Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Hitler




Hitler’s defeat
was the defeat of Europe.
And of America.
How could we have been so blind?


– Edmund Connelly









Last February represented a milestone in the development of my thought. Even though I had read The Gulag Archipelago in Manchester ten years ago, I was unaware that the Jews were over-represented in the crimes committed by Stalin’s willing executioners. Nor did I know that the Jews were over-represented too in the strenuously lobbying through more than a century to open the gates for massive, non-Aryan immigration into the United States: something far more devastating for the American soul than what the Muslims did on 11 September of 2001 (Tanstaafl’s appropiation of Auster’s First Law applies here, something that will be more evident in the next decades).

My awakening to the realities of the Jewish Question (JQ) was such that I am no longer on speaking terms with some conservative bloggers who are willfully blind to acknowledge that such JQ does indeed exist. The paradigm shift was so cataclysmic that in those February days I did not dare to tell the whole story of what was going on in my mind. Now that I have purchased some books and read what is perhaps the best on the JQ, Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique, I must confess a soliloquy I had in my private diaries. On my copy of Mein Kampf, on 27 February 2010 I wrote:

After the lightning bolt that pissed off Taksei so much, I realized that—oh irony of ironies!—Hitler was right about his “anti-Semitism” (though I still believe he was wrong about accepting the genocide of Jews in 1942). The irony is that in a very recent post [now removed from this blog] I say exactly the opposite, that anti-Semitism is wrong. Now I must settle the score with Hitler. Let’s see how much I can stand reading this book...
It was the same copy of Mein Kampf that I had started to read in 1996, when I was a staunch philo-Semite. In 1996 I was living in Houston and annotated that copy with many longhand footnotes about Hitler’s purported “paranoia” on the JQ (as I have said, most of my life I was unaware about what the Jews had done in Russia and in America). The “irony” I referred to above was my realization that, just as I had a lightning experience, young Adolf had experienced something quite similar before my grandma was born. Since in my second reading of Mein Kampf I no longer held that pondering around the JQ was by itself paranoia, the experience was like leafing through the book for the first time in my life. There’s a world of difference between reading it while one is sleeping in the Matrix and after one is violently unplugged from the Matrix. I don’t claim having read it all (it’s boring). But what struck me in my second try is what Arthur Koestler used to call “The angel of the library.” Right after the lightning that split my intellectual life in twain, the angel conducted me right to the page where young Adolf describes... his own lightning experience! Starting on page 55 of the translation by Ralph Manheim that I had acquired in Houston, Hitler wrote:
My views with regard to anti-Semitism thus succumbed to the passage of time, and this was my greatest transformation of all. It cost me the greatest inner soul struggles, and only after months of battle between my reason and my sentiments did my reason begin to emerge victorious. Two years later, my sentiment had followed my reason, and from then on became its most loyal guardian and sentinel.
Just compare it with the quotation of Mein Kampf I liked before the lighting struck me. It describes the mind of a teenage Adolf before the lighting struck him:
For the Jew was still characterized for me by nothing but his religion, and therefore, on grounds of human tolerance, I maintained my rejection of religious attacks in this case as in others. Consequently, the tone, particularly that of the Viennese anti-Semitic press, seemed to me unworthy of the cultural tradition of a great nation. I was oppressed by the memory of certain occurrences in the Middle Ages [pogroms], which I should not have liked to see repeated. (p. 52)
Last month Occidental Dissent published a short article on Hitler open for discussion. I was fascinated by the exchanges between Greg Johnson, the former editor of The Occidental Quarterly, and another nationalist. As I have done in my previous posts, I will not include ellipsis or most of the exchanges from other nationalists. The following debate exactly responds to what I had in mind when, back in February, I wrote that I needed to settle the scores with someone whom the politically correct world has turned into the archetype of evil. (Take note that, in one of his responses, Johnson included an article by Irmin that summarizes my current views, “Some Thoughts on Hitler” that I repost way below:)


Some responses to the article Open Thread — Adolf Hitler:

Jackson says: The continuing fetish of Hitler-love of some in the WN [white nationalist] movement is a huge impediment to any sort of racial solidarity today. How could you expect Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, French and all the other people’s of Europe, and their descendents, to “Sieg Heil” this beast? The sooner we leave him behind the better. It is most unfortunate that this otherwise interesting website is disgraced by his picture and a posting saluting him. Please let us be done with Hitler. We don’t need him.

Andrew says: 
I will repeat Jackson’s plea, “Please let us be done with Hitler. We don’t need him.” He is poison to our movement. Our founding fathers, who were committed White Nationalists, should be our guides to the awakening of the WN movement. They were superior to Hitler in almost every way.

Greg Johnson says: Hitler did not start the Second World War. He started a war with Poland, over German territory stolen at the end of the First World War. He started that war in exasperation, having exhausted diplomacy. 
The German-Polish war grew into a world war when the British declared war on Germany and others followed suit. Nothing compelled the British to make that decision. They had their reasons, mostly ignoble and spurious, but nothing compelled them. Their world position was safe; Hitler admired them and their empire. The world was big enough for the British Empire and a reunited Germany. But the British started a World War over a German-Polish border conflict, and tens of millions died, the British Empire collapsed, and half of Europe fell to Stalin. It is amazing that people still conduct discussions of a war that began in 1939 in terms of blatantly false propaganda clichés like “Hitler started the Second World War” and “Hitler wanted to conquer the world.”


Andrew says: Greg, With all due respect, Hitler must receive credit for starting the war. Britain and France had an alliance with Poland. Hitler knew this and attacked anyway. They should instead have let the invasion happen without response? Come on. His Ardennes gambit could have very well failed. If he truly loved Germany or his race, was another devastating war an acceptable risk? I would argue these were maniacal gambles, and it was completely irresponsible for Hitler to roll the dice with the fate of his supposedly beloved folk. 


Greg Johnson says: Britain allied herself with Poland, and stoked Polish intransigence, because they wanted to encourage a war. The elegant proof that the alliance with Poland was merely a pretext for the British to start a war with Germany is that Britain did not declare war on the USSR and Stalin, who also invaded Poland after the Germans had done the lion’s share of the work. And of course while Perfidious Albion was simulating moral outrage over German “aggression” (liberating Germans from foreign oppressors), they were rather less in a lather about Soviet aggression against Finland, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.


If the Germans had defeated the USSR, a vast, German-dominated, high-tech, racially unified blonde empire would have emerged stretching from the Rhine to the Urals. And a lot of us, I imagine, would prefer living there to what we have to endure today.


Daybreaker and the like: You can condemn Hitler till you are blue in the face, and that will still not alter your status as goyim slated for extinction. Do you really imagine that the only thing standing in our way is abominable Adolf? You remind me of the people who promote the spurious Ben Franklin quote to the effect that America would be perfect, were it not for the one small problem of the Jews, when the truth is that the system Ben Franklin helped create was systematically flawed, hence the rise of the Jews. These sorts of attitudes are appealing, because they spare us the need to reflect on broader, deeper, systemic problems that might implicate us as well.

Why do 99.99% of Whites in the post-war era reject explicit White Nationalism? Because they in no way want to be associated with the mass-murder carried out by the Nazis.
Do you really think that if we changed just one little thing—if Hitler had decided to stay a painter, for instance—that White Nationalism would be enjoying a good press today? Once whites allowed a Jewish take-over of the press, academia, etc., our days were numbered, no matter who became Chancellor of Germany in 1933.


Andrew says: Greg, The aftermath of World War 2 did see a massive shift in the Western public’s perception of Jews, from the widespread anti-Semitism of the 1930s to the widespread sympathy of the 1950s. While Jewish media is an important factor, the Holocaust storyline and Hitler’s swath of destruction are also very important contributors to that shift in public opinion. Without the Holocaust hype and Hitler’s horrors, White Nationalism would be in a much better position today.

Greg Johnson says: 
Andrew: That is a far cry from blaming Hitler for our problems. If Hitler had not existed, we would still be under attack. As long as we allow Jews to determine which leaders are positive and which are negative, all white nationalist leaders will be deemed negative except Jewish tools. The only “respectable” opposition is an ineffectual one. Today, that means one that is controlled by Jews or their tools.


“Some Thoughts on Hitler” by Irmin

1. Hitler as Multiracialist Propaganda


The argument advanced by some racial nationalists that any defense of Adolf Hitler, in light of the hostility and even revulsion that his name now evokes, risks alienating mainstream Whites is plausible on its surface and should receive a respectful hearing. But it is still on balance mistaken.

Although most nationalists in the United States and even in Germany do not consider themselves national socialists, multiracialists and anti-White Jewish advocacy groups call each and every one of us a “Nazi.” It is an undeniable fact that in our contemporary political climate any white nationalism, as recent events in the Balkans amply demonstrate, will be labeled Hitlerian and will summon, in breathless media presentations, “the specter of the Holocaust” and anguished fears that “it” might just happen again, if the goyim get too restless. That, after all, is the central lesson taught by the countless Holocaust Museums sprouting up, like noxious toadstools, throughout most of the West: that White racial consciousness is literally lethal and must therefore be actively combated, a lesson which we have now enshrined, in deference to Jewry, at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, a national memorial to our White wickedness.

We are thus obliged, like it or not, to live under Hitler’s shadow. Our enemies have ensured that any expression of White racial consciousness, however innocuous, will be officially pronounced hatefully Hitlerian and “Nazi,” whether we admire Hitler or despise him. It is therefore incumbent on us, as a simple matter of self-defense, to arrive at a balanced view of Hitler and the movement he founded.

Anyone who doubts all this should recall the abuse that Pat Buchanan received at the hands of the controlled media and the organized Jewish community during his campaigns for the Republican nomination. Buchanan is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a national socialist, nor even a conscious racialist. He is, instead, a traditional Christian conservative, with all the virtues and liabilities that entails. But he was persistently labeled a “Nazi” nevertheless. [After] his 1992 speech at the Republican National Convention, Jewish columnist Molly Ivins opined, “probably sounded better in the original German.” Her meaning was clear: She was identifying Buchanan as a “Nazi,” delegitimizing his nationalism and social conservatism with the most potent weapon in the Left’s rhetorical arsenal.

So as racial nationalists we can either manufacture false “anti-racist” credentials by claiming to hate Hitler just as much as Abe Foxman does, a subterfuge that I very much doubt will convince anyone, least of all Abe, or we can tell the truth.

The truth is that the maniacal Hitler of popular demonology is a World War II propaganda fiction, and the principal purpose of the fiction’s incessant repetition more than fifty years after the war is to stigmatize any nationalist movement, NS or otherwise. Hitler now represents not a specific historical figure and the political party he led, but nationalism of any variety, from timid anti-immigration conservatives to angry White-power skinheads. The System’s anti-Hitler orthodoxy, invoked almost daily, is in effect tacit propaganda for multiracialism and a potent device to keep all nationalists perpetually hiding in closets, too afraid of labels like “racist” and “Nazi” to openly say what we sincerely believe. We have, therefore, a real interest in demythologizing Hitler, and we have no hope of escaping our association with what he now represents. We can’t run away from Hitler, however much some of us want to.

2. Let’s Notice the Obvious

The crucial facts about World War II are uncomplicated and readily available in mainstream sources. NS Germany had limited war aims: the recovery of territory taken from Germany at Versailles, the acquisition of living space for the German people in the East, and the destruction of the Marxist Soviet Union, history’s most brutal regime. Insofar as the United States had any stake at all in the outcome of the war, it would have been to help Germany and her Axis allies, including thousands of Russian patriots, accomplish the latter. Absent the campaign conducted by the Western democracies to save Stalinism by defeating Hitler, the Soviet Union would have collapsed.

Since America had no national interests in the conflict in Europe, our government deliberately lied about German war aims in order to manufacture the perception that we did, claiming that Hitler had global territorial ambitions, a plan for “world domination.” Over fifty years later most Americans still accept the lies.

The predictable result of the Allied victory and the German defeat was Stalin’s occupation of half of Europe. A war that ostensibly began to restore Polish sovereignty ended with Poland, along with the rest of Eastern Europe, being handed over to the Communists. And in quite concrete terms no American would have died in Vietnam if Hitler had destroyed Soviet Communism, arguably the central objective of his political career; American soldiers fought in Europe so that their sons could die in Southeast Asia.

None of this should be the least controversial. It is a symptom of the effect of persistent propaganda that so many of us fail to notice the obvious.

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that multiracialism itself, along with our servile deference to Jewry, is founded on the mythical image of Hitler as evil incarnate, Satan’s secular counterpart in modern history. Remove the false, childishly simplistic Hitler myth, and a significant ideological justification for multiracialism would collapse. The simple question, “Were Hitler and NS Germany really as evil as everyone says?,” therefore has huge repercussions, and an entire machinery of propaganda—ranging from Hollywood films and “Holocaust education” in the public schools to off-hand comments in the controlled media (“better in the original German”)—has been designed to discourage anyone from even contemplating the obvious but heretical answer.

3. National Socialism

Hitler defined his own national socialism as a uniquely German movement:
The National Socialist doctrine, as I have always proclaimed, is not for export. It was conceived for the German people. (Hitler-Bormann Documents, Feb. 21, 1945)
In other words, German National Socialism arose at a specific time in a specific place under the pressure of a unique set of historical circumstances, none of which could ever be precisely replicated elsewhere. In particular, the autocratic Führer state, central to NS Germany, would never be acceptable to Americans; our republican political culture and belief in individual rights are, thankfully, far too strong. Hitler was a dictator and his government authoritarian; Americans prefer their political and civil liberties.

Which doesn’t mean that NS Germany was a police state. It had in fact fewer policemen per capita, and far fewer secret police, than either modern Germany or the United States, despite the misleading image most of us have of legions of sinister Gestapo agents kicking down doors in the middle of the night.

The basic principles of national socialism are, nevertheless, universal: that God (or Nature) has assigned each of us to a racial group and has endowed each group with distinct qualities; that a nation is not simply a geographical concept, a set of lines arbitrarily drawn on a map irrespective of the people living within them, but instead derives (or should derive) its political institutions and national objectives from the character of the people themselves; that a nation organized to preserve a race and develop its distinctive character is therefore “natural”; that the strength and social cohesion of a nation derives from its sense of a common identity, of which race is the most important determinant; that in addition to our individual rights we have larger social obligations, not only to the present generation of our nation but to its past and future generations as well; that the primary purpose of a nation is not economic, but the preservation and advancement of its people, economics being subordinate to the volkisch (racial/national) objectives that should be a nation’s core reason for existing.

“The [Nation-] State in itself,” Hitler wrote, “has nothing whatsoever to do with any definite economic concept or a definite economic development. It does not arise from a compact made between contracting parties, within a certain delimited territory, for the purpose of serving economic ends. The State is a community of living beings who have kindred physical and spiritual natures, organized for the purpose of assuring the conservation of their own kind and to help towards fulfilling those ends which Providence has assigned to that particular race or racial branch” (Mein Kampf, I, iv). [Image: NS propaganda poster: “The NSDAP Protects the Racial Community.”]

In the generic sense of the term national socialism is (arguably) not inconsistent with democratic institutions, despite Hitler’s own view of the matter; its true antonyms are multiracialism and capitalist, one-world globalism. Nor is national socialism inconsistent with an American “melting pot” view of ethnicity, provided that the various ethnic groups that comprise the nation are sufficiently similar that each can see a common identity and common destiny in the others—that is, insofar as they, despite their ethnic differences, are branches of the same race and can, therefore, be effectively acculturated to a common set of national ideals.

I consider Hitler less a model to be followed than an avalanche of propaganda we must dig ourselves out from under. Never in human history has a single man received such sustained vilification, the basic effect and purpose of which has been to inhibit Whites from thinking racially and from acting in their own racial self-interest, as all other racial/ethnic groups do. Learning the truth about Hitler is a liberating experience. By the truth I mean not an idealized counter-myth to the pervasive myth of Hitler as evil incarnate, but the man himself, faults and virtues, strengths and weaknesses. Once you’ve done it, once you’ve discovered the real Hitler beneath the lies and distortions that have buried his legacy, you’ll be permanently immunized against anti-White propaganda, because you will have seen through the best/worst the System has to offer.

__________________________

The above article by Irmin
was originally posted in Racial Nationalist Library.
It represents the food for thought I'd been looking for - Chechar

__________________________


That said, costume Nazi groups, uncritical Hitler-worship, debating the minutiae of the Second World War, etc. are easily parodied by the enemy and usually do not help our cause.

Andrew says: Greg [wrote]:
The argument advanced by some racial nationalists that any defense of Adolf Hitler... risks alienating mainstream Whites... is still on balance mistaken... It is an undeniable fact that in our contemporary political climate any white nationalism... will be labeled Hitlerian... We are thus obliged, like it or not, to live under Hitler’s shadow.
This line of reasoning is not logical. If White Nationalists will be labelled by opponents as Satanic, does that mean we need to find a way to defend and apologize for Satan and live under Satan’s shadow? Defending Hitler, Genghis Khan or Ivan the Terrible, or having anything whatsoever to do with those historical figures, is completely unnecessary. It is true that in the debate, WNs will be labelled with any handy disparaging epithet and compared to any negative stereotype that has the potential to smear. But in a debate, the best tactic is to completely reject those labels and comparisons.

American White Nationalism should have its roots in the writings and designs of the founding fathers. Benjamin Franklin wanted “lovely White” people to populate the nation, not the “tawny” ones. Jefferson wrote quite a bit about race realism, he and Madison wrote about the impossibility of Blacks living in the same government as Whites. Lincoln was a WN as well, and his successor Andrew Johnson talked about America as a “White Man’s Nation” as did most major public figures of the time. Truman’s quote from his diary about America being meant for the White Man is also useful. We have a vast arsenal of immigration law, government policy and writing by the greatest Americans in history that all defines, supports and defends the WN position. Hitler has absolutely nothing to do with American White Nationalism, and I would argue he should be rejected completely as a foreign leader of an enemy nation in an old war fought by our grandfathers.


Greg Johnson says: Andrew, what will you say when someone replies to your all-American version of White Nationalism: “But if Jefferson, Franklin, and the rest were racists, then they were just like Hitler!”? Evading the issue will not help.


Andrew says: While on this topic, Greg, a massive opportunity that lies before the WN movement right now is the Tea Party movement, which is almost all White, politically active, patriotic and angry, under continual verbal attack as “racists.”

Euro says: Whatever the merits or demerits of the Nazi regime this much is clear: it wasn’t any variation of the “respectable right” that put up any meaningful resistance to Leninist-Stalinist designs on Western Civilization. Far from it. Parliamentarism, Capitalism and various Christian ecclesiastical outfits were almost invariably on the Leninist-Stalinist side. This is the crux of the whole matter. That’s the point. Whatever failures the Nazi/Fascists are responsible for, without their enormous efforts we today would be utterly doomed. We should celebrate them for that.

Junghans says: Greg, you’ve tested the waters here with a very hot topic. I’ve refrained from entering this thread until now. No White person, and especially a WN, can escape the shadow of Hitler, and that should be obvious to any sentient person. This is an issue that will not go away, and will eventually have to be dealt with by Whites. In this vein, I think that the article by Irmin that you quoted in post #67 is basically balanced and explains the “Hitler ghost” dilemma about as well as anybody can. The destruction of nationalist Europe in 1945 was a severe blow to White ethnic interests, and a watershed event of disastrous proportions. We are all still stunned by the fratricide, and are trying to dig out of the moral and intellectual rubble. We wish it hadn’t happened, but it did.
Stormfront has a sub-forum on the Second World War that discusses these issues, and that’s where passions of the subject are regularly vented.


Greg Johnson says: 
Andrew writes:
If the opposition claims that the founders were racists, they grant WNs a significant victory. If Jefferson is a racist, the opposition grants that the Constitution and founding document of the U.S. (written largely by Jefferson) is a White Nationalist document for a WN nation. Most White Americans, or at least a very large number, regard the founders as intellectual and moral giants. If they are “racists” and thus associated with the WN movement, it greatly legitimizes us. It would be pretty hard to convince Whites that Benjamin Franklin, the kindhearted inventor and postman, and the other founders are “Hitlerites,” or evil.
Andrew, I don’t think that you are right about this. As long as the establishment has the power to demonize the founders as racists, and demonize racists as “like Hitler,” then people will stop thinking of the founders as intellectual and moral giants and start thinking of them as monsters. Indeed, that process has been underway for a long time, chipping away at their reputations.

Jared Taylor made the point in his essay in Race and the American Prospect that the creation of an anti-racist, multiculturalist America means the repudiation of the Founders, the constitution, and most of American history, and he is right. But as long as people are so cowed by charges of “racism” and “Nazism” that they are giving away the future of their country, their race, their progeny, what makes you think that they are going to rally to save their past from obliteration as well? “Racism” and “Nazism” are only verbal sticks to beat us with. If those sticks don’t work, they will just be replaced. The deep underlying problem is the squishiness at the core of Americans and whites in general that make us feel like we need to apologize for ourselves, our ancestors, etc.–apologize to our inferiors and enemies, I might add–and to no avail, because these people will never like us anyway.

“I’m not racist, but...”

You don’t need to complete the sentence, because everything you say is negated by communicating the need to apologize according to a moral code created by our enemies to destroy us. You are playing against the house, and you are going to lose in the long run, because they get to make the rules.

“I’m not a Nazi, but...”

Same problem. The cure is not merely to rehabilitate racism or Hitler (although those things would help some). The cure is to rehabilitate the white character, to get back to the sheer will to live, the self-assertiveness that characterizes every healthy animal.


Andrew says: Greg, You make a valid and insightful point that we cannot simply run away from certain figures because they are considered “racists.” It is also very true that the Left is busily critiquing the founders, and will attempt to make all pro-White symbols, historical figures and spokesmen radioactive through criticism and labelling them as “racists,” etc. However, there is a very important distinction here. Hitler’s legacy is indefensible for a White Nationalist. The Germans did liquidate millions, such as the Slav prisoners of war. Whatever the truth of the Holocaust, many Jews did die, and everyone has seen countless depictions of the horrible piles of bodies being bulldozed into pits. This is ground that we cannot defend, and no amount of pro-White media could rehabilitate Hitler. Even if Hitler was in fact a true hero, another Charles Martel, responsible for saving Western Civilization, he is irretrievably radioactive, his image is toxic death when attempting to persuade someone.

On the other hand, the founders were a “raging festival of awesome” if I may borrow a quote. They are the high ground, a thoroughly defensible fortress of ideas and imagery. In America Besieged! we talk about bulletproof George, surviving horses shot from beneath him, his hat shot off and bulletholes in his coat. Attacking him as a racist plays into our WN hands. His image is everywhere, sternly looking at us from the dollar bill, his name blazoned on streets and schools. It’s one thing to demonize Hitler, but quite another to brand the founders as evil. There is no horrible footage, but rather a vast literature about liberty and morality, as well as paintings and other imagery showing them in heroic poses. They are in some ways like our Greek gods, mythical beings we rightly revere. When the Left attacks them as racists, they offend the very people we want to persuade, patriotic traditional Americans. In spite of the Left’s influence, the ability to demonize the founders is substantially limited.
“Racism” and “Nazism” are only verbal sticks to beat us with. If those sticks don’t work, they will just be replaced. The deep underlying problem is the squishiness at the core of Americans and whites in general that make us feel like we need to apologize for ourselves, our ancestors, etc.

I agree that words such as “Nazi” and “Racist” are simply tools of intimidation, and it is imperative that we develop an immunity to such (this is discussed in America Besieged!, I hope I am making you curious enough to read it). The correct method to deal with smears is to reject them, not defend them. It helps us immensely to be standing on the shoulders of giants such as the founders, where we are in a very strong ideological position that is very attractive to other Whites. That said, you make a strong point that we must hold our ground with the founders, we cannot retreat from them when they are assaulted as slave-owners, racists and Indian-annihilators. The difference is that the founders, who are now legends, can be defended (as opposed to Adolf, who has become the personification of evil incarnate). The fact of the matter is that Adolf really has nothing to do with America or the WN movement here, there is no convincing connection that can be made between men like Franklin and Hitler that is persuasive for traditional Whites.
The cure is not merely to rehabilitate racism or Hitler (although those things would help some). The cure is to rehabilitate the white character, to get back to the sheer will to live, the self-assertiveness that characterizes every healthy animal.
A big part of winning the debate is to point out that every ethnic group has ethnic interests, and that it is absolutely moral and right to protect and assert those interests. I do not think we can rehabilitate racism or Hitler, or that it would be productive to even try. Instead, we reframe the debate, pointing out that it’s all about ethnocentrism, ethnic interests and ethnic conflict, which is completely normal and universal, with deep roots in our human brains and behavior patterns. Ethnic conflict is inevitable, and ethnic separation is the only reasonable solution (of course this is all discussed in America Besieged!).


Svigor says: Whites Unite [wrote]:
Why do 99.99% of Whites in the post-war era reject explicit White Nationalism? Because they in no way want to be associated with the mass-murder carried out by the Nazis. As long as you persist in Hitler admiring, you will be rejected by the vast majority of your own people—not because of “Jewish propaganda,” but because the vast majority of our people embrace universalistic concepts of right and wrong, as they have since the days of the Stoics and especially since the advent of Christianity.
That’s horseshit. Most whites, like most people, are sheep. The bleat how they’re told. Nowadays that means how their media-government-academic complex tell them to. It has nothing to do with a considered, thoughtful opinion on anything for the sheep.

- end of excerpts from the Occidental Dissent exchange -


My present take on the subject is that because the U.K. and the U.S. literally sided with Stalin to crush Germany (photo), whites are now literally threatened with extinction. If unlike Hitler and the Nazis—cf. the NS propaganda poster above—we persist to ignore the Talmudic admonition that “the best of the goyim must be destroyed,” we’ll go extinct. I believe that Johnson was right way above when he said that the system that the mythical founders helped to create was systematically flawed, hence the rise of the Jews. Read this trilogy to see what do I mean.

I know, I know... This does not justify the atrocities committed by the Germans with the Polish Slavs, the people of Belarus and the Jews in the heat of the Second World War. But I must end this entry paraphrasing Nietzsche: “He who fights monsters —‘the best of the non-Jews must be destroyed...’— should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”

Sunday, May 09, 2010

The Culture of Critique’s preface (10 of 10)



“The Jewish problem is one of the greatest problems in the world, and no man, be he writer, politician or diplomatist, can be considered mature until he has striven to face it squarely on its merits.”

…......................—Henry Wickham Steed



Here I present the tenth part of Prof. MacDonald’s 2002 Preface to The Culture of Critique. The inclusion of images is entirely my own initiative. No images appear in the printed text of MacDonald’s Preface. For the Contents Page and my introduction, click here.


Conclusion

CofC is really an attempt to understand the 20th century as a Jewish century—a century in which Jews and Jewish organizations were deeply involved in all the pivotal events. From the Jewish viewpoint it has been a period of great progress, though punctuated by one of its darkest tragedies. In the late 19th century the great bulk of the Jewish population lived in Eastern Europe, with many Jews mired in poverty and all surrounded by hostile populations and unsympathetic governments. A century later, Israel is firmly established in the Middle East, and Jews have become the wealthiest and most powerful group in the United States and have achieved elite status in other Western countries. The critical Jewish role in radical leftism has been sanitized, while Jewish victimization by the Nazis has achieved the status of a moral touchstone and is a prime weapon in the push for large-scale non-European immigration, multi-culturalism and advancing other Jewish causes. Opponents have been relegated to the fringe of intellectual and political discourse and there are powerful movements afoot that would silence them entirely.

The profound idealization, the missionary zeal, and the moral fervor that surround the veneration of figures like Celan, Kafka, Adorno, and Freud characterize all of the Jewish intellectual movements discussed in CofC (see Ch. 6 for a summary). That these figures are now avidly embraced by the vast majority of non-Jewish intellectuals as well shows that the Western intellectual world has become Judaized—that Jewish attitudes and interests, Jewish likes and dislikes, now constitute the culture of the West, internalized by Jews and non-Jews alike. The Judaization of the West is nowhere more obvious than in the veneration of the Holocaust as the central moral icon of the entire civilization. These developments constitute a profound transformation from the tradition of critical and scientific individualism that had formed the Western tradition since the Enlightenment. More importantly, because of the deep-seated Jewish hostility toward traditional Western culture, the Judaization of the West means that the peoples who created the culture and traditions of the West have been made to feel deeply ashamed of their own history—surely the prelude to their demise as a culture and as a people.


[Free yourself from The Matrix]

The present Judaized cultural imperium in the West is maintained by a pervasive thought control propagated by the mass media and extending to self-censorship by academics, politicians, and others well aware of the dire personal and professional consequences of crossing the boundaries of acceptable thought and speech about Jews and Jewish issues. It is maintained by zealously promulgated, self-serving, and essentially false theories of the nature and history of Judaism and the nature and causes of anti-Semitism.

None of this should be surprising. Jewish populations have always had enormous effects on the societies where they reside because of two qualities that are central to Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy: High intelligence (including the usefulness of intelligence in attaining wealth) and the ability to cooperate in highly organized, cohesive groups (MacDonald 1994). This has led repeatedly to Jews becoming an elite and powerful group in societies where they reside in sufficient numbers—as much in the 20th-century United States and the Soviet Union as in 15th-century Spain or Alexandria in the ancient world. History often repeats itself after all. Indeed, recent data indicate that Jewish per capita income in the United States is almost double that of non-Jews, a bigger difference than the black-white income gap. Although Jews make up less than 3 percent of the population, they constitute more than a quarter of the people on the Forbes magazine list of the richest four hundred Americans. A remarkable 87 percent of college-age Jews are currently enrolled in institutions of higher education, as compared with 40 percent for the population as a whole (Thernstrom & Thernstrom 1997). Jews are indeed an elite group in American society (see also Chapter 8).

My perception is that the Jewish community in the U.S. is moving aggressively ahead, ignoring the huge disruptions Jewish organizations have caused in the West (now mainly via successful advocacy of massive non-European immigration) and in the Islamic world (via the treatment of Palestinians by Israel). Whatever the justification for such beliefs, U.S. support for Israel is by all accounts an emotionally compelling issue in the Arab world. A true test of Jewish power in the United States will be whether support for Israel is maintained even in the face of the enormous costs that have already been paid by the U.S. in terms of loss of life, economic disruption, hatred and distrust throughout the Muslim world, and loss of civil liberties at home. As of this writing, while Jewish organizations are bracing for a backlash against Jews in the U.S. and while there is considerable concern among Jews about the Bush Administration’s pressure on Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians in order to placate the Muslim world (e.g., Rosenblatt 2001), all signs point to no basic changes in the political culture of the United States vis-à-vis Israel as a result of the events of 9-11-01.


_________________

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Saturday, May 08, 2010

The Culture of Critique’s preface (9 of 10)



“The Jewish problem is one of the greatest problems in the world, and no man, be he writer, politician or diplomatist, can be considered mature until he has striven to face it squarely on its merits.”

…......................—Henry Wickham Steed



Here I present the ninth part of Prof. MacDonald’s 2002 Preface to The Culture of Critique. The inclusion of images is entirely my own initiative. No images appear in the printed text of MacDonald’s Preface. For the Contents Page and my introduction, click here.


The Question of Bias

I have several times been called an “anti-Semite” for the tone of some of my writings, both in CofC and my comments on various Internet discussion lists. To be perfectly frank, I did not have a general animus for organized Jewry when I got into this project. I was a sort of ex-radical turned moderate Republican fan of George Will. Before even looking at Judaism I applied the same evolutionary perspective to the ancient Spartans and then to the imposition of monogamy by the Catholic Church during the middle ages (see MacDonald 1988a, 1995b). There are quite a few statements in my books that attempt to soften the tone and deflect charges of anti-Jewish bias. The first page of my first book on Judaism, A People that Shall Dwell Alone (MacDonald 1994), clearly states that the traits I ascribe to Judaism (self-interest, ethnocentrism, and competition for resources and reproductive success) are by no means restricted to Jews. I also write about the extraordinary Jewish IQ and about Jewish accomplishments (e.g., Nobel prizes) in that book. In the second book, Separation and Its Discontents (MacDonald 1998a), I discuss the tendency for anti-Semites to exaggerate their complaints, to develop fantastic and unverifiable theories of Jewish behavior, to exaggerate the extent of Jewish cohesion and unanimity, to claim that all Jews share stereotypically Jewish traits or attitudes, especially in cases where in fact Jews are over-represented among people having certain attitudes (e.g., political radicalism during most of the 20th century). And I describe the tendency of some anti-Semites to develop grand conspiracy theories in which all historical events of major or imagined importance, from the French Revolution to the Tri-lateral Commission are linked together in one grand plot and blamed on the Jews. All of this is hardly surprising on the basis of what we know about the psychology of ethnic conflict. But that doesn’t detract in the least from supposing that real conflicts of interest are at the heart of all of the important historical examples of anti-Semitism. Most of this is in the first chapter of Separation and Its Discontents—front and center as it were, just as my other disclaimers are in the first chapter of A People that Shall Dwell Alone.

It must be kept in mind that group evolutionary strategies are not benign, at least in general and especially in the case of Judaism, which has often been very powerful and has had such extraordinary effects on the history of the West. I think there is a noticeable shift in my tone from the first book to the third simply because (I’d like to think) I knew a lot more and had read a lot more. People often say after reading the first book that they think I really admire Jews, but they are unlikely to say that about the last two and especially about CofC. That is because by the time I wrote CofC I had changed greatly from the person who wrote the first book. The first book is really only a documentation of theoretically interesting aspects of group evolutionary strategies using Judaism as a case study (how Jews solved the free-rider problem, how they managed to erect and enforce barriers between themselves and other peoples, the genetic cohesion of Judaism, how some groups of Jews came to have such high IQ’s, how Judaism developed in antiquity). Resource competition and other conflicts of interest with other groups are more or less an afterthought, but these issues move to the foreground in Separation and Its Discontents, and in CofC I look exclusively at the 20th century in the West. Jews have indeed made positive contributions to Western culture in the last 200 years. But whatever one might think are the unique and irreplaceable Jewish contributions to the post-Enlightenment world, it is naïve to suppose they were intended for the purpose of benefiting humanity solely or even primarily. In any case I am hard pressed to think of any area of modern Western government and social organization (certainly) and business, science, and technology (very probably) that would not have developed without Jewish input, although in some cases perhaps not quite as quickly. In general, positive impacts of Jews have been quantitative rather than qualitative. They have accelerated some developments, for example in finance and some areas of science, rather than made them possible.

On the other hand, I am persuaded that Jews have also had some important negative influences. I am morally certain that Jewish involvement in the radical left in the early to middle part of the last century was a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for many of the horrific events in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. (About this, of course, one can disagree. I am simply saying that I find the evidence compelling.) But the main point is that I came to see Jewish groups as competitors with the European majority of the U.S., as powerful facilitators of the enormous changes that have been unleashed in this country, particularly via the successful advocacy of massive non-European immigration into the U.S. I found that I was being transformed in this process from a semi-conservative academic who had little or no identification with his own people into an ethnically conscious person—exactly as predicted by the theory of social identity processes that forms the basis of my theory of anti-Semitism (see MacDonald 1998a). In fact, if one wants to date when I dared cross the line into what some see as proof that I am an “anti-Semite,” the best guess would probably be when I started reading on the involvement of all the powerful Jewish organizations in advocating massive non-European immigration. My awareness began with my reading a short section in a standard history of American Jews well after the first book was published. The other influences that I attributed to Jewish activities were either benign (psychoanalysis?) or reversible—even radical leftism, so they didn’t much bother me. I could perhaps even ignore the towering hypocrisy of Jewish ethnocentrism coinciding as it does with Jewish activism against the ethnocentrism of non-Jewish Europeans. But the long-term effects of immigration will be essentially irreversible barring some enormous cataclysm.

I started to realize that my interests are quite different from prototypical Jewish interests. There need to be legitimate ways of talking about people who oppose policies recommended by the various Jewish establishments without simply being tarred as “anti-Semites”. Immigration is only one example where there are legitimate conflicts of interest. As I write this (November, 2001), we are bogged down in a war with no realizable endgame largely because of influence of the Jewish community over one area of our foreign policy and because of how effectively any mention of the role of Israel in creating friction between the U.S. and the Arab world—indeed the entire Muslim world—is muzzled simply by the cry of anti-Semitism. And at home we have entered into an incalculably dangerous experiment in creating a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society in which the intellectual elite has developed the idea that the formerly dominant European majority has a moral obligation to allow itself to be eclipsed demographically and culturally—the result, at least at its inception and to a considerable degree thereafter, of the influence of Jewish interest groups on immigration policy and the influence of Jewish intellectual movements on our intellectual and cultural life generally. As noted above, the rise of Jewish power and the disestablishment of the specifically European nature of the U.S. are the real topics of CofC.

I agree that there is bias in the social sciences and I certainly don’t exempt myself from this tendency. It is perhaps true that by the time I finished CofC I should have stated my attitudes in the first chapter. Instead, they are placed in the last chapter of CofC—rather forthrightly I think. In a sense putting them at the end was appropriate because my attitudes about Jewish issues marked a cumulative, gradual change from a very different world view.

It is annoying that such disclaimers rarely appear in writing by strongly identified Jews even when they see their work as advancing Jewish interests. A major theme of the CofC is that Jewish social scientists with a strong Jewish identity have seen their work as advancing Jewish interests. It is always amazing to me that media figures like the Kristols and Podhoretzes and foreign policy experts like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle do not feel an obligation to precede their remarks on issues affected by their solicitude for Israel by saying, “you should be wary of what I say because I have a vested ethnic interest in advancing the interests of Israel.” But the same thing goes for vast areas of anthropology (the Boasian school and racial differences research), history (e.g., obviously apologetic accounts of the history and causes of anti-Semitism or the role of Jews in the establishment of Bolshevism), psychology (the Frankfurt School, psychoanalysis), and contemporary issues (immigration, church-state relations). The point of CofC that really galls people is the idea that we should simply acknowledge this bias in (some) Jewish researchers as we do in others. There are a great many books on how Darwin and Galton were influenced by the general atmosphere of Victorian England, but writing of a Jewish bias immediately results in charges of “anti-Semitism.”

But the deeper point is that, whatever my motivations and biases, I would like to suppose that my work on Judaism at least meets the criteria of good social science, even if I have come to the point of seeing my subjects in a less than flattering light. In the end, does it really matter if my motivation at this point is less than pristine? Isn’t the only question whether I am right?

_________________

The Bibliography will appear in the next entry

The Culture of Critique’s preface (8 of 10)



“The Jewish problem is one of the greatest problems in the world, and no man, be he writer, politician or diplomatist, can be considered mature until he has striven to face it squarely on its merits.”

…......................—Henry Wickham Steed



Here I present the eighth part of Prof. MacDonald’s 2002 Preface to The Culture of Critique. The inclusion of images is entirely my own initiative. No images appear in the printed text of MacDonald’s Preface. For the Contents Page and my introduction, click here.


Jewish Organizations and Censorship of The Internet

In CofC (Ch. 8) I wrote, “one may expect that as ethnic conflict continues to escalate in the United States, increasingly desperate attempts will be made to prop up the ideology of multiculturalism... with the erection of police state controls on nonconforming thought and behavior.” As noted above, there has been a shift from “the culture of critique” to what one might term “the culture of the Holocaust” as Jews have moved from outsiders to the consummate insiders in American life. Coinciding with their status as an established elite, Jewish organizations are now in the forefront of movements to censor thought crimes.(40)

The Internet is a major gap in control of the major media, but Jewish organizations have taken the lead in attempting to censor the Internet. The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) distributes a compact disc titled “Digital Hate 2001” that lists over 3000 “hate sites on the Internet.” Both the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the ADL have attempted to pressure Internet service providers (ISP’s) like AOL and popular websites like Yahoo into restricting subscriber access to disapproved websites. Recently Yahoo removed 39 Internet clubs originally identified as “hate sites” by the SWC.(41) Internet auction sites have been subjected to protests for selling Nazi memorabilia.(42) Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com have come under fire for selling Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The ADL also published a report, Poisoning the Web: Hatred Online, and has urged the U.S. Congress to initiate a “comprehensive study of the magnitude and impact of hate on the Internet.”(43)

Online services in the U.S. are also under pressure from foreign governments, including France, Germany, Austria, and Canada, where there are no constitutional guarantees of free speech. For example, a judge in France ruled that Yahoo was violating French law by delivering Nazi memorabilia to people in France via the company’s online auctions, even though the service is based in the United States. Yahoo was acting illegally, the judge said, even though the company has created a separate French site that, unlike the broader Yahoo service, follows French law. The company was ordered to use filtering technology to block politically sensitive material from appearing on computers in France or face fines equivalent to $13,000 a day. In Germany, a court found that German law applies even to foreigners who post content on the Web in other countries—so long as that content can be accessed by people inside Germany. In this case, the court ruled that an Australian citizen who posted Holocaust revisionist material on his Australian website could be jailed in Germany. Theoretically it would be possible for Germany to demand that this person be extradited from Australia so that he could stand trial for his crime.(44)

Jewish organizations have been strong advocates of laws in European countries that criminalize the distribution of anti-Jewish material. For example, the ADL pressured the German government to arrest a U.S. citizen who distributed anti-Jewish materials. Gary Lauck was arrested in Denmark and extradited to Germany on the warrant of a Hamburg prosecutor. He was sentenced to four years in jail, served his sentence, and was deported.(45)

This sort of government-imposed censorship is effective in countries like France and Germany, but is not likely to succeed in the United States with its strong tradition of constitutionally protected free speech. As a result, the major focus of the Jewish effort to censor the Internet in the United States has been to pressure private companies like AOL and Yahoo to use software that blocks access to sites that are disapproved by Jewish organizations. The ADL developed voluntary filter software (ADL HateFilter) that allows users to screen out certain websites. However, while AOL—the largest ISP by far—has proved to be compliant in setting standards in line with ADL guidelines, the ADL notes that other ISP’s, such as Earthlink, have not cooperated with the ADL, and independent web hosting sites have sprung up to serve websites rejected by AOL.(46)

The ADL and the SWC have an uphill road because the Internet has long been touted as a haven for free speech by the high-tech community. One senses a certain frustration in the conclusion of a recent ADL report on the Internet:
Combating online extremism presents enormous technological and legal difficulties... Even if it were electronically feasible to keep sites off the Internet, the international nature of the medium makes legal regulation virtually impossible. And in the United States, the First Amendment guarantees the right of freedom of speech regardless of what form that speech takes. As a result, governments, corporations and people of goodwill continue to look for alternative ways to address the problem.(47)

[Note the ADL logo on the jacket's lapel]

Clearly Jewish organizations are making every effort to censor anti-Jewish writing on the Internet. They are far from reaching their goal of removing anti-Jewish material from the Internet, but in the long run the very high political stakes involved ensure that great effort will be expended. I suspect that in the U.S., if pressuring existing ISP’s by organizations like the ADL and the SWC fails, these companies may become targets of buyouts by Jewish-owned media companies who will then quietly remove access to anti-Jewish websites. AOL has just recently merged with Time Warner, a Jewish-controlled media company, and it had already merged with Compuserve, a large, nationwide ISP. As indicated above, AOL-Time Warner has complied with pressures exerted by Jewish activist organizations to restrict expressions of political opinion on the Internet.

I suppose that the only option for prohibited websites will be to develop their own Internet service providers. These providers—perhaps subsidized or relatively expensive—would then fill the niche of serving people who are already committed to ethnic activism among non-Jewish Europeans and other forms of politically incorrect expression. The situation would be similar to the current situation in the broadcast and print media. All of the mainstream media are effectively censored, but small publications that essentially preach to the converted can exist if not flourish.

But such publications reach a miniscule percentage of the population. They are basically ignored by the mainstream media, and they mainly preach to the choir. The same will likely happen to the Internet: The sites will still be there, but they will be out of sight and out of mind for the vast majority of Internet users. The effective censorship of the Internet by large corporations does not violate the First Amendment because the government is not involved and any policy can be justified as a business decision not to offend existing or potential customers.

_________________

NOTES [the Bibliography will appear in the 10th entry]

40. Jewish organizations have also been strong advocates of “hate crime” legislation. For example, in 1997 the ADL published Hate Crimes: ADL Blueprint for Action, which provides recommendations on prevention and response strategies to crimes of ethnic violence, such as penalty enhancement laws, training for law enforcement and the military, security for community institutions, and community anti-bias awareness initiatives. In June 2001 the ADL announced a program designed to assist law enforcement in the battle against “extremists and hate groups.” A major component of the Law Enforcement Initiative is the development of specialized hate crime, extremism, and anti-bias curricula for training programs designed for law enforcement.

41. SWC Press Information, July 15, 1999; www.wiesenthal.com.

42. E.g., SWC Press Information, November 29, 1999; January 26, 2001; www.wiesenthal.com.

43. ADL Press Release, September, 14, 1999; www.adl.org.

44. AFP Worldwide News Agency, April 4, 2001; www.afp.com.

[ADL organizations in the U.S.]

45 . ADL Press Release, August 22, 1996; www.adl.org.

46. C. Wolf. Racists, Bigots and the Law on the Internet. www.adl.org.

47. C. Wolf. Racists, Bigots and the Law on the Internet. www.adl.org.

The Culture of Critique’s preface (7 of 10)



“The Jewish problem is one of the greatest problems in the world, and no man, be he writer, politician or diplomatist, can be considered mature until he has striven to face it squarely on its merits.”

…......................—Henry Wickham Steed



Here I present the seventh part of Prof. MacDonald’s 2002 Preface to The Culture of Critique. The inclusion of images is entirely my own initiative. No images appear in the printed text of MacDonald’s Preface. For the Contents Page and my introduction, click here.


Jews and the Media: Shaping “Ways of Seeing”

I noted above that Jewish movements opposing European domination of the U.S. focused on three critical areas of power: The academic world of information in the social sciences and humanities, the political world where public policy on immigration and other ethnic issues are decided, and the mass media where “ways of seeing” are presented to the public. CofC focused on the first two of these sources of power, but little attention was given to the mass media except where it served to promote Jewish intellectual or political movements, as in the case of psychoanalysis. This lack of attention to the cultural influence of the mass media is a major gap. The following represents only a partial and preliminary discussion.

By all accounts, ethnic Jews have a powerful influence in the American media—far larger than any other identifiable group. The extent of Jewish ownership and influence on the popular media in the United States is remarkable given the relatively small proportion of the population that is Jewish.(28) In a survey performed in the 1980s, 60 percent of a representative sample of the movie elite were of Jewish background (Powers et al. 1996, 79n13). Michael Medved (1996, 37) notes that “it makes no sense at all to try to deny the reality of Jewish power and prominence in popular culture. Any list of the most influential production executives at each of the major movie studios will produce a heavy majority of recognizably Jewish names. This prominent Jewish role is obvious to anyone who follows news reports from Tinsel Town or even bothers to read the credits on major movies or television shows.”

Media ownership is always in flux, but the following is a reasonably accurate portrait of current media ownership in the United States by ethnic Jews:

The largest media company in the world was recently formed by the merger of America On Line and Time Warner. Gerald M. Levin, formerly the head of Time Warner, is the Chief Executive Officer of the new corporation. AOL-Time Warner has holdings in television (e.g., Home Box Office, CNN, Turner Broadcasting), music (Warner Music), movies (Warner Brothers Studio, Castle Rock Entertainment, and New Line Cinema), and publishing (Time, Sports Illustrated, People, Fortune).

The second largest media company is the Walt Disney Company, headed by Michael Eisner. Disney has holdings in movies (Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group, under Walt Disney Studios, includes Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, Caravan Pictures, Miramax Films); television (Capital Cities/ABC [owner of the ABC television network], Walt Disney Television, Touchstone Television, Buena Vista Television, ESPN, Lifetime, A&E Television networks) and cable networks with more than 100 million subscribers; radio (ABC Radio Network with over 3,400 affiliates and ownership of 26 stations in major cities); publishing (seven daily newspapers, Fairchild Publications [Women’s Wear Daily], and the Diversified Publishing Group).

The third largest media company is Viacom, Inc., headed by Sumner Redstone, who is also Jewish. Viacom has holdings in movies (Paramount Pictures); broadcasting (the CBS TV network; MTV [a particular focus of criticism by cultural conservatives], VH-1, Nickelodeon, Showtime, the National Network, Black Entertainment Television, 13 television stations; programming for the three television networks); publishing (Simon & Schuster, Scribner, The Free Press, and Pocket Books), video rentals (Blockbuster); it is also involved in satellite broadcasting, theme parks, and video games.

Another major media player is Edgar Bronfman, Jr., the son of Edgar Bronfman, Sr., president of the World Jewish Congress and heir to the Seagram distillery fortune. Until its merger with Vivendi, a French Company, in December 2000, Bronfman headed Universal Studios, a major movie production company, and the Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music company (including Polygram, Interscope Records, Island/Def Jam, Motown, Geffen/DGC Records). After the merger, Bronfman became the Executive Vice-Chairman of the new company, Vivendi Universal, and the Bronfman family and related entities became the largest shareholders in the company.(29) Edgar Bronfman, Sr. is on the Board of Directors of the new company.

Other major television companies owned by Jews include New World Entertainment (owned by Ronald Perelman who also owns Revlon cosmetics), and DreamWorks SKG (owned by film director Steven Spielberg, former Disney Pictures chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, and recording industry mogul David Geffen). DreamWorks SKG produces movies, animated films, television programs, and recorded music. Spielberg is also a Jewish ethnic activist. After making Schindler’s List, Spielberg established Survivors of the Shoah Foundation with the aid of a grant from the U.S. Congress. He also helped fund Professor Deborah Lipstadt’s defense against a libel suit brought by British military historian and Holocaust revisionist David Irving.

In the world of print media, the Newhouse media empire owns 26 daily newspapers, including several large and important ones, such as the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Newark Star-Ledger, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune; Newhouse Broadcasting, consisting of 12 television broadcasting stations and 87 cable-TV systems, including some of the country’s largest cable networks; the Sunday supplement Parade, with a circulation of more than 22 million copies per week; some two dozen major magazines, including the New Yorker, Vogue, Mademoiselle, Glamour, Vanity Fair, Bride’s, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, Self, House & Garden, and all the other magazines of the wholly owned Conde Nast group.

The newsmagazine, U.S. News & World Report, with a weekly circulation of 2.3 million, is owned and published by Mortimer B. Zuckerman. Zuckerman also owns New York’s tabloid newspaper, the Daily News, the sixth-largest paper in the country, and is the former owner of the Atlantic Monthly. Zuckerman is a Jewish ethnic activist. Recently he was named head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, an umbrella organization for major Jewish organizations in the U.S.(30) Zuckerman’s column in U.S. News and World Report regularly defends Israel and has helped to rejuvenate the America-Israeli Friendship League, of which he is president.(31)

Another Jewish activist with a prominent position in the U.S. media is Martin Peretz, owner of The New Republic (TNR) since 1974. Throughout his career Peretz has been devoted to Jewish causes, particularly Israel. During the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, he told Henry Kissinger that his “dovishness stopped at the delicatessen door,” and many among his staff feared that all issues would be decided on the basis of what was “good for the Jews” (Alterman 1992, 185, 186). Indeed, one editor was instructed to obtain material from the Israeli embassy for use in TNR editorials. “It is not enough to say that TNR’s owner is merely obsessed with Israel; he says so himself. But more importantly, Peretz is obsessed with Israel’s critics, Israel’s would-be critics, and people who never heard of Israel, but might one day know someone who might someday become a critic” (Alterman 1992, 195).

The Wall Street Journal is the largest-circulation daily newspaper in the U.S. It is owned by Dow Jones & Company, Inc., a New York corporation that also publishes 24 other daily newspapers and the weekly financial paper Barron’s. The chairman and CEO of Dow Jones is Peter R. Kann. Kann also holds the posts of chairman and publisher of the Wall Street Journal.

The Sulzberger family owns the New York Times Co., which owns 33 other newspapers, including the Boston Globe. It also owns twelve magazines (including McCall’s and Family Circle, each with a circulation of more than 5 million), seven radio and TV broadcasting stations; a cable-TV system; and three book publishing companies. The New York Times News Service transmits news stories, features, and photographs from the New York Times by wire to 506 other newspapers, news agencies, and magazines.

Jewish ownership of the New York Times is particularly interesting because it has been the most influential newspaper in the U.S. since the start of the 20th century. As noted in a recent book on the Sulzberger family (Tifft & Jones 1999), even at that time, there were several Jewish-owned newspapers, including the New York World (controlled by Joseph Pulitzer), the Chicago Times-Herald and Evening Post (controlled by H. H. Kohlsaat), and the New York Post (controlled by the family of Jacob Schiff). In 1896 Adolph Ochs purchased the New York Times with the critical backing of several Jewish businessmen, including Isidor Straus (co-owner of Macy’s department stores) and Jacob Schiff (a successful investment banker who was also a Jewish ethnic activist). “Schiff and other prominent Jews like... Straus had made it clear they wanted Adolph to succeed because they believed he ‘could be of great service to the Jews generally’” (Tifft & Jones 1999, 37-38). Ochs’s father-in-law was the Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the founder of Reform Judaism in the United States.

There are some exceptions to this pattern of media ownership, but even in such cases ethnic Jews have a major managerial role.(32) For example, Rupert’s News Corporation owns Fox Television Network, 20th Century Fox Films, Fox 2000, and the New York Post. However, Peter Chernin is president and CEO of Fox Group, which includes all of News Corporation’s film, television, and publishing operations in the United States. Murdoch is deeply philosemitic and deeply committed to Israel, at least partly from a close relationship he developed early in his career with Leonard Goldenson, who founded the American Broadcasting Company. (Goldenson was a major figure in New York’s Jewish establishment and an outspoken supporter of Israel.) Murdoch’s publications have taken a strongly pro-Israel line, including The Weekly Standard, the premier neo-conservative magazine, edited by William Kristol.
Murdoch... as publisher and editor-in-chief of the New York Post, had a large Jewish constituency, as he did to a lesser degree with New York magazine and The Village Voice. Not only had the pre-Murdoch Post readership been heavily Jewish, so, too, were the present Post advertisers. Most of Murdoch’s closest friends and business advisers were wealthy, influential New York Jews intensely active in pro-Israel causes. And he himself still retained a strong independent sympathy for Israel, a personal identification with the Jewish state that went back to his Oxford days. (Kiernan 1986, 261)
Murdoch also developed close relationships with several other prominent Jewish figures in the New York establishment, including attorney Howard Squadron, who was president of the AJCongress and head of the Council of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, and investment banker Stanley Schuman.

Another exception is NBC which is owned by General Electric. However, the President of NBC is Andrew Lack and the President of NBC News is Neal Shapiro, both of whom are Jewish. In addition, the Bertelsmann publishing group is a Germany-based company that is the largest publisher of trade books in the world and also owns magazines, newspapers, and music. Most of Bertelsmann’s influence is outside the United States, although it recently purchased the Random House Publishing Company.

Even granting the exceptions, it is clear that Jews enjoy a very powerful position in U.S. media, a position that is far more powerful than any other racial/ethnic group. The phenomenal concentration of media power in Jewish hands becomes all the more extraordinary when one notes that Jews constitute approximately 2.5% of the U.S. population. If the Jewish percentage of the American media elite is estimated at 59% (Lichter et al. 1983, 55)—probably an underestimate at the present time, the degree of disproportionate representation may be calculated as greater than 2000%. The likelihood that such an extraordinary disparity could arise by chance is virtually nil. Ben Stein, noting that about 60% of the top positions in Hollywood are held by Jews, says “Do Jews run Hollywood? You bet they do—and what of it?”(33) Does Jewish ownership and control of the media have any effect on the product? Here I attempt to show that the attitudes and opinions favored by the media are those generally held by the wider Jewish community, and that the media tends to provide positive images of Jews and negative images of traditional American and Christian culture.

As many academics have pointed out, the media have become more and more important in creating culture (e.g., Powers et al. 1996, 2). Before the 20th century, the main creators of culture were the religious, military, and business institutions. In the course of the 20th century these institutions became less important while the media have increased in importance (for an account of this transformation in the military, see Bendersky 2000). And there is little doubt that the media attempt to shape the attitudes and opinions of the audience (Powers et al. 1996, 2-3). Part of the continuing culture of critique is that the media elite tend to be very critical of Western culture. Western civilization is portrayed as a failing, dying culture, but at worst it is presented as sick and evil compared to other cultures (Powers et al. 1996, 211). These views were common in Hollywood long before the cultural revolution of the 1960s, but they were not often expressed in the media because of the influence of non-Jewish cultural conservatives.

Perhaps the most important issue Jews and Jewish organizations have championed is cultural pluralism—the idea that the United States ought not to be ethnically and culturally homogeneous. As described in CofC, Jewish organizations and Jewish intellectual movements have championed cultural pluralism in many ways, especially as powerful and effective advocates of an open immigration policy. The media have supported this perspective by portraying cultural pluralism almost exclusively in positive terms—that cultural pluralism is easily achieved and is morally superior to a homogeneous Christian culture made up mainly of white non-Jews. Characters who oppose cultural pluralism are portrayed as stupid and bigoted (Lichter et al. 1994, 251), the classic being the Archie Bunker character in Norman Lear’s All in the Family television series. Departures from racial and ethnic harmony are portrayed as entirely the result of white racism (Powers et al. 1996, 173).

Since Jews have a decisive influence on television and movies, it is not surprising that Jews are portrayed positively in the movies. There have been a great many explicitly Jewish movies and television shows with recognizable Jewish themes. Hollywood has an important role in promoting “the Holocaust Industry,” with movies like Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) and the four-part television miniseries Holocaust (1978), written by Gerald Green, directed by Marvin Chomsky, and produced by Herbert Brodkin and Robert Berger. Both of these films were lavishly promoted by Jewish groups. The promotion for Holocaust in 1978 was remarkable (Novick 1999, 210). The ADL distributed ten million copies of its sixteen-page tabloid The Record for this purpose. Jewish organizations pressured major newspapers to serialize a novel based on the script and to publish special inserts on the Holocaust. The Chicago Sun-Times distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of its insert to local schools. The AJCommittee, in cooperation with NBC, distributed millions of copies of a study guide for viewers; teachers’ magazines carried other teaching material tied to the program so that teachers could easily discuss the program in class. Jewish organizations worked with the National Council of Churches to prepare other promotional and educational materials, and they organized advance viewings for religious leaders. The day the series began was designated “Holocaust Sunday”; various activities were scheduled in cities across the country; the National Conference of Christians and Jews distributed yellow stars to be worn on that day. Study guides for Jewish children depicted the Holocaust as the result of Christian anti-Semitism. The material given to Jewish children also condemned Jews who did not have a strong Jewish identity. This massive promotion succeeded in many of its goals. These included the introduction of Holocaust education programs in many states and municipalities, beginning the process that led to the National Holocaust Memorial Museum, and a major upsurge of support for Israel.

In general, television portrays Jewish issues “with respect, relative depth, affection and good intentions, and the Jewish characters who appear in these shows have, without any doubt, been Jewish—often depicted as deeply involved in their Judaism” (Pearl & Pearl 1999, 5). For example, All in the Family (and its sequel, Archie Bunker’s Place) not only managed to portray working class Europeans as stupid and bigoted, it portrayed Jewish themes very positively. By the end of its 12-year run, even archenemy Archie Bunker had raised a Jewish child in his home, befriended a black Jew (implication: Judaism has no ethnic connotations), gone into business with a Jewish partner, enrolled as a member of a synagogue, praised his close friend at a Jewish funeral, hosted a Sabbath dinner, participated in a bat mitzvah ceremony, and joined a group to fight synagogue vandalism. These shows, produced by liberal political activist Norman Lear, thus exemplify the general trend for television to portray non-Jews as participating in Jewish ritual, and “respecting, enjoying, and learning from it. Their frequent presence and active involvement underscores the message that these things are a normal part of American life” (Pearl & Pearl 1999, 16). Jewish rituals are portrayed as “pleasant and ennobling, and they bestow strength, harmony, fulfillment, and sense of identity upon those who observe them” (p. 62).

Television presents images of Jewish issues that conform to the views of mainstream Jewish organizations. Television “invariably depicts anti-Semitism as an ugly, abhorrent trait that must be fought at every turn” (p. 103). It is seen as metaphysical and beyond analysis. There is never any rational explanation for anti-Semitism; anti-Semitism is portrayed as an absolute, irrational evil. Positive, well-liked, non-Jewish characters, such as Mary Tyler Moore, often lead the fight against anti-Semitism—a pattern reminiscent of that noted in CofC in which non-Jews become high-profile spokespersons for Jewish dominated movements. There is also the implication that anti-Semitism is a proper concern of the entire community.

Regarding Israel, “on the whole, popular TV has conveyed the fact that Israel is the Jewish homeland with a strong emotional pull upon Diaspora Jews, that it lives in perpetual danger surrounded by foes, and that as a result of the constant and vital fight for its survival, it often takes extraordinary (sometimes rogue) measures in the fields of security and intelligence” (Pearl & Pearl 1999, 173). Non-Jews are portrayed as having deep admiration and respect for Israel, its heroism and achievements. Israel is seen as a haven for Holocaust survivors, and Christians are sometimes portrayed as having an obligation to Israel because of the Holocaust.

In the movies, a common theme is Jews coming to the rescue of non-Jews, as in Independence Day, where Jeff Goldblum plays a “brainy Jew” who rescues the world, and in Ordinary People, where Judd Hirsch plays a Jewish psychiatrist who rescues an uptight WASP family (Bernheimer 1998, 125-126). The movie Addams Family Values, discussed in CofC (Ch. 1, Note 4) is another example of this genre. Bernheimer (1998, 162) notes that “in many films, the Jew is the moral exemplar who uplifts and edifies a gentile, serving as a humanizing influence by embodying culturally ingrained values.” As discussed in CofC, this “Jews to the Rescue” theme also characterizes psychoanalysis and Jewish leftist radicalism: Psychoanalytic Jews save non-Jews from their neuroses, and radical Jews save the world from the evils of capitalism.

On the other hand, Christianity is typically portrayed as evil, even going so far as depicting Christians as psychopaths. Michael Medved describes Hollywood’s cumulative attacks in recent years on the traditional American family, patriotism, and traditional sexual mores—the Hollywood version of the culture of critique. But the most obvious focus of attack is on the Christian religion:
In the ongoing war on traditional values, the assault on organized faith represents the front to which the entertainment industry has most clearly committed itself. On no other issue do the perspectives of the show business elites and those of the public at large differ more dramatically. Time and again, the producers have gone out of their way to affront the religious sensibilities of ordinary Americans. (Medved 1992/1993, 50)(34)
Medved fails to find even one film made since the mid-1970s where Christianity is portrayed positively apart from a few films where it is portrayed as an historical relic—a museum piece. Examples where Christianity is portrayed negatively abound. For example, in the film Monsignor (1982), a Catholic priest commits every imaginable sin, including the seduction of a glamorous nun and then is involved in her death. In Agnes of God (1985), a disturbed young nun gives birth in a convent, murders her baby, and then flushes the tiny, bloody corpse down the toilet. There are also many subtle anti-Christian scenes in Hollywood films, such as when the director Rob Reiner repeatedly focuses on the tiny gold crosses worn by Kathy Bates, the sadistic villain in Misery.

Another media tendency is to portray small towns as filled with bigots and anti-Semites. Media commentator Ben Stein records the hostility of the media toward rural America:
The typical Hollywood writer... is of an ethnic background from a large Eastern city—usually from Brooklyn [i.e., they have a Jewish background]. He grew up being taught that people in small towns hated him, were different from him, and were out to get him [i.e., small town people are anti-Semites]. As a result, when he gets the chance, he attacks the small town on television or the movies...

The television shows and movies are not telling it “like it is”; instead they are giving us the point of view of a small and extremely powerful section of the American intellectual community—those who write for the mass visual media... What is happening, as a consequence, is something unusual and remarkable. A national culture is making war upon a way of life that is still powerfully attractive and widely practiced in the same country... Feelings of affection for small towns run deep in America, and small-town life is treasured by millions of people. But in the mass culture of the country, a hatred for the small town is spewed out on television screens and movie screens every day... Television and the movies are America’s folk culture, and they have nothing but contempt for the way of life of a very large part of the folk... People are told that their culture is, at its root, sick, violent, and depraved, and this message gives them little confidence in the future of that culture. It also leads them to feel ashamed of their country and to believe that if their society is in decline, it deserves to be. (Stein 1976, 22)
This is a good example of social identity processes so important in both Jewish attitudes toward non-Jews and non-Jewish attitudes toward Jews: Outgroups are portrayed negatively and ingroups are portrayed positively (see CofC passim and MacDonald 1998a, Ch. 1).

Influence on the media undoubtedly has a major influence on how Israel is portrayed—a major theme of Finkelstein’s (2000) The Holocaust Industry. Ari Shavit, an Israeli columnist, described his feelings on the killings of a hundred civilians in a military skirmish in southern Lebanon in 1996, “We killed them out of a certain naive hubris. Believing with absolute certitude that now, with the White House, the Senate, and much of the American media in our hands, the lives of others do not count as much as our own.”(35)

The election of Ariel Sharon as Prime Minister of Israel provides another study in contrast. There was a huge difference in the media reaction to Sharon and the response to the situation in Austria when Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party won enough seats in parliament to have a role in the Austrian government. Several countries, including Israel, recalled their ambassadors in response to the election of Haider. Politicians around the world condemned Austria and announced that they would not tolerate Haider’s participation in any Austrian government. Trade embargoes against Austria were threatened. The cause of these actions was that Haider had said that there had been many decent people fighting on the German side during World War II, including some in the SS. He had also said that some of Hitler’s economic policies in the 1930s had made good sense. And he had called for a cutoff of immigration into Austria. Haider apologized for these statements, but the electoral success of his party resulted in the ostracism of Austria and a continuous barrage of alarmist media attacks against him personally.

Contrast this with the treatment of Ariel Sharon’s election as prime minister of Israel in 2001. Sharon was Israel’s Minister of Defense in September 1982 during the slaughter of 700-2000 Palestinians, including women and children in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps just outside Beirut, Lebanon. New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman saw “groups of young men in their twenties and thirties who had been lined up against walls, tied by their hands and feet, and then mowed down gangland style.”(36 )Radio communications among Israeli military commanders were monitored in which they talked about carrying out “purging operations” in the refugee camps. While the actual killing was done by Lebanese Christians supported by Israel, the Israeli army kept the camps sealed for two days while the slaughter went on. The Kahan Commission, an Israeli commission formed to investigate the incident, concluded that Sharon was indirectly responsible for the massacre, and it went on to say that Sharon bears personal responsibility.(37)

The reaction to the election of Sharon in the U.S. media has been subdued to say the least. No trade embargoes were threatened, no ambassadors were recalled. The Los Angeles Times dutifully printed a column in which Sharon was portrayed as having “learned from his mistakes.”(38) In June, 2001, Sharon was indicted as a war criminal in Belgium on the basis of affidavits provided by survivors of the slaughter. It is also noteworthy that Rehavam Zeevi, a close associate of Sharon and Israel’s Minister of Tourism as well as a member of the powerful Security Cabinet until his assassination in October, 2001, described Palestinians as “lice” and advocated the expulsion of Palestinians from Israeli controlled areas. Zeevi said Palestinians were living illegally in Israel and “We should get rid of the ones who are not Israeli citizens the same way you get rid of lice. We have to stop this cancer from spreading within us.”(39)

As another indication of the very large Jewish influence on the U.S. media, Eric Alterman notes that “in most of the world, it is the Palestinian narrative of a dispossessed people that dominates. In the United States, however, the narrative that dominates is Israel’s: a democracy under constant siege.” (E. Alterman, “Intractable foes, warring narratives: While much of the world sees Mideast conflict through Palestinian eyes, in America, Israel’s view prevails” March 28, 2002). A critical source of support for Israel is the army of professional pundits “who can be counted upon to support Israel reflexively and without qualification.” Alterman lists 60 prominent media personalities in this camp (including a long list of Jewish writers: William Safire, A. M. Rosenthal, Charles Krauthammer, Martin Peretz, Daniel Pipes, Andrea Peyser, Dick Morris, Lawrence Kaplan, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Mortimer Zuckerman, David Gelertner, John Podhoretz, Mona Charen, Yossi Klein Halevi, Sidney Zion, Norman Podhoretz, Jonah Goldberg, Jeff Jacoby, Seth Lipsky, Irving Kristol, Ben Wattenberg, Lawrence Kudlow, Alan Dershowitz, David Horowitz, Jacob Heilbrun, Michael Ledeen, Uri Dan, Paul Greenberg). These writers have access to virtually all of the major media in the United States. 
This contrasts with a much smaller group of five columnists “likely to be reflexively anti-Israel and/or pro-Palestinian regardless of circumstance.” These include Patrick Buchanan, Christopher Hitchens, Edward Said, Alexander Cockburn, and Robert Novak. Three of these columnists are associated with the far left journal, The Nation (Cockburn, Hitchens, Said), and only Novak is presently affiliated with a major media organization (The Washington Post). 
Alterman points to another small group classified as “columnists likely to criticize both Israel and the Palestinians, but view themselves to be critically supporters of Israel, and ultimately would support Israeli security over Palestinian rights”; this group includes the editorial Boards of The New York Times and The Washington Post. Another columnist who should be included in the intermediate category is Michael Lind, who noted the following in a column in Newsweek International (April 3, 2002):
What passes in the United States as an evenhanded stance is perceived, not only in the Middle East but in Europe and throughout the world, as unquestioning American support of bully tactics by Israel... (F)or more than a decade, U.S. policy toward Israel has been shaped as much by domestic politics as by grand strategy: the pro-Israel lobby is the most powerful one in Washington. This support for Israel—no matter what its policies—has given license to Israel’s hard right to employ savage means of oppression against the Palestinians, and even against their own Arab citizens. While it is rarely noted in the American media, Israel has now occupied Palestinian lands for 35 years, denying 3 million people rights, and ruling over them with brutality. 

There can be little doubt that the U.S. media is dominated by a pro-Israeli perspective ultimately deriving from Jewish influence on the media. What is perhaps most interesting is the long list of non-Jews who are in the first category—those who support Israel reflexively and without qualification. These include George Will, William Bennett, Andrew Sullivan, Allan Keyes, Brit Hume, Bill O’Reilly, Michael Barone, Ann Coulter, Linda Chavez, and Rush Limbaugh. The fact that reflexive support for Israel is not characteristic of non-Jews in other societies with less Jewish influence on the media strongly suggests that unconditional support for Israel is a critical litmus test of acceptability by the major media in the U.S.—that prospective pundits “earn their stripes” by showing their devotion to Israel (and, one might infer, other Jewish issues, such as immigration; none of these pundits is a critic of massive non-European immigration into Western societies). After all, reflexive, uncritical support for anything is rare enough for any issue, and we know that the media in other countries are not so one-sided. So it seems difficult to explain the huge tilt toward Israel as the result of individual attitudes in the absence of some enormous selective factor. And there is the obvious suggestion that while the Jews on this list must be seen as ethnic actors, the non-Jews are certainly making an excellent career move in taking the positions they do. This litmus test for prospective opinion makers is further supported by the fact that Joe Sobran was fired from National Review because he had the temerity to suppose that U.S. foreign policy should not be dictated by what’s best for Israel—an event that was accompanied by charges by Norman Podhoretz that Sobran was an “anti-Semite” (see Buckley 1992; Podhoretz, 1986).

_________________

NOTES [the Bibliography will appear in the 10th entry]

28. Discussions of Jewish ownership of the media include: Ginsberg 1993, 1; Kotkin 1993, 61; Silberman 1985, 147.

29. http://www.economictimes.com/today/31tech22.htm [this item has been removed from that site]

30. The Forward, April 27, 2001, pp. 1, 9.

31. The Forward, November 14, 1997, p. 14.

32. A partial exception is the Washington Post Co. Until her recent death, the Washington Post was run by Katherine Meyer Graham, daughter of Eugene Meyer, who purchased the paper in the 1930s. Ms. Graham had a Jewish father and a Christian mother and was raised as an Episcopalian. Katherine’s husband, the former publisher of the Post, Phil Graham, was not Jewish. The Post’s publisher, since 1991, is Donald Graham, the son of Katherine and Phil Graham. This influential publishing group is thus less ethnically Jewish than the others mentioned here. The Washington Post Co. has a number of other media holdings in newspapers (The Gazette Newspapers, including 11 military publications), television stations, and magazines, most notably the nation’s number-two weekly newsmagazine, Newsweek. The Washington Post Co.’s various television ventures reach a total of about 7 million homes, and its cable TV service, Cable One, has 635,000 subscribers. In a joint venture with the New York Times, the Post publishes the International Herald Tribune, the most widely distributed English language daily in the world.

33. www.eonline.com/Features/Specials/Jews/ [this item has been removed from that site]

34. Cones (1997) provides a similar analysis:

This analysis of Hollywood films with religious themes or characters reveals that in the last four decades Hollywood has portrayed Christians as sexually rigid, devil worshipping cultists, talking to God, disturbed, hypocritical, fanatical, psychotic, dishonest, murder suspects, Bible quoting Nazis, slick hucksters, fake spiritualists, Bible pushers, de-ranged preachers, obsessed, Catholic schoolboys running amok, Adam & Eve as pawns in a game between God and Satan, an unbalanced nun accused of killing her newborn infant, dumb, manipulative, phony, outlaws, neurotic, mentally unbalanced, unscrupulous, destructive, foul mouthed, fraudulent and as miracle fabricators. Few, if any, positive portrayals of Christians were found in Hollywood films released in the last four decades.

35. Reprinted in the New York Times May 27, 1996.

36. James Ron, “Is Ariel Sharon Israel’s Milosevic?” Los Angeles Times, February 5, 2001.

37. http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0ign0 [this item has been removed from that site].

We shall remark here that it is ostensibly puzzling that the Defense Minister did not in any way make the Prime Minister privy to the decision on having the Phalangists enter the camps.

It is our view that responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defense for having disregarded the danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by the Phalangists against the population of the refugee camps, and having failed to take this danger into account when he decided to have the Phalangists enter the camps. In addition, responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defense for not ordering appropriate measures for preventing or reducing the danger of massacre as a condition for the Phalangists’ entry into the camps. These blunders constitute the non-fulfillment of a duty with which the Defense Minister was charged.

38. Yossi Klein Halevi, “Sharon has learned from his mistakes.” Los Angeles Times, February 7, 2001.

39. Washington Post, July 3, 2001; Los Angeles Times, October 18, 2001.

40. Jewish organizations have also been strong advocates of “hate crime” legislation. For example, in 1997 the ADL published Hate Crimes: ADL Blueprint for Action, which provides recommendations on prevention and response strategies to crimes of ethnic violence, such as penalty enhancement laws, training for law enforcement and the military, security for community institutions, and community anti-bias awareness initiatives. In June 2001 the ADL announced a program designed to assist law enforcement in the battle against “extremists and hate groups.” A major component of the Law Enforcement Initiative is the development of specialized hate crime, extremism, and anti-bias curricula for training programs designed for law enforcement.