Christopher Donovan: Ricci Decision Hurts Whom, Again?

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Christopher Donovan: It’s amazing the tidbits you find while crumpling up old newspaper for kindling for a Christmas fire. “Employers Hurt By Bias Decision” was the odd headline I spied in a July edition of LawyersUSA, a trade rag for the legal profession, while trying to get the logs to ignite.

My first thought was: Imagine a Supreme Court decision on a “civil rights” case benefitting blacks being described by the media as anything but divine wisdom revealed. “Decision long overdue”, “Blacks commend decision” or “Decision hailed, but more work needed” is more like it.

But as I read the story, the point was fair enough — in the wake of the Ricci decision, employers are put into yet another “sued if you do, sued if you don’t” situation. If an employment test keeps out too many non-Whites, tossing it out could get you into “Ricci” trouble. But keeping it in could get you into “disparate impact” trouble.

Of course, this is just the sort of impossible situation you’ll find yourself in when you try to reconcile the irreconcileable: a Black and Hispanic population that is inherently less intelligent than the white population, and a policy that requires equal outcomes for members of all racial groups.

Better headline: Whites Hurt By Multiracial Society. Watch for it soon.

Navigating the Racial Landscape

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It’s depressing to read the continual barrage of racial propaganda in the mainstream media.  A December 28 LA Times’ op-ed, “The dark side of white,” by Gregory Rodriguez is a wonderful example of intellectual confusion and ethnic special pleading. He writes, “Oh sure, some dim-witted people thought [race] was a rigidly scientific category. But for the most part, the evolving definitions and elastic boundaries were subject to cultural bias and, let’s face it, whim and subjectivity.”

Races are descent groups. It couldn’t be more obvious or more rooted in the modern science of population genetics. Of course, there is a biological reality to race as even a brief glance at a diagram like the following shows.

Race exists as a biological reality and, as Frank Salter reminds us, race constitutes an important storehouse of genetic interests for all humans. The number of races is not set in stone but is a more a matter of where one wants to draw lines. The figure results in seven different racial groups, but one could easily combine some groups together and get a lower number.

Biological descent is not the whole story, but I suspect that Rodriguez is well aware that the cultural components of race are far more than “whim and subjectivity.” To a large extent cultural influences result from conflicts of perceived interest and political infighting, and multiculturalists like Rodriguez are experts at this game.  Indeed, the #1 way that culture influences our concept of race is the denial by the political left that there is any biological basis for race at all.

As noted in a previous blog, by using our rational faculties (what psychologists label ‘explicit processing’), we can decide how to carve up the racial landscape to best suit our political and genetic interests. A good example is in crime statistics where “Hispanic” is considered as a victim category for “hate crimes” but not considered a category of offender.  Another example is provided by Rodriguez: An Arab American leader complains “because we are not treated as white in society and by the government, but we also don’t qualify as minorities to get the benefits of some programs.” There are obvious benefits for being in an official victim category.

Rodriguez notes that the 2010 census will not have ethnic breakdowns for Whites — a tribute to the genetic and cultural assimilation among the pre-1965 White population. On the other hand, Latinos and Asians will have sub-categories (Mexican-American, Cuban; Chinese, Japanese). He then worries that “we as a nation care less about the many ethnic groups that helped build this country than the divisive racial categories that have generally served to divide it. … As the concept of ethnicity vanishes into whiteness, society’s alienation abounds.”

In Rodriguez’s ideal world, there would be no category of ‘White” at all—the peoples that now make up the category of White would remain separate — German-Americans, Italian-Americans, etc.

But it’s too late for all that: America has indeed been a melting pot for the various European ethnicities and there’s no going back. Getting rid of the category of White would be a great strategy for Rodriguez and his people but would be a poor strategy for Whites:  For a European-American, it makes much more sense to identify with others who can trace their ancestry back to Europe before 1492, but quite possibly excluding Jews given the unusually long history of hostility and mistrust between Jews and Europeans and  because most of their genetic background derives from the Middle East.  We may not want to include Arab Americans because of the genetic distance and because their voting patterns are not similar to those of European Americans.

Rodriguez would love it if Whites identified themselves only as Scottish Americans or Italian-Americans because these relatively small groups have much less political potential in multicultural America than the category of White or European-American.

When push comes to shove in the US — and push will come to shove, it will indeed be Whites versus the non-White racial and ethnic minorities. We have already traveled a long way down this road, with 90% of Republican votes coming from Whites and an average of around 80% of non-Whites voting Democrat. The gulf will only become more obvious as time goes on. (Incidentally, including groups like Jews and Arabs in the White category functions to blunt perceptions of the racial divide in American politics because these groups are far more likely to vote with the multi-cultural Democrat coalition than people whose ancestry derives from Christian Europe.)

The concept of race is not set in stone. How we behave on the basis of this information is not at all determined by the genetic data. We Europeans must define ourselves in a way that makes strategic sense. And we have to make explicit assertions of racial identity and explicit assertions of our racial interests. No other strategy will succeed in staving off the dispossession of European America.

The Archaeology of Postmodernity, Part III: Transvestism in Music

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The Austrian statesman Clemens von Metternich once declared that the Orient started southeast of the city walls of Vienna. Western Europe’s centuries-long confrontation with Oriental empires helped define Central Europe as a cultural and historical frontier region.  The experience of imperial subjugation and multi-ethnicity — an Eastern European patchwork of ethnic groups with different languages, cultures, and traditions living closely together — became essential parts of the Central European historical experience.

Schloss Schönbrunn, Vienna

As Anthony Alofsin points out, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was “a collage of so many nationalities that it could never be transformed into a unified nation-state.” Within this collage, Jews achieved cultural preeminence. As Robert S. Wistrich points out,

In 1900, Gustav Mahler was the leading conductor and composer in the city, Karl Kraus its high priest of satire, Arthur Schnitzler its outstanding playwright, Adolf von Sonnenthal its greatest actor.  The founder of the Austrian Social Democratic Party, Victor Adler, was a ‘Protestant’ Jew and many of his leading associates were middle-class Jewish intellectuals. Sigmund Freud had just published his epoch-making Interpretation of Dreams and psychoanalysis was about to be born. Waiting in the wings were such central figures of twentieth-century culture as Arnold Schoenberg, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Buber and Franz Kafka, not to mention writers like Joseph Roth, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Felix Salten, Stefan Zweig and Peter Altenberg – all of them of Jewish origin.

Alexander Ringer points out, perhaps defensively, that “as long as familiarity with New England transcendentalism or American individualism is considered indispensable for a meaningful appraisal of Charles Ives and his particular mission, Arnold Schoenberg, his exact contemporary and eventual fellow American, deserves equally serious attention in equivalent Jewish terms.”

In this context, the significance of Schoenberg’s “antirational” view of art and his personal experiences with anti-Semitism in the early 1920s has been emphasized:

His acknowledgement that he could not escape his Jewish heritage initiated a protracted period of reflection upon Jewish issues from both theological and political points of view culminating in the early 1930s with yet another attempt to give a comprehensive statement of his position by means of words and music — this time in his opera Moses and Aron, which presents his personal vision of Judaism.

The moment of truth is usually believed to have come in 1921, when he was asked for his certificate of baptism (to prove that he was not a Jew) while on holiday in Mattsee, near Salzburg (Austria).  Schoenberg explicitly articulated his identification with a classically Jewish perspective and declared himself “no longer a European” but a Jew, in a letter to the painter Wassily Kandinsky written in 1923:

For I have at last learnt the lesson that has been forced upon me during this year, and I shall not ever forget it. It is that I am not a German, not a European, indeed perhaps scarcely even a human being (at least, the Europeans prefer the worst of their race to me), but I am a Jew. I am content that it should be so! Today I no longer wish to be an exception; I have no objection at all to being lumped together with all the rest. … We are two kinds of people. Definitively!

Schoenberg’s statements of an explicitly Zionist position begin in 1924, when he, according to Nicholas Cook, “argued that only military victory could secure a Jewish state in Palestine against its enemies.” In The Biblical Way (1926) he presented his belief in the necessity of an exodus of European Jewry in the form of a psychodrama.

In a letter of 13 June 1933, after Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, Schoenberg declared: “It is necessary to give up all Western acquisitions; we are Asians and nothing essential binds us to the West. … We must return to our origins.” A few weeks later, Schoenberg stated that he planned “a long tour of America, which could perhaps turn into a world tour, to persuade people to help the Jews in Germany.” He explains that he considers this more important than his art, and that he is determined “to do nothing in the future but work for the Jewish national cause.” On another occasion during the same year he states it explicitly: “I offer the sacrifice of my art for the sake of Jewry.”

Arnold Schoenberg: His sometimes banal use of language is expressed in Die Sanftergebenen: “O wie schön lebt sich’s doch im Dreck” (Oh, how beautiful it is to live in the muck).

Although Schoenberg — whose ancestry included both rabbis and cantors — for a period of time discarded the Jewish faith for Lutheran Protestantism, the proximity of his ideas to Jewish theological thought remained obvious. Adorno had a point when he asserted that Schoenberg translated the Old Testament ban on images into music: Dissonance can be seen as an expression of the need to change forms of expression in art, absolutely necessary in order to fulfill the old Jewish prohibition on images.

As William E. Benjamin points out, “Schoenberg realized that Judaism provided a historical model for what he was attempting as an artist.” Robert Wistrich emphasizes the “connection between Schoenberg’s musical agenda, his Jewish identity and the commitment to a Jewish national renewal (by returning to the essence of ancient Judaism)”: “The Mosaic aversion to idolatry, to visible symbols and mystery, as well as the Judaic call for the triumph of rational consciousness, are harnessed by Schoenberg to the cause of twentieth-century modernist expressionism.”

In Judaism, as in Islam, “it was sacrilegious to make a figurative representation of God. With very few exceptions, there were no Jewish painters before the Russian artist Marc Chagall, who had to come to Paris to paint.”

Gleichgewichtsstörung: The Schoenberg-Kandinsky–Tango

Schoenberg’s friendship and cooperation with the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky — a philosemite who was erroneously listed as a Jew in the Grosse Jüdische National-Biographie (1929) — underscores the impact of the blurring of boundaries between art forms, as well as the underlying, religiously motivated, “aniconic” (i.e., without icons) or “iconoclastic” thematic structure. Music meant a great deal to Kandinsky; he referred to his own paintings as “compositions,” and became deeply interested in Schoenberg’s attempts to establish correspondences between musical tones and colors, and in his rejection of the traditional tonal order.

A new kind of transvestism among the arts was thus born:

We see, for example, a painter who wrote an opera libretto (Kokoschka), a poet who composed music (Pound), and a composer who painted pictures (Schoenberg). It is as if artistic talent were a kind of libido, an electricity that could discharge itself with equal success in a poem, a sonata, or a sculpture. Throughout the modernist movement, the major writers and composers both enforced and transgressed the boundaries among the various arts with unusual energy – almost savage at times.

As Christian Meyer, director of the Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna, points out:

The first decade of the twentieth century saw an almost simultaneous musical and visual revolution. Because of Schoenberg’s innovations, musicians were freed from the system of tempered tonality.  At the same time, painters, especially Kandinsky, broke away from the system of central perspective and figural representation. These traditions had been legitimated for centuries by an overwhelming number of masterpieces and were so universally sanctioned that they had come to be regarded as the unquestioned essence of both arts. This explains the anarchist energy that had to be unleashed to liberate music and painting from the bonds of tradition, and at the same time it illuminates the “atonal character” of pre-World War I painting in Europe, which reflects this revolution.  While Schoenberg’s music was an inspiration to Kandinsky as he explored abstraction, today Kandinsky’s paintings function as ambassadors for Schoenberg’s musical works.  The strong colorful essence of Kandinsky’s prewar works has the same richness of sound colors in Schoenberg’s compositions.

Schoenberg approved of Kandinsky’s Der gelbe Klang with its “ungraspable” dimension, comparing it to his own Die glückliche Hand – a work that, according to Christopher Butler, explicitly challenged “the ‘laws’ of art as imposed by the Academy, along with the order of society as a whole.” According to James Leggio, Kandinsky’s “floating sensations” and celestial aspirations were reflections of Schoenberg’s release from “the gravitational grip of tonality”, a feeling of “weightlessness.”

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Kandinsky explained to Schoenberg that Der gelbe Klang was based on the anti-geometrical type of construction attained “by the ‘principle’ of dissonance.” Referring to the Ten Commandments in a letter to Schoenberg, he emphasized the power of negation and the difference between the law as a sign (word) and its signified (the meaning of the law). Kandinsky broke the link between the sign and a transcendental linguistic signified and hence equated art with reality.  As with Schoenberg, the artistic form is conceived as pure perception — independent of external references. This flight from meaning (in the traditional sense) eventually reached its final destination with the Dadaists: “The Dada Manifesto of 1918 proclaimed proudly and in capital letters: DADA DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING.”  As their contemporary Ferdinand de Saussure stated: “The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.”

Kandinsky and Schoenberg viewed their urge to change forms of expression as motivated by the desire to comply with the ancient Jewish prohibition against images. The old Jewish prohibition on images is characterized by its ability to uphold a separation between the pictorial and its referent, that is, the difference between the sign and what it signifies.

Vassily Kandinsky’s Impression III (Concert), painted immediately after attending a concert featuring Schoenberg’s music in Munich on 2 January 1911

Steven Beller cites Schoenberg’s maxim “music should not decorate, it should be true,” and suggests that his explicit invocation of musical logic (most obviously in his serialism) represents an “invasion of the world of aesthetics by the ethical impulse of truth.” Beller comments that “it does not seem improbable that this stemmed from attitudes whose origins lay in his Jewish background.” Nicholas Cook agrees: “The whole debate about ornamentation … might be seen as resulting from the application to art of traditional Jewish thinking.” Both Schoenberg and Heinrich Schenker have been described as “Grenzjuden” (frontier Jews) — both cultural insiders and alienated outsiders.  Schenker held that Jews are “the compulsory instructors of humanity.”

The Jewish position, inclined to abstraction as in the work of Schoenberg, “stood in tension with the aesthetic hedonism of the official Catholic culture of Austrian society.” No wonder, then, that shouting and scuffling accompanied the 1908 premiere of Schoenberg’s Second Quartet in Vienna — a work that certainly did not result in aesthetic pleasure in the audience. A near-riot erupted on March 31, 1913, at an orchestral concert in Vienna in which works by Mahler, Berg, Webern, Zemlinsky, and Schoenberg were played.

As Carl Schorske points out,

The system Schoenberg thus devised was no return to the hierarchical, privileged order of the diatonic system.  Yet its democracy of twelve tones would cohere again in a systematic way: in a hidden order, created by the composer — one in which above and below, forward and back, were related visibly to the analytic mind, even though not generally accessible to the listening ear. … Schoenberg as psychological Expressionist confronted his listener with an art whose surface was broken, charged with the full life of feeling of man adrift and vulnerable in the ungovernable universe; yet beneath it he posited out of his own powers a subliminal, inaudible world of rational order that would integrate the chaos. Here liberated dissonance became a new harmony; psychological chaos, a meta-sensuous order. … Thus Schoenberg the artist, even as he turned back to the faith of his fathers and submission to God, became man the creator, what Goethe would have called ‘der kleine Gott der Welt.’

At a personal level, Schoenberg was hardly a moral icon. Richard Taruskin points out that Schoenberg’s personality “was as absolutist and despotic as any dictator’s,” and that “his personal relationships could be repellently exploitative.” Schoenberg’s only name for skeptics, adversaries, or opponents was “enemies.”

The big step that others called the leap into “atonality,” a term that he deplored for its negativity, Schoenberg called pantonality or the “emancipation of dissonance.” Schoenberg characterized the Tristan chords as “spies reconnoitering weaknesses” to be exploited “in order to create confusion”.  But, as Taruskin points out, it was not dissonance itself that had been emancipated: It was the composer who was liberated “from the constraints of ‘voice leading rules’ whereby dissonance was subordinated to consonance in traditional harmony and counterpoint.”

The assertion that Schoenberg’s atonality represents a consequence of the chromaticism of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde has been commonplace for quite some time.  Heinrich Schenker held that Wagner was directly to blame for the excesses of Schoenberg and his school.  But, as Richard Taruskin points out, the Wagnerian “crisis of tonality” was not Wagnerian at all: “It was read back into Wagner by Schoenberg’s apologists”:

Wagner used the chromaticism of Tristan und Isolde to delay to the point of torture the harmonic resolution that would symbolize the slaking of sexual desire. That harmonic tension … was the mainspring that controlled the syntax of what we now call “tonal” music.  Did the delays caused by Wagner’s chromaticism attenuate that harmonic tension? Don’t be silly.  They only magnified it, vastly so.  Wagner’s chromaticism gave tonality a new source of strength and expressivity. The consequences Schoenberg drew from Wagner’s musical style were entirely idiosyncratic and ahistorical, inevitable only in eyes blinded by “dialectic.”  To say the very least, they had nothing to do with Wagner’s creative aims, least of all in Tristan.

Schoenberg’s style recognized “no distinction between consonance and dissonance, so that harmonically speaking, literally anything goes.” Schoenberg once cracked to a pupil, “Now that I’ve emancipated dissonance, anybody can be a composer.” Removing the qualitative distinction between consonance and dissonance “eliminates the concept of the one being beautiful and the other ugly.”

While Wagner in his heyday took center stage, Schoenberg remained marginal or sectarian, as noted by Leon Botstein:

In contrast to Wagner, Schoenberg’s music and the rhetorical strategy employed in its defense (designed largely by Schoenberg himself) never achieved wide acceptance. … [F]rom the beginning, in the face of controversy, [Schoenberg’s] assertion of artistic integrity assumed a nearly puritanical façade of ethical superiority. Schoenberg’s envy of Stravinsky, Ravel, Respighi, and Bartók took the form of high-minded moralizing about aesthetic concessions and superficialities.

Nevertheless, it is a matter of fact that without Schoenberg, “our era would have made a different sound.” As Jacques Le Rider points out, the utopias of mysticism, genius and narcissism – as responses to “feelings of solitude, ego-fragility, and instability” – had in common the striving to transcend limitations imposed by tradition: “they negate the male/female dichotomy and tend towards an androgynous ideal; they aim at the auto-destruction of a self that suffers because it cannot accept its contingent qualities (sex, race, etc.) and at the creation of a more perfect self.”

As Taruskin notes,

Surmounting the majory/minor dichotomy, voiding all distinctions between particular keys, was for him an achievement comparable to embodying androgyny or double gender. … To his pupil Anton Webern he confided that pantonality, like androgyny, “has given rise to a higher race!”

As Jacques Le Rider points out, “Viennese modernism recognised that [the] old certainties had crumbled. The androgynism of the modern psyche and the inextricable commingling of Jew and non-Jew had given rise to the most bewildering confusion.”

Egon Friedell presented his essay on Peter Altenberg (“the Zarathustra of the Café Central”) as a “natural history” of the human race in process of mutation. Indeed, the phenomenon of Schoenberg “stemmed from an intellectual Gesamtkunstwerk, closely related to new ideas then overflowing from science, literature, and painting that quickly intermingled with those emanating from music per se.”

It has been suggested that the formation and evaluative assessment of systems in relativistic or quantum physics and atonalistic or dodecaphonic music are inspired by the same operative principles and insights, and that there is “a historical-cultural link between these two system mutations as such and the new world-view they produced” (e.g. probability taking over from determinism, the pivotal role of the observer, theoretical pluralism, etc.). In many respects the determinism inherent in tonality theory reflected the determinism in classical physics. In a similar fashion, quantum physics and atonality share an indeterministic rationale, affirmed in the principle of probability and in the disappearance of external determinism (tonality).  As Mark Delaere points out: “In quantum physics external determinism and causality were toppled. The description of reality in terms of probability represented the triumph of ontological determinism over the mechanical determinism of classical physics.”

The ‘twelve-tone idea’ can be defined as a systematic circulation of all the twelve pitch classes based on “transposition, inversion, retrograde, and retrograde-inversion”; a shift from harmony as its principal structural determinant and toward counterpoint, reversing the stylistic change that occurred from Bach to Mozart by returning again to polyphonic thinking,” as noted by John Covach (pp. 604–610).

Delighting in parody and outrage, the avant-garde, according to Richard Drain, “fought a guerilla war against bourgeois culture”, the first onslaught of which came with futurism (launched in 1909), followed by Dadaism in 1916. Dada preferred non-Western cultures to ‘modern’ culture, opposed all –isms, including modernism, favoured spontaneity and a cabaret environment, cubist paintings and cacophonous music. Relativity – a key modernist notion, invoked also by the Dadaists and the futurists – was used “to deflate the status of ‘objective’ truth, license multiple viewpoints, and release them from the judgement of a final authority.”

Indeed, transmutations parallel to the convergence between Kandinsky’s painting and Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music – a turning point sometimes described as a ‘Metaphysik des Schwebens’, i.e. a ‘floating’ condition between the subject and the world – can also be seen in a general shift away from apparently absolute certainties in the direction of relativity: Boasian anthropology, denying the concept of race; Saussurean linguistics, insisting that there are no positive quantities but only differences; Gödel’s incompleteness theorem; the Heisenberg Indeterminacy Principle and the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’, marking the advent of a “postmodern” science characterized by “paradox, uncertainty, and the limits of precise measurement”; Einstein’s theory of relativity; Nietzsche’s scorn for the unfounded pretences of religion, logic, or history; Freudian “decentring” of homo sapiens, not to mention expressionism, surrealism, absurdism, Cubism (Picasso’s “extravagant deformations”), Dadaism, and atonalism in the arts.  Charles Lemert has pointed out that the rise of the relativistic paradigm – or relativistic deconstructionism – was based on the conviction that reality itself is not self-evident and orderly. Relativism is critical of traditional rationality, uncritical realisms, strict tonalisms, objectivisms, and systematic explanations.

This development set off a chain reaction that paved the way for the critical dismantling of Western tradition and traditional modes of thought, the cultural logic of deconstructionism or The Culture of Critique, according to which “the Western ideal of hierarchic harmony and assimilation” was gradually destabilized and perceived as “an irrational, romantic, and mystical ideal.”  The outcome was a gigantic meltdown of a whole civilization’s “cultural DNA structure,” a transition to “liquid” (post-)modernity through a memetic “epidemiology of ideas,” inventing a kind of “assembly line nihilism.”  The age of the gardeners has been succeeded by the age of the hunters and the order of chaos and wilderness.

Jacques Attali was right: music is prophecy. Music makes mutations audible.

Part I: Viennese Mutations

Part II: The Emancipation of Dissonance

E. R. E. Knutsson (email him) is a freelance write

Jimmy Carter Grovels

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One of the virtues of being an ex-president is that there is no need to cater to the political constituencies that are essential for election. American presidential candidates, and especially Democrats, are beholden to Jewish financial support, and Jews are an important swing voting bloc in several states, especially New York. I recall that the first time I thought about Jewish influence, at least in a negative way, was during the 1976 election campaign when Jimmy Carter made the obligatory campaign stop in New York and pledged fealty to Israel.

But since his presidency, Carter has definitely gotten on the bad side of serious Zionists — prototypically the folks at David Horowitz’s Frontpagemag.com. Here’s the video version of Jimmy Carter’s War Against the Jews. (Pop Quiz: An article on Frontpagemag complains that a certain religious group defiles Christmas and this year engaged in a “hatefest” on Christmas Day. Which group is it? For answer, see here.)

But now Carter has apologized. “We must recognize Israel’s achievements under difficult circumstances, even as we strive in a positive way to help Israel continue to improve its relations with its Arab populations, but we must not permit criticisms for improvement to stigmatize Israel.” In particular, he now says that the use of the word ‘apartheid’ in the title of his 2008 book was a prediction of the future if the Palestinians are not allowed to control the West Bank, not a comment on present realities. Moreover, “Carter said he never meant to convey the impression that the pro-Israel lobby silenced criticism of Israel, only that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee was the “most influential lobbying group” and that presidents including himself and congresses have historically been “totally committed” to Israel’s security.

Since Carter realizes the West Bank is an apartheid society (complete with walls of separation, separate roads for Jews and Arabs, etc.) and since the Israel Lobby does indeed have a long history of doing everything it can to silence its critics (see Cong. Paul Finley’s aptly named They Dare to Speak Out [1st edition, 1985]) and since Carter is well aware of all of this, his apology is has to count as groveling. To be sure, Carter claims that his views are mainstream (e.g., he says his positions are the same as J Street’s). But this is surely a significant move on Carter’s part, especially since he now asserts things that are manifestly untrue. So what possessed him to make such a statement?

Although he denies it, there is a strong suspicion that the statement was intended to help Jason Carter, his grandson, in his campaign for the state senate in Georgia in a district with a “substantial” Jewish community. Indeed, JTA reports that “The younger Carter has been trying for days to reach Liane Levetan, a former state senator and CEO of DeKalb County, and as soon as they connected Tuesday, he directed her to the JTA Web site to read the letter.” Jason obviously has a bright future in politics.

Pretty much no matter what Jimmy Carter says, at this point he is persona non grata with Jews. Jimmy Carter’s former honesty will not be forgiven and it will not be forgotten. Groveling never helps, but it may well help Jason: The article notes that Jesse Jackson’s son managed to have a political life despite the transgressions of his father, but only after a lot of fence mending with Jews.

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Gabriel Schoenfeld exists in an alternate universe

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Gabriel Schoenfeld’s The Weekly Standard  article “Back to the Future: British Anti-Semitism Returns with a Vengeance” is the sort of thing that makes you want to bang your head against a wall. The idea is that those virulent anti-Semites John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt managed to “peddle” their vicious article on the Israel lobby to the London Review of Books when it was sensibly rejected by American publishers. It then metastasized into a book that was much admired in the US by the likes of David Duke and pretty much no one else. The “respectable middle” were on page with Leslie Gelb’s authoritative review in the august New York Times which accused them of “shoddy scholarship” that promoted anti-Semitism. As I noted in an earlier blog, “Some of Gelb’s charges might even seem reasonable—if you haven’t read the book.”

The fact that Mearsheimer and Walt managed to first publish their monstrosity in England is no accident. After all, the Brits are a bad lot and always have been. “Anti-Semitism has deep roots in England. In the 12th century, many of the country’s Jews were put to the sword in a wave of massacres. The 13th century began with the introduction of the yellow badge, the mandatory marking that Jews were compelled to wear, and ended with the mass expulsion of the Jews.”

There you have it. Nothing much has changed in England since the 12th century when it comes to the Jews. Anti-Semitism remained rampant in England throughout the 20thcentury, going underground when the Brits were fighting the Nazis (who were even more anti-Jewish), but re-emerging now into the open. In its latest incarnation, it manifests itself as hatred toward Israel.

According to Schoenfeld, this irrational anti-Jewish hate is more obvious than ever.  You can tell that because Britain is now “a congenial home” where radical Muslims “preach their genocidal doctrines.” (Never mind the role of Jewish organizations in facilitating immigration into England and opposing nationalist parties like the BNP that want to keep England English. See Ch. 7 of Culture of Critique.)

In fact, right now Parliament is considering a law to force Jews to report to concentration camps.

No wait. Actually, it’s an inquest into how Tony Blair made the decision to join in the Iraq invasion. Not only that, but a newspaper columnist had the temerity to complain that two of the panelists were Jews. Another chimed in that this complaint was “helpful” because the war was “initiated .  .  . by a group of influential American neocons .  .  . nearly all of whom were ardent Zionists.” And the London Times didn’t even label all of this “anti-Semitic.”

And then there was Peter Oborne’s program (see Martin Webster’s TOO article) on the influence  of the Israel Lobby: “With shades of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and shades of Mearsheimer-Walt, the program conveyed a picture of a nefarious conspiracy to plunge Britain into war in Iraq.”

The last straw is the court decision that an Orthodox school is guilty of discrimination for insisting on matrilineal descent as a criterion of admission. Schoenfeld puts ‘discrimination’ in quotes because, you see, it’s not discrimination if Jews do it. Surely it’s obvious that Jews (and no one else) ought to be able to discriminate on the basis of biological descent.

Obviously, Jews like Schoenfeld (and they’re the ones we keep hearing from in the media) are out of touch with reality. This is Abe Foxman on steroids. In Scheonfeld’s eyes, the inquest into the Blair government’s actions and the Oborne program are nothing more than updated examples of centuries-old anti-Jewish hatred. No need to look at what actually happened.

Indeed, the very thought that Jews might be biased against finding that Jews whose main allegiance is to Israel were the major force behind the decision of the British government to join the Iraq invasion is so obviously wrongheaded that even asking the question betrays vicious hatred of Jews. By their very nature Jews are impartial and completely uninfluenced by their ethnic identification. Schoenfeld doubtless sees himself as an exemplar of evenhandedness — completely above the fray and able to judge Israel’s actions and all things Jewish with brutal, impartial honesty.

Schoenfeld and the rest of these Jewish spokespeople are living in an alternate universe — a universe where mundane things like facts and truth are irrelevant. It’s an absolute article of faith that Jewish behavior is always — always —completely irrelevant to anti-Semitism. No matter how much money Jewish activists and organizations shower on politicians and no matter now much media they own and influence, Jews never actually influence anything. And if they do happen to have a slight influence, they only want the best for everyone. There could not possibly be legitimate conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews.

There is simply no way to communicate with people like Schoenfeld. And that’s a big part of the problem.

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Christopher Donovan: Boys Choir of Harlem No More

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Christopher Donovan: It says a lot about the organizational inabilities of blacks that the venerated Boys Choir of Harlem, a 41-year institution that once ranked as an American cultural icon, is now reported as dead.

Consider the magnitude of the incentive to keep it going.  Here you have a perfect storm of America’s hopes and aspirations for race:  They’re young, they’re Black, they’re from America’s most famous and recogizable poor black neighborhood.  And rather than spew rap laden with foul language, they make White NPR listeners swoon by singing   “Mozart in Latin and Bach in German”, as the New York Times put it.  From the rubble of their White oppression, they shine forth like the jewels they truly are, proving racist Americans everywhere that they’re wrong.  It’s like a self-writing movie. 

The raw material for even a large choir wouldn’t seem difficult to come by.  New York is filled with poor young Blacks, many of whom can probably sing very well.  Little overhead is needed —  a space to sing in, a few leaders, some blazers to wear.  The white liberals are tickled by it, sure, but there’s some nice self-interest for blacks, too:  they can use the experience to launch to an entertainment career, or just put it on a resume and sail into a nice college.  And who doesn’t like to hear a nice choir singing, anyway? 

It’s further baffling to me that nobody — with the slight exception of (of all things) a White country duo — would come to their financial rescuse.  Straightening out their tax woes sounds like a gem of a pro bono project for a big New York City law firm, and I would have thought that Fortune 500 companies would fall over themselves for the opportunity to fund them.  For just a few bucks, you get to trumpet your dedication to noble Blacks — a win-win, as the corporate types like to say. 

And where are rich Blacks?  None of them could have pitched in?  If money were the only problem, Oprah’s interest earnings for the weekend could cover it. 

Ah, but we’re talking about Black people here.  The well-known IQ differences, the shortened time-horizons, and the rest of the inherited behavioral differences are what’s likely at work here.  The problem with blaming whites or other external factors for their failures in this case is that all that’s been factored out. 

The reality is that their own, Blacks are woefully unable to perform the organizational tasks that keep an advanced society functioning.  In multiracial societies, it’s Whites who carry that burden.

Morris Dees — Allegations of Sociopathy

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Arthur Kemp has posted excerpts from the divorce papers of Morris Dees. It portrays someone eager to have sex with pretty much anything that moves — perhaps not that uncommon in 1970s America. But the excerpts also portray him as a sociopath — someone with no sympathy or empathy and inclined to use people to attain selfish goals — in Dees’ case, sexual gratification. Sociopaths feel no remorse for committing crimes against others. The prisons are full of them.

In particular, Dees is alleged to have entrapped his wife in order to get favorable terms in the divorce, and then “He hit her and gave her a busted jaw.” The allegations of sexually molesting his 16-year-old stepchild also indicate sociopathy — an attempt to take advantage of a minor in a way that would likely lead to psychological distress and perhaps dysfunction later. Another indication is that his mistress “had become pregnant by him and had received an abortion which he had paid for.” In other words, even though the relationship with the mistress is described as “permanent,” it was about self-gratification rather than family creation.

It’s not surprising that someone like Dees has no feelings for his people. Sociopaths never do. Such sociopathy is rampant among White people in our political and media elite. Bill Clinton comes to mind.

One of the things that struck me in reading the academic literature on the Bolshevik horror in the USSR was that the ethnic Russians who were involved in mass murder and torture were “psychopaths [another word for sociopaths] and criminals.” (See the Preface to the paperback edition of CofC.) Most of the damage was done by ethnic outsiders, predominantly Jews. These people quite often had strong feelings for their families and their own people — their cruelty directed at ethnic outsiders.  But there was no lack of sociopathic Russians to aid in dispossessing their own people.

We are seeing the same thing now.