How Real Is Anti-Semitism?
How Real Is Anti-Semitism?
Ron Unz, a Jew, is the straightest talking bravest person I know
This is a Five Star Article
American Pravda: The Nature of
Anti-Semitism
RON UNZ • JULY 30, 2018
• 5,500 WORDS
I recently published a couple of long
essays, and although they primarily focused on other matters, the subject of
anti-Semitism was a strong secondary theme. In that regard, I mentioned my
shock at discovering a dozen or more years ago that several of the most self-evidently
absurd elements of anti-Semitic lunacy, which I had always dismissed without
consideration, were probably correct. It does seem likely that a significant
number of traditionally-religious Jews did indeed occasionally commit the
ritual murder of Christian children in order to use their blood in certain
religious ceremonies, and also that powerful Jewish international bankers did
play a large role in financing the establishment of Bolshevik Russia.
When one discovers that matters of
such enormous moment not only apparently occurred but that they had been
successfully excluded from nearly all of our histories and media coverage for
most of the last one hundred years, the implications take some time to properly
digest. If the most extreme “anti-Semitic canards” were probably true, then
surely the whole notion of anti-Semitism warrants a careful reexamination.
All of us obtain our knowledge of the
world by two different channels. Some things we discover from our own personal
experiences and the direct evidence of our senses, but most information comes
to us via external sources such as books and the media, and a crisis may
develop when we discover that these two pathways are in sharp conflict. The
official media of the old USSR used to endlessly trumpet the tremendous
achievements of its collectivized agricultural system, but when citizens
noticed that there was never any meat in their shops, “Pravda” became a
watchword for “Lies” rather than “Truth.”
Now consider the notion of
“anti-Semitism.” Google searches for that word and its close variants reveal
over 24 million hits, and over the years I’m sure I’ve seen that term tens of
thousands of times in my books and newspapers, and heard it endlessly reported
in my electronic media and entertainment. But thinking it over, I’m not sure
that I can ever recall a single real-life instance I’ve personally encountered,
nor have I heard of almost any such cases from my friends or acquaintances.
Indeed, the only persons I’ve ever come across making such claims were
individuals who bore unmistakable signs of serious psychological imbalance.
When the daily newspapers are brimming with lurid tales of hideous demons
walking among us and attacking people on every street corner, but you yourself
have never actually seen one, you may gradually grow suspicious.
Indeed, over the years some of my own
research has uncovered a sharp contrast between image and reality. As recently
as the late 1990s, leading mainstream media outlets such as The New York Times
were still denouncing a top Ivy League school such as Princeton for the
supposed anti-Semitism of its college admissions policy, but a few years ago
when I carefully investigated that issue in quantitative terms for my lengthy
Meritocracy analysis I was very surprised to reach a polar-opposite conclusion.
According to the best available evidence, white Gentiles were over 90% less
likely to be enrolled at Harvard and the other Ivies than were Jews of similar
academic performance, a truly remarkable finding. If the situation had been
reversed and Jews were 90% less likely to be found at Harvard than seemed
warranted by their test scores, surely that fact would be endlessly cited as
the absolute smoking-gun proof of horrendous anti-Semitism in present-day
America.
It has also become apparent that a
considerable fraction of what passes for “anti-Semitism” these days seems to
stretch that term beyond all recognition. A few weeks ago an unknown
28-year-old Democratic Socialist named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez scored a
stunning upset primary victory over a top House Democrat in New York City, and
naturally received a blizzard of media coverage as a result. However, when it
came out that she had denounced the Israeli government for its recent massacre
of over 140 unarmed Palestinian protesters in Gaza, cries of “anti-Semite” soon
appeared, and according to Google there are now over 180,000 such hits
combining her name and that harsh accusatory term. Similarly, just a few days
ago the New York Times ran a major story reporting that all of Britain’s Jewish
newspapers had issued an “unprecedented” denunciation of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour
Party, describing it as an “existential threat” to the Jewish community for the
anti-Semitism it was fostering; but this apparently amounted to nothing more than
its willingness to sharply criticize the Israeli government for its long
mistreatment of the Palestinians.
One plausible explanation of the
strange contrast between media coverage and reality might be that anti-Semitism
once did loom very large in real life, but dissipated many decades ago, while
the organizations and activists focused on detecting and combating that
pernicious problem have remained in place, generating public attention based on
smaller and smaller issues, with the zealous Jewish activists of the
Anti-Defamation League (ADL) representing a perfect example of this situation.
As an even more striking illustration, the Second World War ended over seventy
years ago, but what historian Norman Finkelstein has so aptly labeled “the
Holocaust Industry” has grown ever larger and more entrenched in our academic
and media worlds so that scarcely a day passes without one or more articles
relating to that topic appearing in my major morning newspapers. Given this
situation, a serious exploration of the true nature of anti-Semitism should
probably avoid the mere media phantoms of today and focus on the past, when the
condition might still have been widespread in daily life.
Many observers have pointed to the
aftermath of the Second World War as marking a huge watershed in the public
acceptability of anti-Semitism both in America and Europe, so perhaps a proper
appraisal of that cultural phenomenon should focus on the years before that
global conflict. However, the overwhelming role of Jews in the Bolshevik Revolution
and other bloody Communist seizures of power quite naturally made them objects
of considerable fear and hatred throughout the inter-war years, so the safest
course might be to push that boundary back a little further and confine our
attention to the period prior to the outbreak of the First World War. The
pogroms in Czarist Russia, the Dreyfus Affair in France, and the lynching of
Leo Frank in the American South come to mind as some of the most famous
examples from that period.
In 1991 Cambridge University Press published The Jew Accused by Albert
Lindemann, a noted scholar of European ideological movements, and his book
focused on exactly that era and those sorts of incidents. Although the text is
quite short, running less than 300 pages, Lindemann built his discussion upon a
huge foundation of secondary literature, with his footnotes drawn from the 200
works included in his extensive bibliography. As far as I could tell, he seems
a very scrupulous scholar, generally providing the multiple, often conflicting
accounts of a given incident, and coming to his own conclusions with
considerable hesitation.
This approach is certainly
demonstrated in the first of his major cases, the notorious Dreyfus affair of
late 19th century France, probably one of history’s most famous anti-Semitic
incidents. Although he concludes that Captain Alfred Dreyfus was very likely
innocent of the charge of espionage, he notes the seemingly strong evidence
that initially led to his arrest and conviction and finds—contrary to
myth-making by numerous later writers—absolutely no indications that his Jewish
origins played any role whatsoever in his predicament.
However, he does note some of the
underlying social context to this fierce political battle. Although only one
Frenchman in a thousand was Jewish, just a few years earlier a group of Jews
had been the leading culprits behind several huge financial scandals that
impoverished large numbers of small investors, and the swindlers afterward
escaped any punishment by means of political influence and bribery. Given this
history, much of the outrage of the anti-Dreyfusards probably arose from their
fears that a Jewish military spy from a very wealthy family might be able to
walk free using similar tactics, and the public claims that Dreyfus’s brother
was offering enormous bribes to win his brother’s release certainly
strengthened this concern.
Lindemann’s discussion of the 1913
Leo Frank Affair, in which a wealthy Northern Jew working in Atlanta was
accused of sexually-assaulting and murdering a young girl, is even more
interesting. Once again, he notes that contrary to the traditional narrative,
there seems absolutely no hint that Frank’s Jewish background played any role
in his arrest or conviction. Indeed, at his trial it was instead his very
highly-paid defense attorneys who unsuccessfully sought to “play the race card”
with the jurors by crudely attempting to deflect suspicion upon a local black
worker by means of racially-charged invective.
Although Lindemann regards Frank as
probably innocent, my own reading of the evidence he presents suggests the
overwhelming likelihood of his guilt. Meanwhile, it seems undeniable that the
outpouring of popular anger against Frank was produced by the vast ocean of
outside Jewish money—at least $15 million or more in present-day dollars—that
was committed to the legal efforts to save the life of someone widely regarded
as a brutal murderer. There are strong suggestions that far more improper means
were also employed, including bribery and influence-peddling, so that after
Frank was convicted by a jury of his peers and thirteen separate legal appeals
were denied, a governor with strong personal ties to the defense lawyers and
Jewish interests chose to spare Frank’s life a few months before leaving office.
Under these circumstances, the lynch-mob that hung Frank was viewed by the
community as merely enforcing his official death sentence by extra-judicial
means.
I also discovered that the leading
figures in the anti-Frank movement had views far nuanced than I had expected.
For example, populist writer Tom Watson had previously been a strong defender
of Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman, while ferociously denouncing the
Rockefellers, Morgans, and Goulds as the “true destroyers” of Jeffersonian
democracy, so his outrage that Frank might escape punishment for murder seemed
motivated by the extreme wealth of Frank’s family and his supporters rather
than any pre-existing anti-Semitic sentiments.
The unmistakable conclusion of
Lindemann’s analysis is that if the defendants in both the Dreyfus and Frank
cases had not been Jewish, they would have suffered identical arrests and
convictions, but lacking any wealthy and politically mobilized Jewish community
to rally around them, they would have received their punishments, just or
unjust, and immediately been forgotten. Instead, Theodor Herzl, the founding
father of Zionism, later claimed that the massive anti-Semitism revealed by the
Dreyfus Affair was the basis of his personal ideological awakening, while the
Frank Affair led to the establishment of America’s Anti-Defamation League. And
both these cases have entered our history books as among the most notorious
examples of pre-World War I anti-Semitism.
Lindemann’s discussion of the often difficult relations between Russia’s
restive Jewish minority and its huge Slavic majority is also quite interesting,
and he provides numerous instances in which major incidents, supposedly
demonstrating the enormously strong appeal of vicious anti-Semitism, were quite
different than has been suggested by the legend. The famous Kishinev Pogrom of
1903 was obviously the result of severe ethnic tension in that city, but
contrary to the regular accusations of later writers, there seems absolutely no
evidence of high-level government involvement, and the widespread claims of 700
dead that so horrified the entire world were grossly exaggerated, with only 45
killed in the urban rioting. Chaim Weizmann, the future president of Israel,
later promoted the story that he himself and some other brave Jewish souls had
personally defended their people with revolvers in hand even as they saw the
mutilated bodies of 80 Jewish victims. This account was totally fictional since
Weizmann happened to have been be hundreds of miles away when the riots occurred.
Although a tendency to lie and
exaggerate was hardly unique to the political partisans of Russian Jewry, the
existence of a powerful international network of Jewish journalists and
Jewish-influenced media outlets ensured that such concocted propaganda stories
might receive enormous worldwide distribution, while the truth followed far
behind, if at all.
For related reasons, international
outrage was often focused on the legal confinement of most of Russia’s Jews to
the “Pale of Settlement,” suggesting some sort of tight imprisonment; but that
area was the traditional home of the Jewish population and encompassed a
landmass almost as large as France and Spain combined. The growing
impoverishment of Eastern European Jews during that era was often assumed to be
a consequence of hostile government policy, but the obvious explanation was
extraordinary Jewish fecundity, which far outstripped that of their Slavic
fellow countrymen, and quickly led them to outgrow the available spots in any
of their traditional “middleman” occupations, a situation worsened by their
total disinclination to engage in agriculture or other primary-producer
activities. Jewish communities expressed horror at the risk of losing their
sons to the Czarist military draft, but this was simply the flip-side of the
full Russian citizenship they had been granted, and no different from what was
faced by their non-Jewish neighbors.
Certainly the Jews of Russia suffered
greatly from widespread riots and mob attacks in the generation prior to World
War I, and these did sometimes have substantial government encouragement,
especially in the aftermath of the very heavy Jewish role in the 1905
Revolution. But we should keep in mind that a Jewish plotter had been
implicated in the killing of Czar Alexander II, and Jewish assassins had also
struck down several top Russian ministers and numerous other government
officials. If the last decade or two had seen American Muslims assassinate a
sitting U.S. President, various leading Cabinet members, and a host of our
other elected and appointed officials, surely the position of Muslims in this
country would have become a very uncomfortable one.
As Lindemann candidly describes the
tension between Russia’s very rapidly growing Jewish population and its
governing authorities, he cannot avoid mentioning the notorious Jewish
reputation for bribery, corruption, and general dishonesty, with numerous
figures of all political backgrounds noting that the remarkable Jewish
propensity to commit perjury in the courtroom led to severe problems in the
effective administration of justice. The eminent American sociologist E.A.
Ross, writing in 1913, characterized the regular behavior of Eastern European
Jews in very similar terms.
Lindemann also allocates a short
chapter to discussing the 1911 Beilis Affair, in which a Ukrainian Jew was
accused of the ritual murder of a young Gentile boy, an incident that generated
a great deal of international attention and controversy. Based on the evidence
presented, the defendant seems likely to have been innocent, although the
obvious lies he repeatedly told police interrogators hardly helped foster that
impression, and “the system worked” in that he was ultimately found innocent by
the jurors at his trial. However, a few pages are also given to a much less
well-known ritual murder case in late 19th century Hungary, in which the
evidence of Jewish guilt seemed far stronger, though the author hardly accepted
the possible reality of such an outlandish crime. Such reticence was quite
understandable since the publication of Ariel Toaff’s remarkable volume on the
subject was still a dozen years in the future.
Lindemann subsequently expanded his examination of historical anti-Semitism
into a much broader treatment, Esau’s Tears, which appeared in 1997. In this
volume, he added comparative studies of the social landscape in Germany,
Britain, Italy, and several other European countries, and demonstrated that the
relationship between Jews and non-Jews varied greatly across different
locations and time periods. But although I found his analysis quite useful and
interesting, the extraordinarily harsh attacks his text provoked from some
outraged Jewish academics seemed even more intriguing.
For example, Judith Laikin Elkin
opened her discussion in The American Historical Review by describing the book
as a “545-page polemic” a strange characterization of a book so remarkably
even-handed and factually-based in its scholarship. Writing in Commentary,
Robert Wistrich was even harsher, stating that merely reading the book had been
a painful experience for him, and his review seemed filled with spittle-flecked
rage. Unless these individuals had somehow gotten copies of a different book, I
found their attitudes simply astonishing.
I was not alone in such a reaction.
Richard S. Levy of the University of Illinois, a noted scholar of
anti-Semitism, expressed amazement at Wistrich’s seemingly irrational outburst,
while Paul Gottfried, writing in Chronicles, mildly suggested that Lindemann
had “touched raw nerves.” Indeed, Gottfried’s own evaluation quite reasonably
criticized Lindemann for perhaps being a little too even-handed, sometimes
presenting numerous conflicting analyzes without choosing between them. For
those interested, a good discussion of the book by Alan Steinweis, a younger
scholar specializing in the same topic, is conveniently available online.
The remarkable ferocity with which
some Jewish writers attacked Lindemann’s meticulous attempt to provide an
accurate history of anti-Semitism may carry more significance than merely an
exchange of angry words in low-circulation academic publications. If our
mainstream media shapes our reality, scholarly books and articles based upon
them tend to set the contours of that media coverage. And the ability of a
relatively small number of agitated and energetic Jews to police the acceptable
boundaries of historical narratives may have enormous consequences for our
larger society, deterring scholars from objectively reporting historical facts
and preventing students from discovering them.
The undeniable truth is that for many
centuries Jews usually constituted a wealthy and privileged segment of the
population in nearly all the European countries in which they resided, and
quite frequently they based their livelihood upon the heavy exploitation of a
downtrodden peasantry. Even without any differences in ethnicity, language, or
religion, such conditions almost invariably provoke hostility. The victory of
Mao’s Communist forces in China was quickly followed by the brutal massacre of
a million or more Han Chinese landlords by the Han Chinese poor peasants who
regarded them as cruel oppressors, with William Hinton’s classic Fanshen
describing the unfortunate history that unfolded in one particular village.
When similar circumstances led to violent clashes in Eastern Europe between
Slavs and Jews, does it really make logical sense to employ a specialized term
such as “anti-Semitism” to describe that situation?
Furthermore, some of the material
presented in Lindemann’s rather innocuous text might also lead to potentially
threatening ideas. Consider, for example, the notorious Protocols of the
Learned Elders of Zion, almost certainly fictional, but hugely popular and
influential during the years following World War I and the Bolshevik
Revolution. The fall of so many longstanding Gentile dynasties and their
replacement by new regimes such as Soviet Russia and Weimar Germany, which were
heavily dominated by their tiny Jewish minorities, quite naturally fed
suspicions of a worldwide Jewish plot, as did the widely discussed role of
Jewish international bankers in producing those political outcomes.
Over the decades, there has been much
speculation about the possible inspiration for the Protocols, but although
Lindemann makes absolutely no reference to that document, he does provide a
very intriguing possible candidate. Jewish-born British Prime Minister Benjamin
Disraeli certainly ranked as one of the most influential figures of the late
19th century, and in his novel Coningsby, he has the character representing
Lord Lionel Rothschild boast about the existence of a vast and secret network
of powerful international Jews, who stand near the head of almost every major
nation, quietly controlling their governments from behind the scenes. If one of
the world’s most politically well-connected Jews eagerly promoted such notions,
was Henry Ford really so unreasonable in doing the same?
Lindemann also notes Disraeli’s focus on the extreme importance of race and
racial origins, a central aspect of traditional Jewish religious doctrine. He
reasonably suggests that this must surely have had a huge influence upon the
rise of those political ideas, given that Disraeli’s public profile and stature
were so much greater than the mere writers or activists whom our history books
usually place at center stage. In fact, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a leading
racial theorist, actually cited Disraeli as a key source for his ideas. Jewish
intellectuals such as Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso are already widely
recognized as leading figures in the rise of the racial science of that era,
but Disraeli’s under-appreciated role may have actually been far greater. The
deep Jewish roots of European racialist movements are hardly something that
many present-day Jews would want widely known.
One of the harsh Jewish critics of Esau’s Tears denounced Cambridge University
Press for even allowing the book to appear in print, and although that major
work is easily available in English, there are numerous other cases where an
important but discordant version of historical reality has been successfully
blocked from publication. For decades most Americans would have ranked Nobel
Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn as among the world’s greatest literary figures,
and his Gulag Archipelago alone sold over 10 million copies. But his last work
was a massive two-volume account of the tragic 200 years of shared history
between Russians and Jews, and despite its 2002 release in Russian and numerous
other world languages, there has yet to be an authorized English translation,
though various partial editions have circulated on the Internet in samizdat
form.
At one point, a full English version
was briefly available for sale at Amazon.com and I purchased it. Glancing
through a few sections, the work seemed quite even-handed and innocuous to me,
but it seemed to provide a far more detailed and uncensored account than
anything else previously available, which obviously was the problem. The
Bolshevik Revolution resulted in the deaths of many tens of millions of people
worldwide, and the overwhelming Jewish role in its leadership would become more
difficult to erase from historical memory if Solzhenitsyn’s work were easily
available. Also, his candid discussion of the economic and political behavior
of Russian Jewry in pre-revolutionary times directly conflicted with the
hagiography widely promoted by Hollywood and the popular media. Historian Yuri
Slezkine’s award-winning 2004 book The Jewish Century provided many similar
facts, but his treatment was far more cursory and his public stature not
remotely the same.
Near the end of his life,
Solzhenitsyn gave his political blessing to Russian President Vladimir Putin,
and Russia’s leaders honored him upon his death, while his Gulag volumes are
now enshrined as mandatory reading in the standard high school curriculum of
today’s overwhelmingly Christian Russia. But even as his star rose again in his
own homeland, it seems to have sharply fallen in our own country, and his
trajectory may eventually relegate him to nearly un-person status.
A couple of years after the release
of Solzhenitsyn’s controversial final book, an American writer named Anne
Applebaum published a thick history bearing the same title Gulag, and her work
received enormously favorable media coverage and won her a Pulitzer Prize; I
have even heard claims that her book has been steadily replacing that earlier
Gulag on many college reading lists. But although Jews constituted a huge
fraction of the top leadership of the Soviet Gulag system during its early
decades, as well as that of the dreaded NKVD which supplied the inmates, nearly
her entire focus on her own ethnic group during Soviet times is that of victims
rather than victimizers. And by a remarkable irony of fate, she shares a last
name with one of the top Bolshevik leaders, Hirsch Apfelbaum, who concealed his
own ethnic identity by calling himself Grigory Zinoviev.
The striking decline in
Solzhenitsyn’s literary status in the West came just a decade or two after an
even more precipitous collapse in the reputation of David Irving, and for much
the same reason. Irving probably ranked as the most internationally successful
British historian of the last one hundred years and a renowned scholar of World
War II, but his extensive reliance on primary source documentary evidence posed
an obvious threat to the official narrative promoted by Hollywood and wartime
propaganda. When he published his magisterial Hitler’s War, this conflict
between myth and reality came into the open, and an enormous wave of attacks
and vilification was unleashed, gradually leading to his purge from
respectability and eventually even his imprisonment.
Similarly, Israeli academic Ariel
Toaff, son of the chief rabbi of Rome, was regarded as one of the world’s
leading scholarly authorities on Medieval Jewry. But when he published his
remarkable 2004 analysis suggesting the likely reality of the Jewish ritual
murders of Christian children throughout history, the resulting media firestorm
forced the cancellation of the book’s publication, and the work only survives
in samizdat form, while there were even calls for his arrest and incarceration.
In other cases, pressure from the ADL
and similar Jewish activist groups have led Amazon to completely eliminate
entire categories of historical analysis and ban those publishers who produce
such works, which drastically reduces their availability to the reading public.
All of these cases were the sort of
high-profile examples which are well-known to anyone who pays attention to such
matters. But surely there must have been many other incidents, involving far
less prominent authors, which never received any significant media coverage,
and also a vastly larger universe of cases in which writers have self-censored
their texts in order to avoid such controversies. Over the decades, I have
gradually discovered through sad experience that I must exercise extreme
caution whenever I read anything relating to the subjects of Jews, Judaism, or
Israel.
These important examples may help to explain the puzzling contrast between the
behavior of Jews in the aggregate and Jews as individuals. Observers have
noticed that even fairly small Jewish minorities may often have a major impact
upon the far larger societies that host them. But on the other hand, in my
experience at least, a large majority of individual Jews do not seem all that
different in their personalities or behavior than their non-Jewish
counterparts. So how does a community whose individual mean is not so unusual
generate what seems to be such a striking difference in collective behavior? I
think the answer may involve the existence of information choke-points, and the
ability of relatively small numbers of particularly zealous and agitated Jews
in influencing and controlling these.
We live our lives constantly immersed
in media narratives, and these allow us to decide the rights and wrongs of a situation.
The vast majority of people, Jew and Gentile alike, are far more likely to take
strong action if they are convinced that their cause is a just one. This is
obviously the basis for war-time propaganda.
Now suppose that a relatively small
number of zealous Jewish partisans are known to always attack and denounce
journalists or authors who accurately describe Jewish misbehavior. Over time,
this ongoing campaign of intimidation may cause many important facts to be left
on the cutting-room floor, or even gradually expel from mainstream
respectability those writers who refuse to conform to such pressures.
Meanwhile, similar small numbers of Jewish partisans frequently exaggerate the
misdeeds committed against Jews, sometimes piling their exaggerations upon past
exaggerations already produced by a previous round of such zealots.
Eventually, these two combined trends
may take a complex and possibly very mixed historical record and transform it
into a simple morality-play, with innocent Jews tremendously injured by vicious
Jew-haters. And as this morality-play becomes established it deepens the
subsequent intensity of other Jewish-activists, who redouble their demands that
the media “stop vilifying Jews” and covering up the supposed evils inflicted
upon them. An unfortunate circle of distortion following exaggeration following
distortion can eventually produce a widely accepted historical account that
bears little resemblance to the reality of what actually happened.
So as a result, the vast majority of
quite ordinary Jews, who would normally behave in quite ordinary ways, are
misled by this largely fictional history, and rather understandably become
greatly outraged at all the horrible things that had been done to their
suffering people, some of which are true and some of which are not, while
remaining completely ignorant of the other side of the ledger.
Furthermore, this situation is
exacerbated by the common tendency of Jews to “cluster” together, perhaps
respresenting just one or two percent of the total population, but often
constituting 20% or 40% or 60% of their immediate peer-group, especially in
certain professions. Under such conditions, the ideas or emotional agitation of
some Jews probably permeates others around them, often provoking additional waves
of indignation.
As a rough analogy, a small quantity
of uranium is relatively inert and harmless, and entirely so if distributed
within low-density ore. But if a significant quantity of weapons-grade uranium
is sufficiently compressed, then the neutrons released by fissioning atoms will
quickly cause additional atoms to undergo fission, with the ultimate result of
that critical chain-reaction being a nuclear explosion. In similar fashion,
even a highly agitated Jew may have no negative impact, but if the collection
of such agitated Jews becomes too numerous and clusters together too closely,
they may work each other into a terrible frenzy, perhaps with disastrous
consequences both for themselves and for their larger society. This is
especially true if those agitated Jews begin to dominate certain key nodes of
top-level control, such as the central political or media organs of a society.
Whereas most living organizations
exist solely in physical reality, human beings also occupy an ideational space,
with the interaction of human consciousness and perceived reality playing a
major role in shaping behavior. Just as the pheromones released by mammals or
insects can drastically affect the reactions of their family members or
nest-mates, the ideas secreted by individuals or the media-emitters of a
society can have an enormous impact upon their fellows.
A cohesive, organized group generally
possesses huge advantages over a teeming mass of atomized individuals, just as
a Macedonian Phalanx could easily defeat a vastly larger body of disorganized
infantry. Many years ago, on some website somewhere I came across a
very insightful comment regarding the obvious connection between
“anti-Semitism” and “racism,” which our mainstream media organs identify as two
of the world’s greatest evils. Under this analysis, “anti-Semitism” represents
the tendency to criticize or resist Jewish social cohesion, while “racism”
represents the attempt of white Gentiles to maintain a similar social cohesion
of their own. To the extent that the ideological emanations from our
centralized media organs serve to strengthen and protect Jewish cohesion while
attacking and dissolving any similar cohesion on the part of their Gentile
counterparts, the former will obviously gain enormous advantages in resource-competition
against the latter.
Religion obviously constitutes an
important unifying factor in human social groups and we cannot ignore the role
of Judaism in this regard. Traditional Jewish religious doctrine seems to
consider Jews as being in a state of permanent hostility with all non-Jews, and
the use of dishonest propaganda is an almost inevitable aspect of such
conflict. Furthermore, since Jews have invariably been a small political
minority, maintaining such controversial tenets required the employment of a
massive framework of subterfuge and dissimulation in order to conceal their
nature from the larger society surrounding them. It has often been said that
truth is the first casualty in war, and surely the cultural influences of over
a thousand years of such intense religious hostility may continue to quietly
influence the thinking of many modern Jews, even those who have largely
abandoned their religious beliefs.
The notorious Jewish tendency to
shamelessly lie or wildly exaggerate has sometimes had horrifying human
consequences. I very recently discovered a fascinating passage in Peter
Moreira’s 2014 book The Jew Who Defeated Hitler: Henry Morgenthau Jr., FDR, and
How We Won the War, focused on the important political role of that powerful Secretary
of the Treasury.
A turning point in Henry Morgenthau
Jr.’s relationship with the Jewish community came in November 1942, when Rabbi
Stephen Wise came to the corner office to tell the secretary what was happening
in Europe. Morgenthau knew of the millions of deaths and the lampshades made
from victims’ skin, and he asked Wise not to go into excessive details. But
Wise went on to tell of the barbarity of the Nazis, how they were making soap
out of Jewish flesh. Morgenthau, turning paler, implored him, “Please, Stephen,
don’t give me the gory details.” Wise went on with his list of horrors and
Morgenthau repeated his plea over and over again. Henrietta Klotz was afraid
her boss would keel over. Morgenthau later said the meeting changed his life.
It is easy to imagine that
Morgenthau’s gullible acceptance of such obviously ridiculous war-time atrocity
stories played a major role when he later lent his name and support to
remarkably brutal American occupation policies that probably led to the postwar
deaths of many millions of innocent German civilians.
Related Reading:
American Pravda: The Bolshevik Revolution and Its Aftermath
American Pravda: Oddities of the Jewish Religion
The Remarkable Historiography of David Irving
The Myth of American Meritocracy
Our American Pravda
