Kishinev: In Jewish History and Jewish Memory

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has recently attracted some attention for a tweet he penned following the discovery of the bodies of three missing Israeli yeshiva students. The students, Gil-Ad Shaer,16, Eyal Yifrah, 19, and Naftali Fraenkel, 16, were kidnapped late at night on Thursday June 12 from a hitchhiking point in Gush Etzion, before being found dead on June 30. At this writing, the facts concerning those behind the slayings remain obscure, though there is a growing consensus that Hamas was behind it. Soon after the discovery of the bodies, Netanyahu tweeted: “Vengeance for the blood of a small child, Satan has not yet created. Neither has vengeance for the blood of 3 pure youths who were on their way to parents who will not see them anymore. Hamas is responsible and Hamas will pay. May the memories of the three boys be blessed.”

Although most of the commentary thus far on this tweet has revolved around its inflammatory nature (the cry for ‘vengeance’ rather than ‘justice’) I have been more intrigued by the lesser appreciated literary allusion made by Netanyahu. The first line of the tweet appeals directly to Chaim Nahman Bialik’s poem, “On the Slaughter,” which was composed in the aftermath of the Kishinev ‘pogrom’ in 1903. I believe that Bialik’s role as Israel’s unofficial ‘national poet,’ and Netanyahu’s drawing upon the literary motifs in Bialik’s work, reveal something about the thought processes, self-perceptions, and siege mentality of Jews more generally. In this essay I want to examine two of Bialik’s poems, with particular attention paid to the manner in which Bialik interpreted non-Jews, and the nature of Jewish-Gentile hostilities. I’ll conclude with some remarks on Bialik’s legacy in Israel and Jewish thought.

Chaim Naḥman Bialik (1873–1934), was born in Radi, Volhynia, Ukraine, then a part of the expansive Jewish Pale of Settlement. Born into poverty, Bialik was left fatherless when he was five or six years old and was brought up by his rigid and pious grandfather. After an intensive education in the Jewish classics, he attended for a short time the Jewish academy in Volozhin (now Valozhyn, Belarus). These three influences — his poverty, his being an orphan, and his study of Jewish religious classics — were the inspiration for much of Bialik’s early poetry. In 1891 he went to Odessa, then the center of Jewish modernism, where he struck up a lifelong friendship with the Jewish author Aḥad Haʿam, who encouraged Bialik in his creative writing. Read more

Minority Rites: Modern Lessons from the Bolshevik Revolution

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The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia, David King (Tate Publishing, new edition 2014) Who said the following?

We must carry along with us ninety million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s inhabitants. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.

Was it Stalin? No, it was one of his victims, one of the commissars who vanished: Grigorii Zinoviev, described as “Lenin’s Mad Dog” in this fascinating and disturbing book. Zinoviev launched “the Red Terror” after Uritsky’s assassination and Lenin’s “close call” in 1918. Moisei Uritsky was the head in Petrograd of the Cheka, the murderous secret police that later became the OGPU, the NKVD and the KGB. Its first leader was Felix Dzerzhinsky and one of its chief torturers was Yakov Peters. This book describes how Peters “interrogated” the “Socialist Revolutionary” Fanya Kaplan, the woman arrested for the attempt on Lenin’s life. In response, Yakov Sverdlov promised “merciless mass terror against all enemies of the Revolution.” Sverdlov was another of Stalin’s victims, another of the commissars who vanished.

There’s an important pattern in the preceding paragraph. A negative one: although it describes a very important episode in Russian history, it does not contain a single ethnic Russian. Zinoviev, Uritsky, Sverdlov and Kaplan were all Jewish, Stalin was Georgian, Dzerzkinksy was Polish and Peters was Latvian. Lenin was half Mongol, a quarter German and a quarter Jewish. The Bolshevik Revolution is an example of what happens when paranoid, vengeful minorities win power over a majority with whom they do not identify and against whom they have historic grudges. This is exactly what is planned for the White inhabitants of Europe and the United States: they will be ruled by minorities who have been encouraged to hate and scapegoat Whites. Read more

Peter Beinart’s Jewish Triumphalism: Jettisoning the White Working Class

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Peter Beinart has a Jewish triumphalist article in The Atlantic riffing off an article by Ann Coulter deploring soccer (“Ann Coulter Is Right to Fear the World Cup“). He reads Ann Coulter to be basically saying “Soccer’s alleged collectivism, effeminacy and elitism are simply markers of its foreignness. The core problem with embracing soccer is that in so doing, America would become more like the rest of the world.”

American enthusiasm for soccer becomes a marker of all that is good for Beinart and all that is bad for Coulter:

Which is why Coulter should be very afraid. Because America is embracing soccer. America’s World Cup game against Portugal attracted almost 25 million television viewers in the U.S., eight million more than watched the highest rated World Cup game in 2010, and far more than the average viewership for last year’s World Series or this year’s NBA finals. NBC now broadcasts English soccer. And America’s own league, Major League Soccer, draws as many fans to its stadiums as do the NHL and NBA.

Beinart traces anti-soccer attitudes to anti-immigration sentiment a century ago, “an era when mass immigration was spawning Coulter-like fears that America was losing its special character. … Old-stock Americans … were elevating baseball, football, and basketball into symbols of America’s distinct identity. Immigrants realized that embracing those sports offered a way to claim that identity for themselves. Clinging to soccer, by contrast, was a declaration that you would not melt.”

Steve Sailer interprets this implied swipe at “old-stock Americans” and their sense of national identity as resulting from Beinart’s sense of revenge against those old-stock Americans—”Revenge is a dish best served a century cold.” Read more

More Executions, Fewer Murders

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On April 29th, the State of Oklahoma accidentally botched the execution of a convicted murderer named Clayton Lockett, who had been sentenced to die by lethal injection.The 43 minutes it took Lockett to die of a chemically-induced heart-attack has generated predictable calls for the abolition of capital punishment from the usual suspects on the left half of the political spectrum.

While his execution by lethal injection was far more compassionate than the fate accorded his victim – who was brutally beaten, shot and buried alive – its individual deterrent effect is beyond dispute, since this predator will never again harm another innocent White woman.

Equally predictable is that in the debate to follow, the victim will be studiously ignored while abolitionists of every stripe will ensure that the public remains focused on what is alleged to have been an agonizingly slow death by Lockett.For this reason, it is worthwhile to reconsider the primary motivation for enacting capital punishment statutes in the first place: That is, their General Deterrent Effect upon potential murderers, and the innocent lives thus spared.

The quaint notion that capital punishment is not an effective general deterrent to murder came as a result of some very flawed research done in the late 1950s by a leftist sociologist named Thorsten Sellin (Thorstein Sellin, The Death Penalty. American Law Institute, Philadelphia, 1959). As often occurs in these endeavors, objective truth was sacrificed to the “loftier” goals of ideology: That is, Sellin candidly acknowledged that he set out to “prove” that capital punishment did not deter the crime of murder in the U.S., and his bias was immediately evident in his results. Read more

Vladimir Avdeyev And The Russian Revival Of Racial Science

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Posted also on VDARE.com

[Adapted from Kevin MacDonald’s Foreword to Raciology, by Vladimir Avdeyev]

raciology

J. Philippe Rushton once commented that science moves forward, continuing to gather data and refine its theories—with one important exception. A century ago, there was a robust Darwinian science of race differences, from differences in head shape and cranial capacity, to differences in intelligence and behavioral restraint. However, this young science was nipped in the bud.

But not because it was displaced by a new, powerful, empirically based theory. Rather, the demise of racial science came about because of intellectual movements dominated by ethnic Jews and tightly linked to the political Left—the topic of my book, The Culture ofCritique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in 20th-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Kindle edition now available).

This was a case of science being replaced by ideology—an ideology designed to oppose the idea that Europeans were in any way unique or superior. Ultimately, it was an ideology that rationalized the decline of Europeans and their culture that we see all around us today.

The new ideology decreed that humans were infinitely malleable creatures of their culture. It eventually became defined by the view that “race does not exist.” Franz Boas, the high priest of the new cult, was a strongly-identified Jew and committed Leftist. His famous study purporting to show that skull shape changed as a result of immigration from Europe to America was very effective propaganda weapon in the cause of eradicating racial science.

Read more

Alain Soral FAQ, Part 3

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chavez_stickers_rvb

E&R poster: “We want a French Chávez! Labour Left & Values Right, let us unite against imperialism! Equality and Reconciliation proudly supports President Hugo Chávez.”

Part 1

Part 2

What are Alain Soral’s relations with foreign nationalists?

Soral can be said to support all nationalists worldwide who are opponents of “the Empire.” He has previously called himself an “alter-nationalist,” modeled on the borderless-Left’s “alter-globalist.” Put another way: “Nationalists of the world, unite!”

In particular, Soral has said that Hugo Chávez’s brand of socialist, Christian, anti-racist and anti-imperialist nationalism is the closest to his own. In the Muslim world, Soral has supported Iran (especially Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s fight against Israeli colonialism and against censorship of historical research), Syria, and Lebanon (particularly the national reconciliation between Christians and Muslims in Lebanon achieved by General Michel Aoun and Hezbollah). He also supports Vladimir Putin’s Russia as the leading rival to “the Empire.”

Soral opposes the various far-right Zionist nationalists, including the Dutch Party for Freedom and the English Defense League. Read more

Alain Soral FAQ, Part 2

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Go to Part 1.

Where is Alain Soral coming from? Or, from “Game” to Social Conservatism

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A young Alain Soral discusses “game” on television

Born on October 2, 1958, Alain Soral had by all accounts a miserable family life, beaten by his father, a downwardly-mobile déclassé who was convicted of fraud and lost his properties. He went to Paris in 1976 doing odd jobs. Despite having no high school diploma, he found work in the cultural-media-advertising world through his sister Agnès Soral, who as an aspiring actress had a growing network in the mondain world of Paris show business and commercial culture (e.g. marketing).

Alain apparently hated this work as unfulfilling and morally bankrupt, finding it terribly boring. He seems to have been motivated by a sharp sense of humiliation as a bourgeois-turned-proletarian (saying he had a “double consciousness” as both proletarian and bourgeois as a result), a sharp intellect, an acute sensitivity to the nuances of social life around him, and a hunger to prove himself and be loved. Those who have followed the careers of Roissy/Heartiste and RooshV may find it interesting that the young Soral was a dragueur de rue (a street pick-up artist), apparently coming to bed over 800 women, especially enjoying young, narcissistic bourgeois women as a form of “class struggle.”

Jonathan Bowden, who stressed the link between art and radical, dissident politics, might not be surprised to learn that Soral’s first interest was in the arts, going on to study at the Paris Beaux-Arts. He read a large amount of political literature, mainly Marxist, including Michel Clouscard, Lucien Goldmann, György Lukács and others. He would later write in the third person: “Alain Soral, former dragueur de rue who loved books as much as girls, so much so that he has not chosen between them.” Here is clearly a “cultured thug”…

Depressed and reportedly contemplating suicide, he co-authored a book on fashion (Les Mouvements de mode expliqués aux parents, 1984), apparently as a challenge to himself, which became a surprise best-seller. It soon became Soral’s ambition to liberate himself from wage slavery by living modestly from books. Over the next decades he would publish the following works:

  • La création de mode: Comment comprendre, maîtriser et créer la mode(1987)
  • Le Jour et la Nuit, ou la vie d’un vaurien(1991): An autobiographical novel he wrote while being a castle caretaker; did not sell well.
  • Sociologie du dragueur(1996): His guide to “game,” really a kind of autobiographical essay with powerful meditations on epistemology (theory vs. practice, intellectual vs. practitioner), male-female roles, and human existence.
  • Vers la feminization ? : Démontage d’un complot antidémocratique(1999): An attack on official and narcissistic bourgeois feminism.
  • Jusqu’où va-t-on descendre ? Abécédaire de la bêtise ambiante(2002): Politically incorrect analyses of various aspects of contemporary politics and society.
  • Socrate à Saint-Tropez: texticules(2003): The same as above, with legally risqué critiques of communautarisme(e.g., the rise of lobbying by gay/feminist/Jewish elites), the subtitle being a pun on “small-texts” and “testicles”.
  • Misères du désir(2004): A novel.
  • CHUTe ! Éloge de la disgrâce(2006): A novel on the decline and fall of an “honest journalist” (or on the inevitability of official journalism as propaganda).

Soral has also directed a film, Confession d’un dragueur, based on his books on seduction.

I will not attempt to psychoanalyze Soral to try to determine what has made him choose the remarkable and difficult path he has taken. But it is important to know the man’s biography given the nature of Soralian epistemology. Read more