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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   26191 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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that's just out of hatred and revenge?

A lack of reciprocity and revenge are often very much tied together. I said nothing about what white identitarians should do, only that their hostility toward Israel is not the result of any care for Palestinians or any actual concern with the status of Muslim-Jewish hostilities. And they typically freely concede this when asked what, say, they would do if they were Jewish and ran Israel. The problem for white identitarians is that they want their Israel, whereas what the left is deeply focused on is preventing any more Israels at all. Talking themselves into the DEI coalition is therefore likely to backfire, and it certainly isn’t politically advantageous if it only puts thirdworldist leftists in power who will be only too happy to open the West’s doors and wallets to the world far, far wider than they already are today.

It is about confronting Jewish influence in culture and politics and they are over the correct, soft targets…. Why would the DR take the side of the Jews now that the political radicalism they created is being directed towards their own project?

Political liberalism predates substantial Jewish influence on Western politics and would surely postdate it too. If the insinuation is that discrediting Israel leads to a backlash against all Jews, how does that square with your own depiction of anti-Zionism as the very triumph of Jewish leftist ideology? Antizionist Jews, among them the countless prominent Jewish leftist academics over the last 150 years (including many leading critical theorists etc), succeeding in rallying public opinion to the leftist cause of rallying against ethnonationalism would be no win for the right. With the settler colony of Israel vanquished as South Africa was, attention can turn to the even more critical ongoing work of decolonizing Canada, Australia and - most necessarily - the United States, not to mention the rest of Western Europe. There will be plenty of gentile leftists - white, brown and beyond - plus those prominent antizionist Jews (who you will find grow quickly in number if the tides of public opinion change quickly) to continue to keep white nationalists firmly under the boot, while America Brazilifies ever further.

Why should wignats support Israel? I don’t know, but perhaps because if Israel is destroyed (or looks like it might be), many millions more Jews are coming to the US. And my guess is that, in said event, white identitarians won’t have enough political clout to stop them.

are indeed responsible for the ethos that is now consuming them

Jews are both extraordinarily successful in taking over Western institutions to benefit themselves and their tribe to the extent that they practically dominate politics, media and finance in the world’s most powerful country, but also dumb enough that - at the absolute height of their power - they allow a movement of Muslims, communists and TikTok zoomers to destroy public support for their ethnostate? If we had the influence you ascribe to us, why did we let this happen? Before the canned reply about hubris, golem, etc, that metaphor does not apply so easily when the scale of the influence alleged is as great as this.

If we had the influence you ascribe to us, why did we let this happen? Before the canned reply about hubris, golem, etc, that metaphor does not apply so easily when the scale of the influence alleged is as great as this.

Isn't the history of the Jewish people just a long series of such fumbles?

Here's a prominent member, the current US Secretary of Homeland Security. Could this fellow be said to have any influence over immigration flows into the US? Now isn't it surprising to learn that this man's mother fled not one but two separate countries within a lifetime?

His mother, Anita (Gabor),[19] was a Romanian Jew whose family escaped the Holocaust and fled to Cuba in the 1940s[20][21][22] before leaving for the United States after the Cuban Revolution.[20]

With modern technology fueling political developments, I would not be surprised if some set a record at 3 or 4 in this century.

plus those prominent antizionist Jews (who you will find grow quickly in number if the tides of public opinion change quickly) to continue to keep white nationalists firmly under the boot, while America Brazilifies ever further.

I'm not sure the boot has legitimacy without the Holocaust mythos that fundamentally forms the foundation of Jewish power in the 20th century. And Zionism is eroding the power of that mythos. It means less and less to be called "antisemitic" or "racist." The old guardrails are beginning to weaken. Anti-Zionist Jews who invoke the Holocaust to tell White people they have to accept demographic change are discredited even though their position is more morally consistent than Zionist Jews.

Jews are both extraordinarily successful in taking over Western institutions to benefit themselves and their tribe to the extent that they practically dominate politics, media and finance in the world’s most powerful country, but also dumb enough that - at the absolute height of their power - they allow a movement of Muslims, communists and TikTok zoomers to destroy public support for their ethnostate?

They foremost have themselves to blame, not that they are capable of or willing to admit it. The pathological goodwill of the Anglos towards them was squandered with subversive and extreme hostility. The waxing and waning of Jewish influence in culture and politics is an apparently never-ending cycle. We now seem to be heading towards the "waning" phase, for the first time in our lives.

Have you read the - quite remarkable - Atlantic piece The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending from earlier this month? The author essentially admits to all the behavior by Jews which is charged by White identarians but of course spins it as a good thing, and it's only falling apart because the world cannot accept how morally good and pure Jews are. It's a fascinating piece:

In the hatred that I witnessed in the Bay Area, and that has been evident on college campuses and in progressive activist circles nationwide, I’ve come to see left-wing anti-Semitism as characterized by many of the same violent delusions as the right-wing strain. This is not an accident of history. Though right- and left-wing anti-Semitism may have emerged in different ways, for different reasons, both are essentially attacks on an ideal that once dominated American politics, an ideal that American Jews championed and, in an important sense, co-authored. Over the course of the 20th century, Jews invested their faith in a distinct strain of liberalism that combined robust civil liberties, the protection of minority rights, and an ethos of cultural pluralism. They embraced this brand of liberalism because it was good for America—and good for the Jews. It was their fervent hope that liberalism would inoculate America against the world’s oldest hatred.

For several generations, it worked. Liberalism helped unleash a Golden Age of American Jewry, an unprecedented period of safety, prosperity, and political influence. Jews, who had once been excluded from the American establishment, became full-fledged members of it. And remarkably, they achieved power by and large without having to abandon their identity. In faculty lounges and television writers’ rooms, in small magazines and big publishing houses, they infused the wider culture with that identity. Their anxieties became American anxieties. Their dreams became American dreams.

But that era is drawing to a close. America’s ascendant political movements—MAGA on one side, the illiberal left on the other—would demolish the last pillars of the consensus that Jews helped establish. They regard concepts such as tolerance, fairness, meritocracy, and cosmopolitanism as pernicious shams. The Golden Age of American Jewry has given way to a golden age of conspiracy, reckless hyperbole, and political violence, all tendencies inimical to the democratic temperament. Extremist thought and mob behavior have never been good for Jews. And what’s bad for Jews, it can be argued, is bad for America...

I grew up at the apex of the Golden Age. The nation’s sartorial aesthetic was the invention of Ralph Lifshitz, an alumnus of the Manhattan Talmudical Academy before he became the denim-clad Ralph Lauren. The national authority on sex was a diminutive bubbe, Dr. Ruth. Schoolkids in Indiana read Anne Frank’s diary. The Holocaust memoirist Elie Wiesel appeared on the nightly news as an arbiter of public morality. The most-watched television show was Seinfeld. Even Gentiles knew the words to Adam Sandler’s “The Chanukah Song,” which earned a place in the canon of festive music annually played on FM radio. Jews accounted for roughly 2 percent of the nation’s population at the time, but I’d estimate that my undergraduate class at Columbia University was one-third Jewish; soon, a third of the justices on the Supreme Court would be Jewish as well....

Born in Silesia in 1882, the eldest of eight, Horace Kallen had a preordained calling: to become a rabbi like his father. But a Boston truant officer forced him, against his parents’ wishes, to attend a secular grammar school. This set him on the path to Harvard, where he paid his way by reading meters for the Dorchester Gaslight Company. Kallen never felt at ease with patrician classmates like Franklin D. Roosevelt, though the philosopher William James embraced him as a protégé.

Kallen’s breakthrough came in the course of an argument with another Jew. In 1908, the British-born playwright Israel Zangwill had a hit called The Melting-Pot, a melodrama about a pogrom survivor who sets out to marry a Christian woman in the hopes that he will no longer be haunted by his identity. This vision of assimilation was a warmed-over version of the devil’s bargain that Western Europeans had offered Jews ever since Napoleon: In exchange for the rights of citizenship, Jews would have to give up their distinctive identity.

Kallen didn’t want to surrender his identity. He wasn’t religious, but he had read Spinoza and devoured the works of the early Zionist thinkers. At Harvard, he co-founded the Menorah Society, a Jewish affinity group. His rebuttal to Zangwill took the form of unabashed patriotism. In essays that were intellectual bombshells at the time, Kallen extolled the mongrel nature of American society, the phenomenon known as hyphenation. Harvard’s Brahmin elite believed that newcomers must assimilate in full, commit to what they called “100 percent Americanism.” But to Kallen, the hyphen was the essence of democracy. He described America as a “symphony of civilization,” an intermingling of cultures that resulted in a society far more dynamic than most of the countries back in the Old World. The genius of America was that it didn’t coerce any minority group into abandoning its marks of difference.

That argument was idealistic, though also self-interested. Kallen’s polemics implicitly targeted the Protestant monopoly controlling academia, politics, and every other corner of the establishment, which reverted to desperate measures to block the ascent of Jews, imposing quotas at universities and restrictive housing covenants in well-to-do neighborhoods. His ideas were emblematic of an emerging strain of Jewish political philosophy, a set of arguments that would define American Jewry for generations.

The sons and daughters of immigrants may have dabbled in socialism, but in the 1930s and ’40s, liberalism became the house politics of the Jewish people. Walter Lippmann, a descendant of German Jews, first used the term liberal in the American context, to describe a new center-left vision of the state that was neither socialist nor laissez-faire. Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court, conceptualized a new, expansive vision of civil liberties. Lillian Wald and Henry Moskowitz co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in the belief that all minorities deserved the same protections. Jews became enthusiastic supporters of the New Deal, which staved off radical movements on the left and the right that tended to hunt for Jewish scapegoats. As a Yiddish joke went, Jewish theology consisted of die velt (“this world”), yene velt (“the world to come”), and Roosevelt.

The historian Marc Dollinger titled his 2000 narrative of Jewish liberalism Quest for Inclusion. Jews set out to achieve that goal procedurally—opposing prayer in public school, knocking down discriminatory housing laws, establishing new fair-employment rules. But it was also a project of mythmaking and dream-casting. Widely read mid-century intellectuals such as Louis Hartz, Daniel Boorstin, and Max Lerner wrote books reimagining America as the home of a benevolent centrism—tolerant, cosmopolitan, unique in the history of nations.

Reality began to resemble the myth: In the years following World War II—and especially as the world began to comprehend the extent of the Nazi genocide—a liberal consensus took hold, and anti-Semitism receded. After Auschwitz, even three-martini Jewish jokes at the country club felt tinged by the horrors. In 1937, the American edition of Roget’s Thesaurus had listed cunning, rich, extortioner, and heretic as synonyms for Jew. At that time, nearly half of Americans said Jews were less honest in business than others. By 1964, only 28 percent agreed with that assessment. It became cliché to refer to America as a “Judeo-Christian nation.” Quotas at universities fell to the side.

As anti-Semitism faded, American Jewish civilization exploded in a rush of creativity. For a time, the great Jewish novel—books by Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, and Bernard Malamud, inflected with Yiddish and references to pickled herring—was the great American novel. Under the influence of Lenny Bruce, Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Elaine May, Gilda Radner, Woody Allen, and many others, American comedy appropriated the Jewish joke, and the ironic sensibility contained within, as its own.

..It wasn’t just mass culture. The New York Intellectuals, a group with a name as euphemistic as it sounds, acquired a priestly authority in the realm of aesthetics and political ideas, and included the likes of Alfred Kazin, Clement Greenberg, Irving Howe, and Susan Sontag. Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg ushered second-wave feminism into the world. Jews became the prophetic face of American science (J. Robert Oppenheimer) and the salvific one of American medicine (Jonas Salk). The intellectual rewards of Jewish liberation could be measured in medals: Approximately 15 percent of all Nobel Prize winners are American Jews.

In the Golden Age, Jews in America embraced Israel. Enjoying their political and cultural ascendance, they looked to the new Jewish state not as a necessary refuge—they were more than comfortable on the Upper West Side and in Squirrel Hill and Brentwood—but as a powerful rebuttal to the old stereotypes about Jewish weakness, especially after the Israeli military’s victory in the Six-Day War of 1967. As The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman has put it, American Jews “said to themselves, ‘My God, look who we are! We have power! We do not fit the Shylock image, we are ace pilots; we are not the cowering timid Jews who get sand kicked in their faces, we are tank commanders.’ ”

There's a lot to unpack here, the whole article is fascinating and worth a read. The point is that accepting the reality of this "Golden Age of American Jewry" does not allege some sort of omnipotence or invincibility. As Franklin Foer emphasizes, this was a Jewish phenomenon with Liberal trappings. The cultural phenomena advocated by them was distinctly self-interested, and it created the world as we "know it" today.

The pathological goodwill of the Anglos towards them was squandered with subversive and extreme hostility.

Except in that, by your own admission, the ‘people’ are turning against Israel not because they reject “Jewish leftist” ideas, but because they embrace them. You gloss over this fact.

I’ve read the article in The Atlantic a couple of times, I think we may even have discussed it. It’s the same eulogy that’s been given thirty times over the last twenty years. I’ve made many of the same points here myself. But the real reason is that a combination of high intermarriage and low birthrates among bourgeois secular Jews have eroded the intellectual core of the American Jewish population, hence the decline from 40% to 10% or fewer of Ivy undergraduates etc. Again, Sailer, Unz and others have been writing about that for decades.

The waxing and waning of Jewish influence in culture and politics is an apparently never-ending cycle.

There has never been an age of substantial antisemitism in the 250 year history of the United States.

More generally, you still cannot actually explain where the Jewish mistake was. Why couldn’t they keep a lid on anti-Zionism? Why were liberal palestine activists able to so successfully subvert ‘us’, if we were in possession of all the power you say we are? Why does Zuckerberg allow pro-Palestine content on Facebook and Instagram? Why does Sulzberger print stories alleging the IDF struck hospitals before quietly retracting them days later? This is poor coordination at best, outright (almost white style) ethnomasochism at the worst. You ignore the more credible explanation, that while Jews disproportionately participated in liberal politics from the haskalah onward, we could not alter the more fundamental trajectory, which did eventually come for our settler colony populated in substantial part by (what are, to the vast majority of whites and essentially all nonwhites) white people.

The same golem (if you will), invented by white gentiles and a few Jews here and there (cf Spinoza etc), came for both of us in the end. But assigning blame is easier that reckoning with one’s own failures. As you suggest, that is another thing we have in common.

More generally, you still cannot actually explain where the Jewish mistake was.

The Jewish mistake was their implacable hostility towards their most important base of support - White American Christians. Proof that no matter how much white people cuck try to be friendly and allied with Jews, Jews will wage Culture War on them to advance their own security and interests. White American Christian magnanimity towards Jews was rewarded with an immense decimation of them by establishment Institutions in every respect: politically, culturally, demographically...

One observation made by Churchill in his essay was that the fact Jews and synagogues were exempt from the universal hostility of the Bolsheviks provided a hint towards the genealogy of that ideology. The fact that what we now call "wokeness" has so heavily been directed towards White American Christians with Jews completely exempt from the hostility of that discourse - protected even (until now), proves that this is not simply a case of Liberalism run amok.

Although that was their greatest mistake the actual cause for the land shift is indeed social media. Back when everyone got their information from a small set of sources, even something like Talk Radio, there was almost no way to share information outside the kosher political spectrum. Sure, you had some dissident journals, publications, and societies. But the level of engagement with that content was microscopic compared to social media engagement.

The past 10 years they have aggressively sought to wrangle Social Media, which is why we are all here instead of on Reddit, but the cat is already out of the bag.

There has never been an age of substantial antisemitism in the 250 year history of the United States.

Go back further. The origin story of the Jewish people starts with their existence as a minority under an imperial hegemon. Then they gain political influence, a social radical wreaks plagues upon the empire, and they get expelled by an exasperated Pharoah. They seem to take immense pride in coming into conflict with every single Civilization that has taken them in.

Given the possibility we will see a substantial level of antisemitism in the United States, who could the Jews blame that on except themselves? White American Christians? Are they really going to go with the "and for no reason at all..." narrative despite America's historic support for Jews? Looking at Foer's article in the Atlantic, the answer to that question seems to be yes, they are going to blame the White American Christians.

Go back further. The origin story of the Jewish people starts with their existence as a minority under an imperial hegemon. Then they gain political influence, a social radical wreaks plagues upon the empire, and they get expelled by an exasperated Pharoah. They seem to take immense pride in coming into conflict with every single Civilization that has taken them in.

That's a heck of a spin on the Old Testament. Every people has an "origin story" that is basically all about their early conflicts with their neighbors/occupiers/invaders. Only the Jewish one has such a sinister subtext, apparently.

"Hitler did nothing wrong" memes are old, but I have to admit that "The Pharaoh did nothing wrong" is a new one for me.

"Takes them in" meaning enslaving them? Is there any case of oppression of Jews, ever in history, anywhere in the world, that you don't think was justified? Is "They had it coming" just a universal axiom where Jews are concerned? Or do you deny any oppression has ever occurred? Are the Russian pogroms and the expulsions from European countries as fictitious as the Holocaust? Either they had it coming or it didn't happen.

It's true that there are common elements of violence and conflict in origin stories across the board, but the particularities of the myth are relevant to the particularity of the people. The Aeneid is a quintessentially Aryan foundation myth, and Exodus is a quintessentially Jewish foundational myth. It is not a coincidence that the Jewish foundational myth entails their presence as a fifth column in a host civilization, within which an influential and trusted political figure spread plagues throughout the land- including the ritualistic murder of the firstborn sons of the gentiles by the Jewish tribal god Yahweh, culminating in a slave revolt followed by their ultimate expulsion from their host nation.

Jewish revolt, in particular slave revolt from more of a Nietzschean interpretation, against their host civilizations is an endless cycle that plays out over and over. Jews acquiring political power in America and then being turned against because they are too closely associated with the social movements that have brought plagues upon the country is just another chapter in this endless cycle.

Are the Russian pogroms and the expulsions from European countries as fictitious as the Holocaust?

It's funny reading Joer's article, in which the emergence of antisemitism in America is 0% the fault of Jews and 100% the fault of everyone else. Luckily I have been alive during this time, I can see with my own lying eyes how the Jews have burned through an immense amount of goodwill in the blink of an eye. It does make you wonder how much "oppression" there actually was, when Jews have the chutzpah to complain about being oppressed by White Christian Americans in 2024.

It is not a coincidence that the Jewish foundational myth entails their presence as a fifth column in a host civilization

You know that one could rewrite every foundational myth with a similarly uncharitable casting from the point of view of their enemies, right?

It's funny reading Joer's article, in which the emergence of antisemitism in America is 0% the fault of Jews and 100% the fault of everyone else. Luckily I have been alive during this time, I can see with my own lying eyes how the Jews have burned through an immense amount of goodwill in the blink of an eye. It does make you wonder how much "oppression" there actually was, when Jews have the chutzpah to complain about being oppressed by White Christian Americans in 2024.

Speak plainly. Were there actually pogroms in Russia? Have Jews ever been expelled from other countries? If it did happen, did they have it coming? Is there any hostility towards Jews that is ever undeserved? Do you think every individual Jew has a punch in the face coming because of what "Jews" do?

I don't think historicity is relevant in evaluating the worth or meaning of a foundational myth, but it's worth noting that there's no historical basis for the enslavement of the Hebrews in Egypt. So this foundational myth entails the exaggeration, or more likely outright fabrication, of their oppression as a propaganda tool for justifying claims to land, hostility towards their neighbors, and their own racial supremacy.

You could likewise say the Aeneid entails mostly historical myth in order to do the same: justify violence, conquest, and racial supremacy- and I agree. But the Aryan mode of that foundational myth is claiming descent from Classical heroes who built a glorious civilization that was lost to conquest, not that they were slaves within a foreign nation and their tribal god murdered the first-born sons of their host.

Properly understanding the Holocaust as a modern-day Exodus myth, there's a basis of truth, exaggerations, and outright fabrications. The truthful basis being the actual attempt by Europeans to expel the Jews into a territory outside the European sphere, the hard conditions in the concentration camps especially in the closing months of the war, reprisals being that basis of truth. And nonsense about millions of Jews being gassed inside gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. buried, then unburied and disappeared so nobody could ever find them, is the outright lie. The particularity of the foundational myth points towards the particularity of the people.

You may be aware the Holocaust is said to entail 100% of Jewish deaths in WWII. So Jewish deaths under the influence of Stalin, before or after the war, or pogroms by local populations in the Soviet sphere which fell under the German occupation, give way to the "gas chamber" myth. The myth turns a more complicated issue- like pogroms in Ukraine due to the association of the Jews with Bolshevism and the suffering by the Ukranian people, and converts it into a simpler story of them all being killed by Germans in shower rooms purely out of racial animus.

The point being, "yes" there were pogroms in Russia, but the modern-day consensus of the genealogy of antisemitism that informs the perception of those events likewise is going to contain an element of truth and an element of exaggeration or outright fabrication. While I have not really studied pogroms in Russia, I have seen how a much more complicated story of antisemitism in Eastern Europe is transmitted into a black-and-white "history" of millions of Jews dying in extermination factories purely out of racial hatred. My priors would that there is a similar whitewashing of the "history" regarding the pogroms in Russia to make those events completely one-sided in their interpretation.

I don't think historicity is relevant in evaluating the worth or meaning of a foundational myth, but it's worth noting that there's no historical basis for the enslavement of the Hebrews in Egypt.

There's no historical basis for a lot of foundational myths, whether we're talking about Lamanites or Fir Bolg.

You may be aware the Holocaust is said to entail 100% of Jewish deaths in WWII.

I have not heard this claim, and like most of your statements, it's hard to parse since I don't know if you're claiming it's something some Jew once said and you're taking it out of context or what. (I mean, every army had some number of Jewish soldiers, some of whom were obviously killed in battle. So obviously the statement cannot literally be true.)

My priors would that there is a similar whitewashing of the "history" regarding the pogroms in Russia to make those events completely one-sided in their interpretation.

So essentially, "if it happened, the Jews had it coming" is correct?

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It is not a coincidence that the Jewish foundational myth entails their presence as a fifth column in a host civilization, within which an influential and trusted political figure spread plagues throughout the land- including the ritualistic murder of the firstborn sons of the gentiles by the Jewish tribal god Yahweh, culminating in a slave revolt followed by their ultimate expulsion from their host nation.

Leaving out a lot of context why the Golden Age of Egyptian Jews fell apart here.

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