Steve Sailer writes: Back in 2008 it finally dawned on me that the popular phrases “white guilt” and “Jewish guilt” have functionally opposite meanings:
In other words, in the classic example of Jewish guilt, [Philip Roth’s] Portnoy’s Complaint, Jewish guilt is the opposite of white guilt: Portnoy’s feelings of Jewish guilt stem not from his ancestors being too ethnocentric (as in “white guilt”) but from himself not being ethnocentric enough to please his ancestors. His parents make him feel guilty because he’s individualistically ignoring his racial duty to settle down and propagate the Jewish race.
Orwell’s 1984 emphasizes the difficulties humans have in thinking about phenomena for which they lack names, and the usefulness to power of constricted vocabularies. For example, Orwell explains that in the future The Party will have eradicated all the ideological terms in Thomas Jefferson’s vocabulary and replaced them with one word: “crimethink.”
That got me thinking about the virtual non-existence of the mirror image term to “anti-Semitism:” “anti-Gentilism.”
I used the New York Times’ search engine to discover that the last time the Times ever used the term “anti-Gentilism” was before I was born, in a review of a 1958 novel by the hard-working author Jerome Weidman, The Enemy Camp:
New York Times Book Review
June 15, 1958
“The Education of George Hurst”
The Enemy Camp, By Jerome Weidman, 561 pp. New York: Random House. $4.95
Reviewed by John Brooks
One of the most familiar starting-points of the great American success story is the lower East Side of New York City. From it have come a disproportionate number of our most illustrious citizens in business, finance, entertainment, the arts, science, politics — almost every field imaginable. A compelling aspect of the irresistible old story in this particular setting is that there is so often a special twist. The twist, of course, is the issue of religious prejudice: specifically, anti-Semitism and its opposite, anti-Gentilism.
As this sentence suggests, the existence of “anti-Gentilism” seems logically inevitable, given the much publicized existence of “anti-Semitism.” And yet the phrase hasn’t appeared in the New York Times in 57 years.
“The Enemy Camp,” a Book-of-the-Month Club selection for July, is a large, rich novel about anti-Gentilism, done in broad strokes, full of plot and exaggeration, and infused with considerable passion held in fine restraint. In much of Jerome Weidman’s earlier writing about young men on the make (like his memorable first novel, “I Can Get It for You Wholesale”), his heroes have seemed to be only fleetingly concerned with moral or ethical questions: the reader’s interest in them derived chiefly from their appalling singleness of purpose and the intricate techniques they use to advances themselves. In “The Enemy Camp” the situation is more complex. The hero has been divided into two men — one by nature moral, the other amoral. The clash between the two keeps the pot boiling.
The good boy is George Hurst, adopted from a Houston Street orphanage at the age of 3 by the proprietor of a tailor shop on East Fourth Street, a woman he comes call Aunt Tessie. … The bad boy is Danny Schoor (later Shaw), George’s childhood neighbor, pal and idol. The battle line of the neighborhood is all too clearly drawn: on one side of the street is Gerrity’s saloon, patronized by the Gentiles, the shutzkim — the enemy camp. On the other side, in a world of bagels and lox, live two kinds of Jews: those who, like Aunt Tessie, hate the shutzkim out of nothing less than a sense of mission, and those who, like Danny, make a vocation of currying the enemy’s favor in the interest of getting ahead.
… When Mr. Weidman’s largely bitter tale comes to its provisionally happy end, it is George, the good boy who would not traffic with shutzkim, who is happily married to one of the them and occupying a firm position in a relatively prejudice-free world; while Danny, the unscrupulous shutzkim-lover, is, for all his riches, still an outcast clawing for respectability. Does Mr. Weidman intend this as the final cosmic jest. He leaves it for us to judge.
This seems like a pretty reasonable book review, and it demonstrates that “anti-Gentilism” is a useful term for a public intellectual to have in his conceptual toolkit for describing the world, especially the part of the world centering on New York City.
But June 15, 1958 was the last time “anti-Gentilism” appeared in the New York Times. So I guess not.
I wonder why this useful term has disappeared down the Memory Hole. Perhaps I’ve forgotten the anti-Semitic pogrom in Gramercy Park on June 16, 1958 staged by readers brandishing copies of the New York Times Book Review. (I think the anti-Semitic mob was led by John Updike. That did happen, right?)
In contrast, the New York Times has used the term “anti-Semitism” 11,059 times since June 16, 1958:
So, 11,059 to 0 over the last 57+ years.
From Mel Gussow’s 1995 obituary for novelist Weidman in the NYT:
Jerome Weidman, the prolific and popular novelist who wrote ”I Can Get It for You Wholesale” and also won a Pulitzer Prize as the author (with George Abbott) of the Broadway musical ”Fiorello!,” died yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was 85.
In his two prosperous careers as novelist and playwright, Mr. Weidman often wrote about the rough underside of business and politics — and daily life — in New York, the city in which he was born. His first novel, ”I Can Get It for You Wholesale,” published in 1937 when he was 24, teemed with the life in Manhattan’s garment center, telling about the rise of the ragingly ambitious Harry Bogen. Along with the title character in Budd Schulberg’s ”What Makes Sammy Run?,” Harry became an archetypal figure in American literature: the abrasive young man who would do anything to get ahead.
… The novel made his reputation and became his longest running success. Transformed into a Broadway musical in 1962 (with a score by Harold Rome), it starred Elliott Gould as Harry Bogen, and was the show in which Barbra Streisand made her Broadway debut (as the secretary Miss Marmelstein). …
Mr. Weidman’s first novel became the hallmark of his career, and also a subject of controversy. There were those like Meyer Levin who thought of him, along with Mr. Schulberg, as examples of ”the self-hating period in writing,” as novelists who wrote too negatively about their Jewish backgrounds.
… The novel made his reputation and became his longest running success. Transformed into a Broadway musical in 1962 (with a score by Harold Rome), it starred Elliott Gould as Harry Bogen, and was the show in which Barbra Streisand made her Broadway debut (as the secretary Miss Marmelstein). …Is the phrase “self-hating” ever used to discourage Gentile artists from criticizing Gentile businessmen? Is Orson Welles denounced as self-hating for parodying William Randolph Hearst in Citizen Kane?
Comments:
* I definitely feel the sentiment, but part of the trouble is that the demographic I think you are concerned about when raising this is non-Jewish white people, right Steve? It’s not Gentiles specifically, and it’s probably not whites although when we talk about anti-White activity that’s 90% the way there. Jews are what, 2% of white people or something like that in the USA? Maybe 3-4% given that the 2% figure from memory applies to all of the USA rather than just the white people.
Anyway, if some guy coincidentally named Cohen writes an article about the unbearable whiteness of X, what do we call it? Is it anti-Gentilism or Anti-Whitism? My guess is that he doesn’t write equivalently hatey articles about the stifling brownness of the kitchen hands of every eatery in the USA, or the horrible blackness of the NBA etc. So to my mind, calling his article anti-White captures the target of his animus pretty well. Is he going to complain “How can I be anti-white, I’m white myself, aren’t I?”? Well, he could do this but he’s just playing semantics. The term is 96%+ of the way there.
OTOH, anti-Gentilism really doesn’t capture this because he doesn’t care if so-called redneck whites are doing poorly because they have to compete in a rigged game with non-white Gentiles, or if all the Ivy League schools have quotas such that 10% of the student body is now white and the other 90% are various non-whites… so long as the Jews are taken care of.
Anti-white Gentilism is of course, more accurate but I think for most purposes anti-white suffices.
* I just don’t think Gentiles have much tribal instinct at baseline, at least when compared to Jews. “Self-hating” doesn’t really resonate with us because we’re all fairly distrustful of each other, and perfectly willing to slit each other’s throats if necessary. Even today you have major “right-wing” figures like Nigel Farage bleating on about how he’s really anti-immigrant categorically and actually prefers Pakis to Poles. Now I’m sure he doesn’t really believe that in his heart but that he would even say it is a testamet to how little racial feeling exists amongst “Europeans,” many of whom find even that categorization to be ridiculous.
* Since white gentiles are the solid majority of the country at about approx. 65% of the population why do you want to encourage the newspaper of record to rally the majority people against minority opponents? (White gentiles who are leftists are not anti-gentiles, they are self-hating.)
The only people who can be anti-gentiles are minorities. Why do you want to fire up the majority against those minorities? Do you not understand the policy reasons for suppressing majority unity expressed in racial animus against others? Or more likely do you just not care?
* We cannot be allowed to feel unity or confidence because it endangers minorities and these minorities reserve the right to actively handicap us. I really don’t think that was the deal we all agreed to back when Jews were given full civil rights. The Duke of Wellington was right about this. It’s a bit late to change it now though. The best the rest of us can do is come to understand institutions like the NYT are playing by the rules you describe and conduct ourselves accordingly.
* From WIKIPEDIA’s description of Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions:
Christian Diestl is at first a sympathetic German drawn to Nazism by despair for his future but willing to sacrifice Jews if necessary; Noah Ackerman is an American Jew facing discrimination of the American kind; and Michael Whitacre is an American WASP who struggles with his lack of meaning arising from his lack of struggles.
The three have very different wars: Diestl becomes less sympathetic as he willingly sacrifices more and more merely to survive; Ackerman finally overcomes the discrimination of his fellows in the army only to be nearly undone by the horror of the camps; Whitacre, still without meaning in his life, survives them both.
* Whites were tribal for a very long time, except the tribal instinct was redirected into loyalty to the state, organized sports, etc. Anything but loyalty to family, clan and tribe.
Other elements helped as well:
Think how the government created white flight in the name of forced busing and integration. It destroyed a lot of white ethnic enclaves in smaller cities and towns.
You ever notice how all the different non-white ethnics have their own special day in school praising their culture and history and whites have… nothing. Whites are deliberately kept from having pride in their peoples and traditions.
Organized sports plays a very large role in this – because it takes the emotional and bonding energy of whites away from each other and transfers it to a bunch of thuggish black athletes who despise their white fans. And ever notice how it’s always pushed by very wealthy whites, most of whom identify as liberals and globalists.
One of the most important things whites could do is IMO is to stop watching college or professional sports. It’s poison.
As for Farage, he must watch what he says because there are no free speech laws in England, he literally has to praise Muzzies lest he finds himself in front of a judge.
* Yes, two days ago Maher closed the show with an anti-anti-racist tirade about self-hating white liberals. As part of it he also criticized the “doofus dad” anti-white male trope used endlessly in TV and advertising.
He really gets away with a lot:
* I don’t see white guilt and jewish guilt as opposed.
White guilt can be a sense of guilt over the real or imagined crimes against minorities of one’s ancestors.
More commonly I think it is a sense that racial differences exist and being born white was a stroke of luck without doing anything in particular to merit one’s superiority. That’s why white guilt is only really found in the top quarter or so of the socioeconomic spectrum.
Jewish guilt deals with a feeling of displeasing or failing one’s parents or grandparents. That could mean failing to spread their genes after all the effort they put into raising you. It could just as much mean failing at school or work, or some other way of letting your family down.
* Do Jewish people ever feel guilty about what they’re ancestors have done. Do you think white people (Jewish people included) would feel guilty about what their ancestors did if we didn’t have to hear about how awful it was all the time? I doubt it, unless we knew that our ancestors personally hurt other people.
* Steve writes a lot about the hypocrisy of various Jews who support ethno-nationalism for Israel but not for whites in the USA or Europe.
I agree with him that they are wrong and hypocrites. However, it is a strange focus because we are not really talking about too large group, and the vast majority of Jews are either consistently anti-white or consistently pro-white.
Trump v Kasich/Rubio was a pretty good test of whether you are OK with the demographic destruction of white America or not, and Jew-heavy New York gave Trump some of his best numbers, as did Florida. (A vote for Cruz is hard to categorize. He really is better than most Republicans, but he’s also oily about the issue and seems to favor a very large increase in “guest workers” and H1B.)
* I want to point out the reality of a lot of Jewish culture and ritual is about hating Gentiles in some way.
Take Passover. Pesach celebrates when, in Jewish myth, God ‘passed over’ the houses of the Jews on the way to murder the first born sons of all the non Jews in Egypt.
Jews celebrate this. If you’ve celebrated Passover, you’ll know Jews explicitly celebrate all the terrible things God did to the Egyptians. They chant the names of the ten plagues joyously. Jews celebrate the death of non-Jews. It’s not a turn-the-other-cheek kind of religion.
Think about the mindset you’d have doing these rituals year after year. Jews despise Gentiles and don’t mind ripping them off and cheating them.
* One of the things the Millennials (of whom I am not one, being born in the late seventies) get right is that it’s an article of faith that you never trust one source. The whole idea of a paper of record is a little outdated. If the NYT doesn’t talk about anti-gentilism, well, it’s a Jewish-American paper, and you can’t expect them to be unaffected by their biases. There were fewer sources back in the era Steve’s talking about, but you can look at the Post, you can look at right-wing journals of opinion before the neocon takeover, and so on. This isn’t ancient history where you’re stuck with three sources all of whom were favored by some writer three hundred years later to save from the trashpile.
I don’t trust Steve on everything, but he says enough that I find perceptive to find him worth reading, and I think he says the truth, at least as he sees it, anyway. I don’t trust anyone on everything. You read the Nation, the Atlantic, the NYT, National Review, and Unz and Takimag, and you make up your mind.
* You’re right that there are Jews who are anti-Israel and anti-white (most far-lefties) and pro-Israel and not really anti-white at least (Orthodox, some of the neocons like Frum), but most are trying to be pro-Israel while trying to hold onto their liberal beliefs.
But, by and large, the Jewish portion of the conservative intelligentsia (which is really all we can see) has gone against Trump. You haven’t, LOTB hasn’t, Mike Savage hasn’t as far as I know. But the Commentary and National Review crowd are going into hysterics trying to stop the guy, and it just confirms the WN view that Jews are trying to destroy the White race’s champion. Hell, even Ben Shapiro, who has some really funny videos on Youtube demolishing the white privilege concept, hates the guy. Milo’s a halfie.
Which I don’t exactly share–I think the Reform crowd mostly believes in their liberal ideas, outmarries like crazy, and thinks Trump is going to send them to concentration camps in North Dakota. (Which I think is about as likely as Trump taking his name off those buildings and becoming a monk.)
* Sheldon Adelson has been remarkably non-overbearing this primary season. He liked Rubio, his wife likes Cruz, and he’s had nice things to say about Trump.
* The majority’s hate is especially brutal? It is? How so? Go spend a few fun-filled hours on World Star Hip. It’s like faces of death. The worst brutality I see in this country is done by the group that makes up about 3% of the population. Black males between 15 and 30. Here’s a recent sample out of Baltimore public schools.
* Religions are a double-edged sword. They have the power to unify and motivate people. At the same time, they have a certain inflexibility to them that leads to the same mistakes being repeated ad infinitum.
The chutzpah of Jews to try something unimaginably ballsy is a strength and also a weakness. Some ideas are dumb, in the long-run counterproductive, and shouldn’t be tried. PC is one of them. Marxism probably another. My guess is that this tendency to overreach has probably been at the root of a lot of pogroms throughout the centuries. It is dangerous to keep pushing people who by nature, tend to bottle their anger.
The war-making focus of Muslims is both a strength for them and a weakness. In the era of very slow progress of war technology, it was a strength for them. In an era where technology plays such a large part, the focus on war as opposed to economy and science is a weakness. Also a weakness is the urge to attack and strike terror rather than bide their time and wait until they have demographic superiority.
Christians have their weaknesses too. The urge to proselytize to non-whites is a huge weakness. There are others of course.
