More On Our Unethical Financial Elite

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Matt Taibbi is at it again, this time with “Wall Street’s Bailout Hustle.” I can’t really comment on many of his substantive claims, but there is an awful lot of smoke at this point for one to suppose that there is no fire. Note especially the point that the financial system “assumes a certain minimal level of ethical behavior and civic instinct over and above what is spelled out by the regulations” (p. 7).

That’s the thing. We have not only replaced a manufacturing economy with a financial economy (see Kevin Phillips). We also have a financial elite is completely corrupt — with devastating consequences to the rest of the economy and the long term prospects of growth. As Taibbi notes, the system depends on a “true believer” syndrome in which people simply can’t believe they were conned. We desperately want to trust our elites — the people who come from the best schools and have close ties to the government. As Francis Fukuyama emphasizes, trust in elites and the assumption of civic mindedness are critical characteristics of individualist societies:

To this set of traits, Francis Fukuyama also adds trust as a critical virtue of individualist societies. Trust is really a way of emphasizing the importance of moral universalism as a trait of individualist societies. In collectivist, family-oriented societies, trust ends at the border of the family and kinship group. Social organization, whether in political culture or in economic enterprise, tends to be a family affair. Morality is defi ned as what is good for the group—typically the kinship group (e.g., the notorious line, “Is it good for the Jews?”). This lack of ability to develop a civil society is the fundamental problem of societies in the Middle East and Africa, where divisions into opposing religious and ultimately kinship groups define the political landscape. The movement of the West toward multiculturalism really means the end of individualist Western culture. (See here, p. 27)

We are entering an era where trust in political and cultural elites is fast becoming a thing of the past. Robert Putnam has shown that trust is lower in multi-ethnic societies. This decline in public trust will be accelerated when people really grasp the enormity of the disaster created by Wall Street and its close connections to the government. It’s really the end of a key feature of what made Western societies so successful. As Taibbi points out, there’s no change on the horizon–just a short pause for reloading.

Finally, I can’t help referring to today’s Doonesbury cartoon about the development of an ethical sense among bankers. The banker begins as a college grad who thinks “I hope to do something of value well and be fairly paid.” By middle age he is saying “I demand to be paid obscenely well for destroying value.” The cartoon illustrates the point that lack of trust in financial elites is very widespread and that they are reasonably portrayed as a predatory elite rather than an elite that helps create value.

The only problem with the cartoon is that it’s at least doubtful that the people who make it to the top in this system ever thought much about creating social value. As Edmund Connelly’s recent blog recounts, there is a very long history of vastly disproportionate Jewish involvement in financial fraud. And rather than a long history of civic responsibility, there is a long history of Jews thinking of themselves as outsiders in Western societies — a hostile elite with a strong sense of historical grievance. The long term prosperity of the society is certainly not uppermost in their minds.

This is the relevant passage from page 7 of Taibbi’s article:

Con artists have a word for the inability of their victims to accept that they’ve been scammed. They call it the “True Believer Syndrome.” That’s sort of where we are, in a state of nagging disbelief about the real problem on Wall Street. It isn’t so much that we have inadequate rules or incompetent regulators, although both of these things are certainly true. The real problem is that it doesn’t matter what regulations are in place if the people running the economy are rip-off artists. The system assumes a certain minimum level of ethical behavior and civic instinct over and above what is spelled out by the regulations. If those ethics are absent — well, this thing isn’t going to work, no matter what we do. Sure, mugging old ladies is against the law, but it’s also easy. To prevent it, we depend, for the most part, not on cops but on people making the conscious decision not to do it.

That’s why the biggest gift the bankers got in the bailout was not fiscal but psychological. “The most valuable part of the bailout,” says Rep. Sherman, “was the implicit guarantee that they’re Too Big to Fail.” Instead of liquidating and prosecuting the insolvent institutions that took us all down with them in a giant Ponzi scheme, we have showered them with money and guarantees and all sorts of other enabling gestures. And what should really freak everyone out is the fact that Wall Street immediately started skimming off its own rescue money. If the bailouts validated anew the crooked psychology of the bubble, the recent profit and bonus numbers show that the same psychology is back, thriving, and looking for new disasters to create. “It’s evidence,” says Rep. Kanjorski, “that they still don’t get it.”

More to the point, the fact that we haven’t done much of anything to change the rules and behavior of Wall Street shows that we still don’t get it. Instituting a bailout policy that stressed recapitalizing bad banks was like the addict coming back to the con man to get his lost money back. Ask yourself how well that ever works out. And then get ready for the reload.

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Kevin MacDonald: The Genteel Mr. Bradlaugh

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I agree with everything in Christopher Donovan’s blog on Bradlaugh’s take on the AmRen cancellation. But a couple of things Bradlaugh wrote stick in my craw. It used to be that Jews complained about genteel anti-Semites. Now we have people like Bradlaugh who spout genteel philo-Semitism: He complains about “the antisemitism of the AR followers, which rubs me the wrong way. I fall in line with the long tradition of British philosemitism (Cromwell, Victoria, Lloyd George, Maggie Thatcher), and just have no patience with the other thing.” He could have included Winston Churchill who was philo-Semitic to the point of corruption.

It seems to me that anyone writing on politics has a responsibility to write honestly about the various forces that influence public policy. For Bradlaugh, it’s simply not genteel to discuss embarrassing things like Jewish power. I suppose Mearshimer and Walt rub him the wrong way as well. I had this to say about John Derbyshire, Bradlaugh’s alter ego:

Derbyshire is, apart from some minor irritations, quite uncritical about Jewish motives and influence, even when they conflict with the interests of people like himself. He implies that non-Jews should understand Jewish motivation to break down the ethnic homogeneity of their own societies while advancing the interests of Israel as an ethnostate. … Derbyshire lives in a sort of childlike world in which Jewish interests are legitimate and where Jewish attempts to pursue their interests, though they may occasionally be irritating, are not really a cause for concern much less malice. It doesn’t require an evolutionary theory to realize that good, reasonable people can have conflicts of interest, and that the results of conflicts of interest can be devastating to the side that loses.

I think that Bradlaugh’s problem is that he sees himself as genteel and that being genteel is a very good thing. (Definition: 1. Refined in manner; well-bred and polite. 2. Free from vulgarity or rudeness. 3. Elegantly stylish: genteel manners and appearance. 4. a. Striving to convey a manner or appearance of refinement and respectability. See Synonyms at polite. b. Marked by affected and somewhat prudish refinement.)

He seems very impressed with good manners, a well-rounded education, and being polite. Genteel people simply don’t discuss Jewish power and influence for fear of offending the Jews. In the same way, genteel people would not want to offend others by calling attention to their garish clothes. To do so would make one impolite and vulgar and therefore consign one to a lower order of society.

His gentility is probably also why he doesn’t resonate with AmRen’s “ethos of the South, which I don’t really … get. I wonder if a foreigner ever can get it. It’s as odd and particular, in its own way, as Tibetan Buddhism.”

The reality is that White Southerners are by far the largest identifiable group of White Americans who have held onto their culture and identity in the face of the onslaughts of the last 50 years. The White vote for Obama was nearly in the single digits in three southern states, and lopsidedly Republican in the others. White Southerners understand, at least implicitly, that it’s about racial and ethnic conflict. As the racialization of American politics continues, all Whites will tend even more in this direction. (The recent election in Massachusetts certainly supports this). Conservatives who think they can take back the country without Southern Whites are seriously deluded.

Bradlaugh’s gentility also leads him to entirely avoid framing the issue in ethnic or racial terms at all:

My own strong preference, as I argued in that debate with Jared, would be for everybody to shut up with the race business. There doesn’t seem to be much prospect of this happening, though, so it’s not hard to see the AR-ers point of view. In any case, I say again, whatever you think of that point of view, it’s a point of view. It shouldn’t be shut out of the public square; and if it is so shut out, by goons phoning in death threats to hotel employees, there ought to be a fuss made. Well, here I am on Secular Right, making a fuss as best I can. Freedom of speech! Freedom of assembly! Liberty! Liberty!

This is “proposition conservatism” at its finest. If only people would stop talking about racial and ethnic conflict, then we could frame everything in terms of principles like free speech without soiling ourselves like the AR crowd. For people like Bradlaugh, massive immigration would presumably be fine if the immigrants were all principled people like himself.

The reality, of course, is that whether or not we talk about it, racial and ethnic conflict will continue. There is no other possible outcome given that 100 million more non-Whites are to be added to the population of the US in the next few decades.

The bottom line is that no one has come up with a formula to get rid of ethnicity as a form of identity and as a vehicle of expressing interests. None seems on the horizon. And in the process of losing the ethnic battle, the society will be less and less committed to Bradlaugh’s cherished principles because, in the end, the principles of free speech, individual liberty, and the rest of the corpus of Western individualism are ethnic creations.

But people like Bradlaugh are more willing to lose the ethnic battle than to become anything less than genteel by mentioning the ethnic conflict that is at the heart of the political divisions in the US. It just wouldn’t seem proper.

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For God and the Reconquest of the West!

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Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand lead the Reconquistadors, holding aloft a cross

Recently two articles in TOO have expressed diametrically opposed views of the proper place of Christianity in the fight to save the West demographically.

Thomas Dalton outlines Friedrich Nietzsche’s critical view of Christianity and its origins. Nietzsche ridiculed the traditional religion of the West as senile and decadent and speculated that Christianity was invented by embittered Jews, especially St. Paul, to turn the lower classes against Rome and thus provide Israel with a degree of freedom from Roman rule.

Michael Colhaze is loyal to Christianity. He attacks Nietzsche’s character and sanity, portraying his writings as fanciful and his superman ideal as monstrous social Darwinism. He praises Christianity for embodying the love and compassion of Christ that empowers believers.

I have agreements and disagreements with both perspectives based on the criterion of what is good for the survival of ethnic groups that adopt Christianity, though my main interest is the corporate survival of Western peoples. I come down roughly in the middle of the two positions, though tilting decidedly towards a Christianity of the traditional variety informed by anthropology and genetics.

Thomas Dalton, in his article “Nietzsche and the Origins of Christianity,” demonstrates considerable sympathy for the German philosopher  —  born 1844, died 1900. Dalton reveals aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy that will be attractive to many White advocates, as we shall see.

Nietzsche began his treatment of Christianity with a bold accusation — that it is decadent, weak, and nihilistic. Dalton writes: “It led to a sickly, subservient, herd morality, and suffocated the quest for human excellence. Worst of all, it replaced a life-affirming naturalness with an otherworldly, life-denying negativism. It has become, in fact, ‘the greatest misfortune of mankind so far.’”

Here Nietzsche must be radically wrong. The Church ministered to European peoples during our long resistance to Islamic aggression, our invention of science and industry, and our spectacular global expansion. That includes all three Christian worlds — Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox. The arrest of Western confidence and expansion and its accelerating contraction have coincided with the liberalization of Christianity or its actual suppression under communist regimes. I shall take up this theme again.

The alleged disaster of Christianity can only be explained, Nietzsche thought, by understanding its Jewish origins. Jesus and the apostles were Jewish, as were Mark, Luke and Paul and the many unknown authors who contributed to the New Testament. This meant that Christianity is stamped with the Jewish character, which Nietzsche refers to as “race.” That character comes through in the slave morality embodied by the religion from the beginning, which Nietzsche interprets to be Paul’s strategy to subvert the masses of the Roman Empire, weaken Rome’s aristocratic grip on its far-flung provinces, and thus give Israel a chance to break free.

It should be emphasized that this is speculation.

For the success of this alleged strategy Nietzsche mainly blames the West. Dalton quotes Nietzsche: “There is no excuse whatever for their failure to dispose of such a sickly and senile product of decadence [as the Christian God].But a curse lies upon them for this failure: they have absorbed sickness, old age, and contradiction into all their instincts — and since then they have not created another god. Almost two thousand years — and not one new god!”

Dalton states that a fitting — a fitness enhancing? — re-conception of religion needs to be “a truly uplifting, life-affirming, and ennobling enterprise — decidedly unlike Judeo-Christianity — and must never be taken as permanent and absolute truth. All superstitious, i.e. anti-natural, religions are out of the question. The human condition, and human ‘salvation’, must be firmly rooted in the present, physical world — the real world.”

I wholeheartedly agree with the need for a religion that engages reality, especially the reality of humans as an evolved species with biological interests of survival and continuity. However I cannot accept such a negative depiction of the traditional religion of the West. At the same time I have difficulties with blanket praise for what it has become, which brings me to the article critical of Nietzsche.

Michael Colhaze, in his article “Nietzsche and No End” turns Nietzsche’s critical blowtorch back on its inventor. Colhaze describes Nietzsche’s superman as “[a] kind of socio-Darwinian zombie whose general credo is the exact reversal of Christian ethics. Goodness is stupidity, compassion the dumbness of slaves, beauty ugliness, love utter contempt, gentleness dirt under his fingernail. In short, a two-hundred-fifty-page glorification of hate without any strings attached.”

I agree that Nietzsche’s superman is not the sort of person to invite for dinner, at least to the family table. And would he be someone who could be relied upon? I also agree with Colhaze that this so-called superman evinces some social-Darwinistic values which should be rejected. But social Darwinism is not the same as modern evolutionary theory and it has never constituted the theory. In fact Darwin himself was interested in untangling the causes of morality and compassion, not abolishing them, even if at the same time he was quietly proud of his English and European identity and pessimistic about the potential of primitive races.

It is one thing to criticize Nietzsche’s excesses, another to rubbish his call for a religion that respects reality. Colhaze does so by mischaracterizing the evolutionary process:

a process similar to tossing an infinite amount of golf balls into the air, each numbered, and each falling accidentally into a hole with the corresponding number.

The only alternative, Colhaze concludes, is an omnipotent God, “one whom I believe to be solely responsible for the world’s creation and its grandiose theatre, though not for the crimes of mankind which cause about ninety nine percent of all its suffering.” Actually the great majority of suffering is caused by competing life strategies, e.g. between predator and prey.

Colhaze believes that Christianity delivers “man’s highest and most sublime aspiration. An aspiration to consummate, on a strictly personal level, Christ’s divine message of Love and Compassion. A message that is, for those who handle it calmly, an inexhaustible font of joy and inner certainty, a way of life that can brace adversities more thoroughly than any other. And a message that might one day, ’one day’ after many a summer, enable mankind to live in the Utopia we sometimes dreamt about when we were young.”

The science of human bonding is converging remarkably on the moral truths of Christianity, especially the traditional Catholic ordering of love and duty. Christianity does distil and train a purity of attachment dependent on abstract intelligence. Since our ancestors converted at the urging and example of pioneer Medieval monks, we have been enjoined to nurture our families and local communities and to stand against the heathen at the city gate.

Conclusion

Nietzsche longed for a religion that embraced nature red in tooth and claw, that did not shy away from reality. There is no doubt that the West needs religious leadership that defends our temporal interests, not only short-term individual ones but corporate survival — cultural and genetic continuity. And it is undeniable that Nietzsche appeals to masculine values of strength and heroism in an age of white domestication. Those familiar with the shortcomings of the modern mainstream churches might find his writings attractive on that score.

In the face of diversity’s many sins, not one major Christian denomination stands with the majority of Westerners in opposing mass Third World immigration. Nor do they defend voluntary reciprocal segregation in multi-ethnic societies or criticize the elites that are forcing diversity on an unwilling but leaderless public. The depredations of diversity — higher divorce rates, alienation, destruction of downtown social life, uncaring societies, the decline of education, rising corruption and crime, loss of general social trust, reduced economic growth, less foreign aid, not to mention civil war and genocide — all have been shown to be exacerbated by diversity (see here and here).

Despite these failings Christianity is not inherently weak or ignoble. For example, post-Vatican II Catholicism does not represent much of the Church’s noble history.

Nietzsche’s criticisms remain valid only if they are taken to apply to the Church’s weakness in defending the ethnic interests of their modern Western congregations. However that interpretation reduces his charge to a criticism of Church policy, not of Christianity root and branch.

Such a reinterpretation is a favour to Nietzsche because his accusation of Christian weakness is absurd when tested historiographically. As Kevin MacDonald has documented during the Middle Ages the Church became an organic part of European society. Not for nothing was the West known as Christendom. The Church acted to save bodies and posterity as well as souls. It blessed new knights in the ceremony of knighthood, sanctified the new code of chivalry that forbade harming civilians and enacted the first codified rules of war. War was justified when it advanced Christendom — an ethnic-friendly legitimization that reduced or at least regulated fighting among Christians and culminated in the Crusaders’ attempt to wrest Near Eastern lands of the Eastern Roman Empire back from the Arabs. The Church defended the ordinary man from a parasitic aristocracy. It helped forge nations with responsible governments. It protected the mass of the people from enemies without and within. The English Church promoted the expulsion of Jews — who had become a predatory financial elite — from the country in 1290 as a pastoral duty, also a trend elsewhere in Western Europe. Throughout Europe the Church was Gentiles’ repository of sophisticated culture, of literacy and record keeping. It was indispensible for governance, advising kings and educating princes. It prevented the Jews from monopolizing the niche of trans-generational literary group strategy. It underwrote the earliest stirrings of modern science. The university, one of the greatest creations of the West, was founded under the Church’s auspices. Professors were priests of learning. Gregor Mendel was an ethnic German monk!

Instead of speculating on the basis of almost non-existent ancient documents concerning St. Paul, Nietzsche should have been looking for the origins of the seamless dovetailing of Christianity and European culture, achieved in a very few centuries. A plausible theory is offered by James C. Russell in his book The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity (1994).

Russell shows that the seamlessness resulted from the missionaries’ policy of accommodating the Church to local custom. The result was the reciprocal Germanization of Christianity, though the process is better described as the Europeanization of Christianity because the Celtic peoples of the British Isles and the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe also had their folk festivals incorporated into the Church. Irish monks were instrumental in converting the Germans, working from the Lake Constance area northwards from the fifth century, while Greek monks began the conversion of the Russians. The deep imprint of the northern winter and isolated settlements is clearly evident in the Christian calendar.

Nietzsche should have been content that this Europeanization was, as Russell puts it, part of the broader phenomenon of a “world-rejecting” religion such as early Christianity being transformed by its accommodation to “world accepting” Indo-European peoples.

Very few grasp how central the Church was to European society for more than 1500 years because modern education and the mass media — notably the movies — have all but expunged the monk and Sunday services from the record or pathologized them. Ministers and priests are routinely shown as corrupt and generally deplorable.

That was not always so. Even Hollywood finds it difficult to delete Friar Tuck from the story of Robin Hood or his dual identity as priest and warrior. Religious patriots were depicted in the glory days of Hollywood, when its Jewish proprietors were disciplined by powerful Christian elites. Who can forget the striking imagery of Charton Heston as an upper class Jew awestruck by the grace of Christ in Ben Hur (1959) or as a Visigoth nobleman smiting the Muslim occupiers “for God, Alfonso, and Spain” in El Cid (1961). Christian-conservative external control of Hollywood slipped after 1965, and the rising Jewish elite had its coming-out decade, a general uprising against White Christian society and culture. Some modern movies, notably Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, show monks blessing the Scottish army on the battle field. But that is rare. Who wants to be accused of religious bigotry?

Civilized and cultivated by this “senile” religion, the West rose in a little over one millennium from the ashes of the Roman Empire to dominate global trade, to invent modern science and industry, to subdue most of the world and settle three continents. As Churchill would say, some senility!

All this was done without knowledge of genetic interests, that humans are a specially endowed evolved species with the same vital interest in reproduction as all other species (even more vital if those endowments are valued). However the Church always  acknowledged the values attendant on individual reproduction. It blessed sex within marriage because the resulting children and bonds harmonize reproduction and the stability of the child-rearing family. Partly for that reason the Church stands against sex outside of marriage and against homosexuality.

Whatever the deviations of this stance from an evolutionary perspective — for example homosexuals also have ethnic interests — the fact is that the Christian Church has historically stood for the heterosexual family, which makes good evolutionary as well as humanitarian sense.

Modern knowledge of biology supports the Church’s pro- family policy. And extends it. Humans have never existed as isolated individuals or even single families but as parts of genetically related communities. We evolved to have genetic and cultural interests not only in the continuity of our families but of our tribes and nations. Historically the Church recognized this, not perfectly but well enough to establish precedent. The Christian Church was the West’s evolutionary group strategy. We were Christendom, and Christendom defended, elevated and shaped us. Priests were not abstractly removed hermits but organic parts of their communities. As they became more mobile, taking up appointments in the Church’s far-flung domain, so they served the wider European interest.

Now Christianity’s domain is the entire world and priests should be true to the vital interests of all peoples. That is the truth of Christian universalism. But just as the Church protects parental rights and the autonomy and dignity of families, so it should defend national rights. It would be wrong for Chinese bishops to promote mass foreign immigration to China, or for Japanese monks to undermine Japanese homogeneity.

This is doubly true for those who believe that God has been an agent in human genetic and cultural evolution. If He created distinct peoples over countless millennia, Christians should stand against the atheist-humanist drive to confound that creation. If one believes in God’s agency in the real world, Christians who support mass non-European immigration to the West on the basis that the immigrants are Christian are as blind to God’s will as are the immigrants themselves. They are destroying His creation by trying to rebuild the tower of Babel, not in the mythical way of a single language group challenging God’s glory but by forcing — against their will — a diversity of peoples to lose their many cherished identities in a single cosmopolitan mishmash that dissolves communities, flattens ethnic genius and is good for nothing except facilitating globalism.

The West is literally dying for the lack of warrior-scholar priests. White advocates need to win back their churches to become once again defenders of their congregations’ vital interests.

With Nietzsche we declare: “The last sacrament will always be irrelevant to us as a people!” But with Charles Martel, El Cid, Edward I of England, the English lords at Runnymede, Isabella I of Castille, and the Alamo martyrs we welcome the Victory Psalm [reprinted below] with the shout: “For God and the reconquest of the West!”

A cross looms over the army of Charles Martel at it defeats the Muslims at the Battle of Tours

Afterword

The 35th Psalm is a regular part of Christian services, considered one of the masterworks of prayer that constitute the psalms. It was composed by King David and is part of the Old Testament, and as such Friedrich Nietzsche would undoubtedly approve. He would like the muscular tribalism, the unapologetic ethnocentrism. Yet it is also part of the Christian tradition. And it is a work of beauty.

I read the Psalm recently in the memoir by English super soldier Andy McNab (Seven Troop, 2008, pp. 414–415), recipient of the Distinguished Conduct Medal and the Military Medal. It was given to Andy by another soldier who was a devout Christian. McNab saw frequent evidence of Christianity among elite soldiers. The Psalm is what one would expect from a biologically informed religion. Of course a universal religion seeks to defend the temporal interests of all believers, and as these can be opposed it would seek to harmonize those interests. It would seek peace and reciprocity. But it would never pretend that temporal interests do not exist and that people are not justified in defending them.

Psalm 35 (King James Version)

1Plead my cause, O LORD, with them that strive with me: fight against them that fight against me.

2Take hold of shield and buckler, and stand up for mine help.

3Draw out also the spear, and stop the way against them that persecute me: say unto my soul, I am thy salvation.

4Let them be confounded and put to shame that seek after my soul: let them be turned back and brought to confusion that devise my hurt.

5Let them be as chaff before the wind: and let the angel of the LORD chase them.

6Let their way be dark and slippery: and let the angel of the LORD persecute them.

7For without cause have they hid for me their net in a pit, which without cause they have digged for my soul.

8Let destruction come upon him at unawares; and let his net that he hath hid catch himself: into that very destruction let him fall.

9And my soul shall be joyful in the LORD: it shall rejoice in his salvation.

10All my bones shall say, LORD, who is like unto thee, which deliverest the poor from him that is too strong for him, yea, the poor and the needy from him that spoileth him?

11False witnesses did rise up; they laid to my charge things that I knew not.

12They rewarded me evil for good to the spoiling of my soul.

13But as for me, when they were sick, my clothing was sackcloth: I humbled my soul with fasting; and my prayer returned into mine own bosom.

14I behaved myself as though he had been my friend or brother: I bowed down heavily, as one that mourneth for his mother.

15But in mine adversity they rejoiced, and gathered themselves together: yea, the abjects gathered themselves together against me, and I knew it not; they did tear me, and ceased not:

16With hypocritical mockers in feasts, they gnashed upon me with their teeth.

17Lord, how long wilt thou look on? rescue my soul from their destructions, my darling from the lions.

18I will give thee thanks in the great congregation: I will praise thee among much people.

19Let not them that are mine enemies wrongfully rejoice over me: neither let them wink with the eye that hate me without a cause.

20For they speak not peace: but they devise deceitful matters against them that are quiet in the land.

21Yea, they opened their mouth wide against me, and said, Aha, aha, our eye hath seen it.

22This thou hast seen, O LORD: keep not silence: O Lord, be not far from me.

23Stir up thyself, and awake to my judgment, even unto my cause, my God and my Lord.

24Judge me, O LORD my God, according to thy righteousness; and let them not rejoice over me.

25Let them not say in their hearts, Ah, so would we have it: let them not say, We have swallowed him up.

26Let them be ashamed and brought to confusion together that rejoice at mine hurt: let them be clothed with shame and dishonour that magnify themselves against me.

27Let them shout for joy, and be glad, that favour my righteous cause: yea, let them say continually, Let the LORD be magnified, which hath pleasure in the prosperity of his servant.

28And my tongue shall speak of thy righteousness and of thy praise all the day long.

Charles Dodgson (email him) is the pen name of an English social analyst.

Christopher Donovan: Secular Right on the AmRen Shutdown

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Christopher Donovan:  Over at Secular Right, the blog for religion-averse conservatives, “Bradlaugh” has weighed in on the outrage that was the threat-driven shutdown of the American Renaissance conference.  “Bradlaugh” sings the praises of Jared Taylor but decries the “anti-semitism” of some conference attendees.  I guess even under a pen name, you’ve got to watch out for Big Jew.

It’s still a good post.  I haven’t scanned the 78 (when I checked last) comments, but if any TOO readers feel inclined to throw in, go right ahead.  Are we winning?

Though I drag my sorry sinner’s rear into random churches on the odd Sunday with my daughter in tow, I have the same sympathy for the Secular Right ethos as I did libertarianism back in college.  It’s got a nicely rational line-up of ideas and tends to attract whip-smart figures like Heather MacDonald, John Derbyshire and Walter Olson.  The secular right crowd shows a strength of mind that reminds me of, well, race realists and white advocates.

But like Christian conservatives, secular conservatives will never get anywhere near the society they envision because they ignore the fundamental issues of racial difference and ethnic competition.

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

Kevin MacDonald: On Shutting Down Pro-White Meetings

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Kevin MacDonald: William Sheldon’s current TOO article (“Pro-White Conference 2.0”) offers suggestions on how to avoid the aggressive tactics typically used against any meeting that has overtones of White advocacy. The recent cancellation of the AmRen conference and the cancellation of three speeches in America by BNP leader Nick Griffin (including one scheduled for AmRen) indicate a need to come up with a counter strategy. As Sheldon notes, the face-to-face meetings that are enabled by conferences are a crucial ingredient in any organization. Quite a few people attend conferences not so much to hear the speakers but to be able to network with like-minded others. 

Sheldon’s strategy of using Webinar technology would probably work — provide the benefits of a pro-White conference without drawing the attention of their Leftist opponents. It is an excellent prescription for a group that must remain underground in order not to expose its members to the usual costs of being associated with White advocacy (job loss, etc.). 

The downside is that pro-White advocates would be implicitly accepting their status as an underground movement. Such meetings could essentially go on forever without effecting real change in the direction we all want. 

It seems to me that we have to get above-ground visibility. We have to make noise and have a public presence if we are going to make real progress. We have to get in people’s faces and have the courage of our convictions. Hence perhaps Nick Griffin’s “frequently voiced despair over U.S. politics, given its lack of white nationalist parties” (in the WSJ article).

This is one thing that attracted me to American Third Position. The young men who are the backbone of the party go out onto the streets with signs and pamphlets advocating deporting illegals and other issues related to pro-White advocacy. They are not afraid of people spewing in-your-face hostility at them. (Guess what? You may be called a “racist” or a “Nazi.”) They do not hide away in secret conferences or restrict themsleves to discussing issues among themselves on private email lists. 

Nick Griffin dealing with hostility. The caption in the MailOnline: Heavy with hatred: The BNP leader Nick Griffin, typically surrounded by his security men

Quite clearly, the left is well aware that public visibility would be the beginning of the end for their dominance of public discourse. That’s why the mainstream media has given almost no coverage to the cancellations of AmRen or Nick Griffin — the only exception I have come across is a brief mention in the Wall Street Journal. The article is noteworthy for not mentioning anything about the obvious implications for public discourse in America. The tone of the article is that some meetings of far right crazies got shut down — expressed in the same manner as a story on the cancellation of a meeting of the local school board because of a snow storm. Imagine the outrage if meetings of La Raza or the NAACP were shut down with similar tactics. 

Meetings at privately owned facilities are problematic because businesses are likely to cave under the pressure of the left and I suppose that is their right as property owners.  Some people have suggested using government-owned facilities because denial by such a facility would raise First Amendment issues. I think this is a good idea. And we should be ready with attorneys willing to argue on our side if there are attempts at disruptions or if the government attempts to cancel the event for reasons like “public safety.” And we need security forces; and ways to identify the people who are doing the disrupting. 

And it should all be out in the open.

Note to Whites: Animals Aren’t Children, May Actually Kill You

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Dawn Brancheau, the 40-year-old White woman killed by a (surprise) killer whale, was married and had no children.  But “she loved the animals like they were her own children”, a family member says.

Allow for a moment my angle on this, which I realize isn’t shared by some White advocates:  Dawn Brancheau represents a disturbing trend among Whites whereby puppies, kittens, dogs, cats, horses, orangutans and other beasts are considered their “children.”  They collect them, work with them, hoard them, fawn over them and spend absurd amounts of money on them.  Meanwhile, they have no actual children — and I’m betting it’s not often because they’re biologically unable.

My unclinical opinion is that this is a form of obsessive compulsive disorder, though possibly with a historical root in an evolutionarily-developed survival affinity for animals (unique to Whites) that can provide food and protection.  The latter is understandable, but the former is a problem.

White women seem to be able to think of pretty much anything as their children — except natural children from their own wombs:  adopted children from Africa, expensive houses, dogs, even killer whales.  It has to stop.  Dawn Brancheu was fit and attractive and probably would have borne great White children.  Instead, she walked in front of nature’s moving train and got crushed.  Can you hear the Black comedians joking about this one? (“Da lady got in the tank with killer whales.  And guess what happened?”)

I’ll have to give them this one. Talk about survival of the fittest.

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

Jews and Money

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Editor Kevin MacDonald has just written about Our Unethical Financial Elite. This is a worthy topic, especially to the extent it openly discusses Jewish involvement.

Two things stand out here: First, the level of deceit and corruption is stunning. Second, the combination of Jews and financial malfeasance has a historical record thousands of years long. In other words, it is part of an old and sordid story, as I related in my essay The Culture of Deceit.

There I wrote how historians, including Paul Johnson (A History of the Jews) and Albert Lindemann (Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews), showed this pattern of Jewish deception and fraud. For example, in 1781 Prussian official Christian Wilhelm von Dohm published a tract claiming, in Johnson’s paraphrase, “The Jews had ‘an exaggerated tendency [to seek] gain in every way, a love of usury.’ These ‘defects’ were aggravated ‘by their self-imposed segregation . . .’ From these followed ‘the breaking of the laws of the state restricting trade, the import and export of prohibited wares, the forgery of money and precious metals.’” In short, von Dohm’s describes traditional Jewish communities as far more resembling a mafia-like group engaged in organized crime than what we think of as a religion.

Lindemann notes that during the 19th century in Eastern Europe there were also persistent complaints about Jewish perjury to help other Jews commit fraud and other crimes. For example, in Russia a neutral observer noted that judges “unanimously declared that not a single lawsuit, criminal or civil, can be properly conducted if the interests of the Jews are involved.” Writing in 1914, American sociologist Edward A. Ross commented on Jewish immigrants to America that “The authorities complain that the East European Hebrews feel no reverence for law as such and are willing to break any ordinance they find in their way. … In the North End of Boston ‘the readiness of the Jews to commit perjury has passed into a proverb.’”

Jewish involvement in financial scandals became a prominent theme of modern anti-Semitism. Johnson writes, “The Union Générale scandal in 1882, the Comptoire d’Escompte scandal in 1889—both involving Jews—were merely curtain-raisers” to a far more massive and complex crime, the Panama Canal scandal, ‘an immense labyrinth of financial manipulation and fraud, with [Jewish] Baron Jacques de Reinach right at the middle of it.’”

Lindemann offers a parallel description of the rise of Jewish power paired with Jewish involvement in major financial scandals. In Germany, Jews “were heavily involved in the get-rich-quick enterprises” of the period of rapid urbanization and industrialization of the 1860s and 70s. “Many highly visible Jews made fortunes in dubious ways . . . Probably the most notorious of these newly rich speculators was Hirsch Strousberg, a Jew involved in Romanian railroad stocks. He was hardly unique in his exploits, but as Peter Pulzer has written, ‘the . . . difference between his and other men’s frauds was that his was more impudent and involved more money.’”

Lindemann offers an account that sounds much like what Americans have been hearing about their own economic woes in the last few years:

In the summer of 1873 the stock markets in New York and Vienna collapsed. By the autumn of that year Germany’s industrial overexpansion and the reckless proliferation of stock companies came to a halt. Jews were closely associated in the popular mind with the stock exchange. Widely accepted images of them as sharp and dishonest businessmen made it all but inevitable that public indignation over the stock market crash would be directed at them. Many small investors, themselves drawn to the prospect of easy gain, lost their savings through fraudulent stocks of questionable business practices in which Jews were frequently involved.

Like Johnson, Lindemann believes that accusations of fraud against many European Jews were not based on mere fantasy. With respect to the Panama Canal scandal of 1888–1892, for instance, Lindemann writes:

Investigation into the activities of the Panama Company revealed widespread bribery of parliamentary officials to assure support of loans to continue work on the Panama Canal, work that had been slowed by endless technical and administrative difficulties. Here was a modern project that involved large sums of French capital and threatened national prestige. The intermediaries between the Panama Company and parliament were almost exclusively Jews, with German names and backgrounds, some of whom tried to blackmail one another . . . .

Thousands of small investors lost their savings in the Panama fiasco. . . . A trial in 1893 was widely believed to be a white-wash. The accused escaped punishment through bribery and behind-the-scenes machinations, or so it was widely believed. The Panama scandal seemed almost designed to confirm the long-standing charges of the French right that the republic was in the clutches of corrupt Jews who were bringing dishonor and disaster to France.

In many cases, the Jewish nexus of the financial scandal includes the idea that Jews involved in financial scandals were being protected by other highly placed Jews: As Lindemann notes, “The belief of anti-Semites in France about Jewish secretiveness was based on a real secretiveness of some highly placed and influential Jews. What anti-Semites suspected was not so much pure fantasy as a malicious if plausible exaggeration, since solid facts were hard to come by.”

Consider, for example, the spectacle of the Wall Street scandals of the 1980s. So much of it was played out on the pages of major newspapers and magazines, so there was no doubt about the identity of the vast majority of culprits—at least for those with eyes to see it.

Two writers who both had the eyes to see it and the talent to write about it intelligently were Connie Bruck—who happens to be Jewish—and James B. Stewart—who is not. Bruck wrote The Predators’ Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the Junk Bond Traders. The book has more than enough information to convince the average reader that Jewish financial mischief is rife—and has a massively negative effect on the greater non-Jewish world.   

Stewart’s book is even better, beginning with its title, Den of Thieves. For those whose biblical knowledge is sketchy, the title comes from Matthew 21:12–13, where he recounts

And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves. And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.

Stewart goes on to chronicle the misdeeds of Ivan Boesky, Martin Siegel, Dennis Levine, and Michael Milken, the mastermind behind it all. Simply by describing all the Jews involved Stewart makes clear that it was a cabal of Jews that pillaged and destroyed some of the most well-known corporations in America at the time by inventing and peddling “junk bonds” as an advance in capitalist operations. Lindemann was careful to include this in his story as well, writing that it had become clear that “the stock market scandals of the mid-to-late 1980s in the United States saw an overwhelming preponderance of Jews — at least ninety percent was a widely accepted figure.”

Jumping ahead to our own day, one of the best accounts of Jewish financial power—and its relationship to other forms of Jewish power—comes in the writing of retired professor James Petras. He has penned series of books starkly exposing “the Zionist Power Configuration” that includes Jewish dominance in Western finance.

In particular, his book, Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire: Bankers, Zionists and Militants, focuses on this, but he also addresses it in The Power of Israel in the United States, Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of US Power, and Global Depression and Regional Wars: The United States, Latin America and the Middle East.

Here are some of the observations Petras makes: “Jewish families are among the wealthiest families in the United States” and nearly a third of millionaires and billionaires are Jewish. He also points to similar wealth in Canada, where “over 30 percent of the Canadian Stock Market” is in Jewish hands. Alan Greenspan’s tenure as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve is also linked to Zionist power, since Greenspan was “a long time crony of Wall Street financial interests and promoter of major pro-Israeli investment houses.” (Greenspan was succeeded by coreligionist Ben Shalom Bernanke.)

Debunking the “high school textbook version of American politics,” Petras argues that “the people in key positions in financial, corporate and other business institutions establish the parameters within which the politicians, parties and media discuss ideas. These people constitute a ruling class.” Of the two groups cited by Petras—those in control of financial capital and Zioncons—both are so heavily Jewish as to constitute a single “cabal,” a word which Petras uses liberally throughout both books.

Wall Street supplies many of the “tried and experienced top leaders” who rotate in and out of Washington. At the top of the hierarchy, he finds the big private equity banks and hedge funds. Thus, political leadership descends from Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, the Carlyle Group and others. Goldman Sachs is a historically Jewish firm, Stephen A. Schwarzman is co-founder and current head of the Blackstone Group, while David Rubenstein is co-founder of the Carlyle Group and served in the Carter administration as a domestic policy adviser.

To get just a minor sense of the interconnectedness of Wall Street and Washington Petras is discussing—and to see its heavily Jewish ethnic nexus—note that during the second Clinton Administration, Robert Rubin served as Secretary of the Treasury and was succeeded by Larry Summers (also Jewish). Rubin worked his way to Vice Chairman and Co-Chief Operating Officer of Goldman Sachs prior to becoming the Secretary of the Treasury, and later became the Chairman of Citigroup. He is currently co-chairman of the board of directors on the Council on Foreign Relations.

Petras claims that former President Clinton and his economic advisers backed the regimes that allowed the plunder of Russian wealth. Though relegated to an endnote, he names Andrei Shleifer and Jeffrey Sachs as those involved. What is relevant here is the ethnic connections going to the top of American society that validate Petras’s emphasis on the combined power of Zionism, media and financial control.

Petras’s endnote shows that Harvard paid $26.5 million to settle a suit stemming from various improprieties associated with Harvard professors. As Steve Sailer illustrates, however, it is the Jewish aspect of the entire scandal that stands out. The principals of this scandal were Jews, and they were allegedly protected by fellow Jew, Harvard President Lawrence Summers (who had just finished a stint as Secretary of the Treasury). The upshot of the scandal was that the “reform” of the Russian economy “turned out to be one of the great larceny sprees in all history, and the Harvard boys weren’t all merely naive theoreticians.”

Sailer claims that he had not known about the Jewish identity of the “oligarchs” until he read Yale law professor Amy Chua’s book World on Fire (when Chua correctly noted that six out of the seven of Russia’s wealthiest oligarchs were Jews, her Jewish husband quipped to her, “Just six?  So who’s the seventh guy?”). These oligarchs had “paid for Boris Yeltsin’s 1996 re-election in return for the privilege of buying ex-Soviet properties at absurdly low prices (e.g., Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky was put in charge of auctioning off Yukos Oil, which owns about 2% of the world’s oil reserves—he sold it for $159 million to … himself).” Meanwhile, Jews in Russia represented about one percent of the population.

Sailer’s further observations only cast more light on the extent and value of these ethnic connections:

As I’ve said before in the context of exploring how Scooter Libby could serve as a mob lawyer for international gangster Marc Rich on and off for 15 years and then move immediately into the job of chief of staff to the Vice President of the United States, the problem is not that Jews are inherently worse behaved (or better behaved) than any other human group, but that they have achieved for themselves in America in recent years a collective immunity from anything resembling criticism [emphasis added].

Petras makes a similar argument when noting that  “Political corruption, not economic efficiency, is the driving force of economic empire-building.” As part of this “unprecedented pillage in Russia (1991-99) brought on by Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs’s and others’ “shock therapy” in Russia, at least a trillion dollars was transferred to U.S. and EU parties from Russia and Eastern Europe.

For this so interested, here is a brief bibliography of books dealing with the topic of Jews and money:

Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York (New York: Harper and Row, 1967); and The Grandees: America’s Sephardic Elite, (New York: Harper and Row, 1971); Jean Baer, The Self-Chosen: “Our Crowd” is Dead—Long Live Our Crowd (New York: Arbor House, 1982); Judith Ramsey Ehrlich and Barry J. Rehfeld, The New Crowd: The Changing of the Jewish Guard on Wall Street (New York: HarperPerennial, 1989); Richard L. Zweigenhaft and G. William Domhoff, Jews in the Protestant Establishment (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1982); Gerald Krefetz, Jews and Money: The Myths and the Reality (New Haven and New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1982); Dennis B. Levine, An Insider’s Account of Wall Street (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1991); Benjamin J. Stein, A License to Steal: The Untold Story of Michael Milken and the Conspiracy to Bilk the Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992); and J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1996).

Finally, there is the promise of a new book on capitalism, with due attention to its Jewish roots, by prolific author E. Michael Jones. His tome The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (order it here), shows the value in honestly discussing Jewish power and behavior. Keep an eye out for his new book. The topic of Jews and money is forever important.

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

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