Daniel Jonah Goldhagen: Peddler of Hate

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Now that we’ve reached December, it’s the time of year to observe (and suffer from) that familiar Jewish attitude toward Christmas: hate.

VDARE is now running its excellent War Against Christmas exposé of assaults on Christmas by “multicultural” haters of a holiday hundreds of millions of Americans love and cherish. For my money, it’s the best source of information on this particularly hurtful aspect of the war on Western cultures and people.

Tom Piatak leads off this year’s account, giving us a link to an Israeli paper’s description of what some Jews do on Christmas Eve. Reading it, I clearly saw the source for so much of Hollywood’s distaste for what Christmas means and what Christians do to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.

Scurry over to this Israeli site for the skinny — For them, it’s wholly unholy:

Christmas Eve is one of the few occasions when Hasidim refrain from Torah study, do not conduct weddings or go to the mikveh. But they do play chess and work on their bills.

On Christmas Eve, known in Jewish circles as Nitel Night, the klipot (shells) are in total control. The klipot are parasitical evil forces that attach themselves to the forces of good. According to kabbala (Jewish mysticism), on the night on which “that man” — a Jewish euphemism for Jesus — was born, not even a trace of holiness is present and the klipot exploit every act of holiness for their own purposes.

For this reason, Nitel Night, from nightfall to midnight, is one of the few occasions when Hasidim refrain from Torah study. On this horrific night, they neither conduct weddings nor do they go to the mikveh (ritual bath). An entire folkloric literature has developed around the unusual recreational activities of Nitel Night.

Oh, there’s the usual disclaimer that not all Jews follow this custom, but in two decades of research on Jews, I’ve found that it’s simply a truism that Jews have an exceedingly negative view of Jesus, Mary, Christians and Christmas. No wonder so many spit when passing a church . . . or even spit on Christians themselves.

But in the Haaretz story, this passage about Kabbalistic toilet paper really stood out:

The Knesset correspondent of the ultra-Orthodox newspaper Hamodia, Zvi Rosen, relates that celebrated Hasidic admorim (sect leaders) would cut a year’s supply of toilet paper for Sabbath use (to avoid tearing toilet paper on Sabbath) on this night. Actually, this disrespectful act has profound kabbalistic significance, because kabbalistic literature extensively discusses Christianity as waste material excreted from the body of the Jewish people.

Honestly, I couldn’t make this stuff up. And get this: One of their commandments recommends that they attempt procreation on Friday night, which is a holy time. “Yet on Nitel Night, which has no holiness, it is customary to refrain from observing the commandment, because of the fear that a Jewish child conceived on Jesus’ birthday could become an apostate.”

Now how might this anti-Christian sentiment play out in, say, The Big Apple, home to so many hip and chic magazines? According to one account, “it is tough to beat an illustration by the prominent comic-book creator Art Spiegelman. This was intended to go on the cover of the New Yorker magazine in December, 1994, and it revealed Santa urinating in public. Even Tina Brown, the publicity-loving editor of the New Yorker at the time, thought Spiegelman had gone too far, and the piece was never used. In the long history of fallen Santas, that was a rare moment of restraint.” (But Brown did run Spiegelman’s Easter cover picture of the Easter Bunny being crucified.)

As we’ll see below in another case, here Jews spin their own hatred of others as a response to — drum roll — “anti-Semitism.” As one rabbi explained about Nitel Night, “Anti-Semites would ambush Jews and savagely beat them, sometimes even killing them, in the streets on Christmas Eve. Thus, the rabbis decreed that Jews should remain at home that night and not wander in the streets.”

Now go back and read my two-part series last year about Hollywood movies that kill the spirit of Christmas, and sometimes kill Santa, too. (See Merry Christmas . . . NOT! and Merry Christmas NOT! Part 2. We now have a better idea of the font for such a spirit of hatred.

Our editor Kevin MacDonald recently captured this spirit in his post on TOO’s new blog. When talking about a trio of rich Jews, he notes a passage from one of their books:

The Wikipedia entry includes a comment on [John Sperling’s] book The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America: “One America, to judge from the book’s illustrations, … lives in ‘vibrant’ cities with ballet troupes, super-creative Frank Gehry buildings and quiet, tasteful religious ritual; the other relies on contemptible extraction industries (oil, gas and coal) and inhabits a world of white supremacy and monster truck shows and religious ceremonies in which beefy men in cheap clothes scream incomprehensibly at one another.”

Now that I’ve got you in a spirit of, well, hate, let me introduce today’s subject: Professor Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.

Younger readers may not remember the name Daniel Jonah Goldhagen because he first came to our attention back in 1996 when his blistering first book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, appeared. That heavily hyped book wanted to take the blame for the Holocaust off Hitler and his lieutenants and put it where Goldhagen felt it belonged: on ALL Germans. They loved killing Jews in the Holocaust, Goldhagen argued. Being Christian and all, they had internalized  virulent “eliminationist anti-Semitism.”

Naturally, the New York Times adored the book (it spent twenty-five weeks on their Best Seller list), and it was translated into at least fifteen languages.

Across the Big Pond, it sparked the “Goldhagen Debate” in Germany. Defeated in war in 1945, and more thoroughly defeated in spirit ever since, the German nation lauded Goldhagen’s assault on them. A prestigious prize was given: “Because of the penetrating quality and the moral power of his presentation, Daniel Goldhagen has greatly stirred the consciousness of the German public.”

Not all informed readers were as thrilled. Professor Albert Lindemann, for one, wrote in Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge U. Press 1997) that treatments of the Holocaust by those such as Goldhagen “lack penetration in striking ways. A large number might best be described as cries of pain or expressions of indignation rather than efforts to understand.” Further, he called the book “questionable and simplistic; [Goldhagen] typically ignores, or is ignorant of, evidence that contradicts his by no means original reading of German history.” In sum, Goldhagen’s thesis about pan-German responsibility for the Holocaust “might be termed a twentieth-century psogos, a tirade that is motivated by goals other than the impartial search for truth.”

Well, that’s putting it more nicely than I would, but then Lindemann was writing a year after Goldhagen’s first book, while I have the advantage of a dozen more years to draw on. By 2002, Goldhagen had cast his net more widely in his next work, A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair. One reviewer for National Review, called A Moral Reckoning “a 352-page exercise in intellectual bad manners” and “a spree of intellectual wilding.” This was part of the genre of anti-Catholic books that were all the rage during that period, prompting Philip Jenkins to pen The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice.

Now comes Professor Goldhagen’s latest book, Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity. And what a doozy it is. I read the review of it in The New York Times Book Review. Reviewer James Traub thought it was swell.

To my surprise, another review of it turned up in The National Interest. The title of the review, “The Willing Misinterpreter,” captures the tone of the review. Though reviewer David Rieff is a fellow Jew (his mother was Susan Sontag, of blessed memory), he tears apart Goldhagen’s heated prose, beginning by labeling him an “amateur historian.”

As I noted, Goldhagen has widened his net in hunting bad guys, as Rieff picks up on: “Worse Than War is, depending on your point of view, either the logical conclusion of the path Goldhagen has been taking for the past fifteen years or its reductio ad absurdum.” Acknowledging Goldhagen’s families’ history, Rieff still states that Goldhagen’s views “are either willfully naïve or idiotic.” Tracing the bombastic style Goldhagen employs to Goldhagen’s high regard for . . . Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Rieff concludes that “The man really does give self-love a bad name.”

In addition to the differences in assessments of the worth of Worse Than War, I noticed one other important difference between The Times piece and that in The National Interest: The former ignores Jewish identity and Israel, while Rieff twice notes Goldhagen’s powerful pro-Israel orientation. This prompts me to unpack the review in The Times.

To do this, however, allow me a short digression. Earlier this year, I was musing over the question of whether Jews ever feel guilt or remorse when they blatantly insult, injure or kill goyim. I had to conclude, based on my research and observations, that the answer was no. Invariably, they possess mental traits that allow them to project their guilty behavior onto the actual victim, and in turn conceive of themselves as the victims. (Have a look at Chapter 8 of Kevin MacDonald’s Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, which deals with the phenomenon of Jewish self-deception.)

No sooner had I reached this conclusion than E. Michael Jones in his magazine Culture Wars called my views into question. In the April issue, he published his essay “Jewish Monsters from the Jewish Id.” The essay was partially based on his 2000 book Monsters from the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film. The book discussed how the sexual liberation crowd “tried to drive religious and moral nature out with a pitchfork, but found that nature only returned through the back door, in the form of a monster.” In other words, as one review summarized with respect to sexual license and its attendant abortion problem, “Horror, says Jones, comes from a guilty conscience that won’t admit that it’s done anything wrong — and horror stories reveal the true nature of that guilt again and again.”

Jones combined this with his remarkable 2008 book The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History to argue that the 2009 film The Unborn “is about Jewish guilt over abortion manifesting itself as fetal monsters.”

Jones’ review is too long to describe here, but let me say I found his argument compelling. Let me just offer this one passage because it informs what follows on Goldhagen. The crucial Jewish role in getting abortion legalized in America, Jones argues, plus the high rates at which Jews abort their own children,

explains the need to bring up Auschwitz, because the function of the holocaust is to absolve all Jews from any guilt they may have incurred by violating the moral law. Auschwitz is the totem which calms the troubled Jewish conscience by assuring the Jew that he is the eternal victim, and, as such, incapable of incurring guilt as the perpetrator of some immoral act like, say, killing a fellow Jew in the womb of his mother.

More pertinently yet, Jones sees that last December’s Israeli massacre of innocent Palestinian women and children also inevitably creates subconscious Jewish guilt. Which brings me back to Goldhagen and the review of his book in The New York Times.

The Times review never mentions Israel or its behavior. Goldhagen is writing about all manner of genocides and man’s inhumanity to man, but the review is silent on one of the most prominent ongoing examples in the world: that of the Israelis against the Palestinians (see “For Whom the Gaza Bell Tolls,” Part 1 and Part 2.) Early chapters in Worse Than War have titles such as “Our Age’s Slaughters” and “Varieties of Eliminationist  Assault,” so I have to wonder if he admits to what Israel is doing and has done.

More broadly, I find it highly unlikely that Goldhagen will highlight the prominent Jewish role in the Communist takeover of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, resulting in tens of millions of deaths of non-Jews. Perhaps readers familiar with this new book can help me.

Based on the two reviews I’ve discussed, however, as well as Goldhagen’s past works, I’d wager that he ignores, downplays, or denies Jewish guilt in any number of mass slaughters over the ages. If so, I can proffer this hypothesis: A Jewish writer like Goldhagen is projecting Jewish guilt for Jewish behavior onto the groups he writes about. More to the point, Goldhagen himself is dealing with the guilt engendered by concrete Jewish behavior, but is repressing it. As we all know, what is repressed must come out somewhere.

The result in Goldhagen’s case is a series of increasingly obsessive books, where the target group grows larger and larger. Meanwhile, because Goldhagen has mis-identified the source of his rage, his rage only grows.

Daniel Goldhagen

So what else might be going on in the mind of Goldhagen, one of the most privileged Americans of his generation? As far as I can tell, no one has ever touched or threatened a hair on his head. He was born in Massachusetts and raised as the son of a Harvard professor (who survived the Holocaust). In turn, Daniel attended Harvard from B.A. through Ph.D. and then taught there for some years. What might account for his elevated level of what can only be termed hate?

Getting back to my introductory discussion on this “Jewish virtue” of hate — yes, it was so identified in an infamous essay in First Things, “The virtue of hate” where the Jewish rabbi and then Yale Divinity School student admitted that a nun who realized that “hatred is in the Jewish religion” was right. As most of us already know, “Hebrew prophets and judges believed ardently in the ‘virtue of hate.’” With a passion. I like that. And the rabbi has no problem acknowledging that “many Jews, in my own experience, have continued to despise religions Christians.” Bottom line: “When hate is appropriate, then it is not only virtuous, but essential for Jewish well-being.”

It is a common Jewish personality trait that we cannot ignore because so many Jews direct so much hatred toward so many of us non-Jews. Worse, they have the power to turn that hatred into real harm (and to subsequently protect themselves from their actions).

As just another taste of this process, peruse Hervé Ryssen’s characterization of Jewish intellectuals’ contempt for non-Jews in this piece:

It is not enough for these intellectuals to talk nonsense, to lull us with “human rights,” to bind us with repressive laws, and to inject us with alien cultural poisons. They also have to pour into our ears their contempt for our old cultures. But this contempt does not seem to fully satisfy their thirst for revenge. They must also insult us and spit in our faces: “ignoramuses, xenophobes, paranoiacs, morons, lunatics, etc.” . . .

And I will not recount the innumerable films in which the cosmopolitan scriptwriters take their revenge against Christian civilization and the white man in general. It seems obvious to me, regarding all this logorrhea, that these people hate us. It could not be any more obvious if they wore flashing neon signs on their heads.

Let me close with this point: Goldhagen writes that “hundreds of millions of people are at risk of becoming the victims of genocide and related violence.” God help us if Goldhagen is projecting repressed Jewish desires and intentions, for given the current Jewish stranglehold over America, they could indeed induce mass slaughter. We have seen the process at work in Russia, so we know many of the details, accentuated by the tremendous death toll of non-Jews. Recall that “anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with and possibly shot by a Jewish investigator.”

Tomislav Sunic expounded on this parallel between Soviet Russia and today’s America in Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age. In that book, he saw dark clouds on the horizon for any group in America that might be targeted: “Thus, in order for the proper functioning of future Americanized society, the removal of millions of surplus citizens must become a social and possibly also an ecological necessity.” Kevin MacDonald, in the book’s Foreword, identified what sectors might be targeted “and therefore worthy of mass murder by the American counterparts of the Jewish elite in the Soviet Union—the ones who journeyed to Ellis Island instead of Moscow.” They are the European-derived Whites populating vast areas of the American nation, particularly in the so-called “red states.”

Remember, ideas have consequences. And the good Professor Goldhagen seems to have a fixation on genocide. That worries me, given that he is plugged into the ruling circles of the United States.

But in some distant future, there might be hope. As evidenced by his own books, Goldhagen opts to collectively blame Germans, to collectively blame Catholics, to collectively blame many other groups for their trespasses. What if Jews were ever to collectively repent for their considerable trespasses against others these last three-four millennia? To repent for their financial, political, and most of all lethal crimes against humanity? Maybe then the projection and repression might stop and the world would become a far better place.

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

Christoper Donovan: In Philly, Failed System… or Failed Demographics?

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Christopher Donovan: The Philadelphia Inquirer is running a series on the low rate of convictions secured by police and prosecutors in the city.  The system’s overcrowded.  The sheer volume of cases makes the system unwieldy.  Defense lawyers postpone cases in the hopes that witnesses will disappear.  The black “stop sntichin'” culture keeps witnesses off the stand.  Judges dismiss worthy cases.

So, the blame comes to rest on the White “system” and its players (realizing that many in this system are actually minorities).  But the larger demographic reality is that Philadelphia is a heavily black urban area, and it’s plagued with crime and chaos for just that reason.  Juxtapose this with a criminal justice system that developed over centuries in all-white Britain — and was tweaked by all-white American Constitution framers — and you have a recipe for disaster. In fact, you have a recipe for complete unworkability, no matter how hard whites try, or how many tax dollars are squeezed from Whites.

The failure isn’t with the criminal justice system.  The failure is with the multiracial society.  Will the Inquirer take a look at that?

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Kevin MacDonald: The Myth of Pure Science

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Kevin MacDonald: The brouhaha over climate change science has prompted an op-ed in the LA Times  “Climate change e-mail scandal underscores myth of pure science.”  It’s interesting to substitute race science rather than climate science when pondering their comments. Some quotes:

The East Anglia controversy serves as a reminder that when the politics are divisive and the science is sufficiently complex, the boundary between the two may become indiscernible.

Race science is also complex — complex enough for obfuscation by politically motivated parties. It’s not like the double helix structure of DNA where someone who doubts it can be safely relegated to the Flat Earth Society.

Yet both parties have agreed, although tacitly, on one thing: Science is the appropriate arbiter of the political debate, and policy decisions should be determined by objective scientific assessments of future risks. This seductive idea gives politicians something to hide behind when faced with divisive decisions. If “pure” science dictates our actions, then there is no need to acknowledge the role that political interests and social values play in deciding how society should address climate change.

Politicians (and academics and journalists) often hide behind the idea that science has absolutely proved that IQ is not a valid measure or that race differences in academic success are due to White racism, etc.  No need to mention the political commitments of the people who have produced this “knowledge” — people like S. J. Gould, Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin.

In practice, science is competitive, backbiting, venal, imperfect and, indeed, political. Science, in other words, is replete with the same human failings that mark all other social activities.

For sure. I think pretty much every scientist starts out thinking science is way purer than it is. By the end of their career, they are less idealistic. In my case, it came as a result of writing The Culture of Critique. A more recent example of my disillusion is evolutionary psychology.

What is the solution? Let politics do its job; indeed, demand it. … Better to recognize that decision-makers, depending on their political beliefs, will weigh the evidence and risks of climate change differently when evaluating policy options. Voters should evaluate the decisions on that basis, rather than on the false notion that science is dictating the choices.

The problem with this is that it’s no solution at all. We are supposed to simply accept the fact that race science is politicized and that politicians are politicized in what they say about race science. Then somehow the voters are supposed to wade through all this when they decide how to vote on issues such as anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives.

But voters are completely unqualified for evaluating any of the evidence. And in any case, surely voters’ politics will affect their choices in the same way politics  influences everyone else’s choices. 

Of course, the media will weigh in heavily and predictably to convince voters against race realism because we all know they are politicized. The media will be effective because when it comes to race science, the realists are completely marginalized. So in the end, clueless voters who read the New York Times or watch Fox News will end up making these decisions. 

I think that Jewish intellectuals have always known about the politicization of truth. And if truth is politicized, all that’s left is to try to establish consensus and delegitimize everything else –forcibly if need be. This is from Ch. 6 of The Culture of Critique:

A fundamental aspect of Jewish intellectual history has been the realization that there is really no demonstrable difference between truth and consensus. Within traditional Jewish religious discourse, “truth” was the prerogative of a privileged interpretive elite that in traditional societies consisted of the scholarly class within the Jewish community. Within this community, “truth” and “reality” were nothing more (and were undoubtedly perceived as nothing more) than consensus within a sufficiently large portion of the interpretive community.

People who dissent from the manufactured consensus are simply marginalized from polite society. So the closest we can come to truth in race science is consensus and the consensus simply reflects the politics of the people with more power.

I think a lot of race scientists have had an idealistic conception of science. Until we change the people who have the power, especially in the media, there is no chance for their ideas to become mainstream.

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Comments on Ethnic Interests

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Given Ian Jobling’s work (which is decidedly odd for someone who claims to be a race realist and defender of the White race) and the recent interest on this list in ethnic genetic interests and genetic similarity theory (GST), I thought I would briefly lay out my views.

My ideas on GST are spelled out here. The data compiled by Phil Rushton and others are very clear that people assort on the basis of genetic similarity — they like genetically similar people more, are more likely to marry them, etc. Any critic of this theory must show where this rather large amount of data is wrong and provide another explanation for why genetic similarity influences behavior. That has not happened. A recent study that is entirely compatible with GST concludes “assortative mating related to genetic ancestry [not social class] persists in Latino populations to the current day, and has impacted on the genomic structure in these populations.”

Contrary to Jobling, my argument is that GST is not about altruism: “Relationships of marriage, friendship, and ethnic group affiliation fundamentally involve reciprocity, and self-interest is an obvious component of all of these relationships: Assortative mating increases relatedness to children, so that one receives a greater genetic payoff for the same parenting effort. Successful alliances and successful friendships have a greater payoff to self if genetically similar others succeed when you succeed.” There is also a higher threshold for defection.

The same argument can obviously be extended to larger kinship groups. Again, it’s not about altruism but about self-interest. Indeed, as I note, genetic similarity must compete with other interests. For example, in marriage, genetic similarity must compete with the resource value (health, age, beauty, wealth) of a prospective mate. As I also note, GST is not adequate as an underpinning of an evolutionary psychology of groups — of the deep attachment that people often have to their ingroups. Nevertheless, GST mechanisms are doubtless responsible for what I term “implicit Whiteness” — the primal attraction that Whites have for each other in an increasingly multi-racial societies they live in now. Clearly, this has nothing to do with altruism.

Jobling mentions my comment on Jews preferring martyrdom over conversion to Christianity as an example of bad thinking. My argument is not based on GST, but on social identity (SI) and individualism/collectivism mechanisms. In the article referred to above, I provide a number of arguments for why SI mechanisms are an evolutionary adaptation to between-group conflict. These must be answered by any competent critique. I also provide an argument for individual and group differences in social identity processes based on research on individualism/collectivism. Again, it’s not about altruism. The argument is that at the collectivist extreme, people lack an algorithm to calculate the relative benefits of defection versus continued group membership. Any reasonable critique must address my specific argument and provide an alternative explanation of martyrdom. I also argue that in many parts of the world people have lived in group-structured populations for evolutionarily significant periods. This in turn leads into one of the major areas of my thinking briefly discussed in the article— that European peoples are significantly more individualistic than collectivist peoples, prototypically the Jews. European tendencies toward individualism figure in much of my recent writing. (See here and here.)

Finally, I argue that rational choice mechanisms are critical for developing adaptive strategies for humans. For humans, the evolutionary game is played out in conflicts over the construction of culture — hence my book, The Culture of Critique. This argument first appeared in my books on Judaism, since I repeatedly noted that Jews were flexible strategizers, not preprogrammed robots. (Whatever else one might say, an effective lobbying group like AIPAC is using rational mechanisms, not evolved modules in figuring out how to influence US foreign policy.) In the academic journal literature, I presented it here, and I expanded on it here recently.)

It is true that these mechanisms do not have an affective component — they don’t produce an emotional allegiance to one’s race or ethnic group, and they are therefore insufficient to build a mass movement. But rational choice mechanisms do show why it is entirely rational to have allegiance to one’s ethnic group. Implicit Whiteness based on genetic similarity is insufficient as a basis for a successful White movement. I think that ultimately a White mass movement will rely on social identity mechanisms because they do have an emotional component. As Whites become a minority and as the political fault lines are more and more centered on race, these mechanisms will naturally be triggered. This is a recent comment along these lines.

Acting on and strategizing about genetic differences is the very essence of evolution, and there is no doubt that genetic differences between human groups are meaningful and have important effects on behavior. Quite simply, societies composed entirely of sub-Saharan African groups are going to be very different from societies composed entirely of Jews, Chinese, or Europeans.

Humans, like all living things, have genetic interests because we are not clones. People who deny there are genetic differences and behave as if there are no meaningful genetic differences will simply lose the evolutionary game — much like a pacifist male elephant seal who refuses to fight other males in order to be able to mate. Salter’s work is absolutely bedrock sound. Jobling repeats several arguments that have long been refuted (see this paper for a more detailed discussion). As Salter notes no matter what the level of genetic commonality among humans, if this commonality negates the adaptiveness of favoring one’s ethnic group or race, then it must also negate the adaptiveness of parental love. This is absurd, both intuitively and theoretically. But you cannot have it both ways: if preserving genes in your children is adaptive, doing so with any concentration of your genes must be adaptive.

There is no doubt that we have evolved modules that reliably promoted adaptive behavior in past environments, but as humans we are able to make plans and strategies that don’t depend on these modules but are responsive to current contingencies. For example, one idea that has been proposed is to establish a White homeland in the US. Such a proposal should be evaluated by rational choice mechanisms: What are the costs and benefits — genetically, psychologically, financially, economically, and in terms of defensibility, etc.? How exactly would White be defined? These questions can only be answered by rational choice mechanisms — what psychologists term explicit processing.

If we don’t act on our knowledge and understanding of genetic differences we will be like the pacifist elephant seal — a genetic dead end. Our tombstone could read: “Here lies the White race. It went out and conquered the world. It then committed suicide because it decided the game wasn’t worth playing.” This is definitely not an ideology that seems to appeal to others around the world, as in Israel where immigration and marriage are tightly linked to genetic ancestry.

The peoples who appear to be on course to inherit the earth will doubtless enjoy attending museums dedicated to exhibits of this peculiar people. It is perhaps fitting that after the hatred that so many now bear toward Whites for their previous dominance has subsided, our demise would be seen as a mere evolutionary curiosity — the first group to voluntarily exit history.

Kevin MacDonald: Martin Webster on Peter Oborne's Exposé of Britain's Israel Lobby

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Kevin MacDonald: Martin Webster’s article on Peter Oborne’s exposé of Britain’s Israel Lobby was just posted on TOO. Here’s the link to the article, and we are also posting the link to Oborne’s 50-minute program in  the video section of the TOO front page. This is very long article by TOO standards, and Webster adds a lot that is not in the program, so I thought I would briefly mention a couple of things. 

He does an excellent job of exposing the twin strategies of bribery and intimidation that have been so successfully pursued by the Isaral Lobby in America and elsewhere. The article shows how the Israel Lobby has been able to avoid laws intended to prevent corruption of public officials. It also discusses a number of complicit non-Jews who profit from their connections with the Israel Lobby and, in some cases, are married to Jewish women.

Finally, the article illustrates once again the importance of media control. Oborne’s TV show has been given the silent treatment in the media and will doubtless be yet another example of how the truth is marginalized and basically irrelevant in contemporary Western societies.

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The Archaeology of Postmodernity, Part II: The Emancipation of Dissonance

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From an “archaeological” point of view, there are several striking parallels between early 20th-century Austria (as exemplified by the case of Vienna) and early 21st-century America. The easiest ones to unearth are these: increasingly intense minority activism (encouraged by laissez faire policies), a gradual breakdown of the hegemony of the national language and traditional culture, accompanied by a demographic shift away from the country’s Traditionskern — its Germanic ethno-cultural core.

At the turn of the 20th century, Vienna — as the center of the multi-ethnic state of the Habsburg Empire — sheltered a hodgepodge of nationalities, language groups, religious confessions, avant-garde artists, renowned scientists, and rebellious intellectuals who “comingled to give rise to a unique cultural ambiance.”

The ethnic minorities most abundantly represented were the Czechs and the Jews, followed by the Poles and Hungarians. Jacques Le Rider points out that “the xenophobia aroused by the growth of the Czech colony, and the spread of anti-Semitism made Vienna an ethnic battlefield rather than a melting pot.”  The unresolved nationality conflicts “were sapping the foundations of the Monarchy”, according to Robert S. Wistrich.

Kaiser Franz Joseph of Austria

As Stefan Newerkla points out, the basically tolerant laws “provided for the right to have education in one’s native language and stated that no citizen should be forced to learn the language of any other ethnic group.”  Language became a prominent site for inter-ethnic conflicts.  Thomas Wallnig emphasizes the fatal consequences of “the massive struggle between the nationalities that marked the final decades of the Habsburg monarchy”; the state was “unable to establish ‘equal rights of all branches of the people’, since every change to the status quo was interpreted as a political advance by one group at the expense of another with state support.”

These tensions were also felt in the world of music – an art form that occupied a special place in the history and cultural identity of Vienna, as a major repository for some of the greatest composers in the history of Western music (Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner, among others).

By the early 20th century, the Jewish impact on music and modernity had become so obvious that critics demanded to “stem Jewish music and Jewishness in music before they spread too far,” as Philip Bohlman points out.

Richard Wagner’s polemical writings — tracing Jewishness in melody and speech, body and race (“inner spaces”) — “unleashed a flood of responses to the presence of Jewishness in music, pro and contra.” The rhetoric shared by Wagner and his detractors stressed the ontological interority of music: das Judentum in der Musik (Judaism or Jewishness in music). As Philip Bohlman notes,

Rather than rejecting Wagner’s anti-Semitism as baseless prejudice, most Jewish responses mounted counterarguments affirming the possibility of Jewishness in music, using the same terms, if not case studies, as Wagner and often embracing the racialization of music.

Thus, Heinrich Berl in his essay Das Judentum in der abendländischen Musik (“Jewishness in Western Music,” later published as a monograph with Wagner’s exact title, Das Judentum in der Musik) not only accepted the charge that Jewishness in music inevitably embodied oriental traditions, but even rejoiced in “the richness of Eastern influences.”

Richard Wagner held that the capacity of Jewish composers only to reproduce enabled them to enter European music history at a moment of historical collapse, in the aftermath of Beethoven’s death in 1827. Bohlman points out that “Wagner’s claim that Jewishness allowed only for the reproduction of music [indirectly] opened the historical door, emancipating Jewish music from ritual and recalibrating it as Western.”  Since Wagner held that Jewish musicians were essentially bricoleurs –  i.e. ‘handy-men’ adopting relational rather than rational approaches to assemble and enchain their performances from bits and pieces – no Jewish innovations were to be expected.

On the other hand, as Thomas S. Grey points out, the Central European lingua franca of Yiddish was seen as “emblematic of a tendency to appropriate and distort all genuine cultural forms, from speech to writing to philosophical or political thought to singing, acting, and musical composition.”

The movement away from classical tonality was thus radicalized with Gustav Mahler’s “tonal irony”, and culminated with Schoenberg’s atonal revolution — the dissolution and abandonment of tonal structures as an organizing system in favor of the radical constructivism that emerged with twelve-tone serial music: “With the progressive fragmentation of musical material — its decomposition into its smallest elements — the hierarchically ordered tonal structures, together with the restrictions they placed upon possible relations and combinations among tones, were dissolved.”

The ‘emancipation of dissonance’, according to Carl Schorske, not only destroyed harmonic order and cadential certainty: “By establishing a democracy of tones … [the] tonal relations, clusters, and rhythms expand and contract ‘like a gas’, as Schoenberg said.”  Schoenberg, as Leon Botstein points out, “sought to transmute a German national heritage — the pre-Wagnerian German tradition, seen as the universal in music — adequately into the twentieth century. In this way Schoenberg sought to dominate the musical world the way Wagner had, but in a manner in which all Jews … could partake as equals. … Like the inter-war protagonists of Esperanto, Schoenberg sought to fashion a new, valid universal modernist art in which both reason and emotion could be communicated and to which no social class, religion or ethnic group had claims of priority or higher status.”

Arnold Schoenberg

Since the Renaissance, Western music  has been conceived on the basis of a hierarchical tonal order, the diatonic scale, whose central element was the tonic triad, the defined key. Musical events, thus, are not of equal importance: Some are structurally important, while others are primarily ornamental.  Music, like linguistic discourse,  has traditionally been a time-oriented structure that progresses from a beginning to an end.  As Carl Schorske emphasizes,

The task of the composer was to manipulate dissonance in the interests of consonance, just as a political leader in an institutional system manipulates movement, canalizing it to serve the purposes of established authority.  In fact, tonality in music belonged to the same socio-cultural system as the science of perspective in art, with its centralized focus; the Baroque status system in society, and legal absolutism in politics. It was part of the same culture that favored the geometric garden — the garden as the extension of rational architecture over nature. … The tonal system was a musical frame in which tones had unequal power to express, to validate, and to make bearable the life of man under a rationally organized, hierarchical culture. To make all movement fall in the end into order (the musical term is ‘cadence’) was, appropriately, the aim of classical harmony in theory and in practice.

Ethan Haimo points out that with Schoenberg’s atonal revolution, it simply becomes difficult or impossible to determine which of the tones in the chord is the unstable tone, and which are the stable ones:

When the dissonance cannot be identified, its resolution cannot be directed. And when that happens, the emancipation of the dissonance is at hand — not as the result of theoretical speculation about the more remote overtones of the harmonic series but as a consequence of the extension of the methods of chordal formation to include multiple altered and elaborative tones. … Schoenberg was not searching for stable intervals when he reached toward the more remote overtones of the harmonic system; instead, his principles of chord formation made it impossible to identify which tones needed resolution. The consequences of this are profound. If dissonance cannot be identified, it cannot be resolved. And if it cannot be resolved, then the very notion of consonance and dissonance becomes moot.

Consequently, some of the essential pillars of tonality were pulled down by Schoenberg: “The lack of directed harmonic progressions throws the existence of a tonic into doubt; the lack of hierarchy abolishes the diatonic scale as a referential collection; the inability to identify the dissonance erases the distinction between consonance and dissonance.”

Nicholas Cook points out the “thread of violent political imagery [that] runs through Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre,” as when he (Schoenberg) writes:

The tonality must be placed in danger of losing its sovereignty; the appetites for independence and the tendencies towards mutiny must be given opportunity to activate themselves; one must grant them their victories, not begrudging an occasional expansion of territory. For a ruler can only take pleasure in ruling live subjects; and live subjects will attack and plunder.

Schoenberg talks of vagrant chords bringing about the destruction of the tonal system.

Cook also points out that ”the overlapping of insider and outsider identities that coloured Viennese modernism is often seen as a specifically Jewish phenomenon,” and that there was “a longstanding Viennese, or Habsburg, tradition … of associating music and social structure.”  He draws attention to “the network of terms connected with harmonic rootedness, terms which have a technical musical meaning yet at the same time carry the imprint of the political and racial discourses of fin-de-siècle Vienna”:

These political and racial connotations tend to be spelt out more explicitly in Schoenberg’s theoretical writings than Schenker’s, and the term Schoenberg uses in his Harmonielehre to describe chords that lack rootedness immediately reveals what is at issue: they are ‘vagrant’ chords. … Circumstances can turn any chord into a vagrant, he says … perhaps he was thinking of the displaced Ostjuden (later he might have thought of himself). … [A]t all events he [Schoenberg] assigns a range of equally dubious attributes to his vagrants: they are ‘the issue of inbreeding’, their character ‘indefinite, hermaphroditic, immature’. It is possible for them to be assimilated (Schoenberg’s phrase is ‘fit into the environment’), but when they appear in large numbers they will ‘join forces’, and ‘through accumulation of such phenomena the solid structure of tonality could be demolished’; elsewhere Schoenberg says that vagrant chords have ‘led inexorably to the dissolution of tonality’.

In the 1920s, the conservative musicologist and critic Alfred Heuss attacked the “specifically Jewish spirit” of Schoenberg’s music, which he saw as resulting from a “ruthless tendency to draw the very last consequences from a narrow premise.” Annegret Fauser points out that Schoenberg’s expansion of Wagnerian chromaticism pushed “quasi-polyphonic voice-leading to extremes.”

According to Arnold Whittall, Wagner’s use of “half-diminished” seventh chords to promote tonal ambiguity at moments of great dramatic tension and instability remained of absorbing interest in the writings of Arnold Schoenberg:

[T]he very “indefiniteness” of the Tristan chord has made it possible for theorists to regard it as a post-tonal or even atonal entity, thereby promoting that very breakdown of tonality of which Wagner’s own practice stopped short. … [T]he tonally disruptive potential of the chord, and of Wagner’s use of it, was well understood by those early twentieth-century theorists who were experiencing the consequences for composition of the breakdown of tonal order and, as they saw it, of the formal coherence that went with that order.

As Cook observes, Schoenberg ends up undermining the conservative discourses from which he borrows: The way Schoenberg turns a conservative argument against the archetypal ‘Other’ into an affirmation of the role of the ‘Other’ in the future of German culture, might be seen as “a deconstruction of the conservative discourse of hybridity”:

It works by taking a political stance, translating that into musical terms, developing the musical argument, and then translating (or leaving the reader to translate) the conclusion back into political terms.  In other words, it uses music to create an assertion about something other than music — in rather the same way … that television commercials use musical logic to make a point about hair dye or financial products (Cook, p. 310).

The birth of atonality was, according to Ethan Haimo, “the result of a single composer’s intellectual and artistic makeup.” Bryan Simms points out that Schoenberg “jealously defended his historical role as the first to break with tonality and as the discoverer of the twelve-tone system.”

Arnold Schoenberg’s abandonment of tonality in 1908 and the development of the Second Viennese School were both symptom and cause of an ever-widening gulf between composers using music to make discursive political and aesthetic statements (a product of analytical reason) and a public that still yearned for the psychological satisfaction that comes from formal coherence.

From this perspective, Schoenberg — at least in effect — can be regarded as Wagner’s opposite, as a Jewish “Anti-Wagner”. Wagner successfully claimed for art, according to Tim Blanning, “the function previously exercised by religion and arrogated in modern times by politics or economics.” Schoenberg dethroned that position, by composing “irrational”, atonalistic, “liquid,” “decentered” music, twelve tones “in free circulation, without any firm hierarchy or even distinction between the seven diatonic tones and the remaining chromatic tones.”

As he declared in a letter (1909) to his colleague Ferruccio Busoni: “I strive for complete liberation from all forms … from all symbols of cohesion and of logic.”

Part III: Transvestism in Music

Part I: Viennese Mutations

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



Lasha Darkmoon: Why Obama Won the Nobel Peace Prize and Hitler Didn’t

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Lasha Darkmoon: Asked why the Peace prize had been awarded to President Barack Obama, Nobel committee head Thorbjorn Jagland said: “It was because we would like to support what he is trying to achieve.” 

Obviously such a comment would make sense if we knew what Obama was trying to achieve. Even assuming that the President were trying to achieve something noble and uplifting for mankind  — an assumption it would be rash to make — why give a man a peace prize if all he does is make war?  

Mr Jagland then added somewhat enigmatically: “It is a clear signal that we want to advocate the same as he has done.” 

How strange. What has Obama done exactly? I mean, what has he done that the Nobel committee are so enthused about that they wish to advocate it? Get more American soldiers killed in foreign parts? Increase the number of amputees in the armed forces? Order more torture?  Kill more Muslims? Expand old wars and start new ones? 

Mr Jagland does not explain. 

Perhaps there’s something in the air hanging over those Norwegian fjords that does something to the brainsof Nobel Committee members. In 1973 they gave the Peace Prize to one of the world’s most shameless warmongers: Dr Henry Kissinger. Taking note of his war crimes in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the committee decided that here was a man who clearly needed to be commemorated for his unflinching efforts in pursuit of peace. A few years later, in 1994, they handed the peace prize to Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres at a time when the Israelis and Palestinians were, as ever, fighting like cats and dogs. 

The Nobel Peace Prize committee have obviously been influenced by the Orwellian mantra “War is Peace!” Anyone who starts a war, it seems,  automatically becomes a candidate for the Peace Prize. 

*   *   *   *   * 

When Obama collected his prize on December 10, you could almost sense his embarrassment. It’s as if he knew that satire had died yet again. He had the modesty to admit he had no idea why he’d been given this prize. He even pointed out that there were millions of worthier recipients. After all, he had just ordered 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan and had refused to consider a ban on land mines. Not exactly a peacenik. 

His spokesman Robert Gibbs, putting in a good word for this boss of his who had broken all his election promises, noted apologetically: “The president understands that he doesn’t belong in the same discussion as Mandela and Mother Teresa.” 

The understatement of the year. 

*   *   *   *   * 

A few weeks ago, I received an email from a man in Malaysia who asked me if I knew why Obama had been nominated for the Peace Prize. “Isn’t it strange?” he asked. I felt I owed him an explanation, since he was under the impression I was some kind of authority on world peace. So this is what I wrote back to him: 

Yes, it is indeed very strange, seeing that Obama has done nothing to deserve the Peace Prize apart from give a speech in Cairo which hinted at a solution to the long-standing Arab-Israeli problem. I can’t see how anyone can get a pat on the back for telling Israel to stop settlement activity when the Israelis ignore him anyway. Nor can he be given a peace prize for continuing the carnage in Iraq, expanding it in Afghanistan, and starting a new war in Pakistan which has already created over a million refugees. So the answer has to be this: having received the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama will now find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to start a war with Iran. 

The Norwegians may well have maneuvered Obama into a corner. How can a man who has just received the accolade of the world’s most prestigious peace prize give the order to launch an unprovoked attack on Iran in defiance of international law? The people who are crying for Iranian blood in America right now are the known neoconservative warmongers. How can Peace Prize Obama give ear to such warmongers? It won’t be easy. Nor will it be easy, if Israel launches an attack on Iran, to join Israel in pulverizing a helpless and innocent civilian population. Obama’s name would be mud.

Conclusion: give a man a peace prize when you want to stop him starting a new war.

*   *   *   *   *

We shall have to see what happens next. Iran will be the litmus test. If Obama gives the order for an attack on Tehran, our worst suspicions will be confirmed. We shall then have to seriously ask why the Peace Prize wasn’t awarded posthumously to Adolf Hitler.

It’s amusing to note in this context that kookie Jewish-American lesbian litterateuse Gertrude Stein said in 1938: “I think Hitler ought to have the Nobel Peace Prize!”  And she did her best to persuade the Nobel Committee to honor the Nazi leader in this way.  

My Aunt Agatha thinks the reason Obama got the Peace Prize and Hitler didn’t has something to do with Hitler’s mustache. As far as the Norwegians were concerned, that dreadful mustache was a big no-no.  Obama, she says, labored under no such disadvantage.     

She could have a point.

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