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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32956 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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JarJar presented the perspective that eugenic thinking is threatening to Jews, "because Auschwitz." That is a direct reading of his post. So JarJar feels existentially compelled to denounce eugenic or racially-oriented thinking for white people- but of course not for Jews, he himself is an ardent ethnic nationalist while he simultaneously denounces that behavior for white people. None of this is unique to JarJar, all components of it are part-and-parcel of an enormously influential contingent of Jewish thinking and cultural influence.

The next premise is that an ethnically-motivated effort to subvert the eugenic thinking of an outgroup is equivalent to a hostile promotion of dysgenic thinking. This is almost tautological, as "you are not allowed to think eugenically, you have to develop your culture and politics around denouncing eugenic thinking" is by definition a promotion of anti-eugenic thinking, which is dysgenic.

My comment recognizes the dialectic between civilizational order and Jewry, which is on the one hand represented by @Hoffmeister25's concern for civilizational health and survival, and on the other hand represented by JarJarJedi's primary concern for the well-being of Jews. JarJarJedi sees these two things in conflict insofar as eugenic thinking is required for civilizational health and survival. Despite Hoffmeister's effort to smooth his concerns it will never, ever work. I've already presented concrete evidence of this dialectic in the form of the Hebrew bible, where Jews always find themselves in conflict with the hegemonic gentile civilization, whether it's Babylon, Egypt, Persia, Greece, or Rome.

What is Passover? It's the celebration of the Jewish tribal god Yahweh slaughtering the first born sons of the gentiles, after which an exasperated Pharoah expels the Israelites from Egypt. Hoffmeister pays deference to the modern-day replacement for the discredited Exodus story, which is the Holocaust, without seeing the bigger picture: HBD isn't just about the dead horse of race and IQ, it also means taking the Hebrew bible seriously. Those are not just stories, they are myths that emerged from a people and mold the people. I understand JarJarJedi's perspective far better than @Hoffmeister25 does, but in doing so acknowledge that the post-war ideological reformation towards dysgenic thinking that Hoffmeister laments was not accidental, it was planned and it was hostile from the very beginning.

To tie a bow on all this, I'll reference Zygmunt Bauman's work Modernity and the Holocaust. From the wiki description:

Bauman developed the argument that the Holocaust should not simply be considered to be an event in Jewish history, nor a regression to pre-modern barbarism. Rather, he argued, the Holocaust should be seen as deeply connected to modernity and its order-making efforts. Procedural rationality, the division of labour into smaller and smaller tasks, the taxonomic categorisation of different species, and the tendency to view obedience to rules as morally good, all played their role in the Holocaust coming to pass.

From the book (italicized emphasis in original, bolded mine):

The Holocaust was indeed a Jewish tragedy. Though Jews were not the only population subjected to a 'special treatment' by the Nazi regime (six million Jews were among more than 20 million people annihilated at Hitler's behest), only the Jews had been marked for total destruction, and allotted no place in the New Order that Hitler intended to install. Even so, the Holocaust was not simply a Jewish problem, and not an event in Jewish history alone. The Holocaust was born and executed in our modern rational society, at the high stage of our civilization and at the peak of human cultural achievement, and for this reason it is a problem of that society, civilization and culture. The self-healing of historical memory which occurs in the consciousness of modern society is for this reason more than a neglect offensive to the victims of the genocide. It is also a sign of dangerous and potentially suicidal blindness.

...

Yet the exercise in focusing on the Germanness of the crime as on that aspect in which the explanation of the crime must lie is simultaneously an exercise in exonerating everyone else, and particularly everything else. The implication that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were a wound or a malady of our civilization -- rather than its horrifying, yet legitimate product -- results not only in the moral comfort of self-exculpation, but also in the dire threat of moral and political disarmament. It all happened 'out there' -- in another time, another country. The more 'they' are to blame, the more the rest of 'us' are safe, and the less we have to do to defend this safety. Once the allocation of guilt is implied to be equivalent to the location of causes, the innocence and sanity of the way of life of which we are so proud need not be cast in doubt.

The overall effect is, paradoxically, pulling the sting out of the Holocaust memory. The message which the Holocaust contains about the way we live today -- about the quality of the institutions on which we rely for our safety, about the validity of the criteria with which we measure the propriety of our own conduct and of the patterns of interaction we accept and consider normal -- is silenced, not listened to, and remains undelivered. If unravelled by the specialists and discussed inside the conference circuit, it is hardly ever heard elsewhere, and remains a mystery for all the outsider

It should come as no surprise that Bauman viewed his work and perspective as a continuation of Adorno and the Frankfurt school's work on the Authoritarian Personality, which Bauman criticizes for reducing latent Nazism to a personality type, whereas in his view, it is latent in civilization itself.

When JarJar goes on about his shield from the fires of Auschwitz, this is the context of his thinking and why Hoffmeister's response "well real eugenicists would value Jewish IQ" rings so hallow. They view it as an intrinsic conflict between eugenic thinking - the epitome of civilizational order and rationality, and Jewish identity. This dialectic is not new, the Hebrew bible is a story of these recurring conflicts between civilizational order and Jewry, and this dialectic forms a deep component of Jewish identity.

There's a shorter essay by Bauman, which starts with a quote from Rubenstein and Roth:

Civilization now includes death camps and Muselmanner among its material and spiritual products

Related: Scene from Inglorious Basterds, consider the portrayal of the villain from Bauman's perspective. The villain is an avatar of cultured European civilization, the heroes are the antithesis.

Sorry I did not have an opportunity to respond to your original comment, so I’m now having to reply to your follow-up.

When it comes to the JQ, my stance is that it’s not a Yes-or-No question. There is a whole spectrum of possible approaches to dealing with this very thorny issue. The whole “are you anti-semitic or philo-semitic” thing is a false binary; one can have an attitude toward Jews that is neither wholly negative nor wholly positive.

Regarding the historicity of the Holocaust, I remain persuaded, based on the information I’ve read - including the work of prominent revisionists - that there was a concerted and large-scale effort, carried out by soldiers of the Third Reich and its vassal states on orders handed down from Berlin - to kill large numbers of Jewish people. I agree with you that the specific Auschwitz narrative, with gas chambers disguised as showers, and lampshades made of Jew skin, appears to have been either totally fabricated or substantially exaggerated. I also agree that the “6 million” figure doesn’t seem to hold up to scrutiny, let alone “20 million”. These issues don’t invalidate the central claim, which is that at some point between 1939 and 1945 the Third Reich’s initial policy of ghettoization and self-deportation morphed into a concerted effort to kill Jews. This effort may have been an ad hoc decision made in the heat of a rapidly-evolving situation, rather than some Final Solution which the Reich knew from the get-go that they’d eventually achieve, but either way, I remain persuaded that some limited form of the Holocaust did take place. Assuming this is true, it was an abomination, although it would be far from the first time in history that an invading army with designs toward imperial conquest did something similar. I don’t dispute for a second that you’re more knowledgeable about the minutiae of historical evidence on the topic than I am, and I’m open to having my mind changed in the future; this is my assessment of the information I’ve consumed up to this point, though.

As for how a white advocate and a believer in eugenics should think about Jews and their relationship with gentiles, it’s obviously super fucking complicated. I’ve offered some thoughts on the issue before, and I’m sure I’ll do so again in the future. Suffice it to say, my stance on the JQ is somewhere softer than yours, but that the issues you raise do weigh heavily on me and that my thoughts are still evolving.

JarJar presented the perspective that eugenic thinking is threatening to Jews, "because Auschwitz." That is a direct reading of his post.

If so, it is very recent attitude, originating in 1960's and 70's, not in 1940's.

Until then, eugenics was seen as uncontroversial progressive and scientific (including by Jews) and militarism, agressive war were seen as the major drawbacks of Nazism.

Nazis were not seen as "pinnacle of modernity", but obscurantist remnant of the primitive past, wanting to retvrn to the Germanic Dark Forest of ancient times.

https://www.takimag.com/article/the_strange_evolution_of_eugenics_steve_sailer/

John Glad, retired director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, wrote an important book in 2011, Jewish Eugenics documenting the Jewish love-hate relationship with eugenics.

The most striking revelation is that, contrary to the current impression, Jews largely approved of eugenics until the end of the 1960s. (The most effective opponents tended to be Catholics, such as G.K Chesterton, author of 1922’s Eugenics and Other Evils.) Glad quotes endless Jewish spokesmen from the first seven decades of the 20th century to the effect that Jews had been practicing eugenic marriages for 3,000 years. The medical profession, which was largely secular and progressive, was enthusiastic about eugenics, and there was little evidence that the sizable number of Jewish doctors objected.

...

Using many hundreds of quotes from contemporary publications dating back to the 19th century, Glad traces the broad enthusiasm for eugenics among Jewish leaders, both progressive and conservative, assimilationist and Zionist, up through the 1960s. Then, following the rise of 1960s radicalism, Israel’s triumph in the 1967 Six-Day War, the UN’s 1975 vote to condemn Zionism as racism, and the subsequent Holocaust memorial movement, there emerged a new historical orthodoxy. Jewish intellectuals such as Gould systematically demonized eugenics as heavily responsible for the Nazis and much else that wasn't good for the Jews.

According to Glad, the first books linking the Holocaust to the eugenics movement did not appear until the 1970s. Yet, by 2004, at least 131 such books had been published, most of them "shrill."

If so, it is very recent attitude, originating in 1960's and 70's, not in 1940's.

The attitude is not new, the mythos used as a driver for the attitude is what emerged in the 1960's and 70's. Earlier today Keith Woods posted a Twitter thread regarding the academic forces that were opposing racial thinking well before the 1940s. Those academic forces won. It's hard not to notice that the conflict between the eugenicists and Boasian anthropologists largely broke along the lines of white protestants and immigrant Jews. You still see that pattern today with the likes of Stephen Jay Gould versus E.O Wilson, or Eric Turkheimer vs Charles Murray.

This attitude is not new, the mythos used to manipulate the culture is what is new.

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