Israel’s fallback position on organ harvesting

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Following up on Alison Weir’s article “Israeli Organ Trafficking and Theft: From Palestine to Moldava,” Israel now admits that they harvested organs of Palestinians and others without permission from the families. But they say it happened during the 1990s and that the practice has been discontinued. It’s worth mentioning that Donald Bostrom’s chilling account refers precisely to the 1990s. Bostrom’s article has been translated into English and is posted as a TOO article. The article includes a very graphic photo of a Palestinian whose gaping chest wound had been stitched up —  obviously consistent with organ harvesting. This Palestinian was a stone thrower who had been murdered by the Israeli army, his body then taken away for “autopsy.”

Yet when Bostrom’s article came out it was described as the worst sort of anti-Semitism in the Israeli press and by Jewish activist organizations throughout the  world. If the practice has indeed stopped, I suppose it is only because of the glare of this negative publicity.

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Shlomo Sand’s Invention

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Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People is a book full of counter productive ideas for our side. I know it will attract interest for being anti-Zionist, but the author takes up the anti-Zionist argument for all the wrong reasons. He opposes the idea of an ethnostate — a result that would rule out everything except enclaves of implicit white communities. He is extremely anti-nationalist in political outlook; rejects the idea of race as a biological reality; dismisses research findings on Jewish genetics (see the recent blogpost by Ted Sallis for what the scientists say). He rejects the idea of Israel as a ethno-homeland for Jews. Ideologically Sand seems very much in line with the Jewish socialist tradition of Trotsky and Saul Alinsky.

In other words, this is a book by a radical leftist — Sand’s Wikipedia biography notes that he was a communist in his youth. Not  surprisingly, it was published by Verso, a leftwing publisher that has also given us the likes of Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, etc.

Although his book at times contains interesting admissions, overall his thesis rests on a number of flawed, counter-productive, and perilous arguments that racially conscious Whites should reject.

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Jewish Revenge Fantasies

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A recent panel discussion of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds had some interesting tidbits about Jewish revenge fantasies:

But [Dr. Amy] Kalmanofsky quickly put that argument [that Jews should feel guilty about revenge]  to bed, noting that Jewish texts have always embraced revenge fantasies, from the destruction of the Egyptians in Exodus and Haman & Co. in Megillat Esther. And [Rabbi Jack] Moline — echoing the message of one of his Yom Kippur sermons from earlier this year — also praised the film, describing it as a way of helping American Jews shed some of their Holocaust baggage and getting more comfortable with their Zionist sides.

Moline told his congregants: “To my surprise, my complete and utter surprise, there was something cathartic and deeply satisfying watching this revenge fantasy play out. It was as if something I did not dare admit — my secret blood lust to do unto them what they did unto us — was being acknowledged, permitted and validated. I was liberated from victim hood.”

For making Jews feel good about their blood lust, Tarantino’s future in Hollywood is assured. The producer, Lawrence Bender, told Tarantino “Quentin you are about to make your Bar Mitzvah movie, you are going to be officially let into the tribe.”

This reminds me of Alison Weir’s wonderful recent article “Israeli Organ Trafficing and Theft: From Palestine to Moldova.” She discusses the work of Prof. Nancy Scheper-Hughes of the University of California-Berkeley:

Scheper-Hughes discussed the two motivations of Israeli traffickers. One was greed, she said. The other was somewhat chilling: “Revenge, restitution – reparation for the Holocaust.”

She described speaking with Israeli brokers who told her “it’s kind of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. We’re going to get every single kidney and liver and heart that we can. The world owes it to us.’”

Scheper-Hughes says that she “even heard doctors saying that.”

I think that revenge fantasies are a common among Jews and it goes way beyond Nazis. In “Memories of Madison” I wrote that

In my experience at Madison during the 1960s, there was also a strong desire [among Jews] for bloody, apocalyptic revenge against the entire social structure—perceived by them to be the goyish, fascist, capitalist, racist, anti-Semitic social structure. … This fits well with the set of interviews with New Left Jewish radicals in Percy Cohen’s Jewish Radicals and Radical Jews: many had destructive fantasies in which the revolution would result in “humiliation, dispossession, imprisonment or execution of the oppressors.” These fantasies of destruction of the social order were combined with a belief in their own omnipotence and their ability to create a non-oppressive social order.

As Whites become a minority in Western societies and Jews constitute a hostile elite, this Jewish focus on revenge  has grave implications for the future. Revenge becomes an important issue given that Jews tend to interpret their history of living among Europeans as a long series of persecutions beginning with Christianity and ending with the Holocaust. (See, e.g., Norman Podhoretz’s Why are Jews Liberals?.)

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A Reply to Jobling

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Ian Jobling has posted an unfriendly reply to my blog article. It can only be described arrogant, hostile, and condescending — the sort of thing one expects from children who don’t play well with others. The arrogance is especially surprising given that, unlike his adversaries, he has not published even one article related to evolutionary psychology or the theory of kinship in a refereed scientific journal. But worse, it is massively confused on the theory and willfully ignorant of the data.

Here I reiterate and elaborate the main idea: Relationships of friendship and marriage are fundamentally not about altruism but about reciprocity and self-interest. Altruism is a no-go in evolutionary thinking generally because it implies unreciprocated giving. Kin selection is not about altruism because helping relatives at cost is compensated when relatives succeed. So, except in extreme situations like martyrdom or coercion (see below), no one is really talking about altruism.

Jobling’s original article is all about the limits of altruism — that there is a drop off after cousins, and beyond that natural selection could not operate to produce a module for kin altruism. All of his examples — from suicide bombing to giving food — involve giving some resource to kin or others, and then showing that beyond cousins unreciprocated giving can’t evolve.

But that is precisely where I start out —indeed he quotes me as follows: “Because the similarity-detecting mechanisms implied by [Rushton’s genetic similarity theory] assess low levels of genetic relatedness, they would not be expected to produce detectable levels of providing unreciprocated resources to others (altruism).” Exactly. I simply don’t understand how Jobling could disagree with me on this based on his original article. Quite simply, that’s exactly what his article labors to show — without the courtesy of citing me.

We agree on this, but then we draw different conclusions. He decides to completely jettison the evolutionary guts of GST — the data showing that people assort on the basis of genetic similarity and do so for evolutionarily significant reasons. And — most importantly — that preference for genetic similarity in others is heritable.  The finding that there is genetic variation for similarity preference is highly compatible with the proposal that GS mechanisms are an adaptation. Many adaptations show genetic variation, as I have argued in the personality literature (see here and here).

Instead, Jobling proposes a non-evolutionary theory of similarity seeking — Consensual Validation Theory — that your basic anti-evolutionary psychologist (and there are many of them) would love. With evolutionary theorists like Jobling, who needs Boas or Stephen Jay Gould? Minimally, one would have to unpack CVT to propose how this fits with an evolutionary perspective. What are the adaptations? How are they triggered, etc.? How do they relate to fitness in ancestral and contemporary environments?

Fundamentally, Jobling has to show that the heritability data underpinning GST are incorrect — that is, that the degree of preference for genetic similarity is not in fact influenced by genetic variation. (Unlike Jobling’s writing, Rushton published his data in Psychological Science, a top-level mainstream journal in psychology.) Given this growing body of data, it demands a theory of how it fits with evolutionary thinking. I reject the idea that it implies altruism.

Here’s a really simple way to state my argument: Attraction to genetically similar others is no different from any other kind of attraction — e.g., sexual desire, romantic love, or beauty. No one would argue that these attractions imply altruism, and each of them has an obvious evolutionary interpretation and much supporting data that they are indeed adaptations. But when it comes to genetic similarity, the conventional thinking — which is reflected in Jobling’s original article — has always seen genetic similarity as a watered down version of kin selection and then started looking for altruism.

I began from a different perspective — seeing it as a form of attraction to people that must compete with a variety of other attractions in influencing behavior. This view is not bogged down with specious arguments about altruism that Jobling falls into. Jobling writes:

MacDonald’s logic here is plainly invalid: after all, if kin selection can work at the level of the ethny, why shouldn’t it lead to adaptations for altruism among co-ethnics as well as kin? At low levels of relatedness, altruism should be attenuated, but not absent.

First of all, nothing has to evolve — as Jobling notes in his original article. But my reinterpretation was to accept the idea that the genetic relationship is so attenuated that it becomes difficult to image how evolution would be able to engineer genetic benefits when the recipients of unreciprocated benefits are so distantly related. If I make friends with another White person, say, who is slightly more correlated with me genetically than the White average, the amount of altruism toward this person warranted by our genetic overlap would be vanishingly small and it’s difficult to see how natural selection would be able to calibrate this. As Fisher and Hamilton famoulsy wrote, it would make genetic sense to give up having one of my own children in order to help my brother have two. But how much should I give up to a friend who is only slightly more genetically similar to me than the average White person? Maybe buy him a drink? Or decide not to have one of my own  children but help him have 18 more children than he would have otherwise? (Hard to do in a monogamous culture.) Or would 33 be more appropriate? 39?

There is no way that an adaptation would be able to calculate the degree of self-sacrifice warranted by this relationship. And in fact, when you look at these relationships, you see reciprocity. What is the evidence that altruism is involved?

I am arguing that although natural selection would be unlikely to be able to finely calibrate levels of unreciprocated helping appropriate for each relationship in my life, it would be able to select for self-interest in situations where there is a choice among alternatives, keeping in mind that other interests besides genetic relatedness (especially the resource value of alternatives) are involved. That is, if all else is equal (and it often is not), people should make alliances with people who are more genetically similar to themselves and they will do so because of a psychological mechanism that makes genetically similar others more attractive than average.

So imagine a choice where a woman can marry a genetically similar person or a very wealthy person from another ethnic group. (Elin Woods and Nicole Brown Simpson come to mind.) From a gene’s eye point of view, genetic similarity is one resource among several. The genes may be better off marrying the person from a different ethnic group, and at the proximal level different psychological attractions pull us in different directions. But there is no giving up of anything — no altruism. It’s completely a matter of perceived self-interest. (Elin Woods and Nicole Brown Simpson may well have behaved maladaptively, but no one can foresee the future.) In the same way, someone might weigh the benefits of allying with one’s ethnic group versus a bribe to act against the interests of one’s ethnic group.

Actually, we see a lot of this among White elites these days: Pretty much all of our White, non-Jewish media personalities and political leaders are massively rewarded for betraying their people. From a rational point of view, these people are behaving maladaptively because they are ignoring their ethnic genetic interests — Frank Salter’s argument (see below); the problem is that the emotional attachment to their people is too weak to prevent them from succumbing to the blandishments of fame and fortune.

Whereas calculating genetically appropriate levels of unreciprocated helping for a particular friendship would be next to impossible for natural selection to act on, natural selection could easily act by calibrating genetic similarity as a general attraction to similar others. In my view, this is what the data show. Rushton’s research shows that this attraction to others is heritable, meaning that partly for genetic reasons, some people are attracted to genetically similar others more than other people are. But even for people who are high on attraction to genetically similar others, within the relationship, self-interest and reciprocity are the rule — there is simply a higher cost of defection (see below). In general, people don’t go around being massively altruistic toward their ethnic group — even Jews give less than 2% of their money to charity and even less to ethnic charities. (Their giving would increase if the Jewish community was under threat — as predicted by Social Identity Theory.) But it does make people feel more comfortable with genetically similar others and trust them more (hence Bernie Madoff).

Relationships based on genetic similarity create a cost for defection — just as a relationship based on sexual attraction creates a cost of defection. Someone who is in a relationship with a sexually attractive person may want to defect — for example, if the person is self-centered or a drug addict. But the cost is the loss of a sexually satisfying relationship. Again, where’s the altruism?

In short, my approach aims to avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I want to retain a powerful and important set of data and show how taking account of genetic similarity in others could evolve and be an important psychological component of human behavior.

Jobling’s rejoinder seems to grasp that I reject altruism, but he claims that “When one unpacks MacDonald’s arguments, one finds that altruism is implicit in his theory of ethnicity.” Rather than tell us exactly why this is so — difficult to do, since I explicitly reject altruism — Jobling instead states, “MacDonald is saying that, because of the genetic interest they have in each other’s well-being, co-ethnics go on cooperating even when it is in their self-interest to defect. That is, an individual will forego a benefit to himself in order to grant one to his co-ethnic cooperative partner. This is altruism.”

But that’s ridiculous. That is not at all what I am saying. I am saying that if it is one’s interest to defect (see examples above), then defect. We see it all the time. Genetic similarity is not the only game in town — it’s not the only evolved interest mediated by a psychological attraction that people have.

Actually, it’s sad that it’s not the only game in town. White people would not be in such dire straits if it were a stronger force. Our greatest difficulty right now is that all the rewards for attaining high social status, fame, and fortune for Whites lie with those who turn their backs on their people — a point I elaborate in this article.

Jobling continues:

Also, MacDonald thinks that people prefer to cooperate with co-ethnics rather than allo-ethnics because the former are more inclined to trust each other more than the latter are.

This is correct and based on a great deal of data (e.g., De Bruine’s research discussed in my academic article). This would bias one in favor of hiring a co-ethnic all things being equal. But if the job candidate is completely incompetent (hiring an English major to a computer programmer job) so that the firm would be impacted negatively, this is a bad move. Again, I don’t think that natural selection could calibrate how much loss in performance the Black CEO in Jobling’s example should be willing to incur by hiring a Black person over a more competent White person. (In in this particular case, social identity mechanisms may also be involved — the CEO may see a White person in ingroup-outgroup terms which would bias the decision even more in the direction of ethnic preference.) But I do think that all things being equal in terms of talent, he should prefer the Black person. Then if the prosperity for the company leads to biological success in its employees, the Black CEO would benefit genetically more by hiring the co-ethnic.

Perhaps this is why the most flagrant racial favoritism is typically seen in departments that have little impact on the performance of the company — human resources versus research and development. Companies accept a certain amount load because they are being watched like hawks by the affirmative action industry and shakedown artists like Jesse Jackson.

Jobling writes:

Moreover, many other passages in the article are comprehensible only on the assumption that ethnic altruism exists. For example, in defining ethnocentrism, MacDonald quotes a passage from William Graham Sumner that implies the existence of ethnic altruism.

Right. But notice that that passage where I quote Sumner is in my section on social identity theory — not GST. Jobling is oblivious to the whole point of my article — that we need to posit several different psychological mechanisms related to ethnicity and ethnic conflict. I clearly don’t think that GST provides a psychological basis for the phenomenon of ingroup-outgroup conflict or for martyrdom, but I do argue that social identity theory does provide such a theory. (My original argument is presented in Chapter 1 of Separation and Its Discontents where it forms the basis of my theory of anti-Semitism; a more recent (2008) review of the literature on psychological mechanisms of ethnocentrism was published in a top mainstream journal in psychology, Psychological Review. That article also mentions recent research showing racial imprinting — infants preferring their own race, typically as a result of exposure to parents and other family members. This, of course, has led to anxiety among the righteous about racist babies. It is possible that the preferences found in genetic similarity research are mediated by this imprinting process. I can imagine a future where all Whites would be required to expose their babies to non-Whites during this formative period. Orwell would love it.)

Social identity theory fills an obvious gap — one alluded to by Jobling in his original article: Most ethnic conflict is among closely related groups. (Think Israelis and Palestinians.) In my original article I challenged Jobling to state how my argument for an evolutionary basis of social identity mechanisms is incorrect, but he has not responded. He acknowledges he was incorrect in criticizing my comments on martyrdom. But that means he acknowledges that I am correct that there are psychological mechanisms that could lead to martyrdom and intense identification with an ingroup.

Jobling:

Later, MacDonald writes, “Even if all humans were equally opportunistic and fickle in their group affiliations, so that group interest was always contingent on individual self-interest, groups as vehicles of selection would still be required in order to understand the behavior of coordinated groups.”8 Here MacDonald implies that sometimes people may not be motivated by self-interest, and it seems to me that altruism is the only alternative.

This does not follow at all. My view is that explicit processing mechanisms are critical for understanding how humans are able to form effective groups. (My most recent article on this is in the journal Evolutionary Psychology.) Jobling is simply showing that he is unfamiliar with the literature on cultural group selection. Briefly, because of explicit processing, humans are able to form cohesive groups where, for example, self-sacrificing behavior is coerced via social controls or made psychologically attractive by compelling ideologies. Think of a military unit or a group evolutionary strategy (GES). And in the case of a GES, social controls can provide a selective environment ensuring that people who are most committed to group goals and most embody the group’s cultural ideals (e.g., scholarship and religious fanaticism (hyper-ethnocentrism)  among traditional Jewish groups) prosper by leaving more progeny. And that is evolution.

Jobling:

In another passage, MacDonald writes, “For individuals highly predisposed to collectivism, ingroup norms and the duty to cooperate and subordinate individual goals to group goals are paramount.”9 Subordinating individual goals to the goals of the ethnic group would seem an act of ethnic altruism. MacDonald does nothing to reconcile this sentence with his earlier assertion that ethnic altruism does not exist, despite the apparent contradiction. The same is true of the other passages in which ethnic altruism is implied.

False. This is the argument for martyrdom. Since Jobling accepts that argument (see our comments on my original article), I don’t see the problem. Again, my argument is that individualism/collectivism is an individual differences dimension of social identity processes and that people extreme on collectivism do not have an algorithm that balances the costs of group membership with the benefits of leaving the group. One of my ideas about Jewish society is that the most extreme members of the group — the ones like those in medieval Germany who killed their families rather than convert — are the vanguard. These are the Jews who populate the West Bank settler movement and the forces of the racialist right both in Israel and the US.

Jobling:

MacDonald’s confusion is evident in his blog post as well. If MacDonald does not believe in the existence of ethnic altruism, then he must disagree with Frank Salter’s theory of ethnicity, to which the concept of ethnic altruism is central. Salter plainly believes that natural selection has led to the evolution of instincts for ethnic altruism.

Salter is very clear that rational choice mechanisms are required in order to calculate ethnic genetic interests. Read his book — or my review:

A basic theme of the book is that humans cannot rely on their suite of evolved modules to achieve or even perceive their genetic interests in the modern world. Many individuals do not have the same psychological motivation for their ethnic interests that they have, say, for their family. Salter’s reasoning actually reinforces arguments that there are enormous barriers to the evolution of altruism within local groups, since, as noted above, random co‐ethnics have zero ethnic kinship. Presumably this is because our evolved psychology was designed mainly for a world of small groups separated by tiny genetic differences.

To conclude: For all the political biases and other weaknesses of the academic system, it does give one a certain humility in the face of the daunting complexity of human behavior. Perhaps because he has not subjected himself to the peer review process, Jobling lacks this humility and the result is a demeanor filled with arrogance, hostility, and contempt.

The good news is that Jobling is safely ensconced in his own website where no one need take him seriously — least of all anyone who thinks of himself as developing the groundwork for a scientifically based legitimacy for identifying with White people and their interests.

Christopher Donavan: A Quick Confession of (Tempered) Jealousy

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Christopher Donovan:  From libertarian (and law school) days, I remain on the mailing list of a group called the Institute for Justice, a libertarian pro-bono legal group dedicated to fighting eminent domain, free speech restrictions, government-backed market cartels, and so on.  I’m looking at their most recent “Liberty & Law” (no link, but their website is here), and I have two thoughts.

One, I’m jealous of The Institute for Justice.  I wish white advocates had a legal outfit as on-the-ball as the Institute for Justice.  Law students want to join them, they get press, their litigators went to Harvard, and so on.  They’re established, they’re slick, and they’re having an impact on the law.

But two, they’re absurd.  For years, for instance, they’ve pushing the issue of African hair braiding as an enterprise that ought not be subjected to cosmetology licensing because it involves no chemicals or even equipment.  In the most recent newsletter, they have an emotional article titled “The Power of One Entrepreneur” featuring lovely photographs of the black woman helped by their lawyers.  The rest of the newsletter is peppered with photos of smiling black people who’ve all been helped by the power of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman.

“Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic” doesn’t begin to describe it.  It reminds me of what Sam Dickson once called “the silly right”, i.e., obsessing about details while ignoring the larger white dispossession.  In the face of an oncoming white minority, these jokers are dedicating their lives to African hair braiding.  Do the smarty-pants people of the Institute for Justice get any of this?

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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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