeland Security), Sarah-Jill Lennard (a former UK Diplomat and former Chief Security Officer & Chief Information Security Officer for Deloitte), Buffy Christie (JPMorgan Chase), and Sam Guttman (formerly served as Inspector in Charge with the US Postal Inspection Service where he led the agency’s first initiatives to use forensic computer analysis of data in investigative work).

[8] Diego, Raul, “Africa to Become Testing Ground for ‘Trust Stamp’ Vaccine Record and Payment System,” July 10, 2020. Mint Press News.

[9] Middleton, Anna, Mavis Machiori, Jenniffer Mabuka-Maroa, and Tiffany Boughtwood, “We need to talk about big data and genomics. Here’s why – and how,” July 27, 2020. World Economic Forum.

[10] Founding partners of this network include Palantir, Salesforce, Facebook, Huawei, IBM, Visa, Microsoft, Mitsubishi Chemical, the Inter-American Development Bank, Saudi Aramco, the Bahrain Economic Development Board, Takeda, Netflix, Splunk: The Data-to-Everything Platform Built for the Cloud, Cyberdyne, and GAVI—the Vaccine Alliance (whose founding partners are the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the Gates Foundation, and UNICEF). GAVI’s major funders include Mastercard, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Coca-Cola Foundation, the Government of China, the European Commission, the US Government, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Visa Foundation, TikTok, Unilever, the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Wholesalers, the Government of Australia, the Government of Canada, UPS, Salesforce, Google, and more.

[11] Some of the platform projects include (with descriptions from the WEF website):

  • COVID-19 Financial Services Response Network: Project by the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
  • Pandemic Supply Chain Network (PSCN): Engagement from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), World Bank Group, and World Health Organization (WHO)
  • Managing Epidemics with Consumer Wearables (helmed by the WEF): Policymakers from Estonia and Rwanda as well as the World Health Organization (WHO) have participated in the project community and provided regular input via interviews and workshop participation, along with private companies such as Amazon Web Services, Apple, Facebook, IBM and Xiaomi.
  • The Epidemic Big Data Resource and Analytics Innovation Network (helmed by the WHO): (EPI-BRAIN) is an innovative global platform that allows experts in data and public health to analyze large data-sets for emergency preparedness and response. Through big data and artificial intelligence, the network aims to improve the prediction towards the outbreak as well as strengthen the response to the pandemic. Currently, the Ministry of Health from Bangladesh, Finland, Germany, Singapore and the United States, and the International Air Transport Association have joined the project community together with…private organizations to reduce the impact of outbreaks through forecasting and predictive analytics.

Partner organizations for EPI-BRAIN include the Gates Foundation, GAVI (“The Vaccine Alliance”), the World Bank, Harvard University, the United Nations Foundation, the US HHS, USAID, Novo Nordisk, the Nigerian CDC, Nielsen, the Korean CDC, Médecins Sans Frontières, Johnson & Johnson, PATH, and CEPI.

[12] More fun from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and Department of Environmental Health and Engineering, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health includes five researchers in conjunction with one each from the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and the Department of Anthropology at Texas State University on “The SPARS Pandemic 2025-2028: A Futuristic Scenario to Facilitate Medical Countermeasure Communication,” published in the University of Central Florida’s Journal of International Crisis and Risk Communication Research.

[13] Calhoun, John B., “Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population,” January 1973. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 66(1 Pt 2): 80–88.

[14] Loffredo, Jeremy and Whitney Webb, “Palantir’s Tiberius, Race, and the Public Health Panopticon,” December 7, 2020. Unlimited Hangout.

[15] The UK’s DFID, USAID, the CDC, the NIH, Zambia’s National HIV/AIDS/STI/TB Council, the World Bank Group, the World Health Organization, several UN branches, the University of California-San Francisco, the Sackler Institute for Nutrition Science (yes, those Sacklers), Stanford University, the American Jewish World Service, the London School of Economics and Political Science, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the UK’s ODI, Johns Hopkins University, the Tides Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the WK Kellogg Foundation, the Microsoft Matching Gifts Program, the AmazonSmile Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation, Pfizer Workplace Giving, and the Aga Khan Foundation, among others.

 

[16] The Government of New Zealand (where Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern recently admitted will become a two-tiered society between vaccinated and unvaccinated), the Government of Japan, Microsoft, the Government of India, the Unilever Foundation, Johnson & Johnson, BNP Paribas, the Government of Egypt, Global Affairs Canada, the European Commission and the European Union, Cargill, the Mastercard Foundation, the African Development Bank, UN Food and Agriculture, the World Bank, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN World Food Programme, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the World Health Organization, the EPA, USAID, the US State Department, the Smithsonian Institution, the US Department of Agriculture, the MacArthur Foundation, Harvard University, the Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation, MIT, Johns Hopkins University, and the Rockefeller Foundation

[17] For reference, the contributors to the updated report from July 2020 included a number of individuals with the Rockefeller Foundation as well as those tied to the furtherance of this agenda, such as such as the University of Minnesota, Duke University, Harvard University (Harvard Global Health Institute, etc.), the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago, and Johns Hopkins (Raymond Pearl of Johns Hopkins University was the first president of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, formed in 1927), plus Deloitte, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Scripps Translational Research Institute (in 1922, the Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems was founded in 1922; it would later be renamed the Scripps Gerontology Center in 1972).

 

Joseph Maistre and the Inevitability of Evil

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Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821)

Note: Below is my article I originally wrote in French for the French-Breton website of the European Identitarians, Breizh-Info. 

To each of us his own author, to each of us his own interpretation of the author’s work. For several reasons I chose for our discussion today a Savoyard writer and philosopher Joseph de Maistre. Maistre was a contemporary of Napoleon, although he barely ever mentions Napoleon in his work. He was also a disciple of the Enlightenment, although he was its fiercest opponent. All of us must therefore ask ourselves a question; well, what does Maistre have to do with us and how relevant is he to Europeans living now in the liberal System? I will briefly examine Maistre’s beliefs and also discuss whether he can be useful in understanding the dominant ideas of our time. Can Europeans still use portions of his teachings in the face of coming catastrophes? As to my choice of this author, there is also a personal side to it.  Understanding and interpreting any literary work often depends on the mood and character of the interpreter. Being by nature inclined towards cultural pessimism and being skeptical of the idea of progress, it should come as no surprise that I chose Maistre and his criticism of liberal happy tomorrows.  Moreover, let us also recall that this year marks the bicentenary of his death.

First of all, we must recall that Maistre’s political ideas are closely linked to his ultra-Catholic and Ultramontane beliefs, as well as his unshakeable belief in the iron fist of divine Providence. Being cursed by Original Sin, the human species, from birth onwards, is doomed to eternal Evil, as well as to being a victim of ceaseless suffering. Man cannot escape from Evil even if he is good, even if he considers himself a virtuous man, and even if he boasts of never having done any harm to his fellow man. On the contrary, the more virtuous a man is, the more likely he will be exposed to Evil, which Maistre refers to as “hereditary fault.”:  “On the other hand, it is equally possible that a man tortured for a crime he did not commit really merited punishment for an absolutely unknown crime.” [i]

Consequently, following our gratuitous birth we have irrevocably “fallen into time” —the expression coined by Emile Cioran, a prominent French-Romanian doomsday philosopher whose own work was profoundly inspired by Maistre. As a result of this Fall, all of us, without any exception, are toys of reversibility—that is to say, we are meant to atone not only for the faults and defaults of our distant ancestors, faults which they may have committed without their prior knowledge of it; but we are equally obliged to atone for crimes of those who are harming us now, and even those who had harmed either us or others, thousands and thousands of years before we were born, and whose names we will never know.

Maistre reminds us that “evil has sullied everything, and all of man is nothing but sickness.”[ii] Therefore, any pursuit of earthly happiness falls short—a pathetic endeavor doomed to failure; for he who refuses to suffer is not worthy of being called a human being.

Examples of perpetual Evil abound. Indeed, it suffices to have a quick glance at Europe’s political past. European history has been a long trajectory of conflicts, civil wars, violence and cataclysms. Therefore, a world improvement, or craving for a world ruled by reason, so much praised by the eighteenth-century encyclopedists, can never be attained.

Unhappily, history proves that war is, in a certain sense, the habitual state of mankind, which is to say that human blood must flow without interruption somewhere or other on the globe, and that for every nation, peace is only a respite. [iii]

The cult of Reason, installed by the French revolutionaries as a new secular religion, including their new Goddess of Reason, turned out to be a great historical swindle.  Subsequently, this cult resulted in the escalation of violence between individuals and between nations, as seen during the Bolshevik revolution in Russia a century after the death of Joseph de Maistre. Contrary to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his ramblings about “the noble savage” and his beliefs in the alleged freedom of man at birth, authority always precedes reason and not the other way around. Man becomes aware of his reason, that is, his capacity to think and to reason, only within his family, his tribe, his clan, and his people, guided by wise men and their sense of tradition. The abstract reason of scientists and savants, as revered by the French revolutionaries of the eighteenth century and their liberal-communist offspring of the twentieth century, and later on their multiculturalist and globalist successors of the twenty-first century, is a giant hoax which, under the veneer of “human rights,” “multiculturalism,” and “tolerance” only augur new massacres. As a good connoisseur of classical languages ​​and modern European languages ​​of his time, during his lengthy dialogues in the course of his long walks along St. Petersburg waterfronts, Joseph Maistre was able to foresee the looming danger of the Jacobin doubletalk which was later launched by Bolsheviks and which is common today amidst the new world superclass based in Brussels and Washington DC.

But there is no such thing as ‘man’ in this world. In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare I’ve never in my lifetime met him; if he exists, he is unknown to me. [iv]

In hindsight, this passage may help us better understand the dissolution of the Soviet empire and the emergence of Ukraine and other nations whose national aspirations few knew about earlier. The same was true for the Croats and Slovenes during the dissolution of multicultural Yugoslavia in 1991.  All seems well when the preaching is about man-in-the-abstract; however, once the crisis starts, each of us, even the least nationalist-minded person, knows very well which family, i.e., ingroup he must relate to and in which language he will demonize his now-enemy neighbor. Worse, the ideas of progress and their great optimistic effusions about the best of all possible worlds, as envisaged by the philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment, such as Rousseau, inevitably lead to a new round of revolutions with their processions of massacres and sufferings. The bloody French Revolution, of which Maistre was a prime witness, was only the beginning of the Evil willed by divine Providence. If  Maistre had lived in the twentieth century, his words about the Bolshevik revolution in imperial Russia of 1917 would have sounded even more convincing.

Hence, if each revolution produces Evil, why does God allow it in the first place? Is this a divine attempt to test mankind, or is it a scam originating in a monotheistic religion of the Middle East? Maistre champions monarchical authority and the Inquisition as the sole remedy; in other words, he praises the regimes which until recently have been branded as “muscular regimes.” However, one only needs to think about the wars of religion in sixteenth-century France or the Thirty Years’ War in seventeenth-century central Europe to realize that their violence was not less than that of the Jacobin Revolution condemned by Maistre. Nor does his choice of placing government in the hands of all-knowing papists and Jesuit teachers inspire confidence.

It belongs to prelates, to noblemen, to great officers of the state to be the depositories and guardians of saving truths, to teach peoples what is good and what is bad, what is true and what is false in the moral and spiritual orders. The others have no right to reason about these sorts of things. They have the natural sciences to amuse them.[v]

Should we therefore leave it to Jesuits, to papists, and to the Catholic clergy to reestablish order in Europe and preserve the simulacrum of our small happiness? Out of the question—at least for the minority of free thinkers still remaining. In view of the pro-migration homilies of the actual pope and his high clergy in Europe and in the United States and their multicultural statements in favor of Afro-Asian migrants, there is no longer any need for communist commissars. Maistre himself would be shocked by his own ecumenical logic which has now yielded a worst-case scenario emerging daily when observing papal pronouncements. Two hundred years later, Maistre’s great disciple and admirer, Emile Cioran, also a champion of the Fall into Time, albeit pagan given his vision of the sacred, rightly warned us that we must henceforth expect nothing: neither from men nor from gods. [vi]

Notes:

[i] Joseph de Maistre, St. Petersburg Dialogues (First Dialogue), trans. and edited R.A. Lebrun (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1993), p.21.

[ii] Ibid., p. 36.

[iii] J. de Maistre, Considerations on France, trans. and edited R. A. Lebrun (Montreal: McGill University Press  1994), p. 23.

[iv] Ibid, Considerations, p.53.

[v] St. Petersburg Dialogues, p. 260.

[vi] E.M. Cioran, The Fall into Time (Chicago: Quadrangle books, 1970). Also T. Sunic, „Emile Cioran and the Culture of Death“ .

 

Spencer J. Quinn’s “Solzhenitsyn and the Right”

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Solzhenitsyn and the Right
Spencer J. Quinn
Antelope Hill Publishing, 2021

Spencer J. Quinn’s Solzhenitsyn and the Right summarizes a large portion of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s voluminous body of work, but its focus isn’t entirely on Solzhenitsyn. It is replete with parallels between pre- and post-revolutionary Russia/Soviet Union and the present situation in the West.

Fundamentally, Solzhenitsyn was a Russian patriot, and certainly not in a civic nationalist sense:

In his memoirs, he refers to Russians as his people and Russia as his country, and never does the fate of either escape his concern. He identified with the Russian people and so he bled when they bled, cried when they cried, and cheered when they cheered. He also longed for the Russian soil when he was away from it. Religion, tradition, and patriotism bound him to his people, and his people to each other, as in any enduring civilization. … For Solzhenitsyn, nationalism was more about blood than what it says in one’s passport. (3, 5)

Not surprisingly given such attitudes, he was highly critical of the West where he was exiled for almost 15 years, repeatedly “predicting the West’s downfall” because of its individualism, Enlightenment values, and lack of religious fervor. (4) And, as Quinn notes, he is proving to be right as a result of the immigration tsunami that has transformed Western societies into battlegrounds of conflicting and incompatible peoples and cultures, and where the native European-derived peoples are routinely vilified by elites in the media, the university, major corporations, and the political class in the societies they created. Of these, Solzhenitsyn identified the media as the most influential: it “distorts and embellishes its reportage to be as sensationalist as possible in order to ‘miseducate’ public opinion and garner profits and influence.” (17) In particular, the media appeals to and encourages weakness, whether in the food we eat (often resulting in obesity and its attendant diseases like diabetes), how we spend our leisure, how important we regard material wealth, or the value one places on conforming to the media’s moral imperative to admit and care for an unending stream of migrants who will eventually displace the peoples of the West. As always the demise of Western societies is presented as a moral issue, with payment to the descendants of colonial peoples and slaves quite possibly requiring the forfeit “of everything it owns.” (21)

Quinn notes the parallel between Soviet communism and the contemporary West:

While for Solzhenitsyn this Evil took the form of Communist and totalitarian governments which for the most part existed outside the West, today it appears as the equally totalitarian anti-white Left which lurks among us and has laid claim to our universities, our media, our corporations, and nearly all of our other institutions. It is this Left which has imported its shock troops from the Third World, and it is this Left which the West’s ‘conservative’ leadership has continually bowed down to and appeased. (22)

The composition of Western elites matters, and in particular the media elites. Fundamentally, they hate us. And, although Jews, with their long list of (imagined and real) historical grudges, are highly overrepresented in all areas of Western elites, they are by far most overrepresented as owners and creators in the media.

Solzhenitsyn spent eight years in a Gulag and survived assassination attempts by the KGB. Quinn notes that even this sort of Soviet oppression is more extreme than what we see in the West now, there are certainly the beginning signs of similar repression—travel restrictions, bank account and credit card suspensions for dissidents, banning and shadow banning on social media, double standards of justice in which the legal system throws the book at rightists and typically refuses to even investigate or indict leftists—as exemplified by the consequences of the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally and the recent January 6 protest. There is no reason at all to suppose that the West couldn’t end up being at least as oppressive as the USSR. Powerful interests are seeking just that. “If the Far Left ever succeeds in gaining control over a major government (as it did in Russia in 1917), then the Dissident Right can expect oppression similar to what Solzhenitsyn and other figures faced in the Soviet Union.” (11)

Jewish Issues

Pyotr Stolypin, Prime Minister of Russia from 1906–1911, was assassinated in 1911 by a Jewish radical, Mordecai Bogrov, at a time when such radicalism was common among Jews. Jews hated Stolypin because, as Solzhenitsyn described it, “he boosted Russian interests too blatantly and too insistently—the Russianness of the Duma as a representative body, the Russianness of the state.” (26; italics in text) Solzhenitsyn believed Stolypin’s assassination was catastrophic because it unleashed “the first eddies in a swirl of nihilism, war, and death which would soon consume Europe.” (27) Quinn notes that Solzhenitsyn “dared to depict Bogrov in a way resembling Jewish stereotypes” (30)—a lying, two-faced manipulator, physically weak and neurotic but highly intelligent. “There was nothing the Russians could do, other than cede power to the Jews, that would satisfy him” (31). And indeed, he was motivated by his Jewish identity and sense of Jewish interests: “I was fighting for the benefit of the Jewish people.”  (34)

Parallels to the Present

After describing Lenin’s psychopathic personality (e.g., his duplicity and his “enmity toward everything traditional, natural and morally wholesome,” (43) Quinn notes that “the left has not changed much since Lenin’s day, merely exchanging class for race in the twenty-first century. The same bunch that called for the civil rights of non-Whites is now calling for the open oppression of whites. Just as with Lenin, what the Left says it wants and what it truly wants are two different things. … A stroll through Twitter or anti-white Hollywood in the 2020s will show quite clearly that the left’s violent fantasies against their perceived enemies haven’t gone away and aren’t going anywhere.” (44)

The February Revolution which led to the Provisional Government resulted from well-organized, well-funded activists, just as we see today in the wake of George Floyd’s death; “they are also engaging in the kind of violence, ruthless intimidation, and hateful rhetoric that Solzhenitsyn documents in March 1917.” As today, rightists in 1917 trusted the leftists, who were clearly attempting to end the monarchy, to be “acting in good faith when they clearly weren’t.” And as today, the left is full of promises for a utopian future free of strife and oppression if only power is ceded to them. Solzhenitsyn: “Tranquility would only come to Russia when the present government system had been ripped out at the root.” (54; italics in text) Solzhenitsyn comments on the police being intimidated and rendered powerless, and Quinn draws the contemporary parallel: “During America’s riots in the summer of 2020, how many times did the police stand down or kneel to the rioters? How many times did we see the police actively take the side of the rioters, or refuse to protect innocent people from them?” (57) As now, the media was on the side of the rioters, not only presenting fake news, e.g., on police violence against rioters, but also, as Solzhenitsyn notes, intimidating those with power from enforcing the law: “Columns in the liberal newspapers alone made the governors pale and attempt to justify their measures. … They could not kill their own people” (57)—quite unlike the Bolsheviks who had no compunctions about mass murder against their perceived enemies.

As Quinn notes, the main message of March 1917 is that the Bolshevik Revolution did not have to happen, and neither does the current revolution playing out throughout the West. “The Left does not have to win. But for today’s Right to check the Left and achieve victory, it will need leaders who possess the nerves and confidence that the Russian leaders depicted by Solzhenitsyn entirely lacked”—something sorely lacking at this point. (63; emphasis in text) As Solzhenitsyn noted in his play Prisoners,

We clutch at life with convulsive intensity—that’s how we get caught. We want to go on living at any, any price. We accept all the degrading conditions, and this way we save—not ourselves—we save the prosecutor. But he who doesn’t value his life is unconquerable, untouchable. There are such people. (70; italics in text)

At this point, the Right in the West needs such people to win.

We can only imagine how many intelligent, well-meaning Russians were swayed by the liberal-left media, wanting to be seen as a good person, and conforming to whatever mandates the left proposed. They supported the left and looked forward to the utopian, classless future promised by the Bolsheviks. What is clear now is that there are millions of White voters throughout the contemporary West, many of them calling themselves conservatives, who have been eager to embrace today’s promised utopian future of racial harmony and equal outcomes for all races.

Two Hundred Years Together

The longest section of Solzhenitsyn and the Right discusses Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together, placing “much of the blame for the October Revolution, the atrocities of the early Soviet period, and subversive Left-wing behavior in general squarely on the shoulders of the Jews. [Solzhenitsyn] also … exonerates much of Tsarist Russia from the charge of anti-Semitism, which Jewish authors never seem to tire of leveling. … Dissidents on the Right should take advantage of Solzhenitsyn’s fame and cite him as often as possible in the battlefield of ideas—especially when it comes to the Jewish question.” (83, 84)

Jews were heavily overrepresented in Lenin’s inner circle and indeed, in Lenin in Zurich “Solzhenitsyn offers tantalizing evidence that the October Revolution would not have occurred (or would not have been successful) without actions carried out by Jews at its most critical moments.” (47)

Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn often bent over backwards not to be negative about Jews. Quinn notes that “Solzhenitsyn was no anti-Semite. There are many passages in this work that demonstrate a desire to show justice, even tenderness, toward Jews. It cannot be denied that he had great respect for them” (84)—a trait, as Quinn notes, that is entirely lacking in vast majority of Jewish writers commenting on the behavior of White gentiles toward Jews. And commenting on Jewish characters in his play Republic of Labor, Solzhenitsyn noted in Two Hundred Years Together that he had fictionalized them somewhat because the truth “would be inevitably considered anti-Jewish incitement (as if that trio of Jews was not inflaming it in real life, caring little about consequences).” (78)

Departing from Solzhenitsyn, Quinn eschews any perspective that flinches from dealing honestly with Jews. White nations are in the process of being subjugated and the great majority of Jews, including many wealthy, politically involved Jews and Jews with prominent positions in the media, support this revolution. Of course, this does not mean that White advocates should be dishonest, only that they should not flinch from the truth. So despite what Solzhenitsyn would have advocated, “the value and importance of Two Hundred Years Together cannot be overstated.” (86) What follows then are three chapters listing the “misdeeds” (87) of the Jews.

Solzhenitsyn notes that Jews began to be represented among revolutionaries in the 1870s after originally being underrepresented. The reason for this was that leftist revolutionaries often viewed Jews as exploiters—a perspective that disappeared from revolutionary rhetoric after Jews became prominent among them. This is an important point that is missing from typical accounts by Jewish historians. From Separation and Its Discontents (Ch. 2, pp. 41–42):

Emancipation often accentuated the importance of resource competition as a source of anti-Semitism. Lindemann (1991, 17) notes that Jews in pre-emancipation Russia “were viewed by the authorities and by much of the rest of population as a foreign, separate, exploitative, and distressingly prolific nation.” The official Russian view was that emancipation had resulted in Jews economically dominating and exploiting the Slavic peasants (Judge 1992, 9, 11). The following passage, from an article published in 1893 by M. Pierre Botkine, the Secretary of the Russian Legation in Washington, was also emphasized by Goldwin Smith (1894, 248) in his anti-Jewish writing. It combines the issue of economic domination with the loyalty issue … :

The Hebrew, as we know him in Russia, is “the eternal Jew.” Without a country of his own, and as a rule, without any desire to become identified with the country he for the time inherits, he remains, as for hundreds of years he has been, morally unchangeable and without a faculty for adapting himself to sympathy with the people of the race which surrounds him. He is not homogeneous with us in Russia; he does not feel or desire solidarity with us. In Russia he remains a guest only—a guest from long ago, and not an integral part of the community. When these guests without affinity became too many in Russia, when in several localities their numbers were found injurious to the welfare and the prosperity of our own people as a whole, when they had grown into many wide-spreading ramifications of influence and power, and abused their opportunities as traders with or lenders of money to the poor—when, in a word, they became dangerous and prejudicial to our people—is there anything revolting or surprising in the fact that our government found it necessary to restrict their activity? . . . Is it just that those who have never had to confront such a situation should blame us for those measures?

            Our peasantry has only recently been organized in their existing social relations, and is not yet well educated, or well trained in the exercise of social rights or obligations under their present system. . . . If we take into consideration the character of the Slavonian folk, it is easy to understand why our meek, ignorant, and easy-going peasantry fell under the control of the Jews, who, as a class, are far better educated and more thrifty, and have the aptitude for commerce and for money making which distinguishes their race everywhere—and who readily perceived and soon abused their superiority in those particulars, after the emancipation of the serfs had deprived them individually of the safeguards the old system of things had afforded them. This Jewish influence was everywhere oppressive, and now and then became an unbearable yoke. The peasants in some localities, having lost all patience, were guilty of violent excesses, mobbed the Jews, and destroyed their property. (Botkine 1893, 613–614)

Solzhenitsyn presents numerous Jewish writers who basically say the same thing: that diaspora Jews do not identify with the country they reside in. Israeli author A. B. Yoshua: “The Galut [diaspora] is an immoral creature. He uses all the benefits of his host country but at the same time he does not identify with it.” (129) As has often been the case, Zionists had a much more realistic perspective on Jews, and often regarded Jews as a separate ethnicity and acknowledged that anti-Semitism was a natural reaction to Jews as foreigners. A statement published by the Zionist Federation of Germany after the National Socialists came to power stated “Zionism has no illusions about the difficulty of the Jewish condition, which consists above all in an abnormal occupational pattern and in the fault of an intellectual and moral posture not rooted in one’s own tradition” (SAID, Ch 5, 161).

Continuing SAID (Ch. 2, 42–43) on Jews as oppressors in nineteenth-century Russia:

In 1881 a government document decried the failure of its twenty-year-long campaign to fuse the Russian and Jewish populations and perceived the problem to be “the exploitation [by the Jews] of the indigenous population and mostly of the poorer classes” (in Frankel 1981, 64). This was the view of official American government observers as well (see Goldstein 1990, 36, 290), and it was also apparent in the Jewish revolutionary socialist Hayim Zhitlowski (1972, 129): “Whenever I turned my eyes to ordinary, day-to-day Jewish life, I saw only one thing, that which the antisemites were agitating about: the injurious effect of Jewish merchantry on Russian peasantry. No matter how I felt, from a socialist point of view, I had to pass a death sentence not only on individual Jews but on the entire Jewish existence of individual Jews” (italics in text).[i]

Gentile revolutionaries were also prone to anti-Semitic pronouncements. In 1869 the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin stated of the Jews that “their history, since well before the Christian era, has imprinted on them a trait essentially mercantile and bourgeois, which means, taken as a nation, they are par excellence the exploiters of the work of others, and they have a horror and a natural fear of the masses of the people, whom, moreover, they hate, openly or secretly” (in Rather 1990, 178). The revolutionary party Narodnaia Volia took a tolerant view toward the 1881 pogroms and issued the following statement to the Ukrainian people:

The people in the Ukraine suffer worst of all from the Jews. Who takes the land, the woods, the taverns from out of your hands? The Jews. From whom does the muzhik [peasant], often with tears in his eyes, have to beg permission to get to his own field, his own plot of land?—the Jews. Wherever you look, wherever you go—the Jews are everywhere. The Jew curses you, cheats you, drinks your blood. . . . But as soon as the muzhiki rise up to free themselves from their enemies as they did in Elizavetgrad, Kiev, Smela, the tsar at once comes to the rescue of the Jews: the soldiers from Russia are called in and the blood of the muzhik, Christian blood, flows. . . . You have begun to rebel against the Jews. You have done well. Soon the revolt will be taken up across all of Russia against the tsar, the pany [landowners], the Jews. (In Frankel 1981, 98)[ii]

Importantly, the previous footnote concludes: “In later years, Jews assumed a much larger role in the revolutionary movement in Russia. This resulted in a very different interpretation of the 1881 pogroms. Writing in 1905 during another period of pogroms, the Jewish socialist theorist Shimen Dubnov attributed the 1881 pogroms to “imaginary economic factors,” while the recent pogroms had been the result of “revenge for the revolutionary activity of the Jews” (in Frankel 1981, 136). Workers and peasants were active participants in the 1905 pogroms as well.” In other words, what had originally been a movement dominated by non-Jews had been transformed in a manner congruent with Jewish interests. Solzhenitsyn notes that by the 1880s and 1890s Jews became disproportionately involved in revolution—between a quarter and a third of revolutionaries were Jews and Jews constituted 37 percent of political prisoners despite being only 5 percent of the population.

Like 1960s Jewish radicals (The Culture of Critique, Ch. 3), Russian-Jewish radicals of the late nineteenth century tended to come from wealthy families and were not estranged from their families, both of which were often the case with non-Jewish radicals.

One thing that may surprise many, given the representations of Jews in the popular media and the occupational and social class profile of Jews in the West, is how violent these Jewish revolutionaries were. Solzhenitsyn notes that the 1903 pogrom in Gomel, Belarus was started when “armed and organized gangs of Jews had instigated the pogrom against Russians. … All the casualties were Russian.” But when the troops arrived, they protected the wealthy Jewish parts of the city, “and to show their appreciation, the Jews fired guns and threw stones at them.” (89) These Jews were angry because of the Kishinev pogrom which had happened 6 months previously. Nevertheless, when many Jews showed how violent and sadistic they could be after the Bolsheviks came to power, there was widespread surprise. As I noted in a review of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century:

Many of the commentators on Jewish Bolsheviks noted the ‘transformation’ of Jews: In the words of another Jewish commentator, G. A. Landau, ‘cruelty, sadism, and violence had seemed alien to a nation so far removed from physical activity.’ And another Jewish commentator, Ia. A Bromberg, noted that: the formerly oppressed lover of liberty had turned into a tyrant of “unheard-of-despotic arbitrariness”…. The convinced and unconditional opponent of the death penalty not just for political crimes but for the most heinous offenses, who could not, as it were, watch a chicken being killed, has been transformed outwardly into a leather-clad person with a revolver and, in fact, lost all human likeness (Slezkine, 183–184).

This psychological “transformation” of Russian Jews was probably not all that surprising to the Russians themselves, given [Maxim] Gorky’s finding that Russians prior to the Revolution saw Jews as possessed of “cruel egoism” and that they were concerned about becoming slaves of the Jews.

Quinn notes that all of the blameworthy aspects of Jewish behavior in Gomel have been whitewashed by Jewish historians, and that Jewish accounts of the Kishinev pogrom routinely ignore Jewish behavior as implicated. Moreover, as Andrew Joyce has documented, Jewish accounts at the time played up various hoaxes of Jewish victimization (“Babies were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob,” as a New York Times article claimed).

And it’s no surprise that Jews became the primary theorists of revolution—they “tirelessly propounded anarchism, socialism, and other disruptive ideologies.” (91) It’s also fascinating that a pro-Jewish party and the Jewish press supported the Duma’s refusal to lift restrictions on Jews, likely as a strategic move to retain Jewish ardor in the revolutionary efforts. As Quinn notes, “we should never take the Left, especially the Jewish left at its word. Any progressive agenda is merely a smokescreen for destroying traditional gentile power structures and replacing them with totalitarianism.” (93; italics in text) And regarding the press, it’s no surprise that, as Solzhenitsyn notes, it “was dominated by left-wing or radical Jews who occupied key positions” (94) And it’s hard not to relate to the lament of a Russian newspaper editor in 1905 who noted that “The Jews have bet heavily on the card of revolution” and that Russians “who think seriously have understood that in such movements the press represents a force and that this force is not in their hands, but in that of their adversaries.” (94) In all of this, Solzhenitsyn bends over backwards to present Jewish actions favorably, but, as Quinn notes, “struggles with his evenhandedness [and] his efforts get more strained as the book goes on.” (105)

So it’s no surprise that Jews were overrepresented in the October Revolution or subsequent governments—6 of 12 of the conspirators and, according to mass murderer Lazar Kaganovich, “the vast majority of the presidium at the table were Jews,” as well as at least half of Lenin’s first Soviet Politburo. (103)

Not that other peoples weren’t involved. While Russians remained a minority in the power structure, other groups­—Poles, Latvians, Georgians also played a role, and the Russians who did participate were basically psychopaths. As I noted in the Preface to the 2002 edition of The Culture of Critique (p. 32):

It is interesting that many of the non-Jewish Bolsheviks were members of non-Russian ethnic groups or, as noted in CofC, were married to Jewish women. It was a common perception during the early stages of the Soviet Union that the government was dominated by “a small knot of foreigners” (Szajkowski 1977, 55). Stalin, Beria, and Ordzhonikidze were Georgians; Dzerzhinsky, the ruthless head of the Checka (Secret Police) during the 1920s, was a Pole with strong pro-Jewish attitudes. The original Cheka was made up largely of non-Russians, and the Russians in the Cheka tended to be sadistic psychopaths and criminals (Werth 1999, 62; Wolin & Slusser 1957, 6)—people who are unlikely to have any allegiance to or identification with their people.

Quinn notes that Solzhenitsyn accepts “for the sake of argument” that Bolshevik Jews were renegade Jews (Otshchepentsy), but then wonders why these same Jews hesitate to apply this argument to Russian Bolsheviks. The above indicates that the Russian Bolsheviks tended not to identify with their people—marrying into a group that was widely despised by Russians and counting among them “sadistic psychopaths and criminals.” On the other hand, there is a great deal of evidence that in general Jewish communists retained a strong sense of Jewish identity. This is a critical question because a standard Jewish rationale for Jewish involvement in communism was that these revolutionaries were not really Jews—that they had become entirely removed from any Jewish identity. From The Culture of Critique (Ch. 3):

Several factors favor our supposing that Jewish identification occurred in a substantial percentage of ethnic Jews [in the USSR]: (1) People were classified as Jews depending on their ethnic background at least partly because of residual anti-Semitism; this would tend to impose a Jewish identity on these individuals and make it difficult to assume an exclusive identity as a member of a larger, more inclusive political group. (2) Many Jewish Bolsheviks, such as those in Evsektsiya [an explicitly Jewish section of the Communist Party] and the JAC [Jewish Anti-fascist Committee), aggressively sought to establish a secular Jewish subculture. (3) Very few Jews on the left envisioned a postrevolutionary society without a continuation of Judaism as a group; indeed, the predominant ideology among Jewish leftists was that postrevolutionary society would end anti-Semitism because it would end class conflict and the peculiar Jewish occupational profile. (4) The behavior of American communists shows that Jewish identity and the primacy of Jewish interests over communist interests were commonplace among individuals who were ethnically Jewish communists. … (5) The existence of Jewish crypsis in other times and places combined with the possibility that self-deception, identificatory flexibility, and identificatory ambivalence are important components of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy (see Separation and Its Discontents, Ch. 8). …

Consider the case of Polina Zhemchuzhina, the wife of Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov (Premier of the USSR during the 1930s) and a prominent revolutionary who joined the Communist Party in 1918. (Among other accomplishments, she was a member of the Party Central Committee.) When Golda Meir visited the Soviet Union in 1948, Zhemchuzhina repeatedly uttered the phrase “Ich bin a Yiddishe tochter” (I am a daughter of the Jewish people) when Meir asked how she spoke Yiddish so well (Rubenstein 1996, 262). “She parted from the [Israeli delegation] with tears in her eyes, saying ‘I wish all will go well for you there and then it will be good for all the Jews’ ” (Rubenstein 1996, 262). Vaksberg (1994, 192) describes her as “an iron Stalinist, but her fanaticism did not keep her from being a “good Jewish daughter.”

Consider also the case of Ilya Ehrenburg, the prominent Soviet journalist and anti-fascist propagandist for the Soviet Union whose life is described in a book whose title, Tangled Loyalties (Rubenstein 1996), illustrates the complexities of Jewish identity in the Soviet Union. Ehrenburg was a loyal Stalinist, supporting the Soviet line on Zionism and refusing to condemn Soviet anti-Jewish actions (Rubenstein 1996). Nevertheless, Ehrenburg held Zionist views, maintained Jewish associational patterns, believed in the uniqueness of the Jewish people, and was deeply concerned about anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Ehrenburg was an organizing member of the JAC, which advocated Jewish cultural revival and greater contact with Jews abroad. A writer friend described him as “first of all a Jew. . . . Ehrenburg had rejected his origins with all his being, disguised himself in the West, smoking Dutch tobacco and making his travel plans at Cook’s. . . . But he did not erase the Jew” (p. 204). “Ehrenburg never denied his Jewish origins and near the end of his life often repeated the defiant conviction that he would consider himself a Jew ‘as long as there was a single anti-Semite left on earth’ ” (Rubenstein 1996, 13). In a famous article, he cited a statement that “blood exists in two forms; the blood that flows inside the veins and the blood that flows out of the veins. . . . Why do I say, ‘We Jews?’ Because of blood” (p. 259). Indeed, his intense loyalty to Stalin’s regime and his silence about Soviet brutalities involving the murder of millions of its citizens during the 1930s may have been motivated largely by his view that the Soviet Union was a bulwark against fascism (pp. 143–145). “No transgression angered him more than anti-Semitism” (p. 313).

A powerful residual Jewish identity in a prominent Bolshevik can also be seen in the following comment on the reaction of ethnic Jews to the emergence of Israel:

It seemed that all Jews, regardless of age, profession, or social status, felt responsible for the distant little state that had become a symbol of national revival. Even the Soviet Jews who had seemed irrevocably assimilated were now under the spell of the Middle Eastern miracle. Yekaterina Davidovna (Golda Gorbman) was a fanatic Bolshevik and internationalist and wife of Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, and in her youth she had been excommunicated as an unbeliever; but now she struck her relatives dumb by saying, “Now at last we have our motherland, too.” (Kostyrchenko 1995, 102)

Solzhenitsyn, despite wanting to share blame for the October Revolution and the atrocities that followed, states that “Jews were the driving force behind the October Revolution.” (106) The horror of the early Soviet regime is almost impossible to comprehend. Solzhenitsyn describes the early days of the Russian Civil War not as a war, but as the “liquidation of a former adversary” (108). It was routine to execute their victims without trial, the only “evidence” needed being the social class membership of the victims.

Solzhenitsyn, commenting on the change in attitude among Soviet Jews after Jews became targets of Soviet oppression after World War II:

The Soviet government was as unjust and cruel [after the Revolution] as it was to be in 1937 and 1950. But in the Twenties the bloodlust did not raise alarm or resistance in the wider Jewish population since its force was aimed not at Jewry. (115)

Further, “Solzhenitsyn mordantly points out how convenient it was for his critics to profess outrage over these crimes [i.e., the hundreds of thousands of deaths involved in the construction of the Belomor Canal between Lake Onega and the White Sea] only decades after they had been committed. At the time, however, nearly all Jewish voices were silent; and most remain till this day—except when they want to heap more scorn on Solzhenitsyn as an anti-Semite.” (122)

Similarly, criticism of the USSR among Jews in the United States did not become widespread until there were signs that Jews were being persecuted in the USSR. Indeed, the origins of the neoconservative movement (a Jewish intellectual and political movement) can be traced to the 1950s. For example, Sydney Hook was “deeply concerned about the emergence of anti-Semitism in the USSR.”

Until the Moscow Trials of the 1930s he was blind to the violence and oppression in the USSR. During a visit to the USSR in 1929, “I was completely oblivious at the time to the systematic repressions that were then going on against noncommunist elements and altogether ignorant of the liquidation of the so-called kulaks that had already begun that summer. I was not even curious enough to probe and pry, possibly for fear of what I would discover.” During the 1930s, when the Communist Party exercised a dominant cultural influence in the United States, “the fear of fascism helped to blur our vision and blunt our hearing to the reports that kept trickling out of the Soviet Union.” Even the Moscow Trials were dismissed by large sectors of liberal opinion. It was the time of the Popular Front, where the fundamental principle was the defense of the Soviet Union. Liberal journals like the New Republic did not support inquiries into the trials, citing New York Times reporter Walter Duranty as an authority who believed in the truth of the confessions. (“Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement,” p. 36)

Solzhenitsyn portrays the 1930s as the height of Jewish power in the USSR: “Despite offering the caveat that Jews never constituted all of these powerful organizations, Solzhenitsyn goes on for pages detailing the Jewish dominance of Soviet economics, diplomacy, culture, and politics during the 1930s. … And this was occurring while Stalin was supposedly purging Jews from the Party” (119, 120)

Ethnic networking was pervasive, including in the Gulag and in the construction of the Belomor Canal noted above. Quinn on the Gulag: “They were known to recruit other Jews for privileged positions among the medical staff, even if those they recruited had no medical training” (120) Solzhenitsyn again goes into voluminous detail, naming Jews so privileged, and then noting “Is it really reasonable to suppose that Jews were digging soil with their shovels and racing with their hand-barrows and dying under those barrows from exhaustion and emaciation?” He also notes one non-Jew with the name Bernstein who received privileged treatment because he was thought to be a Jew: “Jews took him for one of their own and never failed to help him when he needed it.” Which reminds me that a well-known article by media critic William Cash provided anecdotal evidence that individuals disguised themselves as Jews in their attempst to become accepted in the movie industry. (SAID, Ch. 2, note 40, p. 84)

Quinn discusses the negative Jewish reception to his work. Even before Two Hundred Years Together, Solzhenitsyn stated, “Even at the height of the battle at the [USSR’s] Secretariat of the Writers’ Union I was not inveighed against with such bile, such personal, passionate hate, as I was now by America’s pseudo-educated elite.” (147) Regarding the reception of Two Hundred Years Together, Quinn notes that Jewish writers have “said little about the vast suffering of Russians during the Soviet period or cared to refute Solzhenitsyn’s linking of high-level Jews … to the suffering.” (130)

No surprise there. Nothing has changed. The Jewish unwillingness to see the enormity of Jewish behavior during the Soviet period and really for the entire gamut of Western history continues into the present. Quinn makes the obvious conclusion: “As whites slowly become minorities in their homelands, Solzhenitsyn’s calls for hope and reconciliation sound more and more like the stuff of fantasy. … How much longer can we afford to hope?” (131) Indeed.

And I agree with Quinn that “white identity is the only solution to Jewish conquest.” (134) In the Russian case, Solzhenitsyn shows that even a rather tepid sense of Russian ethnocentrism was enough to make many Jews leave Russia in the later decades of the Soviet regime. Quinn concludes: “If it can be done there, it can be done anywhere.” (134, emphasis in original) Nevertheless, only the rise of Vladimir Putin, who tamed the Jewish oligarchs who had basically inherited the Soviet economy after the fall of the USSR, prevented the Jews from once again dominating Russia—a source of much of the hatred toward Russia that we see today, especially from neoconservatives.

Besides an upsurge in White identity—which does seem to be happening, we therefore need strong leadership at the political level, and that is sorely lacking. The courage that has been in evidence in so much of the history of the West and enabled its many accomplishments is in short supply. And, as Solzhenitsyn noted in his much-maligned Harvard address of 1978, “Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?” (21)

Spencer J. Quinn’s Solzhenitsyn and the Right is essential reading, and certainly not only for those already well read on White identity and White interests. It will also be a red pill for many who continue to be under the spell of the current culture of Western suicide.

                [i]. The following report from British Vice-Consul L. Wagstaff sums up the public perception of the social and economic causes of anti-Semitism leading to the pogroms of 1881 in Russia and reflects many of the themes of this section and the previous section:

It is chiefly as brokers or middlemen that the Jews are so prominent. Seldom a business transaction of any kind takes place without their intervention, and from both sides they receive compensation. To enumerate some of their other occupations, constantly denounced by the public: they are the principal dealers in spirits; keepers of “vodka” (drinking) shops and houses of ill-fame; receivers of stolen goods; illegal pawnbrokers and usurers. A branch they also succeed in is as government contractors. With their knowledge of handling money, they collude with unscrupulous officials in defrauding the State to vast amounts annually. In fact, the malpractices of some of the Jewish community have a bad influence on those whom they come in contact with. It must, however, be said that there are many well educated, highly respectable Jews in Russia, but they form a small minority. . . . They thoroughly condemn the occupations of their lower brethren. . . . They themselves acknowledge the abuses practised by some of their own members, and suggest remedial measures to allay the irritation existing among the working classes.

Another thing the Jews are accused of is that there exists among them a system of boycotting; they use their religion for business purposes. . . . For instance, in Bessarabia, the produce of a vineyard is drawn for by lot, and falls, say to Jacob Levy; the other Jews of the district cannot compete with Levy, who buys the wine at his own price. In the leasing by action of government and provincial lands, it is invariably a Jew who outbids the others and afterwards re-lets plots to the peasantry at exorbitant prices. . . .

Their fame as usurers is well known. Given a Jewish recruit with a few roubles’ capital, it can be worked out, mathematically, what time it will take him to become the money-lender of his company or regiment, from the drummer to the colonel. Take the case of a peasant: if he once gets into the hands of this class, he is irretrievably lost. The proprietor, in his turn, from a small loan gradually mortgages and eventually loses his estate. A great deal of landed property in south Russia has of late years passed into the hands of the Israelites but principally into the hands of intelligent and sober peasants.

From first to last, the Jew has his hand in everything. He advances the seed for sowing, which is generally returned in kind—quarters for bushels. As harvest time comes around, money is required to gather in the crops. This is sometimes advanced on hard conditions; but the peasant has no choice; there is no one to lend him money, and it is better to secure something than to lose all. Very often the Jew buys the whole crop as it stands in the field on his own terms. It is thus seen that they themselves do not raise agricultural products, but they reap the benefits of others’ labour, and steadily become rich, while proprietors are gradually getting ruined. In their relation to Russia they are compared to parasites that have settled on a plant not vigorous enough to throw them off, and which is being sapped of its vitality.

The vice-consul also noted that peasants often say when they see the property of a Jew, “That is my blood.” The complaints of the pogromists also included charges that Russian girls in service at Jewish households were sexually exploited.

                [ii]. Other pronouncements from revolutionaries during the period stated that “one should not hit the Jew because he is a Jew and prays to his own God . . . but because he plunders the people, sucks the blood of the workingman”; and, “The Jew owns the bars and taverns, rents land from the landowners and then leases it out to the peasant at two or three times the rate, he buys wheat on the field, goes in for money lending and charges percentages so high that people call them simply ‘Yiddish’ rates” (in Frankel 1981, 100). A Jewish socialist, Pavel Borisovich Akselrod, analyzed the situation by writing that “however great the poverty and deprivation suffered by the Jewish masses . . . the fact remains that, taken overall, some half of them function as a nonproductive element, sitting astride the neck of the lower classes in Russia” (in Frankel 1981, 105). These comments agree with the assessment of the British Vice-Consul quoted in note 21. …