A Review of “The Devil That Never Dies” by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Part 2
“Antisemitism” as “The Real Devil that Christianity Spawned”
Rather than hostility toward Jews having its origins in group competition for resources, Goldhagen contends that “antisemitism” is “the real devil that Christianity spawned.”[1] He conveniently ignores the fact that antipathy to Jews was widespread throughout the pre-Christian civilizations of Egypt, Greece and Rome, and instead claims that “antisemitism”
began in ancient Israel during the time of Jesus and migrated shortly thereafter to Greece. There it was codified in the context of early Christians’ desires to appropriate the early Jewish religious and messianic tradition, really Judaism revamped, for themselves. In Greece the Gospels were written, at best based on a long chain of hearsay, not until fifty to one hundred years after Jesus’ death by people who never knew or saw Jesus or the events surrounding his life. Antisemitism then moved to and became entrenched in Rome, the center of the Western world, where Christianity and simultaneously antisemitism had its greatest conquest when Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity for himself and the Roman Empire in the early fourth century. As his empire spread to more European lands in particular, the secular and religious authorities brought the antisemitic gospel with them, which, after Rome’s fall (which did not see the Church fall), spread to all of Europe, so that during the Middle Ages antisemitism, together with Christianity, had solidified itself as the one pan-European belief system, about which different peoples, peoples of different classes and stations, different professions, and eventually even different and warring forms of Christianity could agree upon and coalesce. Then, with European and Christian colonization of much of the world, antisemitism spread farther.[2]
In addition to ignoring the extensive and often violent pre-Christian aversion to Jews, Goldhagen also makes no mention of the fact that Christianity, unlike Judaism, is a universalist creed which eventually led to Europeans being the first people in history to ban slavery for moral reasons. Instead, he maintains that the New Testament is an “antisemitic” and “eliminationist” tract:
The Christian bible is, whatever its subsidiary pronouncement to the contrary, at its heart an eliminationist document. A codification of eliminationist antisemitism against Jews. Their evangelical calls for Jews to follow Jesus aside, the Gospels so deprecate the Jew’s existing cultural core (namely the Jewish bible’s laws and codes), implicitly and explicitly calling for an end to this people as Jews, and so demonize Jews in the process for putatively being Jesus’ enemies and murderers, and so threaten them with violence and destruction, that it is hard to see this as anything but an eliminationist mindset, a blueprint for eliminationist politics, and, if only tacitly, a call to eliminationist action — and this is how it has been taken by Christians and others beholden to the foundational paradigm it grounded.[3]
Goldhagen claims that the New Testament contains “four hundred fifty antisemitic verses just in the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, averaging more than two per page.”[4] Conveniently, he has nothing to say about the “eliminationist” mindset, politics and actions that are far more clearly evident in the Jewish Bible, and how this has shaped Jewish attitudes toward non-Jews. Read more
Charleston, cognitive psychology, and media influence
It’s worth thinking about some basic psychology in relation to the Charleston events. Cognitive psychologists study heuristics that people use to make judgments about the likelihood of events that are complexly determined — things like airplane crashes or shark attacks. A heuristic relevant to Charleston is the availability heuristic, where people make judgments and form attitudes based on their memories of past events. Such memories are greatly influenced by media coverage. From Wikipedia:
After seeing news stories about child abductions, people may judge that the likelihood of this event is greater. Media coverage can help fuel a person’s example bias with widespread and extensive coverage of unusual events, such as homicide or airline accidents, and less coverage of more routine, less sensational events, such as common diseases or car accidents. For example, when asked to rate the probability of a variety of causes of death, people tend to rate “newsworthy” events as more likely because they can more readily recall an example from memory. Moreover, unusual and vivid events like homicides, shark attacks, or lightning are more often reported in mass media than common and un-sensational causes of death like common diseases.[9]
For example, many people think that the likelihood of dying from shark attacks is greater than that of dying from being hit by falling airplane parts, when more people actually die from falling airplane parts. When a shark attack occurs, the deaths are widely reported in the media whereas deaths as a result of being hit by falling airplane parts are rarely reported in the media.[10]
The application to Charleston is obvious. There is wall-to-wall media coverage, so people will easily recall what happened there. Such memories will be easily available to influence attitudes and judgments. Whereas Black-on-White crime motivated by racial hatred is vastly more common than the reverse, such events are rarely reported in the national media, and even local media typically ignore racial designations and downplay racial motivation in such attacks. Read more
A Review of “The Devil That Never Dies” by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Part 1
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is best known for his 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Despite its flawed historiography, this polemical work attracted enormous media attention and established his reputation as a putative authority on “anti-Semitism” and the “Holocaust.” He was soon given a regular platform to peddle his extreme brand of Jewish apologetics in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, and other Jewish-controlled media organs around the world.
A former associate professor of political science and social studies at Harvard University, Goldhagen has since produced further books that morally indict Europeans for their inveterate “anti-Semitism” and supposedly enthusiastic participation in the “Holocaust.” These include A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (2002), and Worse than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (2009). His latest offering is his 2013 book The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise of Global Antisemitism, published by a major commercial publisher and touted as “a groundbreaking — and terrifying — examination of the widespread resurgence of antisemitism in the twenty-first century.”
Goldhagen favors using the term “antisemitism” over the hyphenated “anti-Semitism” — doubtless because the latter implies the existence of a “Semitism” which could (and indeed does) provide the dialectical basis for “anti-Semitism.” Goldhagen, in this way, signals his rejection of the reality that hostility to Jews stems from conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews in a Darwinian world. The assertion by Jews of their ethnic interests (Semitism) inevitably leads to resentment from those whose interests are compromised as a result (so-called anti-Semitism). To admit this basic truth is to admit that non-Jews (including Europeans) have interests that are legitimate, and that the desire to resist those opposed to our interests is eminently rational.
For Goldhagen, however, Jewish behavior is irrelevant for understanding the hostility to Jews that has existed across nations and cultures for over two millennia. He observes that: “Antisemitism has moved people, societies, indeed civilizations for two thousand years, and has done so despite the other vast changes in the world and in these civilizations and societies — economic, scientific, technological, political, social, and cultural.”[1] Despite the persistent, and often intense, antagonism between Jews and non-Jews throughout much of recorded history, Goldhagen argues that “attributing antisemitism to a reasonable (if sometimes exaggerated) reaction against the Jews’ own conduct” is an example of “faulty thinking.”[2] Read more
‘Get that White!’: A Gaze into a Coming Nightmare of Non-Prosecution of Hate Crimes Against Whites
It started off like any average ‘First Friday’ in Florence, Alabama. It ended with a glimpse into the racial nightmare that awaits the European peoples in the coming racial apocalypse. Earlier this month, the Dawes family participated in the familiar civic event before starting to make their way home as evening descended. A group of Blacks, numbering between 20 and 30, chose this moment to set upon them with fists and weapons. Fourteen year old Brandon was the first to be singled out. He was struck violently from behind with a closed fist. When dad Kevin realized what was happening, he quickly moved to defend his son, positioning himself between Brandon and the attacker. At this point the whole frenzied mob moved in to screams of ‘Get that White!’ The feral crowd only dispersed to the sounds of police sirens, but by then the family’s car windshield had been destroyed, and Kevin had several Taser burns and broken facial bones.
The government and police response in the aftermath of the incident tells us all we need to know about our growing need to organize and educate for adequate racial self-defense. Pressed by the media on whether the incident would be treated as a ‘hate crime,’ Police Chief Ron Tyler has been hesitant in the extreme, stating only that the attack was being looked at “from all possible angles.” There is only one angle from which this incident can be viewed – the angle of ceaseless racial conflict. Unfortunately we happen to live in an age of duplicity on a mass scale. There is no racial conflict, we are told, only very bad ‘racists.’ The race traitors and Jews that fill the minds of our youth with the bile of ‘Whiteness Studies’ are so very careful to remind us that while race is a ‘social construct,’ only ‘Whites’ can be racist. Whites are ‘trained’ oppressors, who dominate and exploit simply by existing. We are the personification of ‘hate,’ and we can therefore never expect equal application of ‘hate crime’ laws. They are, in fact, ‘White crime’ laws –designed specifically for our people to be held on a leash. They are the rope that forces us to engage in the racial struggle for existence with one hand tied behind our back. Read more
Can the Ossis save Europe? Part 3 of 3
Putin’s Russia: Imperfect Allies
It would be wrong to either idealize or demonize the government of President Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation. He is neither as sound as White Nationalists would like nor as devilish as many mainstream democrats assert.
But Russia has one great, indeed unique, virtue. Gregory Hood has termed Putin’s regime “the one powerful white government that is not completely under the rule of the bankers and politically correct bureaucrats that rule the West.” Indeed, Russia is the last fully sovereign European-derived nation. Sovereignty exists in all spheres or not at all. Whatever one thinks of them, the Russians are indeed militarily, economically, geopolitically, culturally, and indeed psychologically sovereign like no other. Read more
Also available at Barnes & Noble
Also available at Barnes & Noble
