Reply to Jordan Peterson on the Jewish Question — From His Heroes Part Four: Nietzsche

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Go to Part 1: Solzhenitsyn
Go to Part 2: Dostoevsky
Go to Part 3: Jung

A Reply from Nietzsche.

Like these other figures, whose thought is sanitized and claimed by Peterson, Nietzsche possessed views of Jews quite at odds with Peterson’s own hasty conclusions. Robert Holub’s 2015 Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem: Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism (Princeton University Press) convincingly demonstrates that, at best, Nietzsche could be described as ambivalent towards the Jewish Question. Nietzsche was undeniably in tune with Wagner when it came to animosity towards those aspects of modernity most closely linked with the rise of the Jews in Germany: the hegemony of journalists, the press, newspapers, new ‘trends’ in art, and the stock market. He was a critic of both Berthold Auerbach and Felix Mendelssohn, whom he argued produced works typified by foreignness, jargon, mawkishness and internationalism. At Basel, one of Nietzsche’s closest colleagues was the historian Jacob Burckhardt, described in one dedication as “my honored friend.” Burckhardt was unequivocally opposed to Jewish emancipation and believed that everything of worth in European culture was due to its Greek and Roman heritage rather than the Jewish tradition. He would have balked at the idea of Europe as a ‘Judeo-Christian’ cultural entity—a favorite piece of Jordan Peterson’s nomenclature—and he was firmly convinced that Jews were responsible for the worst manifestations of modernity. Early in his career Burckhardt wrote to a friend that the presence of Jews in a theater would be sufficient to entirely destroy his enjoyment of the event.

Like the others reviewed here, Peterson references Friedrich Nietzsche in almost every interview, talk, or text he delivers. In 12 Rules for Life (p.59), Peterson describes Nietzsche as both “great” and “brilliant,” and calls him (p.85) “perhaps the most astute critic ever to confront Christianity.” In much the same way as he cites Solzhenitsyn, Dostoevsky, and Jung as his ideological forerunners, Peterson holds up Nietzsche as a prescient and thoughtful thinker whose work was characterized (p.37) by its “brilliance.” Read more

Reply to Jordan Peterson on the Jewish Question — From His Heroes: Part Three: Jung

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C. G. Jung

Go to Part 1: Solzhenitsyn.
Go to Part 2: Dostoevsky

A Reply to Jung.

Jordan Peterson references Carl Jung in almost every interview, talk, or text he delivers, and these references are especially frequent in his lecture series on the Biblical stories. In 12 Rules for Life (p.131), Peterson describes Jung as both a “great psychiatrist” and a “psychoanalyst extraordinaire.” Jung’s ideas about the subconscious and archetypes form the backbone of much of Peterson’s self-concept and public work. One therefore wonders what Jung would have made of Jordan Peterson’s “On the So-Called Jewish Question.”

To begin with, Jung would almost certainly object to Peterson’s implicit assumption that Jews are easily integrated parts in the machinery of Western civilization, equal or even superior in suitability to all others. Jung believed that Jews, like all peoples, have a characteristic personality, and he would have stressed the need to take this personality into account. Even in his own sphere of expertise, Jung warned that “Freud and Adler’s psychologies were specifically Jewish, and therefore not legitimate for Aryans.”[1] A formative factor in the Jewish personality was the rootlessness of the Jews and the persistence of the Diaspora. Jung argued that Jews lacked a “chthontic quality,” meaning “The Jew … is badly at a loss for that quality in man which roots him to the earth and draws new strength from below.”[2] Jung penned these words in 1918, but they retain significance even after the founding of the State of Israel. Even today, vastly more Jews live outside Israel than within it. Jews remain a Diaspora people, and many continue to see their Diaspora status as a strength. Because they are scattered and rootless, however, Jung argued that Jews developed methods of getting on in the world that are built on exploiting weakness in others rather than expressing explicit strength. In Jung’s phrasing, “The Jews have this particularity in common with women; being physically weaker, they have to aim at the chinks in the armour of their adversary.”[3] Read more

Reply to Jordan Peterson on the Jewish Question — From His Heroes Part Two: Dostoevsky

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Go to Part 1: Solzhenitsyn.

Jordan Peterson references Fyodor Dostoevsky in almost every interview, talk, or text he delivers —perhaps even more than he refers to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. His admiration for Dostoevsky is considerable and is made clear in 12 Rules for Life. In 12 Rules, Peterson refers to the Russian author as (p.68) “incomparable,” and (p.137) “a wise and profound soul” possessing “great generosity of spirit.” Peterson describes Crime and Punishment (p.83) as “perhaps the greatest novel ever written,” and Dostoevsky himself (p.136) as “one of the great literary geniuses of all time.” He adds to the latter praise that the author “confronted the most serious existential problems in all his great writings, and he did so courageously, headlong, and heedless of the consequences.”

Perhaps even more so that was the case with Solzhenitsyn, Fyodor Dostoevsky has been pilloried in recent decades as an ultra-nationalist anti-Semite who believed Jews “had harmed and continued to harm the foundations of Russian society and culture.

Peterson, it will be recalled, has described anti-Semites as individuals who “claim responsibility for the accomplishments of [the] group [they] feel racially/ethnically akin to without actually having to accomplish anything [themselves].” Clearly an important point needs to be reconciled by Peterson: namely the outstanding literary accomplishments and political stances of Dostoevsky (even in Peterson’s own gushing estimation), and Peterson’s assertion that anti-Jewish critique rooted in nationalist sensibilities is merely a form of psychological escapism for those keen to avoid accomplishing anything for themselves. Surely it is self-evident that Dostoevsky, like Solzhenitsyn, was a man not only of accomplishment, but of remarkable, extraordinary accomplishment. What were Dostoevsky’s attitudes to Jews and the Jewish Question, and how would he respond to Jordan Peterson? Read more

Reply to Jordan Peterson on the Jewish Question — From His Heroes Part One: Solzhenitsyn

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“The Aryan subconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish.”
G. Jung

Overture

I recently took some time to devote serious attention to the work of Jordan Peterson. Until a few months ago, my familiarity with Peterson had been limited to his very weak and ill-advised intervention in the Nathan Cofnas affair. At that time, I toyed with the idea of providing a series of historical examples (there are many) that would contradict every one of Peterson’s assertions regarding the Jewish Question, but, in the end, his intervention was dealt with so conclusively by Kevin MacDonald (see here), that I saw no reason to discuss it further and abandoned that essay at the “skeleton” stage.  Peterson is, however, hard to ignore. As MacDonald put it, Peterson is indeed a “celebrity intellectual,” and one who, despite an occasionally overt philo-Semitism, has engaged in spirited defenses against some manifestations of cultural Marxism. This is admirable, and he is generally pleasing and interesting to watch his TV appearances. Watching and listening to these appearances with any frequency, it’s hard to escape Peterson’s key influences. The Canadian academic is both vocal and (remarkably) repetitive in naming them: summaries, quotes, and interpretations of Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, and Jung all feature very prominently in Peterson’s content.[1] It’s clear that all four men act as his foremost intellectual and personal heroes. But they share something else in common – they have all confronted the Jewish Question in a manner that quite clearly contradicts the view put forth by Peterson. This is not to say that everyone must follow all the ideas of their heroes, but it does call into question how carefully Peterson has both understood these writers and considered his own position on the Jews. The following essay is intended to tease out some problems and contradictions.

I’ve spent the last couple of months listening to Peterson’s lecture series on the Biblical stories, reading his 12 Rules for Life, and examining (and re-examining) his essay “On the So-Called Jewish Question.” I have to confess to finding his lecture series extremely strange. Listening to the audience question and answer sessions at the end of each lecture, it’s clear that Peterson has a sizeable Jewish following and that his lectures are, if not geared toward Jews, certainly holding great appeal for them. Part of this may be the fact that, for an ostensibly Christian apologist, thus far only one of Peterson’s sixteen lectures have concerned the New Testament. What I find particularly interesting about Peterson’s interpretation of these stories is that he extracts, in abstract psychoanalytic fashion, a series of self-help non-sequiturs without looking at how and why the stories were formulated in the first place, and how they have been understood by Jews during the many centuries since they were written. This is an especially ironic development because Peterson’s approach to these particular texts is rather like that of Jacques Derrida, the Jewish Marxist postmodernist he rebukes in 12 Rules for Life, who argued “there is nothing outside the text.” And it is quite unlike the suggestion of his hero Carl Jung, who, as Peterson notes in 12 Rules for Life, suggested that “if you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences — and infer the motivation.”

Peterson doesn’t seem remotely interested in the psychological needs and motivations of the Jewish authors and readers of the stories, and, by his own admission (in the question and answer session following his discussion of the tale of Jacob and Esau) Peterson has never examined the Talmud to see how Jews have interacted with them. Read more

A Math Paper Is Sent Down the Memory Hole

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It should be no surprise to anyone that Political Correctness has managed to conquer subjects such as English Literature or Sociology. The more subjective and speculative the subject is, the easier it is for ideology to exert its Death Grip. So you’d think that Mathematics – the most objective subject in existence – would be uniquely preserved as a bastion of traditional academic values. Well . . . you’d be wrong. In fact, Math is particularly dangerous to academia’s occupiers, because it can be used to objectively prove the ideologically unacceptable.

American Mathematician Ted Hill recently discovered this to his cost when his paper [An Evolutionary Theory of the Variability Hypothesis, August, 2017] applying mathematics to make sense of the “Genetic Male Variability Hypothesis” (“GMVH”), was subject to nakedly Orwellian treatment, partly caused by a Jewish Mathematician.

Hill was fascinated by the hypothesis, commented on even by Darwin, that in all species there is more genetic variability in males than in females. As Hill has pointed out in a recent article on his adventures in the online magazine Quillette, this is why men are over-represented at the extremes of distributions such as birth weight or Math scores. More males have outlier high IQ – meaning more male science Nobel laureates. However, more males also possess outlier low IQ, resulting in greater numbers of male prisoners and vagrants [Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole, By Theodore P. Hill, Quillette, September 7, 2018].

The Emeritus Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, was intrigued to discover that nobody was clear why this sex difference existed. So, Hill and Russian Sergei Tabachnikov, of Pennsylvania State University, worked out a model and posted a preprint in an open access Math archive in May 2017.

The pair submitted their paper to The Mathematical Intelligencer, specifically to its “Viewpoint”, the purpose of which is to present “controversial” studies. The editor-in-chief, Prof Marjorie Wikler Senechal, was enthusiastic about publishing it: ‘Discussing this issue dispassionately and with a mathematical model will be an important contribution towards rationality’ she wrote [Hill has put all the correspondenceonline]. She even suggested mentioning the trouble that Harvard President Larry Summers had got into in 2005 — he was fired — for wondering out loud if GMVH helped to explain the lack of females studying Math and Physics. [Why Feminist Careerists Neutered Larry Summers, By Stuart Taylor, The Atlantic, February 2005]. Hill’s paper was revised various times and then scheduled for publication in the first 2018 issue. Read more

Treble Tribal Trouble: A Review of Ben Cobley’s The Tribe

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The Tribe: The Liberal-Left and the System of Diversity
Ben Cobley
Imprint Academic 2018

I’m sure that Ben Cobley will be displeased to see a positive review of his book The Tribe at a fully certified hate-site like the Occidental Observer. But I think that it’s an important book and that its themes chime perfectly (if incompletely) with those of the Occidental Observer.

Like many other Western nations, Britain has what might be called Treble Tribal Trouble. The first part of our Tribal Trouble is that we’re ruled by a hostile Jewish elite who form a real, genetically interrelated tribe with a quite different set of interests than the native Brits. The second part of our Trouble is that this hostile elite have imported millions of non-Whites and strongly encouraged them to pursue their own advantage with other, home-based identity-groups. The third part of our Trouble is that Whites are discouraged just as strongly from defending themselves. Ben Cobley’s book discusses only the second and third parts of our Tribal Trouble. But it does that very well and I can heartily recommend it to hate-thinkers right across the Anglosphere.

One sinner that repenteth

Cobley is among the first to join what will soon become a flood, when more and more Whites, and White heterosexual men in particular, realize that the “Liberal-Left” hates them, wishes them nothing but ill, and should be treated by them as exactly what it is: an enemy of reason, truth, beauty and freedom. Cobley has seen the Light — and the Blight. He’s described on the back cover as “a former Labour party activist,” and “former” is the mot juste. The Tribe is a series of unspeakable blasphemies against “liberal-left” orthodoxy. Or rather, it’s not, because Cobley speaks his blasphemies very clearly and forcefully. Here’s a prime example, something that all we haters at the Occidental Observer will be delighted to endorse:

The subject of mass immigration probably brings out liberal-left identity and its ideology of diversity in the clearest form. It is unthinkable that the system of diversity could have arisen and developed to anywhere near the degree it has without mass immigration. This defining phenomenon of our times has not just brought in large numbers of people who can be funnelled into the race-based identity groups within the system. It has also offered possibilities to various different groups in British government and political circles, which have gathered around immigration and immigrants as a cause; for them, mass immigration has offered a role and an ongoing project to oversee and enforce. … The radical left [has] found a new class of people to support with its ideologies of oppression [and the] economistic tendency, a dominant force in government circles and public life, [has] found in immigrants a new source of competitiveness and economic activity. (ch. 2, “The Tribe,” p. 50) 

Cobley gets it — or a great part of it, at least. But there are two very big omissions in his analysis. First of all, he doesn’t recognize the central importance of biology and genetics in explaining differences in the behaviour and achievements of different human groups, such as Whites and non-Whites or men and women. Second, he committed a huge unconscious irony in naming his book The Tribe, because he doesn’t identify the small but highly determined group that has earnt precisely that title for its supremacist and predatory behaviour down several millennia. Read more

The White Nationalist Manifesto by Dr. Greg Johnson

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The White Nationalist Manifesto
Greg Johnson
San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2018
150 pages

I first met Greg Johnson in 2001 as part of a group of fifteen conference attendees having a late dinner at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, NC. Dr. Johnson was among those seated at my end of the table. To drop two familiar names, Sam Francis and Jared Taylor were among those seated at the other end. From his introduction I got the impression that Dr. Johnson was an academic doing research on our movement, accompanied by two grad students and a London journalist who was writing a book on political fringe groups. As I recall, he asked a lot of questions and did a lot of listening. Since that introduction he has risen to a position of  prominence and I would name him among the top ten living figures in our movement in terms of output, activity, influence and recognition, although I admit my rating system is biased in favor of intellectual output, which in Dr. Johnson’s case is considerable.

For those familiar with Dr. Johnson’s work there is much in this book that they have seen before, even some topics that have been covered by many different authors, such as Robert Putnam’s findings on the connection between diversity and alienation and John Jay’s celebration of America’s original lack of diversity in the Federalist No. 2. But this book is intended both as an introductory primer and comprehensive summation for potential converts and those new to the movement as well as a much more thorough and fully developed discussion of its topics for movement veterans.

What is new is the focus on the two ultimate topics of our movement. The first topic is the ultimate problem: the fact that our race is undergoing a process of destruction or genocide by multiracialism. The second topic is the ultimate and only sufficient solution to the problem: a grand separation of the races either by the removal of non-Whites (the only solution for Europe) or partition of the country’s territory into independent nations for the different racial groups, now commonly called “ethnostates,” a term derived from Wilmot Robertson’s 1992 book of that title which has gained increasing currency over the last decade. Read more