The Christian Question in White Nationalism

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There is a strong anti-Christian tendency in contemporary White Nationalism.

The argument goes something like this: Christianity is one of the primary causes of the decline of the White race for two reasons. First, it gives the Jews a privileged place in the sacred history of mankind, a role that they have used to gain their enormous power over us today. Second, Christian moral teachings—inborn collective guilt, magical redemption, universalism, altruism, humility, meekness, turning the other check, etc.—are the primary cause of the White race’s ongoing suicide and the main impediment to turning the tide. These values are no less Christian in origin just because secular liberals and socialists discard their supernatural trappings. The usual conclusion is that the White race will not be able to save itself unless it rejects Christianity.

I think that this argument is half right. I do believe that Christianity is one of the main causes of White decline, for the reasons given above. But I do not believe that discarding Christianity is a necessary condition of White revival. I am not a Christian. But the fact that I am not a Christian might lend credibility to my argument that the White Nationalist movement need not and indeed should not be anti-Christian.

First, although intellectual debate is definitely part of White Nationalism (perhaps too large a part), we must never lose sight of the fact that White Nationalism is a political movement, not an intellectual one. Intellectual movements require agreement on first principles as well as ultimate goals. Political movements require agreement only on practical goals.

Our goal is a White homeland in North America. This political goal is, as a matter of fact, shared by Christians and non-Christians alike. To achieve a White homeland, we have to work with our allies, not against them. We might wish that they agree with us on other matters besides the goal of a White homeland. But this is not necessary, and emphasizing differences of opinion is not productive. When one is on the barricades, one does not turn to one’s comrades and start finding fault.

Not emphasizing differences of opinion is not the same thing as hiding them, however. A mature and healthy White Nationalist movement should cultivate a culture of openness and frankness. We need to be as willing to express our differences in a civil manner as we are to put them aside to work for the common good.

Second, Christianity may be a necessary condition of White racial suicide, but it is not really the driving force. Christianity has long ceased to be the ruling power in Western societies or individual Christian lives. Instead, the churches preach White suicide and Christian Zionism because they wish to suck up to the real intellectual and political power structure, and today that power structure is overwhelmingly dominated and defined by Jews and Jewish interests.

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This is not a new phenomenon, either. The church has long trimmed its sails to the winds of expediency. When there were absolute monarchs, the church preached the divine right of kings. When there was slavery, it bade slaves to obey their masters. When there was patriarchy, it taught wives to obey their husbands.

It is tempting to condemn this tendency as mere political opportunism, but that would be a mistake. The church has always been supple at bending to the reigning political and intellectual orthodoxies because, ultimately, its kingdom is not of this world. In spite of aberrations like the Social Gospel movement, the church has always been more concerned with saving individual souls than with social justice. Thus churchmen regard sucking up to the secular powers as a small price to pay to stay in the soul-saving business.

What this implies for White Nationalism is that the church will resist us less fervently than those whose aims are primarily secular, such as Jewish organizations, non-White ethnic organizations, and the secular left. And when we gain power, ministers will begin hunting for Bible verses to justify the new regime. There is no reason why a White Nationalist regime cannot become a new Caesar, to whom Christians render their secular loyalty while reserving their religious loyalty for God. 

Third, it is a basic principle of political struggle that one should always work to preserve the unity of one’s ranks while sowing division among the enemy. Christian resistance to White Nationalism will be weaker if the churches are divided, and they can be divided if there are Christians in our ranks, especially Christians with personal ties to church leaders. Resistance will be stronger, however, if White Nationalism ceases being a merely political movement and takes on the aspect of an anti-Christian crusade.

Once a White Nationalist regime emerges, White Nationalist Christians can use their ties with the churches to better bring them into compliance with the new order.

Although the presence of Christians in the White Nationalist movement will help split the churches and weaken their resistance, their presence will not split or weaken White Nationalism as long as it remains a purely political movement unified solely by the pursuit of a White homeland.

Today White Nationalism is a movement of the political right. Someday, however, it may become the common sense of White people up and down the political spectrum. To my mind, this would be a positive development, because when it comes to religion and politics, I am very much a liberal: I believe in the separation of religion and politics and in basing political decisions on secular reason.

To me, it seems fortunate that the separation of church and state in the White homeland may well be necessitated by political reality. The White Nationalist movement must unite Whites of widely different religious convictions in the struggle for a homeland. That means we must build religious pluralism and tolerance into our movement today, which means they will be built into our homeland tomorrow.

Greg Johnson is the Editor-in-Chief of Counter-Currents Publishing, Ltd. He can be reached at editor@counter-currents.com.

Alison Weir at UC-Irvine

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It’s Israel Apartheid Week at the University of California-Irvine. I went to see Alison Weir who runs  IfAmericansKnew.org. She gave a great talk, a beautiful combination of data and emotionally compelling comments on her personal experience as a witness to the plight of the Palestinians–very moving.

When  it comes to the data, she is at her best in showing how the US media is corrupted by its coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict–an issue that extends far beyond the Middle East to include everything related to multiculturalism in America, including coverage of the Kagan nomination. She presented data on the New York Times, the San Jose Mercury News, and National Public Radio. NPR is particularly interesting because it is often the target of pro-Israel activist organizations like CAMERA. Pro-Israel groups have sought to boycott NPR and have pressured it financially. (Corroborating Alison’s work, just today Mondoweiss posted another devastating critique of NPR–this time “on the month-old Israeli ‘military order’ that allows the IDF to deport any Palestinian inhabitant of the West Bank it defines as an ‘infiltrator,’ simply for lacking the paperwork that the Israeli government itself refuses to issue”–Arizona on steroids. But don’t expect American Jewish organizations to get worked up about it even though they are unanimously against the Arizona law.)

And here she lists all the journalists writing for American publications (one hesitates to call them American journalists) who cover the conflict but also have family ties to Israel or have served in the Israeli army (some may still be in the IDF). Two particularly struck me:

• A previous [New York]  Times bureau chief, Joel Greenberg, before he was bureau chief but after he was already publishing in the Times from Israel, actually served in the Israeli army.

• Media pundit and Atlantic staffer Jeffrey Goldberg also served in the Israeli military; it’s unclear when, how, or even if his military service ended.

Weir is optimistic that things are heading in the right direction. She thinks that more and more Americans seem aware of the situation in Israel. The Israel Apartheid week and the movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions are high-profile efforts on college campuses. Outside the lecture hall was an elaborate display of anti-Israel cartoons and an apartheid wall that had been around to a number of campuses.

Apartheid Wall
Apartheid Wall; Universities are listed on bottom
Mock Israeli tank
Mock Israeli tank
Latuff Cartoon on display
Latuff Cartoon on display

It made me think that my current TOO article on John Mearsheimer may have been too pessimistic. Let’s frame it at its most hopeful: If the Israel Lobby loses its control of the political process in the US, it would mean that Jewish power in general loses. And that would have major implications for a wide range of issues, from immigration to the legitimacy of assertions of White identity.

One thing that struck me was that almost all the ~150  students who came to her talk were Arabs. The women wore scarves, and almost everyone wore a black anti-Israel tee shirt, so the meeting had the air of a uniformed, homogeneous, almost military group, with a couple of White outliers like me. Her talk was sponsored by the Muslim Students Association. It was preceded and followed by the reading of a passage from the Koran in Arabic, followed by an English translation. The event was held in the campus Cross-Cultural Center which has offices for all the ethnic activist student organizations. Immediately following her talk, the MECHA activists set up their meeting, presumably to denounce what’s going on in Arizona. (MECHA and all the other student ethnic lobbies and leftist groups are co-sponsors of Israel Apartheid Week. Hostile Jews have turned up at some of the IAW events, especially Norman Finkelstein’s talk, but I felt cheated by not witnessing any shows of Jewish hostility. They evidently pick their targets, and Finkelstein as a “self-hating Jew” is certainly high on their list.)

So even though I was cheered by the thought that more people are becoming aware of what’s going on in  Israel, it was depressing to think that the anti-Apartheid doings are basically just another ethnic lobby. These students identify with the left, and I rather doubt they would be sympathetic to my view that they really shouldn’t have been allowed into the US in the first place. And they would be rather hostile to the idea that Whites have interests too.

I felt like a foreigner viewing someone else’s show. Outside the lecture hall, I felt like a foreigner even more. Despite the fact that UC-I is in the heart of Orange County (formerly considered a bastion of White Republicanism), spotting a White student was almost a rarity.  Whites officially make up around 23% of the students at UC-I, well below their proportion in the state. UC-I is often called the University of Chinese Immigrants, but Chinese were not particularly noticeable. It was all manner of non-Whites, from every part of the world.

Just walking around campus the percentage of Whites seemed to be far less than what the university says. The official statistics are based on freshman enrollment, and I suspect that a lot of White freshmen decide UC-I is not the place for them and transfer to some other university.

It was actually rare to see a White student. When I got into the student union, there were 2 or three Whites in a total of about a hundred. Four White guys later came in and sat together–probably at least implicitly realizing that their association was based on their race. But it was eerie how Whites stood out because of their minority status–almost like being in Hong Kong or Karachi and noticing a few stray Americans.

Like the Palestinians, I had the feeling of being displaced. Only I very much doubt that the Arab students who were involved in the Israel Apartheid Week would sympathize with my feelings.

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John Mearsheimer and the Future of Israeli Apartheid

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John Mearsheimer has given a fascinating prognosis of the situation in Israel. The basic argument is as follows (skip to the end of the bulleted list if you’ve already read it):

  • There is not going to be a Palestinian state. There is no political will for it in Israel, and the US lacks the power to impose a two-state solution, largely because of the continuing power of the Israel Lobby. Netanyahu’s “victory was so complete that the Israeli media was full of stories describing how their prime minister had bested Obama and greatly improved his shaky political position at home.” Mearsheimer quotes Andrew Sullivan’s comment on “a cardinal rule of American politics: no pressure on Israel ever.  Just keep giving them money and they will give the US the finger in return. The only permitted position is to say you oppose settlements in the West Bank, while doing everything you can to keep them growing and advancing.”
  • A Palestinian state is anathema to the Israeli government — the most radically ethnonationalist in its history — and it contradicts basic Zionist ideology, going back to Mandate days: “From the start, Zionism envisioned an Israeli state that controlled all of Mandatory Palestine.  There was no place for a Palestinian state in the original Zionist vision of Israel.”
  • It is possible that there would be a mass ethnic cleansing — but such a “murderous strategy seems unlikely, because it would do enormous damage to Israel’s moral fabric, its relationship with Jews in the Diaspora, and to its international standing.”  Nevertheless, “we should not underestimate Israel’s willingness to employ such a horrific strategy if the opportunity presents itself.  It is apparent from public opinion surveys and everyday discourse that many Israelis hold racist views of Palestinians and the Gaza massacre makes clear that they have few qualms about killing Palestinian civilians. … Still, I do not believe Israel will resort to this horrible course of action.”
  • The result is that the trends toward an “incipient apartheid state” will become a full-blown apartheid state “over the next decade.”
  • “In the long run, however, Israel will not be able to maintain itself as an apartheid state.  … It will eventually evolve into a democratic bi-national state whose politics will be dominated by the more numerous Palestinians.”
  • An apartheid Israel is non-viable for several reasons: The information freely available on the Internet; continued outrage among the Arabs and Muslims; because it is “antithetical to core Western values”; because it endangers American lives; and because most American Jews will not back it.
  • Elaborating on the last point, he divides American Jews into three groups, “righteous Jews” (liberals like Norman Finkelstein and Philip Weiss who are critical of Israel), “the great ambivalent middle,” and the “new Afrikaners” — people like Abe Foxman and Elie Wiesel whose views are identical to those of the politically dominant ethnonationalist government in Israel. At the very least, the new Afrikaners will support Israel no matter what it does.
  • Although the organized Jewish community is now dominated by the new Afrikaners, this will not last because Jews, like other Americans are ill-informed about the extent of Israeli apartheid. “This situation, however, is unsustainable over time.  Once it is widely recognized that the two-state solution is dead and Greater Israel is a reality, the righteous Jews will have two choices: support apartheid or work to help create a democratic bi-national state.  I believe that almost all of them will opt for the latter option, in large part because of their deep-seated commitment to liberal values, which renders any apartheid state abhorrent to them.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is where I part ways with Mearsheimer. It is certainly true that Jewish activist organizations like the ADL are constantly going into high dudgeon at the very mention that Israel is an apartheid state. Any such assertion is regarded as an “extreme anti-Israel rhetoric” by the ADL and has the effect of shaping the views of ordinary Jews and preventing them from acknowledging Israeli apartheid as it already exists.

But how is this going to change? The reality is that American Jews are quite comfortable with a morally schizophrenic view in which they have vastly different moral standards when it comes to Israel versus the US. This has been going on for a long time — to the point that I started a recent blog by writing, “Finding examples of Jewish double standards and hypocrisy vis-à-vis their attitudes about Israel and the US is like shooting fish in a  barrel. But their posturing on the Arizona immigration law is particularly egregious.” Recall that opposition to Arizona-type laws spans the entire organized Jewish community in the US, despite the fact that such practices are routine in Israel.

Jewish moral particularism is a powerful reality among Jews. Mearsheimer takes Jewish liberalism in America and throughout the West at face value, as representing “deepseated commitment to liberal values” that is central to Judaism itself.

In accepting this, Mearsheimer is taking people like Gideon Aronoff of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society at face value — always a bad idea. The HIAS declares,

Drawing strongly on Jewish tradition, we provide services to Jewish immigrants, refugees, and others in need – without regard for their religion, nationality, or ethnic background. We are guided by our Jewish values and texts. The Torah (Hebrew Bible) tells us 36 times in 36 different ways to help the stranger among us. This, and our core belief that we must “fix the world” (tikkun olam, in Hebrew), are the driving principles behind our work.”)

Aronoff makes it sound as though Jewish advocacy of immigration is part of a deep ethical commitment that goes to the heart of Judaism. But of course he never attempts massive resettlement of non-Jews into Israel, nor does he agonize about Israel’s biologically-based immigration laws. His moral posturing is entirely directed at the US. Even a casual look at traditional Jewish society shows it to be highly authoritarian, with no concept of individual rights or free speech and deeply concerned about the racial purity of all group members. However one interprets the Torah, Jewish society has never welcomed the stranger, and that is certainly true of Israel.

Jewish commitment to liberalism in the West has been all about ethnic hardball, not about high-flown moral values. Jewish liberalism is the cutting edge aimed at displacing previously dominant WASP elites and their culture. It is not motivated by a moral universalism of human rights — a philosophy that is utterly foreign to the Jewish tradition. Rather, it is motivated by fear and loathing of the traditional peoples and cultures of Europe — and the desire to become a dominant elite.

Obviously, the vast majority of Israelis fail to hold liberal values, and historically the common denominator of Jewish behavior in traditional societies has been alliances with elites, often rapacious alien elites. Jewish radicals in the Soviet Union became “Stalin’s Willing Executioners,” perpetrating the greatest mass murders of the 20th century,  and the Jewish left in the US rationalized or ignored it for decades. Indeed, the remnants of the Jewish left in the US are far more concerned about the imagined excesses of McCarthyism than they are about the horrific deeds of their co-ideologues in the Soviet Union.

The result is that Jewish liberalism is far better seen as ethnic strategizing rather than a core ethical commitment:

The Jewish identification with the left should … be seen as a strategy designed to increase Jewish power as an elite hostile to the White European majority of America. As I have argued, Jewish intellectual and political movements have been a critically necessary condition for the decline of White America during a period in which Jews have attained elite status. All of these movements have been aligned with the political left. As Democrats, Jews are an integral part of the emerging non-White coalition while being able to retain their core ethnic commitment to Israel. Indeed, the organized Jewish community has not only been the most important force in ending the European bias of American immigration laws, it has assiduously courted alliances with non-White ethnic groups, including Blacks, Latinos, and Asians; and these groups are overwhelmingly aligned with the Democratic Party. (Review of Norman Podhoretz’s Why are Jews Liberals?) (See also Ch. 3 ofThe  Culture of Critique, p. 79ff)

Mearsheimer suggests that American Jews, especially young Jews, will over time be less committed to Israel as they realize that they are safe in America, so that Israel is not needed as a safety valve. He also points to a very real phenomenon — that Jews in Israel are increasingly dominated by the religious fundamentalists and, I would add, the secular ethnonationalist descendants of Vladimir Jabotinsky. Both groups are highly fertile and they will increasingly dominate Israel in the future. Indeed, they are already the backbone of support for the current ethnonationalist government, which features the openly racialist, pro-apartheid Avigdor Lieberman as Foreign Minister.

But it is highly questionable that commitment to Israel by American Jews has anything to do with Israel as a safety valve. Anti-Semitism in the US declined to vanishingly low levels in the aftermath of World War II, and there has been absolutely no possibility of a serious anti-Jewish movement since.

Nor is it likely that the dominance of the ethnonationalist right in Israel will alienate American Jews. American Jews with even a modicum of Jewish identity see themselves as part of the Jewish people, with interests that transcend the interests of the country they happen to live in. This has always been the case, and is the source of the recurrent charge of dual loyalty (see here, p. 60ff). There is no reason to suppose that this will change in the future.

And this means that if Israel is seen as threatened — and the ADL will see to it that Israel is always presented as threatened, American Jews will rally to its defense. All the more so if the threat is real and dire.  If there was a real threat to Israel, as happened during the Six-Day War, American Jews will suddenly develop an intense commitment that will surprise even them:

[As expected by social identity theory in psychology] in times of perceived threat to Judaism there is a great increase in group identification among even “very marginal” Jews. … Jewish identification is a complex area where surface declarations may be deceptive and self-deception is the norm. Jews may not consciously know how strongly they in fact identify with Judaism.… [For example,] around the time of the 1967 Arab/Israeli war, many Jews could identify with the statement of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel that “I had not known how Jewish I was.” (Separation and Its Discontents, Ch. 9)

I think it is highly doubtful therefore that when push comes to shove the American Jewish community will fail to come to the defense of Israel — no matter how overtly racialist and explicitly apartheid it becomes. Recall Paul Gottfried’s reminiscence about what the 1967 war looked like on American college campuses :

All my Jewish colleagues in graduate school [at Yale], noisy anti-anti-Communists, opposed American capitalist imperialism, but then became enthusiastic warmongers during the Arab-Israeli War in 1967. One Jewish Marxist acquaintance went into a rage that the Israelis did not demand the entire Mideast at the end of that war. Another, though a feminist, lamented that the Israeli soldiers did not rape more Arab women. It would be no exaggeration to say that my graduate school days resounded with Jewish hysterics at an institution where Wasps seemed to count only for decoration. (Paul Gottfried, On “Being Jewish”, Rothbard-Rockwell Report [April]:9–10, 1996.

I saw the same thing among Jewish radicals at the University of Wisconsin at that time: Radical internationalists suddenly became obsessed about Jewish nationalism. Similarly, the Jews who are most critical of Israel would alter their views in a heartbeat if Israel was really threatened.

The internal dynamics of the Jewish community are always led by the most committed activist elements within it, with the rest of the community ultimately going along with them. The best example of this is Zionism itself — once the view of a small minority of deeply committed Jews, but eventually becoming the defining feature of the entire community. Jews who do not go along with the policies advocated by the radicals have been aggressively marginalized by the mainstream Jewish community. I see no reason to suppose that that trend will not continue into the future.

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Mearsheimer concludes that “Greater Israel will eventually become a democratic bi-national state, and the Palestinians will dominate its politics, because they will outnumber the Jews in the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.” This could be avoided by an energetic commitment to a two-state solution, but that just isn’t going to happen for all the reasons noted above. Israel will therefore self-destruct, a victim of Palestinian fertility and the non-viability of an apartheid state in the modern world.

The problem here is that Mearsheimer assumes that the globalist values that he as an American liberal holds dear have triumphed and there is no going back. But the reality is that, as Pat Buchanan noted in a recent column, globalism is on the defensive. Everywhere except the West, that is.  Ethnonationism is utterly normal around the world, except for Whites.

The triumph of ethnonationalism is especially apparent in Israel. Historically, the Middle East has always erected societies based on apartheid. Different religious and ethnic groups lived together, often in superficial harmony overlaying relationships of dominance and subordination. But they remained separated socially into endogamous groups. It’s sobering to realize, for example, that the nethinim who were the remnants of the peoples conquered by the Israelites during the late Bronze Age, remained as an unassimilated, unmarriageable group for hundreds of years within Israelite society. Western ideas of individualism and exogamy are completely foreign to this part of the world. What we see now is Judaism returning to its ancient roots. The only difference now is that the groups are physically separated by walls and separate roads. Israel will jettison democracy long before the Palestinians have a majority.

Moreover, looking ahead, there are numerous signs that the power of the West to enforce its liberal worldview on others is in decline. America cannot afford another trillion dollar war with Iran, and it seems to be losing in Afghanistan. Its hold on Iraq depends on continuing massive injections of money and an occupying army, and in any case has not altered the sectarian, ethnically based structure of the society typical of the Middle East. The entire Muslim world is what it has always been — resolutely opposed to building Western-type societies based on representative government and individual rights against the state.

Moreover, the rise of China certainly does not mean that they will develop an interventionist foreign policy aimed at ensuring human rights and democracy. Far from it. Indeed, China is a model of an ethnonationalist state, with no commitment to democracy but a strong commitment to economic nationalism and remaining ethnically Chinese. For example, its response to the threat of minority breakaway states on its borders has been to flood those areas with Han Chinese.  It’s foreign policy is dominated by its economic goals, not by dedication to abstract principles of democracy and individual rights, and there is no reason to think that that will change in the future. Such principles have no historical basis within Chinese society.

In the case of Israel, the will of Western powers to force an end to apartheid is non-existent.  And while the US and the West are set to decline in influence, Israel remains armed to the teeth. Mearsheimer’s argument is an updated version of the argument in The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy that the influence of the Israel Lobby should be curbed for the long term good of Israel. But from Israel’s point of view, continuing their aggressive ways has a good chance of winning:

After all, Israel is by far the preeminent military power in the region and can easily act to preempt the development of weapons of mass destruction by its enemies, including Iran. And as a nuclear power, it could inflict huge costs on any enemy who even contemplated destroying it. It also has the world’s one remaining military superpower completely at its bidding, so that it’s difficult to envision a worst case scenario in which Israel is decisively defeated. Why should the Israelis give up anything when victory is in sight?

Mearsheimer concludes with some generally sensible advice to the Palestinians. But again, he assumes the perspective of a liberal Westerner. Two of his suggestions show his belief that somehow everyone thinks and acts just like White folks.

It is essential that the Palestinians make clear that they do not intend to seek revenge against the Israeli Jews for their past crimes, but instead are deeply committed to creating a bi-national democracy in which Jews and Palestinians can live together peacefully.  The Palestinians do not want to treat the Jews the way the Jews have treated them.”

 

Finally, the Palestinians should definitely not employ violence to defeat apartheid.  They should resist mightily for sure, but their strategy should privilege non-violent resistance.  The appropriate model is Gandhi not Mao. Violence is counter-productive because if it gets intense enough, the Israelis might think that they can expel large numbers of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza.  The Palestinians must never underestimate the danger of mass expulsion.

I completely agree that violence by the Palestinians might trigger expulsion, but expulsion or at least continued apartheid will happen in any case. Non-violent resistance will be met with effective counter methods. The latest non-lethal method used by the Israelis is spraying Palestinians with “skunk”:

Imagine the worst, most foul thing you have ever smelled. An overpowering mix of rotting meat, old socks that haven’t been washed for weeks — topped off with the pungent waft of an open sewer. Imagine being covered in the stuff as it is liberally sprayed from a water cannon. Then imagine not being able to get rid of the stench for at least three days, no matter how often you try to scrub yourself clean.

Whatever form of resistance the Palestinians adopt will be ineffective.

Non-violent forms of resistance seem to be effective in gaining the sympathies of White Europeans, but I can’t think of any other group of people that they have been effective with. I suspect that the effectiveness of non-violent protest among Westerners is due to their weak ingroup bonds — another aspect of Western individualism which cannot be assumed to operate among other peoples. While everyone else sees human suffering primarily in terms of how it affects people in their ingroup, Westerners seem susceptible to moral appeals — the moral universalism at the psychological level that was exploited so effectively in the civil rights era and now on behalf of impoverished immigrants (legal and illegal), persecuted refugees, Third World orphans, and Haitian earthquake victims.

On the other hand, Jewish fanatics like Abraham Foxman, Alan Dershowitz, and the entire Jewish activist community led by the new Afrikaners feel nothing but contempt and hatred at the sight of suffering Palestinians. They are prone to elaborate rationalizations that rationalize any and every sort of brutality against them. Psychological research shows that powerful ingroup commitments make one morally blind to the suffering of outgroup members — especially if the outgroup members are seen as in conflict with the ingroup.

Mearsheimer believes that images of suffering Palestinians will eventually pull at America’s heartstrings, especially if among those who browse certain sites on the Internet. But there are a lot of reasons why this won’t have a decisive influence in the foreseeable future:

  • Most non-Jewish Americans don’t care about the Middle East and the largest group of those who do care, the Christian Zionists, see Israeli atrocities as easing the way for the End Times. When Americans browse the Internet, they are much more likely to go to entertainment sites — sex, sports, and movie stars — than to anti-Israel sites. They won’t see images of suffering Palestinians unless they appear in the aboveground media.
  • But the aboveground media is still in Zionist hands and that won’t change any time soon. Media moguls like Haim Saban — a new Afrikaner if ever there was one — would go all out to prevent any change away from the status quo. Historically, Jews have been very effective in pressuring media they don’t like with negative economic consequences, such as advertizing boycotts. This is true whether the media is Jewish-owned or not.
  • Even if the American public became motivated on this issue, politicians would think twice about opposing Israel because their opponents would suddenly have lots of campaign money. There are quite a few issues — most notably immigration — where popular attitudes are irrelevant to public policy. America is run by its elites, and Jews are a very prominent component of American elites at all the points of influence — media, financial, legal, and political. Far more than immigration (whose disastrous effects are getting obvious to pretty much everyone), popular anger about Israel is unthinkable without elite concurrence.

 

 

Moreover, it would be foolish for the Israelis to believe that the Palestinians would not hold a grudge against them for all that has happened if indeed the impossible dream of a bi-national democratic state comes to be. This is the same impossible dream that White Americans have when they think that the future multi-racial, multicultural, White-minority America will cease to hold historic grudges against the formerly dominant Whites and that it will retain all the institutional structures as when Whites were dominant. It won’t happen.

The Israelis surely know what their fate would be in a democratic society dominated by the Palestinians and they will go all out to prevent it. Surely no one would suppose that Israelis are so committed to democracy as a principle that they would commit themselves to certain persecution and destruction by continuing to adhere to it. What’s good for the Jews and all that.

Would that White Americans were less committed to principles and more committed to survival. Unfortunately, White Americans still don’t grasp what is in store for them in a society dominated by Jews and other groups with a historical grudge against them. The end of democratic and republican institutions will be the least of it.

Mearsheimer’s almost child-like faith in what the bi-national state would look like shows that he certainly does not really grasp the deadliness of ethnic politics. The Israelis and Jews in general are under no such illusion.

The main point here is that Mearsheimer’s point of view makes a great deal of sense if one can assume that post-1960s liberal Western values will persist into the future and that Western societies will have the power and will to enforce them on Israel. It makes sense if in fact there is some deep democratic impulse in the soul of all Jews. But for all the reasons mentioned above, this is wishful thinking.

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

Kagan’s journalist supporters

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We at the TOO blog have been emphasizing how Jewish ethnic networking is the real story of the  Kagan nomination. One is led to that conclusion from simply looking at how utterly ordinary she is in terms of scholarly accomplishment or anything else that would qualify her for the court–truly the Harriet Miers of the Obama administration. Now Politico has an article discussing Kagan’s friends among journalists (“Kagan’s journo friends“). Of the 8 journo friends mentioned, 7 have obvious Jewish names, the other, Jonathan Capehart, is a Black homosexual. And two of the comments show that the journalist met Kagan in the context of a Jewish social event:

“I first met Kagan in the mid-’90s when we were both former law clerks for Judge Abner Mikva on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit,” wrote The New Republic’s Jeffrey Rosen.

“Elena danced at our wedding in 1986,” wrote The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin. “When my wife, Amy, and I bought our first apartment, Elena’s father was our lawyer.”

Patrick Cleburne has another excellent blog on Kagan. It calls attention to her hostility to free speech, but also makes a point of Kagan’s (Jewish) journo friends, this time at the NYTimes, but also explicitly calls attention to some of her other Jewish connections:

That curious specimen Dick Morris appears on NewsMax.com to ludicrously argue that

Kagan ‘Moderate’ Democrat Tuesday,11 May 2010

Based on the Elena Kagan that I knew, she would be a moderate on the court. She’d be a little bit like Sandra Day O’Connor . .

Morris must really think Newmax.com readers stupid. The New York Times puff piece yesterdayA Pragmatic New Yorker on a Careful Path to Washington
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG, KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and LISA W. FODERARO.) reports Kagan worked on Liz Holtzman’s 1980 Senate campaign, having also interned with Representative Ted Weiss. She then benefited from the patronage of former Congressman Abner Mikva who as a Federal Judge gave her a clerkship. All dedicated leftists (the first two usually 100% in the Americans for Democratic Action rankings) – and fellow Jews.

But then again, so is Morris. There has been a surprsing amount of MSM comment on the exclusion of Protestants from the Court; this is the boot that hasn’t dropped.

Not only are Protestants excluded, Whites will now be in a minority (3 Jews, 1 Latina, and 1 Black are the new majority). This transformation into a non-White elite is happening with breathtaking speed, so much so that Whites are actually a minority in this elite institution well before becoming a demographic minority. Perhaps this will help to make Whites conscious of what is really happening.


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Christopher Donovan: Ignoring the Jewish Lesbian in the Room

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Christopher Donovan: Kevin MacDonald has done great blogging about Elena Kagan, who’s now known to be Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court.  She is, of course, Jewish, and stands as a spectacular example of the “Good Ol’ Jews Network” — her main qualification seems to be that everyone (as in, fellow power-Jews) gushes praise for her, which in turn causes more gushing.  Everyone wants to comment on the king’s fine new clothes.  This type of thing happens to wealthy Jews from the Upper West Side.  It does not happen to White Protestants from Oklahoma, no matter how smart they are.

Speaking of which, there are now no Protestants on the Supreme Court. One might think that white Protestants would bemoan this fact.  But they aren’t.  They’ve been trained not to, of course.  Which stands in sharp contrast to, say, the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor.  She’s supposed to be the Hispanic representative.  The Hispanic complaint was that they didn’t have anyone on the Supreme Court.  Obama fixed that.

So, all things being equal, white Protestants would have just as much of a complaint now that they’re on the outs.  But we all know that racial politics in America today aren’t about actual equality, they’re about pushing Whites off the stage. Elena Kagan will turn the Supreme Court into a “Sanhedrin”, in the phrase of some associates — 1/3 Jewish.  This reflects the shift in America’s powerbase from white Protestant to Jewish.

This has consequences:  policies that hurt whites are enacted, and Whites suffer.  It’s that simple, and that monumental. Yet the conservative legal blogosphere is completely silent on this point.  It is even censoring comments of anyone who mentions it.

At National Review — long discredited in any event, but worth noting as a gauge of the absurd — says nothing about it. Some of them are taken in by Kagan’s having reached out to the Federalist Society as a sign that she’s “not hostile” to conservatism.

This is a complete crock.  Kagan just grasps that it’s “hip” to hang with the Federalist Society because it shows your open-mindedness, but the Federalist Society has absolutely nothing to say on issues that affect Whites.  In fact, it’s a tool for the promotion of Israel-friendly “war on terror” policies.

Most “conservative” legal bloggers are, of course, themselves Jews, so they make sure to keep the focus on silly details.  Ted Frank and Eugene Volokh are good examples. See here, here, and here.

America no longer belongs to whites.  Its machinery is controlled by those hostile to their interests.  We need to recognize this fact and respond.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist. Email him.

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Elena Kagan Gets the Nomination

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It’s great to be Jewish in the year 2010. The latest evidence is the appointment of Elena Kagan as the third Jew on the Supreme Court. Philip Weiss puts it this way:

The Kagan appointment means that we have entered a period in which Jews are equal members, if not actually predominant members, of the American Establishment. Obama’s two closest political advisers are Jewish, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, and are said to be his foreign-policy braintrust. The economy is supervised to a large degree by Jewish appointees, Larry Summers and Fed Reserve Board chair Paul Bernanke (Time‘s man of the year last year, a selection overseen by Rick Stengel, the Time magazine editor, who is also Jewish).

Of course, that’s just scratching the surface on Jewish representation among the elites in politics, law, the financial world, the media, and personal wealth. Weiss goes on to take the standard line that Jews have achieved so much because of their bookish culture. But if there’s anything that stands out about Kagan, it’s how utterly ordinary she is in terms of scholarly accomplishment or anything else that would qualify her for the court–very few publications, no experience as a judge, little courtroom experience — the Harriet Miers of the Obama administration. (I stole that one from someone on the Rachel Maddow show, maybe Maddow herself. But it shows the depth of her inaptitude that even liberals are sensitive to it. For example, Paul Campos writes on the Daily Beast, “if Kagan is a brilliant legal scholar, the evidence must be lurking somewhere other than in her publications. Kagan’s scholarly writings are lifeless, dull, and eminently forgettable. They are, on the whole, cautious academic exercises in the sort of banal on-the-other-handing whose prime virtue is that it’s unlikely to offend anyone in a position of power.”  Here’s my version: “When she received tenure at the University of Chicago in 1995, she had exactly two scholarly articles published in law journals — a record that would ordinarily not get her tenure even at quite a few third tier universities much less an elite institution like the University of Chicago.”)

Her only talent seems to be getting really prestigious jobs without any obvious qualifications apart from her ethnic background. And her appointment is a sure thing for the left: Whereas Republicans have been disappointed several times by nominees who converted into liberals (like John Paul Stevens), Kagan’s ethnic identity ensures that she is on the side of all things multicultural.

My take (see also here) is that this is an affirmative action appointment of someone who has benefited greatly from Jewish ethnic networking and has dangerous views on the First Amendment that are in line with the views of the ADL, the SPLC, and the rest of the organized Jewish community. (See also Patrick Cleburne’s post at VDARE.com.)

It’s amazing to see liberals expressing doubts about Kagan. (In fact, one wonders where these people were before her nomination was a done deal. Kagan’s name has been floated since the Sotomayor nomination, but suddenly we see all these doubts about her — mainly from liberals feigning concern.) She is clearly on the left, perhaps with some neocon tendencies regarding executive power. But that is hardly reassuring. Put these tendencies together and you have someone who could be very dangerous to an incipient racialist movement: Anti-“hate speech” and comfortable with using government power to suppress political action that conflicts with the aims of the regime.

Another thought that crossed my mind was that Obama and his advisers may have wanted to court Jews [bad pun] because of the fallout from the tensions with Israel. Despite the fact that, as John Mearsheimer recently noted, the confrontation with Israel was won hands down by Israel, a recent poll shows that American Jews are defecting from Obama in droves, with only 42% saying they would now vote for Obama (down from 83% who voted for him in 2008). A recent visit to the White House (“Obama Tries to Mend Fences with Jews“, NYTimes, May 4, 2010)  by Elie Wiesel indicated shows that Obama sees a need to placate the Jewish community:

The lunch meeting between Mr. Wiesel and Mr. Obama came three weeks after Mr. Wiesel took out a full-page advertisement in a number of United States newspapers criticizing the Obama administration for pressuring Mr. Netanyahu to stop Jewish settlement construction in East Jerusalem, where Palestinians would like to put the capital of an eventual Palestinian state.

The advertisement, in which Mr. Wiesel wrote that “Jerusalem is the heart of our heart, the soul of our soul,” alarmed White House officials, in part because it came on the heels of similar advertisements from the World Jewish Congress and grumbling from members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, that Mr. Obama was pushing Mr. Netanyahu too hard.

Giving them yet another appointment to the Supreme Court certainly can’t hurt.

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Tony Paulsen: Thoughts on the British General Election

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Tony Paulsen: Here are some thoughts on the British general election — not, you will note, an ex cathedra pronouncement! [Editor’s Note: In his current TOO article, Alex Kurtagic thinks it was all a waste of time.]

I’ll begin with the system parties, and move on to the patriotic right.

It’s strange to see a three horse race in which all three horses lose, but Lib/Lab/Con have managed this remarkable feat. Labour have lost 91 seats in our 650 seat Parliament, while the system’s much hyped faux alternative, the Liberals, lost five seats, rather than make the large gains predicted before the poll. They now hold 57 seats.

The Conservative party, standing on a manifesto of change (think about that for a Conservative party!) gained 97 seats, and now hold 306, but are twenty short of an overall majority.

One seat remains vacant, as a candidate died during the campaign. A bye-election will be held in a few weeks, when the Conservatives should take the seat, pushing them up to 307.

Outside Ulster, which has its own political dynamic, the only minor party to gain a seat was the Greens (more on them anon), while the sole Independent in Parliament lost his, despite being much praised as an honourable and competent member.

The Democratic Unionist Party holds eight Ulster seats, after losing East Belfast, one of the most staunchly Protestant and Unionist seats in Northern Ireland, to the very liberal Alliance party on a three way split in the Unionist vote, exacerbated by the scandals surrounding land deals involving DUP leader Peter Robinson and his wife. The three way split in Unionism also cost the Unionist parties South Belfast. Lady Hermon sits as an Independent Unionist for North Down, making nine Unionists in the House of Commons.

Even supposing the Tories (Conservatives) could persuade all nine Unionists to support them reliably, they would still be eleven seats short of an overall majority, so they are negotiating with the Liberals.

Personally, if I were in Tory leader David Cameron’s shoes, I would thank my lucky stars that I did not have to take office and impose an austerity budget of unprecedented severity on a populace not exactly enured to hardship. I would seek to manoeuvre the Liberals into a coalition with Labour, so that they can reap the odium that will follow.

Such however appears to be Cameron’s vanity and his unbridled desire for office at any price that he may rush in where others might fear to tread, unless, of course, his present courtship of the Liberals is a Machiavellian manoeuvre designed to drive them into the arms of Labour when he eventually fails to propose marriage!

Moving on to the performance of the patriotic right, there are basically three contenders in the field. Two are essentially civic nationalists, the United Kingdom Independence Party and the English Democrats.

The EDs, whose ostensible concern is to obtain a devolved Parliament for England, but whose real objective is the end of the Union, and independence for England, performed terribly. I need waste no more time on them.

UKIP, whose original purpose was to oppose British membership of the European union, but which has tried to rebrand itself as a more broadly based party of the populist right, opposing further immigration into England, is a much more formidable force than the hopeless EDs. It polled 917,832 votes across the country.

Nevertheless, these votes were thinly spread, and nowhere did it approach winning a seat under out “first past the post” system.

Last year, UKIP came second in England and Wales in the elections to the European parliament, after the Conservatives, but ahead of the ruling Labour party, an extraordinary performance. This year, most of those voters plainly went back to the Conservative party, whence they came.

It is tolerably clear that UKIP can only win really big votes in elections to a parliament of whose existence it theoretically disapproves, an unusual state of affairs to say the least.

The BNP made a huge electoral effort, contesting 339 of the 650 seats in Parliament and polling 563,743 votes.

One mystery is what possessed Nick Griffin to contest 339 seats. There was no obvious purpose in contesting more than the number needed to secure a broadcast on television and radio (in England, political parties may not buy air time. The television and radio stations, whether state or privately owned, must provide a certain amount of free air time to each party contesting more than a minimum number of seats, I believe c. 110, so it would have made sense to fight c. 120 seats to allow for errors in filling in the nomination papers: similar arrangements obtain in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland on local television and radio. Obviously the number of seats involved in those countries is far smaller).

The contrast with the Green party, which enjoys roughly similar electoral support to the BNP, could not be starker. The Greens concentrated their limited resources in one or two constituencies in which they are particularly strong, and took a seat, their first ever win at this level.

The BNP leadership on the other hand was overcome by hubris in the run up to this election, and nemesis duly followed.

Nick Griffin had thought that he might win the Barking (East London) seat from the Labour incumbent, Margaret Hodge, née Oppenheimer, scion of a wealthy Jewish family that fled Germany in the 1930s.

In the event, his share of the vote fell from the 16% that the BNP polled in the 2005 election to 14%, and he trailed in third after the Conservative candidate. Hodge was triumphantly re-elected.

Griffin’s deputy, the enigmatic Simon Darby (widely known in movement circles as 5IMon because of his alleged role as an agent of our equivalent of the FBI, MI5) failed to take Stoke on Trent Central, another seat that the BNP had high hopes of actually winning. Instead, he came fourth.

In a dénouement worthy of the book of Esther, “Haman’s sons”, the twelve BNP councillors on Barking council, all lost their seats in the local elections held on the same day.

Up and down the land, BNP councillors lost their seats in the worst electoral reverse that the movement has ever suffered (in fairness, mainly because until recently it never got more than one or two stray councillors elected, so didn’t have seats to lose).

It is plain that the party’s abandonment of the once successful strategy of concentrating on sinking deep local roots in carefully selected communities that are more receptive to its message than the mass of the people at this stage in its development in favour of a massive effort at national level has failed completely.

So what are the positives? (Yes, there are some!). Well, to poll 563,743 votes in 339 of the 650 seats suggests that there are about 1,000,000 people willing to vote BNP in the United Kingdom, even under an electoral system that makes a vote for a minor party a wasted vote in most constituencies, so that most electors choose whichever of the major parties they dislike less.

Were we one day to move to a more proportional system (not unlikely, as the Liberals will demand it as the price of their participation in a coalition) it is plausible that a phalanx of nationalists would eventually enter the establishment’s sanctum sanctorum. Of course the system parties will try to rig the electoral system to exclude nationalists, but it is difficult to do that, especially in times of serious economic hardship that make radical alternatives to the existing system more appealing to the people.

On the down side, morale in BNP circles will now slump in the short term and not easily be revived. At the end of this year, the party will almost inevitably lose members (it has a “churn” rate of c. 25%, that is to say, one in four does not renew at each year end: this year it is hardly plausible that new members will join to replace those who leave).

It will be interesting to see how the party membership now views its leadership, and whether any credible challenger to Nick Griffin emerges.

The party’s strained finances are under investigation by the authorities after it failed its audit last year, while the 2009 accounts are shortly due. Quite why vast sums of money have been sent “over the water” to its strange Northern Ireland based fund-raiser, “the Rev.” Jim Dowson, a bogus evangelist straight out of Elmer Gantry, is one of the many questions that will have to be addressed in those accounts.

Whether the party can put its financial affairs in order remains to be seen, and will be a crucial factor in determining whether the BNP continues under its present leadership, or drops its pilot (who won’t go willingly).

Tony Paulsen is a pen name.