Cheer words and boo words

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It is useful when considering politics, including racial politics and sexual politics, to be aware of cheer words and boo words. As an example of a cheer word, the philosopher Jamie Whyte gives “justice”, where “what it means is not perfectly clear but, whatever someone takes it to mean, he will think it’s a good thing”.[1] Boo words are the opposite of cheer words, an example being “racism”. What this means is not entirely clear, but whatever it is, it’s bad.[2]

The sort of meaning that is unclear in cheer words and boo words is what the linguist Geoffrey Leech calls conceptual meaning, which is meaning as we normally think of it: that which tells us what a word denotes. It contrasts with various other sorts of meaning, including what Leech calls affective meaning, which expresses the speaker’s attitude to what is being talked about.[3] It is characteristic of cheer words and boo words that while their conceptual meanings are elusive and weak, their affective meanings — positive for cheer words and negative for boo words — are evident and strong, so strong in many cases as to overwhelm their conceptual meanings. Thus even if one were to specify, no matter how carefully and laboriously, a concept of racism that made racism excusable, one would not get far using the word in this sense, which would be defeated by the word’s negative affective meaning. This is as certain as it is that no matter how one defined justice, any argument saying that this was something a society could have too much of would fail because of the word’s positive affective meaning. The tendency of cheer words and boo words to elicit a cheer or a boo is built into them, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

It follows that cheer and boo words are of little use in rational conversation unless their conceptual meanings are specified — and, for practical purposes, specified in such a way as to line up with their affective meanings. Otherwise it will be impossible for anyone to be sure, or at least for everyone to agree, what is being discussed, while their affective meanings will arouse emotions not necessarily grounded in any conceptual material that might have been conveyed. If you want to be understood, it is better to use words with known and accepted conceptual meanings. If you do not want to be understood, on the other hand, but wish to befuddle and mislead, perhaps because you are a politician or a demagogue, you will find cheer words and boo words just the ticket. They enable you to gain support without saying anything or to get your audience to cry out against things you have not identified.

As Geoffrey Leech puts it: “the greatest dangers to intelligent communication come with cases where the affective meaning becomes a major part of, if not the whole of, the message”.[4] Therefore statements such as that one intends to promote justice or stands firm against racism in all its forms, which we hear all the time, are not in the business of intelligent communication. They are in effect tautologies, saying little more than that the speaker favours the good and is against the bad.[5]

Cheer words and boo words do not necessarily just exist but can be created. This involves minimising a word’s conceptual meaning and maximising its affective meaning, but it can only be done by a meaning maker, such as a parent vis à vis a child or the mass media vis à vis a society. We can trace the process whereby the media, over a period of fifty years, turned the word “racism” from denoting a degree of aversion to people of other races, which is pretty much a human universal, into the worst of sins, which can ruin a person’s life if detected in them while being hard or impossible to define.

Minimising the word’s conceptual meaning occurred almost automatically, by a process known as concept creep.[6] If it is bad to be averse to people purely because of their race, as might be generally accepted, and if one sees oneself as the nation’s moral legislator, as the media see themselves, one will be tempted to apply the word to anything that can be done regarding race of which one disapproves, from where one will proceed to apply it to anything else regarding race that one wants to stop people doing. Eventually the word will denote so many different things, some the opposites of others, such as treating people differently by race and failing to do so, that it might as well mean nothing.

Maximising a word’s affective meaning is accomplished by modelling the desired reaction to it. Thus commentators, when mentioning something they want people to deplore, act as though anyone would be scandalised that such a thing might be done, thereby telling their audience that it would be wrong to do it. When people start being punished for offending, as when a White character in a soap opera is shunned for mocking something said by a Black character, or when a White contributor to a discussion is hissed at by the rest of the studio audience for expressing concerns about the behaviour of Black youth, the viewing audience sees that the offence is serious. This goes on without the media needing at any point to explain what is supposed to be wrong with the behaviour being condemned. Reason doesn’t come into it as they shepherd the public into the desired moral position.

To sum up the process of making a word a cheer or boo word, it is essentially a matter of creating a conditioned reflex. By multiplying the word’s conceptual meanings to the point of disappearance and making its affective meaning massively predominant, the meaning maker causes us to associate its mere sound with the idea of goodness or badness, and so we feel joyful anticipation or disapproval and revulsion as the case may be. In doing these things the meaning maker follows Ivan Pavlov, who conditioned his dogs to associate the sound of a bell with the idea of being fed, which made them salivate. We end up reacting to the stimulus automatically, our thinking minds playing no part.

The case of an expression like “anti-Semitism” is slightly different in that this has a determinate conceptual meaning, which it wears on its face. As long as we ignore the fact that Arabs are Semites too, we can see that it means being against or disliking Jews. To make “anti-Semitism” a boo word it was therefore necessary to concentrate mainly on maximising its affective meaning, which is to say conditioning us to see disliking Jews as bad, in contrast to disliking the French or Germans, say, which we could continue to do with impunity. This again was accomplished by modelling, not by reason, as can be confirmed by reflecting that we have never heard an argument to say why disliking Jews is bad: that is, unless you call it an argument to suggest should this sentiment arise in us it would mean that we wanted to exterminate the race, for having misgivings about the behaviour of Jews, we have been encouraged to believe, would be equivalent to commissioning the construction of gas chambers.

Thus the media place Jews in a special class simply by acting as though they were in one, and we pick the idea up. It is the same back-to-front process as with “racism”, whereby we accept that something is bad because we see it disapproved of rather than disapproving of it because we think it is bad: a process that can occur because we accept the authority of the media or other meaning maker. Once “anti-Semitism” is established as a boo word, it is too late to enquire what Jews have done to deserve their special status. How dare one ask the question when Jews are such special people?

According to a count of all the words used in books published between 1960 and 2019, “anti-Semitism” is top dog among racial boo words, coming far ahead even of “racism”, let alone such comparatively paltry failings as xenophobia and White supremacy.[7] So while racism in general is bad, this particular variety of it is gigantically bad, which might have something to do with the fact that the mass media and publishing industry are largely owned by Jews.

As the gold standard of racial badness, and indeed of all possible badness, anti-Semitism acts as the measure of other offences, so that it is asked, for example, whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. People have gone on demonstrations holding placards saying that it is not. If they are mistaken, then anti-Zionism is a no-no, whereas if they are correct it is OK. What can never be doubted is that anti-Semitism is as bad as bad can be.

Since the expression has a determinate conceptual meaning, it behooves Jews to make this as comprehensive as possible. The more it covers, the more we can be condemned for doing and hence the more we can be controlled, not just by Jews but by others on their behalf. Thus in 2016 the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) produced a document defining the offence. This document, which shows that it is not for nothing that Jews are known for being clever with words, justifies a digression.[8]

It starts by quoting the Stockholm Declaration of 1972, which presupposed that humanity was still scarred by anti-Semitism and stated that the international community had a solemn responsibility to fight this evil. The scars presumably still existing 44 years later, or seventy-odd years after the event the IHRA exists to remember, the suggestion is that the countries of the world still have this responsibility. Thus the IHRA seeks to get the rest of the world to side with Jews against their enemies.

The document describes its definition of anti-Semitism as only a working one, yet its authors wanted governments and other bodies to sign up to it in its presumably provisional form. The bodies duly complied, including the British government, which adopted the definition promptly, followed eventually by the Labour party, both of which therefore committed themselves to a form of words that might avowedly change at a later date.[9]

According to the oft-cited definition, anti-Semitism is “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews”. What perception this might be the document does not say. What does it mean by hatred? Again it doesn’t say, so we can suppose that hatred could be a strong aversion, such as some people feel for cabbage, or perhaps a tendency to disagree with Jews, as when those who disagree with transgender activists are said to hate transgenders. Then again it could be the sort of thing that makes one embark on a programme of genocide. All the definition really says is that anti-Semitism is an unspecified perception.

To fill out this rather minimal concept, the document provides examples of anti-Semitism, the first being “the targeting of the state of Israel”. It concedes, however, that criticising Israel isn’t necessarily anti-Semitic. If the criticism is “similar to that levelled against any other country”, it can be legitimate. In other words, as long as Israel behaves no worse than other countries, it can be criticised, but if it goes further, the excess must pass without comment.

Rather than considering whether anti-Semitism might be provoked by things Jews do, the document describes it as a tool used by presumably appalling people to accomplish further ends, such as charging Jews with conspiring to harm humanity. Anti-Semitism is also, according to the document, “often used to blame Jews for ‘why things go wrong’”. The implication that one has a perception or emotion for a purpose, intending to “use” it, rather than perceptions and emotions just arising, supports the idea that having them can make one guilty.

The document reifies anti-Semitism, seeing it as something that goes round doing things. For example, anti-Semitism “employs sinister stereotypes and negative character traits”. Naughty anti-Semitism! How could it employ negative character traits when the Jewish character, as is well known, has no flaws?

Other examples include alleging that Jews control the media, which is a “mendacious”, “dehumanising” and “demonising” idea and moreover a “myth” and “stereotype”. This verbal outburst rather suggests that Jews do control the media, or why would the IHRA protest so excessively that they do not? To see how excessive the protest is, one might ask how it can be mendacious, dehumanising or demonising to say that somebody controls something.

It would also be anti-Semitic, according to the document, to deny the fact, scope or mechanisms of the holocaust, which again might raise the question of how well the official version of this event could withstand impartial investigation. Otherwise, why try to deter such investigation? Also we know that in practice not only denying these aspects of the holocaust would be regarded as anti-Semitic but also merely questioning them. On top of this it would be anti-Semitic, says the IHRA, to accuse Jews of exaggerating the holocaust, which means that it can be anti-Semitic to state what appears to be a plain fact, for Jews still make their six-million claim more than thirty years after the number killed at Auschwitz alone was officially reduced by almost three million.[10]

Nor must we say that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the other countries in which they may live. American Jews, that is, are no more loyal to Israel than they are to America, which may be doubted in view of the passionate comments made by such American Jews as Ben Shapiro about Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians.

Scrutiny of the IHRA’s document thus perhaps reveals more about Jews than it does about their critics, making one wonder whether Joseph Sobran was not right to say that an anti-Semite is not someone who dislikes Jews so much as it is someone Jews don’t like.

Especially notable about the document is the fact that at no point does it explain in any reasonable fashion what is wrong with disliking Jews. For example, if it is anti-Semitic to say that Jews control the media, so what? What is wrong with saying that Jews control the media? Attempting to justify the idea that this is bad in terms of dehumanisation and so forth is silly. The document defines a boo word purely on the strength of the fact that it is already a boo word, relying on our existing conditioning to make us accept that we mustn’t do whatever it describes as anti-Semitic.

Coming out of the digression, we can note that when a word has enough conceptual meaning for different opinions to be possible as to whether what it denotes is good or bad, it can be a cheer or boo word for some but not for others. Thus “equality” is a cheer word for many. No one who advocates something in the name of equality needs to say equality in what respect or even necessarily equality between what or whom to raise a cheer from such people. The mere word, with no referent attached to it, is enough. But those who find variety the spice of life or are aware of the horrors that have been wrought by history’s equalisers have less time for equality. This difference of opinion is possible because when all is said and done we know what “equality” means conceptually, namely sameness, and opinions differ as to whether this is desirable. The difference of opinion is also made possible by the fact that the media have yet to complete the process of making “equality” a universal cheer word, at which point every last person will be a mindless devotee of this supposedly glorious ideal.

The power of cheer words and boo words to affect our thinking is illustrated by the word “freedom”. Being a cheer word, this is used in the most preposterous ways, which we unthinkingly accept. Rousseau’s statement that man is born free yet everywhere is in chains strikes many people as a profound truth, yet what could possibly be less free than a new-born baby, which is utterly dependent on its mother? “Free at last!” is something everyone wants to be able to cry, yet who really wants to be free? About the most appealing thing a woman can say to a man is that she is his, to do with as he wills. She doesn’t want to be free but will be only too happy if he takes her on, makes all the difficult decisions and takes responsibility for all the disasters. Every day we see how women value freedom less than security, nor are men necessarily that fond of it. Who wants to go to work and be allowed to do as he likes? One wants a boss to deprive one of that freedom and tell one what to do. Yet another fact that shows how limited can be the attractions of freedom is that in America many emancipated slaves returned to their erstwhile owners asking to be taken back.[11] The idea that we innately and always love freedom is a delusion, created in part by the word’s cheer factor.

The conclusion of this discussion must be that it is good to be aware of how we have been conditioned to react in certain ways to certain words. This awareness is needed if we are to undo the conditioning and think. We should also be aware that the media and other meaning makers are at this moment trying to condition us or to intensify our existing conditioning. Their goal is to put our minds out of action. We shouldn’t let them.

[1] Jamie Whyte, 2005, A Load of Blair, London: Corvo, p. 48. Jamie Whyte calls cheer words hooray words.

[2] The categories of cheer words and boo words overlap with those called purr words and snarl words by S. I. Hayakawa in Language in Thought and Action (1949). “Democratic”, for example, is both a cheer word and a purr word. “Fascist” is both a boo word and a snarl word.

[3] Geoffrey Leech, 1981 (1974), Semantics: the Study of Meaning, 2nd. ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 15.

[4] Ibid., p. 45.

[5] Note incidentally that the formulation “racism in all its forms” seeks to evade not one but many tasks of definition.

[6] Nick Haslam et al, 2020, “Harm inflation: making sense of concept creep”, European Review of Social Psychology, Vol. 31, No. 1.

[7] American Renaissance, Dec. 1st 2023, “Words the Left Uses Against Us”, https://www.bitchute.com/video/jCgn8FVzkN29/.

[8] The original document no longer seems to be available online. The text and some illustrative examples can be found at https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definitions-charters/working-definition-antiSemitism.

[9] The Labour party adopted the definition two years after the Conservatives “after a long struggle against a fierce campaign in its favour” (Morgan Jones, Sept. 4th 2019, “Labour’s Fictitious Anti-Semitism Problem”, https://www.unz.com/article/labours-fictitious-anti-Semitism-problem/).

[10] In 1990 a plaque at Auschwitz stating that four million people were killed there was replaced by one reducing the figure to 1.1 million.

[11] In “The day freedom came” (1901), Booker T. Washington described the gloom that descended on many former slaves when they realised that they would now have to provide for themselves. Gradually, he reported, the older ones began to go back to the “big house” to have whispered conversations as to their future (included by Christopher Ricks and William A. Vance in The Faber Book of America, 1994, London: Faber and Faber, pp. 198-99).

Monotheism vs. Polytheism

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Translated from the French and with the introduction by Tom Sunic

This article was first published in April 1996, in Chronicles; A magazine of American Culture Given the ongoing armed conflict between Israeli troops and Hamas-led Palestinian militants in the Gaza strip, it may be useful to reexamine the Biblical origins of total wars and the nature of modern totalitarianism.

Tom Sunic

Can we still conceive of the revival of pagan sensibility in an age so profoundly saturated by Judeo-Christian monotheism and so ardently adhering to the tenets of liberal democracy? In popular parlance the very word ‘paganism’ may incite some to derision and laughter. Who, after all, wants to be associated with witches and witchcraft, with sorcery and black magic? Worshiping animals or plants, or chanting hymns to Wotan or Zeus, in an epoch of cable television and “smart weapons,” does not augur well for serious intellectual and academic inquiry. Yet, before we begin to heap scorn on paganism, we should pause for a moment. Paganism is not just witches and witches’ brew; paganism also means a mix of highly speculative theories and philosophies. Paganism is Seneca and Tacitus; it is an artistic and cultural movement that swept over Italy under the banner of the Renaissance. Paganism also means Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Charles Darwin, and a host of other thinkers associated with the Western cultural heritage. Two thousand years of Judeo-Christianity have not obscured the fact that pagan thought has not yet disappeared, even though it has often been blurred, stifled, or persecuted by monotheistic religions and their secular offshoots. Undoubtedly, many would claim that in the realm of ethics all men and women of the world are the children of Abraham. Indeed, even the bolder ones who somewhat self-righteously claim to have rejected the Christian or Jewish theologies, and who claim to have replaced them with “secular humanism,” frequently ignore that their self-styled secular beliefs are firmly grounded in Judeo-Christian ethics. Abraham and Moses may be dethroned today, but their moral edicts and spiritual ordinances are much alive. The global and disenchanted world, accompanied by the litany of human rights, ecumenical society, and the rule of law—are these not principles that can be traced directly to the Judeo-Christian messianism that resurfaces today in its secular version under the elegant garb of modern “progressive” ideologies?

And yet, we should not forget that the Western world did not begin with the birth of Christ. Neither did the religions of ancient Europeans see the first light of day with Moses—in the desert. Nor did our much-vaunted democracy begin with the period of Enlightenment or with the proclamation of American independence. Democracy and independence—all of this existed in ancient Greece, albeit in its own unique social and religious context. Our Greco-Roman ancestors, our predecessors who roamed the woods of central and northern Europe, also believed in honor, justice, and virtue, although they attached to these notions a radically different meaning. Attempting to judge, therefore, ancient European political and religious manifestations through the lens of our ethnocentric and reductionist glasses could mean losing sight of how much we have departed from our ancient heritage, as well as forgetting that modern intellectual epistemology and methodology have been greatly influenced by the Bible. Just because we profess historical optimism—or believe in the progress of the modern “therapeutic state”—does not necessarily mean that our society is indeed the “best of all worlds.” Who knows, with the death of communism, with the exhaustion of liberalism, with the visible depletion of the congregations in churches and synagogues, we may be witnessing the dawn of neopaganism, a new blossoming of old cultures, a return to the roots that are directly tied to our ancient European precursors. Who can dispute the fact that Athens was the homeland of Europeans before Jerusalem became their frequently painful edifice?

Great lamenting is heard from all quarters of our disenchanted and barren world today. Gods seem to have departed, as Nietzsche predicted a century ago, ideologies are dead, and liberalism hardly seems capable of providing man with enduring spiritual support. Maybe the time has come to search for other paradigms? Perhaps the moment is ripe, as Alain de Benoist would argue, to envision another cultural and spiritual revolution—a revolution that might well embody our pre-Christian European pagan heritage?

 *    *    *

Alain de Benoist

Nietzsche well understood the meaning of “Athens against Jerusalem.” Referring to ancient paganism, which he called “the greatest utility of polytheism,” he wrote in The Joyful Wisdom:

There was then only one norm, the man and every people believed that it had this one and ultimate norm. But, above himself, and outside of himself, in a distant overworld a person could see a multitude of norms: the one God was not the denial or blasphemy of the other Gods! It was here that the right of individuals was first respected. The inventing of Gods, heroes, and supermen of all kinds, as well as co-ordinate men and undermen— dwarfs, fairies, centaurs, satyrs, demons, devils—was the inestimable preliminary to the justification of the selfishness and sovereignty of the individual; the freedom which was granted to one God in respect to other Gods, was at last given to the individual himself in respect to laws, customs, and neighbors. Monotheism, on the contrary, the rigid consequence of one normal human being —consequently, the belief in a normal God, beside whom there are only false spurious Gods—has perhaps been the greatest danger of mankind in the past.

Jehovah is not only a “jealous” god, but he can also show hatred: “Yet, I loved Jacob, and I hated Esau” (Malachi 1:3). He recommends hatred to all those who call out his name: “Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee? I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies” (Psalm 139: 21-22). “Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God” (Psalm 139:19). Jeremiah cries out: “Render unto them a recompense, O Lord, according to the work of their hands. . . . Persecute and destroy them in anger from under the heavens of the Lord” (Lamentations 5:64-66). The book of Jeremiah is a long series of maledictions and curses buried against peoples and nations. His contemplation of future punishments fills him with gloomy delight. “Let them be confounded that persecute me, but let not me be confounded: … bring upon them the day of evil, and destroy them with double destruction” (Lam. 17:18). “Therefore, deliver up their children to the famine, and pour out their blood by the force of the sword; and let their wives be bereaved of their children, and be widows; and let their men be put to death” (Lam. 18:21).

Further, Jehovah promises the Hebrews that he will support them in their war efforts: “When the Lord thy God shall cut off the nations from before thee, whither thou goest to possess them, and thou succeedest them, and dwellest in their land” (Deuteronomy 12:29). “But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth” (Deut. 20:16). Jehovah himself gave an example of a genocide by provoking the Deluge against the humanity that sinned against him. While he resided with the Philistine King Achish, David also practiced genocide (1 Samuel 27:9). Moses organized the extermination of the Midian people (Numbers 31:7). Joshua massacred the inhabitants of Hazor and Anakim. “And Joshua at that time turned back, and took Hazor, and smote the king thereof with the sword: for Hazor beforetime was the head of all those kingdoms. And they smote all the souls that were therein with the edge of the sword, utterly destroying them: there was not any left to breathe: and he burnt Hazor with fire” (Joshua 11:10-11, 20-21). The messianic king extolled by Solomon was also known for his reign of terror: “May he purify Jerusalem for all gentiles who trample on it miserably, may he exterminate by his wisdom, justice the sinners of this country. . . . May he destroy the impious nations with the words from his mouth.” Hatred against pagans is also visible in the books of Esther, Judith, etc.

“No ancient religion, except that of the Hebrew people has known such a degree of intolerance,” says Emile Gillabert in Moise et le phénomène judéo-chrétien (1976). Renan had written in similar terms: “The intolerance of the Semitic peoples is the inevitable consequence of their monotheism. The Indo-European peoples, before they converted to Semitic ideas, had never considered their religion an absolute truth. Rather, they conceived of it as a heritage of the family, or the caste, and in this way they remained foreign to intolerance and proselytism. This is why we find among these peoples the liberty of thought, the spirit of inquiry and individual research.” Of course, one should not look at this problem in a black and white manner, or for instance compare and contrast one platitude to another platitude. There have always been, at all times, and everywhere, massacres and exterminations. But it would be difficult to find in the pagan texts, be they of sacred or profane nature, the equivalent of what one so frequently encounters in the Bible: the idea that these massacres could be morally justified, that they could be deliberately authorized and ordained by one god, “as Moses the servant of the Lord commanded” (Joshua 11:12). Thus, for the perpetrators of these crimes, good consciousness continues to rule, not despite these massacres, but entirely for the sake of the massacres.

A lot of ink has been spilled over this tradition of intolerance. Particularly contentious are the words of Jesus as recorded by Luke: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). Some claim to perceive in the word “hate” a certain form of Hebraism; apparently, these words suggest that Jesus had to be absolutely preferred to all other human beings. Some claim to see in it traces of Gnostic contamination that suggest renouncement, despoliation of goods, and the refusal of procreation. In this context, the obligation to “hate” one’s parents is to be viewed as a corollary of not wishing to have children.

These interpretations remain pure conjecture. What is certain is that Christian intolerance began to manifest itself very early. In the course of history this intolerance was directed against “infidels” as well as against pagans, Jews, and heretics. It accompanied the extermination of all aspects of ancient culture —the murder of Hypatia, the interdiction of pagan cults, the destruction of temples and statues, the suppression of the Olympic Games, and the arson, at the instigation of the town’s Bishop Theophilus of Serapeum, of Alexandria in A.D. 389, whose immense library of 700,000 volumes had been collected by the Ptolomeys. Then came the forced conversions, the extinction of positive science, persecution, and pyres. Ammianus Marcellinus said: “The wild beasts are less hostile to people than Christians are among themselves.” Sulpicius Severus wrote: “Now everything has gone astray as the result of discords among bishops. Everywhere, one can see hatred, favours, fear, jealousy, ambition, debauchery, avarice, arrogance, sloth: there is general corruption everywhere.”

The Jewish people were the first to suffer from Christian monotheism. The causes of Christian anti-Semitism, which found its first “justification” in the Gospel of John (probably written under the influence of Gnosticism, and to which many studies have been devoted) lie in the proximity of the Jewish and Christian faiths. As Jacques Solé notes: “One persecutes only his neighbors.” Only a “small gap” separates Jews from Christians, but as Nietzsche says, “the smallest gap is also the least bridgeable.” During the first centuries of the Christian era anti-Semitism grew out of the Christian claim to be the successor of Judaism, and bestowing on it its “truthful” meaning. For Christians, “salvation is of the Jews” (John 4:22), but it is only Christianity that can be verus Israel. Hence the expression perfidi, applied to the Jews until recently by the Church in prayers during Holy Friday—an expression meaning “without faith,” and whose meaning is different from the modern word “perfidious.”

Saint Paul was the first to formulate this distinction. With his replacement of the Law by Grace, Paul distinguished between the “Israel of God” and the “Israel after the flesh” (I Corinthians 10:18), which also led him to oppose circumcision: “For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh: But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God” (Romans 2:28-29). Conclusion: “For we are the circumcision” (Philippians 3:3). This argument has, from the Christian point of view, a certain coherence. As Claude Trestmontant says, if the last of the nabis from Israel, the rabbi Yohushua of Nazareth, that is to say Jesus, is really a Messiah, then the vocation of Israel to become the “beacon of nations” must be fully accomplished, and the universalism implied in this vocation must be put entirely into practice. Just as the Law that has come to an end with Christ (in a double sense of the word) is no longer necessary, so has the distinction between Israel and other nations become futile as well: “There is neither Jew nor Greek” (Galatians 3:28). Consequently, universal Christianity must become verus Israel.

This process, which originated in the Pauline reform, has had a double consequence. On the one hand, it has resulted in the persecution of Jews who, by virtue of their “genealogical” proximity, are represented as the worst enemies of Christianity. They are the adversaries who refuse to “convert,” who refuse to recognize Christianity as the “true Israel.” As Shmuel Trigano notes, “by projecting itself as the new Israel, the West has given to Judaism a de facto jurisdiction, albeit not the right to be itself.” This means that the West can become “Israelite” to the extent that it denies Jews the right to be Israelites. Henceforth, the very notion of “Judeo-Christianity” can be defined as a double incarceration. It imprisons “the Christian West,” which by its own deliberate act has subordinated itself to an alien “jurisdiction,” and which by doing so denies this very same jurisdiction to its legitimate (Jewish) owners. Furthermore, it imprisons the Jews who, by virtue of a religion different from their own, are now undeservedly caught in the would-be place of their “accomplishment” by means of a religion which is not their own. Trigano further adds: “If Judeo-Christianity laid the foundations of the West, then the very place of Israel is also the West.” Subsequently, the requisites of “Westernization” must also become the requisites of assimilation and “normalization,” and the denial of identity. “The crisis of Jewish normality is the crisis of the westernization of Judaism. Therefore, to exit from the West means for the Jews to turn their back to their ‘normality,’ that is, to open themselves up to their otherness.” This seems to be why Jewish communities today criticize the “Western model,” only after they first adopt their own specific history of a semi-amnesiac and semi-critical attitude.

In view of this. Christian anti-Semitism can be rightly described as neurosis. As Jean Blot writes, it is because of its “predisposition toward alienation” that the West is incapable of “fulfilling itself or rediscovering itself.” And from this source arises anti-Semitic neurosis. “Anti-semitism allows the anti-Semite to project onto the Jew his own neuroses. He calls him a stranger, because he himself is a stranger, a crook, a powerful man, a parvenu; he calls him a Jew, because he himself is this Jew in the deepest depth of his soul, always on the move, permanently alienated, a stranger to his own religion and to God who incarnates him.” By replacing his original myth with the myth of biblical monotheism, the West has turned Hebraism into its own superego. As an inevitable consequence, the West had to turn itself against the Jewish people by accusing them of not pursuing the “conversion” in terms of the “logical” evolution proceeding from Sinai to Christianity. In addition, the West also accused the Jewish people of attempting, in an apparent “deicide,” to obstruct this evolution.

Many, even today, assume that if Jews were to renounce their distinct identity, “the Jewish problem” would disappear. At best, this is a naive proposition, and at worst, it masks a conscious or unconscious form of anti-Semitism. Furthermore, this proposition, which is inherent in the racism of assimilation and the denial of identity, represents the reverse side of the racism of exclusion and persecution. In the West, notes Shmuel Trigano, when the Jews were not persecuted, they “were recognized as Jews only on the condition that they first ceased to be Jews.” Put another way, in order to be accepted, they had to reject themselves; they had to renounce their own Other in order to be reduced to the Same. In another type of racism, Jews are accepted but denied; in the first, they are accepted but are not recognized. The Church ordered Jews to choose between exclusion (or physical death) or self-denial (spiritual and historical death). Only through conversion could they become “Christians, as others.”

The French Revolution emancipated Jews as individuals, but it condemned them to disappear as a “nation”; in this sense, they were forced to become “citizens as others.” Marxism, too, attempted to ensure the “liberation” of the Jewish people by imposing on them a class division, from which their dispersion inevitably resulted.

The origins of modern totalitarianism are not difficult to trace. In a secular form, they are tied to the same radical strains of intolerance whose religious causes we have just examined. The organization of totalitarianism is patterned after the organization of the Christian Church, and in a similar manner totalitarianisms exploit the themes of the “masses”—the themes inherent in contemporary mass democracy. This secularization of the system has, in fact, rendered totalitarianism more dangerous—independently of the fact that religious intolerance often triggers, in return, an equally destructive revolutionary intolerance. “Totalitarianism,” writes Gilbert Durand, “is further strengthened, in so far as the powers of monotheist theology (which at least left the game of transcendence intact) have been transferred to a human institution, to the Grand Inquisitor.”

It is a serious error to assume that totalitarianism manifests its real character only when it employs crushing coercion. Historical experience has demonstrated—and continues to demonstrate—that there can exist a “clean” totalitarianism, which, in a “soft” manner, yields the same consequences as the classic kinds of totalitarianism. “Happy robots” of 1984 or of Brave New World have no more enviable conditions than prisoners of the camps. In essence, totalitarianism did not originate with Saint-Just, Stalin, Hegel, or Fichte. Rather, as Michel Maffesoli says, totalitarianism emerges “when a subtle form of plural, polytheistic, and contradictory totality, that is inherent in organic interdependency” is superseded by a monotheistic one. Totalitarianism grows out of a desire to establish social and human unity by reducing the diversity of individuals and peoples to a single model. In this sense, he argues, it is legitimate to speak of a “polytheist social arena, referring to multiple and complementary gods” versus a “monotheistic political arena founded on the illusion of unity.” Once the polytheism of values “disappears, we face totalitarianism.” Pagan thought, on the other hand, which fundamentally remains attached to rootedness and to the place, and which is a preferential center of the crystallization of human identity, rejects all religious and philosophical forms of universalism.

Big Money and Little Israel: The Racial Roots of a Rabbi’s Risible Rhetoric

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Absolutely fascinating. And utterly immoral. That’s how I’d describe an experiment that’s been performed several times down the centuries. Or so the stories go. Maybe the stories are wrong. Maybe no powerful ruler has ever ordered a group of babies to be raised in isolation by silent nurses, so that he could discover whether language is acquired or innate, and perhaps learn the true mother-tongue of mankind. But Herodotus says that the pharaoh Psamtik I (664–610 BC) tried the experiment and concluded that Phrygian is our Ursprache. Later historians say that Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250), King James IV of Scotland (1473–1513), and the Mughal emperor Akbar (1542–1605) tried it too.

Tongues and hands

Only Psamtik and Akbar may really have done so, but they wouldn’t have discovered the true and original language of mankind if they did. The evidence suggests that children raised like that can create a true spoken language among themselves, but it won’t match any existing or historic language. An entirely new sign-language appeared like that when deaf children were brought together in schools for the first time in Nicaragua. So yes, language is innate to human beings. It’s coded in our genes and it will emerge ex novo even if children are raised by silent and unsigning adults. But how is language coded in our genes? How did it evolve? I think those are two of the biggest scientific questions, up there with “Why is there something rather than nothing?” and “How does consciousness arise from unconscious matter?”

And maybe the evolution of language is the biggest scientific question of all. After all, language is the most important aspect of human behavior. It defines us and has empowered us in all our achievements. We’ve conquered the earth and begun to understand the universe with two small and feeble body-parts: our tongues and our hands. Mathematics is essential for true scientific understanding, of course, but mathematics wouldn’t exist without language. Nor would any kind of civilization or any kind of genuine culture. So everything comes back to language. That’s why, as I said, it would be absolutely fascinating to study a language that was created by children in isolation. But it would be utterly immoral to run an experiment like that, so we’ll have to go on wondering what such a language might be like.

Leftist linguistics

One of the things that I wonder is what influence race would have on the new language. Would White or Black or Chinese children create something racially distinct? Would finer racial distinctions, say between German and Spanish children, make any difference? The experiment would have to be repeated to get valid results, of course, but orthodox linguistics already knows what those results would be. It says that race would have no influence whatsoever: any kind of language could emerge from any kind of children. After all, race doesn’t exist, so how could it influence language? That’s what the leftist mainstream of linguistics says. But the leftist mainstream is as wrong in linguistics as it is everywhere else. Race does exist and it influences everything from physiology to psychology. Why should language be excluded?

I find it very difficult to believe that identical genes underlie language in every human group. And even if those genes are identical, they wouldn’t be expressed in isolation. Extra-linguistic traits like extraversion and intelligence also influence the language we use. For example, you can see extraversion and intelligence (or lack of it) at work in the language of Black Americans. When White society relaxed its efforts to police feckless behavior and instil European values in Blacks, they swiftly reverted to the matricentric cultural patterns of Africa, as though Black genetics was reasserting itself after centuries of suppression.

No photo required

Is the language of Blacks part of that Afro-genetic renaissance? Take the woman who has been arrested for “trying to burn down the birth home of American civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr in Atlanta, Georgia.” I predict that the leftist media will soon send the crime down the memory-hole, because the arrested woman is Black. I haven’t seen a photo of her, but I have seen her name. It’s Laneisha Shantrice Henderson. Those forenames are definitely Black, but they’re restrained and tasteful by comparison with many others: Shaqeeqah, Demontravius, Shalondra, Rau’shee, D’Vontay, Knowshon, Jermajesty, Anfrene, Deontay, Ogonna, Dremiel, and so on. In nomenclature like that I can sense a new language trying to burst the carapace of English and emerge into the light. If English-speaking Blacks were separated from Whites, they would turn English into an entirely new language. They’ve gone a long way to doing that already, as a satirical commenter at Paul Kersey’s old SBPDL blog once noted:

I was at the bus stop today and there were two of the stupidest, most unintelligible blacks that I have ever been around. Both were in their 40s, unkempt, dirty, and walked with typical Negro lethargy.

They “spoke” for a few minutes in their ebonic gibberish, and it went something like this:

Black 1: Ramclam. RAMCLAM! Suppa dat?!

Black 2: Yah gooby. Muhfugga aw-rah yo.

B1: Yuh huh, ooba dun dee-id dat.

B2: Dahhh ain’ got dat shoeshine.

B1: Nah! Flibba doo bo’ cain’ got da jimjam.

B2: Heard dat! Aw yaw ain’ got duh ribba fo duh foo. Dat’s wah dey ain’ got muhfuggas an’ sheeit!

And it went on like this, with extensive crotch-grabbing and chuckle-laughing, finger-snapping, and levity on a wavelength only these two were on. And to think there are millions of whites who would listen to these two in amazement, thinking they were speaking a unique language rather than butchered English. (Stuff Black People Don’t Like)

But it isn’t really butchered English: it’s Black English. Some Whites find it amusing, while other Whites – so-called “wiggas” – try to imitate it. The first response is much healthier, of course, but it misses the scientific interest of Black English. Are genetics at work in its phonetics, grammar, and semantics? I would say that they are. I would also say that genetics are at work in the English of another alien group in Western culture. Here’s an example of that English from the Financial Times:

Confronted with enormity: murdered infants, abducted grandmothers, slaughtered villagers, lusty chants of “gas the Jews” at the Free Palestine demonstration in Sydney, mere words feel like weak carriers of so much horror and sorrow. Journalistic bloviation on the cause of this and the effect of that seems an indecency, at least until the bodies are gathered and returned to families. So context me no contexts, analyse me no analyses, suspend your partially informed diagnoses; leave off your strenuous efforts at even-handedness. Let us be, to grieve, rage, weep; say the mourners’ kaddish.

Perhaps images, then, not words? Of terrified young people who in a trice went from dancing to frantic running in a futile attempt to escape the spray of bullets; of a kibbutz dog shot as it emerged from a house (that must have helped Free Palestine); a young woman with bloody marks staining her sweatpants as she is bundled away by captors; a knife lying on a sofa in the kibbutz Be’eri, where 10 per cent of the population were killed; or visual evidence of “resistance” like the video of Mor Bayder’s murdered grandmother uploaded by her killers to Mor’s Facebook page.

Sympathy, for the moment, abounds, for as the writer Dara Horn pointed out in the title of her unsparing book of essays, People Love Dead Jews; living ones, especially should we have the temerity to defend ourselves, not so much. There is, rightly, sympathy too for the Palestinians of Gaza who are also victims and prisoners of Hamas and do not deserve to be punished for the wickedness perpetrated by their fanatical tyrants, nor for the delusion that the deaths of Jewish families will make Israel disappear. (“Let us be, to grieve, rage, weep,” The Financial Times, 13th October 2023)

That’s the Jewish historian Simon Schama (born 1945) reacting to the Hamas atrocities in Israel. As I read his  article, I decided that he was committing atrocities of his own – atrocities against the English language. He postures and preens in a thoroughly obnoxious way. And I found myself nagged by a strange thought: that English isn’t Schama’s mother-tongue. Yes, he grew up in an English-speaking Jewish family in an English-speaking country, but he doesn’t use English in a natural way. As Andrew Joyce said in his incisive polemic against Schama at the Occidental Observer: “[…] what strikes me most about [his] literary and visual productions is the inescapably non-European, and utterly alien, manner in which he communicates.” “Alien” is the right word in more ways than one. There’s something squirming and wriggling beneath the surface of Schama’s language, like one of the death-dealing larvae of the Alien films as it prepares to burst from a human body in a shower of blood and shredded tissue.

Speech for speaking’s sake

I think Jewish genetics are at work in Schama’s English. And I think that’s ultimately why I find it so pretentious and ugly. Other Whites have reacted in the same way to Jews using other White European languages. As Andrew Joyce continued: “Schama’s type of verbosity has for centuries been taken as a Jewish hallmark. The most famous attack on Jewish verbosity, of course, came from Richard Wagner who heavily critiqued his Jewish musical contemporaries for their preoccupation with speech ‘for the sake of speaking, rather than with the object that first makes speaking worthwhile.’” And what does make speaking worthwhile? It’s to communicate truth, first and foremost. But any gentile who has ever argued with Ashkenazi Jews must have noticed that some of them simply aren’t interested in the truth. Instead, they’re interested in that perennial and pluripotent question: What’s best for Jews?

And in pursuit of what’s best for Jews, they will unblushingly advance the most ridiculous arguments and commit the most blatant fallacies. Here’s an example from Rabbi Dov Fischer, a Jew who much writes much better than Simon Schama but seems to share Schama’s indifference to reality. Addressing the Black commentator Candace Owens, Rabbi Fischer said she was mistaken to claim that Israel’s supporters had any financial power:

As you posted, Ms. Owens, one “cannot serve both G[-]d and money.” The Big Money: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain. By contrast, Israel is the size of New Jersey, population 9.5 million, comparable to New York City’s 8.8 million, way less than Tokyo’s 14 million. When you stand with Israel, you are turning your back on money while serving G-d in all His glory. (“An Open Letter to Ms. Candace Owens,” The American Spectator, 17th November 2023)

Dov Fischer is an intelligent man. Why could he not see the complete non sequitur of using Israel’s land-area to refute the idea that Israelis and Israel’s supporters have enormous financial power? Yes, Israel is a small country. So is Switzerland. Do we therefore conclude that Swiss banks are a myth and that Switzerland is a nation of barefooted goatherds? Of course not. Nor should we accept the idea that standing with Israel means “turning your back on money.” On the contrary: standing with Israel means opening your arms to money. Lots of money. But was Dov Fischer consciously and willfully lying when he made that utterly ridiculous claim in the American Spectator?

Words versus world

I don’t think so. It’s more complicated than that. There’s a basic division in life between those who think that reality should govern words and those who think that words should govern reality. Those in the first group try to conform their words to reality. That is, they try to speak the truth. Those in the second group try to control reality with words. That is, they have no respect for the truth. Instead, they’re interested in something else, like power or benefiting some identity-group.

Most leftists belong to the second group, but Dov Fischer is right-wing and he has as little respect for the truth as the left-wing Simon Schama. After all, Fischer and Schama are concerned with something much more important than what’s true and what’s real. They’re concerned with what’s best for Jews. We don’t yet know how race affects the genetics of language, but one thing is already certain. Different races use language in very different ways and for very different ends.

Tucker interviews Thomas Massie

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Rep. Thomas Massie is in big trouble with the media after this tweet:

But it’s hard to know exactly what Massie meant by this, but presumably it is linked to the Republicans’ attempt to tie aid to Israel to securing the southern border. But of course, Jewish activists saw it differently, likely thinking that it resurrects the old charge of loyalty to Jewish interests trumping loyalty to American interests. The White House called it “virulent anti-Semitism, and Chuck Schumer tweeted (Xed?), “Rep. Massie, you’re a sitting Member of Congress. This is antisemitic, disgusting, dangerous, and exactly the type of thing I was talking about in my Senate address.” His Senate address included statements such as:

While the dead bodies of Jewish Israelis were still warm, while hundreds of Jewish Israelis were being carried as hostages back to Hamas tunnels under Gaza, Jewish Americans were alarmed to see some of our fellow citizens characterize a brutal terrorist attack as justified because of the actions of the Israeli government.

The problem is that the actions of the Israeli government are also brutal, on the West Bank and especially in Gaza. And it’s not at all clear what the Palestinians are supposed to do about it short of armed resistance.

Massie reposted Schumer’s criticism Tuesday and tweeted, “If only you cared half as much about our border as you do my tweets” implying I suppose, the Democrats’ open border policy bringing in millions of people with no attachments to America but are likely future Democrat voters is anything but patriotic.

All this occurred in the context of a House resolution that basically equated criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. Massie was the sole Republican who did not vote in favor of it. Al Jazeera’s summary of the bill:

The symbolic resolution was framed as an effort to reject the “drastic rise of anti-Semitism in the United States and around the world”.

But it contained language saying that the House “clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism”. It also condemned the slogan “From the River to the Sea”, which rights advocates understand to be an aspirational call for equality in historic Palestine.

Instead, the resolution described it as a “rallying cry for the eradication of the State of Israel and the Jewish people”. It also characterised demonstrators who gathered in Washington, DC, last month to demand a ceasefire as “rioters”. They “spewed hateful and vile language amplifying antisemitic themes”, the resolution alleges.

Husam Marajda, an organiser with the US Palestinian Community Network (USPCN), said the resolution is an effort to “cancel” Palestinian rights advocates by accusing them of bigotry and labelling their criticism of Israeli policies as hate speech.

“It’s super dangerous. It sets a really, really bad precedent. It’s aiming to criminalise our liberation struggle and our call for justice and peace and equality,” Marajda told Al Jazeera.

Mr. Marajda is quite right. Schumer’s tweet it typical of Jewish commentary on the war: no context—nothing about the blockade, the reality of Gaza as an open-air prison, apartheid on the West Bank, and the implacably hostile attitudes of the present Israeli government.

So Massie really stepped into what he must have known would be a deluge of hatred against him—and likely a brimming war chest for whomever runs against him in 2024.

So aid to Israel is being held up by Congress. But no problem. The neocons who run the Biden administration easily found a way to get around it:

The State Department is pushing through a government sale to Israel of 13,000 rounds of tank ammunition, bypassing a congressional review process that is generally required for arms sales to foreign nations, according to a State Department official and an online post by the Defense Department on Saturday.

The State Department notified congressional committees at 11 p.m. on Friday that it was moving ahead with the sale, valued at more than $106 million, even though Congress had not finished an informal review of a larger order from Israel for tank rounds.

The department invoked an emergency provision in the Arms Export Control Act, the State Department official and a congressional official told The New York Times. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivities over the sales. The arms shipment has been put on an expedited track, and Congress has no power to stop it.

The Defense Department posted a notification of the sale before noon on Saturday. It said Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken had informed Congress on Friday that “an emergency exists that requires the immediate sale.”

So Tucker’s December 5 interview with Massie is quite timely. From the Zero Hedge article (emphasis in original):

“But you gotta wonder like, why is the leadership of your party, the Republican party, in favor of this? Why the new speaker — seems like a nice guy but also like a child — why would his first act as speaker be to endorse this? I’m confused,” said Carlson.

To which Massie replied: “Well, I hope he doesn’t. But you know, Biden’s budget director, the head of the OMB sent a letter yesterday to Speaker Mike Johnson, imploring him to spend more money in Ukraine. And what they said is they want to revitalize our defense industrial base.”

“And they sent a list of states that would get money when we spend, you know, money on deadly munitions because they have to be manufactured in Alabama or Ohio or Texas,” Massie continued. “And so, you know, they’re saying the quiet part out loud that congressmen tend to vote for this stuff because a lot of this federal spending that goes to Ukraine is actually laundered back to the military-industrial complex. And in some ways, not very efficiently, but in some ways, it enriches people in their districts and the stockholders, some of whom are congressmen.” …

The two also discussed US Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and her influence in Ukraine, with Carlson calling her “the single most consequential voice” in the Ukraine debate.

(Nuland’s husband, [neocon] Robert Kagan [tapped by Hilary Clinton as a top foreign policy advisor in 2016], notably penned a ‘Trump Dictator‘ piece in the Washington Post last week). [From 2016: Kagan has advocated for muscular American intervention in Syria; Clinton’s likely pick for Pentagon chief, Michelle Flournoy, has similarly agitated for redirecting U.S. airstrikes in Syria toward ousting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.]

Carlson notes that she was a “driving force behind the war in Iraq, which was of course a disaster and hurt the United States,” and now “she has far more influence on it than the entire United States Congress put together.” “How do we allow unelected lunatics like ‘Toria Nuland who clearly hates the United States, and always has, to have this power over our lives and our children’s future?”

[Neocons would be apoplectic at the idea that they hate the U.S.,  but Tucker’s claim seems a transparent attempt to paint them as having loyalty to their ethnostate, as implied by Massie’s tweet.] …

Carlson then asked if the people advocating for more war have ever apologized for “the killing of an entire” generation of Ukrainians who are fighting a “war they cannot win.”

“That’s all so grotesque, but it’s also straightforward. You know, people are getting rich, so let’s do it. Okay — that’s an argument. It’s an immoral argument but it is one. But that’s not the argument they’re making in public. They’re saying we have a moral obligation.”

“You’re a bad person, you just heard the national security advisor say it, you’re a bad person if you’re against this. But no one ever mentions that we have abetted the killing of an entire generation of Ukrainian men that will not be replaced. To fight a war that they cannot win.” -Tucker Carlson

Carlson also pointed out that the Biden administration “prevented a peace deal and we extended the war, and we killed all these people,” adding “And so all the ones running around with their little Ukraine flag pins, they’re implicated in that. Has anyone apologized?”

To which Massie replied, “No, to support this money you have to be economically illiterate and morally deficient.”

Other things that stood out to me:

  • Jake Sullivan: people who vote against Ukraine aid are Putin puppets in a war Tucker said was a “war they cannot win”;
  • Tucker on Victoria Nuland: “You can make the case she should be in prison”;
  • Massie: if border security is part of Ukraine aid bill, it will just give Biden (i.e., Mayorkas) more money to process more illegals;
  • White men not wanted in the armed forces, likely to be replaced by military-aged illegals with no allegiance to America;
  • requiring covid jabs in the military as a litmus test for allegiance to the liberal agenda;
  • proposed expense for additional Ukraine aid is equal to the entire U.S. spending on infrastructure;
  • interest on the debt more than the military budget; covid spending as obviously causing inflation.

The Paradox of MAGA Support for World War Three

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The ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians (both Christian and Muslim) in Gaza has exposed a curious paradox.

While conservative Republican voters claim to oppose the Leftist ruling class as embodied in the D.C. political establishment, the entertainment and news media, academia, and etc., they nevertheless are in complete and total alignment on the biggest-ticket item on the Jewish agenda: global war with Russia, Iran, and China.

How can this be? These people elected Donald Trump to the presidency in a seemingly clear rejection of the neoconservative interventionism of the Bush era. 2016 was supposed to herald the dawn of a new Republican Party. Of course, that new and improved party never truly emerged. There are innumerable possible explanations for this, not the least of which was President Trump’s horrific staffing decisions and consequent inability to exercise control over his own executive branch. The failures of the Trump Administration aside, conventional right-wing populist wisdom continues to maintain that the Republican base did fundamentally and permanently change, and that it is merely the malfeasance of elected officials that is to blame for the perversion and subversion of the promise of 2016.

While Republican voters do indeed continue to overwhelmingly support President Trump, the idea that this voter base is fundamentally different and better than the party of Bush is a delusion. While Republican voters and politicians are finally starting to show tepid opposition to the endless flow of American money into the coffers of the wholly Jewish-Ukrainian government, this opposition has conveniently only concretized as the wholly Jewish-American government decides to pivot from the Russian front of World War Three to the Middle Eastern front.

Even where Republican voters oppose further Ukraine funding, they largely continue to view Russia and President Putin as enemies of America and of “freedom.” From my own experience with Republican voters, I am confident that, given the choice, they would support direct American war against Russia. When I ran for U.S. Congress in the 2022 midterm cycle, I spoke in countless living rooms and assembly halls in which I met average Republican Trump supporters who proclaimed that “we need to take out Putin!.” I spoke to people who expressed their disdain at the Biden Administration (if one can call it that) for not doing enough to support Ukraine. Throughout the rural Ozarks, I saw homes, wealthy and poor alike, flying the Ukrainian flag.

At the first of the laughable Republican presidential debates this year, held merely to create the illusion of real opposition to Donald Trump, Chris Christie stated—with a straight face—that he went to Ukraine to see “what Vladimir Putin’s army was doing to the free Ukrainian people.” He claimed that over 20,000 children “have been abducted, stolen, ripped from their mothers and fathers and brought back to Russia to be programmed to fight their own families. They have gouged out people’s eyes, cut off their ears and shot people in the back of the head, and then gone into those homes and raped the daughters and wives who were left as widows and orphans.” Republican voters actually believe this. When Tucker Carlson asked the self-styled “Christian leader” Mike Pence how he could support the brutal repression of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, Pence simply replied that it wasn’t true. Again, ignorant voters simply internalize the simple slogans fed to them by their masters—Ukraine is the “free,” “democratic,” David against the Russian Goliath. Anything else is “Russian propaganda.”

While I would not go so far as to say that the destruction of Russia is a priority for these voters, I would certainly go that far with respect to Republican opinion on China. Regardless of one’s politics or preference of news source, Americans are incessantly proselytized to about “the China threat.” Never mind the fact that the Biden Administration is openly attempting to provoke military hostilities and conducting a sustained and escalating economic war against China; Republican voters are absolutely convinced that the Chinese control the American government. That “Chinese communists” are our biggest threat. The equation is simple: Name a problem actually inflicted upon White America by Jews, and then blame the “Chicoms.” No country is more universally demonized among conservatives than China. When—not if—Taiwan is made the third front of World War Three, rural Americans will be more than happy to send their sons to die for “capitalism and democracy.”

These rural Americans are, however, more interested in, indeed thrilled at the prospect of sending their sons to die and be maimed in the name of Israel. When it comes to Israel, conservative voters are entranced, their wallets open, their hearts on their sleeve, their pulse quickened, their pupils dilated. A perfect example of these Americans is furnished by the Jerusalem Post:

Meet the Christian Cowboys defending Israel’s heartland

Fifteen American Christian cowboys with their wide-brimmed hats, denim shirts, tight Wrangler jeans, leather belts with large buckles, and well-worn boots have come to Israel to protect the Jewish residents of the biblical heartland – Judea and Samaria.

“We want to live for Israel; that is our goal,” said 24-year-old Yosef Strain from Montana, his voice carrying a subtle twang.

The young men, mostly in their early 20s, hail from across the South: Tennessee, Missouri, Texas, Arkansas, and Montana [Note: Apparently, the Jerusalem Post believes that Montana is a Southern State]. They join other faith-driven volunteers in Israel through Hayovel. For 20 years, this organization has been bringing several hundred Christians to Israel each year to help harvest the grapes of the biblical heartland. These Evangelical Christians are usually focused on restoring Christian-Jewish relations and confirming Israel’s right to their ancestral homeland.

However, after the October 7 Hamas massacre, “we understood the morbid reality that we are facing a serious enemy and the world does not recognize it,” explained Hayovel Director of Operations Joshua Waller. “If we did not say yes [to helping Judea and Samaria], no one was.”

Hayovel launched Operation Itai to raise $29 million for security supplies for the West Bank. So far, more than $2 million has been raised from American Christian Zionists for bullet-proof vests, helmets, night vision binoculars, drones, flashlights and more.

Itai was the non-Jewish commander of King David’s 600-men army, mentioned in II Samuel, chapter 15.

“We did not set a budget,” said Waller. “We asked the communities what they needed, and Operation Itai responded.”

In addition, Hayovel decided to bring a group of “hardcore guys” to help install security roads, build warehouses for supplies, deliver supplies, and do 24/7 guard duty, Waller said.

These 15 cowboys were selected.

“Because of their farming-can-do attitudes, we knew these would be the right guys,” Waller said.

“Everyone is talking about a proportionate response,” he added. “A proportionate Christian response would be to bring the supplies needed to stop another Jewish massacre from happening.”

He said Gaza is only one front. Syria and Lebanon are two other fronts, and the West Bank is the fourth front.

“This is one of the most severe fronts. You have around 500,000 Jewish people scattered among 200 different communities living next to two- to three-million Palestinians, and there are no security fences between them and us,” Waller added. “No one wants to say it, but these Palestinians, many of them are also involved with Hamas or another terrorist organization, and if they believe they are strong enough and Israel is weak enough, they will strike.”

The cowboys stay on Har Bracha with Hayovel but work throughout the West Bank, including in the southern Hebron Hills. They participate in what they call “farm watch” – staying up all night to catch cattle and sheep thieves and terrorists.

These boys are the real deal.

“A lot of people think we are dressing up,” Strain, 22, wearing a large Star of David metal belt buckle, told The Jerusalem Post. “We just have a different style and culture.”

Strain, whose family farm trains horses and rides them in rodeos, said he had been to Israel three times before, and his parents were “pretty supportive.”

And none of the cowboys seemed very afraid of violence.

Charles Hutsler, 19, from Huntsville, Arkansas, said he was “not scared” about being in the country during a war because “God has my back.”

Ezekiel (“Zeek”) Strain, 20, Yosef Strain’s brother, said he believes in Israel in the promised land, specifically, the biblical heartland.

“I ain’t scared of what could happen or might happen. I just want to help,” he said.

“God put a special calling on my life and has given me certain talents, direct my life in a certain path, that I can do something when the time comes,” added Johnny Plocher, 24. “I am not on Earth for money, a new truck or property, a vacation – that is not my purpose. I feel called here now and am glad to be here.”

The cowboys stressed that they do not represent the Biden administration or liberal Americans.

“Biden does not represent these cowboys,” Waller said. “Americans support Israel, including Judea and Samaria. The Biden administration believes in a two-state solution and would like to see 500,000 Jews pushed out of here, their biblical heartland.

“These cowboys represent the America behind Israel and the Bible.”

He continued: “We are here to say no way to have to cut the State of Israel in half and the ability to create an Arab state in the idle of Israel’s heartland. These cowboys are not going to see it.”

The very same Republican voters who deride the Lügenpresse as the enemy of the people, who watched for years as news presenters lied about President Trump, about “COVID” and the mRNA injections, about everything, wholeheartedly and unquestioningly believe the same media when it comes to Israel. The blatant, shoddy atrocity propaganda about “decapitated babies,” almost as ridiculous as atrocity propaganda about the alleged “Holocaust,” was absorbed and believed immediately.

Israel and its agents within the Bush Administration were likely involved in the attack on the United States on September 11, 2001. But the American public doesn’t know — indeed has no interest in knowing. Trillions of dollars, millions of lives, and unquantifiable civil liberties were lost in consequence. Christian-Islamic relations were perhaps irrevocably ruined, exacerbated by simultaneously flooding the zone with nonstop anti-Muslim “national security” propaganda and a constant flow of Muslim immigrants into the West.

In other words, the same vermin who told us to fear Muslims also told Muslims that we hate them and used our armed forces to slaughter hundreds of thousands of Muslims while also importing millions of Muslims into our country. Israel made us hate each other, in order to use our young men as cannon fodder to remove their geopolitical enemies from the playing field, with the current genocide of Gaza likely designed to culminate in a direct war against Iran. Op-ed in the Jerusalem Post (November 26):

America needs to bomb Iran – opinion

How do you deal with Iran when it intends to take out Israel with a nuclear bomb? There’s only one way this can be prevented: A preemptive strike on Iran by America.

When evangelical Representative Brian Mast (R-FL) wears an Israel Defense Forces uniform to Congress and repeats the Israeli government line that there are no innocent Palestinians in Gaza, when Breitbart tells us that Palestinian hospitals, refugee camps, and schools are “Hamas bases,” when politicians like Ron DeSantis and Josh Hawley declare that we must censor and criminalize “antisemitic speech,” which is to say any criticism of Israel or individual Jews, when Nimrata “Nikki Haley” Randhawa wags her finger on television that we have to “finish” Iran, American Christians clap their fat hands together like seals and cheer this slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent civilians, primarily children. They donate their money to the “International Fellowship of Christians and Jews” when they see Mike Huckabee and Michelle Bachman on the screen, chiding us to “bless Israel” and “feed the hungry Jews.” They’re hungry, alright—hungry for Christian blood.

I am a Christian, and thus it pains me to say this, but it must nevertheless be said: Self-professed Christians are dragging us all to Hell with them.

The South is home to most of the few Christian churches that have not fallen to feminism, homosexuality, transgenderism, negrophilia, and the other forces which have largely captured American Christianity. And yet these churches, otherwise seemingly bastions of traditional Christianity, are just as corrupt and satanic as those that openly espouse Leftism. They have been conquered, for many decades now, by Christian Zionism, the most consequential heresy in history. I know of many churches in the South firsthand whose Sunday sermons explore the topic of “Why Christians owe a duty to Israel.”

These pathetic, gullible, lost souls still think that the Jewish religion is that of the Old Testament, that Jews are their friends, that Jews are still God’s Chosen, that Christians are actually subordinate to Jews. They don’t know that the Jewish Talmud says that Christ is being boiled in excrement for eternity. Most insidiously, though, these rubes believe that by physically aiding and even fighting for the Israeli state, they will hasten the Second Coming of Christ. The Book of Revelation is impenetrable, and yet Christian Zionists believe they have it all worked out. This account of a sermon by the notorious John Hagee of “Christians United for Israel” is instructive:

Pastor John Hagee of Cornerstone Church brought a focused message to his congregation and millions of viewers around the world.

Hagee discussed the horror of the Hamas attacks on Israel, then quickly turned his attention. “The righteous rage of America must be focused on Iran,” he thundered, flanked by Israeli diplomatic officials and joined by several members of Congress, who recorded pretaped messages of support for his cause.

The pastor called for increased military assistance to Israel and said the U.S. should ratchet up sanctions, block oil shipments to Iran, and strike at Iranian ships. “Let me say it to you in plain Texas speech,” Hagee continued, “America should roll up its sleeves and knock the living daylights out of Tehran for what they have done to Israel. Hit them so hard that our enemies will once again fear us.”

The crowd in San Antonio erupted in applause and waved small Israeli flags.

Many televangelists have depicted the Hamas terror attack on Israel on October 7 as a piece of a biblical prophecy that some evangelical Christians believe is sign of the “End Times.” These Christian Zionists have preached that bloodshed in Israel is necessary for the second coming of Jesus Christ.

In this interpretation, Christian Zionists cite the prophet Isaiah’s words in the Old Testament, that God “shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed Judah from the four corners of the Earth,” a prophecy they believe was fulfilled with the creation of Israel in 1948. Further, verses from the Book of Revelation that discuss an apocalyptic war over Israel will usher in Christ’s return and reign over the earth.

For many of these evangelical Christians, the modern founding of Israel was the beginning of this prophecy, which they argue states that Jews must control Jerusalem before a war between the evil empires of “Gog and Magog.” Televangelists such as Hagee have said that various Arab nations, as well as China, Russia, and Iran, correspond to these biblical enemies of Israel, and he believes a war is necessary to fulfill the prophecy. According to this belief, the End Times conclude with faithful Christians raptured to heaven and Christ returning to slay or convert nonbelievers, including Jews, before ruling over the world in a final era of humankind.

Such a view of current events was on full display last Sunday, as co-pastor Matt Hagee, John Hagee’s son, and heir to the religious throne, presided over a geopolitical map of the Middle East, showing that Israel was surrounded by its biblical enemies such as a Magog as Russia and Persia as Iran.

“The Secretary of State is not going to get us out of this one,” said the younger Hagee. “God has a hook in the jaws of these nations, and he’s drawing them here,” he continued, pointing at the map. “God tells Ezekiel exactly how he’s going to defend Israel,” he said. “He speaks about raining down fire and hail and brimstone. That’s a heavenly air assault.”

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, took the stage at the San Antonio, Texas church later that day, citing the prophet Isaiah, a nod to End Times theology, to call for Americans to support Israel’s war.

“We need to be partners with God,” said Erdan. “For those of us in Israel, we are battling on the frontlines, for you my friends, we need you on the frontlines as well,” he said.

The frontlines on which Americans could help, the Israeli ambassador explained, are “the political frontlines, making sure your elected officials on the state and national level stand with unwavering support for Israel.”

“Israel is the apple of God’s eye, Israel is unique to God,” thundered Pastor John Hagee during the broadcast. “Let me say to every person watching this telecast,” Hagee continued, “I encourage you to bless the house of Israel with your financial giving.”

The telecast featured messages from Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Ted Cruz of Texas, as well as Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the House Majority Whip.

“Congress must take deliberate action to give Israel whatever resources they need to end Hamas once and for all and combat Iran’s support of terrorism,” said Emmer, who ended his message with a prayer. “This savage atrocity wasn’t just the worst slaughter of Jews since World War 2, but one of the worst terror attacks against America since 9/11,” remarked Cotton.

The populist delusion that, were we to remove Jewish money and party machinery from the equation, average Americans would right the ship of state and everything would be hunky-dory is just that: a delusion. It is certainly more comfortable than the truth, which is that American politicians are accurate reflections of the people who vote for them.

Yes, the 2020 presidential election was indubitably stolen. Many elections are stolen. But not every election is stolen. Very ignorant, very real people actually show up on election day to vote for the likes of Lindsey Graham. And those very ignorant, very real people, even those who steadfastly support President Trump and have faith that a Republican will ever be elected president again in this country, will in one breath cry, “America First!”  and, in the next, “We have to support Israel!”

Certainly, there are encouraging signs, such as falling rates of enlistment in the armed forces. But all it will take is another 9/11 to get those numbers back up, or, failing that, a draft. Given the fact that Republican voters can’t find it within themselves to muster up the courage to resist the aggressive Jewish homosexual-transgender agenda to brainwash, rape, and mutilate their own children, I don’t predict any resistance against a draft. After all, White conservatives are the only demographic left who idolize and honor the military and police — who hate them. Republicans will be the first in line to hand in their guns—and as they’re led to the gulags, they’ll thank the guards for their service.

In the final analysis, there will be no solution to any question until there is a solution to the Jewish Question. It is a waste of time to talk about anything if we lack the spine to name the culprit, to speak freely of our oppressors. It gives me no pleasure to report this, but the Republican electorate is simply not ready to even entertain a discussion of the Jewish xenocracy that rules the darkness which once was America. They will continue to be good goyim, working away in their cubicles day after day and raising new generations of children to kill and die for their Jewish masters.

Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.

The Goldene Medine: Anglo-Jewish Responses to the White Australia Policy

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 War rages in Palestine and once again we are witness to the intractable reality that wherever they go in the world, Jews seem to bring conflict and chaos with them. Watching the destruction safely from afar, one wonders if there has ever been a Jewish population, diaspora or Israeli, minority or not, that has enjoyed a peaceful existence and the full acceptance of their neighbours, one not beset by animosity or the emergence of violence. The answers are far and few in between over the past 1000 years, but a viable candidate would have to be the Jewish community that took root in the eighteenth century in a country located about as far away from Europe as one could possibly go.

The nature of Jewish behaviour and in-group strategy and the resultant hostilities this engenders when it encounters gentile society have been discussed in extensive detail by writers at The Occidental Observer over the years. Whether it’s shaping immigration policy in the U.S. and launching destructive wars in the Middle East for the benefit of Israel, promoting multiculturalism in the U.K. and Australia, or inflicting critical race theory on Ireland, the pattern of Jews aggressively promoting their own interests at the expense of the gentile majority is simply impossible to ignore.

In light of this, my familiarity with Australian history, in particular Australian Jewish history, has often given me pause. If racial nationalism is such a universal danger to Jewry, why is it that I have never encountered any critical responses by contemporary Anglo-Jewry to the foundation of the White Australia Policy. Have Jewish historians simply forgotten to investigate such an important topic? Can it be that the interests of Anglo-Jewry and the White majority were so well aligned that there was no need to undermine the majority in the first place?

As this essay will seek to lay out, the history of Jewry in Australia prior to the 1930s is one that gives even the most hardened White identitarians a reason to believe that co-existence between Jew and gentile, without the need for any kind of legal or political restrictions on Jewish behaviour, could actually be possible. If you are willing to forgive their occasional involvement in financial scandals or in anti-Catholic politicking, neither of which were behaviours exclusive to Jewry, Australian history seems to provide the perfect example of Jews peacefully reconciling themselves to an explicit White racial and cultural status quo, at least prior to 1933.

The resulting outcome of this seeming paradise of White Nationalism and Judaism exposes the fantasy, and instead reveals to us what eventually occurs when Jews abandon the culture of critique, make peace with racialism and live in harmony with a White supermajority.

The Goldene Medine

Of all their diasporas throughout history, the Anglo-Jewish community that existed in Australia between 1788 and 1933 may hold the distinction of the safest, most secure, and most accepted Jewish minority in a homogenous Christian society, a ‘Goldene Medine’ (Golden Land) which many a Jew in Europe dreamt of migrating to. Where the Jews of Europe fought for the eradication of legal discriminations during the nineteenth century, and campaigned for the equal rights promised by the Enlightenment, Jews were present in the Australian colonies from their very foundation and there was never any question that the rights owned by gentiles applied equally to Jews, all being British subjects one and the same. Fully emancipated, the most prominent fights over legal discriminations against Jews in Australia, if they could even be considered as such, were on utterly mundane topics such as state aid for the erection of religious buildings, Christian prayers in secular education, or the aversion to government funding for religious schools.

The security of the Anglo-Jewish community was owed to its status as a well-assimilated community that identified itself exclusively as ‘Englishmen of the Mosaic persuasion’ or ‘Australians of the Jewish Faith.’  Religious life and observance were uniformly based around the teachings of British Chief Rabbi Nathan Adler, who promoted the Anglicising of Judaism in order to adapt it to English cultural life and strengthen the position of Jews in a modern, emancipated world. In Australia, every effort was made to avoid the creation of enclaves and remove or minimise outward differentiation between Jew and non-Jew other than in religious practice, and even then, certain practices such as keeping Kosher were poorly maintained.

Anti-Judaism was rarely heard of in Australia—a prejudice of the Old World that had no function in a nation dedicated to freeing itself from the religious tensions of Europe. Examples of prejudicial incidents in Australia identified by Jewish academics tend to be limited to minor insults or aspersions to Jews as financially tricky. The latter took the form of the Yiddish-speaking pawnbroker or the Shakespearean ‘Shylock’ character, the scheming Jewish financier that still persisted in English cultural and literary memory. Anglo-Jewry were keen to distance themselves from both embarrassing stereotypes and gentile Australia generally made the distinction between foreign Jews abroad and “our Jews” in Australia who were of a far superior type.

As a result, Jewish loyalty to Australia as a British society and to the British Empire was utterly unquestioned, and Australia’s protestant-liberal elite operated free of tensions with the Anglo-Jewish community, sharing identical commitments to political liberalism and a hostility to Catholicism. Contrast this to the reality within the multi-ethnic empires of Europe such as Austria or Russia with significant Jewish populations, where Jews clashed with a solidly anti-liberal and Catholic/Orthodox establishment.

When it came to political radicalism, Australian Jewry was shielded from the developments that swept through the shtetls of Eastern Europe. Communism was abhorred by the primarily middle-class and upwardly mobile community, Jews being absent from any kind of leadership positions within the Communist Party of Australia until the post-World War II era. Zionism arrived almost dead in the water; an unpatriotic fringe movement criticised by virtually all of the Anglo-Jewish leadership for its insistence that Judaism was more than religion. As far as Australian Jewry was concerned, what was the need for a safe Jewish homeland if they already had Australia? In 1901, Theodore Herzl himself made a personal appeal to the Australian Jewish community, the only one thus far not represented at the Zionist congresses, to no avail.[1]

With the arrival of racialism in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the political desire to form a racially homogenous Australia, these realities resulted in the small, highly assimilated and accepted Anglo-Jewish community being identified as White. Judaism itself had yet to be racialized in Australia and was still conceived of by gentiles and its Australian adherents as solely a religion, not a race. It was therefore possible to be both part of the White race in Australia and part of the Hebrew faith, or conversely to be an Oriental Jew or an Asiatic Jew who was thus not White. Though the boundaries of Jewish Whiteness were loose and hard to define, no effort was made to publicly counter this identification, and it stood as a measure to symbolise their acceptance as Australians.

The Foundation of the Policy

As far as the historical record is concerned, there is no evidence of a single prominent member of the organised Jewish community opposing the foundation of the White Australia Policy during the formative period of 1901 to 1906. Whereas Jews in the United States agitated against the 1924 immigration law which sought to stem the flow of migrants and retain America’s traditional demographic makeup, and at the same time launched the offensive against racial science under Franz Boas[2] (events which would later have an impact on Australia), no opposition of any sort from Anglo-Jewry was evident towards the Immigration Restriction Act (1901), the Naturalization Act (1905) or the deportation of Chinese and Pacific Islanders that formed the basis of the White Australia Policy.

This can be strongly substantiated by the fact that modern Jewish academics and historians seemingly fail to point to any examples of Jewish resistance to the policy. Jewish history books and journal articles are lacking in all references to any pressure groups, deputations or lobbying during this period. An embarrassing reality for those so keen to present themselves as the ‘Light unto Nations’, one would readily assume that if such a figure or group existed, even if only minor, he or she would be dredged up from the historical record and loudly paraded as a visionary and exemplary Jewish figure, worthy of remembrance in the fight against racism and insular politics.

In fact, the White Australia Policy found one of its foremost defenders in arguably the most prominent and successful Jew of the Federation era, Isaac Isaacs. Whilst a Parliamentarian for the Protectionist Party, Issacs was a political ally of Prime Minister Edmund Barton and Attorney General Alfred Deakin of the first Government of Australia, which introduced the White Australia Policy. Isaacs would have been in a prime position to attempt to influence the Protectionist Party and Deakin to temper their policy and follow the line of the British government which feared repercussions of the strict racial barrier on their new alliance with Japan. Instead, Isaacs gave full support to the legislation and made one of the staunchest defences of the Australian racial mission in a speech to parliament:

I recognise to the fullest that here in Australia we have a white man’s war. It is a struggle for life; it is a struggle for that higher and fuller life that all progressive nations must feel and share in. It is that struggle for victory over adverse circumstances which is the pride and glory of all advancing civilizations. It is a white man’s war that we must face, and I would not suffer any black or tinted man to come in and block the path to progress. I would resist to the utmost, if it were necessary, any murky stream from disturbing the current of Australian life.[3]

Isaacs retired from parliament in 1906 to become a justice of the High Court and later became the first Australian-born Governor General—the Crown’s representative in Australia. It was a testament to the almost complete absence of anti-Jewish sentiment in Australia that it was his native-born status that was seen as controversial for the job, not his religious heritage. Despite Issacs’ towering achievements in Australian politics, his commitment to White Australia and his opposition to Zionism has now rendered him a reviled figure to the modern Jewish community.

Two other Jewish members of the federal parliament were present in the period 1901–1906, Elias Solomon and Vaiben L. Solomon, both members of the Free Trade Party from South Australia. Neither is recorded as opposing the relevant legislation and Vaiben L. Solomon campaigned for the restriction of Chinese immigration into South Australia during the 1890s.

Rabbi Cohen Speaks Out

Perhaps the only recorded instance of a leading member of the Anglo-Jewish community criticising the White Australia Policy prior to World War II can be found in 1912. This occurred with a revealing set of exchanges surrounding a speech given by Rabbi R. L. Cohen, Chief Minister of the Great Synagogue of Sydney from 1904 to 1934, at a meeting of the Jewish Literary and Debating Society of Sydney. Titled “The Jewish Attitude toward the White Australia Policy,” Rabbi Cohen, basing his argument in scripture and on the superiority of Jewish moral teaching compared with that of the Christian (which was, according to Cohen, based upon the haughty spirit of the Germanic races), argued that acceptance of the policy was ultimately incompatible with Jewish moral teaching to not despise the stranger. Cohen concluded that:

“…it was not expedient for Jews to consent to recognise difference between man and man, for history showed that wherever a distinction had been permitted by Jews to be recognised it had recoiled on their own heads and the Jew was in danger in such a case. Therefore their attitude on the White Australia policy should be one of caution and one not at all over-sympathetic.”[4]

Aaron Blashki, a prominent merchant and founder of the Sydney Jewish Aid Society, rounded out the discussion by stating he often felt ashamed of the policy when travelling overseas; however an editorial on the speech published in the Jewish Herald two weeks later remarked on the subsequent discussions by attendees, indicating a quorum of support for the White Australia Policy:

…the course of the debate in the Sydney society revealed, we are told a preponderance of opinion in favour of the political measures comprehended under the term “A White Australia.”… All the speakers readily admitted the ethical superiority of the Jewish doctrines governing the relations of man with man, but the majority of them seem to have considered that the particular circumstances of the Commonwealth rendered any attempt to practically, apply those doctrines injudicious.[5]

Rabbi Cohen, perhaps responding to the sentiments of his congregation, appeared to have a more moderated take on the subject in a sermon a decade later from 1924, also pointing the finger at recently arrived Jewish migrants who were less keen on assimilation:

Now, if there is a matter on which Australians are determined, it is to take heed, and profit by American mistakes, and avoid them here. Hence the White Australia Policy, and the resolution-to keep the local population if not still 98 per cent, British in origin, yet overwhelmingly so in sentiment, and entirely free from sectional segregations. The happy standing of the Australasian Jews, excelled nowhere, and scarcely rivalled anywhere, has been recently attributed by the Chief Rabbi to their continuing the attitude of pioneer settlers in co-operating with their neighbours of other creeds. But latterly I have regret ted to notice, among some of the recent arrivals, a lack of appreciation of these communal traditions, and an inclination to another spirit. … Any Ghetto isolation would inevitably raise the question of restricting immigration here as in America; and we should have no right to complain.[6]

Russian Refugees, Zangwill and Territorialism

The careful framing of the issues surrounding the immigration of Russian refugees and Jewish settlement projects also shows the deference paid to the White Australia Policy by local Jews and international activists. We now know that much of the claims of pogroms and atrocities against the Jews in Russia were fictitious and were used to cloak undesirable economic migrants as refugees (see Andrew Joyce’s three-part series), but this did not stop the emergence of significant international pressure groups for Jewish resettlement throughout the world that built upon the refugee narrative. The vast swathes of unoccupied land made Australia a prominent option for Jewish settlement, in particular for anti-Zionist groups such as the Jewish Territorial Organisation (ITO) that opposed Herzl’s insistence on Jewish settlement in Palestine and sought alternative solutions.

The prospect of large-scale Russian Jewish migration to Australia during the 1890s had aroused angst amongst mainstream Australia still reeling from an economic depression and such activists were keen to present the Russian Jews as White and an economic asset for Australia. Israel Zangwill, the co-founder of ITO, famous in America for his play The Melting Pot, framed the issue in a letter from 1907 in terms of the precariousness of Australia’s racial status in Asia:

I am quite aware that Australia will fight hard against giving away any territory or fostering our aims in any way, but Australia has to choose between a black population and a Jewish white one. Australia is waking up to her folly, and her possible future collapse. The Jews could possibly safeguard her future as white territory.[7]

Australia historically feared that the underdevelopment of its northern regions would otherwise invite foreign settlement or invasion. The prospect of a Jewish settlement in the region, later to crystallise in the failed Kimberly Scheme, was touted as a potential solution for defending these vast unoccupied territories and settling it with White migrants. None of these plans ever came to fruition, but it demonstrates that at the time Jewry was able to work within the political confines of White Australia.

Anglo-Ambivalence

Overall, Anglo-Jewish attitudes to the White Australia Policy can be described as conflicted, but erring to the side of being generally supportive. Whilst some may have recognised that the policy was not ideal for the Jews, this did not translate into outright hostility or political opposition, and the consensus seemed to be was that it was nonetheless worthy of support even if only for the sake of maintaining impeccable relations between Jew and Gentile in Australia. The purported incompatibility of the Jewish teaching of moral universalism claimed by many post-Enlightenment Jews (in contrast to the moral particularism of traditional  Jewish ethics) and racially restrictive immigration controls — substantively no different than similar claims made by Christian ministers who opposed the policy — was simply waved away.

Modern Jewish scholarship, where it does not outright ignore the discussion, seeks an excuse for the Jewish support for White Australia in all the usual places. Historian John Stratton blames anti-Semitism and claims that Australian Jewry, contrary to the widespread positive disposition expressed by most Australians towards them, actually existed in a precarious state due to the inherent ambiguity of the identification of Jews as White.  He contends that the Anglo-Jews, in the aftermath of the minor debate on the undesirability of Russian Jewish migration during the 1890s, consigned themselves to Whiteness under duress or out of fear for their survival:

From this time on the fear for Australia’s assimilated Jewry, caught in the ambivalence of their white/non-white status, was that any increased visibility for the Jews, any signs of racial/cultural difference, would mark them as a threat to the homogeneity of the nation.[8]

Using a handful of articles in the press that disparaged the character of Russian Jews (in particular The Bulletin[9]) and the angst over the prospect of mass migration of foreigners during an economic depression, Stratton invents a sweeping anti-Jewish sentiment during this period in order to absolve Jews of any agency for capitulating to racialism. We are left with the bizarre conclusion that anti-Semitism can not only be used to exclude Jews but can also lead to them being included.

Furthermore, it is difficult to see the acceptance of Whiteness by Anglo-Jewry as not being at least partially genuine. Whatever ambivalence may have existed amongst the elite, this did not translate well to the rank-and-file members of the congregation who were clearly quite comfortable with the status-quo. One would not have seen the levels of intermarriage between Jews and gentiles and the extent of assimilation that was occurring if support for the White Australia Policy and the public identification of themselves as only a religious group was nothing more than a cover to protect the Jewish people from the emergence of a destructive anti-Jewish force in Australian politics.

In a strategy of external deception of the outgroup combined with internal cohesion, like the conversos in Spain who continued to secretly practice Judaism after outwardly converting to Catholicism, one would expect the rates of endogamy to remain high.  Instead, intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles during this period was common enough to be utterly unremarkable, signalling a lack of perceived racial difference between the two communities and a genuine acceptance by one another as members of the same stock. At its peak in 1921, 29 percent of Jewish husbands in Australia had a non-Jewish wife and 16 percent of Jewish wives had a non-Jewish husband.[10] Rates of intermarriage were even higher in rural communities with a skewed Jewish male-to-female ratio. Rutland concludes that, far from any negative pressures from gentiles, “the drift away from Judaism in Australia can simply be seen as a result of social factors of free intermixing and a virtual absence of anti-semitism.”[11]

The Fall of the Jewish Paradise

“…during the 1920s Australian Jewry was not a viable community. It was not capable of reproducing itself, and without largescale Jewish immigration would have disappeared in the long run.[12]”

The above quote from Susan Rutland lays bare the costs incurred by Jews through their assimilation into Australia and their acceptance of White identity. Structural assimilation was successfully breaking down the cohesion of the ingroup, and all around the country, Jewish communal organisations were deteriorating and synagogues losing congregants. The extent of intermarriage and assimilation into gentile society by such a small population generally spelt death for the Anglo-Jewish community. Lacking any sudden course corrections, in a few generations there would be almost no Jews left in the country.

Anglo-Jewry was left scrambling for a solution that would not upset the status-quo. Even in the realm of immigration—perhaps their only viable measure for arresting this demographic decline, the position of Anglo-Jewry fell in line with the White majority and government policy, opposed to the large-scale entry of Jews and supportive of the federal government’s attempts to limit the flow of refugees from Europe prior to World War II.

Combined with their snobbish dismissal of the Ostjuden and their destructive political ideas, Anglo-Jewry understood intuitively that the mass entry of Eastern European and non-White Jews into the country threatened to break the stability of Anglo-Jewish identity and the accepted position of Jews in Australia. Sympathetic to concerns that Russian and Eastern European Jews were almost impossible to assimilate en-masse and would form enclaves and bring political strife to Australia, Anglo-Jewry in the end created their own shadow of the White Australia Policy.[13] This prioritised the entry of British Jews, supported immigration quotas and restrictions on the more problematic Eastern European Jews, and felt comfortable with the outright rejection of Jews who could not be classified racially as White—primarily Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews from the Middle East.

If combatting prejudice and anti-Semitism is a motivating force for adopting a ‘culture of critique’ and a radical criticism of gentile society, then a society where Jews benefit from full social equality and a complete acceptance by gentiles is cause for its abandonment. That acceptance comes at the price of assimilation, the end result of which is the eventual disappearance of Jewry, a price that no Jewish community can consciously accept. Seen from this perspective, Anglo-Jewish abandonment of Whiteness and their support for the White Australia Policy was inevitable if they wanted to survive as a separate entity.

A Declaration of War

In the end, the decision was taken out of their hands and salvation to the demographic crisis arrived on the back of the great calamity of the twentieth century. Change came, as so many other political and cultural changes in Australia eventually did, with the waves of Jewish migrants after World War II. The immigration quota system began to break down under sustained domestic and international pressure, in particular from protests from the newcomers known as the ‘Thirty-Niners’, the small trickle of Jewish migrants who managed to gain entry to Australia prior to 1939. The influx eventually saw a wholesale transformation of not just the demographic makeup of the Australian Jewish community, but also a transformation of its leadership structures through the displacement of the conservative Anglo-Jewish elite.

Restless and anxious from the events in Europe, Jewish refugees saw little appeal in behaving like the Anglo-Jews and making themselves seem as little Jewish as possible, forcing a fundamental re-assessment of Jewish identity in Australia. As far as they were concerned, Australia’s careful approach to the entry of Jewish refugees was nothing more than blatant anti-Semitism, a narrative that has persisted to this day. The strict racial barrier of White Australia was no longer a measure the Jewish community could accept, but rather a dangerous mechanism of intolerance that needed to be destroyed, with assimilationist policy merely finishing the job that Hitler started.

Extract from a pamphlet issued by the Australian Jewish Welfare Society to European refugees, encouraging them to assimilate as quickly as possible. Examples such as this were often pointed to by the refugees as evidence of the hostile opinion of Anglo-Jewry.

By this point, unambiguous public protests against the White Australia Policy were starting to emerge from the Jewish community, in particular within newspapers not under control of the Anglo-Jewish establishment. The Sydney Jewish News, founded in 1939 as a direct counter to the conservative Hebrew Standard which maintained the Anglo-Jewish line, is such an example. In a September 1949 edition, the Sydney Jewish News ran with the editorial “The Silence of the Rabbis”, criticising the rabbinical leadership on their refusal to speak against the Wartime Refugees Removal Act (1949)[14] and the intolerance cloaked in the White Australia Policy.[15] The migrant flow alleviated the threatened disappearance of Australian Jewry, but once migration rates had steadied and assimilatory trends reasserted themselves, it wasn’t long before these new Jewish leaders were again starting to worry about the long-term future of their community.

The End of Jewish Whiteness

The entrance of Walter Lippmann as a community leader in the 1960s bookends the transition that occurred within Australian Jewry. As a German Jew originally from a prosperous Hamburg-based family, had Lippman arrived in Australia in the early years of the twentieth century, he would have been classified as a highly-assimilable Jewish migrant who could be expected to effortlessly acclimatise to Anglo-Jewish life. In the aftermath of Hitler and World War II, this could no longer be the case. In an address given to a dinner in his honour in 1971, Lippmann enunciated the new mantra for the Jews of Australia to live by: I believe we are not Australians of the Jewish faith but part of the Jewish people living in Australia.[16]

As arguably the architect of Australian multiculturalism, it was Lippmann’s unparalleled lobbying, networking, and activist ability that drove the concept far into the depths of the Australian political apparatus. His immense value and influence to the multiculturalist cause came not just from his position inside government bodies but from his community organisation skills where he initiated many of the key connections between future multicultural activists. His organisation, the Australian Jewish Welfare Relief Society (AJWRS), became the template for other ethnic multicultural advocacy groups formed by the Italian and Greek communities during the 1960s, Lippman practically teaching them how to organise and lobby the government on an ethnic basis. It was Lippmann above anyone else who shifted the discussion on cultural pluralism from a method to deal with uncooperative new migrants to an operating principle for the entire Australian society.

Lesser well known is the fact that Lippmann, who arrived in Australia in 1938, began his journey to multiculturalist crusader as a self-taught social scientist, keenly studying the trends in Jewish demography. Between 1966 and 1967, Lippmann carried out a major social survey on the state of the Jewish community in Melbourne, publishing his findings in a paper entitled “The Jewish Family in Melbourne.” The result worried Lippmann and he concluded that the Jewish community of Victoria was

a predominately immigrant community with a high degree of social and economic mobility. At the same time, it revealed a changing character of the community with an emerging Australian-born generation of a high educational level facing the dangers of decimation and possible gradual extinction through low birth rates and rising rates of intermarriage.[17]

Subsequent surveys conducted by Lippmann continued to bear out similar trends. Lippmann discovered that 80 percent of the descendants of the members of the Great Synagogue in Sydney from 80 years ago were no longer Jewish and his concern reached a fever pitch in 1971 when the census revealed that the number of Jews in Australia was again on the decline. One thing was certain to Lippmann and the now invigorated Jewish community, to ensure the long-term survival of the Jews in Australia, the policy of assimilation had to be dismantled and any kind of support for White Australia that was once entertained by Anglo-Jewry was utterly off the table.

Thus, Jews set themselves on a collision course with White Australia and its homogenous, mono-cultural identity. Either these new Jewish migrants would be forced to accept the government policy of assimilation and the racial status-quo carefully negotiated by their Anglo predecessors, and therefore begin down the same path towards dissipation, or Australia would submit to the will of the Jews and accept cultural pluralism, better known as multiculturalism. The end result of this confrontation is now plain to see.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY:

  • Lopez, The Origins of Multiculturalism in Australian Politics: 1945-1975 (Melbourne University Press, 2000).
  • Medding, From assimilation to group survival: A political and sociological study of an Australian Jewish community (F W Cheshire, 1969).
  • Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora: Two Centuries of Jewish Settlement in Australia, 2nd ed. (Brandl & Schlesinger, 1997)
    Rutland, The Jews in Australia (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
    Stratton, Coming Out Jewish: Constructing Ambivalent Identities (Routledge, 2000).

[1] Rutland, S 1997, Edge of the Diaspora: Two Centuries of Jewish Settlement in Australia, 2nd Edition, Brandl & Schlesinger, Rose Bay Australia, p.87.

[2] See Chapters 2 and 3 of The Culture of Critique

[3] Commonwealth of Australia, Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 12 September 1901, retrieved from: https://historichansard.net/hofreps/1901/19010912_REPS_1_4_c1/

[4] The Hebrew Standard of Australasia 1912, ‘JEWISH LITERARY & DEBATING SOCIETY OF SYDNEY. THE WHITE AUSTRALIA POLICY’, Friday 16 August, p. 7, retrieved from: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/13433409

[5] The Jewish Herald 1912, Editorial, Friday 30 August, p.8-9, retrieved from: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/17606706?

[6] The Hebrew Standard of Australasia 1924, ‘Whom to Blame’, Friday August 15, p.2, retrieved from: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/129356428?

[7]The Hebrew Standard of Australasia 1907, ‘The I.C.O in Australia’, Friday 10 May, p.7, retrieved from: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/12623021?

[8] Stratton, J 1996, ‘The Colour of Jews: Jews, Race and the White Australia Policy’, Journal of Australian Studies, Vol.20 No.50-51, p.56

[9] As Windschuttle points out, left-wing academia in Australia has a bad habit of pointing to radical magazines such as The Bulletin as a kind of ‘voice of the nation’ which encapsulated the feelings of the majority. In reality, The Bulletin was a minor publication that hardly had a monopoly on public opinion – see Windschuttle, K 2004, The White Australia Policy: race and shame in the Australian history wars, Macleay Press, Sydney Australia.

[10] Rutland, Op. Cit., p.141

[11] Ibid., p.145

[12] Ibid., p.142

[13] Ibid., p.169

[14] The law, which allowed the government to deport non-Whites who arrived in Australia during the war, was designed to nullify a recent High Court decision which allowed an Indonesian refugee to remain in Australia.

[15] The Sydney Jewish News 1949, ‘The Silence of the Rabbis’, Friday 2 September, p.2, retrieved from: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/261691322

[16] Address by Walter Lippmann to the “Y” club dinner in his honour, re-published by the Australian Jewish News: ‘TRIBUTES TO MR LIPPMANN’, Australian Jewish News, 19 February 1971, p.7.

[17] Markus, A & Taft, M 2016, ‘Walter Lippmann, Transformative Leader,’ Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal, Vol. 23/1, p.93–110, retrieved from: https://collections.ajhs.com.au/Detail/objects/53983

Justice and identity politics

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It can be useful to go back to first principles, so here is what one might come up with when going back to first principles regarding justice. After this come some thoughts on what is made of these principles by identity politics.

When we think of justice, two things might come to mind, the first being someone getting their just deserts. They have been found guilty, and now they are being sentenced. The second thing is fairness. A child who says “It’s not fair!” is complaining that an injustice has been done, usually because of a lack of equal treatment. This idea of justice as equal treatment is enshrined in the principle of equality before the law and by extension as a principle that should govern the operation of any institution. We may not be entitled to equal treatment from people in our private lives, but we should be able to expect it from institutions. These two aspects of it, as concerning a question of guilt and as equal treatment by an institution, capture the essence of justice for practical purposes.

In either sense justice is a process or procedure. It is a human activity, something that is done. What goes on in a court of law is a process, procedure or activity that should lead to a just result. Justice as equal treatment is a way an institution has or should have of proceeding as a matter of course.

What exactly do we mean by equal treatment as afforded by an institution? Not strictly that it treats everyone the same. A teacher can give one child a higher mark than another or a policeman can arrest one person but not the next without doing an injustice. Such unequal treatment is acceptable, indeed required, because in meting it out an institution is responding to differences between people that are relevant to what it is supposed to be doing. What is wrong is for an institution to treat people differently for a reason not relevant to its task, such as because of their race. Schools should not treat children differently by race because a child’s race is irrelevant to the task of educating it, nor should the police treat people differently by race, because a person’s race is irrelevant to the task of law enforcement. So by an institution treating people equally we mean that it treats them equally with respect to characteristics irrelevant to its task.

Perhaps then it is not quite true to say that justice as equal treatment requires an institution to do something. Arguably it requires it to refrain from doing something, namely bestowing favours or inflicting bad things on people for reasons irrelevant to its task.

Justice sorts a population in various ways. A just education system separates the brighter and more hardworking from the less bright and less hardworking, causing the former to obtain more qualifications. A criminal justice system separates criminals from law-abiding citizens. What goes for individuals goes for groups. A just society gives brighter and more hardworking groups more qualifications than less bright and less hardworking groups, and puts more criminally inclined groups through its criminal justice system at a higher rate than it does less criminally inclined groups. Justice therefore shows a society how its component groups differ.

Turning to identity politics, this is the process whereby so-called identity groups struggle to defeat justice in their perceived self-interest. The question that preoccupies such a group is this: how can we as black people, women or whatever evade our just deserts and get the unjust deserts we want, so as to gain an advantage over our opposite group? If an identity group knows one thing, therefore, it is that it doesn’t want equal treatment; it wants unequal treatment in its favour. If the group is anti-racist — we ignore the supposedly noble-sounding name anti-racism gives itself — it wants institutions to treat people differently by race, favouring non-whites. Feminism wants institutions to treat people differently by sex, favouring women. Nor do identity groups arrive at such aims after cogitation; such aims are their reasons for existing. The only thing an identity group needs to cogitate about is how it intends to achieve its anti-justice aims.

It can achieve them only by misrepresentation and denial — or in short deception — which begins with its presentation of itself. Anti-racists, unless they are deluded, know as well as anyone that black people are not the same as white people. Feminists know that women are not the same as men. They know moreover that this is why black people come out of institutions in a different position from white people and why women come out in a different position from men. They know that it is differences between the races that cause black people to pick up guilty verdicts at a higher rate than the other races, and that it is sex differences that explain the fact that women qualify as hairdressers and beauticians at a higher rate than men. But such facts are of no use to an identity group, which must find its opposite group responsible for its situation, and so the first thing it must do is deny that it differs in any essential way from its opposite group. Accordingly, the basic axiom of anti-racism is that the races are essentially the same, and the basic axiom of feminism is that the sexes are essentially the same.

These axioms of essential equality prompt the following questions, or questions of the following form. Why have non-whites, especially blacks, achieved less than whites, and why do they keep on achieving less? Why have women accomplished less than men and why do they continue in this manner? For example, why was it white people and not black people who built great cathedrals, wrote Hamlet and painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, having built the Sistine Chapel, and why do black people still fail to stand out as architects and builders, dramatists and painters? Why was it men not women who discovered the laws of motion, came up with the idea of differential calculus and invented the washing machine, and why do women still rarely distinguish themselves as physicists or mathematicians, inventors or engineers?

The ideologies reply by saying in the case of black people that white people stopped them. True, white people had yet to encounter black people in the medieval or for the most part in the Elizabethan period, but it is still their fault that black people did not equal their achievements. Feminists say that men stopped women. Quite how they might have stopped a determined maiden lady from discovering the laws of motion is not entirely clear, but they stopped her. According to these ideologies, therefore, the races compare as they do, and the sexes compare as they do, not because of nature but because of the injustice of white people and men, who refused to give black people or women a fair chance. Now it is payback time, when the white man owes his victims special treatment in reparation for his oppression, which is in proportion to the many great things they could have done if only he had let them. Such is the way in which identity groups demand the injustice they were after.

All that remains for them to do is point to examples of the oppression, which it might be thought they would have difficulty doing, yet they find them everywhere. They find them in the past, which they constantly refer to as if they were speaking of the present. Or, admitting that they are not to be found in the present, they say that the effects of past oppression persist. If a slave could not rise in the world, how can the descendant of a slave rise in the world? If women were not allowed to do something 150 years ago, how can they do it today? Or they might say that the oppression originates in the mass media. If history did not entirely stamp the life out of black people and women, how can any remaining ember ignite anything if these groups don’t see “positive images” of themselves on the television? How can a black man think of becoming an industrial chemist unless he sees pictures of black industrial chemists in advertisements? What woman can aspire to be a chief executive unless she sees chief executives portrayed as women in her magazines?

If such measures still fail to realise anti-racist and feminist hopes, perhaps the opportunities that seem to exist for black people and women are illusory. Perhaps teachers’ efforts to make sure that they do not discriminate by race are to no avail because the schools themselves, regardless of what anybody does in them, are “institutionally racist”. Perhaps a “glass ceiling” comes between the women who want to run huge corporations and any chance of their doing so. To anti-racists and feminists, the fact that these barriers are invisible only proves the diabolical cunning of those who conspire to keep non-whites and women down.

And so, as we have seen in recent decades, no theory is too silly to be proposed by an anti-racist or a feminist intent on denying that God made black people different from white people or women different from men. Nor have idiotic theories merely been proposed; in anti-racist and feminist ideology they are orthodox. More than this: the ideologies themselves are orthodox. They are imparted to the whole population, including children, who are taught them from an early age. Non-whites and women are not considered culturally literate unless they automatically blame white men for anything not to their satisfaction. Nor do white men, who are hardly free from anti-racism and feminism, deny that it is all their fault.

These ideologies can only be maintained by the systematic abuse of language. The meaning of every expression in the semantic field of justice must be inverted, starting with justice itself. No one can argue against justice, because it is a “cheer word”, meaning that the idea that whatever it might refer to is good is built into it. Therefore the enemies of justice must appropriate the word and describe themselves as seeking something with a name that contains it, such as “racial justice” or “social justice”.

But as soon as we compare these forms of justice with real justice, we see that they are fake. Real justice, as we have seen, is a process, procedure or activity or perhaps a non-activity, as in refraining from treating people differently on account of irrelevant characteristics. Justice cares not how its results affect one group or another, nor is it interested in statistics. But the proponents of these varieties of so-called justice mention no process, procedure or activity, nor do they talk about refraining from unjust discrimination. They are concerned only with results, and in particular with the distribution of results between their favoured groups and their opposites, which means that they are obsessed with statistics. For anti-racists, “racial justice” is nothing but the equal distribution of results between white people and non-whites, especially blacks, as calculated by statisticians. For feminists, “social justice” is nothing but the equal distribution of results between the sexes. The reason anti-racists and feminists don’t say how these equal distributions are to be arrived at is that they can only be arrived at by discriminating in favour of their pet groups, and discriminating so energetically as to offset the intrinsic differences between these groups and their opposites.

Nor are the results that concern these people necessarily the results of anything that went on in an institution; they are simply circumstances. What anti-racists and feminists demand is that everyone be placed in equally attractive circumstances and indeed in the same circumstances. This is why the world they envisage will be so fascinating. Everybody’s life will be an exact copy of everybody else’s. It is also why the ideologies inevitably tend to Maoism or Marxism, for only an all-powerful state can hope to create the total human sameness they desire.

Justice requires a level playing field, on which the better team will win. Therefore when an identity group’s team loses, the group complains that the playing field was tilted. But when it demands a level playing field, it doesn’t mean a level playing field; it means a tilted one. “Level” in the usage of an identity group is something a playing field can only be if the game ends in a draw, even if one needs to be virtually a mountaineer to get from one end of it to the other. Nor for them does fairness refer to the manner in which a competition was conducted; it refers again to the result. Again the only fair competition is one that ends in a dead heat, no matter what crookery might be needed to contrive this.

Discrimination in the normal meaning of the word is an injustice and is necessarily something that is done. There must be someone who discriminated. As anti-racists and feminists use the word, however, for discrimination to be found there doesn’t need to have been any injustice, nor does anyone need to have done anything. Discrimination is found, again, in a result. Either it is assumed to have occurred on the basis that the result was not a tie, or it is a name given to the result itself. Unequal outcomes themselves constitute “discrimination” for these people.

For them equal treatment can itself be a variety of discrimination. In British law, “indirect discrimination” is that type of discrimination that occurs when everyone is treated the same but one group is less able than others to meet a certain standard or requirement. Thus if one group cannot equal others in a mathematics test, it has been indirectly discriminated against by the test or whoever set it. Everyone sat the same test under the same conditions, yet this was discrimination. Anti-racists have argued that the law against street robbery indirectly discriminates against black people, who break it at a higher rate than others. They sail close to the wind here, resting their argument not only on the admission that black people are more prone to mugging than are the other races but also on the implicit contention that they can’t help it. Similarly, years ago four black boys were expelled from an English school for drug dealing. They were reinstated after it was found that the rule forbidding drug dealing indirectly discriminated against them.[1] Again the argument was that they were black, therefore how could they fail to deal in drugs?[2]

“Institutional racism” sounds like the worst possible form of anti-black discrimination. The institution is run through with it from top to bottom, presumably because all it wants to do is blight the lives of black people. But the term as famously defined in a British official report does not mean anti-black discrimination; it means any lack or insufficiency of pro-black discrimination. It was defined in terms of “processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination” (emphasis added), namely processes or behaviour that produce race-correlated outcomes, namely equal treatment.[3] To rid itself of institutional racism, an institution had to indulge in pro-black discrimination or in more of it than it was already indulging in. “Institutional racism”, like “indirect discrimination”, is only a dysphemism for equal treatment: a bad-sounding name for that hated thing otherwise known as justice.

Thanks to identity politics and its acceptance by every institution in English-speaking, majority-white countries, justice is a thing of the past in these places, or at least an unwanted relic of what is seen as a benighted age. Our leaders didn’t like its way of contradicting the doctrine of universal human equality. In the courts, it caused black people to be convicted at a higher rate than others, thereby bringing out a difference between the races, nor did equal treatment on the street help, where the police kept having to arrest members of this race. Now that the police treat people differently by race, as they have been doing increasingly for forty years,[4] they can reduce the supply of black offenders to the courts and try to get more white people convicted, of things like “hate speech” offences.[5] Nobody cares that this brings us ever more real crime; the important thing is that it improves the statistics, helping to create the impression that the races are the same.

As for the sexes, the courts have always treated women more leniently than men,[6] but where we have made progress recently is in limiting the freedom of girls to choose what to study when they leave school. Given freedom, too many studied the humanities and not enough the hard sciences, showing up a difference between the sexes. Now that we push girls almost bodily into STEM fields, not caring how much we have to discriminate in their favour to get them in or how poorly they perform after graduating, we are correcting these statistics too. Eventually the sexes too will appear officially to be the same.

So today justice is for the birds, in fact for the pterodactyls, the unregenerate survivors from prehistory who remain attached to first principles.

[1] Telegraph, Sept. 21st 2000, “School drugs exclusions ‘were racist’”.

[2] Although indirect discrimination is unlawful only if a condition cannot be justified irrespective of race (House of Lords, Dec. 3rd 1999, “Race Relations [Amendment] Bill [explanatory notes]”), this only motivates lawyers to argue that conditions they want lifted cannot be so justified. In 1999, anti-racists intended to use an amended Race Relations Act to have stop-and-search ruled illegal (Telegraph, Nov. 7th 1999, “Race Bill to end stop and search”). The Commission for Racial Equality said that the police should ask whether they could justify policies based on criteria that, although not apparently race-specific, could produce disproportionately adverse outcomes for particular racial groups, such as the criterion of being involved in certain types of crime (Commission for Racial Equality, Feb. 2000, Race Relations [Amendment] Bill [briefing note], http://www.cre.gov.uk/publs/dl_rrab3.html).

[3] Sir William Macpherson, 1999, Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry by Sir William Macpherson of Cluny, CM 4262-I, The Stationery Office, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/277111/4262.pdf, Paragraph 6.34.

[4] See “Anti-racism’s victory over the British police” by the present author, Aug. 7th 2023, Occidental Observer, https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2023/08/07/anti-racisms-victory-over-the-british-police/.

[5] See “The British police’s anti-racism today” by the present author, Aug. 25th 2023, Occidental Observer, https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2023/08/25/the-british-polices-anti-racism-today/.

[6] Ernest Belfort Bax, 2015 (1913), The Fraud of Feminism, Norderstedt: Herstellung und Verlag: BoD (Books on Demand.