Why is there such a large achievement gap between Jews and non-Jews. Why are Jews wealthier and more powerful than any other group, religious or racial?
I see these possibilities:
* High Jewish IQ. Ashkenazi Jewish IQ average in America has been measured at around 110, five points higher than East-Asians and ten points higher, on average, than whites.
* Ethnic networking. Jews enjoy more group solidarity than other groups.
* The wisdom of the Jewish tradition. Judaism, for instance, is the most this-world oriented of the world’s religions.
If you look at things statistically, almost all of Jewish success can be accounted for by the higher average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews. Sephardic, Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jews don’t out-achieve Gentiles on average.
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In a previous blog post, I noted Jews and Judaism’s open and frank attitudes towards sex. For one comparison, look at the difference in attitudes in Israel and America. Prostitution is essentially legal and widespread in Israel while it is illegal in most of America. The world’s pornography industry and sex trafficking industry have a disproportionate number of secular Jews in them. In American legal history, it has largely been secular Jews who’ve pushed for more liberal and accepting attitudes towards sex, porn and the like. American Jews have long opposed censorship of pornography at a much higher rate than other religious and ethnic groups. As someone who grew up in churches but then converted to Judaism in his 20s, I find much more frank talk about sex, porn, prostitution and the like at shul than I ever did at church.
Posted inJews, Prostitution|Comments Off on What Are The Origins Of The Word ‘Jewess’?
Are Jews more obsessed about sex than other people? That’s the complaint of many people who don’t like Jews. That was one of Hitler’s complaints about Jews in his book Mein Kampf.
I say Jews are a reflection of Judaism’s greater ease with the natural passions for things such as sex, honor, money, fame, etc.
Almost everybody wants good sex, good money, good fame and the like. I don’t think Jews want these things more than other people, they just feel freer than most people to voice what they want because Judaism is a religion of law, allowing the Jew to be more open about what is going on inside of him. Jews are more open, in general, more emotional, more passionate, than non-Jews.
A major reason that the sacred texts of Judaism devote so much space to sex is that Judaism and Jews are focused on this life. Judaism is the most this-life focused of the world’s religions and sex is a major pre-occupation for people in this world. Saints don’t worry about sex, humans do.
The most comprehensive survey of American’s sexual habits found that Jews, more than any other religion, had the most sex partners (approximately twice as many as Catholics and Protestants). I suspect that most of the Jews in the survey, like most Jews in America, were secular and therefore less inhibited.
In real life, it is easy to notice that Jews tend to speak more frankly about sex, money, power, fame, honor and the like and that secular Jews are more uninhibited sexually, in general, than other white people, while traditional Orthodox Jews are more likely than the goyim to reserve sex for marriage.
For one comparison of the different Jewish and Gentile attitudes to sex and hookers etc, look at the difference in attitudes in Israel and America. Prostitution is essentially legal and widespread in Israel while it is illegal in most of America.
The world’s pornography industry and sex trafficking industry have a disproportionate number of secular Jews in them. In American legal history, it has largely been secular Jews who’ve pushed for more liberal and accepting attitudes towards sex, porn and the like. American Jews have long opposed censorship of pornography at a much higher rate than other religious and ethnic groups.
As someone who grew up in churches but then converted to Judaism in his 20s, I find much more frank talk about sex, porn, prostitution and the like at shul than I ever did at church.
Judaism has a strict moral code and Orthodox Jews, by and large, tend to live by it at least as much as other groups live up to their codes. As befitting their high average IQ, Jews, I am sure, commit sex crimes at a much lower rate than Gentiles. Jews have long been famous for the stability and depth of their family life. Everywhere Jews have gone in the world, they’ve tended to have a more stable family life than their Gentile neighbors and to commit crimes at a lower rate, including sexual crimes. On the other hand, secular Jews have pushed for looser sexual mores and this has disproportionately hurt the low IQ groups, such as blacks, more than high IQ groups such as themselves.
Those Jews who are the most Jewish, who most practice Judaism, who most study the Talmud, are the most sexually moral. They have stable family lives. They’re law abiding. They are the group of Jews who pose the least threat to goyim. They are the least likely to have any kind of intercourse with goyim, sexual, social or whatever. There are lots of things in Talmud that sound horrible on their face, but Talmud is meant to be studied with a learned rabbi and the process of studying it is usually elevating. There aren’t many Jews who come out of a Talmud class and start raping and pillaging.
A severe chastisment of the erstwihile American elites by a unique figure, a right-wing Jewish anti-neocon Paul Gottfried
by Paul Gottfried
A remark by Richard Brookhiser in April in a syndicated column in the New York Post about “how we’re all WASPs now” made me realize that Brookhiser’s statement taken in context does not prove what he thinks he’s saying. A journeyman author, long associated with NR, Brookhiser, to all appearances, is an upper-class WASP endowed with all the proper manners and tics. Nonetheless, for decades he’s been in the employ of the neocons, people who would hardly qualify as bon gratin.
A scene involving one of their leaders, John Podhoretz, sticks vividly in my mind. While in the employ of the Washington Times, where Arnaud de Borchgrave entertained him lavishly as a favor to his parents, the present editor of Commentary was known for his crude table manners and general loutishness. I recall seeing him in Borchgrave’s office slouched over his chair and (dare I be so frank) picking his nose while in conversation with the apparent boss. (Actually it was Norm and Midge who called the shots at the WT then.) But people like John Podhoretz are precisely the ones whom Brookhiser and other WASPs, and particularly those at The New Criterion, have been kissing up to for years.
This subordinate position certainly does not demonstrate the assertion that “we’re all WASP patricians now.” The fact is members of our onetime dominant ethnicity and its onetime social elite are down on their luck. They’ve been reduced to menials serving at the beck and call of other groups, and in the journalistic and media world, this means working for Jewish liberals and Jewish neocons.
Such a situation should distress the new class of menials (perhaps it does!), but as I’ve indicated in more scholarly venues, their fate is entirely deserved. Elites that melt into spasms of guilt or niceness and which fail to continue to produce figures of the caliber of George Kennan, the Tafts, Robert E. Lee, Henry Adams, etc are not going to continue to be around as social, political, and cultural leaders. In doing research for my book on multiculturalism, I encountered statistical information that showed the decline of WASPdom since the middle of the last century in just about every area of human endeavor. The exception here (and it’s nothing to be proud of) is the disproportionate white Protestant representation at the public trough, and particularly in the ranks of the GOP. The last significant WASP patrician in public service was our recent, unmissed president, George W. Bush, someone whose ancestry is almost as noteworthy as the evidence of his verbal ineptitude. Needless to say, W took orders, whether or not he understood them, from neocon control-persons.
Clearly we’re not all WASPs now; and in my book Encounters I described in detail how differently the WASP gentry behaved when I was at Yale in the 1960s as compared to the Jews and even Irish Catholics. The WASP gentry were noticeable for their lack of élan and for their overpowering desire to be non-controversial. The Jews, by contrast, were conspicuously nasty. They had chips on their shoulders, and profoundly loathed the group they were destined to replace. Once they took over academic and journalistic posts these parvenus left no doubt who was in charge. They behaved with an ideological and sociological intolerance that was truly breath-taking.
Even that over-the-top critic of Jewish power, Kevin MacDonald, has hardly scratched the surface in delineating the nastiness with which the children and grandchildren of Eastern European Jewish immigrants clawed their way to the top of the academic-media industry, on the backs of those they often despised. And all the while they appealed with brilliant success to a guilty WASP conscience.
This tactic worked like a charm because of the ruthlessness and hypocrisy of those doing the climbing and because of the mentality of those they supplanted. Apparently WASPs suffer from an onerous sense of guilt toward others whom their ancestors excluded or were alleged to have discriminated against. Other groups, particularly Jews, blacks, Irish Catholics, and Latinos, consider themselves to have been the victims of discrimination, and they therefore happily associate with the Democratic Party, as an in gathering of victimized ethnicities.
One may attribute the WASP’s far deeper sense of social guilt to any number of causes, but his ancestors were hardly worse than those of the groups whom he now worships as designated victims. Did African blacks treat their slaves better than did American slave-owners? What about the Muslims who dragged captured blacks eastward, to Arab countries, well into the twentieth century, when they weren’t enslaving European Christians, whom they captured in naval raids? When one of my students, who himself is predictably WASP, noted in class that his ethnic group lost influence in the US “because they practiced discrimination against other people,” I asked somewhat impatiently: “How the hell did everyone else get into the country?”
Certainly many other groups have been more oppressive than American WASPs. Human history is full of them. But no other group, except for their pathological German cousins, seems to enjoy quite as much as WASPs the ecstasy of wallowing in guilt. And no other group seems quite as easily swayed to engage in moral crusades, perhaps to atone for their past sins as racists, sexists, or whatever. Unfortunately these crusades show our WASP population at their worst, trying to save the rest of the world with confected “human rights” after laying waste to their countries. If there’s anything WASPs should feel inexpressibly guilty about, it is this Jacobin fervor that causes them to unleash wars on other societies in order to bring them the gift of American democracy. But for some reason my Republican WASP neighbors think such devastation is alright and may be redemptive for its victims. After all, blowing up non-democrats is not reprehensible in the same way as refusing to let other ethnicities into WASP country clubs or being against affirmative action for Australoid transvestites.
Although I’ve loads of respect for their Protestant antecedents, I can’t say that I like or respect this present generation of WASPs. And least of all can I understand why their elites, by the time I was in my teens and early twenties, began to feel guilt toward those who hated their guts. As a great Italian thinker Pareto pointed out about a hundred years ago, ruling classes fall not so much because of opposition from below as they do from disintegration from above. Or as the Russians put it, the fish rots from the head on down.
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They were all teenagers then, charged as adults for their violent crimes. At the D.C. jail, they found solace in a book club, reading memoirs and reciting poems they had written.
Over the past year, they finally came home. They see themselves as reformed men who did dumb things as kids but who know that others may have trouble forgiving.
So they stick together. The support system that strengthened them then is the one they are counting on to help them now that they’re out. The unlikely community has become an unlikely lifeline, as they try to defy the patterns that send ex-offenders back to jail.
They fall into a high-risk category: Juveniles tried as adults are 34 percent more likely than youth tried as juveniles to return to prison, according to a 2007 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The alumni of the book club have no interest in becoming part of this statistic. So they work together to create goals. They applaud when someone meets his goal, such as when Barksdale got a job working full time as a city maintenance worker. They share job leads and work out together and meet up for pancakes.
It`s widely argued that the reason that blacks tend to perform poorly in schools and jobs is their fear of being accused by other blacks of "acting white." Thus in the current issue ofThe New Republic, linguist John McWhorter, the celebrated black intellectual associated with New York`s Manhattan Institute, lauds the new book Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregationby Stuart Buck (who is white—see picture.) McWhorter argues, "Much of the reason for the gap between the grades and test scores of black students and white students was that black teens often equated doing well in school with `acting white.`"[Guilt Trip, June 24, 2010]
In an interview with Buck about his book, Rod Dreher defines"acting white" as when "academically accomplished black students are often accused of being traitors to their race (`acting white`) because of their good grades and study habits."
Buck`s main argument: blame black underperformance on the paradoxical consequences of integration. He explains:
"An integrated school can often appear to black students to be controlled by whites, or to be run in a way that benefits white students. Thus, the black student who tries to curry favor from the white authorities is seen as saying, `I`m better than you.`"
Buck declares:
"… I think there`s a strong case that `acting white` began with desegregation. First, as far as I could tell, black people who went to school before desegregation have testified unanimously (whether in autobiographies, newspaper articles, or personal interviews) that `acting white` was a completely foreign concept in their school days. After all, why would a child whose most-admired peers and mentors within the school were black think of any type of school behavior as `acting white`?"
But Wolters made clear, however, that one major cause of the decline of black communities was blackflight—middle class African-Americans fleeing contact with poor blacks.
Are blacks held back by fear of "acting white"?
No doubt this is often true. Yet the benefits that whites bestow upon blacks for acting reassuringly white (for example, the White House itself) are so lavish that it`s hardly certain what the net effect is. As Buck admits, when unsuccessful blacks denounce successful blacks for "acting white," there`s an obvious whiff of sour grapes about the proceedings:
"Indeed, in one of the earliest scholarly accounts of `acting white,` one of the poorer black students was remarkably frank about how he viewed the more accomplished black students in his class: `There`re just a few of these Uncle Toms at school, these are the goody-goody guys. Maybe I say this, though, because they`re doing a little bit better than I am. And maybe I`m a little bit ashamed of myself because I`m not doing as good as they are in school, and I`m jealous. Maybe that`s why I think of them as Uncle Toms.`"
One peculiarity of this popular "acting white"theory: there is significantly stronger evidence that a lack of intellectual ambition holds back otherwise capable Hispanics (especially Mexican-Americans) than that it debilitates African-Americans. But that never seems to come up in public discussion—probably because, as I`ve argued before, Anglos just find blacks much more interesting than Latinos.
Google finds 14 times as many pages featuring the phrases "African American" and "acting white" as it does "Mexican American" and "acting white." An expensive Harvard study by celebrity black economist Roland Fryer intended to
confirm the "acting white" hypothesis by showing that black students lost friends as they earned higher grades actually wound up demonstrating that this problem is much worse among Latinos.
Contrary to the claims of John McWhorter, African-American culture isn`t particularly anti-intellectual or anti-education … at least relative to the average black IQ of 85, some 15 points below the white average. [VDARE.com Note:Via Amazon.com`s search inside feature, we find that no mention of this IQ gap—indeed, the lettersIQ appear only twice in the book. Test gap?Check. Stereotype Threat? Check.
Parenting? Check. IQ? No.]For example, think of how many black intellectuals you can name?Probably quite a few. (You can start with McWhorter.)
Each advocated impressive albeit contrasting ideologies. Du Bois endorsed legal equality for the black elite—the "Talented Tenth",
as he called them. In contrast, Washington contended that building human capital among the black masses was key to their moving up from sharecroppers to factory workers.
An example of black ambition relative to Mexicans: taking the Law School Admissions Test might seem like a pretty white thing to do. Yet blacks do it vastly more than Mexican-Americans: in 2006, 11,288 blacks took the LSAT compared to only 1,789 Mexican-Americans. On a per capita basis, young blacks were four times as likely to take the LSAT as young Mexican-Americans.
The problem is that so many blacks took the LSAT that their average score fell at only the 12th percentile of the white distribution. In contrast, so few Mexican-Americans attempted the LSAT that those who did would have averaged at the moderately mediocre 29th percentile among whites.
White Americans constantly fret over whether black self-esteem is endangered by the mere mention of IQ gaps, but worry far less about the danger of overestimating how smart they are. Yet, that can lead even genuinely if modestly talented individuals into a disastrous career cul-de-sacs. For
example, 53 percent of blacks who begin law school never pass the bar exam, compared to only 24 percent of whites. In contrast, Hispanics are less likely to waste time pursuing degrees they aren`t cut out for.
In fact, the anti-educational bias in Hispanic culture certainly does keep down a fair number of Hispanics who really do have the brains to make use of education.
For example, Latinos who grow up in the U.S. have at least as bad a high school dropout rate as blacks, according to Nobel Laureate James Heckman`s 2007 study. Yet their IQ scores average about five points higher. P.L. Roth`s 2001 meta-analysis of 39 studies covering a total 5,696,519 individuals in America found that the white-Hispanic gap appears to be only about 65% as large as the notoriously unmentionable white-black gap.
In other words, while the Hispanic IQ glass is almost
two-thirds empty, it`s also over one-third full. So, why isn`t the Latino high school graduation rate better?
The likelihood that Latinos have the brainpower to accomplish more than they are currently is actually pretty good news, because they already outnumber blacks in the U.S. If this country is going to stay solvent over the next generation, especially if immigration policy remains jammed on full throttle, Latinos are going to have to earn a lot more income, so they can pay a lot more taxes.
But will they? Unfortunately, nobody knows how to motivate Latinos to stick with education.
Mexican-Americans tend to see pursuing education as being disloyal to la familia and La Raza. Mexican ethnic pride correlates with Mexican lack of education. PBS commentator Richard Rodriguez, who has been perhaps the most distinguished Mexican-American public intellectual ever since he published his gracefully written memoir Hunger of Memory way back in 1981 (i.e., there`s not much competition), argues:
“Americans like to talk about the importance of family values. But America isn`t a country of family values; Mexico is a country of family values. This [America] is a country of people who leave home.”
My theory: I suspect that class matters. Before McWhorter`s turning point year of 1966, African-Americans had been in America long enough for a class structure to emerge, with people of mixed-race descent largely on top. And the “one drop” rule for defining who was black typically kept them black.
In contrast, the Mexican-American population is constantly being replenished by immigrants from the lower reaches of the Mexican class pyramid.
Moreover, the racial barriers in America have always been low enough that the more successful and ambitious Mexican-Americans tend to marry Anglos. For example, a recurrent theme in Joseph Wambaugh`s long string of novels about the Los Angeles Police Department, from 1971`s The New Centurions through 2009`s Hollywood Moon,
is the ambiguously Latino character, somebody whose ethnicity could arguably be either Mexican or Anglo.
Thus, particularly in California, there hasn`t been much of a Spanish-speaking upper class to refine manners since the 1840s. And those role models who have existed have been unfortunately influenced by the fatalism and indolence of Spain.
McWhorter writes:
“I even sense from the testimonials I have received that if one particular year could be pegged as the time in which `You think you`re white making those grades?` `tipped` as a community commonplace, it would be 1966—perhaps because this was the year that `black power` ideology went mainstream in the black community.”
The birth of the Black Pride movement around 1966 meant that the African-American Talented Tenth switched from emphasizing their cultural whiteness to emphasizing their cultural blackness: there was now good money to be made in acting black.
But this meant that the manners of the black masses were no longer upbraided by starchy black upper class role models, like Carlton Banks on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
For example, one of the main characters in Tom Wolfe`s novel A Man in Full,is mild-mannered Roger White II, a black lawyer and Stravinsky devotee. He is known to his Morehouse college fraternity brothers, including the mayor of Atlanta, as Roger Too White. By the end of the book, even Roger Too White has figured out that the real money and power in modern Atlanta is in representin`.
White people will pay well to employ blacks who can act white—but as long as whites and blacks insist on assurances that the blacks are “authentic”, racial tensions will continue.
And the black-white educational performance gap is likely to continue even longer.
* I think you underestimate the time value of sex, and the ability to gain superior sex by eschewing education for more macho endeavors such as gang membership.
Students in the barrio who do good have to conceal it, otherwise they are beaten by gang members (if they are boys, no one cares about girls). Why? Because it is a signal of dominance. Football players who do well grade-wise of course are left alone. I personally have seen this in action as a barrio teacher.
Meanwhile, being a top HS football player OR gang member will get you a very hot girlfriend. Lets not be shy, for a 13 year old kid, the prospect of a really, really hot girlfriend three years out as an up and coming gang member, versus a ten year slog of almost total celibacy, and another ten years of near monk-like study, to finally get a girlfriend at age 30, is not an easy sale.
A boy that age is looking at twenty years of hard work. Without much reward, as he can see. Versus the guys he sees in the neighborhood, with girls and even kids. Yes the risk is greater (being shot) but he can run that risk just being a studios nose-to-the-grindstone kid. For a slightly enhanced (as he sees it) risk he gets much greater rewards.
Just as a dollar today is worth more than one ten years out, so too is a beautiful teenager to a teenage boy himself worth more than a prospective 30 year old twenty years from now. Particularly since he won’t be a provider, instead “spread your seed” type of guy.
Its not as if the White/Anglo culture values guys as providers (no fantasies about hunky beta guys that some lucky woman lands) and Mexican culture is even worse.
* How do we know that the mestizos and indios are smart? Something like 1/2 of Mexican teenagers are illiterate. It does not take much money to learn to read, nor does Spanish phonics take incredible brain power to master.
Now that isn’t to say that indios and mestizos are also a particularly undynamic, boring group. Just that they’re even less likely to have the minimal brain power required to benefit from acting white.
The rare as hens teeth slightly above average hispanic student has no hispanic friends because frienship is pretty much impossible across a 30 point (say ~110 for the bright aborigine and ~80 for his co-ethnics) IQ gap.
“Acting white” points towards the real personality differences between human groups that also matter. Whites aren’t just smarter than blacks, the behavioral differences are tremendous. Sailer himself has noted that more whites have IQ below 85 than blacks, but less intelligent whites don’t act like blacks. Why? because they’re acting white.
* Living on the Arabian Peninsula I have concluded that the imposition of strict shariah law is the only practical solution. Nothing like knowing you will receive a hundred lashes for talking to a girl or boy not related to you to change a gangbanger’s attitude.
* So that’s why there’s such a large and intractable Dancing Gap between blacks and whites — the pales who could actually cut a little rug fear being ostracized by fair-skinned fuddy-duddies for “acting black.”
* People from less study obsessed groups quite understandably don’t like others raising the stakes with the amount of time they have to invest in education, generally because they’d rather enjoy life.
And if they’re already insulated from competition, their quality of life is good and they have no prospect of being placed in a situation where it’s bad if they use their political leverage successfully (to prevent immigration, for’ex), who can really blame them for wanting to have more time to relax and goof off?
Certainly, I think most iSteve readers would not be that sympathetic to the behaviour of White people who adopt the “work ethic” (put euphemistically) of an Asian peasant and who would advocate this for all Whites rather than simply excluding the Asian peasant competition.
* I’ve watched this phenomenon my entire career. The treatment of good students by their peers ranges from ostracism to out and out persecution, sometimes violent.
I’ve mostly taught in rural schools that were almost entirely black, and pretty much everyone was on Free and reduced lunch.
Since gangs essentially run these schools (everything in Chicago migrates back to Mississippi), I sense an added incentive on top of the oft-discussed reasons for the “acting white” phenomenon, at least in rural areas. The academic students represent competition with the gang way of life. In some of these small villages, gangs have become the only real social institution. The studious kid represents a disruption of the transgressive, initiatory behavior that gangs continuously reinforce that is known as “the game”.
Another deep psychological factor that can be at play is that studiousness usually implies a somewhat stable home life, and the presence of a male role model (even though he’s often a grandfather, rather than a father). This is an affront to the tormentor, who constantly has to reinforce his chaotic existence through disrupting class, mindlessly reciting rap lyrics, and displaying gang affiliations, no matter how absurd it is (I’ve had students who literally spent all day rerolling a shirt sleeve and pants leg on the left or right side, depending on their Chicago-based gang affiliation).
* When high IQ white children go to school with asian children the whites and the asians intermarry.
When low IQ white children and latino children go to school together, the groups intermarry.
This doesn’t happen all at once, but it certainly becomes pervasive when the groups attend the same schools for two generations.
A good example here in California – massive numbers of people moved from Japan to California a long time ago – perhaps 100 or more years ago. The older generation worked very hard to preserve a separate cultural identity, teaching the children and grandchildren Japanese, trying to keep them interested in eating Japanese foods, some even at great expense arranged for the young ones to spend summers in Japan.
Despite the best efforts of the older generation, the Japanese in California married in to the larger white community. In fact, if you look at Japanese families that have been living in California for more than 100 years, more than 80% have intermarried with the white population to some extent.
Japanese and Whites in California have just melted in to one high IQ successful lump. “Japanese survivalists” that tell the young to preserve their culture by not intermarrying are laughed at the same way that “white survivalists” telling whites not to intermarry are laughed at.
You can’t tell what culture someone has just by looking at their skin. I am surprised that the rapper Drake hasn’t gotten more press in the HBD blog-o-sphere. Drake is culturally very jewish, he grew up in a majority jewish neighborhood, went to a jewish religious school, goes to shul for Yom Kipur and wears talit – the whole nine yards. Drake’s mom is 100% ashkenazi and his dad is 100% black and if you were to just look at his photos you would see a big muscular scowling black guy.
In many parts of california things are changing – the old rigid racial lines are sort of an artifact of the past – not relevant to the young.
High IQ whites and asians that attend the UC schools together find they have so much in common that there is no way to keep them from getting together.
Low IQ whites and latinos in the inland Empire find they have so much in common that there is no way to keep them from getting together.
I believe that California is the future of the USA and that race will melt away.
However, I don’t know how things work in the rest of the USA – can other people give me examples that prove me wrong? Is there a place in the USA where low IQ whites have been going to public school with latinos for 100 years where the two groups have NOT merged in to one?
Is there ia place in the USA where high IQ whites have been going to school with asians for 100 years and the groups have not melted in to one?
* Steve, I’m disappointed that you wrote “Before McWhorter’s turning point year of 1966, African-Americans had been in America long enough for a class structure to emerge, with people of mixed-race descent largely on top” without a parenthetical note about McWhorter’s melanin deficiency.
* Why do liberal Jews go on and on about black-white gap? Could it be to divert our attention from the Jewish-gentile gap, which is the most astounding in our society. And it never seems to be going away.
Jewish-black gap, Jewish-white gap, and even Jewish-Asian gap are quite dramatic.
Since Jews don’t want to call attention to their own power and privilege, they bitch and whine about white-black gap and dump all the blame on ‘white society’, though no group among whites are as successful and far ahead of others as Jews are.
If whites are guilty for leaving blacks behind, aren’t Jews especially guilty for leaving blacks WAY BEHIND?
* 30 minutes after reading your comment, I observe the following in Marin County, California. I’m in McDonald’s getting coffee. Enter two teenaged, obviously lower class whites with tatoos. So far no problem. As I leave store, wiggers get into 25 year old, paint-peeling Chrysler, parked in zone reserved for handicapped. At wheel of car is young black guy. I believe that in the U.S., the attraction for wiggers is the opportunity to piggyback on blacks’ immunity to the rules.
* Culture does matter in social achievement. Cultures that look down upon education for women will have ignorant women.
Italian-American parents have been less academically supportive of their kids than Jewish parents. Jewish parents took pride in their kids doing better. Italian-American parents–at least long ago–took offense when their kids did better; they took it personally, as if their kids were putting them down. The movie PADRE PADRONE shows what Italian youth were up against.
Also, we know from ultra-orthodox Jews that culture can narrowly define intellectual endeavor. Orthodox rabbis and scholars may be smart and knowledgable about the Talmud and Torah but they aint gonna become great scientists.
And in the American South, being smart or intellectual can get you called ‘liberal’ or ‘gay’. Even within the White Right community, you get called a ‘neocon’, a ‘zog’, ‘negrophile homo’, ‘lesbian’, etc, etc if you go against white nationalist orthodoxy. Try to have an open debate with morons at Stormfront, and it is impossible. If you say the Holocaust happened, you’re a ‘zog homo negrophile’.
And the equivalent of ‘acting white’ in white schools is called being ‘geeky’ or ‘nerdy’–like Anthony Michael in Breakfast Club. Geeks are not popular but they are tolerated in most white schools.
And try to argue for evolution among white Christian Southerners, and they look at you like you’re a ‘communist’. So, cultural stupidity holds a lot of white conservatives from achieving more in cultural and intellectual endeavors. Anti-intellectual bible thumping, flag waving, gun-hugging, and beer guzzling have made lots of conservatives stay stoooooopid.
So, culture does matter.
But culture is shaped to an extent by biology. Dumb people tend to have dumber cultures. If you got a people with IQ of 150 and a people with IQ of 85 and told each to edit and publish a journal of ideas, the 150 IQ group is gonna come up with more interesting ideas and views than 85 IQ group.
Much of black culture is dumb because too many blacks aren’t too smart. And even the smart ones tend to lack wisdom cuz blacks are by nature more uppity, self-centered, arrogant, and aggressive. Mike Dyson, Cornel West, and Henry Louis Gates may be smart guys but they are soooo full of themselves–always posing, preaching, and self-promoting–that they sound like bratty children then real scholars. They lack dignity and depth. They are slickity and slackity, like jazz musicians. All style, no substance.
The fact is many blacks don’t like ‘acting white’ because it feels alien to what their natural soul rhythm tells them–to git down and funky!! Basketball and football are games created by white men–as is the Olympics–,but blacks have no problem with doing that. Guns and beer were created by whites, but blacks love that too. Whites created the boombox and other musical stuff, but blacks love that too. So, it doesn’t matter if it was created by whites as long it’s fun and thrilling to the bouncy wouncy black butt. It feels natural to the black butt. But sitting still, being patient, and thinking quietly just aint natural to the black man. He starts asking, ‘what is this shit, man?’
* People revert to their natures under freedom.
Prior to the 60s, blacks were less free and still fearful of whites, so they ‘behaved’ better. Also, there were more social/moral/spiritual taboos within the black community. It could be scandalous even in the 1950s if a black entertainer used gospel music to sing about ‘my woman got a nice big butt’. So, the black community was under control due to external(white) and internal(black spiritual/moral)pressure.
But the 1960s not only liberated blacks but also women and youths. Black women got welfare and didn’t need their men no more. Indeed, single mother black women gained an advantage over black males since all they had to do was have kids to receive welfare.
And black men were sexually liberated too, and they got to screwing everyone instead of sticking around. Especially since their ho’s could get welfare, why bother to take care of ‘my woman and children’. Since fatherhood was dead and youth culture was all the rage, black kids began to act crazy and shit–using drugs, guns, and etc.
What took place was a kind of return-to-nature social dynamic. Well, not all races have the same natures, just as different dog breeds have different personalities or caninalities. For middle class whites, return to nature meant being like a hippie flower child. For blacks, it meant acting wild and funky, which was more damaging to society. To be sure, some whites became like pagan barbarians like old. Just look at trashy white Britons on welfare. They are like Vandals of old.
Well, we have returned to nature, but ironically paid for by super artificial big government which doles out welfare to those who act like animals.
(The rise of black male/white female sex is also the product of return-to-nature, as females in nature put out to toughest studs. This has been secured in pop culture through hiphop and Hollywood, and in higher culture via the promotion of Obama. Obama’s mother was a white woman of privilege, education, and intellect who went with a black guy. So, if rap culture tells white trash girls to have sex with blacks, Obama’s mother serves as an example to elite white women to go with blacks. It’s no wonder liberal Jews love Obama mucho.)
UK used to be more repressive and rigid, but the lower classes once looked to emulate respectable upperclassmen, and that had been the basis for some social harmony and stability.
But once the working class whites turned into the shirking class on welfare and turned to class rage via punk music and such trash, they turned into a bunch of drunken shiites and soccer hooligans.
* Before the real reason is known and understood there are a plethora of silly hypotheses. Such is the case now with black school achievement or Mexican school achievement. We have “the legacy of slavery explanation” and we have the “acting white” explanation.
Not so very long ago the cause of tuberculosis was unknown but that didn’t keep people from speculating. My favorite theory before Pasteur and Koch was that TB was caused by vampires.
Black people have about 70cc less gray matter in their frontal lobes. That accounts for their poor school performance. Period full stop.
People do indeed tend to impugn the mental acuity of slaves. But that prejudice evaporates like dew in the desert if the former slaves are normally intelligent. The Germans were Roman slaves for a millennium.
Similarly if almost all your friends are stupid and do poorly in school you may come up with a fanciful explanation. This is to confuse effect with cause. Better to blame the vampires.
* If a young man from a backwoods, trailer park West Virginia background happens to be born with very high IQ and happens to go to a prestige university and major in something useful like engineering, how likely is he to marry a high IQ female?
My understanding is that white prole culture tells young men to marry the best looking virtuous female they can get, and not to select on the basis of IQ.
On the other hand, Brahmin culture, Northeast Asian culture, Ashekenazi culture all stress over and over again to young men the truth that their sons’ IQ depends on the IQ of their wife’s family.
I have noticed that white Americans of European ancestry that grow up in neighborhoods with Brahmins, Northeast Asians, and Ashkenazi know that their sons will only succeed in life if their sons are born with high IQ, and that the only way to get high IQ for their sons is to marry a female from a very high IQ family.
On the other hand, white Americans who grow up isolated from Asians, Brahmins, Ashkenazi don’t seem to care how high the IQ is of the females they marry. Is the problem that no one has ever taught these young men that their sons need high IQ in order to succeed, or is the problem that these young men don’t understand the correlation between IQ of his wife and IQ of his sons?
“Each individual adopts a set of values which, if truly absolute in the world–so ordained by some almighty force–would make not that individual but his group . . . the best of all possible groups, the best of all inner circles.”
I only wish Wolfe had come up with a catchy name, which he, the coiner of “radical chic,” “the Me Decade,” and “the Right Stuff,” is certainly capable of. A reader writes:
“Tom Wolfe’s “fiction-absolute” structure of the mind has tremendous explanatory power.
Regarding (racial) groups with significantly different innate abilities, it would suggest that the 2 groups cannot ever live together in harmony. No group would ever agree to take part in a society that valued traits that would ensure that their group was valued less. Even though their group overall well being might be materially better, and any individual might gain status and prestige within this system, if it decreased the status potential of the group they will rebel and create their own values.
I have been waiting my whole life for someone to systematically explain this to me. It seemed intuitive but I wasn’t smart enough to systematically understand it.
It would also explain the phenomenon of political correctness. It never made sense to why telling the truth was such a big deal. Maybe the liberals understand the human mind better than I do. Maybe each particular group must feel that they have a theoretical chance to dominate or else there will be a psychological schism too large to bridge without overt domination of one group over another.
A diverse society therefore has two options: living a lie that every group is equal in ability (eventually backed by force as it fails) or a caste system backed by force.
This would seem to argue against neoconservative color blind society that ignores group differences. It would also argue against your citizenism where we are all aware of our differences but get along fine and only think about the nation as a whole.”
What happens is that people are perfectly capable of living happily in a society where their group is below average … until they think about it. The problem is that as time goes on, people general get more time on their hands to think about things like this, and more “ethnic leaders” to encourage them to dwell on the insult of it all.
The funny thing is that your group doesn’t even have to be below average for you to be outraged. Indeed, it appears to be a general pattern that the closer your group gets to being the top dog today, the angrier you get over slights to your group in your great-grandfather’s day, as JPod’s tantrum over immigration last Friday on NRO’s “The Corner” showed.
Let me add, thought, that the point of citizenism is not that its natural or easy but that it’s necessary to head off trouble caused by natural divisiveness.
A reader suggests the following potential replacements for [Tom] Wolfe’s important concept that “Each individual adopts a set of values which, if truly absolute in the world–so ordained by some almighty force–would make not that individual but his group . . . the best of all possible groups, the best of all inner circles.”
Hopefully one of these buzzwords for “fiction absolute” might pull it off:
Vanity paradigm
Group-hype
egocosmos
hypeomology
This little insight would explain much about why Black-American media culture so adamantly condemns assimilated, by-the-book blacks as “acting white”. If a critical mass of blacks decides to abide by the White egocosmos, it will damage the credibility of its black counterpart, and thus compell (eventually) blacks to accept being in second place in the dominant paradigm. Thus where going by the book might be the better individual strategy, the preservation of group vanity requires the instillment of an alternative paradigm reflecting the endowments of African-Americans, where they come in first and whites in second.
Any other suggestions?
Reader comments:
I think that ‘egocosmos’ takes it. A nice, smooth neologism that emphasizes the rootedness of the social myth in the inner urges, anxieties, and will-to-power of the subjects.
Thinking about Wolfe’s idea, I like the terms “group primacy,” “club primacy,” or to come at it differently “The Perfect Circle.” It could be given a more scientific note if we Latinzed it “Orbis Superbia.”
What the heck is “hypeomology?”
“Ideal type” I know, Max Weber used it in another sense, but since it has zero recognition in the general culture I say it is open.
How about three-word phrases? This isn’t an easy concept to get across, so maybe we should try being a little more expansive.
Tribal narcissism
“Tribal” is very good. “Narcissism” is close, but it sounds too self-contained, too aloof, whereas this phenomenon is more competitive, more relative, more needing to put other groups down to promote your own.
Vanity Paradigm
“Vanity” pays tribute to Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities,” although there Wolfe was using “vanity,” I would assume, in the sense of Ecclesiastes and/or Savonarola, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” rather than in the more contemporary sense of egotistical.
I think Wolfe is drawing an analogy to Kant’s philosophically sophisticated version of the Golden Rule, the Categorical Imperative, which says “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it would become a universal law.” (Another version: “Act so that the maxim … may be capable of becoming a universal law for all rational beings.”)
Wolfe’s “fiction-absolute” is the evil twin of the categorical imperative: “Each individual adopts a set of values which, if truly absolute in the world–so ordained by some almighty force–would make not that individual but his group . . . the best of all possible groups, the best of all inner circles.” In other words, “Act so that if the maxim became a universal law for all rational beings, your group must be seen as best.”
So, maybe some term calling attention to the contrast with Kant’s categorical imperative might help, such as “competitive imperative.” I kind of like “tribal competitive imperative.”
Muslims are clearly the implacable enemies of Jews right now and I suspect most Jews in Europe and America would prefer their continents were free of Muslims.
REPORT: Joseph Schuster discourages Jewish visibility in Muslim quarters, asks for improved security, but adds that ‘hiding is not the right way’
“The question is whether it makes sense to be recognizable as Jews in certain areas… by wearing a yarmulka, or whether it’s better to wear a different head covering. This is indeed a development that I didn’t see five years ago and that is a little frightening.”
In an interview with a Berlin-based radio station, Schuster said such areas include “problematic quarters,” particularly in Berlin but also elsewhere in Germany, “and districts with strong Muslim populations.”
One of Schuster’s predecessors, Charlotte Knobloch, advised German Jews not to make themselves recognizable as such in public.
Posted inAnti-Semitism, Germany, Islam|Comments Off on German Jewish leader: Don’t wear yarmulkas in certain areas
Steve Sailer writes: “When I was at UCLA’s MBA school in the early 1980s, a retailing professor had to warn female gentile students that they’d never get promoted beyond Buyer at any of Los Angeles’s major department store chains. Funny how you never hear that kind of discrimination mentioned. Of course, we don’t even have a word for it, so it’s hard to remember.”
Comments to Steve Sailer:
* She was born in the US yet still insists on wearing a headscarf? So much for the idea of assimilation or becoming Americanized. Watch, in time there’ll be demands that all publicly served meat be halal, there’ll be no-go areas for women not dressed in approved attire, and so on. Giving in one inch would be a huge mistake, there’ll never be an end to it. Their culture has a strange fixation on women’s hair where showing it is immodest, a bizarre concept to western people who think nothing of the sort.
* Officially Approved American culture: the lowest common denominator of everyone who happens to have a piece of paper saying they’re American.
* The last bit reminds me of some good advice given by an adjunct professor while I was a student at a prominent film school in LA. He said that gentiles should feel free to begin working at an agency (in the mail-room or as an assistant) as the first step to getting a job in development at a production company, but that they should never expect to actually become an agent.
* How far are we from the time when all these brands with a ‘preppy’ – read ‘white’ – image are compelled to abandon it in their advertising?
Brands like A&F, Ralph Lauren, Armani, Boss etc etc are overtly appealing to a white audience.
Under disparate outcome laws, it doesn’t matter what their motivation was for hiring each individual worker, or casting each individual model, its the effect in the aggregate that matters. If their stores rarely hire certain type of workers, or rarely cast certain types of models, and that can be proven statistically, they are prima facie guilty of discrimination in the aggregate and are culpable under disparate outcome laws.
So what’s the next step after that? How do they keep on cultivating an image, and appealing to target demographics if their in-store staff and their advertising campaigns are forced to run counter to that desired image? Will free speech prevail against disparate outcome? Given who’s getting their hands of the wheels of power, I’d very much doubt it.
* @Anonymous said:
“Have women completely taken over American diplomatic leadership?”
They have taken over the government. Today I spoke with someone from my state dept of agriculture, a country office for economic development, and an agricultural extension to the major state university. All were women. When I go to the VA hospital, almost all employees are women. I have yet, in the past couple of years not encountered government employees that were not women.
My belief is that they can afford to work for the wages the government pays because their sexual and social standing is not derived from their income like it is for males. So males have to seek the work that pays the most and hope it is interesting. Women seek work that is interesting to them and hope it pays OK or at least OK in benefits and security. Women find “things” or concepts boring and prefer the interacting with people that government work often provides. In addition they like the officious nature of cheap authority it gives them.
Can you imagine how female noses would turn up if a man disclosed he worked as a bureaucrat? I have yet to see some RomDramCom where the leading man was a government employee even though on paper, the guy would make a pretty good husband.
Posted inIslam, Jews|Comments Off on What Do You Call Animus Towards Gentiles?
Many people could benefit from an approach that prioritizes their interests over loyalty to abstract principles.
Should not loyalty to your group be a principle?
Extending this type of thinking to the West might well lead to more rights for majorities and fewer rights for minorities. How could a country with one dominant religious and racial identity become stronger from the admission of many races and religions? Then it would be up to the minority groups to make the case that their presence is a blessing.
When a country is at war, it employs censorship in its group interest.
Maybe it is impossible to have complete free speech. Perhaps every society has to hold certain things, certain symbols, certain identities, sacred. Perhaps every society to survive needs a soft totalitarianism in certain areas.
Is this fierce protection of Jews in the following story anti-Christian? Jews and the Christian missionaries described have clashing interests and when Jews assert their interests, that is not good for the Christians. Similarly, when Gentiles assert their group interests, that is called anti-Semitism when it clashes with Jewish interests.
JewishIsrael is pleased to see that a growing number of concerned columnists across the religious and political divide are covering the severity of the missionary problem in Israel. Writers such as Diane Bederman and Donny Fuchs have persevered despite the controversy and unpleasant challenges that come with exploring territory which is deemed “untouchable” in an era marked by Israel’s enormous dependence on evangelical Christian support.
Sacrificing principles which are fundamental to Judaism, Jewish identity and Jewish continuity should not be done in the name of “democracy”, “tolerance” or” freedom of religion and expression”. This is an issue all Jews can agree on regardless of political views or degree of religious observance…
The issue of increasing fundamental Christian influence in Israel should be of worry to every Jew concerned with the continuity of Judaism. This is an issue which should unify the Diaspora and Israeli communities rather than cause divisions along political and religious lines. JewishIsrael encourages thinking Jewish writers and activists to honestly explore this very challenging problem via a Jewish perspective, which requires putting partisan politics aside and prioritizing the survival of Israel as a unique Jewish nation.
The new Weimar constitution was drawn up under the guidance of
the great sociologist Max Weber. It gave parliament full financial
sovereignty for the first time. It was supposed to embody all the best
features of the American constitution. But it had one serious
weakness. The President, elected for a seven-year term, was not the
head of government: that was the Chancellor, a party figure respon-
sible to parliament. But the President, under Article 48, was endowed
with emergency powers when parliament was not in session. From
1923 onwards this article was pervertedly invoked whenever par-
liament was deadlocked. And parliament was often deadlocked,
because proportional representation prevented the development of a
two-party system and absolute majorities. To many Germans, who
had been brought up on the notion that Germany and the Germans
were a metaphysical, organic unity, the spectacle of a divided,
jammed parliament was unnatural. The argument that parliament
was the forum in which quite genuine and unavoidable conflicts of
interest were peacefully resolved was alien to them, unacceptable.
Instead they saw the Reichstag as a mere theatre for the enactment of
‘the game of the parties’, while the real, eternal, organic and
honourable Germany was embodied in the person of the President
and Article 48…
The cleavage within the constitution might not have mattered so
much had it not reflected a much deeper division in German
society, and indeed in German minds. I call this the East— West
division, and it is one of the central themes of modern times, in so
far as they have been influenced by Germany’s destiny. The princi-
pal characteristic of the pre-war German regime of princes, generals
and landowners, the law-professors who endowed it with academic
legitimacy, and the Lutheran pastors who gave it moral authority,
was illiberalism. This ruling caste hated the West with passionate
loathing, both for its liberal ideas and for the gross materialism and
lack of spirituality which (in their view) those ideas embodied. They
wanted to keep Germany ‘pure’ of the West, and this was one
motive for their plans to resume the medieval conquest and set-
tlement of the East, carving out a continental empire for Germany
which would make her independent of the Anglo-Saxon world
system. These Easterners drew a fundamental distinction between
‘civilization’, which they defined as rootless, cosmopolitan, immo-
ral, un-German, Western, materialistic and racially defiled; and
‘culture’, which was pure, national, German, spiritual and authen-
tic. 17 Civilization pulled Germany to the West, culture to the East.
The real Germany was not part of international civilization but a
national race-culture of its own. When Germany responded to the
pull of the West, it met disaster; when it pursued its destiny in the
East, it fulfilled itself.
In point of fact, it was the Easterners who had ruled Germany
throughout, who had created the war-anxiety, got Germany into
war, and then lost it. In the minds of most Germans, however, the
‘stab-in-the-back’ mythology refuted this factual analysis because it
attributed the loss of the war to the defeatism and treachery of the
Westerners, who had then signed the armistice, accepted the disas-
trous peace, introduced the Republic and enthroned ‘the rule of the
parties’. It was thus the Westerners who were responsible for all
Germany’s misfortunes in the post-war world, as was only logical,
for they were the puppets or paid agents of the politicians of the West
in Paris and London, and of the international financial community in
Wall Street and the City. Their outpost in Germany was the
parliament in Weimar. But authentic German culture still had its
redoubt within the Republic, in the person of President Hindenburg,
an Easterner par excellence, and in the authority of Article 48. In
time, that vital bridgehead could be extended.
For the moment, however, the Westerners were triumphant.
Weimar was a ‘Western’ republic. It stood for civilization rather than
culture: civilization was in office, culture in opposition. It is no
coincidence, either, that German civilization reached its gaudiest
flowering during the 1920s, when Germany, for a brief period,
became the world-centre of ideas and art. This triumph had been
building up for a long time. Germany was by far the best-educated
nation in the world – as long ago as the late eighteenth century it had
passed the 50 per cent literacy mark. During the nineteenth century it
had progressively established a system of higher education which for
thoroughness and diversity of scholarship was without equal. There
were world-famous universities at Munich, Berlin, Hamburg,
Gottingen, Marburg, Freiburg, Heidelberg and Frankfurt. The Ger-
man liberal intelligentsia had opted out of public and political life in
the 1860s, leaving the field to Bismarck and his successors. But it had
not emigrated; indeed, it had spread itself, and when it began to
resurface just before the Great War, and took command in 1918,
what was most striking about it was its polycentral strength.
Of course Berlin, with its 4 million population, held the primacy.
But, unlike Paris, it did not drain all the country’s intellectual and
artistic energies into itself. While Berlin had its Alexanderplatz and
Kurfurstendamm, there were plenty of other cultural magnets: the
Bruehl in Dresden, the Jungfernsteg in Hamburg, the Schweidnitzter-
strasse in Breslau or the Kaiserstrasse in Frankfurt. The centre of
architectural experiment, the famous Bauhaus, was in Weimar, later
moving to Dessau. The most important centre of art studies, the
Warburg Institute, was in Hamburg. Dresden had one of the finest
art galleries in the world as well as a leading European opera house,
under Fritz Busch, where two of Richard Strauss’s operas had their
first performance. Munich had a score of theatres, as well as another
great gallery; it was the home of Simplicissimus, the leading satirical
magazine, and of Thomas Mann, the leading novelist. Frankfurter
Zeitung was Germany’s best newspaper, and Frankfurt was a leading
theatrical and operatic centre (as was Munich); and other cities,
such as Nuremberg, Darmstadt, Leipzig and Diisseldorf, saw the first
performances of some of the most important plays of the Twenties. 18
What particularly distinguished Berlin was its theatre, by far the
world’s richest in the 1920s, with a strongly political tone. Its
pre-eminence had begun before the war, with Max Reinhardt’s reign
at the Deutsche Theater, but in 1918 republicanism took over
completely. Some playwrights were committed revolutionaries, like
Friedrich Wolf and Ernst Toller, who worked for Erwin Piscator’s
‘Proletarian Theatre’, for which George Grosz designed scenery.
Bertholt Brecht, whose play Drums in the Night was first staged in
Berlin in 1922, when he was twenty-four, wrote political allegories.
He was attracted to Communism by its violence, as he was to
American gangsterism, and his friend Arnolt Bronnen to fascism;
Brecht designed his own ‘uniform’, the first of the Leftist outfits –
leather cap, steel-rimmed glasses, leather coat. When The
Threepenny Opera, which he wrote with the composer Kurt Weill,
was put on in 1928 it set an all-time record for an opera by receiving
over 4,000 performances throughout Europe in a single year. 1 ^ But
the bulk of the Berlin successes were written by liberal sophisticates,
more notable for being ‘daring’, pessimistic, problematical, above all
‘disturbing’, than directly political: men like Georg Kaiser, Carl
Sternheim, Arthur Schnitzler, Walter Hasenclever, Ferdinand Bruck-
ner and Ferenc Molnar. 20 Sometimes the ‘cultural Right’ went for a
particular play, as when it tried to disrupt the first night of Der
frohliche Weinberg by Carl Zuckmayer (who also wrote the script
for The Blue Angel). But it was really the theatre as a whole to which
conservatives objected, for there were no right-wing or nationalist
plays whatever put on in Berlin. After watching a Gerhart Haupt-
mann play, a German prefect of police summed up the reaction of
Kw/tar-Germany: ‘The whole trend ought to be liquidated.’ 21
Berlin was also the world-capital in the related fields of opera and
film. It was crowded with first-class directors, impresarios, conduc-
tors and producers: Reinhardt, Leopold Jessner, Max Ophuls, Victor
Barnowsky, Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Leo Blech, Joseph von
Sternberg {The Blue Angel), Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder {Emil and
the Detectives), Fritz Lang {Metropolis). In designing and making
scenery and costumes, lighting-effects, the standards of orchestral
playing and choral singing, in sheer attention to detail, Berlin had no
rivals anywhere. When Wozzeck, a new opera written by Arnold
Schoenberg’s gifted pupil Alban Berg, received its premiere at the
Berlin State Opera in 1925, the conductor Erich Kleiber insisted on
no less than 130 rehearsals. 22 The 1929 Berlin Music Festival
featured Richard Strauss, Bruno Walter, Furtwangler, George Szell,
Klemperer, Toscanini, Gigli, Casals, Cortot and Thibaud. 23 Against
this background of talent, craftsmanship and expertise, Germany was
able to develop the world’s leading film industry, producing more
films in the 1920s than the rest of Europe put together; 646 in the
year 1922 alone…
The Right, in short, could practise violence with little fear of legal
retribution. Judges and juries felt they were participating in the battle between German culture and alien civilization: it was right to
recognize that violence might be a legitimate response to cultural
provocation. Thus when the great liberal journalist Maximilian
Harden, who was also a Jew, was nearly beaten to death by two
thugs in 1922, the would-be killers got only a nominal sentence. The
defence argued that Harden provoked the attack by his ‘unpatriotic
articles’, and the jury found ‘mitigating circumstances’.
The universities and especially the professoriate were overwhelm-
ingly on the side of Kultur. The jurists and the teachers of German
literature and language were stridently nationalist. The historians
were the worst of the lot. Heinrich von Treitschke had written of
Germany’s appointment with destiny and warned the Jews not to
get in the way of the ‘young nation’. His hugely influential History
of Germany in the Nineteenth Century, a Wilhelmine classic, went
into another big popular edition in 1920. Contemporary historians
like Erich Marcks, Georg von Below and Dietrich Schafer still
celebrated the achievements of Bismarck (the anniversaries of Sedan
and the founding of the empire were both public universities’
holidays) and the lessons they drew from the Great War centred
around Germany’s lack of ‘relentlessness’. They provided academic
backing for the ‘stab-in-the-back’ myth. The academic community
as a whole was a forcing-house for nationalist mythology. Instead
of encouraging self-criticism and scepticism, the professors called
for ‘spiritual revivals’ and peddled panaceas. 51
By sheer bad luck, the most widely read and influential book in
1920s Germany was The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler,
a foolish and pedantic schoolteacher. He conceived his book in
1911 as a warning against undue German optimism. He wrote it
during the war in anticipation of a German victory. Its first volume
actually appeared in 1918, when defeat gave it an astonishing
relevance and topicality. Thus it became a best-seller. The essence
of the book was social Darwinism. He defined eight historic cul-
tures and argued that the ‘laws of morphology’ applied to them.
The last, the culture of the West, was already showing symptoms of
decay, such as democracy, plutocracy and technology, indicating
that’ ‘civilization’ was taking over from ‘culture’. It seemed to
explain why Germany had been defeated. It also heralded a coming
age of cruel war in which would arise new Caesars, and democrats
and humanitarians would have to be replaced by new elites of
steel-hardened heroes who would look not for personal gain but
for service to the community. 52 He followed it up in 1920 with a
sensational essay, Prussianism and Socialism, which called for a
classless, national socialism, in which the entire nation worked
together under a dictator. It was exactly the sort of argument
Mussolini was beginning to put forward in Italy.
Neatly complementing Spengler’s analysis was the work of two
other important Easterners. Carl Schmitt, Germany’s leading legal
philosopher, who poured out a flood of books and articles during
these years, constantly stressed the argument that order could only
be restored when the demands of the state were given preference
over the quest for an illusory ‘freedom’. The Reich would not be
secure until Weimar was remodelled as an authoritarian state around
the principle embodied in Article 48. 53 The point was restated in a
historical perspective by the cultural historian Arthur Moeller van
den Bruck in a brilliant book published in 1923. The Germans, he
argued, were the leading European creators. Their first Reich, the
medieval empire, had formed Europe. Their second creation, Bis-
marck’s, was artificial because it had admitted the corruption of
liberalism: that, of course, was why it had collapsed under test.
Weimar was a mere interlude of chaos. Now the Germans had
another opportunity: by purging society of liberalism and capitalism,
they could build the third and final state which would embody all
Germany’s values and endure for a thousand years. He entitled this
remarkable exercise in historical prophecy The Third Reich, 54
Spurred on by their professors, the German student body, which
averaged about 100,000 during the Weimar period, gave an enthusias-
tic reception to these Easterner philosophies. The notion that the
student body is in some constitutional way a depository of humanita-
rian idealism will not survive a study of the Weimar period. Next to
the ex-servicemen, the students provided the chief manpower res-
ervoir of the violent extremists, especially of the Right. Student
politics were dominated by the right-wing Hochschulring movement
throughout the 1920s until it was replaced by the Nazis. 55 The Right
extremists proceeded by converting half a dozen students on a
campus, turning them into full-time activists, paid not to study. The
activists could then swing the mass of the student body behind them.
The Nazis did consistently better among the students than among the
population as a whole and their electoral gains were always preceded
by advances on the campus, students proving their best proselytizers.
Students saw Nazism as a radical movement. They liked its egalita-
rianism. They liked its anti-Semitism too. Indeed, the students were
more anti-Semitic than either the working class or the bourgeoisie.
Most German student societies had excluded Jews even before 1914.
In 1919 the fraternities subscribed to the ‘Eisenach Resolution’,
which stated that the racial objection to Jews was insuperable and
could not be removed by baptism. The next year they deprived
Jewish students of the ‘honour’ of duelling. In 1922 the authorities at
Berlin University cancelled a memorial service in honour of the
murdered Walther Rathenau rather than risk a violent student
demonstration. This policy of appeasement towards student violence
became the pattern of the 1920s, the rectors and faculties always
capitulating to the most outrageous demands of student leaders
rather than risk trouble. By 1929 the universities had passed almost
wholly into the Easterner camp…
It is probably true to say that Hitler’s cultural assets were the
source of his appeal. Popular detestation of Weimar culture was an
enormous source of political energy, which he tapped with relish.
Lenin’s notion of giving up music to concentrate on politics would
have been incomprehensible to him. In Germany, music was politics;
and especially music-drama. Hitler exemplifies the truth that ar-
chitectural and theatrical skills are closely related. His romantic-
artistic instincts led him to rediscover a truth almost as old as the
polls itself, which certainly goes back to the Pharaohs: that the
presentation of the charismatic leader, whether Renaissance mon-
arch or modern democratic politician, is at least as important as the
content. One of the reasons Hitler admired Wagner was that he
learnt so much from him, especially from Parsifal, which became the
model for his political spectaculars. The lesson he derived from the
Western Front was that wars could be won or lost by propaganda: a
thought which inspired his famous sixth chapter of Mein Kampf. The
object of all propaganda, he wrote, was ‘an encroachment upon
man’s freedom of will’. 67 This could be achieved by the ‘mysterious
magic’ of Bayreuth, the ‘artificial twilight of Catholic Gothic chur-
ches’, and both these effects he used; but he also plundered the tricks
of Reinhardt and other despised Weimar producers and the cinema of
Fritz Lang. The scenes of his oratory were designed and set with
enviable professional skill; the attention to detail was fanatical.
Hitler was the first to appreciate the power of amplification and the
devilry of the searchlight: he seems to have invented son et lumiere
and used it with devastating effect at his mass night-meetings. He
imported political costumery and insignia from Mussolini’s Italy but
improved upon them, so that Hitlerian uniforms remain the standard
of excellence in totalitarian sumptuary. Both Stalinism and Maoism
imitated Hitler’s staging, exceeding it in scale but not in style.
Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu is apparently a graduate in Journalism and Economics from The George Washington University and he writes for The Jewish Press:
Galloway has been released from the hospital, but it is doubtful that the attacker was able to beat some sense into his head.
The MP, who has built his political career on loving Saddam Hussein and Hamas and hating Jews and Israel, was posing for pictures in west London Friday night when the attacker jumped on him while calling him “Hitler.”
The assault “appears to be connected with his comments about Israel because the guy was shouting about the Holocaust,” said Galloway’s spokesman. The name of his one-MP party is Respect, which indicates his ignorance of the English language.
The party’s name is a very contrived acronym for Respect, Equality, Socialism, Peace, Environmentalism, Community and Trade Unionism. A more accurate acronym would be “Racist, Extremist, Satanic, Pisher, Ethnic=hatingt, Crude and Twisted.
Galloway has been under police investigation since his call earlier this month that the city of Bradford, which he represents, be an “Israel-free” zone that would bar Israeli tourist and place a total ban on anything related to Israel.
We wish Galloway a speedy recovery and hope that some of the medicine he needs is made in Israel.
Do Jews think that publicly rejoicing over the Jewish assault of a Gentile politician for his anti-Jewish beliefs is good for the Jews? Do Jews think that by encouraging such attacks this will redound to the benefit of the Tribe?
Posted inAnti-Semitism|Comments Off on Jewish Press Gloats That Anti-Jewish MP George Galloway Was Assaulted
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
