More on Peter Beinart

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The Peter Beinart event continues to reverberate within the Jewish community. (See here.) The whole thing is rather surreal. Critics focus a great deal on why American Jews might be excused for carving out a special place for ethnic nationalism while holding on to their liberal attitudes in the US. James Kirchick writing in Foreign Policy is among many who say it’s all the Palestinians’ fault.

There’s never any mention of the possibility that the liberalism of American Jews is a strategy that is well suited to Jewish ethnic aims in the Diaspora but is quite unsuited for Israel. Jewish liberalism in the Diaspora is a sign that Jews are morally superior people who have been forced by circumstances to accept a certain amount of illiberalism in order to have a Jewish state at all. As I noted previously, the reality is that the most prestigious and powerful Jewish communal organizations, such as the ADL, see no problem at all in supporting the most extreme forms of ethnonationalism in Israel while at the same time framing their advocacy of liberal policies in America as stemming from the very nature of Judaism as an ethically superior group — despite the fact that these liberal policies conform to Jewish group interests in the US and effectively undermine White identity and interests. Beinart is a bit more honest in at least feeling a tad of cognitive dissonance in this state of affairs.

In general, there is very little mention of one of Beinart’s main points–that the entire Jewish community in Israel and in the Diaspora is likely to become more religious and more nationalistic over time because of demographic trends. Simply put, the orthodox and nationalist elements are the ones having the babies. In his critique of Beinart, Steven M. Cohen writes that the main factor influencing the lack of involvement of young Jews is intermarriage — the “departure from all manner of Jewish ethnic ‘groupiness,’ of which Israel attachment is part.” Beyond that, secular Jews have fewer children than their religious/nationalist brethren, with the result that the Jewish community in general is moving in their direction.

As an evolutionist, I see this as natural selection for ethnocentrism within the Jewish community. In traditional societies, even the less ethnocentric Jews were more or less forced to marry within the community. Marrying a non-Jew effectively removed one from the community. It also carried huge penalties to the entire family that remained behind–a blot on their name for as long as communal memory remained. But since the Enlightenment, Jews have been able to marry outside the community, and many have done so. In the same way, traditional pressure to marry kept genes for homosexuality in the gene pool because people with homosexual tendencies got married and had children. There is doubtless strong selection pressure against homosexuality now — ironically, because gay activists have succeeded in making homosexuality an acceptable lifestyle  in the West. Intermarriage was seen as a serious problem by the early Zionists who viewed the creation of a Jewish state as preventing intermarriage and allowing Jewish ethnic continuity. As Cohen implies, liberal, secular Jews cannot maintain Jewish group ties over the long haul. The demographic engines both in Israel and the US are the more Orthodox and conservative elements–precisely the people who have aggressive, nationalistic attitudes toward the Palestinians.

So Cohen agrees with Beinart that American Jewish activist organizations will be run by nationalist Jews and the entire American Jewish community will be increasingly nationalist. And I predict that American Jewish nationalists will continue to advocate liberal policies in America. Psychologically, greater ethnocentrism would be expected to be linked to seeing issues more in terms of what’s good for the Jews–and rationalizing whatever  is good for the Jews in terms of whatever principles place them in a positive light. As Beinart notes, the Conference of Presidents continues to insist that  “Israel and the United States share political, moral and intellectual values including democracy, freedom, security and peace” — despite the obvious reality that Israel is an apartheid ethnonationalist state. The more ethnocentric one is, the less cognitive dissonance one will feel for holding such attitudes.

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Carolina Hartley's article on Ezra Pound's ideas on money

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I am soliciting comment here on Carolina Hartley’s current TOO article on Ezra Pound’s ideas on money. Ezra Pound is a tragic figure–jailed for his pro-fascist sympathies and, as Hartley suggests, because of his unwelcome ideas on money. Pound’s fate reminds us that until the end of World War II there were quite a few major intellectual and artistic figures who had views that are vilified today. It’s important to understand what they had to say.

Kevin MacDonald, Editor

Ezra Pound on Money

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We’re never far from money. We spend most of our time and energy in quest of money.

But how did this thing become an intermediary between us and the world around us? Before money, we bartered. Why did money supplant barter and who is custodian of the money system?

These questions are dangerous: they cost Ezra Pound twelve years. Pound was a victim of political persecution at the behest of financiers and their minions like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. These people feared Ezra because he asked “what is money for,” and came up with an inconvenient answer.

Pound understood that money is ticket for exchange. People who make thingscan trade more easily with other people who make things using money. There should only be as much money as there are things to trade. Another way of saying this is: money supply should increase and decrease along with the change in economic output.

Here’s the rub. If money supply grows faster than the amount of things made, then theft is taking place. The thief creates extraneous dollars and spends them first: at the time when the rest of us expect a dollar to be worth a certain amount. By the time the thief’s dollars have been absorbed into the economy, we notice our dollars are buying less. This is inflation. The thief has dipped into our savings and traded with shoddy bills.

What happens when money supply shrinks compared to things made? Then a new characteristic of money emerges. Things made don’t always last — take bread for instance. A baker must sell his bread in a matter of days, otherwise it’s lost. Money isn’t bound by such considerations. A thief can horde money until the baker’s goods rot, then buy his bakery at a huge discount.  

The “thief” in both these examples holds a special place in society: he controls the supply of money and “future money” called credit. Controlling money supply is economic power; it is a sovereign privilege. The people who really control a nation control its money supply.

Pound’s criticism of the financial class was that they were bad sovereigns. They managed money supply for their own benefit: they were thieves. In contrast, the Founding Fathers were good rulers because they designed a system where Congress managed the money supply; and Congress was answerable to a large swathe of the population.

Pound identified the grasping, vampire-like nature of international finance, and the venal nature of its supporters in national governments.He was interested in finding ways to systematically limit their power: perfecting what the Founding Fathers started in Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution. This is why Pound studied in the work of Silvio Gesell.

One of Gesell’s ideas was to eliminate the disparity between money and perishable goods. A way to do this is to discount large bills over time: holders of large bills would need to get them stamped every month, each stamp representing a decrease in their value. This way, hoarders bear the cost of their behavior and investment is encouraged. Small denominations would not be discounted.

Gesell recognized that the economy is like a body and money is like its blood. If blood builds up systematically in any one place, a disease results. His discounted script discouraged people from taking advantage of others’ simple lack of cash. (Note: this is very different than being forced to lend to people who aren’t creditworthy.) Saving in the form of investment was systematically encouraged.

Pound notes that Gesell’s system worked imperfectly in Alberta, Canada mostly due to planning errors that could easily be fixed. The system worked very well in the Austrian village of Wörgl, and it was promptly closed down by mainstream financial interests.

These financial interests were trying to preserve their privilege: they benefited from the increasing productivity of the societies they milked. Pound didn’t see how being born into a banking family; or buying the latest politician; should give them the right to those benefits. Ezra liked the ideas of Major Clifford Douglas: the people who worked should accrue those benefits. This is the essence of Social Credit.

The text of the 1933 version of Major Douglas’ book Social Credit, can be found here. Pound appreciated Maj. Douglas’ ideas, but thought they needed further exploration. What Pound really felt passionate about was fixing the money problem. Ezra wrote during the Great Depression when, much like now, people were captivated by the supposed security of gold.

Pound was never an advocate of gold-backed money. He understood how easily such systems can be subverted by controlling the supply or the clearing market for the backing commodity. Much of Britain’s power during the 19th century came from the fact that London was the clearing market for gold; and other nations used a gold-standard currency. They had to go to England to manage their money!

In Ezra’s words:

The trick is simple. Whenever the Rothschild and other gents in the gold business have gold to sell, they raise the price. The public is fooled by propagandizing the devaluation of the dollar, or other monetary unit according to the country chosen to be victimized. The argument is that the high price of the monetary unit is injurious to the nation’s commerce.

But when the nation, that is, the people of that nation own the gold and the financiers own the dollars or other monetary units, the gold standard is restored. This raises the value of the dollar and the citizens of “rich” nations, as well as citizens of other nations, are diddled.

Preventing nations from being “diddled” is why Pound supported Fascism in Italy. He saw Fascism as the only system available to the Italians that was likely to deal with the threat from international finance. Mussolini’s Fascism let Italy be ruled in an Italian fashion — and until Anglo-American banking interests were threatened, things worked better in Italy than they had in a long time.

Pound never supported Fascism in America. We have our Constitution, which describes a government for Americans run in the American fashion. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Pound realized that  America’s challenge was implementing the laws we already have. Read Jefferson and/or Mussolini for his whole argument.

Ezra was a true economic historian. He explained his analysis in the following way:

“The definition of an idea, as observed by someone who understands the events of the day, may shed more light on the historical process than many volumes.”

“History, as seen by a Monetary Economist, is a continuous struggle between producers and non-producers, and those who try to make a living by inserting a false system of book-keeping between the producers and their just recompense.”

“The usurers act through fraud, falsification, superstitions, habits and, when these methods do not function, they let loose a war. Everything hinges on monopoly, and the particular monopolies hinge around the great illusionistic monetary monopoly.”

Pound’s analysis identified the canker in American life: the cooperation between government and finance to defraud the public — the “monetary monopoly.” Monopolies don’t exist without tacit government approval. Beneficiaries of the financial monopoly have collaborated with venal officials against producers for a long time. The history of the largest American fortunes, since the Civil War at least, have followed this trend.

Historically, banking was begun by families as private businesses. As these businesses grew and issued receipts for gold and silver deposits, they gradually developed “fractional reserve” banking by issuing more notes than they had gold on deposit. Although kings would mint coins of gold and silver they owned at their royal mints, fractional reserve banking was a dangerous business, and Kings did not want to gamble with their sovereign power by going into that business. Rather, kings and especially parliaments, became dependent upon these fractional reserve bankers for loans, and would grant monopoly charters to a group of private bankers to create a national or central bank which would then have the power to regulate the size of the money stock through its fractional reserve activities, as it collected taxes, issued the national paper currency and sold sovereign debt on behalf of the government.

These national or central banks conferred significant advantages on the private banks that organized and owned them. Private banks were allowed to borrow at the discount window at special rates provided that they posted reserves with the central bank. Of course, the real advantage of the central bank for its owners and organizers was inside information. During the years of the gold standard, having a seat on the board of a central bank meant that the insider would know when emergency borrowings ticked up, telegraphing the probable start of a bank crisis and stock market crash. In the case of war, it was an easy task for a private bank with seats in several different national banks to calculate the deposits and income of the contesting states and the loans they secured to raise their armies, thus allowing the privileged few to bet on the probable winner.

The gold standard was popular among bankers for the simple reason that the supply of gold increased irregularly but on average more slowly than the increase in population, meaning that the value of loans would gradually increase over time as would the burden of repayment. Debtors resented the power of gold, hence William Jennings Bryan’s political appeal and his famous “Cross of Gold” speech. Coincidentally the gold standard was finally abandoned in 1971, six years after the birth control pill descended upon the civilized world.

Pound recognized two very important threats to the international banking community that arose out of the Third Reich. First, Hitler abandoned the gold standard, meaning that Nazi Germany suddenly had the power to prevent defaulting on its future debt simply by printing money — a power that the U.S. copied from Germany just as it copied the autobahns. Second, and much more important, the Reich took back the power of central banks by financing infrastructure projects directly, issuing notes in payment to the laborers, contractors, and suppliers rather than first borrowing the money from a central bank at interest. (See here and here.) If this practice had spread, bankers would be no more powerful than plumbers.

Furthermore, as long as the supply of this newly printed money in the form of notes matched the increase in GNP and future productivity from these new highways, rails, and factories, the printing of money would not necessarily produce inflation. The Reich also issued debt directly to German citizens and businesses to finance Hitler’s economic miracle, but the central banks lost control over the money supply and lost the ability to trigger banking panics and depressions inside the Reich. It was a mortal threat, and it had to be stopped. Pound was right.

Hitler’s experiment in freedom from banking was broken, and the finance/government partnership was preserved at the cost of millions of lives in World War II.

This finance/government collaboration explains the American elites’ love affair with international socialism. They don’t know how to make money any other way.Competition is a sin. Government organized monopolies are profitable when you control the government. If there are no national restrictions on moving profits around, they can hide their loot offshore. The perfect crime.

Pound recommended the writings of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Martin Van Burenfor a practical explanation of how the young Republic wrested itself from London finance. He recommended Classical study (Aristotle’s Politics and the works of Demosthenes) for understanding the tricks financiers use. Nationally-controlled money was popular politics until the Civil War; when Pound notes a collective amnesia took the mind of the American public. Tragedy and forgetfulness. This is also the time when Lincoln let the bankers back in with theNational Banking Act.

Ezra didn’t revel in victimhood. The “monetary monopoly” was made possible by voters’ laziness. In his ABC of Economics, Pound castigates the American public for letting its money fall into the hands of enemies and irresponsible men. Americans circa 1930 were ignorant about money and banking; the situation now is even worse. It is a national tragedy that we have been lazy enough to let Congress sell its responsibilities; and let hostile elites control our credit.

The way to fix the situation is to dissolve the Federal Reserve; force Congress to manage money supply as described in the Constitution; and vote the venal or incompetent out of office. The revolutionary patriots gave us the tools; we need to step up to the plate and use them.

Our amnesia and laziness have had a lot of help. Pound pointed out that hostile elites were overrepresented in academia and the media — a situation which has worsened with time. Now we are reaping the harvest: schools devoid of the Classics; universities teaching castrated Economics; and Gloria Vanderbilt’s boy on TV. Ezra saw it coming, and he told us how to fix it.

Carolina Hartley (email her) has a degree in Finance and Economics from the University of Chicago. She is also student of aesthetics and social history, though not from the orthodox perspective.

[1] Pound’s repeated recommendation of Christopher Hollis’ work The Two Nations is based on the book’s excellent explanation of British economic power over the centuries.  Return to text.

[2] “Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II. Edited by Leonard W. Doob. Greenwood Press, 1978. Return to text.

[3] Pound recommended the correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and the writings of Van Buren for the economic history of the United States.

Pound’s Pamphlets on Money are excellent; the first “An Introduction to the Economic Nature of the United States” and “A Visiting Card” are particularly useful. (Published by Peter Russell, London. 1950.) Return to text.

[4] The Works of John Adams: Second President of the United States: with A Life of the Author, notes and illustrations, by his Grandson, Charles Francis Adams. Little, Brown and Co. Boston 1850–56.

The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition, XX Volumes, Washington, 1903-04.

The Autobiography of Martin Van Buren, written in 1854 and remaining in manuscript until its publication as Vol. II of the “Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the year 1918,” Government Printing Office, Washington 1920.

Pound also recommends Jefferson and Hamilton by Claude G. Bower.

“Machete”: A new front in the war on Whites

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Here at TOO, we have often noted that the heavily Jewish elite in America today does not particularly like the non-Jewish masses it controls, especially us Whites. Several writers (see, e.g., here) has also pointed to the way Jews have used blacks to advance the Jewish assault on the hated non-Jewish power structure in America.

One of the best accounts of this comes in a book by E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History. There, Jones devotes eight chapters to telling the story of the way Jews executed their plan to “carry the war into Africa” by turning American Negroes into revolutionaries. Some “alliance.”

In a way, however, that story is old hat. A newer story involves how the burgeoning numbers of Hispanics are being manipulated into assaulting Whites. My favorite blogger, Steve Sailer, shows how. In MSM Buries Lead—American Majority Supports Arizona Law. But Our Elites Don’t Like The American Majority, he begins by noting that

In modern America, Latinos often function as a sort of “stage army” for our elites. They want Hispanics to intimidate—by sheer bulk of numbers—the citizenry and make resistance to elite projects appear historically hopeless. The vast and seemingly always increasing quantities of Hispanics can be cited as justification for whatever a person in a position of influence wants to do. . . .

I wonder if “intimidate” is not too weak a word for what we are seeing. Evidence suggests that some parties seek to turn Hispanics in America into actual political murderers of “gringos.”

For example, a few years back, a spoof movie trailer called Machete was made. Here is that original trailer.

In these anti-White times, such a murderous depiction of a war on Whites has lasting power, so the idea has now been turned into a movie.  Wikipedia already has an entry for it (see here).

To emphasize the racial aspect of this film, a new message has been added to the beginning of the trailer. The message threatens the people of Arizona for having passed a stringent law against illegal immigrants, mostly from Mexico. Click on the video in the middle of this blog to hear Danny Trejo growl, “This is Machete with a special Cinco de Mayo message — to Arizona!”

A consistent theme of TOO has been that the rise of hostile anti-White minorities with historical grudges presents enormous dangers for Whites, especially as we become a minority. As in the cartoon below, high-minded Whites (the Amy Biehl syndrome) will not be spared.

Machete is yet another wake-up call on what the future holds for Whites–quite possibly, the very near future. Alex Jones bluntly called this film a rallying cry for race war in America. Later, he claimed that two anonymous Hispanic crew members alerted him to the extent of the anti-White scenes in the film. “Further, two individuals who were privy to early screenings of Machete have warned that the film is far more racially inflammatory than either the trailer or leaked have indicated.”

Machete is slated to be released on September 3rd of this year.

Edmund Connelly (email him) is a freelance writer, academic, and expert on the cinema arts. He has previously written for The Occidental Quarterly.

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Libertarianism under intellectual scrutiny — and a call for papers

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Rand Paul’s Senate candidacy has been a godsend to the liberals. Jonah Goldberg puts it this way:

Indeed, it’s worth noting that the only people who are really jazzed to reopen the argument about the Civil Rights Act are liberals. And they have good reason: They won that argument, politically and morally. This is a fact liberals never stop reminding us, and themselves, about. Like a paunchy middle-aged man who scored the winning touchdown in the high school championship, nostalgic liberals don’t need an excuse to bring up their glory days (which were not the Democratic Party’s glory days, by the way). Give them a living, breathing politician who suggests, no matter how imprecisely or grudgingly, that the Civil Rights Act wasn’t perfect, and they’ll talk your ear off like a drunk uncle at a wedding.

I’d have to agree with Goldberg that the liberals won the argument politically — hence the liberals’ glee at finding a really fat target. But it’s not at all clear that the liberals won the argument intellectually, or even morally. Goldberg himself is quite confused about what Rand Paul is saying — conveniently, as it turns out, because he comes up with a clever argument that he seems to think absolutely destroys Paul’s position:

For the record, Paul and [Barry] Goldwater were both wrong. The libertarian position is not to defend Jim Crow but to condemn it, and not just because of its unjust bigotry but because of its economic folly that served to entrench that bigotry.

Paul weeps for the lost right of white businessmen to refuse black customers (even though he rejects the practice himself). But he fails to appreciate the perverse irony that one of Jim Crow’s greatest evils was its intrusion on the property rights of whites. Jim Crow wasn’t merely some “Southern tradition” undone by heroic good government. Jim Crow laws were imposed by government. And they banned white businessmen from serving blacks.

Based on his interview with Rachel Maddow, Rand is well aware of the distinction between private discrimination and government laws that would force people to discriminate. Paul stated quite clearly that he supports the aspects of the Civil Rights bill that struck down government laws that enforced segregation, but he opposed the parts of the law that made it illegal for private individuals or companies to discriminate on the basis of race.

So Goldberg is managing to go along with the liberals in bashing Paul, without really confronting the intellectual issue of whether the rights of individuals should include the right to personal discrimination. (Incidentally, one wonders whether Israel apologist Goldberg would condemn Israeli apartheid. I assume he would rationalize or ignore all the official and unofficial ways that Israel discriminates against Palestinians in Israel and especially in  the occupied territories, doubtless citing the “Israel is our democratic ally” mantra.)

So the intellectual and moral issues remain.  I have recently become editor of the Occidental Quarterly. (Formal announcement and plea for subscriptions TOQ later, but you can subscribe now, if you want.) Greg Johnson, the previous editor, initiated a contest for the best essay on “Libertarianism and Racial Nationalism.” (The deadline is June 1, but it will be extended to July 1. $1000 to the winner!) Great topic.

Libertarianism is a strong tradition in American history — the tradition of unfettered individualism. Eric Kaufmann’s treatment emphasizes the idea that 19th-century libertarians saw their freedom-loving ideology as an aspect of their Anglo-Saxon ethnic heritage, and as an evolutionary psychologist I agree that there is an ethnic basis to libertarian tendencies.

But Kaufmann also notes that this libertarian tendency became part of the culture of Western suicide in the 20th century. One of the things I noticed in writing the chapter on the Frankfurt School for The Culture of Critique was that these very Jewish (and therefore profoundly anti-libertarian in their own commitments) former Marxists had nothing but good things to say about individualism.  “In the end, the ideology of the Frankfurt School may be described as a form of radical individualism that nevertheless despised capitalism—an individualism in which all forms of gentile collectivism are condemned as an indication of social or individual pathology.”

So it’s not surprising that Goldberg as  a Jewish neocon presents himself as true to libertarianism — while ignoring the more difficult issue of personal discrimination.  But for us White advocates, the problem is even deeper. On the one hand, there is good reason to think that we Whites have a natural tendency to want to live free from intrusive governments and not have to march in lock step with others. That’s not to say that we can’t organize as a collective, it’s just that it’s harder for us to do.

Indeed, White advocacy is essentially a plea that Whites have collective interests and a right and an interest in organizing in order to achieve their interests in what has now become a cauldron of competing ethnic interests. Ethnic competition is always the death knell of individualism, as people organize themselves into competing groups. (That’s the real point  of the Arizona ethnic studies law: The last gasp of American individualism.) Any putative White homeland would necessarily discriminate on the basis of race, if only to secure its borders against the sort of invasion that we are now undergoing. Are Whites really so principled that that they would fail to see a moral imperative in preserving themselves, their culture, and their institutions, even if it meant that they had to discriminate on the basis of race.

It seems clear to me that libertarian individualism is indeed a culture of White suicide given the current political landscape. As Whites become a smaller and smaller percentage of the population, libertarianism will become an “okay” ideology for Whites — an officially approved harmless palliative to make them think they are intellectually honest while they sink into the sunset.

But I am open to all sorts of ideas on this topic and am definitely looking forward to reading the contributions to the special contest issue of TOQ.

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Peter Beinart on the future of American Zionism

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Peter Beinart’s  NYRB article (“The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment“) has gotten quite a bit of attention. Beinart thinks liberal American Jews are pulling away from Israel. The main reason is that

the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.

Beinart does a good job describing the dominance of racial nationalism in Israel and the rationalizations, blind spots and hypocrisies of the organized Jewish community committed to minority empowerment in the US. Like John Mearsheimer, he thinks that American Jews are liberals at heart and are pulling away from Israel, especially because the rhetoric of victimization on which Israel is founded is more and more remote from their daily lives.

There are some reasons to doubt this analysis. Commitment to Israel among young secular Jews is likely to increase if there was indeed a real threat to Israel, as happened in the 1967 war. (See my comments on Mearsheimer.) Moreover, there are always gaps between the more committed Jews who man the activist organizations and the great majority of Jews for whom Israel is not the center of their lives. (Mearsheimer calls them the new Afrikaners and the great ambivalent middle.) It’s not obvious that the new Afrikaners won’t continue to run the show and police the attitudes of the great ambivalent middle as they have been doing for years. This may be so even though, as Beinart points out, AJC polling data indicates that young secular Jews are less attached to Israel than are Orthodox Jews.

But in any case, notice Beinart is not saying that this will mean that the support of American Jews for Israel will end. Far from it. Rather, the most interesting part of his analysis is his claim that the organized Jewish community will have to look to the Orthodox and other seriously religious Jews to maintain support for Israel:

To sustain their uncritical brand of Zionism, therefore, America’s Jewish organizations will need to look elsewhere to replenish their ranks. They will need to find young American Jews who have come of age during the West Bank occupation but are not troubled by it. And those young American Jews will come disproportionately from the Orthodox world.

And that bodes well for Zionist organizations because demography, as always, is destiny:

Because they marry earlier, intermarry less, and have more children, Orthodox Jews are growing rapidly as a share of the American Jewish population. According to a 2006 American Jewish Committee (AJC) survey, while Orthodox Jews make up only 12 percent of American Jewry over the age of sixty, they constitute 34 percent between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. For America’s Zionist organizations, these Orthodox youngsters are a potential bonanza. In their yeshivas they learn devotion to Israel from an early age; they generally spend a year of religious study there after high school, and often know friends or relatives who have immigrated to Israel. The same AJC study found that while only 16 percent of non-Orthodox adult Jews under the age of forty feel “very close to Israel,” among the Orthodox the figure is 79 percent. As secular Jews drift away from America’s Zionist institutions, their Orthodox counterparts will likely step into the breach. The Orthodox “are still interested in parochial Jewish concerns,” explains Samuel Heilman, a sociologist at the City University of New York. “They are among the last ones who stayed in the Jewish house, so they now control the lights.”

The result will be that there will less of a gap between the fervid nationalism in Israel and the attitudes of a large percentage of American Jews: “If current trends continue, the growing influence of Orthodox Jews in America’s  Jewish communal institutions will erode even the liberal-democratic veneer that today covers American Zionism.”

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In the end, there will be “an American Zionist movement that does not even feign concern for Palestinian dignity and a broader American Jewish population that does not even feign concern for Israel.” Again, this last outcome is iffy because I can’t see any reason why the activists policing the great majority of ambivalent American Jews can’t continue indefinitely. And as the demographic trends continue, the job of policing secular Jews will be easier as they become an increasingly small minority of American Jews.

The interesting part of this analysis is what implications it has for how the rest of America sees Jews and the Israel lobby. The Israel lobby necessarily projects Israel as embodying American ideals: “AIPAC celebrates Israel’s commitment to ‘free speech and minority rights.’ The Conference of Presidents declares that ‘Israel and the United States share political, moral and intellectual values including democracy, freedom, security and peace.’”

It’s hard to see how the lobby can have any credibility with Americans at all if these deceptions are abandoned. Certainly the lobby will continue the deception as long as it can. It will continue to pour money into the campaign coffers of politicians who paint Israel as the democratic ally of the US and it will rigorously police the media—not a difficult job because so much of the elite media is dominated by hard core Zionists.

The worst case scenario for the lobby is that the propaganda that Israel embodies American ideals is so far out of touch with reality that even the American media cannot continue the charad, and American politicians would be laughed at as they spout the pro-Israel line.

But there are all sorts of issues besides Israeli racial nationalism where American media and politicians are completely out of touch with reality, particularly on issues related to race, multiculturalism, and immigration in the US. For example, elite consensus on immigration continues to shape media coverage and political rhetoric even though most Americans, particularly White Americans, oppose it.

The media has already shown that it can maintain egregious fictions for a very long time as long as there is elite consensus. But how is the  elite consensus going to change in the face of aggressive policing by the lobby? In the same way, elite consensus on issues like race, crime, and IQ continue to be maintained in the face of overwhelming data to the contrary. Some of the same organizations that police unreality in the case of Zionism, such as the ADL, also enforce intellectual orthodoxy related to the other fictions on race, multiculturalism, and immigration that are so central to American political life. Right now things are proceeding just fine for the spinners of deception.

The basic problem that I have with these “end times” for Zionism (and the American consensus on race and immigration) is that they assume a worst case scenario far off in the future somewhere. I certainly would like to believe that the mainstream media and politicians must eventually confront reality in all these areas — including issues related to White advocacy.  Certainly we in the White advocacy movement believe that the fictions can’t be maintained forever and that White anger will eventually result in a credible movement to take back America, or at least part of it. So it’s encouraging to see that a great many smart people think that the fictions about Israel can’t be maintained indefinitely. But I’ll believe it when I see it.

Kevin MacDonald is editor of The Occidental Observer and a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach. Email him.

Elena Kagan on the Jewish radical tradition in American politics

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JudicialWatch.org has some important material on Elena Kagan. Judicial Watch President Thomas Fitton notes the “most disturbing”  parts of her senior thesis at Princeton are the following:

Through its own internal feuding, then, the SP [Socialist Party] exhausted itself forever and further reduced labor radicalism…to the position of marginality and insignificance from which it has never recovered. The story is a sad but also a chastening one for those who, more than half a century after socialism’s decline, still wish to change America.

…if the history of Local New York shows anything, it is that American radicals cannot afford to become their own worst enemies. In unity lies their only hope.

As Fitton says, “Do we really need a Supreme Court Justice who once lamented the lack of unity on the part of the Socialist Party?”

Judicial Watch had a link to Kagan’s thesis but it doesn’t work as of today. Her senior thesis is consistent with other historical studies in showing that the Socialist Party in New York in the early 20th century was a Jewish phenomenon. She notes that Jews were the backbone of the Socialist Party and that other ethnic groups, such as the Irish and Italians, could not be motivated to join even though they were in a similar economic situation.

Not only were Jews the backbone of the Socialist Party, socialism was very mainstream within the Jewish community.  Her account parallels those of other historians who describe the Jewish community from 1890 to 1920 as “one big radical debating society” (see here, p. 71ff).

From [1886] on Jewish districts in New York and elsewhere were famous for their radical voting habits. The Lower East Side repeatedly picked as its congressman Meyer London, the only New York Socialist ever to be elected to Congress. And many Socialists went to the State Assembly in Albany from Jewish districts. In the 1917 mayoralty campaign in New York City, the Socialist and anti-war candidacy of Morris Hillquit was supported by the most authoritative voices of the Jewish Lower East Side: The United Hebrew Trades, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and most importantly, the very popular Yiddish Daily Forward. This was the period in which extreme radicals—like Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman—were giants in the Jewish community, and when almost all the Jewish giants—among them Abraham Cahan, Morris Hillquit, and the young Morris R. Cohen—were radicals. Even Samuel Gompers, when speaking before Jewish audiences, felt it necessary to use radical phrases.

The result was a radical mainstream Jewish culture that persisted in New York and elsewhere into the 1960s and beyond. With the success of the Bolshevik Revolution, many Jews opted out of the Socialist Party, resulting in a Jewish Communist subculture that was also entirely mainstream within the Jewish community.

Kagan’s comments in her thesis suggest a sympathy with this radical Jewish culture — even a desire to carry it to fruition. Everything we know about her indicates that she continues to be immersed in a Jewish culture whose attitudes are well to the left of the American mainstream–a subculture that was hostile to the  traditional people and culture of the US and has now become a hostile elite.

This fits well with Kagan’s childhood in New York’s Upper West Side — described by Dan Freedman as “as conservative’s worst nightmare.” During her college years she wrote, “Where I grew up _ on Manhattan’s Upper West Side _ nobody ever admitted to voting for Republicans.”

Elena Kagan and many of this culture’s children emerged from the Upper West Side political cauldron as committed to making the world a better place for all, mindful that everyday people can affect change as teachers, doctors, lawyers _ and, yes, even journalists _ and make government work for the common good.

There is no indication that Kagan has changed her views, and there’s not much doubt that indeed she will be a judicial activist on the left. Fitton quotes from her Oxford thesis:

As men and as participants in American life, judges will have opinions, prejudices, values. Perhaps most important, judges will have goals. And because this is so, judges will often try to mold and steer the law in order to promote certain ethical values and achieve certain social ends. Such activity is not necessarily wrong or invalid.

Well, at least we know what we can expect when Kagan gets on the court.

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