In Praise Of Traditional Ties

I notice that people who are rooted in the traditions of their people like it when others are similarly rooted. Orthodox Jews, for instance, do not rejoice when the goyim become secular and lose their traditional ties. It is better when all peoples have transcendent allegiances, when everybody has things to live for beyond satisfying their impulses. Men who have families to provide for, hobbies to pursue, and roles to play in their communities, for example, are more likely to work hard and to be obey the laws of the land. It is the shiftless, rootless and idle who are particularly dangerous.

Christians rooted in Christianity, I’ve noticed, tend to prefer Jews who are rooted in their Judaism. Chinese and Japanese who are rooted in the traditions of their people are also comfortable when outsiders observe their peculiar ways of life.

Life is exhausting and living an insular life is usually inevitable, efficient and comforting.

Eugene Girin writes:

With the upcoming Easter in mind, I could not help but to share a Twitter observation reposted by Scott Richert:

“Advertisers now call an Easter ham a “holiday ham”. You know, so as not to offend all those celebrating Passover with a ham”

Funny? Of course. Sad? Even more so. As someone who actually observes Passover (which I prefer to call by its original name of Pesach) fairly strictly – even the vodka in my freezer is kosher for Passover – I have a few observations about the ridiculous, evil, and idiotic dechristianization campaign that has been taking place in America for the last few decades.

First, people who seriously observe Jewish holidays by and large, do not object to Christmas and Easter having a prominent, public place in American society. I have never met an Orthodox Jew (Hasidic, Modern Orthodox, or non-Hasidic hareidi) who were offended, bothered, or even annoyed by public displays of Christianity. Such Modern Orthodox public figures as Dennis Prager and Michael Medved (whatever their faults) have always spoken in favor of a Christian America. The same goes for Conservative Rabbi Jacob Neusner who used to write for this magazine. Indeed, the more religiously observant a Jew is, the less he is bothered by public displays of Christianity.

Second, there were more public displays of Christianity on Easter in the former Soviet Union than in today’s America. As a child in post-Soviet Moldova, I remember how seriously Easter was taken by local people – and this was just two or three years after the fall of the militantly atheist Soviet Union. You could literally feel something different in the air on Easter. Coming to America, the only public displays of Easter I would see were colorful bunnies with egg baskets on the front lawns of suburban houses in upstate New York.

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Is The Subtext Of This Article Race?

Liberals often accuse conservatives of dog whistling for race when they talk about law and order, states rights, lower taxes and welfare payments, Obamacare and the like.

I have a lot of sympathy for this liberal argument. Arguing on the basis of race to favor whites is to end your career in public life in the western world. It is simply not acceptable. So instead people who would prefer to live and work among their own tend to speak in code. They often move to the suburbs and to rural America and create white enclaves.

My position is that every people, every culture, every race, and every religion deserve the right to live in peace and on their own from other influences. I believe in nationalism for everyone.

I think race is a subtext in this Victor Davis Hanson article:

So Mr. Bundy must realize that in about 1990 we decided to focus on the misdemeanor of the law-abiding citizen and to ignore the felony of the lawbreaker. The former gave law enforcement respect; the latter ignored their authority. The first made or at least did not cost enforcers money; arresting the second began a money-losing odyssey of incarceration, trials, lawyers, appeals, and all the rest.

Mr. Bundy knows that the bullies of the BLM would much rather send a SWAT team after him than after 50 illegal aliens being smuggled by a gun-toting cartel across the southwestern desert. How strange, then, at this late postmodern date, for someone like Bundy on his horse still to be playing the law-breaking maverick Jack Burns (Kirk Douglas) in (the David Miller, Dalton Trumbo, Edward Abbey effort) Lonely Are the Brave.

But the interest in Mr. Bundy’s case is not about legal strategies in revolving fiscal disagreements with the federal government.

Instead, we all have followed Mr. Bundy for three reasons.

One, he called attention to the frightening fact that the federal government owns 83% of the land in Nevada. Note that “federal” and “government” are the key words and yet are abstractions. Rather, a few thousands unelected employees — in the BLM, EPA, Defense Department, and other alphabet soup agencies — can pretty much do what they want on the land they control. And note, this is not quite the case in Silicon Valley or Manhattan or Laguna Beach. The danger can be summed up by a scene I see about once a month on a Fresno freeway: a decrepit truck stopped by the California Highway Patrol for having inadequate tarps on a trailer of green clippings, just as a new city garbage truck speeds by, with wet garbage flying over the median. Who will police the police?

Two, this administration has a long record of not following the law — picking and choosing when and how to enforce immigration statutes, depending on the particular dynamics of the next election; picking and choosing which elements of Obamacare to enforce, again depending on perceived political advantage; and picking and choosing when to go after coal companies, or when not to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, or when to reverse the order of the Chrysler creditors, or when to allow Lois Lerner to destroy the credibility of the IRS for partisan advantage.

In other words, the Obama administration regularly breaks the law as it sees fit. So we wonder why a federal agency sends out swarms of armed security agents to the empty desert on behalf of a tortoise, when it could just as easily storm Jay Carney’s press conference and demand that the president promise to enforce the Affordable Care Act. Or start apprehending those who are not just violating immigration law, but also serially signing false federal affidavits or providing employers with fraudulent identities.

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What Creates Civility At A Sports Stadium?

In some sports stadiums, you take your life in your hands if you wear a jersey of the visiting team, while in other stadiums, it is no problem. I notice that in some stadiums, such as Green Bay’s, fans are safe wearing the gear of the visiting team.

I have this picture of people in the mid-West and the north of America being particularly nice. If this is true, I wonder if this primarily has to do with religion, culture, ethnicity, race, socio-economic status, education, amount of government welfare or what? I suspect one factor does not provide the whole answer. Take race, for instance.

In many countries in Europe, white fans in white stadiums are not at peace (Catholics hating Protestants and vice versa, many people hating Jews, low-class whites looking for fights with other low-class whites over sporting allegiances, etc). Despite this, I expect there’s less criminal violence in European sports stadiums than at African sports stadiums and Latin American sports stadiums.

I have this idea, perhaps wish, that people who go to church or synagogue regularly are less likely to riot and to commit crime.

On his radio show Apr. 22, 2014, Dennis Prager talked about his great experience attending a San Diego Padres home game but did not mention the obvious factor of race.

Dennis: “The fans there were so nice that it was tempting to root for the Padres. I have rarely experienced — this sense of calm niceness. I wonder if you can measure niceness and go to various stadiums? Compare Yankee Stadium fans with Fenway Park Fans with Kansas City Royals fans? The sandlot for little kids. I was touched.”

I wonder if the racial/religious/socio-economic make-up of Padre fans and Dodger fans and Angels fans is different.

I suspect that the whiter the city in America, the whiter the crowd at a stadium, the more law abiding it is. If the city and stadium population was dominantly Oriental, it would be even more peaceful. Generally speaking, Orientals are more law abiding than — in the order of the universal crime statistics — whites, followed by latinos and blacks.

If you talk to prosecutors in America, they’ll tell you that their typical Oriental defendant will say something like, “I wish to receive my punishment.” The typical white defendant will have a lot of excuses. The typical latino defendant will be proud of his crime. And the typical black defendant will blame racist police.

The kind of close-knit community Prager advocates is in inverse proportion to racial diversity noted leftist Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, who was so upset by the results of his study that he didn’t publish it for a decade and only then with a pro-diversity spin. Putnam found that Los Angeles, the most racially diverse of America’s cities, had the least trust, meaning that people in such a racially mixed community tend to pull their heads in, go out less, cooperate less, and watch more TV. By contrast, the whitest cities such as Portland have the most neighborliness.

Steve Sailer (highly regarded by psychometricians) asked: “Can you guess which two cities lead the list of top 50 metropolitan areas in terms of the highest percentage of adults volunteering for charity? And which two cities came in last?” Lilly-white cities Minneapolis-St. Paul and Salt Lake City came in first, while diverse cities Miami and Las Vegas came in last.

A resident of Chicago, Steve Sailer worked with his community to do good things, but
concluded: “Multiculturalism doesn’t make vibrant communities but defensive ones…”

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Impatient, Arrogant & Condescending

I’m fascinated by how I’ve inherited these unpleasant traits from some of my ancestors and how these traits continue down in my family line with some of my relatives.

If I’m not careful, I become impatient with anyone who does not interest me (about 90% of humanity). I struggle with road rage. I become impatient with drivers who don’t conduct themselves as I would like and I curse them out under my breath. At work, I have been known to exhibit my underlying impatient, arrogant and condescending dark side.

I am much better behaved around patient people, with certain bosses I’ve been consistently sweet-tempered, but combine me with others who are similarly ill-tempered and the results are often not good.

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The Psychological Causes Of Physical Pain

When I am in physical pain, I don’t enjoy it when people suggest that my problem is psychological. I had one girlfriend, for instance, whenever I complained of pain, she would say, “Do you think it might be psychological?”

I don’t like it when psychology is used as a weapon. My pain might indeed be psychological but when a non-professional brings it up, it does not help things. It does not lead me to discover anything. I just get mad.

There’s nothing good that comes from a non-professional asking, “Do you think it might be psychological?” But when a person voluntarily chooses to see a psychological professional to explore such matters, then great good can come from it.

I’m rereading Daniel Siegel’s book, Mindsight.

He talks about a young female patient he had named Allyson. She was a fine arts teacher and was experiencing such severe back pain, she was considering surgery.

Dr. Siegel did a body scan with her and found that when they went to her back, she experienced great terror. When they explored that, Allyson had memories of being at a party and a friend of a friend tried to have sex with her in the garage, pushing her back painfully on to the corner of the pingpong table. After further work, Allyson realized that it was her step-father, not the friend of a friend, who had tried to rape her.

After this discovery, her back pain went away and she cancelled the surgery.

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The Gullible Goyim

I’m reading the Tom Clancy novel Red Storm Rising, probably his best.

The bad guy spy sent into West Germany is a deliberately chosen Jew: “And it’s a cunning plan. The Jewish identification, for example. The bastards play on our sensitivity with the Jews, no? If he is stopped by a police officer, he can make a casual remark about how Germans treat Jews, and what would a young policeman do, eh? Probably apologize and send him on his way.” (Pg. 114)

It’s time the goyim stand up and refuse to be guilted by aggrieved minorities.

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Feedback On My Paul Gottfried Interview

Barry emails:

I’ve bought three of Paul Gottfried’s books in the last year – he is a fascinating man whose Jewish background gives him a totally fresh perspective. I still learned a lot from your interview though – his hatred of his enemies was so refreshing! (Actually that could be the subject of a piece for you – is the idea of forgiving your enemies a lot of nonsense? I suspect it is)

I remain curious though as to why nationalists and conservatives never mention something that is obvious to me.
Namely that immigration/race is part of internal white class war. It is a way of disempowering the real enemy which most upper class whites recognise as lower class whites. They know their own progeny will only be able to enjoy their status through unearned privileges. And the chances of them doing that without screwing up are minimal.

Hence the need to rig the game somewhat by screwing up the chances of the kids of the lower classes via the promotion of single parent families, multiculturalism and immigration. It is about dispossessing and demoralising these kids so they never coherent enough to fight back. If this is true – and I think it is – then white “self hatred” and self loathing, don’t really exist at all. It is all about class.

You see this probably more starkly in Britain where the classes most enthusiastic about immigration etc are most keen on protecting their own families from the consequences of it via private schooling and living in the most black-free neighbourhoods etc.

You also see it in the new emergence of an Upstairs/Downstair style servant class which the top, say third, love lording it over. These tend to be Eastern Europeans as our top third are increasingly outspoken about their loathing for the white working class.

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Tales From A Courthouse

* One woman was named “Abcde”, pronounced “ABsidee.”
* Two sisters testified. They were named “La Cienega” and “La Tijera”.
* A judge looked at the defendant and said, “Your name is Ramson?” “Yes,” said the defendant. “After the strong man in the Bible.”

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Paul Gottfried Interview

According to Wikipedia:

Paul Edward Gottfried (born 1941) is an American paleoconservative political philosopher, intellectual historian, columnist and former Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, as well as a Guggenheim recipient. He is currently an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute,[1] and H. L. Mencken Club President.

He is the author of numerous books and articles detailing the influences which various German thinkers (such as Hegel and Schelling) have exerted on American conservative political theory, and was a friend of many political and intellectual figures: such as Richard Nixon, Pat Buchanan, John Lukacs, Thomas Molnar, Will Herberg, Samuel T. Francis, Paul Piccone, Murray Rothbard, Eugene Genovese, Christopher Lasch, and Robert Nisbet. Gottfried is a paleo-conservative critic of neoconservativism within the Republican Party.

According to his own website:

Paul Edward Gottfried (b. 1941) has been one of America’s leading intellectual historians and paleoconservative thinkers for over 40 years, and is the author of many books, including Conservatism in America (2007), The Strange Death of Marxism (2005), After Liberalism (1999), Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt (2002), and Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America (2012) . A critic of the neoconservative movement, he has warned against the growing lack of distinctions between the Democratic and Republican parties and the rise of the managerial state. He has been acquainted with many of the leading American political figures of recent decades, including Richard Nixon and Patrick Buchanan.

His books include:

Conservative Millenarians: The Romantic Experience in Bavaria, Fordham University Press, 1979 ISBN 978-0-8232-0982-8
The Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right, Northern Illinois Univ Press, 1986 ISBN 0-87580-114-5
The Conservative Movement, Twayne Pub 1988, with Thomas Fleming (second edition 1992) ISBN 0-8057-9724-6
Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory, Greenwood Press 1990, ISBN 0-313-27209-3
After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State, Princeton University Press, 2001 ISBN 0-691-08982-5
Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards a Secular Theocracy, University of Missouri Press, 2002 ISBN 0-8262-1417-7
The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium, University of Missouri Press, 2005 ISBN 0-8262-1597-1
Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007 ISBN 0-230-61479-5
Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers, ISI Books, 2009 ISBN 1-933859-99-7
Leo Strauss and the American Conservative Movement, Cambridge University Press, 2012

I talk to Paul Gottfried by phone Thursday.

Paul: “For somebody with such strong European sensibilities, I shouldn’t like LA, but I love LA. I like the natural setting. I love the areas around it like Santa Monica and Pasadena.”

Luke: “I believe that Los Angeles used to be the most Anglo-Saxon city in the United States.”

Paul: “It would not surprise me.”

Luke: “I grew up a WASP. Then I converted to Reform Judaism about 20 years ago and then Orthodox Judaism.”

Paul: “I have no idea how you can convert to those things. It is ethnic, very ritualistic, you have to live in a community with people of the same background. It’s very different from being a Protestant. There are beliefs that hold together a community. Here there is ethnicity and ritual. As a WASP, you don’t make it, particularly with the Orthodox. You haven’t remained in that camp?”

Luke: “I’m still an Orthodox Jew. I go to synagogue every morning. I study the Rambam, daf yomi (page of Talmud).”

Paul: “That’s remarkable.”

Luke: “One led to the other. I saw how effectively and without any shame how Jews organize in our self-interest. We do not sell our homes to non-Jews in this community.”

Paul: “You’re talking about a group that does not recognize white Protestants as anything other than the other, as some outside group.”

Luke: “If we Jews can and should organize in our self-interest, and every other group does except for whites, that makes me think, hey, why aren’t [non-Jewish] whites organizing in their group interest?”

Paul: “That’s like saying you’re going to become black or Chinese because these are groups that organize in their self-interest. The one indispensable element for Western civilization are the white Christians. Once they go, everything goes. Jews aren’t going to save anything except Jewish self-interest, which is often viewed as incompatible with the preservation of a Western Christian civilization. Jews typically tend to weaken that. I agree with Kevin MacDonald on this entirely. I don’t think it’s anything socio-biological nor necessarily consistent with the entire course of Jewish history, but if you look at Jews in today’s world, they do very much play the role Kevin MacDonald says they do.”

Luke: “I interviewed Kevin MacDonald a couple of weeks ago… [He] also agreed with me that the traditional Orthodox Jew presents much less of a threat.”

Paul: “To say that Orthodox Jews are less of a threat to civilization does not mean that they are an appealing alternative. They’re not as dangerous as the more assimilated Jews. It doesn’t make them the good guys. It doesn’t make them a model you want to imitate if you are interested in preserving Western civilization.”

“What we’re looking at is created by white Christians. They’ve created multiculturalism and all those problems, but once they go down, I don’t think much will survive as a recognizable Western society.”

Luke: “Why do you think the term ‘white nationalist’ is considered so loathsome?”

Paul: “Because whites have chosen themselves to be the ultimate victimizers.”

When we talk about whites, we mean non-Jewish whites.

Paul: “So you’re saying that these people who have chosen the role of victimizers have a right to organize in self-defense in the same way that all the groups whom they’ve privileged as victims have been able to do. I see it as a non-starter. I don’t think whites have a nationalist sense. I don’t think they’ve had a nationalist sense. My concern is not with the lack of nationalism but with the masochism they are expressing, the self-destructiveness. Nationalism is always organizing against other groups. What whites need to do is to stop beating themselves and treating other groups according to their just deserts.”

Luke: “You see no hope for whites organizing in their group interest like Jews and Chinese and blacks?”

Paul: “But whites are not successful at it. They destroy themselves. Most whites at most times do not buy into this white nationalism. There are other things that have united white people — ethnicity, religion, being a part of a particular nation. It is rare that whites have seen themselves in terms of racial nationalism.”

“I have had this discussion with Jared Taylor on a number of occasions and I have tried to explain to Jared that whites in the past have expressed racial preferences does not mean that white nationalism was the focus of their existence. Groups dislike other groups and try to preserve their own identity. White nationalism says that nothing else really counts in terms of what we are except race. I have a problem with that. I don’t want to take sides with homosexuals against black people. I’m much more concerned about the feminists and homosexuals than I am about people of different races because I am a social conservative.”

Luke: “Why couldn’t white nationalism mean organizing in your group interest just like all other groups do?”

Paul: “Nationalism historically has meant reaction, the friend-enemy distinction. Nationalism in the 19th Century develops against some group that has conquered somebody else. It contributes to the tensions of both sides leading to World War I. Until recently, it was a destructive force. I don’t think it is true anymore. I support nationalist movements in Europe because they are against multiculturalism. They don’t usually hate their neighbors, at least in Western Europe. I don’t think the nationalist paradigm even works here. I don’t think the problem is that whites are beleaguered but that whites behave in a lunatic fashion. They just have to stop being lunatics. They don’t have to hate blacks or exclude them, just don’t be crazy. I worked at a college. I think most of the people I worked with were certifiable. The feminists, the anti-whites, they were just loony tunes. The answer is not to organize them as white nationalists, it is getting them to [stop] behaving in a crazy way.”

Luke: “What do you think of American Renaissance and Jared Taylor?”

Paul: “I think it is a noble endeavor. He undertook this project, hoping that it would turn the country around. This is also true about VDARE. It is a hope that if you call certain problems to the attention of the general public, it will have a beneficial effect. It has not had that beneficial effect because the problems by now are so systemic that one small publication coming out once a month is not going to make much difference.”

“Another problem we face is that the conservative movement in the United States is controlled by neoconservatives. There is no right-wing movement that can effectively contend against the left. You have elements of the right that have no political voice. It is the problem of powerlessness that leads some of us to look for solutions that are not really solutions.”

Luke: “Where do you see hope for America?”

Paul: “I have no hope for the near-future. I hope that in the course of time, there will be a reaction. I always tell people that I am a right-wing Lenninist. The worse, the better. If I lived in New York City, I would have voted ten times if I could for DeBlasio. I would never vote Republican in a presidential race. That staves off the disaster. Things have to fall hard before they get any better.”

Luke: “Should Jews fear Kevin MacDonald?”

Paul: “I can’t imagine why. First of all, he has no power. What could he do to them? Second, a lot of the stuff he writes is perfectly sensible. There’s nothing he’s going to do. He doesn’t have that wide readership. He is denounced and marginalized by the establishment. So am I. I don’t even write on these subject, you just have to cross the line by questioning the happy results of the civil rights revolution that takes you out of the picture. I was recently kicked out of ISI (Inter-Collegiate Studies Institute), which had published me for like 40 years because I was friendly with people who believed in cognitive disparities [by race]. Once you befriend anyone who believes in cognitive disparities, the conservative movement kicks you out.”

Luke: “The Jewish response to him is to throw slurs rather than to rebut.”

Paul: “Yes, of course. What else do you expect? He’s questioning the nobility and high-mindedness of Jewish leftists. I wouldn’t expect any other kind of response. I don’t think the very Orthodox Jews care one way or the other.”

“The neoconservative position is that if blacks don’t like us, we have done so much for them, we have sacrificed ourselves, they should kiss our toes and support Israel and if they don’t, they’re making us suffer because they’re extremely evil. What Kevin MacDonald shows is that leftist Jews take certain positions because they’re trying to neutralize the Gentile [threat]. Most Jews I have known on the left fear white Gentiles.”

Luke: “Many liberal Jews I’ve known make civil rights for blacks the center of their Jewish identity while the Orthodox Jews I go to synagogue with could care less about civil rights for blacks.”

Paul: “Because they live in another world. They’re not concerned about what happens to Gentiles. The other [Jews] are in the process of assimilating and they fear and hate Christians. I was listening to this guy Alan Dershowitz on a television program and he was asked if the Ten Commandments are good and he said, oh no, they’re awful. They were written for primitive people. And they have nothing to do with us. Now why would a Jew be attacking the Ten Commandments? Because he doesn’t want the Gentiles to have it. He doesn’t want them to have any religion except left-liberalism. He hates the goyim. If you read his book Chutzpah, it is even more obvious that he hates Gentiles. I’ve never seen Jewish liberalism as anything other than an attempt to neutralize a group that Jews fear and hate.”

Luke: “When did you become a heretic? Outside the pale of acceptable opinions?”

Paul: “I always was. My father was. My brother is. I’ve never thought any differently. I was critical of the Civil Rights revolution. Most of the people I grew up with thought this way except that they opportunistically changed their minds later on.”

Luke: “How have you dealt with the ostracism?”

Paul: “I don’t care. The people who ostracize me, I despise anyhow. If somebody asked me why do I bother to fight at all? The answer is I despise my enemies. They’ve kept me back. I’ve published important works that they make sure are never reviewed, even if they are published by Princeton and Cambridge and other universities. They can all go to hell. I can vomit when I look at these neocons on Fox News. They’re there so they can offer a politically correct alternative to political correctness and their parents got them those jobs.

“If I were ever given any power, I would destroy them. I would make sure that they disappear from the face of the earth. The thing I really like about the Jewish tradition is that it is OK to hate your enemies because I thoroughly despise mine.”

Luke: “When you say you would like to see them disappear from the face of the earth, does that include violence?”

Paul: “I don’t care. Whatever. No, I’d just like to see them professionally ruined and socially ruined. I do not wish them physical harm. I would like to see them no longer be any factor in public life, which would probably cause them to commit suicide. I hear that this guy Jay Nordlinger who works at National Review always refers to me as the Court Jew of Pat Buchanan. I have never criticized the state of Israel in any of my writings. Why would I be called that? The answer is that I don’t agree with the neocons about the outbreak of World War I or something like that. If you deviate the breadth of a hair from the party line, they hate you. They have gone out of their way to ostracize and marginalize me. That’s fine. I would do the same thing if I were in a superior position. I would align myself with Kevin MacDonald against them at any point if I thought that that kind of alliance would go anywhere.”

Luke: “Do you practice Judaism?”

Paul: “Up to a point. I consider it an ethnic identity. I know that now that you are Orthodox, that is not your position any more. It’s being loyal to ancestral custom. I do believe in God.”

Luke: “Do you believe that God has communicated to humanity?”

Paul: “Yes.”

Luke: “How?”

Paul: “I can accept the Bible as being inspired and probably the New Testament as well as the Old Testament. I do have a religious side. I don’t feel entirely comfortable with the intensity of my hatred for my enemies.”

Luke: “Do Jews have the same relationship to America as WASPs?”

Paul: “No. Not the same as the WASPs used to. I think it is true of the old German Jews. They thought of themselves as 1000% American. They tried to assimilate into the WASP establishment. There are different senses of being American [among Jews]. The neoconservatives identify America with global democracy, human rights, Jewish interests, Zionism, the struggle against German Nazism in two world wars, the victory of the Civil Rights movement. They have their own myth of America and it differs only slightly from Obama’s view of America, that America is good because it has progressed, overcome prejudice, it is universal and it is based on human rights. Other Jews on the left are more radical because they are still afraid of Christian influence. However radical Americans have become, Jews are even more radical with gay rights and things like that. Jews often play a pivotal influence in introducing new phases of radicalism.”

“My father thought the Civil Rights movement was something that was organized by members of the Communist party. He didn’t think Joe McCarthy was too bad. I first met Jewish radicals when I was a graduate student at Yale. Then I noticed how radical they were and how much they disliked the WASP establishment at Yale. I admired these [WASPs].”

Luke: “Is it endemic to belonging to a tribe?”

Paul: “Yes. That’s exactly what it is. Jews are more articulate than most other groups. They have higher intelligence than most other minorities. I meet people from India, from China. They all behave like Jews. John Derbyshire is married to a Chinese lady and she says all her friends are big Obama supporters. It’s all ethnic identity. I’ve known black people who were devout Christians, who were against abortion, who prayed over food when they ate it, and they loved Obama and they thought George W. Bush wanted to re-enslave every black in America because being a Democrat was black ethnic identity. It was being on the side of the minority party against the Christian white majority that was going to oppress you.”

Luke: “Would it make sense for a national state such as the United States to pay special attention to the activities of tribes and perhaps giving them greater scrutiny before perhaps giving them access to power and national security interests?”

Paul: “We’re beyond that. I can’t even imagine that. There’s not even a WASP leadership running the country. What you have are groups of minorities who distrust each other. My wife gets New York magazine which is put out by Jewish liberals and you think that once you leave New York, it is entering Nazi Germany. Their sense of the world is so provincial. They seem to hate cowboys in Texas, and fundamentalist preachers in Oklahoma. They think these are nasty people who are going to come after them as Jewish liberals. But the WASPs don’t seem to care. They buy into all this stuff. They want to please. They want to accommodate. The ones who are patriotic are patriotic about America as a universal nation going abroad to destroy the enemies of human rights. They have no sense of ethnic identity. These nutty ideas — propositional nationhood, human rights, liberal internationalism — were invented by whites. There’s no concern to preserving their own cultural hegemony in the United States.”

Luke: “Remember when Osama Bin Laden was killed, people poured out on to the streets, the people were overwhelmingly white and Protestant.”

Paul: “True. It was seen as a patriotic act. WASPs are patriotic but it is a patriotism that is made to incorporate Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Stonewall, and the rest of this stuff. It is a progressive narrative that fills their patriotism. It is a cumulative leftism that goes into this WASP patriotism… While I would like to restore WASP hegemony of the old form, I can’t think like a WASP. I don’t even know what goes into their heads. I understand people who try to preserve their identity. People who go around beating themselves on the head because they were prejudiced or used to own slaves, it’s all very nutty. I’m trying to read the minds of people whose behavior is incomprehensible to me.”

“The WASPs have a certain kind of guilt culture. They internalize the guilt, which is very good for lawfulness, for republican government, for self-government, but it is not the way most people act and think. An Italian friend was telling me that they had to lie about where their niece was staying so that they could get reduced insurance rates. They told their older son, ‘Tell the insurance company that Laura lives here.’ He asked me, do you think I did the right thing? I said, of course you did the right thing. You have to protect your family.

“Then he had a teacher from India who taught Sanskrit who said, in my village, I would do the same thing. Then he asked this Methodist who said, you did a terrible thing. Each individual should never lie. And he went on and on.

“Both sides are right. Traditional societies would take the side of this Italian guy and WASP individuals would take the side of the Methodist.”

Luke: “I know Jews in the entertainment industry who don’t care about the effect of their work on society. They feel no loyalty to the wider society.”

Paul: “What they would typically say, since Jews are very verbal, is that this is good because it is breaking down Christian prejudice.

“I suppose from a Protestant sense, from an Old Testament sense, I would say this is terrible, you are breaking down communal morals, but this is exactly what they want to do. I don’t think this is just an indifference to morals, there’s a certain malice that lies behind it. In many ways, it is a moral act, a kind of inverse morality they are practicing.”

Luke: “Are Jews served by putting themselves off-limits to any group criticism?”

Paul: “It’s an expression of power. Usually the ones who run to shut you up are Christians. It makes you wonder about the prospects for white nationalism, these people are just running to serve someone else’s interests, which are not your own. Morally, culturally, it is not good that this happened. I don’t see it being changed.”

“Neoconservatives are selectively for academic freedom when it advances what they see as Jewish interests. They’ll say it’s everybody’s interests.”

“They also hate the Russians because their ancestors came from Russian villages. If you say nice things about the Russians, they don’t like it. I’ve noticed that all the magazines that take money from neoconservative foundations and from Rupert Murdoch take the same party line on certain countries and certain issues. I don’t see any of this changing. We are not going to change anything.”

“The Jewish positive [intellectual] tendencies are seen in science and business. Most of the Jewish cultural [and political] influence in America is very bad. I just don’t see the good cultural influence of Jews.”

Luke: “That comes from non-Orthodox Jews because Orthodox Jews don’t participate in these things.”

Paul: “Speaking as a German Jew, most of them come from Eastern European Jews. Orthodox Jews don’t do much one way or the other [in culture and politics]. It seems that the only political interest they have is Israel. The [Modern] Orthodox are ardent Zionists.”

“The WASP contribution to American culture is nil at this point. It’s not that Jews are singularly evil but that the group that once provided cultural leadership is gone.”

Luke: “Have Jews collectively been more of a blessing or a curse to the United States?”

Paul: “I think it is mixed.”

“Just because I like Bach and Goethe doesn’t mean I have to like Hitler.”

“Jews have brought with them a certain kind of animating force, which I don’t see in WASPs anymore. The brain stupefaction of WASPs never ceases to amaze me. There are exceptions. Jared Taylor is one. Sam Francis is another. I would say that most of the WASPs I have admired have been southerners.”

“The neocons will call any Jew they don’t like a self-hating Jew. Anyone who disagrees with them is a self-hating Jew.”

Luke: “What do you think about the accusation that American Jews have dual loyalties [to America and to Israel]?”

Paul: “I could say what the late Joseph Sobran said, ‘What’s so dual about it? Is there any country but Israel for them?’ That’s partly true. Theoretically, they love Israel as a Jewish land but they are not going to go there to live. It’s some distant country they admire. In traditional Jewish circles [outside the haredim], anything for Israel is good. But they’re not going to leave the United States. They have a physical and financial and residential attachment to the United States.”

Luke: “Do you ever pause before saying anything to ask yourself whether this will be good or bad for the Jews?”

Paul: “Never… I was not even raised to think that way.”

Luke: “My perception of tribal identity is that you can never go wrong within your tribe by putting your tribe’s interests first.”

Paul: “If you would put Jewish interests first, you would not care at all about what happens to white Christian society in which you are living, but if that goes down, Jewish tribal interests are not going to survive long. It’s linked to a larger whole no matter how much Jews despise their white Christian allies.”

Luke: “What percentage of American Jews would you estimate care more about Israel than about America?”

Paul: “It would be true of the Modern Orthodox Jews I have known… and the older generation of liberal Jews. That’s a vanishing sentiment.”

Luke: “I was watching Alan Dershowitz’s 2009 documentary The Case For Israel, and in the last 20 minutes he complains about how Israel is singled out for human rights violations. I think that is philosemitism. Our actions are singled out because we are a more interesting people. Nobody cares what the Arabs do because they don’t produce anything.”

Paul: “You could say the same thing about South Africa because it was a white Protestant society. The horror over Nazi crimes was much greater than the horror over Soviet crimes because Russians are seen as barbaric people compared to the Germans. Atrocities committed by people more like yourself become harder to justify.”

Luke: “Do you think South African whites simply lost the will to rule?”

Paul: “Exactly.”

Luke: “Do you think American whites have been losing the will to rule?”

Paul: “Yes. I don’t think the Israelis have. I greatly admire the Israelis. The thing I admire about the Israelis is that they don’t give you any human rights nonsense. They don’t talk about global democracy. I give the Israelis as a model of political realism. They don’t even hate their enemies, but they wouldn’t think twice about shooting them.”

“I once met David Duke. I thought he was a nutcase. I don’t fit into the radical right. I don’t like people who are visceral antisemites. Kevin MacDonald is fine. He wants to criticize Jews and I generally agree with what he says. Someone like David Duke and William Pierce viscerally hate Jews. They want to destroy them. I find that to be a vile sentiment.”

“Jim Kalb and I had the same problem. We were known to be friendly with socio-biologists. What they say makes sense to me, but I am not a deep racialist. I do not hate people because they’re black. I would be very happy if black people didn’t vote. I would be very happy if the Civil Rights movement had failed. That’s because I would like America to remain an old-fashioned constitutional republic with a sane immigration policy. I would even vote for black people if I agreed with their views. I am not a white nationalist. Is Jared a stronger white nationalist than I am?”

Luke: “What do you think will happen to America?”

Paul: “It will muddle through for a while because it is so rich. I think the whites will become so decadent that they will allow the minorities to do whatever they want. There will be no core loyalty except to social programs. The government will give out victimological credits. Tribal divisions will become so severe that it will convulse the country. At some point, the saints will rise up and try to preserve what there is left of white society.”

Luke: “Do you think different races can live in the same land for very long without conflict leading to war?”

Paul: “It depends upon proportions.”

Luke: “Do you think we will ever restore freedom of association in this country?”

Paul: “WASPs will never allow it. They’re so decadent and full of guilt and political correctness.”

Luke: “I will pull this together.”

Paul: “Please feel free to cut out my effusions of hate.”

Luke: “Oh no, I love your effusions of hate.”

Paul: “Jared Taylor, being a Southern WASP aristocrat, would never say those things.”

Luke: “Jews are much more visceral and emotional and passionate in their hatreds.”

Paul: “I’m afraid that I came across as someone insufficiently racist.”

Paul knew the late Phil Rushton. “The guy was an incredible researcher. He was not in any way motivated by malice. He was convinced of the conclusions of his scientific research.”

“These people [along with Arthur Jensen] have a 19th Century mentality. They think that if you prove something scientifically, people will accept it. Political correctness is not at all about rationalist or science.”

“Most of the kids I tried to teach did not have the grey matter to do college work so you had to entertain them, give them social work courses or major in communications. If one tried to run a college on the basis of being able to attract students with the cognitive wherewithal to do college work, you’d have to close up your place. Most small colleges and state universities are dealing with people who do not have the IQ to do college work. They’re bored by it. There’s little effort to get them to study. They’re simply customers who bring money in. Students are sent into a learning situation they do not have the means to deal with.”

By the 1990s, Paul had been purged from National Review, followed by Peter Brimelow, Steve Sailer, John Derbyshire, and Robert Weisberg.

“You don’t want millions of blacks to be mobilized because they were going to vote for the left. I would have been the last one to vote for female suffrage for the same reason.”

Paul Gottfried writes for VDARE:

Jews are also a more cohesive group than WASPs—who may be the least unified and most atomized ethnicity on earth. A diatribe against WASPs will not hurt its author and may even bring him or her admiring recognition. By contrast, adverse comments about Jews, or about the“Holocaust Industry” in the case of Norman Finkelstein, who (despite being Jewish himself) lost his job at Depaul University after Alan Dershowitz weighed in against him, can be professionally fatal.

The late Joe Sobran once observed that denying that Jews are powerless can bring swift retribution. That is precisely because the Jewish community is anything but powerless. The professionally conscious intellectual is also expected to stress the supposed agonies of the American Jewish experience—for example, the virulently anti-Semitic past for which American Christians are considered responsible.

…Jews in public life pose a special problem in the US and in other Western democracies to the extent that they overwhelmingly follow a certain behavioral and attitudinal pattern. The problem is not only that these Jews work collectively to discredit any traditional gentile way of life. They also work reduce the possibility of debate about what they condemn, because they associate (and get others to associate) open discourse with bigotry and anti-Semitism.

For confirmation one need only check the websites of quintessentially Jewish organizations as the Anti-Defamation League and the Canadian Jewish Congress, or such predominantly Jewish organizations as theSouthern Poverty Law Center ($PLC to VDARE.com. There one learns that only bigots and anti-Semites would oppose gay marriage. The CJC has repeatedly used its weight to make sure that anyone who criticizes the desired social innovation will be prosecuted in court for “hate speech”.

Jews in public life and in academe have trouble living in an intellectually open society, because it would allow those whom they fear and/or loathe to be heard in open forums. This is something that Jewish organizations and Jewish intellectuals seek to avoid at all costs, through “Hate Speech” laws, academic speech codes, and associating dissent with the Holocaust or anti-Semitism.

During forty years in “higher education”, I never ceased to be amazed by how allergic most of my Jewish colleagues were to open discussion. Never did they wish to see opened a question that they collectively decided to close, allegedly for the sake of combatting prejudice and discrimination. (It goes without saying that everything featured on VDARE.com would qualify as off-limits.)

But this war on forbidden thoughts does not end with what VDARE.com dares to discuss. My Jewish colleagues and the ones I read in academic journals never tire of invoking certain guilt-infused taboos, reminding their subjects about how little they had done to atone for racism, sexism, and other currently condemned attitudes…

One cannot have both a free society and one controlled by the current crew of Jewish intellectuals and journalists.

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Jews Ordered To Register In Donetsk, Ukraine

The Jewish Press reports:

On the first day of Passover this week, three armed men in the eastern Ukrainian province of Donetsk distributed flyers warning Jews to “register” themselves and their assets with the new pro-Russian government, according to the novosti.dn.ua website.

The flyers were handed out next to a synagogue as people were leaving following holiday prayers. They read as follows:

“Dear Ukraine citizens of Jewish nationality,

Due to the fact that the leaders of the Jewish community of Ukraine supported (Stepan) Bendery Junta, and oppose the pro-Slavic People’s Republic of Donetsk, [the interim government] has decided that all citizens of Jewish descent age 16 and older, residing within the territory of the republic, are required to report to the Commissioner for Nationalities in the Donetsk Regional Administration building and register by May 3.

(Ed. Note: Stepan Bander was a Ukrainian nationalist leader in Kiev who fought with Nazi Germany in the 1940s against Soviet troops before switching sides and taking up arms against the German occupation.)

“ID and passport are required to register your Jewish religion, religious documents of family members, as well as documents establishing the rights to all real estate property that belongs to you, including vehicles. Evasion of registration will result in citizenship revocation and you will be forced outside the country with a confiscation of property. A registration fee of $50 is required.”

This frightens me. I think it portends ill for the welfare of Jews in the Ukraine. It also seems reflective to me of the way the world works.

It seems incontrovertible to me that Jews and other members of tribes have a different relationship to the nation-state than do non-Jews. To be blunt, I suspect that many tribes are less loyal than the majority population (as measured by law-abidingness, honesty with taxes, civic participation, etc). Because of this, it seems rational to me that a nation-state might want to keep a special eye on special tribes.

Most Jews are not revolutionaries, but history shows that a disproportionate number of leftist revolutionaries are Jews.

As Ashkenazi Jews are on average about 15 IQ points above the goy, they are going to have a disproportionate influence on society compared to their numbers. It would make sense for a nation-state to keep a special eye on them and to warn Jewish leaders that they will expel anyone who threatens the nation.

In the book, Why the Jews?: The Reason for Antisemitism, the authors write: “Finally, does not the fact of Jewish nationhood still mean that Jews are members of two nations — the Jewish nation and the nation among whom they reside? Yes, and in this respect Jews are unique; but so long as moral rather than national values are held supreme, this should trouble no one.”

When Jews adopt the majority’s national identity to the exclusion of their Jewish national identity, they soon cease to be Jews. They assimilate.

In my experience, to belong to a tribe means putting the tribe’s interests first. It’s hard to imagine any tribe penalizing a member who puts the tribe’s interests above that of the nation they live in.

As an Orthodox Jew, my first identity is that of an Orthodox Jew. My primary thoughts and concerns are about the welfare of Jews. While I abide by Jewish law, it is difficult to have much social intercourse with non-Jews and non-observant Jews. You belong to a people set apart. The more religious the Jew, the less he interacts with non-Jews and the more narrowly focused his life becomes.

If Israel were run by Torah law, sex between Jews and non-Jews would likely be illegal. It would also be likely that non-Jews would have to specially register and they may well face significant discrimination and be at risk of expulsion. So I don’t think we should be surprised when non-Jews establish nation-states that make minority populations specially register and receive extra surveillance and face the risk of expulsion if they rock the boat.

According to Wikipedia: “Kahane’s legislative proposals focused on transferring the Arab population out from the Land of Israel, revoking Israeli citizenship from non-Jews, and banning Jewish-Gentile marriages and sexual relations, based on the Code of Jewish Law compiled by Maimonides in the Mishneh Torah.”

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