This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
The biography of Marx and Engels would be useless, but if you aspire to large-scale denazification or decommunization then the intellectual and mythological inspirations for the collective consciousness are at the forefront of relevancy. This is an all hands on deck audit and I wouldn't spare anything from scrutiny, not Christianity or the American mythos itself. I give a critical eye even towards those things I have held dear in my life. But I'm certainly not going to lie to myself about what is an obvious ethnopolitical undercurrent to Jewish political and cultural influence in the 20th century either.
Understanding the malady that haunts us absolutely requires us to understand these forces, including the means and motives. We need to be able to detect them, decode them, countersignal them. This is not historical trivia, these same forces I've described are at the absolute forefront of censorship, lawfare, lobbying, and culture-creation across the entire world. It's a present-day conflict that confronts you whenever you turn on the TV. It's not biographical trivia.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link