Luke Ford

From an objective perspective, I do not see how one can love or hate any group. The world consists of blacks and whites, mosquitos and Mexicans, lions and lambs, and these different forms of life have different evolutionary group strategies. When groups compete for scarce resources, there are winners and losers, and sometimes groups die out while others flourish and expand. A life form is either expanding or contracting.

From where I stand, that’s the objective perspective on life, and it is the one I generally strive for when I analyze the world on this blog though I grant that it is impossible to live this way, one can’t help but go through life speaking of right and wrong and dividing the world into good guys and bad guys.

As Kevin MacDonald (KMAC) puts it in his book A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy: “The idea of group strategies presents a quite different paradigm for human behavior. From a group strategy perspective, human societies are seen as ecosystems in which different human groups are analogous to species occupying a common ecosystem and engaging in competition and/or reciprocity with each other. Thus, in the natural world, an ecosystem may comprise producer species as well as several levels of predator species and parasitic (and hyperparasitic) species. Species may also enter into mutually advantageous roles vis-à-vis each other–what ecologists term mutualism. Each species may be viewed as having an evolutionary strategy by which it adapts to a particular ecosystem.”

“As in a natural ecosystem, it verges on theoretical impossibility for one species to develop the role of predator, parasite, and primary producer.”

In my naive days, I thought Jews were inevitably a blessing to the non-Jews they lived among, but now I see that it is as obvious as the nose on my face that all groups, including Jews, sometimes have a negative impact on out-groups in addition to neutral and positive effects. Just as Englishmen pursuing English interests have often had a negative effect on non-Englishmen and Muslims on non-Muslims and Christians on non-Christians, so too Jews in their pursuit of Jewish interests (for example, it might in Jewish interests for goyim to believe that they have proposition nations rather than blood and soil nations so that Jews can be full participants in these proposition states, but belief that one’s country is a proposition nation is pure poison, and thus what may be good for Jews is bad for gentiles) have inevitably done harm to non-Jews, just as non-Jews in their pursuit of gentile interests, have inevitably done harm to Jews (such as the Holocaust). To put it simply, life is sometimes war. What is good for one group (such as control of a particular territory) is often bad for other groups.

Once one has made the inevitable leap to loving a group, usually one’s own, then I do not see how a healthy person concerned with his own group’s welfare can avoid hating one’s enemy (and every group has enemies). If you are black and Jews are moving into your neighborhood, buying up property and influence, how can you not have negative feelings about Jews? If you are Jewish and you are sharing a community with blacks who commit a lot of crime and suck up government welfare, how can you not have negative feelings about blacks? To love your people means to hate its enemies. Such love and hate are simply two sides of the same coin — affiliation and affection for a particular people. Ties bind and blind. We naturally see our own people in the best light and out-groups in lesser light.

On Sunday, I spoke to intellectual Andrew Joyce, who wants the West to be Juden-free. Ironically, we started our conversation discussing Game of Thrones, and one way that Andrew saw that TV show as having parallels with the Alt Right was that the characters in it rarely were rarely controlled by abstract and universal moral dictums. Instead, they were preoccupied with what was best for themselves and for their families and for their groups.

Yet when we analyze Andrew Joyce’s writings, we see that he frequently moralizes about group-conflicts between Jews and gentiles. The free market perspective on life, by contrast, is that if adults freely arrive at a contract, there is no meaning to terms such as “exploitation” or “parasitism.” Instead, these terms denote a juvenile placing of moral labels on deals that do not deserve them.

If a Jew sells a payday loan to a goy with an interest rate of 1000%, is there a bad guy in this transaction? I don’t see it. Anybody so foolish to take such a deal is going to have a lifetime of equally foolish decisions behind him and in front of him, so this particular transaction is just a symptom rather than a cause of the dumb goy’s decline.

If a Jew tells a grown goy to suck off a dog, and the goy sucks off the dog and dislikes the taste, who’s the bad guy?

I can’t summon much indignation against other parties when I think back on my life and all the bad deals in the marketplace I’ve freely made (when there was no lying and illegal or unethical behavior). Therefore, I find it hard to summon indignation against the free market. Sure, the dumb get screwed, but the dumb get screwed in any system. Why are the Jews or any middle man minority the bad guys if they legally and ethically do a job better than their competitors? If they use underhanded means, then I understand and share the antipathy.

Andrew Joyce wrote: “The Jews of the Middle Ages engaged in no productive labor, almost all of them living parasitically from moneylending.”

Weren’t some of these Jews peddlers and engaged in other forms of commerce? How is peddling not productive? Does productivity only come from working the land? How is lending money less productive than other economic transaction? I don’t believe that lending money at interest becomes immoral at any particular interest rate if the deal is made between consenting adults and is conducted on legal and open terms. To say that lending at 30% interest is immoral is an arbitrary and moralistic designation.

Would you say that Jews today in the West engage in no productive labor and only exploitation? If not, what has changed from the Middle Ages? Jews gave us Hollywood, Google and Facebook. Have not these institutions enhanced our lives?

I remember Andrew saying on a podcast that when money enters into Jewish hands, it stays there. It doesn’t circulate back out to the goyim.

Well, this completely contradicts my Chicago-school education in Economics where I was told that money circulates. If Jews accumulate money, they hire more goyim. They don’t sack their money away under mattresses. Instead, they buy boats and blow and hookers and books and music and TV studios and land and buildings and create charities, just as gentiles do when they accumulate money. How could this money stay within the Jewish community? It beggars the imagination.

I’ve read a bit of Kevin MacDonald and a bit of Andrew Joyce and I think the major difference between them is that Andrew is more likely to condemn Jewish-gentile interactions such as money-lending as parasitic while Kevin is more likely to point out group conflicts with less if any moral judgment.

I searched People That Shall Dwell Alone for every mention of “paras” and found six examples and none of them were for KMAC describing Jews as parasites. The closest that he comes is in this passage, which is more philo-semitic than anti-semitic: “The belief in the superiority of Jewish intelligence has been common among Jews and gentiles alike. Patai and Patai (1989, 146ff) review data indicating that Jewish intellectual superiority was a common belief among many 19th-century and early 20th-century scholars, including some for whom the belief in Jewish intellectual superiority had anti-Semitic overtones: Galton and Pearson believed that Jews had developed into a parasitic race which used its superior intelligence to prey on gentiles. Castro (1954, 473) shows that both scholars and the populace agreed that the Jews of Spain had superior intelligence…”

A search for “paras” in KMAC’s book The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements yields only this mention: “The success of the Jews then constituted a trauma to the gentile bourgeoisie, “who had to pretend to be creative” (p. 175); their anti-Semitism is thus “self-hatred, the bad conscience of the parasite…””

In the KMAC book Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, a search for “paras” yields seven results. Here is the first one:

Similar themes of oppression resulting from Jewish moneylending combined with oppression by gentile elites occur in a 19th-century account on Morocco:

As money-lenders the Jews are as maggots and parasites, aggravating and feeding on the diseases of the land. I do not know, for my part, which exercises the greatest tyranny and oppression, the Sultan or the Jew,—the one the embodiment of the foulest misgovernment, the other the essence of a dozen Shylocks, demanding, ay, and getting, not only his pound of flesh, but also the blood and nerves. By his outrageous exactions the Sultan drives the Moor into the hands of the Jew, who affords him a temporary relief by lending him the necessary money on incredibly exorbitant terms. Once in the money-lender’s clutches, he rarely escapes till he is squeezed dry, when he is either thrown aside, crushed and ruined, or cast into a dungeon, where fettered and starved, he is probably left to die a slow and horrible death.

To the position of the Jews in Morocco it would be difficult to find a parallel. Here we have a people alien, despised, and hated, actually living in the country under immeasurably better conditions than the dominant race, while they suck, and are assisted to suck, the very life-blood of their hosts. The aim of every Jew is to toil not, neither to spin, save the coils which as money-lender he may weave for the entanglement of his necessitous victims.

Not once in his Jewish trilogy does KMAC label Jews as “parasites” or their activity as “parasitic.”

My argument is that the use of such as terms for middle men minorities denotes subjectivity, moralism, and arbitrariness. It seems like venting rather than logic. There are only two honorable forms of disputation — to clash over facts and logic. Terms like “parasites” and “exploiters” when applied to the freely chosen economic activity of adults are subjective appeals to emotion. I prefer more objective thinking about group conflicts.

I understand that objectivity is not the only prize in writing and that you can’t read a cry from the heart the same way you would study a textbook of economic analysis. So perhaps Andrew Joyce and Kevin MacDonald belong to separate genres — KMAC’s work is primarily analysis and Andrew’s work is rhetoric in service of white nationalism.

One possible explanation for the greater antipathy towards Jews in the writings of Andrew Joyce when compared with KMAC is that KMAC writes under his real name while Andrew Joyce is a pseudonym. People using their real name tend to be more toned down than the anonymous activist.

On the other hand, KMAC birthed “Andrew Joyce.” There never would have been an “Andrew Joyce” without KMAC. And KMAC first published him, and others like him, at The Occidental Observer, where many of the writers and commenters use language about Jews that KMAC would not use.

I can see a strong argument that Andrew Joyce is the logical culmination of Kevin MacDonald.

Returning to Andrew Joyce’s critiques of Jews, I find myself unable to summon any indignation that Jewish butchers have sold inferior non-kosher meat to goyim at inferior prices. In general, inferior goods sell at inferior prices when compared with superior goods. In my life, I have frequently paid inferior prices for inferior goods. This doesn’t upset me. I don’t see a good guy or a bad guy in these transactions. If Jews sell cheap loans, cheap liquor, cheap meat, cheap clothes to goyim at cheap prices, who’s the bad guy here? I don’t see it. If Jews make dumb TV that the goyim love, and idiotic music, and this sells and makes Jews a big profit, who’s the bad guy? The Jew for selling it or the goy for buying it?

If Jews out-compete gentiles in certain areas of business (while abiding by the law of the land and conventional ethics), and gentiles out-complete Jews in other areas of business, then what’s the big deal? Different groups have different interests and different abilities.

On the other hand, I am not a free market purist. I don’t regard capitalism as the ultimate value. There are many consensual interactions between adults that Judaism (to which I converted in 1993) regards with contempt. When a man tempts a woman into prostitution, they’re both acting low. When one adult sells illegal drugs to another adult, they’re both acting low. When an adult brother has sex with his adult sister, they’re both acting low. When an adult man has sex with another adult man, they’re both acting low. When adult men go around in public wearing women’s clothing, they’re acting low. When adults mutilate themselves in an attempt to change their sex, they’re acting low. In fact, for many of these interactions, Judaism regards them as so low that it prescribes the death penalty.

Against the media’s onslaught against everything I hold precious, I cling to my guns and to my religion.

Goldwin Smith was a 19th Century professor of English at such places as Cornell. In 1892, he published an essay on The Jewish Question:

A community has a right to defend its territory and its national integrity against an invader, whether his weapon be the sword or foreclosure. In the territories of the Italian Republics the Jews might, so far as we see, have bought land and taken to farming had they pleased. But before this they had thoroughly taken to trade. Under the filling Empire they were the great slave traders, buying captives from barbarian invaders and probably acting as general brokers of spoils at the same time. They entered England in the train of the Norman conqueror. There was, no doubt, a perpetual struggle between their craft and the brute force of the feudal populations. But what moral prerogative has craft over force?

Mr. Arnold White tells the Russians that, if they would let Jewish intelligence have free course, Jews would soon fill all high employments and places of power to the exclusion of the natives, who now hold them. Russians are bidden to acquiesce and rather to rejoice in this by philosophers, who would perhaps not relish the cup if it were commended to their own lips. The law of evolution, it is said, prescribes the survival of the fittest. To which the Russian boor may reply, that if his force beats the fine intelligence of the Jew the fittest will survive and the law of evolution will be fulfilled. It was force rather than fine intelligence which decided on the field of Zama that the Latin, not the Semite, should rule the ancient and mold the modern world.

This critique rings true to me. Any community has the right to defend itself. If that community can’t out compete Jews in a free market, then I would expect it to rig the market by all means necessary. Any group that does not put its own survival first is not likely to last. Your people’s survival seems more important to me than allegiance to universalist ethics.

Jon*:

I’m not saying Aquinas was right, but your ice-cold “if a goy will suck off a dog” take is challenged by the view that a just person wouldn’t make such an unjust offer… the reason it’s worth understanding is that Aquinas seems to envision a brotherhood of man trading with other members of the brotherhood–no trace of tribal interests here. A just Christian wouldn’t charge another Christian 1000% because justice, brotherhood. But the usurious Jewish lender sees the Christian as “other,” right? So,… offer them a terrible & unjust deal. I guess the question is, is justice only tribal, or can we imagine a justice that encompasses two separate cultures?

The advantage does seem to go, perennially, to the person who practices tribal, rather than universal, justice… cuz they can always stiff the universalist, while the universalist won’t acknowledge any differences between the two exist. What a scam!