A Thousand Fools and Idiots

Introduction

An anecdote: there is a document from 1234, attesting to the fact that for having paid a sum of 100 marks (however much that is), the “good men of Newcastle upon Tyne” could enjoy the privilege of barring Jews from living in their town. This was the first arrangement of this type under the kingship of Henry III, and several other towns followed suit once the precedent had been set. In a short and turbulent history of just over 200 years (1066-1290), which displayed all the familiar ingredients: given license by the crown to serve as money-lenders; duality in relationship with the nobility and the rest of the populace; popular hostility spilling over on occasion into bouts of murderous violence – this anecdote symbolizes to me the true heart of the story. It’s about an encounter between a settled people, a volk, encountering a group of uprooted wanderers with a set of beliefs and behaviors that they found so distasteful that they simply could not abide them to be living in their midst.

The violence is regrettable, the connivance of the ruling classes to use Jews as a source of income is an issue that can only be partly laid at the feet of the Jews (and they can only be partially absolved of), but the instinctive repulsion they aroused is something that was theirs and theirs alone. I would guess that it had all these components together, each of them compounding the overall effect a little further. First, a set of devotional practices and way of life that to outsiders would appear as falling far short of anything resembling a proper culture. Second would be a sense of aloofness and lack of interest in fitting in with their surroundings. And lastly, a sense of superiority, coupled with dogmatic stubbornness about whether there really was any cause for such pridefullness. These things together led to a group that was so intolerable to the common people, those who had to live next to them, that they were willing to pay a tax not to have this proximity imposed on them.

This detail speaks louder than what any revisionist propaganda could cover up. You can seize the means of historical production, you can change every instance of inter-group strife to persecution, and every accusation of misconduct to libelous slander, but you can’t change the fact that the good men of Newcastle upon Tyne were willing to pay 100 marks to not have to suffer your presence amongst them. (A mark is 8 ounces of silver, so it’s about $25,000 in today’s money.)

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Another anecdote, of sorts; compare the two following sentences:

[Das Judenthum in der Musik] is an essay by composer Richard Wagner which criticizes the influence of Jews and their “essence” on European art music, arguing that they have not contributed to its development but have rather commodified and degraded it.

[Das Judenthum in der Musik] is an antisemitic essay by composer Richard Wagner which criticizes the influence of Jews and their “essence” on European art music, arguing that they have not contributed to its development but have rather commodified and degraded it.

Question: what is the function of the word ‘antisemitic’ in the bottom sentence? What would be missing if it were omitted? That’s not the anecdote, that’s just something to think about. The anecdote here, for me, as it relates to this essay of Wagner’s, is that already in 1850 there was a sense of Jews starting to play a role as cultural commissars. I’m using anecdote here in the sense that it’s a bit of information that confirms something you were already suspecting to be so. The plural of anecdote is ‘anecdotes’, and once you’ve collected enough of them you begin to develop a sense that you might possibly know what you’re talking about, at least a little bit. In this case, there is both the year of publication, helping to narrow down the time period in question, and also some of what is said in the essay, which I will address in a bit.

There’s a part of the essay where he talks about a tap root that connects the most sublime aspects of the art produced by German culture to the feeling of the common people (“still it keeps below one fibre of connexion with its natural soil“). He says that the lack of this rootedness is the cause for the absence of depth of feeling in Jewish art. I believe this to be very true, and is the difference between an organic group and a non-organic group, which is what the Jewish collective is. My thoughts on this are informed by Robert Pirsig, both in his writing on quality, and in one of the main ideas in his book, “Lila”, in which he introduces a categorization scheme where he splits up the world of subjects and objects (or matter and mind) into 4 levels: Physical*, Biological, Social, and Intellectual. He describes the progression from one level to the next as an evolutionary process, and says that the moral law of the universe is for each level to progress in quality – either within its own bounds, or by giving rise to the next level. Thus: atoms form molecules, form cellular structures, form organisms, form societies which produce abstract ideas.

* Correction: he uses ‘Inorganic’, not ‘Physical’ for the first layer of abstraction, to highlight the difference between molecular interactions that don’t involve Carbon atoms, and between organic chemistry, which does, and is the fundamental building block of almost all biology – hence the phrase, ‘Carbon-based life-forms’. While I did misremember this, I’m keeping it this way as an allusion to the OSI model of network communication, which has ‘Physical’ at its lowest layer and is probably why it sounded right to me.

He doesn’t talk about this, but the space where each two layers interface could also be given a name. The interface between ‘Physical‘ and ‘Biological‘ could be called ‘Environment‘. The interface between ‘Biological‘ and ‘Social‘, could be called ‘Group‘. And, the interface between ‘Social‘ and ‘Intellectual‘ could be called ‘Culture‘. In this slightly simplified way of thinking about it, you have groups existing in environments, interacting with other groups and from these interactions arise various cultural patterns which can help or hurt a particular group in its quest for reaching higher levels of quality. An organic group has a sort of collective memory of its progression up along the hierarchy of stages, and of an increase in quality relative to itself (assuming there was such an increase).

Another thing an organic group has, is a sense of its own decline. Wagner says that the progression from Bach, to Mozart to Beethoven was a rise in quality of artistic expression, of the ability of music to convey feelings of depth and warmth, but that this is a process that had culminated, and no further discoveries or improvements are to be expected. He seems to be perfectly at peace with such an idea. What he is not at peace with, is the bastardization of art, turning it into entertainment. The only reason people go to concerts is due to being bored, but “the disease of boredom” cannot be remedied “by sips of Art.” Meanwhile, people who go to concerts, are willing to pay for the privilege, and therefore you’ll have the cultural entrepreneurs trying to find out what they like so they can sell it to them. Later on this becomes telling them what they like, because it’s easier that way, and they’re too dumb to know better, anyway.

I don’t have the attention span for appreciating the type of music Wagner was writing about. It’s music from a different age, written by and for brains that are wired differently than my own. I was curious if I could be persuaded by the case he was making, or if I would be left wondering whether there was anything to what he was saying. It comes across as very honest and well argued. It also seems to be written with the right attitude. It was reassuring to learn that he didn’t nurse a grudge against the “Jewish influence” he was writing about, but instead became more circumspect about the causes for the cultural decline afflicting his era. To me, this says that he was writing from the right place when he did, and once he’d said what he needed to say, he moved on to other concerns. He also, so far as I know, never renounced the ideas he expressed there. This is a good approach. I think I can safely say that Richard Wagner was not a boomer.

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As the title here suggests, there is a relationship between an abundance of boomers, and between the ascendancy of Jewish power. I am well aware that the term ‘boomer’ is kind of annoying. That’s part of the reason for using it. However, it also has a further meaning for those of my generation, in that it’s a word that didn’t use to have a pejorative connotation. If not positive, it at least had overtones of naive idealism. It certainly wasn’t taken to mean selfish materialistic geezers, with no sense of their own impermanence, and no desire to accept responsibility for the world as it exists due to their mismanagement of it. However, this description deals with only a subset of boomers, the titular ‘Boomers’, but this label isn’t being used as a generational designation, but refers rather to an attitude, or a state of being.

What is the relationship between Jews and boomers? Boomerism is a product of decline. As this decline progresses, they resemble less and less the organic group that their ancestors belonged to. Jews are a sort of group-like collective, that maintains stability without the in-built mechanisms of group dynamics. Relative to the highly atomized boomer population, they are remarkably cohesive. This cohesiveness is maintained by creating antagonism and provoking anti-Semitism. If you want to reduce Jewish power, the best thing you can do is learn to avoid directing your antagonism towards them. This can’t be achieved without first describing their influence on society accurately, and then realizing that it’s the decline of society that gave rise to Jewish power in the first place.

Another central concept Pirsig introduces in ‘Lila’, is the distinction between static and dynamic quality. If something is too static, even though it has quality, it can’t progress in an evolutionary sense. If something is too dynamic, it is unstable. What he doesn’t discuss is a situation where something is dynamic, but also has negative quality. In the terminology of system dynamics, a system is some “unity” made up of several components. The more components it has, the greater its inherent instability, and the longer a multi-component system holds together, the greater must be the feedbacks working to keep it from falling apart. I think European history is a case of a system with an unusually large number of components, i.e., very dynamic, that was able to hold together far longer than it should have (i.e., it was a situation with negative quality), but this dynamism did produce some cultural artifacts that have a special kind of quality (as in the case of Wagner’s description of the progression from Bach through to Beethoven – even much simpler art is able to elevate the soul, but in the European context, it was necessary to reach for such depths in order to give expression to this distinct intensity of feeling).

One of the components of the European system, that lent it instability but also dynamism, was the Jewish population. Hopefully, this statement alone is enough to get across what I mean about dynamism without quality. The next part involves a discussion of the relationship between two fundamentals of the European system, the Catholic Church, and the Jews.

The Catholic Church and the Jews

I was reading something by EMJ some time ago, and realized I’d been using “The West” wrongly. For me it meant, Western Europe. When he said it, I realized it referred to the Western half of the Roman Empire, the part governed by Rome rather than Constantinople. Correct though that may be, I still think my definition is more accurate. The West moved west, especially after the defeat of Napoleon, which saw the end of the British and French warfare that had been a perennial feature of life in that part of the continent, and to an even greater extent after the US took over from Britain as leader of the Anglosphere, following WW1. What did the territory he is referring to have in common, after the USA became “leader of the free world”? It already ceased to have meaning as a descriptor after the Reformation took hold. That term, “The Reformation” carries a value judgment that smacks of what he would call, “Whig History”. You pick up all kinds of terms like Whig history from listening to EMJ. Although he is the focus of this section, it really deals with one possible approach to solving the problem of atomization, which lies at the heart of the Zionist takeover of “The West”; and still being sore about the Protestant-Catholic split is probably not a good way to promote unity and a shared sense of purpose.

E. Michael Jones likes to talk in strategic terms about the fight against the Zionist takeover. His message is that you should pick your battles wisely, fight on your preferred territory and not the enemy’s, etc. One of his insights, a correct insight, is that trying to rally around the banner of ‘White’ culture won’t work, because the concept arouses a visceral hostility in a broader segment of the population than just those you are at war with. He uses the metaphor of spear-wielding Zulus getting mowed down when charging machine gun positions, while having no effect whatsoever. To avoid being that Zulu and dying pointlessly by Anglo hands, you must define your terms correctly so you know what you are fighting against, and aim for having the broadest possible level of appeal. If you fail to do that, you’ll be up against a far more organized force, that will leave you isolated, marginalized, and as he likes to say, “You will lose every time.”

EMJ is a prolific author and speaker. I’ve been following him more than any other commentator in recent months. There’s no one better to follow if you want to hear the authentic voice of Paleo-Catholicism. Quite why you would want to do that is another matter, but the point is that once you start following him, it’s easy to stick around for the personality and sense of mission, and to set aside disagreements about specific areas of contention. It’s a good object lesson, that what unites can be stronger than what divides. Agree or disagree, it can be refreshing to hear another perspective, presented in a form undiluted by the conventions of political correctness and accepted historical narratives. That being said, there are disagreements and there are disagreements. Not everything can be set aside, or swept under the carpet.

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As mentioned, EMJ has written a lot, and on a lot of subjects. Of interest here are two of his books, ‘The Slaughter of Cities’, written in 2004, and ‘The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit’, written in 2008. They deal with very different topics, but they share one thing: a pro-Catholic slant, and a corresponding hostility to non-Catholics which is used to explain away all ills that befall Catholics wherever they may be living. The one main thing they differ in, is that in the intervening years, between writing the first and second books, and in the wake of the neo-cons dragging America into the Iraq war, EMJ became awakened to the Jewish Question. The first book mentioned deals with a story of Protestant perfidy in trying to undermine Catholic solidarity in the US by ethnically cleansing them out of their cohesive, politically-formidable ethnic neighborhoods. The second book adds Jew-bashing to the mix, but keeps up the Protestant-bashing.

I should say first that both books are worth reading, and have some very good parts. They also have some really bad parts. There’s nowhere else where you’ll find a description of the Enlightenment as a ‘Black Op’ (a propaganda operation, aimed at weakening a target society in some way, to advance an opponent’s interests). Is this a good description of the enlightenment? It is at least presented in a consistent manner and you can follow his train of thought on it. Even without accepting his conclusions, he is right on a number of things regarding the underlying process taking place, which when told from the pov of Whig history is described as a purely positive thing, marking a stepping stone along the path of human progress. The difference between the books is that in the first, the target is the old Anglo Protestant elite, especially the Quakers, who were concerned about being outbred by Catholics with large families; and in the second book the target is Jews, and the concern is that they don’t know what they want, besides to interfere in the works of others (to give it my own interpretation). The difference between these two things, is that in the first case, the concern is legitimate, and in the second it’s a bunch of people who don’t know what they want and yet keep interfering with what other groups have accomplished. You’d think that possibly, if you had gone to the trouble of writing a long and thoroughly researched book on WASP social engineering attempts which also included many Jewish players involved in doing much of the engineering, and then later had an epiphany about how these same Jews played a similarly-destructive role in many other situations, then you’d at least narrow your focus down to dealing with just them.

As they say, “No one can serve two masters”. Does he stand for a unified front against Talmudist capture of the institutions of the West, or does he stand for Catholic revanchism, and a continued simmering resentment over the wars of religion of centuries past?

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What is the opposite of ‘Whig History’? The diametric opposite would be whitewashing (or explaining away) all Catholic failings, and insisting that anyone not on board is a heretic and a Judaizer (more on that term later). Just from his own version of events, you’d think EMJ would be a lot more open to criticism of the Church and a need for reform. There was a TV series, ‘The Borgias’, about the life and times of Pope Alexander VI. One of the subplots there is the story of the Florentine Dominican preacher, Girolamo Savonarola. In Savonarola’s day, Florence had descended into decadence, and he preached a return to Christian piety and virtue, and an end to the practice of usury, which was supposedly prohibited under Church doctrine, but was widely practiced there. In EMJ’s own words (more or less): the sodomites and the usurers teamed up with the Pope to silence Savonarola. In this case, silencing meant hanging and then a burning of his corpse. Pretty nasty. Not very Christian. The thing that gets me, is that this wasn’t like a few hundred years after the Church was founded and became the dominant institution in European life; this was more than a thousand years after that, in 1498. Is this really the best that could be hoped for? At the time, there were a lot of people who felt that this wasn’t good enough, as evidenced by the fact that less than 20 years later, Martin Luther began his protests against corruption in the Church, and the reformation soon followed.

The above is an example of immorality and decay, but there are worse examples, of seriously despicable crimes on a massive scale. The worst, to my mind, is the so-called ‘Albigensian Crusade’, against the Cathar sect, in Languedoc, in what is today southern France. The Church considered Catharism a heresy, and once it started gaining ground, became determined to stamp it out. This raises a few questions. Why is the Church in the business of telling people what they can believe? What happened to free will? If forced conversion is wrong, why is forced orthodoxy permitted? The second related question deals with the attitude of the Church towards the Jews. Church doctrine stated that it was impermissible to convert the Jews by force, and instead you should pray for their sincere conversion. Why couldn’t that be the approach towards the Cathars as well? It makes no logical sense, and it sets the Jews up in a special status all their own, which goes a long way towards explaining why they are the way they are.

The story of the Catholic Church is mainly one of an identity crisis. The religion that lies at its heart was inspired by a sense of an approach of the last days, and final judgment. Its underlying message is rejection of earthly things and embrace of the sacred and spiritual. It was never intended to be a state religion, and yet that’s what it became. On top of that there’s also the confused identification as being in some way a continuation of the Roman empire, or at least of keeping some of its legacy alive. Those two things together gave rise to one of the most destabilizing forces in European history, the Holy Roman Empire. If you look at a map of western and central Europe from around the 16th C., you have some countries with a recognizable outline, like France; Spain and Portugal; England, Scotland and Wales; and then there are areas with territories subdivided into smaller states but still you can make out how they combine into the state we know today (Italy, is an example of four or five smaller territories that became unified Italy). Then, right in the center, in what is today Germany and Austria you have this wasteland that looks like nothing so much as a patch of mange; tiny principalities and dukedoms, all in some way related to an entity known as the HRE, but none of them really beholden to it. The HRE had its own unclear relationship to the Church in Rome, supposedly serving as its secular arm, but in practice serving as much use as some vestigial appendage. The notable thing about all this is that it was a state of affairs that lasted for centuries; much longer than you’d expect, given the instability inherent in this arrangement.

Adding to the instability, there was the area of Poland off to the east, which served as a boundary between the Germanic territories and the Slavic territories, except that it was also Catholic, rather then Orthodox. It is in some way not surprising that this boundary region became home to the Jewish population that was ejected out of the more stable parts of Europe. An area which has some built-in tension, is more likely to draw in an external element, similar to an ocean gyre sucking in a piece of flotsam. It needs to be said, that had Poland not been Catholic, it would not have become home to the largest Jewish population anywhere in the world (at its height, before Poland was split up between Prussia, Russia and Austria, it was home to as much as two-thirds of the world’s Jewish population). In large part, the Jewish phenomenon is a Catholic invention (a bit of Catholic social engineering, if you will).

This combination of factors, a spiritual religion with a temporal arm, a power vacuum that can’t be filled due to too many competing forces, none of which can gather up enough support to challenge the moribund entity at the heart of the status quo, and an ex-territory acting as an incubator for a group that is notorious for exacerbating existing instabilities, all led to a situation in central Europe that prevented the emergence of a centralized state comparable to the ones existing in France and Britain, which itself led to those two countries being able to exert a lot more influence than they would’ve otherwise been able to, had there been a third powerful actor creating a balance of powers. The key ingredient in all this, the thing that explains why it didn’t get resolved sooner, is the fact that Christianity is a very powerful personal religion. As a state religion it is pretty much nonsensical, but amongst the individual practitioners, even those at the highest levels, there is a sufficiently large percentage of true believers, that the corrosive effect of institutional cynicism can’t become sufficiently entrenched to cause the sort of decay that ends up bringing the house down (case in point: the Soviet Union).

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What does it mean for a religion to be considered a good personal religion? It means it fulfills some need for an individual, usually at a time of personal turmoil. The truth is that this part of the religion, the part that resonates with the needs of the searching individual, accounts for only a small subset of the overall doctrinal framework of the religion. I’ve long wondered whether there is a system to Christianity that gives it some internal consistency that elevates it above other religions, beyond the admittedly powerful story of redemption and salvation. This isn’t the place to get into that, and it’s not important what I personally think about the subject. The question more accurately is what role (if any) did Christianity play in human progress.

There is a chapter in ‘The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit’ that deals with Freemasonry. It left me quite depressed after reading it, and I couldn’t quite explain to myself why, besides that it made me ask the question, “what human progress?”. A while later I realized that it was a sense of everyone involved coming across as incredibly uninspired in one way or another; either superstitious, or vain, or vacuous. It was, additionally, a rather long chapter, and the unrelenting dreariness also helped contribute to the sense of dismay. One of the main flaws of the book is that some of the topics he touches upon, fall far outside the scope of what he claims he is writing about: the role of Jews in various revolutionary movements. The chapters where this comes out most strongly are the ones dealing with the Hussites and Taborites, where he fails to mention any actual Jewish connection. The Cathars, too, are supposedly influenced by Jews and yet no evidence is produced to support the claim (and it’s unlikely such evidence exists, given how there is nothing in common between their gnosticism and between any strand of Judaism – at least any that I know of). Instead of a Jewish connection, he produces the term, ‘Judaizer’, which means, “anything EMJ doesn’t like.”

In the case of the Freemasons, there was some rather limited Jewish involvement, but it was nowhere nearly extensive enough for Freemasonry to be considered a Jewish movement. The Masons also had some interest in Kabala and other esoteric Jewish belief systems, but they were interested in ancient Egyptian mysticism as well, and it’s a bit of a stretch to claim that this in itself makes them ‘Judaizers’. In the case of the Hussites and Taborites the connection is even more tenuous, and what makes their rebellion against Rome and the HRE Judaic, is that they took inspiration from the Old Testament for some of their ideas. If the Catholic Church had discarded the Old Testament entirely, then the New Testament would just be called ‘The Testament’. The Hussites were ethnic Bohemian Czechs who found the Catholic Church a bit too worldly:

“They,” said one Hussite referring to Rome, “have introduced as necessary for the kingdom of God, Greek rules, Aristotelic justice, Platonic sanctity, and gentile rites and honor.” The Hussites would have none of this. Like the Muslims before them and the Puritans after them, they were willing to burn down whatever edifice contained more than their understanding of the word of God.

Is it at least possible that the church hadn’t found the right mix of sources of inspiration? Seems like it wasn’t doing the job of producing a community of believers who lived their lives according to the rules they were taught they should follow. If some group thinks they have a better idea, why shouldn’t they be allowed to follow their conscience?

Where he gets really careless with the term, is when he applies it to what he calls, “the error of the Jews”. The error of the Jews is a belief in heaven on earth. There is nothing that this couldn’t apply to. Want your city council to fix a pothole near your house? Guess you’re getting ready to usher in the reign of the anti-Christ, otherwise why would you care about some minor inconvenience, when the fate of your eternal soul is what should concern you.

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If he is at his weakest when he is railing against non-Catholic strands of Christianity, the chapters where he deals with actual Jewish revolutionary activity are very informative. Most of these are in the modern period, after emancipation took place in Western Europe, and then later in Russia and in the US once they had arrived in sufficient numbers. The chapters on the civil rights movement (a topic that is dealt with in both books) are particularly instructive. I didn’t read anywhere near the whole of ‘Slaughter of Cities’, as it’s very long, but he lays out the gist of it early on (what follows is a very rushed overview, so apologies if this seems superficial). In cities like Philadelphia, which had large populations of Catholic ethnics (Irish, Italian, Polish, etc.), each group would congregate in some part of a neighborhood and establish a community based around their church, which often held services in their mother tongue. Neighborhoods would be segregated by streets, but in essence were mixed communities. The type of housing is also important – in Philadelphia there were row-houses aimed at low-income families, which is something that ceased being available once urban planning came under local, State and Federal control. What he is describing is a type of self-organizing behavior, that is very recognizable from the way other species behave, which was later replaced by top-down planning, with catastrophic results. He describes two types of social engineering: a misguided type that is just incompetent and produces bad results; and a malicious one that is intended to drive out a population – a process he describes as ethnic cleansing, a label that certainly seems to apply.

The ethnic tensions this provoked, especially between blacks who were coming up from the South, in search of work (and to fill labor shortages caused by the war-time economy) and between the Catholic ethnics who were already living in cities like Philadelphia and Chicago, were more than harmful. They actually destroyed any hope of creating a social fabric, and condemned generations of blacks to poverty and marginalization.

This is again a process where the differences between organic groups and those that can’t be considered as such, are apparent. Groups with a strong ethnic identity don’t have to be told how to behave, they do so by instinct, and when resources are not scarce, they can coexist with other strongly-identified ethnic groups, each in its own sphere. The WASPs were a group that was starting to lose its ethnic identity, due to numerical decline and by loss of a sense of their own group status. The Jews, who were hired by the WASPs into the bureaucracies that were doing the social engineering, were just making it up as they were going along, because their ethnic identity was of a different type to these other groups and they could not relate to them, nor did they care to try.

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There’s one other topic that I want to discuss, before summing up. It deals with an issue he brings up in ‘The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit’, and is also something he talks about fairly frequently, which is the topic of Jewish-Catholic dialogue, under the broad label of Vatican II. This is a debate that goes back to the period after WW2, when the Jews were both more aggrieved than ever, and more powerful than ever in terms of their ability to shape discourse. Vatican II, was an ecumenical council held in the early 60s, aimed at harmonizing the Church’s image with the realities of life in the second half of the 20th Century, where one topic under discussion was the Church’s attitude towards the Jews. Broadly speaking, the teachings of the church had been that a Jew was someone who rejected the Messiah, and carries the guilt for that act with him, which can only be washed away by baptism. There’s not very much you can do with that underlying set of beliefs to harmonize it with current philo-Semitic attitudes. The most you can do, is quibble over what does the term ‘Jew’ entail.

The question of which Jews were responsible for the death of Christ, can also be extended to the question of who gets to speak for all Jews. If they were smart, the Vatican authorities would have told the various self-appointed Jewish spokespeople, “We’d love to have this dialogue with you, please present us with your credentials, so we know we’re dealing with the authentic representatives of the Jewish people”.

“His blood be on us and our children.” (Matthew 27:25) Who were these Jews who were willing to take on such an obligation on themselves and their children? What were their credentials to speak on behalf of all Jews?

To my knowledge, it was only the Catholic church that made Jewish guilt such a central part of their doctrine, and in so doing they created a class of people called Jews, who exhibit the kind of traits that you’d expect from someone who believes they are special in one way, and is told by his surroundings he is special in another way. EMJ is very clear on who he thinks the Jews’ father is. Whether he is right about this or not, it seems clear to me that their mother must be the Catholic Church.

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Getting acquainted with the ideas of a strongly-identified Catholic, I was struck by a certain similarity that exists between the Catholic conservatives and Jews. The Catholics resemble very much what Jews tell themselves they are, but aren’t really. There’s the pride in the status as originators, the unbroken lineage, the sense that this tie to antiquity is what gives them their stature. In the case of the Jews, the claim to an unbroken link with the past is unjustified, since this preservation of themselves as a group came from the outside, not from their own internal cohesiveness. It’s much truer for the Catholics, if you discount things like the Avignon Papacy and other minor hiccups. There’s also a certain stubbornness that both groups share. Again, the difference here can be demonstrated by the expression, “[to get] dragged kicking and screaming into the [present day]”. The Jews are very good at the kicking and screaming part, in fact it’s the only thing they seem to enjoy, but it never ends up getting them anywhere. With the Catholics, there is a slight delay and then they wind up more or less on the same page as everyone else. At least most of them do.

One of the stories that is told in ‘Slaughter of Cities’ deals with the Democratic Pennsylvania state representative from Philadelphia, Martin Mullen, who announced in 1966 that he would hold up the state budget in his committee, as long as it had provisions in it for birth control programs. Without going into further details, this is EMJ’s summary of the incident, at the end of the chapter that deals with this event:

The Catholics had won the birth-control battle of 1966, but the outrage which resulted when the forces of Enlightenment found themselves defeated by the ethnics insured that the cultural war surrounding the birth-control issue would continue unabated, and that it would spill over into other areas of concern to these same groups, areas like housing. In March of 1966, just as the Mullen’s role in the battle over the state’s involvement in birth control was becoming a feature of daily report in the area’s newspapers, the Quakers expanded their housing program to include southwest Philadelphia, where Mullen’s congressional district was located.

You know what it reminds me of? A Zulu charging a machine gun position.

In keeping with the theme I’m trying to develop here, the ethnic neighborhoods he talks about can be seen as a phenomenon that has some quality to it, in the sense that it is an authentic expression of the biological and social intelligence that typifies human groups, as they developed naturally. It is however, a static kind of quality. Moreover, the act of transplanting these communities from their original homelands, onto the shores of the New World, cannot be seen as an expression of upward movement along the quality axis. It is at best lateral movement, and this movement does not obey the moral law of increase in quality. It is moral for a higher level (intellect) to control a lower level (biology), and it is immoral for biology to impose itself on the higher levels.

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EMJ likes to say ‘Jew’ a lot. I think there should be more people saying ‘Jew’. The problem seems to be that there only ever seems to be a small group willing to discuss the topic of the outsize influence that Jews have, and this is all they seem to ever want to discuss, except for one or two other pet issues of theirs, which invariably are issues that most other people find off-putting. It makes it so that these people don’t even have to be marginalized, because they become self-marginalizing.

If he wants to be a Catholic conservative and talk about things that are of interest to Catholic conservatives, that’s entirely up to him. He should however remember that Church teaching is that you should pray for the sincere conversion of the Jews, not that you should complain about them ad nauseam. So, instead of spending the majority of his programs talking about the Jews, what he should do is spend almost the entire time talking about Catholic conservative stuff, and then right at the very end he should remind his audience to pray for the sincere conversion of the Jews, and he can also plug his book, “The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and its Impact on World History”.

White Identity is not the answer

Since this is not intended to be more than a rough outline, and the priority is on getting it done, rather than on filling in all the details, I’ll be much briefer in this section.

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An Interlude (Comic? Perhaps, but not ha-ha funny)

Part-way between finishing up examining what the non-kosher goys have to say and between starting to wrap up the discussion of Jewish influence, it’s worth stopping to look at the area of Jewish involvement in the media. The goal seems to be to control all sides of the debate, so they can get ahead of what people are saying about them – which wouldn’t be an issue if they weren’t trying to control all sides of the debate.

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L’Affaire Cofnas – a Comical Interlude

I mentioned that there were no interviews I could recommend of Kevin MacDonald, in which neither he nor the person he is talking to manage to avoid engaging in some “unwholesome” rhetoric. There is one exception to this, where he does manage to keep it PG-13 the entire time.

He went on a podcast earlier this year to talk about his well-publicized exchanges with public intellectual and mega-galaxy brain, Nathan Cofnas, who is the only one to date to give serious scholarly consideration to MacDonald’s theories. They each did a separate interview, talking about their side of the argument. You can search for their names, plus ‘podcast’, and you’ll find it.

The necessary background can be found by searching for these recorded interviews, so I won’t be going over it here. What I’ll be doing in this section is pointing out some relevant aspects of the Cofnas interview, mainly by way of highlighting the nonsensical nature of the discussion. When MacDonald talks about intellectual movements, it’s easy to get the sense that their salient feature is the content of their ideas. This isn’t the case. Their key feature is as a set of arguments that can be “weaponized” to push for a desired outcome. The thing that’s of interest to him is the attitude behind the ideas, not the ideas themselves as systems of thought worthy of consideration in their own right. The way Cofnas goes about “disproving” MacDonald’s arguments, goes a long way towards substantiating them instead.

The comical aspect of this, for me, is how it began as something that would appear as a fiasco in the making for MacDonald, but actually saw him come out the other side of it appearing sober and reasonable. It has the quality of an unfolding saga, each episode getting a little more absurd, and you can question the wisdom of getting involved in a back-and-forth with someone who must be around 50 years his junior, which would appear to suggest a certain desperation for engagement, but he actually did a credible job of maintaining composure throughout. What made this discussion stand out for me was that there’s a generational aspect to it. I don’t know if Cofnas would count as a late-Millennial, or early-Gen Z. One thing for sure, both he and the podcast host, who seem to be of a similar age, are the result of an environment that has ceased providing role models for younger generations to follow, and the only ones providing such a service are various online figures who have helped raise a generation of dimwitted narcissists. One aspect of these influencers, and those emulating them hoping to become the next batch of influential new-media personalities, is that as a group, they are very Jewish in their makeup.

I don’t know how attached MacDonald is to the theoretical side of his arguments. His theory bears the hallmarks of a well-constructed scientific argument, because it had to in order to get published. Maybe MacDonald is eager to treat it as such. It’s clear however that it also serves him as a vehicle for discussing issues of undue Jewish influence, which is a topic that can be described without needing to be explained. Once he’d gained some notoriety, there was a prominent researcher who said that he’d take a shot at doing a critical review of his work. After more than 20 years, no such review has been made, and this researcher died in 2023. If you took an honest stab at disproving his ideas as they relate to the field of evolutionary psychology, you could make plenty of arguments against it, but along the way you’d have to acknowledge that the fundamental picture he paints is accurate, and you’d either have to provide your own explanations for it, or admit that there is a phenomenon there that needs to be explained, one way or the other. Cofnas has no interest in making such an admission, and treats the theory in the most literal-minded fashion, completely ignoring the larger context within which the debate is taking place. One such important bit of context: the first edition of Culture of Critique was published in 1998, and in 2002 MacDonald put out a paperback edition, with an updated preface. This was just as the extent of neo-con involvement in shaping US foreign policy was becoming apparent, and there is only a brief mention of Iraq, in one of the endnotes of the revised preface. This set of podcast interviews was conducted during the ongoing Gaza war (which has since escalated to encompass Lebanon too). These events don’t merit consideration, apparently, in Cofnas’s view. Which is why Cofnas’s view can be cheerfully and comprehensively discarded.

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In this section, I’ll try to focus on some of the ways in which MacDonald’s arguments are substantiated, by highlighting particular behaviors. If this all comes across as a bit petty (or even a lot), I’ll say that my main motivation here is to discuss the continued phenomenon of the cultural influence that Jews have – not through skill or smarts, but through persistence and absence of self-regulation. Both of these young men, are clearly products of the anti-woke industry that started making itself felt in the mid-10s (the ‘IDW’ as it was once called). My target here is not these two individuals, but the morons who helped shape them into what they are. These people have added an extraordinary amount of stupidity to the world, that wouldn’t otherwise be in it, and I have a longstanding deep and personal resentment of this fact. Also, Cofnas specifically is a nasty piece of work, and so is a worthy target for ridicule in his own right.

Myopia

The first item to examine is an example of a literal-minded argument, missing the forest for the trees, coupled with a heaped serving of good old fashioned chutzpa. What is the definition of chutzpa? Claiming, without batting an eyelid, that there is a question whether or not Jews could be considered ethnocentric (especially when it relates to Jews who were living and working in the first half of the 20th Century).

The first claim is not worth treating seriously. You can argue that ethnocentrism is not well-defined. A good definition for it would be, look at the Jewish group, that’s what I mean when I say ethnocentric. The second is only worth considering if you consider the ‘evolutionary’ component of MacDonald’s theory a central aspect of it, which I don’t. It seems to me, however, that one feature of a successful strategy would be to incorporate as much external genetic diversity, without diluting the characteristics that give the group its particular quality. As the podcast host himself demonstrates, you can be typically Jewish with only one Jewish parent. At the same time, it is a numbers game, and Jews have always been at risk of assimilation, once the strong barriers separating them from their surroundings were weakened, and this has been an ongoing issue of concern for Zionists in the US.

Whether or not Jews are ethnocentric can be examined when taking Cofnas himself as a case study, especially the context in which this whole debate is happening:

• The journal that published his 2021 paper, which generated the most publicity due to the scandal of retraction of MacDonald’s response, is Israeli (or began as an Israeli journal, not sure if it has remained so). His arguments are of very low quality, and would not be published in a neutral venue.
• The podcast itself.
• Who he interacts with online.

Personality traits

The MacDonald interview (which I don’t focus on here) has a decent discussion of the role Jewish personality traits play in their ability to shape the society around them. A lot of these are negative traits, relating to lack of inhibitions (negative in that sense, and also in the regular sense, tbqh). The less concern you have about how you are coming across, the more options you have at your disposal for how to act.

All quotes are from the interview, unless otherwise stated.

Anti-woke gurus and their harmful impact on the impressionable minds of today’s youth

Nathan Cofnas is a nasty piece of work

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Are the ‘Jewish Values’ in the room with us right now?

This is a complimentary section to the discussion of the anti-woke crowd, but considered from the other side of the coin.

The question here is what do Jews really believe, given the fact that they seem to be present in every movement and every point of view. The obvious objection here is that every group has a range of opinions. Instead of trying to describe what other people believe and how they believe it, I’ll get to the heart of the matter which is that Jews hold the opinions that they find advantageous to hold. Opinions are positions, and positions are platforms for self-promotion. I could also say that opinions are just opinions. They have no ramifications. With enough influence, they can have real world consequences: the neo-cons didn’t just hold the opinion that Saddam had to go. But they also didn’t care if it was true or not that Saddam had to go. It was convenient to believe it, and they had the opportunity to act on it. There were no sincerely held beliefs in any of it.

And the question is, are there any sincerely held “Jewish” beliefs.

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What are the ‘attributes’ of a sincerely held belief? What does activism motivated by such a belief look like?

Supposing you were writing a book, informed by your convictions, trying to give your view of the world and your place in it – how would you go about it?

You’d make sure that everything in it was as accurate as you could get it. You would take cognizance of concerns raised against your side by those who oppose your views. You would put in the extra effort to make sure it was as free from obvious errors as possible.

The book I’m about to discuss is the exact opposite of that (or at least the two chapters of it that have been made available online are, and these are all I’ve read). These chapters are from Naomi Klein’s book, “Doppelganger”. I wouldn’t care about anything Naomi Klein pretends to believe if she dealt with anything other than Israel-Palestine or Zionism and anti-Semitism. I do care about those things, because she makes it her point to uphold the accepted view of anti-Semitism, and to hold herself up as a model for anti-Zionist Judaism.

Thinking about it, there’s actually not really very much to say about the second one. It’s just an attitude, and there is a total commitment to it. Is there a meaningful separation between Israelis and between the Jews in North America? No. Are there Zionists who don’t live in Israel? Millions of them. So, when did Zionists cease being Jews? Without some core substance to the concept of an anti-Zionist Jew, the label is meaningless, but it is accepted as legitimate, in large part due to the work of Klein, and many others like her.

As to the first point, the one that can come under the heading, ‘intersectionality of the oppressed’, this is what Klein is primarily concerned with. There are so many groups she wants to link up with, just so long as they remember to validate her concern with anti-Semitism. Thing is, she does it in such a slipshod manner, which goes against every one of the criteria I identified above for a work that is aimed at reflecting a deep conviction.

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Let’s list the groups she tries to attach herself to, and why she isn’t being truthful in her presentation.

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One person she quotes, in connections to blacks and law enforcement, is an African studies professor named Rinaldo Walcott. I’m not sure, but I think he’s the source for the claim that is sometimes heard that there is a connection between modern policing and slave patrols that existed to prevent slaves from escaping.

Rinaldo Walcott makes his living off of being a professional victim. I’m sure he has nothing good to say about Zionism, but he would never criticize Jews as a group.

If you were an anti-Zionist Jew, and you were really concerned about fighting Zionism, you know who you would give a platform to instead? Tony Martin. I only first heard about Tony Martin a couple of months ago. He was a professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts (he passed away in 2013). He became the target of an orchestrated Jewish harassment campaign, because he dared to include as part of his course, the book by Nation of Islam about the Jewish involvement in the slave trade. He wrote a book about his experiences, and there are videos online of presentations he gave where he summarizes the tactics he was subjected to (very entertaining speaker, highly recommended).

He also has a section in the talks he gave on the subject, about how he overcame these assaults. His lessons from that perspective are, stick to your truth, build a support network, become financially independent (in his case by establishing his own publishing company).

What advice does Rinaldo Walcott give? I don’t know. I do know that he makes a point of spelling ‘Black’ with a capital letter and ‘white’ without. You know what this tells me? That he plans on milking his victim status for all eternity (he moved from Barbados – same country where Tony Martin was born – to Canada. No one in Canada owned his ancestors as slaves, and he has no more right to exist in that territory than anyone else, and if he feels unsafe there he can move). Is black skin sufficient for you to feel oppressed? Isn’t it better to get off that oppression bandwagon?

Just in terms of role models, who would you want young blacks to identify with? And if you are an anti-Zionist, whose story would you want to see given more prominence?

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The degree of sanctimony in Klein’s writing is astronomical. You’d think someone of her age, who’s only ever seen Jewish power increasing over her lifetime, and the Jewish state become more brutal and more extreme, would start to develop some doubts about the story she’s been taught. No one is more committed to preserving the sense of the blameless Jewish victimhood than Naomi Klein. Naomi Klein is a great Zionist.

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Feedbacks keeping the Jewish ‘System’ going

I’ve written enough about Jewish issues. To do any more of it would be to indulge in an obsession. I’m not obsessed with it, and am in fact bored out of my mind with this topic. All my writing on it has been done in order to have an impact: get a response, move the needle. My target audience has changed over time, following each successive failure to achieve this, and I’m now speaking to a group that is not Jewish, and not actively engaged in talking about Jewish/Zionist affairs (not professionally, that is – or, at least not with a long history of this, because the people in that category are set in their ways, and if they haven’t been persuaded up to now to change their approach, there’s no reason to expect they ever will). The type of person I have in mind are the people who engage in back-and-forth with high-profile Zionist accounts, follow the news and boost bigger accounts who talk about these things, etc. Not the ones with the big platforms, but the ones who are doing it in their spare time and have the least invested in following a particular approach. My advice to them will be in the next, final part of this series.

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Note on the use of language:

In case you find it distasteful my use of ‘they’, here and in the rest of the series; it is, but it can’t be helped. At least it’s direct. For one, I’m not sure how I could say it otherwise without tying myself in knots. Two, I already tried ‘you’, without success, and so the underlying message is that it’s no use talking to ‘them’.

When I say ‘they’, now, it’s because I’m talking to ‘you’. And if you don’t want to listen, it’s probably because you’re a boomer or a Zionist, and quite likely both.

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Ticking off some things I don’t have to talk about:

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Most of the remaining things I’ve been meaning to talk about can be fitted without too much strain into Pirsig’s conceptual framework of the interplay between the four levels. It is in fact why I’ve kept from talking about these particular subjects, because I wanted to do it in the proper context.

Outside the Moral Law

Without looking up the terms, it seems to me that ‘morals’ and ‘ethics’ are just two words for the same thing. Maybe there’s some subtlety that I’m missing, but I’ll use them here to make a point about the difference between a third and fourth level pattern. I’ll use ‘moral behavior’ as a label for a third level pattern, and ‘ethics’ as a label for a fourth level pattern. You could change it around and say ‘ethical behavior’ and ‘morality’, but why would you want to do that, when my way is so much better?

‘Moral behavior’ is a way of behaving within a group, that has quality. If the whole group observes moral behavior, you would expect to find a group that is able to achieve more than if it is split between ‘rule-followers’ and ‘rule-breakers’. To act morally is to follow codes of conduct, within your group. Morality is closer to biology than it is to ‘ethics’. It is a reflection of the forces of nature operating on individuals and groups, and an attempt to achieve some harmony between these realities and between the need to feel that existence in itself has some type of ‘quality’ to it. In simpler lifeforms, stronger males castrate weaker males as part of their dominance struggles. This might not have much quality for the loser of the struggle, but even for him, the reduction in population pressure has advantages. The group benefits where the individual suffers, and the trade-off can be justified. As lifeforms become more complex, better rules need to be devised for how to regulate these things, as success in chopping off nuts does not translate to success in all endeavors. The group will gain more if it increases its concept of what is good, what should be valued.

For a group that is in contact with other groups, there’ll eventually arise a situation where there are clashes between what each one considers moral. This will give rise to a generalized concept of ‘ethics’, concerned with how do you define moral behavior. After vigorous debate, and much bloodshed, the various groups in this example will reach a sort of meta-morality, that doesn’t include every type of behavior, but a general framework in which there is agreement on some fundamental do’s and don’ts. In a context where there really was a lot of bloodshed, this could be seen as a sort of truce, after an arms race of escalating violations. All groups agree that some types of behaviors are weapons that should not exist in anyone’s arsenal. The structuring of the relation to other groups can create more stable truces, more permanent truces, which will allow all groups to progress the concept of morality past the point of simple cost-benefit, to something more evolved and more generalizable. As a wider palette of ‘good’ behaviors/traits is developed, a concept of ‘virtue’ emerges, which is a kind of morality that has taken on a life of its own. In order to get there, there needs to be respect for biological fundamentals. Some types of strength, or some level of robustness, need to be synonymous with ‘good’; some level of toleration of the existence of other groups is also required. In that way, you reach a point where a group has the wherewithal to consider virtue and ethics in their full complexity.

The truce between groups can be called, ‘The Moral Law’. Its method is reciprocity, and its guiding light is good faith. For some reason, Jews as a group lost contact with the reasons for why this moral law exists. They learned they could live outside of it, and accrue some benefits to themselves by doing so. The fundamental truth they discovered is that if there’s only one group of cheaters, then there’s no new arms race, and cheating can continue apace. The reason why other groups don’t devolve into cheating is that is would have low quality to them. Whatever advantages Jews have been able to achieve by their cheating, it does not let them thrive as an organic group would. They can just keep their head above water, and keep treading.

The objective here would be to try to get boomers hopping mad at the fact that Jews are cheating by not working within the framework of the moral law. The one thing that could reverse the atomization would be a shared sense of belonging – partially to rekindle a recollection of their former status as members of an ethnic group, but more importantly a sense of belonging to a different kind of group – the group that does take seriously these restrictions, and understands why they were put in place; and takes pride in sticking to them.

The numbers represent the different stages of Pirsig’s four-level scheme. The curly brackets ‘{}’ indicate where the self is. The asterisk ‘*’ identifies where the perception of quality happens.

I don’t want to downplay my belief in this idea. I wouldn’t waste time arguing about it with someone who didn’t accept it, because it’s completely theoretical. I do believe that even if not exactly this, there’s something similar going on.

The first diagram shows a group operating within the moral law. The separation into two groups of square brackets is just to highlight what is of primary concern, and what is secondary. For a member of an organic group, there is benefit in maintaining a higher over-all valuation of the three lower levels, as a whole. This is what allows for reciprocal relations with other groups, due to recognition of similarities in circumstances.

The diagram of the Jewish group presents it as a free-standing fourth-level pattern, perpetuating itself at the expense of the lower levels that represent specific Jewish communities, and Jewish individuals. I won’t try to expand on this further; Pirsig talks very convincingly about how once they emerge, higher level patterns use lower-level patterns as tools for their own development – his example is New York city, as a social pattern that feeds off of the biological humans who built it and help maintain it, who then get chewed up and spit out by ‘the Giant’, which is his name for the overall phenomenon. I think this also applies to the idea of ‘Jewishness’ that exists at the expense of the welfare of the individuals who serve to prop up this idea.

The moral law of institutions

Through the 18th C., and reaching fulfilment in the 19th C., there was a shift in the method of ordering human affairs, from competition between kinship and ethnic groups, with the various customs that regulated such competition, to an emergence of new types of interest groups with an institutional character.

Institution here is a general term for any type of bureaucracy, corporation, or organization. Institutions are fourth level patterns. It is frequently noted that they seem to exist in order to perpetuate themselves. They use the language of ‘social benefits’ to justify their activity, and are not troubled in the least by failing to deliver on these promises. Individuals living in a heavily-institutionalized society are powerless to fight against these institutions, either by criticizing them from without, or working to try to change them from within. Of note here, is that it is moral for an institution to perpetuate itself, because it is a higher level of organization. If an institution could talk, it could say, “you humans are looking at it from a human time-scale perspective, and you want results now. We institutions think of ourselves as a new development, and we’re still learning how to be the best institutions we can be, and once that’s done, you’ll benefit from it just as much as we do. And in any case, on your own you are too insignificant to consider anything beyond your immediate surroundings and can’t appreciate how everything works together, and you need us to do it for you.” Or something along those lines. The moral law of institutions is different from the moral law of humans.

The moral law of Jewishness is much more similar to that of institutions than it is to the version that human groups follow. This help to explain why individual Jews seem better at advancing within an institution. They share the ‘institutional’ view that the institution itself is the end goal, and not the benefits it is supposedly set up to facilitate. Rising up along the institutional hierarchy is a moral act, whereas to a non-Jew, it makes no difference what your status in within an organization that doesn’t deliver on what is expected of it. This is a view that leads to cynicism and lack of motivation, a handicap that isn’t an issue for a Jewish person working in the same setting, so long as there’s an institutional hierarchy to climb.

Institutions also interface with each other, and Jewishness as a whole can be seen as just another institution, interfacing with its fellow institutions. The corporation called ‘Israel’ can interface with the corporation called ‘State Department’, or ‘British Broadcasting Corporation’, and agree that it makes a lot of sense for them to work together on ways to advance their shared interests.

You’re only cheating yourselves

One of the books I read in preparation for writing this is called, “The Inside Story of the ‘Peace Conference’”. I was interested in reading it because of a line in, ‘The International Jew’ that referred to the topic, which states that, “[T]he only program that passed successfully and unchanged through the Peace Conference [was the Jewish program.]” The author of this book comments on the similarities between the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, and the Congress of Vienna of 1814. It’s really just a matter of a process of “bureaucratization” that is further along between the two centuries. Searching for certain strings like, ‘Arab’, ‘Syria’, ‘Palestine’, ‘Zion’, you can find the parts that are relevant to us today. There’s another string you can use that is also quite interesting. One thing it picks up is a discussion of some “Jewels”. What is happening to these Jewels? They are being misappropriated by someone, nevermind who. Looking up all those strings, especially the last one, gives you a sense of some of the complaints against Jewish interference in world affairs. It isn’t too much of a stretch to put it all under the heading of ‘cheating’. The thing is, that all the cheating in the world can’t change the fact the billions are stronger than millions. It just delays the inevitable, while more and more groups are united into a coalition against you.

Cheating as a feedback

The thing is, that in the meantime, this cheating produces extraordinary results, certainly in the “age of the boomers”, where standards of individual conduct are so low, and bonds of national pride and ethnic solidarity are correspondingly weakened.

One of the main examples of this, a benefit acquired by cheating, that goes on to create a false sense of accomplishment, is the British involvement in putting down the Arab Revolt, during the years 1936-39. Without this, there would have been no state of Israel. The basic idea behind “Jewish nationalism” is correct. Having their own country, and taking care of their own affairs, would have gotten Jews off the track they were on. Except that by pursuing this goal as they did, they cheated themselves out of the chance to actually build something that they could have pride in, and which they would feel a sense of mission to preserve and uphold its character. Easy come, easy go – the Zionist story in Israel always had a quality of “transience”, like a scam that could be uncovered at any time, and that we can’t believe we’ve been able keep it going for so long.

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Another feedback is the constant flow of newcomers to Israel. One impact it had was to dilute the ‘native’ identity. If such an identity had been allowed to form, it could have become strong enough to fight off the “Jewishness” that was looming over the whole thing and twisting it towards its own ends. It also strengthened the link between communities abroad and in Israel, due to family relations.

Another thing that newcomers do, is they have a normalizing effect on negative behavior (they can also do the opposite, but if that was the case, there would be no need to be writing this). Newcomers tend to defer to old-timers on how things are done. If a large group of newcomers arrives and sees ‘old-timers’ behaving in irrational ways, and they fail to comment on it or reject such behavior, they end up normalizing this behavior, both amongst themselves, and even for those who are already engaging in it, and who might at some point be inclined to realize its self-defeating nature.

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Almost too obvious to mention: maintaining an environment that stokes external hostility (sense of persecution, producing self-righteousness). True for Jews in Israel and abroad.

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Last example is not a single feedback, but an interaction between mutually-reinforcing feedbacks, that sets up a dynamic with such power that it dictates future events up until the point where the force stored within it is spent.

The failure to break free of Israeli militarism is such a case, which ended up having so many repercussions, each leading to their own set of reinforcing feedbacks, that it basically created a channel through which events had to flow.

The sense of doom in the period leading up to the 1967 was entirely artificial. It was based on the unwillingness to acknowledge legitimate grievances, and act in accordance with them. The Egyptian strategy was to build up their forces in order to deter a rational actor, but they were not facing a rational actor. Their irrational opponent won a decisive victory against their military build-up, which they hoped to never have to use. Just to list four main consequences of this, and there are many more: increased identification of foreign Jews with Israel and mass movement to Israel; reinforcing a positive attitude towards militarism in Israeli society; acquisition of territory that became the settlement movement; strengthening ties with US government due to perceived usefulness (this isn’t exactly right, more accurately it’s that it became easier to make the case for a pro-Israel stance which wouldn’t pass any serious scrutiny, so it’s fortunate that none was applied).

The second arm of this dynamic is 1973, that flowed directly from 1967, which weakened the potential of a ‘nativist’ Israeli identity. If I was listing this as its own feedback, it would have to be titled something like, ‘killing off potential rivals’.

After the Yom Kippur war, it was all just inertia, up to the present day.

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This is the last of the ‘Jewish’ themed articles, except for the concluding one, which discusses the relationship between the so-called anti-Zionists and the pro-Palestinians, and which will be the least developed of all the parts in this series. The less said about these people the better, and I’ll try to focus on providing positive recommendations for how someone might go about trying to change things as they presently stand.

Give-and-take: You give, I take

As noted at the end of the previous section, this last one is supposed to be the least developed and most direct. I don’t care what you think your contribution has been to this “debate”, if you can’t point out plainly and simply that American Jews are making decisions aimed at benefiting Israeli Jews, you are avoiding the issue and normalizing this avoidance.

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If you can criticize Israel, without adding “of course I only mean some Israelis”, then you can criticize American Jews. If you have no problem criticizing Israel, but can’t criticize Jews as a group, then you might consider S-ing TFU. That’s it, that’s the post.

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Here are some suggestions for people who would like to be more effective in their online activity (keeping in mind that online doesn’t count for very much):

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In the Biden administration, including President and Vice President, and without getting into any sort of record keeping beyond the identity of the top-level officials, the top most influential spots are staffed by 6 Jews, and 6 non-Jews.

L’État, c’est Moishe.

Moishe has a cousin living in a caravan on a hilltop in the West Bank.

If you think you can have any sort of impact without commenting on this, then you are deluding yourself. Why does it even seem necessary to avoid commenting on this?

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If there’s a ‘they’ that I could criticize in the most dismissive fashion without feeling the slightest tinge of guilt, it’s the pro-Palestinian activists who live in the West, and who’ve kept the same style of rhetoric all throughout the period immediately following October 7, and up to now, despite achieving nothing while doing this. Contempt is a strong word, and it applies here, unreservedly.

Doing the same thing and expecting different results is generally not considered a good thing, and is in fact no different than doing nothing.

What would you call doing the same thing and expecting different results, while asking for money? I call it fraud, personally.

Not only do these people avoid addressing Jewish issues, they also promote and cooperate with Jewish anti-Zionists who account for a large reason for this reticence (it’s harder criticizing people you have a personal familiarity with).

This partnership between the pro-Pals and anti-Zios goes back a long time, but it has known ebbs and flows. The latest incarnation of it goes back to around the time of the Obama administration, initiated by activists working under an umbrella of anti-racist and anti-colonialist ideology, in which both Zionism and anti-Semitism were frowned upon. This was a strategic partnership, based on give-and-take and mutual self-interest.

This was the idea (from the pro-Palestinian side): there are certain things we can’t say about Jewish power in the US, because if we say it we get smeared as antisemitic, and we’re fighting a battle for the hearts and minds of the international community. If we partner with American Jews, they can say these things for us, and we can validate their claim that Zionism is not the same as Judaism.

The anti-Zionists, meanwhile, were using their dislike for Israel as a way of criticizing the American Jewish community, but without actually criticizing it. Criticizing Israel functions as a type of release valve, where tensions within the Jewish community in the US can be relieved by having a debate about Israel, that sidesteps the fact that there are many more reasons to criticize the way they act as a group.

In any case, this partnership proved useless. Useless for Palestinians. It serves some pro-Palestinian activists just fine.

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How is sticking to this partnership with its agreed-upon self-restrictions, even after it’s proven to have no benefits, any different than what the PA does?

The issue of the relationship between Zionism and Judaism was always up for debate. Especially as it relates to the Palestinians, there was always the possibility of saying, “As far as we’re concerned, you’re all one group working together, at our expense.”

The PA’s strategy was to give up its main tool, armed resistance, in exchange for ‘TBD‘. TBD turned out to be, “a fat load of nothing.”

These pro-Palestinian activists have given up the right to criticize the Jewish community, in exchange for what?

It’s even worse in their case, because at least the PA is upfront about it, and tells you clearly that they’re not on your side. These clowns tell you, “We have your back”, and then fail to show up.