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Oh man, it is unironically charming and hilarious reading @SecureSignals giving a postmodernist DR read on superhero comics with all the zeal and complete lack of familiarity with the actual mythos of the wokes and anti-wokes currently going on about Star Wars on Twitter.
So is the theory here that the very concept of a "superhero" is crypto-Jewish? Because:
Most superheroes have some kind of origin story. They came from another planet. They got irradiated. They were injected with a super-serum. They have mutant genes. They found a magic ring. They had a spell cast on them. They were possessed. Their father is a demon or a god or an alien or a vampire or...
Certainly, you can map some kind of crypto-Jewish symbolism into any of those stories, but this is doing exactly what po-mos do, which is starting with a thesis and then bending the story to fit it.
The "Jewish" origins of Superman are hardly a new revelation (Siegal and Shuster pretty explicitly imagined Superman as a kind of power fantasy who could, among other things, fight Nazis and punch Hitler just like Captain America - obviously any superhero who fights Nazis must be sending coded Jew-signals, even if they were written at the height of World War II when, you know, America was fighting Nazis!)
You're making way too much of Elliot S. Maggin's comment. He was a Superman writer, but his internal "head canon" is not official DC canon. Superman, like all properties, has been through literally hundreds of writers. If the "Jewishness" of his origins taints him even in the hands of non-Jewish writers, then so are all characters stuck being representative of whatever their original creator imagined, despite the huge number of variant and conflicting reimaginings that superheroes in particular go through.
You wrote this long rant about how Superman is symbolic of Jews pretending to assimilate while they actually envision themselves as the secret master race, completely oblivious to the long Superman/Batman discourse in fandom on this very subject (minus the Jewish nonsense) - tldr is that most fans consider Clark Kent to be the real man, with Superman being a costume he puts on, whereas Bruce Wayne is just a mask worn by Batman. (Though I am sure you can make either one fit your Secret Joos thesis.)
And yeah, I know superheroes weren't really the point of your post, but they're more interesting than white nationalists eating each other alive on Twitter playing "find the Jew."
Of course not! My theory is that superheroes are a vehicle for waging Culture War. This was true in the Greco-Roman Pantheon, in the Hebrew Pantheon, as true as it is in Marvel Comics. These heroes are consciously and intelligently designed to send cultural signals of dominance, weakness, subversion, or celebration of a people based on the conscious intentions of the mythmaker. It runs the gambit. Jupiter, for example, is obviously an Aryan superhero who is placed at the very top of the hierarchy of that mythos. James Bond is an Aryan superhero, Superman is a crypto-Jewish superhero. Moses is a Jewish superhero. Bruce Wayne is Jewish according to canon.
It's about understanding the medium, not the assertion that all superheroes are crypto-Jewish. It's about the fact that this body of myth betrays the fact that the mythmakers strongly identify as Jewish and perceive themselves as playing a different sort of role in Gentile society than assimilation with Protestant values and White culture. That is not what those content-creators internalized or portrayed at all in their myths. They are portraying Culture War with gentiles, and depicting their self-conceived role in it.
I don't think your interpretation holds up. "Ordinary man turns out to have a special origin and is secretly a god" is a story as old as myth. You have to bend it a lot to make it a "crypto-Jewish" story. Superman is very much a metaphor for immigrants assimilating and becoming American, and if your claim is that actually he doesn't assimilate and he's instead spreading "Jewish" values in his "gentile" society as part of the secret Jewish plot to subvert their host civilization, well... why does almost every actual Superman story tell the opposite of that narrative? (There are of course numerous "Superman is evil" stories, but those are usually set in an alternative universes.) Is it because those tricky Jews are trying to convince us that immigration is good or what? When I said you are engaging in the po-mo fallacy, I meant it - you see Superman as crypto-Jewish, and Captain American as crypto-Jewish (because he gets injected with a super-serum and fights Nazis), and like I said, if I wanted to "prove" that Thor and Iron Man and Wonder Woman and Spider Man and Captain Marvel and every other superhero you could name is actually crypto-Jewish propaganda, I'm sure I could come up with a similarly bent interpretation of their origin stories (Iron Man - a wealthy capitalist using his accumulated wealth to make himself more powerful, need I say more? Wonder Woman is literally a golem! Thor, uh, let me think about that, I'm sure there is some way that the Norse God of Thunder is Jewish...)
I could make Jupiter and James Bond into crypto-Jewish superheroes if I tried.
This is all quite amusing, but it's like reading a Marxist earnestly explaining how every story ever actually proves that Marx was right.
That is obviously not the intention of the writers. The intention of the writers is that he lives among the humans even though he can never truly be one of them. He protects them and guides them, and he's an avatar for Kryptonian values. Obviously the myth-creators do not view Superman as a subversive but as a superior being, leader, and moral teacher. That is their self-conception. It's the same self-conception as Freud, Franz Boas, the Frankfurt school. It was absolutely not "I just want to be one of you and adopt your way of thinking and living." In none of those cases.
Jewish writers portraying superheroes as fighting Germans, even before American entry into WWII, is an obvious demonstration of the ethnic motivation of the creation and depiction of superheroes. Captain America was created in 1940, well before Pearl Harbor and when America was in opposition to entering the war against Germany by over 90%. But then we get these Superheroes that inspire large audiences, who go out and fight the Germans and redefine American Values. It is absolutely subversive, even if the writers genuinely see themselves see themselves as doing a moral good:
These figures are, intrinsically, conceived by particularistic ethnic motivations to produce a moralizing or psychological effect on audiences. In the case of Captain America, he was created by Jewish mythmakers to inspire Americans to wage war on Germany during a time this was deeply unpopular. These myths are not inscrutable, they can be interpreted. The idea that there's no deeper meaning to a Jewish immigrant Abraham Erskine injecting Steve Rogers with a serum to fight the Germans is just totally preposterous.
Exactly, and that's the point. You could make James Bond African. That would be subversive. You are proving my point that Superheroes, and their creation and depiction in myth, is a medium for waging Culture War. But if you decide to write a myth portraying Jupiter as crypto-Jewish, it would rightfully be considered subversive, but it would also not change the fact that the origin of the character had a different ethnic motivation which you would try to change or subvert in your updated myth.
Captain America and Superman and many other comic-book heroes have a deep meaning regarding the self-conception of Jews in Gentile society, and it is not at all a story of assimilation with Gentile culture.
Okay, I'll play along - suppose this is true. Jews see themselves as a wiser, benevolent people here to guide us goyim, and they even create superheroes to reinforce this story. How is this different from Christians who create Christian stories and characters to perpetuate Christian values, or atheists or communists or...
Superheroes are cultural icons, therefore part of the Culture War? Sure. That's why we get so much screeching about whatever Hollywood has done with the MCU lately. But since you are (as usual) trying to bring this back to Jewish nefariousness, where is the nefariousness? Jews tell stories just like everyone else, and I'm sure their Jewishness does influence the stories they tell. You seem to leave it as an unsupported inference that this is somehow subversive or works to the detriment of non-Jews. (Otherwise, why does it bother you? Because you're mad that they duped us into fighting on the wrong side in WWII? Which is what I take to be your unstated thesis.)
It's about tracing the development of the modern-day myth of America, today in 2024. It's about establishing that it's totally untrue that modern-day American mythos was predetermined by Protestantism or Classical Liberalism, although I definitely grant those are necessary ingredients. But you cannot ignore the ingredient of Jewish influence on the culture, and that influence was and is not motivated by a desire to assimilate to Protestant values or White culture. It is and always has been hostile to White culture. This dynamic is foundational to so many of the most important myths that calibrate our moral compass and perception of the world: the Holocaust, desegregation, WWII, Hitler as the anti-Christ of our post-war universe...
Obviously, this does not describe the behavior of everyone, or every contribution, or every myth or body of art. But there is a systematic, underlying current that can't be denied and it's just silly and this point that people try to deny it.
Why does the "myth of America" matter anyways, though? I can understand the contours of the post-WWII "creation myth" of the US perfectly fine, but I can also sense that that narrative is probably going to be outmoded soon enough, if it wasn't already. The newer generations don't buy into the "America the righteous" story, and if anything, are ripe for a new narrative to be moulded.
I'm with Amadan and ResoluteRaven on this, that this all seems like pointless tilting at windmills. We're only in a culture war because there are no "real" wars to fight at the moment. The moment China or Russia move directly against us, though, I expect even the most radical of progressive American Jews to start frothing at the mouth and wrapping themselves in the Stars and Stripes, baying for blood.
I strongly object to your suggestion that Culture War falls by the wayside with real war. That isn't true. Our prevailing post-war American Mythos fundamentally revolves around the story of WWII and the Holocaust. Culture War gets racketed up during period of armed conflict, it doesn't go away.
Yes, at the outbreak of war in Europe American Jews started to froth at the mouth and wrap themselves in Stars and Stripes, baying for blood. That didn't lead to a "pause" in the Culture War it culminated in a complete reinvention of the American Mythos under the banner and ethos of pop-culture figures like Superman and Captain America, which were created by Jews with the conscious intention to redefine American Values in a way that accommodated their ethnically particularistic motives and, in my opinion, at the grand sacrifice of the legacy white American population and Europe as a whole.
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Ah, here we have the critical swerve, the place where you say uncontroversial, obviously true things so people will nod along, before you suddenly take the sharp right.
There is a great deal of Jewish influence on the culture? I don't know anyone who disputes that.
Jews don't want to assimilate to Protestant values? Well, that depends what you mean by "values" (some of Protestant and Jewish values are the same, some are not, given that they are different religions), but Jews have never claimed to be assimilating to Protestantism (and in fact object to it).
"White" - well, we've had this discussion before. Whether or not Jews are white seems to be a question answered purely based on who is asking and who is answering. What are the "white" values (as distinct from Protestant values) that Jews do not share?
"It is and always has been hostile to White culture."
This is what you keep claiming, and it's still nonsensical.
It is absolutely not silly, and easy to deny, given the incoherence of your thesis. Jews are out to get us, but not all Jews, and Jews do things like create stories, and identify with their religion and culture, and have political opinions, and they're not always Protestant ones, and therefore Jews are an existential threat to white people (which sometimes includes them and sometimes doesn't). Oh, and they don't want white people to identify as white people because only Jews should have ethnic solidarity, if I recall your main objection correctly. Who orchestrates this anti-white agenda? Either it's Jew genes or... storytellers, I guess.
Cultural relativism and race denial (i.e. Boasian Anthropology), Critical Theory (i.e Frankfurt School), Psychoanalysis (i.e. Freud) are major areas of intellectual and cultural influence which are widely regarding as introducing hostility towards White culture and traditional values, and the progression into what we call Wokeness. Would you agree with that? I think a lot of us here are aware of the implications of HBD denial, what even boomercons are calling "Critical Race Theory" and so-on. Freud was obviously hostile to traditional values, as were the Frankfurt School intellectuals who related traditional values and White ethnocentrism to anti-Semitism and the authoritarian personality.
So accepting that these intellectual movements perpetuated hostility towards White culture and traditional values, all that remains is understanding the motivation of these intellectuals. They were not rooted in empiricism: Boasian anthropology, Frankfurt School study of the "Authoritarian Personality", and Freudian psychology are known for ideological dogmatism and antipathy for empiricism. They were likewise not motivated by 18th century liberalism. They were motivated by their Jewish identity and their hostility towards Gentile culture and morality.
Yes, it's storytellers. Alwayshasbeen.jpg. Stories orient us in the world, they direct our moral compass and perception of reality. The stories we tell and honor direct our behavior in all respects. It's an important insight. Stories matter, the people who tell stories can influence masses of people. Not a new insight by the way, Plato understood this.
Even if we accept that these ideas were the product of 20th-century Jewish immigrants channeling their conscious or unconscious bias against white gentiles, I don't think it necessarily follows that knowing their motivations would be that much help in your fight against their ideology, any more than knowing the biographies of Marx and Engels would be particularly useful if one were engaged in a geopolitical rivalry with a communist state (rather than understanding Marxism as interpreted by living party members).
Here I'll borrow a metaphor from Scott to make this more interesting:
I'd wager that most of us here believe something along these lines, although we differ in the details of what exactly the alien is, the merits of being eaten by said alien, in which century it was summoned, who did the summoning, etc. In any case, you seem intent on crafting weapons to fight the long-dead summoner and his kin, rather than engaging the alien directly, and it seems like an ineffective strategy to me.
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There are a lot of things embedded in that question, so my answer is a qualified "no."
"Cultural relativism" was not invented by Boas (in fact, I'll bet @FCfromSSC would assign this as a product of the Enlightenment), and "race denial" implies a lot of things in a binary way, because of course binary arguments are tactically more valuable to you. The specific Frankfurt school of Critical Theory is not the same as every single thing referred to as "critical theory" today, but sure, it's certainly been influential on post-modernism. I think the connection between Freudian psychoanalysis and modern progressivism is more of a stretch. Did all these things lead to progressivism and wokeness, or are they simply developments (good or bad) along the road from the Enlightenment to the present? You clearly prefer to see them as specifically Jewish inventions with a specific Jewish purpose; you have not made that case. As for your weasel-worded "widely regarding(sic) as" claim - certainly those things were a reaction to/against "traditional" values but again, that they were "anti-white" is your conviction which I find unconvincing (for the same reason I find your argument that Jews are all a separate race waging war against us unconvincing).
So you've named several non-empirical schools of thought largely led by Jews, and once again made a huge leap you are hoping won't be examined too closely to "They were motivated by their Jewish identity and their hostility towards Gentile culture and morality." Boas invented his school of anthropology because he was Jewish and hated white people? Freud invented psychotherapy because he was Jewish and hated white people? All the Jews in the Frankfurt School invented critical theory because they were Jews and hated white people? Are all the non-Jews just useful fools? Are Jews who invent things that aren't "anti-white" not members of the tribe, or are you a follower of the Ibrim X Kendi school ("All Jewish ideas are either pro-white or anti-white")?
Yes, yes, and I've read Campbell too. (Damn, it's a shame he was Catholic and not Jewish, I'm sure we could explain the Monomyth as an insidious Jewish subversion of traditional values too.) So Jews tell stories like everyone else - why do you think all Jews are telling "anti-White" stories? If non-Jews had created Superman and Captain America, would they necessarily have been different stories? Were Siegel and Shuster motivated by hatred of white people, or were they just following biological Jew imperatives?
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