John Derbyshire writes: A subset of American Jews—a subset, a minority—suffer from a kind of psychological deformation that keeps them trapped in a particular, strangely atavistic type of paranoia, of victim mentality.
In this mentality, it’s always 1881 and we’re still in Russia. The Jews are cowering behind their doors in fear as the Cossacks rampage through the town, or Christian peasants with pitchforks and flaming brands march on the Jewish quarter.
One side effect of this mentality: an unblinking vigilance, a hyper-sensitivity, towards the slightest tendency of the Gentile majority to drift Cossack-wards. This easily and often slops over into—and I am speaking of a subset of a subset of American Jews—into a generalized dislike, a prejudice, against white Christians.
Another side effect: the feeling that, for an oppressed minority—we’re still in 1881, remember: it’s always 1881—for an oppressed minority there is safety in courting and joining with other outsider groups for solidarity against the dangerous, dominant Goyim. The great dream of this mentality, in fact, is to get enough of a coalition of outsiders together to outnumber the Goyim, the white Christians. That’s why so many Jews are so passionately committed to mass Third World immigration.
It’s not hard to find evidence of this. Example: one of the “Intelligence Squared” debate series that took place September 13th. The motion to be debated was “Blame the Elites for the Trump Phenomenon.” It lasts an hour and 44 minutes.[Transcript PDF]
All four debaters were Bigfoot American journalists. Both sides of the debate were anti-Trump; the debate was over whose fault it was that Trump had gotten the GOP nomination. For the motion, arguing that it was the fault of the elites, were Ben Domenech [Email him] and Timothy Carney, [Email him] both Gentiles. Against the motion, arguing that it was not the fault of the elites, were Jennifer Rubin [email her] and Bret Stephens [Email him] both Jewish.
That tells you something by itself. That atavistic style of Jewish paranoia that I spoke about, when it hears the word “elites,” at once flies to the thought: They’re talking about US! … and the hoofbeats of the Cossacks are heard drumming in the distance.
At some mental level Rubin and Stephens read the title of the debate as: “Blame the Jews for the Trump Phenomenon.” That’s why they’re arguing against the motion. No, no, it’s not our fault—it’s those damn peasants!
This put them on edge. You can see it in the debate. Stephens actually plays the Holocaust Card at 1h22m, brandishing the print-out of an anti-Semitic tweet he got. Earlier, at 56m, the whole debate had almost veered into a straightforward Christians versus Jews joust. Dealing with Mrs. Clinton’s use of the word “irredeemable,” Jay Carney and Jennifer Rubin clashed lances thus:
Clip: (Carney) I disagree with Bret Stephens and with Hillary Clinton that a quarter of the population is unredeemable. And my bias, on the table, is, I’m a Christian and I think everyone is redeemable …
(Rubin) We Jews just believe in good and evil. We don’t think everyone isredeemable.
It’s been a while since I saw the atavistic paranoia of Jews, that subset of them, so starkly presented. The last time was, in fact, when I saw that Sacha Baron Cohen movie Borat, where it’s likewise hard to miss.
If I’m right about Rubin and Stephens, the result of the debate did nothing to soothe their paranoia. Part of the format for these Intelligence Squared debates is that the studio audience is polled at the beginning—how many for, how many against, how many undecided. The debate takes place, then at the end the audience is polled again, to see how many of the undecideds were persuaded which way.
Result: The audience percentage favoring the motion, that our elites were to blame for the rise of Trump, shot up 26 percent, from 32 to 58. The percentage blaming the peasants went up only six percent, 27 to 33.
Uh-oh, here come the Cossacks.
I’ll just add here that if you take exception to all that coming from me, a Gentile, perhaps you’ll take from Caroline Glick, a Jew. (I know I’m not allowed to say “Jewess” because I checked once with a Jewish lady editor I was working for. Quote from her: “We can say it, but you can’t.”)
Ms. Glick covers that same debate from the point of view of an ethnocentric Jew, and her coverage comes out sounding a lot like mine. She points up the rather high level of open anti-Semitism on the political Left. Then—
The problem on the Republican side of the aisle … is not that the party has turned against the Jews. The problem is that a large contingent of prominent Jewish Republicans has decided to commit political suicide …
Rather than … accept the will of their fellow Republicans, this year the most prominent members of the Jewish Republican elite have opted to attack Trump and his voters.
That is, they have decided to commit political suicide. Twilight of American Jewry, Jerusalem Post, September 15, 2016
That’s you she’s talking about, Jennifer Rubin and Bret Stephens.
As I said, both sides in that Intelligence Squared debate were anti-Trump. Whether all four were actually NeverTrumpers was not clear. You can be anti-Trump without being NeverTrump, on the lesser of two evils principle.
But at least one of the Jewish side was a NeverTrumper, though. How do we know this? These are opinion journalists, recall. He wrote about it.
Yes, it’s opinion journalist Bret Stephens again.
September 12th, the day before the debate, Stephens posted a Q&A column in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, where he is a Deputy Editor and opinion columnist. Both the Qs and the As were apparently written by Stephens himself, a common format in opinion journalism. I’ve done columns in that format myself.
The title of Stephens’ column: Nevertrump For Dummies.
Subtitle: “The nominee has more in common with Kanye West than with Steve Wynn.”
That subtitle threw me. Kanye West I know about at a very vague level. He’s one of those famous-for-being-famous people, right? I couldn’t tell you a single darn thing he’s done, but I see his name on the scandal sheets when I’m in the supermarket checkout line.
Who’s Steve Wynn, though? I had to look him up. He’s a billionaire property developer, very much like Trump. He’s built luxury hotels and casinos.
So what’s he doing in that subtitle? Well, he seems a bit more Upper West Side than Trump. He’s a connoisseur of fine art, for example. I don’t see much otherwise to place him at one end of an acceptability spectrum that has Donald Trump and Kanye West at the other end.
Or do I? Checking a bit further, I see that Steve Wynn, like Bret Stephens, is an American-born Ashkenazi Jew, original name Weinberg. So on that acceptability spectrum, we have two Jews at one end and two Gentiles at the other—just like in the following day’s debate!
Kanye West is a Gentile; I checked. In fact, a couple of years ago he got himself in a spot of bother by telling a New York radio station that “Black people don’t have the same level of connections as Jewish people.”.[Kanye West wants to take back ‘ignorant compliment’ about Jews , Jerusalem Post, December 22, 2013]I wouldn’t be terrifically surprised to learn that it was exactly that remark that lodged itself in Bret Stephens’ mind, causing him to pair off West with Trump at the dark end of the spectrum.
OK, getting past the subtitle, what’s in the column? Well, you can read it for yourself. No, you don’t need a Wall Street Journal subscription—who can afford those things? What you do is, put the title, “NeverTrump for Dummies,” into the search box at Google News. I’ll just pull out one single quote.
First thing I did was Ctrl-F on the word “nativist.” Yep, there it is. I knew it would be: “Mr. Trump’s nativist brand of politics is much further removed from conservatism than Mrs. Clinton’s mainstream liberalism,” end quote.
There you see the paranoia, the immigration fanaticism. For a politician to be “nativist”—to favor the natives, the people born in his country, over foreigners—is worse, much worse, than Clintonian liberalism, says Bret Stephens.
For him, to be “nativist” is worse than anything, because if a “nativist” gets power, our Coalition of Others will never have numbers to swamp the Goyim. They’ll be dominant for ever, and sooner or later they’ll turn on the Jews! [Hoofbeat sounds].
I know, it sounds nutty. Possibly I am being paranoid. But watching that debate, and then reading Bret Stephens’ print piece, it does seem to me that Bret Stephens’ paranoia, that atavistic fear, is in plain sight, just under the surface.
What, after all, is wrong with nativism? Why is this a pejorative—even on the political Left, never mind from the pen of a self-described conservative.
For a government to favor its own people over foreigners: There’s something wrong with that? What? What, exactly?
Because it’s “hateful”? What nonsense! I favor my own kids over your kids, by a mile and a half; but I don’t hate your kids, so long as they don’t come into my house uninvited. Good luck to them.
Good luck to foreigners: Jolly good luck to them all, the long and the short and the tall.
Now, will our government please attend to the fortunes and concerns of our people, our citizens, and let foreigners shift for themselves?
What, that’s “nativist”? OK—then three cheers for nativism!
COMMENTS:
* Derb is a nice fellow but he is incapable of writing boldly and honestly about any issue that involves Jews as wrongdoers. Thus, even when he ventures into this taboo-laden area, he squanders half his time back-peddling and apologizing. Is he running for public office?
Derb understands the problem. All too well. But he lacks courage. Derb’s terrified of being labeled an ‘anti-Semite’. Silly boy. But this anxiety disorder affects his judgement.
Unfortunately, America is full of public figures with this affliction. Their cravenness is part of the problem.
The result? Derb is unable to be penetrating, straightforward and boldly critical about you-know-who and you-know-what.
On this topic, he’s a hopeless wimp.
Sorry, Derb, but boldness and honesty are what’s urgently needed right now. Yet you keep failing to deliver. This weak article proves it.
I recommend that you read more essays by Kevin MacDonald, Gilad Aztmon, or Philip Giraldi.
In the meantime, stick to writing about illegal immigration.
And pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!
* Saying there’s no anti-semitism in your archives is like a Good Progressive saying he’s never written anything politically incorrect. Even if it’s true that doesn’t mean it’ll be true tomorrow. Because there’s no hard definition of an anti-semite. Certainly it doesn’t mean someone who objectively hates Jews. It has come to mean anyone Jews, or those speaking for Jews, don’t like. Jews could start disliking you any day, if they don’t already.
Once that happens, anything in your archive is anti-semitic by definition.
* Why are you talking about Cossacks and 1881 when it would be more to the point to mention Nazis and 1933-1945. That’s where their minds are trapped. Same way for neocons it’s always 1938 or ’39 and we’re Great Britain.
But I suppose it’s a good thing that not every single page on the internet is about Nazis.
* Assuming that theory is true, maybe the goyim wouldn’t turn on the Jews if the Jews didn’t constantly agitate to flood the nation with foreigners and come up with retarded new ways to demonize the domestic population.
That aside, I’m not sure left wing Jews really believe it’s 1881 Russia, or that their Judaic values compel them to be liberals. It’s more likely the other way around. They use their past victimhood as a fearmongering tactic, and their religion as moral support for their political views. Deep down, they are first and foremost true believers, worshiping at the altar of Egalitarianism.
* That’s as anti-semitic as most of the more thoughtful on the alt-right are, Derbyshire. Even /Goebbels/ knew that ‘not all Jews are like that’ – apparently he had a Jewish history teacher who he loved. Your understanding has structure, while that of many lazier-thinking alt-righters does not.
I wonder whether it’s connected to the phenomenon of people never really getting over a defeat – rejection in love, the American South forever mumbling old bones, Mexicans still smarting from the loss of their territory to America. Perhaps the difference in degree is due to Jews’ higher smarts and thus potency in this world, perhaps due to a higher-than-average sense of /their people/. Christ, I’ve heard NPR’s Ira Glass talk about ‘his people’.
* The best way forward for a small, well-connected minority is to align with the dominant ethnic group and go forth from there. This is actually the best way forward for the Jews, and why they don’t simply do this is something I don’t understand. Any Jew who doesn’t want to do this is free to move to Israel – surely the said Jew also wouldn’t want the Palestinian Arabs to out number the Israeli Jews?
The Jews are fighting an unending war to prevent 1933 from ever happening again, never mind that they’ve successfully associated Judaism with (Catholic, and European Protestant) Christianity, that Islam is arguably the most “anti-Semitic” religion out there, that they’d paint themselves into a corner by not looking like the dominant goyim.
This is like setting fire to an oil rig – and its lifeboats – in the North Sea.
* I do not see anything uniquely or especially Jewish about either the far-left anti-white people or elitist anti-Trump Republicans, or all that much similar to each other.
There is certainly a Jewish flavor of white ethnomasochism, and it is as greatly distasteful as the English, Swedish or Popish varieties.
Regarding the global elite, it seems much more at its base Anglo-Saxon and more broadly Western European, and the Jews in it tend to be miscegenated (mostly with NW Europeans, increasingly with NE Asians) and ultra-assimilated. Bret Stephens wasn’t engaging in intensive Torah study at Middlesex boarding school, the University of Chicago, and the London School of Economics.
* Growing up in a Jewish family, I was conditioned to think about pogroms and the Holocaust, whenever the issue of immigration came up. However, I was cured of this neurosis by being exposed to extreme diversity (i.e. getting the feeling that your hometown and school district are no longer part of America). Stephen Miller, a Jewish aide to Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump, seems to have had a similar “conversion” experience when he was growing up in Southern California.
* I love that notion that a panel of two Jews, two Christians, all four Lille-White, privileged, connected, “educated”, sit around and bat about the percentage of Trump voters that are irredeemable and deplorable and racist. They name the group, White, working class, lower-caste Trump supporters. Then, they assign varying levels of racism to us? And the Jewish debaters of course, in THEIR racism, assign higher levels of racism to the Trump Goyim than the Christian debaters and of course, the Jews consider US irredeemable more than the Gentile elites at the panel debate.
These are the elites that set the illegals on the rest of us, empower Blacks to their violence (not a word for THEIR racism and violence, of course) and live in their gated communities traveling on armed security details and limousines. This panel, they’re the same coin, different side, both sides elite, except the Jews have more money, no doubt. Being a Multi-Culti Deplorable however, I will happily observe if not assist, the anarchy that goes looking for these elites. When the balloon goes up, when the gated communities are swamped and the mobs are looking for these people to repay the anarchy these elites themselves create, the mobs will not discriminate, they will cut ALL the elite throats. Mustn’t be anti-Semite! In that scenario, ALL the elites die.
* Its funny that people like Rubin and Stephens are all multiculturalism for the US and all nativist apartheid when it comes to Israel. There is a psychological term called projection which states you project onto others your own failings. I think it sums up these gatekeepers except the rabble they lost control over supports their vision of Israel too. The only reason to pay attention to Rubin is to get a good belly laugh from her nativist war propaganda for Israel. The comments section at the Washington Post is always better, with most of the people making fun of her instead of agreeing with her.
* Jews are very politically active as a group, but I’ve never seen groups of Jews protest against immigration and the displacement of whites, or violence against whites in the U.S. or Europe. Jews are far more likely to protest against the displacement of Palestinians by Israel than they are to oppose demographic change in the West, or racial violence and rape directed against whites by minorities, and they aren’t very likely to do even that.
* Lot, maybe you can explain to this poor, dumb Gentile why only Jews seem to be qualified to run the USA’s finances, by having control over the US Treasury and the potent FED?
Current US Treasury Secretary is Jacob Lew, his second is Sarah Bloom. Adam Gzubin is the head of the department flinging the economic sanctions against ME nations and Russia.
Past Treasury heads, have been Tim Geithner; Larry Summers and Robert Rubin-who helped Clinton make it easier for Wall Street casinos to steal our money–all Jews and just for pointing out the truth, I’m guilty of anti-Semitism.
The only Gentile recently was Hank Paulson, who was needed during the Great Depression of 2008 to reassure Americans that there is nothing wrong, go back to sleep.
The FED is run by Janet Yellen, whose second in command, Stanley Fisher, is a dual-citizen, who was the past head of an Israel bank. Before Yellen it was ‘Shalom’ Bernanke, and before him it was Alan Greenspan.
But don’t even think or wonder why no Gentile’s are appointed to these crucial positions, because that’s anti-Semitism and you’ll be hounded until you no longer exist in the cyber world.
I could go into who controls the majority of the thoroughly rotten and corrupt US media, but let’s stick with the FED and Treasury.
* Obviously can’t speak for those who believe in an actual overarching jewish conspiracy, but the evidence for disproportionate jewish influence in media and politics is clearly evident to anyone who experiences censorship and even prosecution for expressing opinions that are “anti-Semitic”. Good luck trying to generate such harassment for anybody expressing equivalently anti-white opinions.
Here’s one of my own bits of anecdotal evidence:
As it happens he hasn’t succeeded with that particular piece of harassment yet, although he succeeded in getting me banned from The National Interest and from Spectator Blogs using the same special connection. Clearly there are some jewish people for whom commitment to freedom of speech is more genuine than for others (such as our host here, I assume).
Shall I try writing to the various white non-Jewish owners and managers of some major publications asking them to ban people who’ve been making anti-white comments? How far do you think I’d get?
* I’m used to pushback from all the special interest groups I annoy by skewering their sacred cows. The amount depends upon the readership of the publication in question, generally. But robbersdog’s the first to ever credibly threaten prosecution (in fairness to others, these anti-dissent laws are only nowadays starting to be properly enforced), and the only one to actually succeed in getting me banned, from two publications (The National Interest and the Spectator blogs), though many have reported me for, variously, “homophobic”, “racist”, “sexist” and other comments advocating traditionalist conservative opinions. Clearly, as well as good timing, jewish would-be censors benefit from institutional and political connections at the highest levels, perhaps more so than the run of the mill special interest identity groups.
Mind you I was banned sharpish from the Guardian (many years ago), but I think that was the management’s decision without any special pleading needed. I don’t mind that, as I’d expect openly leftist publications to frown on traditionalist opinions. It’s the ones who pretend to be “conservative” that annoy me, by their dishonesty.
* I was laying in bed watching TV and flipping channels when I saw CNN’s Jake Tapper sitting in for Charlie Rose. Curious I left it there and Jake was talking with some State Department official about Syria. Tapper brought up Trump’s son’s comment ‘Would you eat from a bowl of Skittles if you knew three of them had been poisoned’ in reference to bringing Syrian refugees to the US. The State Department official squirmed as he had no reasonable reply to Tapper. He switched to his ( Jewish) heritage and filibustered with an cartoonish tale about his Bialystok born step father. Auschwitz,Maidenek, Treblinka. He had been in all of them ( but survived, he always survived though no one else from his school did). On a ‘death march’ in 1945 he runs away and again survives and hides in the woods until he hears the rumble of machinery. Were the Nazis sending Panzers to look for the escaped Jew? No, by the grace of God, instead of the hated swastika there was a white star on the tank. The invincible Jew runs out of the woods waving with joy and, instead of a burst of machinegun fire from the American tank, the hatch pops open and a negro tank commander appears!
The story had all the authenticity of a fairy tale and yet here was a senior State Department official reciting ( probably for the 100th time) it as if it was the truth.
*
Are you singing Dixie and attending Nassacre on a regular basis? Are those the pinnacle of American cultural markers?
Forgive the limits of my goyishe kopf but these are the shibboleths of the American culture despised by Jews. Good, bad or indifferent they among other things are part of the dominant culture which alleged to be “assimilating” Jews should be joining in rather than the other way round. That’s the point – you’re not assimilating when you make the dominant culture more palatable to you and more like your own. You’re asserting supremacy.
I’d say football, apple pie, thanksgiving, love for the works of Hemmingway, Faulkner, Melville , Lee are more American. And plenty of Jews do that. In fact I’d speculate without direct evidence that proportionally similar to the general population.
Right! Somebody has to own the teams! Wakka Wakka:
http://www.tmz.com/2014/03/28/gene-simmons-jews-football-own-teams-la-kiss/
Who else would tell us that Ahab is a repressed homosexual and the white wale a giant phallus? That’s appreciation if I ever heard it!
It is extremely expensive to remain a Jew [a direct corollary being remaining members are generally wealthier].
You’re going to have to explain why and how one’s ethnicity and religion could be unilaterally expunged by an insufficient income.
Yes, and you have observed all this yourself among the many Jews you call friends and neighbours, am I right? It’s unmitigated nonsense. Spare me the ‘patriotic’ drumbeat please and recount your experience, even a few, where you’ve felt a Jewish person pulling cultural rank over you, and I will show you an idiot. Most likely you don’t have any.
I could start with the childhood experiences of being one of a handful of gentiles at a Jewish summer camp for several years seriatim. It doesn’t matter though since no amount of experience and no number of similar experiences to my own would be sufficient for you. I could never satisfy your challenge since it is by design intended not to be satisfied. From childhood Jews are imbued with ethnic and moral chauvinism and among themselves have no compunction about expressing it.
* Jews (or Organized Jewry) in the US have a disproportionate amount of power in financial circles & media (and a few other areas, but that is beside the point). Well- who zombified you guys ? Who prevented you from having equal or greater media clout ? Is Fox News, the most influential newsmedia, actually “Jewish” ?
In the US, Jews are not dominant in banking- overrepresented yes, but not dominant; nor are they much present in other “moneyed” fields like oil & gas or military-industrial complex. Most big US banks don’t have a strong Jewish influence; to speak of Jews among Seven sisters or Lockheed Martin is outright silly.
Also, media in most European countries (Germany, UK, France, Italy, Denmark, Spain,..) & Russia is in the hands of national, non-Jewish elites. And they- Russia apart- all spout the same liberal nonsense.
Jews or no Jews, this is a phase of European & Europe-derived civilization with its own dynamics, causes & effects. Jewry’s influence is not negligible, but also- far from crucial. The weakness lies elsewhere.
* Jacob Weisberg writes in 1990:
Joe Sobran, a syndicated columnist who was himself accused of anti-Semitism a few years ago, offers this perspective on the Pat Buchanan flap: “Jewish claims are being cut down to size in various ways. It’s coded by a lot of Jews as anti-Semitism. I don’t think it is. It’s more like counter-Semitism.”
Sobran says that “counter-Semitism,” unlike anti-Semitism, does not seek a “negative outcome” for Jews. It is an attempt “to bring Jews down to the level of ordinary civil society.” According to Sobran, he shares with Buchanan, a friend, an urge to diminish “the excessive moral prestige Jews have in the media and the public square. . . . Jews deciding the standards, setting the criteria of humanity. Since they set themselves up as the arbiter, there is, if you’ll pardon the expression, a certain kill-the-umpire impulse. . . . People are looking at them and saying, come off it. This period of moral prestige has kind of ended.”
* I would point out that Jewish power is both; it is vast, and fragile. It is the subverted power of others. It is soft power that depends entirely on the assent of other peoples. When Jews’ good name is lost, so is their power. They know this perfectly.
Every big Jew was once a small Jew. They don’t spring from the eye of Zeus, fully-formed.
I’ll quote John Hartung for the umpteenth time:
“In-groups sandwich an outline for animosity, an organizing principle for prejudice, between layers of social support. Whether Christian or Muslim or Jewish, every extremist is supported by a small number of less extreme admirers and each of those supporters is buoyed, in turn, by a larger group of sympathizers. These connections are continuous right down to the bottom of the pyramid, where vaguely sympathetic in-group members are offended by the very extremists who would have no base, and no basis, without them. It is that vague sympathy which needs to be examined.”
* Ethnic networking exists; Jewish ethnocentrism is real; Jews in the US are powerful: but, this is not the dominant, let alone crucial element in the policies of 3rd world immigration swamping, PC muzzle, growing plutocracy & elitism, anti-Euro-American rhetoric in the academia etc.
* There are two sides of the Anglo regard toward Jews, exemplified by the expression, within living memory common among the English, “un-British,” which meant “Jewish.” Like another insular culture’s linguistic distinction of outsiders, “un-British” has its counterpart in the Japanese gaijin.
There is in my experience actually a great deal more evidence of British, especially English, fond romanticizing of Arabs and even of all of Islam, than there is of English fondness for Jews and Judaism.
William Blake’s “Jerusalem” posits the English not as the historical Jewish center of Judeo-Christian culture, but as blessed with the New Testament (New Covenant) opportunity of building “Jerusalem” as the new, English center of Western Civilization “in England’s green and pleasant land.” It is and it remains a distinctly Anglican-Protestant thesis.
