Luke Ford | No sacred cows.

Putin to European Jews: Come to Mother Russia!

Posted on January 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

Jews are a formidable people, but Putin might be up to managing them in a way that’s most congruent with Russia’s interests.

If Hitler had used Jews to further his ends, instead of exterminating them, he may well have gotten nuclear weapons first and thereby won WWII.

There are no permanent allies for Jews or for any nation. There are only shifting alliances.

From Tabletmag:

On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin invited Jews facing anti-Semitism in Europe to return to Russia.

The comments, reported by the RBC, a Russian media outlet, took place during a meeting in Moscow with a delegation from the European Jewish Congress, which expressed concerns over the culture of anti-Semitism in Europe, “the worst since World War II,” said its president Viatcheslav Moshe Kantor. In reponse, Putin said: “During Soviet times they left, so let them return.”

Putin then made a “come here” gesture with his forefinger and, in an uncharacteristically gentle manner, instructed the Jewish delegation and the Jews of Europe, saying: “Here, to us. They should come to us.”

‘That is a fundamentally new idea,” said a surprised Kantor, who reportedly showed signs of experiencing visible difficulties in containing his laughter. All six fellow Jewish delegates sitting around Kantor likewise giggled.

“I have seen those reports of the situation in European countries and of people even attempting to hide their nationality,” said Putin. “People are even afraid of wearing their Kippah in public.”

The Russian President added that the situation of Russian Jews was currently the best of any place in Europe.

This would be far from the first time that Putin has made such comments at a Jewish gathering. In July of 2014 he thanked a gathering of prominent Israeli and European rabbis for what he categorized as their “help in Russia’s fight against the revival of Nazism.” In fact, Putin’s magnanimous offer was the latest gambit in the contentious leveraging of the issue of anti-Semitism in the continuing Russian-Ukrainian conflict.

Previous: In Lviv, a Dubious Anti-Semitic Demonstration
A Chief Rabbi of Russia Supports Those Who Hang Gays
Putin Defends Ukraine’s Jews, Slams Ukraine’s Jewish Oligarchs
Related: Andrey Sheptytsky Welcomes Nazis to Ukraine. That’s Not the Whole Story.

Posted in Jews, Russia | Comments Off

Steve Sailer: Hispanic Electoral Tsunami Postponed Once Again Due to Lack of Interest

Posted on January 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes:

For years we’ve been reading about the Righteous Racial Rage of Hispanics and how the only hope of the Republican Party to survive is to facilitate an auto-coup by its South Florida wing of Jeb Bush and/or Marco Rubio to boost immigration. Sure, the GOP would lose on average on each immigrant, but it would make up for it on volume!

But when I look at the Hispanic turnout numbers in detail, the reality is less electrifying.

From the New York Times:

Yes, Latinos Are Rising, but So Are Latino Nonvoters
Damien Cave @damiencave JAN. 19, 2016
Here’s the reality of Latino political power today: It’s not what it could be.
Even though 27 million Latinos will be eligible to cast a ballot in November — an increase of 17 percent since 2012 — the Latino population is becoming more distant from the American political process, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center.
Most Latinos who could vote in the last three national elections chose not to. Turnout was just under 50 percent in 2008, and fell to 48 percent in 2012. It dropped to 27 percent in the 2014 midterms, the lowest rate ever recorded for Latinos.
Another low yield may define 2016 as well.
“We’re seeing the number of people who could vote growing at a faster pace than those who do vote,” said Mark Hugo Lopez, director of Hispanic research at Pew Research Center. “There were more nonvoters than voters in the last election, and those nonvoter numbers are rising.”
The lack of engagement is not new; Latino voter turnout has lagged behind that of whites and blacks for decades. Asian-American voter turnout has also been below black and white turnout since at least 1992; it was even with Latino voter turnout in 2012.
But among Latino leaders and social scientists, there is a growing recognition, and increasing concern, that Latinos are punching beneath their weight, and may be stuck in a cycle of disconnection.

Maybe, deep down, they think that Anglos on average tend to be better than Latinos at running a country, which is why they are here rather than back home in Latin America.

COMMENTS:

* Sure, the GOP would lose on average on each immigrant, but it would make up for it on volume!

This is no joke. You cannot believe how many Republican supporters I have spoken to in the past who echo this line. When the sheer innumerate idiocy of the strategy is explained to them they just go blank.

Posted in America, Latino | Comments Off

Why The Jews?

Posted on January 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

I converted to Judaism because I believed that Jews carried the burden of God in history and I wanted to join that project.

I converted in 1993 after several years of study. One of the books that most influenced me was Why The Jews: The Reason For Antisemitism by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin.

From the bestselling authors of The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism, a compelling discussion of the dangerous rise in antisemitism during the twenty-first century.
The very word Jew continues to arouse passions as does no other religious, national, or political name. Why have Jews been the object of the most enduring and universal hatred in history? Why did Hitler consider murdering Jews more important than winning World War II? Why has the United Nations devoted more time to tiny Israel than to any other nation on earth?
In this seminal study, Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin attempt to uncover and understand the roots of antisemitism—from the ancient world to the Holocaust to the current crisis in the Middle East. Why the Jews? offers new insights and unparalleled perspectives on some of the most recent, pressing developments in the contemporary world, including:
-The replicating of Nazi antisemitism in the Arab world
-The pervasive anti-Zionism/antisemitism on university campuses
-The rise of antisemitism in Europe
-Why the United States and Israel are linked in the minds of antisemites
Hatred of the Jew has been humanity’s greatest hatred. While hatred of other groups has always existed, no hatred has been as universal, as deep, or as permanent as antisemitism.
The Jews have been objects of hatred in pagan, religious, and secular societies. Fascists have accused them of being Communists, and Communists have branded them capitalists. Jews who live in non-Jewish societies have been accused of having dual loyalties, while Jews who live in the Jewish state have been condemned as “racists.” Poor Jews are bullied, and rich Jews are resented. Jews have been branded as both rootless cosmopolitans and ethnic chauvinists. Jews who assimilate have been called a “fifth column,” while those who stay together spark hatred for remaining separate. Hundreds of millions of people have believed (and in the Arab world many still do) that Jews drink the blood of non-Jews, that they cause plagues and poison wells, that they secretly plot to conquer the world, and that they murdered God.
The universality of antisemitism is attested to by innumerable facts, the most dramatic being that Jews have been expelled from so many of the European and Arab societies in which they have resided. Jews were expelled from England in 1290, France in 1306 and 1394, Hungary between 1349 and 1360, Austria in 1421, numerous localities in Germany between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, Lithuania in 1445 and 1495, Spain in 1492, Portugal in 1497, and Bohemia and Moravia in 1744-45. Between the fifteenth century and 1772, Jews were not allowed into Russia; when finally admitted there, they were restricted to one area, the Pale of Settlement. Between 1948 and 1967, nearly all the Jews of Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen fled these countries, fearing for their lives.
The depth of antisemitism is evidenced by the frequency with which hostility against Jews has gone far beyond discrimination and erupted into sustained violence. In most societies in which Jews have lived, they have at some time been subjected to beatings, torture, and murder solely because they were Jews. In the Russian Empire during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mass beatings and murders of Jews were so common that a word, pogrom, was coined to describe such incidents. And these pogroms were viewed by their antisemitic perpetrators as being of such significance that they were equated with the saving of Russia.
On a number of occasions even beating and murdering Jewish communities was not deemed sufficient. Antisemitic passions have run so deep that only the actual annihilation of the Jewish people could solve what came to be called by antisemites the “Jewish Problem.” The basic source of ancient Jewish history, the Bible, depicts two attempts to destroy the Jewish people, that by Pharaoh and the Egyptians (Exodus 1:15-22) and that of Haman and the Persians (book of Esther). While it is true that the historicity of these biblical accounts has not been proven or disproven by nonbiblical sources, few would dispute the supposition that in ancient times attempts were made to destroy the Jews. Indeed, the first recorded reference to Jews in non-Jewish sources, the Mernephta stele, written by an Egyptian king about 1220 B.C.E., states, “Israel is no more.”
Jewish writings from the earliest times until the present are replete with references to attempts by non-Jews to destroy the Jewish people. Psalm 83:5 describes the enemies of the Jews as proponents of genocide: “Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation, that the Name of Israel may no more be remembered.” Just how precarious Jews have viewed their survival is reflected in a statement from the ancient, and annually recited, Passover Haggadah; “In every generation they rise against us in order to annihilate us.”
On three occasions during the last 350 years, annihilation campaigns have been waged against the Jews: the Chmelnitzky massacres in eastern Europe in 1648-49, the Nazi German destruction of Jews throughout Europe between 1939 and 1945, and the attempt to eradicate the Jewish state by its enemies.
For various reasons, the Chmelnitzky massacres are today not well known among Jews and are virtually unknown among non-Jews; perhaps the Holocaust tends to overshadow all previous Jewish suffering. Yet without denying the unique aspects of the Nazi Holocaust, there are a number of significant similarities between it and the Chmelnitzky massacres. In both instances, all Jews, including infants, were targeted for murder; the general populaces nearly always joined in the attacks; and the torture and degradation of Jews were an integral part of the murderers’ procedures. These characteristics are evidenced by the following contemporaneous description of a typical Chmelnitzky massacre:
Some of [the Jews] had their skins flayed off them and their flesh was flung to the dogs. The hands and feet of others were cut off and they were flung onto the roadway where carts ran over them and they were trodden underfoot by horse….And many were buried alive. Children were slaughtered in their mothers’ bosoms and many children were torn apart like fish. They ripped up the bellies of pregnant women, took out the unborn children, and flung them in their faces. They tore open the bellies of some of them and placed a living cat within the belly and left them alive thus, first cutting off their hands so that they should not be able to take the living cat out of the belly…and there was never an unnatural death in the world that they did not inflict upon them.
The permanence (as well as depth) of antisemitism is attested to by the obsessive attention given to the “Jewish Problem” by antisemites throughout history. At one time or another nearly every major country that has had a large Jewish population has regarded this group, which never constituted more than a small percentage of its population, as an enemy. To the Roman Empire in the first century, the European Christian world for over fifteen centuries, the Nazi Reich, the Soviet Union, and to the Arabs and much of the Muslim world, the Jews have been or are regarded as an insufferable threat.
Jews have been perceived as so dangerous that even after their expulsion or destruction, hatred and fear of them remain. The depiction of Jews as ritual murderers of young Christian children in Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales one hundred years after all Jews had been expelled from England attests to the durability of antisemitism. So does the characterization of Jews as usurers who wish to collect their interest in flesh in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, three hundred years after the Jews’ expulsion. A more recent example was Poland in 1968, when for months the greatest issue for Polish radio, television, and newspapers was the “Unmasking of Zionists in Poland.” Of the thirty-three million citizens of Poland in 1968, the Jews numbered about twenty thousand or less than one-fifteenth of 1 percent.
How are the universality, depth, and permanence of antisemitism to be explained? Why such hatred and fear of a people who never constituted more than a small minority among those who most hated and feared them? Why, nearly always and nearly everywhere, the Jews?
Many answers have been offered by scholars. These include, most commonly, economic factors, the need for scapegoats, ethnic hatred, xenophobia, resentment of Jewish affluence and professional success, and religious bigotry. But ultimately these answers do not explain antisemitism; they only explain what factors have exacerbated it and caused it to erupt in a given circumstance. None accounts for the universality, depth, and persistence of antisemitism. In fact, we have encountered virtually no study of this phenomenon that even attempts to offer a universal explanation of Jew-hatred. Nearly every study of antisemitism consists almost solely of historical narrative, thus seeming to indicate that no universal reason for antisemitism exists.
We reject this approach. To ignore or deny that there is an ultimate cause for antisemitism contradicts both common sense and history. Antisemitism has existed too long, and in too many disparate cultures, to ignore the problem of ultimate cause and/or to claim that new or indigenous factors are responsible every time it erupts. Factors specific to a given society help account for the manner or time in which antisemitism erupts. But they do not explain its genesis — why antisemitism at all? To cite but one example: the depressed economy in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s helps to explain why and when the Nazis came to power, but it does not explain why Nazis hated Jews, let alone why they wanted to murder every Jew. Economic depressions do not explain gas chambers.
The very consistency of the passions Jews have aroused demands a consistent explanation. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, medieval and many modern Christians and Muslims, and Nazis and Communists have perhaps only one thing in common: they have all, at some point, counted the Jews as their enemy, often their greatest enemy. Why?
Among Jews, this question has been posed only in the modern era. Until the modern age, Jews never asked, “Why the Jews?” They knew why. Throughout their history, Jews have regarded Jew-hatred as an inevitable consequence of their Jewishness. Contrary to modern understandings of antisemitism, the age-old Jewish understanding of antisemitism does posit a universal explanation for Jew-hatred: Judaism, meaning the Jews’ God, laws, peoplehood, and claim to being chosen. The historical record, as we shall show, confirms the traditional Jewish view that the Jews were hated because of Jewish factors. Modern attempts to dejudaize Jew-hatred, to attribute it to economic, social, and political factors, and universalize it into merely another instance of bigotry, are as opposed to the facts of Jewish history as they are to the historical Jewish understanding of antisemitism.
Antisemites have not hated Jews because Jews are affluent — poor Jews have always been as hated; or strong — weak Jews have simply invited antisemitic bullies; or because Jews may have unpleasant personalities — genocide is not personality-generated; or because ruling classes focus worker discontent onto Jews — precapitalist and noncapitalist societies such as the former Soviet Union, other Communist states, and various Third World countries, have been considerably more antisemitic than capitalist societies. Antisemites have hated Jews because Jews are Jewish. Christian antisemites ceased hating rich Jews when they became Christians. Muslim antisemites embrace Jews who convert to Islam. The same has held true for virtually all other antisemites except the Nazis, whom we shall discuss later.
What about Judaism has provoked anti-Jewish hostility? There are four answers.
1. For thousands of years Judaism has consisted of four components: God, Torah, Israel, and Chosenness; that is, the God introduced by the Jews, Jewish laws, Jewish peoplehood, and the belief that the Jews are God’s chosen people. Jews’ allegiance to any of these components has been a major source of antisemitism because it not only rendered the Jew an outsider, but more important, it has often been regarded by non-Jews as challenging the validity of their god(s), law(s), national allegiance, and/or national worth.
By affirming what they considered to be the one and only God of all humankind, thereby implying illegitimacy to everyone else’s gods, the Jews entered history — and have often been since — at war with other people’s most cherished beliefs. The antisemites also hated the Jews because the Jews lived by their own all-encompassing set of laws. And because the Jews also asserted their own national identity, Jews intensified antisemitic passions among those who viewed this identity as threatening their own nationalism.
2. As if the above were not enough, Judaism has also held from the earliest times that the Jews were chosen by God to achieve this mission of bringing the world to God and His moral law (i.e., ethical monotheism). This doctrine of the Jews’ divine election has been a major cause of antisemitism.
3. From its earliest days, the raison d’être of Judaism has been to change the world for the better (in the words of an ancient Jewish prayer recited daily, “to repair the world under the rule of God”). This attempt to change the world, to challenge the gods, religious or secular, of the societies around them, and to make moral demands upon others (even when not done expressly in the name of Judaism) has constantly been a source of tension.
4. As a result of the Jews’ commitment to Judaism, they have led higher-quality lives than their non-Jewish neighbors in almost every society where they have lived. For example, Jews have nearly always been better educated; Jewish family life has usually been more stable; Jews aided one another more than their non-Jewish neighbors aided each other; and Jewish men have been less likely to become drunk, beat their wives, or abandon their children. As a result of these factors, the quality of life of the average Jew, no matter how poor, was higher than that of a comparable non-Jew in the same society (see Chapter 4).
This higher quality of life among Jews, which, as we shall show, directly results from Judaism, has, as one would expect, provoked profound envy and hostility among many non-Jews.
Since Judaism is the root cause of antisemitism, Jews, unlike victims of racial or ethnic prejudice, could in almost every instance of antisemitism, except Nazism, escape persecution. For thousands of years and until today, Jews who abandoned their Jewish identity and assumed the majority’s religious and national identity were no longer persecuted.
For these reasons, Jews have always regarded antisemitism as a response, however immoral, to Judaism. Thus, most Jews until the modern era, and most religious Jews to this day, would describe Jews murdered by antisemites not as victims of ethnic prejudice but as having died al kiddush hashem, that is, as martyrs sanctifying the name of God before the world.
Once one understands why Judaism has precipitated antisemitism, the unique universality, depth, and permanence of Jew-hatred also become understandable. It takes infinitely more than economic tensions or racial prejudice to create the animosity that often has involved the torturing of children and the murdering of entire communities. Only a people representing a threat to the core values, allegiances, and beliefs of others could arouse such universal, deep, and lasting hatred.
That is why totalitarian regimes, secular and religious, inevitably are antisemitic. Totalitarian regimes by definition aim to control the totality of their citizens’ lives and can therefore tolerate no uncontrolled religious or national expressions, both of which are part of Judaism. Once the Jewish roots of antisemitism are recognized, the only solutions to the “Jewish Problem,” as far as antisemites are concerned, are obvious. The Jews must either convert, be expelled, or murdered. In the 1880s, the Russian czar’s procurator of the Holy Synod and architect of Russian government policy at the time, Constantine Pobedonostev, is said to have offered precisely this advice: One-third of the Jews living in the Russian Empire should be converted to Christianity, one-third should be expelled, and one-third should be put to death.
In fact, for the last two thousand years, this has repeatedly been the chronological order of antisemitic acts. First, attempts would be made to convert the Jews. When the Jews refused, they were often expelled. And when even expulsion failed to solve the “Jewish Problem,” there remained one “Final Solution,” which is precisely the name the Nazis gave to their plan to annihilate the Jews.
It is also clear that antisemitism is not ethnic or racial prejudice, though it obviously shares certain features with them. Haters of Jews persecuted them for the same reasons Romans persecuted Christians, Nazis tortured members of the Resistance, and Communist regimes imprison dissidents. In each instance, the group is persecuted because its different beliefs represent a threat to the persecuting group. This hatred must be understood as being very different from a racial or ethnic prejudice. Blacks in America, for example, have been discriminated against because of the physical fact of their blackness, not because of specific black ideas or beliefs. Hatred of blacks is racial prejudice. Blacks cannot stop being black. But in dictatorships, dissidents can stop being dissenters, and a Jew has always been able to, and in general still can, stop being a Jew.
Even the major exception to this rule, Nazi antisemitism, confirms the Jewish basis of antisemitism. The Nazis simply maintained that Jews could never really become non-Jews. They believed that no matter how much Jews may consciously attempt to appear and behave like non-Jews, they nevertheless retain the values of Judaism. Nazi anti-Jewish “racism” emanated from a hatred of Judaism and what Jews represent. Nazi racism is ex post facto; first came the antisemitism, then came the racist doctrine to explain it.
Antisemitism is, therefore, as Jews have always regarded it: a response to Jews. The charges often made by antisemites — that Jews poison wells, drink human blood, plot to take over the world’s governments, or control world finance — are hallucinatory. But the roots of antisemitism are not. The real reasons antisemites hate Jews and the accusations they make against them are rarely the same. This is hardly uncommon. When people harbor hatreds, individually or communally, they rarely articulate rationally the reasons for their hatred.
We should not be so naive as to regard all antisemitic accusations as the reasons for the antisemitism. For example, the modern belief that economic factors cause antisemitism, besides confusing exacerbating factors with causes, grants the accusations of antisemites far too much credence. It is analogous to the efforts of some fine historians to determine the historical accuracy of the Christian claim that the Jews killed Jesus, because Christian antisemites called Jews “Christ killers,” as if proving one way or another would have ended Christian antisemitism. It is also analogous to the tireless efforts of other fine historians to decipher the exact number and circumstances of Arabs displaced during the founding of Israel, as if those who single out Israel from all other countries to support efforts to destroy it do so because six hundred thousand Arab refugees were created in 1948.
The questions for those wishing to understand the roots of antisemitism are not whether some Jews helped execute a fellow Jew two thousand years ago, or how great a role Jews played in the German economy, or how many Arabs fled Israel in 1948. The questions are why, to begin with, people hate Jews, and then invent reasons to do so.

This was an intoxicating vision — Jews are persecuted for being God’s representatives on earth.

Then I gradually saw other reasons why Jews were hated. For example, some of the world views the word “Jew” as synonymous with dishonesty in business (though it seems to me that Jews are not more dishonest than other people of Middle Eastern origin, and they are considerably more law-abiding and honest than the Chinese and Africans).

So I kept reading and eventually I was able to understand why white nationalists view themselves as an oppressed minority, oppressed by powerful Jews.

I guess every nationalism contains a victimology, every victimology contains a nationalism and every nationalism contains the capacity for genocide. Different groups have different interests and they compete for scarce resources.

A Jewish friend says:

I read Why the Jews and I thought it was such a poorly written piece of selective facts to argue a specific point of view I couldn’t believe anyone took it seriously, except Jews who want to reinforce their persecution complex.
What Prager and Teluskhin absolutely failed to deal with how such a despised minority acquired so much power and wealth.
I remember reading some Rabbi’s sermon in which he explained that all countries which exhibited hostility toward Jews suffered as a result. I don’t know about that. After the Spanish expelled the Jews in 1492, Spain became the wealthiest and most powerful empire in the world for the next three hundred years and retained significant power and clout until the Spanish American War at the end of the 19th Century.
I think for someone who knows little of Jewish history and less of Jewish Gentile relations and history, the book if the facts are taken as true, paints Jews in a heroic light, holding onto their one true religion, wanting nothing more than to be left in peace to recite their prayers and study Torah and Talmud, except for those irrational haters surrounding them.
One of the other great myths about Jewish immigration around the turn of the century is that Jews came to America to avoid persecution. In fact whether the societies they came from were anti semitic in one degree or another, the Jews came for economic reasons. No Jewish institute of learning, and there were many especially in Lithuania, relocated to the United States.
Polish Jews who we often see in the shtetl photographs of Roman Vishniak were actually up to the start of WWII mostly urban with Jews forming huge neighborhoods (not ghettos) in Polish cities, especially Lodz and Warsaw, many of them despite living in an officially anti semitic regime with strict quotas for Jews at universities quite wealthy.
It is so easy to conflate the efficient and lethal official anti Semitism of Nazi Germany, with the folk anti Semitism in Roman Catholic and most Eastern Orthodox countries, and the official anti Semitism practiced in pre-communist Russia and in interwar Poland, and the Baltic States. Jews could and did thrive in these countries despite the folk and institutional anti Semitism.

Posted in America, Anti-Semitism, Jews, Whites | Comments Off

How an Obscure Adviser to Pat Buchanan Predicted the Wild Trump Campaign in 1996

Posted on January 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

Michael Brendan Dougherty, The Week, January 16, 2016:

[S]ooner or later, as the globalist elites seek to drag the country into conflicts and global commitments, preside over the economic pastoralization of the United States, manage the delegitimization of our own culture, and the dispossession of our people, and disregard or diminish our national interests and national sovereignty, a nationalist reaction is almost inevitable and will probably assume populist form when it arrives. The sooner it comes, the better . . . [Samuel Francis in Chronicles]

Imagine giving this advice to a Republican presidential candidate: What if you stopped calling yourself a conservative and instead just promised to make America great again?

What if you dropped all this leftover 19th-century piety about the free market and promised to fight the elites who were selling out American jobs? What if you just stopped talking about reforming Medicare and Social Security and instead said that the elites were failing to deliver better health care at a reasonable price? What if, instead of vainly talking about restoring the place of religion in society–something that appeals only to a narrow slice of Middle America–you simply promised to restore the Middle American core–the economic and cultural losers of globalization–to their rightful place in America? What if you said you would restore them as the chief clients of the American state under your watch, being mindful of their interests when regulating the economy or negotiating trade deals?

That’s pretty much the advice that columnist Samuel Francis gave to Pat Buchanan in a 1996 essay, “From Household to Nation,” in Chronicles magazine. Samuel Francis was a paleo-conservative intellectual who died in 2005. Earlier in his career he helped Senator East of North Carolina oppose the Martin Luther King holiday. He wrote a white paper recommending the Reagan White House use its law enforcement powers to break up and harass left-wing groups. He was an intellectual disciple of James Burnham’s political realism, and Francis’ political analysis always had a residue of Burnham’s Marxist sociology about it. He argued that the political right needed to stop playing defense–the globalist left won the political and cultural war a long time ago–and should instead adopt the insurgent strategy of communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci. Francis eventually turned into a something resembling an all-out white nationalist, penning his most racist material under a pen name. Buchanan didn’t take Francis’ advice in 1996, not entirely. But 20 years later, “From Household to Nation,” reads like a political manifesto from which the Trump campaign springs.

To simplify Francis’ theory: There are a number of Americans who are losers from a process of economic globalization that enriches a transnational global elite. These Middle Americans see jobs disappearing to Asia and increased competition from immigrants. Most of them feel threatened by cultural liberalism, at least the type that sees Middle Americans as loathsome white bigots. But they are also threatened by conservatives who would take away their Medicare, hand their Social Security earnings to fund-managers in Connecticut, and cut off their unemployment too.

Middle American forces, emerging from the ruins of the old independent middle and working classes, found conservative, libertarian, and pro-business Republican ideology and rhetoric irrelevant, distasteful, and even threatening to their own socio-economic interests. The post World War II middle class was in reality an affluent proletariat, economically dependent on the federal government through labor codes, housing loans, educational programs, defense contracts, and health and unemployment benefits. All variations of conservative doctrine rejected these . . .
Yet, at the same time, the Ruling Class proved unable to uproot the social cultural, and national identities and loyalties of the Middle American proletariat, and Middle Americans found themselves increasingly alienated from the political left and its embrace of anti-national policies, and counter-cultural manners and morals. [Chronicles]

{snip}

But the response of the predominantly-white class that Francis was writing about has mostly been one of personal despair. And thus we see them dying in middle age of drug overdose, alcoholism, or obesity at rates that now outpace those of even poorer blacks and Hispanics. Their rate of suicide is sky high too. Living in Washington D.C., however, with an endless two decade real-estate boom, and a free-lunch economy paid for by special interests, most of the people in the conservative movement hardly know that some Americans think America needs to be made great again.

{snip}

Plenty of others have noticed the parallels between Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump. Some have seen that Trump is attracting the “radical middle” social base and taking on the Caesarist, almost Latin American-style populism that Francis recommended. Buchanan was recently asked about why Trump was having all the success that he did not enjoy, when he is running on so many of the issues Buchanan did 20 years ago. Buchanan said that it was because the returns are in on the policies he criticized 20 years ago. All of this is true.

The Trump phenomenon does seem to be sui generis. There are not squadrons of Trumpistas in the Republican Congress. And his celebrity persona, his extremely unusual and independent financial power, his felicity for not just recognizing but channeling the grievances of his supporters is unmatched. It’s hard to imagine anyone else rebuilding his coalition of Middle American radicals and fringier, race-obsessed “alt-right” nationalists.

{snip}

What is so crucial to Trump’s success, even within the Republican Party, is his almost total ditching of conservatism as a governing philosophy. He is doing the very thing Pat Buchanan could not, and would not do. And in this, he is following the advice of Sam Francis to a degree almost unthinkable. Here’s the concluding flourish of Francis’ 1996 essay:

I told [Buchanan] privately that he would be better off without all the hangers-on, direct-mail artists, fund-raising whiz kids, marketing and PR czars, and the rest of the crew that today constitutes the backbone of all that remains of the famous “Conservative Movement” and who never fail to show up on the campaign doorstep to guzzle someone else’s liquor and pocket other people’s money. “These people are defunct,” I told him. “You don’t need them, and you’re better off without them. Go to New Hampshire and call yourself a patriot, a nationalist, an America Firster, but don’t even use the word ‘conservative.’ It doesn’t mean anything any more.”
Pat listened, but I can’t say he took my advice. By making his bed with the Republicans, then and today, he opens himself to charges that he’s not a “true” party man or a “true” conservative, constrains his chances for victory by the need to massage trunk-waving Republicans whose highest goal is to win elections, and only dilutes and deflects the radicalism of the message he and his Middle American Revolution have to offer. The sooner we hear that message loudly and clearly, without distractions from Conservatism, Inc., the Stupid Party, and their managerial elite, the sooner Middle America will be able to speak with an authentic and united voice, and the sooner we can get on with conserving the nation from the powers that are destroying it. [Chronicles]

Trump embodies this in nearly every letter. He doesn’t have people from the traditional Republican power structure advising him. He doesn’t say he’ll direct the existing members of the managerial class to make a little tweak here or there; he says he’ll send his friend Carl Icahn and threaten China with a tariff wall that could repel a tsunami of cheap goods.

What so frightens the conservative movement about Trump’s success is that he reveals just how thin the support for their ideas really is. His campaign is a rebuke to their institutions. It says the Republican Party doesn’t need all these think tanks, all this supposed policy expertise. It says look at these people calling themselves libertarians and conservatives, the ones in tassel-loafers and bow ties. Have they made you more free? Have their endless policy papers and studies and books conserved anything for you? These people are worthless. They are defunct. You don’t need them, and you’re better off without them.

And the most frightening thing of all–as Francis’ advice shows–is that the underlying trend has been around for at least 20 years, just waiting for the right man to come along and take advantage.

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The Alienation Blues

Posted on January 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* But some people can’t get ’nuff of those Alienation Blues.

Take the snooty Bengali-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri.

She was born in the UK but left for the States at the age of two where her alleged acute sense of alienation provides a river of material for her books and reasons to whine about life in the west. She has, naturally, been showered with prizes for her “honesty” and “subtlety”.

“In a sense I’m used to a kind of linguistic exile. My mother tongue, Bengali, is foreign in America. When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.”

Note: she admits to not being able to speak Bengali properly nor read and write it.

Now, in middle age, she has switched to Rome and Italian:

“I think it’s not so much English in itself as everything the language has symbolized for me. For practically my whole life, English has represented a consuming struggle, a wrenching conflict, a continuous sense of failure that is the source of almost all my anxiety. It has represented a culture that had to be mastered, interpreted. I was afraid that it meant a break between me and my parents. English denotes a heavy, burdensome aspect of my past. I’m tired of it.”

Her mother, a doctor, was of course regularly racially insulted by the staff at the hospital when she started work in the States.

But “In the United States, she continued, as far as possible, to dress, behave, eat, think, live as if she had never left India, Calcutta. The refusal to modify her aspect, her habits, her attitudes was her strategy for resisting American culture, for fighting it, for maintaining her identity. Becoming or even resembling an American would have meant total defeat. When my mother returns to Calcutta, she is proud of the fact that, in spite of almost fifty years away from India, she seems like a woman who never left.”

In a peculiar way Lahiri, like many of her fellow writers in ‘exile’, come across as displaced blood and soil nationalists; she says, for example, that every language is ultimately rooted in a particular locality.

As far as I know Lahiri has never demanded that her Indian ‘homeland’ be swamped with non-Indians – perhaps to spare the newcomers the alienation? It never seems to occur to her that mass immigration might produce in white and black Americans a feeling of loss that is worse than the putative alienation suffered by overachieving migrants who bask in the steady state existence of their home culture.

Lahiri has now of course discovered that Italians are racist and chauvinist: still mass immigration will surely cure than in time eh Lahiri?

* What are basic human rights?

You might be able to sell me on the idea that we (meaning the developed nations) should feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and heal the sick of the underdeveloped world. (But only if birth control is part of the deal.) There have been programs in place to do these things for a long time.

But since when is being given a free ticket to an advanced country and unlimited access to all the welfare goodies a *basic* human right?

A reasonable person can argue that no one should have to sleep on the street – that there should be shelters for the homeless. Most folks would probably agree with that idea, although many would insist on certain conditions – they might want the able-bodied to do some kind of productive work in return for the free bed.

But what you’re saying is that the lousiest, drunkest, nastiest bum has the basic human right to spend his days lounging in a mansion on the taxpayers’ dime, simply because he’s alive and breathing.

Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way.

* When we have things you want to take, our ancestors are blamed and we are supposed to give our good stuff to you.

It is so very convenient that the historically evil people presented by the Narrative are the same people that have nice things they are supposed to gladly give away.

Posted in Immigration, Nationalism | Comments Off

LAT: The Latino vote is bigger and better educated than ever before, a new report finds

Posted on January 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

Rosalia Garcia de Flores, center, listens with others at a news conference in Pacoima launching a campaign to register Latino voters in mixed-status families. The number of Latinos eligible to vote in this year’s presidential election is 40% higher than it was just eight years ago, according to a new report by Pew Research Center. (Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times)

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No WWII, No Holocaust

Posted on January 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

No Hitler, no Holocaust.

If Britain and France had not declared war on Germany in September of 1939, there likely would not have been a world war and therefore no Holocaust.

Chaim Amalek writes:

“Never been a holocaust?” OK. It is 1939, and Hitler has overrun Poland (or at least the western and central parts of it), along with some 3,000,000 or however many Jews lived there. His charge to his lieutenants was “Make this land German for me again!”. Now then, just what do you suppose would have been the fate of those 3,000,000 Polish Jews? Also, Hitler was obsessed with invading the USSR for “living space.” That war was going to happen sooner or later. What do you suppose Hitler would have done to the Jews of the Ukraine? And finally, had war not come in ’39, Hitler’s minions would have had more time in which to perfect jet aircraft, radar, and who knows, possibly even nuclear weapons (the Germans had Heisenberg and some other more than competent scientists working for them). No holocaust? Maybe not including France, but everywhere else his armies marched, that was a key goal of his.

A friend tells me:

One of the things that so many people forget about the onset of WWII was that the German demands that led to the war, return of Alsace Lorraine, reunification with Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia, protection of ethnic Germans in Poland, the Baltic States and even within the Soviet Union, even the Anschluss with Austria, were not unique to Hitler. People forget that up to WWI, the ethnic Germans in Poland were under German governmental control since there was no Poland, its territory divided between Imperial Germany and Tsarist Russia, that the ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia were under Hapsburg control out of Vienna, that Alsace Lorraine were part of Germany and that even the ethnic Germans within Russia were well treated.
There was tremendous pressure, both from within Germany and from the Germans outside of Germany to be protected and reunited with Germany. This nationalism was not limited to the Nazis. The Austrians were more than happy to join with Germany, especially since Germany’s leader was Austrian by birth, and the non German ethnic parts of the Hungarian Empire had been split off from its German speaking core after the war.
The question that your correspondent Amalek asks is whether Hitler would have stopped had he been granted the right to the Danzig corridor and the protection of Germans in Poland. Hitler clearly didn’t fear war. He believed it had many positive effects, but there certainly is a case to be made if he consolidated Germans if he had had his way with Poland (before the Soviet – Nazi pact) that he would have expanded his influence among the Aryan nations Belgium, Holland, and the Scandinavian contries. It is also to be remembered that although Germany was anti semitic, sanctioned German killings of Jews didn’t happen until after Operation Barbarossa (the first killings were pogroms by ethnic Latvians and Lithuanians) and the Wannsee conference, which most people use as the date the final solution was adopted for implementation took place at the beginning of 1942. So not only were the annexations of Alsace Lorraine, Austria and Czechoslavakia not accompanied by extermination, neither was the conquest of Poland, France, Holland, Belgium, Norway and Denmark. Jews in those places may not have been happy, but they were not sent to extermination camps until 1942 at the earliest.

Posted in Adolf Hitler, Germany, Holocaust | Comments Off

Is there anything to IQ?

Posted on January 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

Stuart Richie writes:

“IQ tests just measure how good you are at doing IQ tests”. We’ve all heard this argument: it’s almost always made when intelligence testing is mentioned. It’s often made by people who are, otherwise, highly scientifically literate: you wouldn’t catch them arguing that climate change is a myth or that vaccines might cause autism. But saying that IQ tests are useless is just as wrong as these notions: in fact, decades of well-replicated research point to IQ tests as some of the most reliable and valid instruments in all of psychological science.

So what does an IQ test—which might consist, for example, of shape-based puzzles, timings of how quickly you can check through lists of meaningless symbols, memory tests, and vocabulary measures—actually tell you? The strongest relation is perhaps unsurprising: an IQ score is highly predictive of how people will do in school. One huge study found that IQ scores at age 11 correlated .8 (on a scale of -1 to 1) with school grades at age 16. Surely this gives us some basis for calling these measures ‘intelligence tests’. But that’s just the beginning: higher IQ scores are predictive of more occupational success, higher income, and better physical and mental health. Perhaps the most arresting finding is that IQ scores taken in childhood are predictive of mortality: smarter people live longer, and this association is still there after controlling for social class. So much for “just how good you are at IQ tests”.

Neuroscientists and geneticists have also made good progress in understanding human intelligence. Meta-analyses of hundreds of studies confirm that people with larger brains tend to get higher scores on IQ tests, and research on more specific brain regions and features continues apace. We know from studies of twins, and from studies done directly on DNA, that intelligence test scores are heritable: that is, many of the intelligence differences between people are due to genetics. We’ve just begun to find some of the specific genes that might be responsible for these differences.

Because it has been linked to genetic and neural features, and because it seems highly stable across the lifespan, people make the mistake of assuming intelligence is immutable. Your IQ score, they think, is set in stone, condemning you to a poorer life if it’s below-average. But this is a mistake: there’s nothing in principle to suggest we can’t raise people’s IQ scores, at least to a degree (though many recent attempts to do so have been non-starters). Indeed, IQ scores have been rising inexorably across the years, in a process called the Flynn Effect, for (non-genetic) reasons that aren’t yet clear. Another mistake is to think that anyone has ever claimed that an IQ score ‘sums up’ a person; this is another falsehood, since all IQ researchers would readily admit that personality, motivation, and a host of other factors—including luck—are all critical for success in life.

It would be foolish to deny that there are any skeletons in IQ testing’s closet. Many (though by no means all) of the originators of the tests were involved with the eugenics movement in the early 20th Century, and it’s absolutely reasonable to be appalled at some of the uses to which IQ tests were originally put. But these concerns are irrelevant to the main question of whether an IQ score, taken today, can tell you anything about a person: facts are facts, and the validity of intelligence test scores is amply backed by voluminous evidence.

As all the studies linked above show, IQ tests are useful in a wide variety of situations, from education to medicine to the world of work. We need IQ tests to help us understand how the brain ages, and how we might be able to help it do so more healthily. We need IQ tests to help us work out how to boost people’s intelligence, and thus to boost their productivity. Perhaps above all, IQ tests are one of the tools with which psychologists can dissect and examine human intelligence: we’d be extremely unwise to continue to ignore their insights.

–

You can read more about the science of intelligence and IQ in my new book, Intelligence: All That Matters, published on June 18 by Hodder & Stoughton.

MIKE EMAILS:

The weird thing is that progressives, black and white, fought to eliminate the death penalty for Negros who were “retarded”.

Retarded murderers, they said, were unable to control themselves and didn’t know right from wrong. In effect, they argued that retarded murderers were sub-human and (like violent animals) could not be held to human standards.

So how do we tell if murderers are “retarded”? There is only one way: IQ tests.

The next time a bleeding heart lefty moans about some governor executing a retarded murderer, tell them that there is no such thing as “intelligence” and that the murderer (who probably was determined to be “retarded” because his IQ was 75 or less) was just as smart as anyone else since “all IQ scores tell you is how well you do on IQ tests”.

If you REALLY want to mess with their heads, tell them that IQ tests are racially biased and the retarded murderer really was just as smart as a 100 IQ white murderer.

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Facebook begins Europe-wide campaign against extremist posts

Posted on January 19, 2016 by Luke Ford

The ADL and the Simon Wiesenthal Center will be happy with this.

REUTERS: Facebook Inc (FB.O) began a Europe-wide campaign on Monday to thwart extremist posts on social media, after German politicians in particular raised concerns about a rise in xenophobic comments linked to an influx of refugees.

The U.S.-based group launched its “Initiative for Civil Courage Online” in Berlin, pledging over 1 million euros (1 million pounds) to support non-governmental organisations in their efforts to counter racist and xenophobic posts.

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said hate speech “has no place in our society”, including in the Internet.

Facebook’s ground rules forbid bullying, harassment and threatening language, but critics say it does not enforce them properly.

On Friday, the firm said it had hired a unit of the publisher Bertelsmann to monitor and delete racist posts on its platform in Germany.

In November, prosecutors in Hamburg launched an investigation into Facebook on suspicion of not doing enough to prevent the dissemination of hate speech.

Top German politicians and celebrities have voiced concern about the rise of anti-foreigner comments on Facebook and other social media as the country struggles to cope with a tide of new migrants that amounted to 1.1 million last year alone.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has urged Facebook to do more, and the Justice Ministry set up a task force with Facebook and other social networks and Internet service providers with the aim of identifying criminal posts more quickly and taking them down.

Posted in Censorship, Facebook, Germany | Comments Off

Was Adolf Hitler A Genius?

Posted on January 18, 2016 by Luke Ford

Walther Johann von Löpp writes:

For a bunch of amoral foul-ups, the Nazis at Nuremberg were an above average group. Four of them, Schacht, Seyss-Inquart, Göring and Dönitz were in the genius range. In fact, Schacht and Seyss-Inquart possessed IQ’s equaled by a mere 1 percent of humanity. Unfortunately, Hitler himself was never tested (though some have attempted to estimate his IQ), leading to much speculation about his relative intelligence.

During the course of the defendants’ testimony during the trial of the major war criminals, many of them offered their reflections on Hitler; truly informed opinions which provide a number of clues to the Führer’s intellectual capacity. (Note: One must, of course, bear in mind that the defendants continually emphasized Hitlers unassailable authority as an element in their defense, saying in effect that the Führer was the whole show and they had little or no influence, thereby mitigating their own guilt.) The following are some pertinent excerpts from this fascinating material:

Funk – IQ 124: “I immediately received the impression of an exceptional personality…He grasped all problems with lightning speed and knew how to present them very impressively, with great fluency and highly expressive gestures.”

Jodl – IQ 127: “Hitler was a leader to an exceptional degree. His knowledge and his intellect, his rhetoric and his will power triumphed in the end in every spiritual conflict over everyone. He combined to an unusual extent logic and clarity of thought, skepticism and excess of imagination, which very frequently foresaw what would happen but also very often went astray. I really marveled at him when, in the winter of 1941-2, by his faith and his energy he established the wavering Eastern Front…The modesty in his mode of life was impressive… …I became convinced – at least during the years 1933 to 1938 – that he was not a charlatan but a man of gigantic personality who, however, in the end assumed infernal power. But at that time he definitely was an outstanding personality…My influence on the Führer was unfortunately not in the least as great as it might, or perhaps even ought to have been in view of the position I held. The reason lay in the powerful personality of the despot who never suffered advisors gladly.”

Ribbentrop – IQ 129: “His thoughts and statements always had something final and definite about them, and they appeared to come from his innermost self. I had the impression that I was facing a man who knew what he wanted and who had an unshakable will and who was a very strong personality.”

Keital – IQ 129: “To a degree which is almost incomprehensible…Hitler had studied general staff publications, military literature, essays on tactics, operations and strategy and…he had a knowledge in the military fields which can only be called amazing…Hitler was so well informed concerning, armament, leadership and equipment of all armies and…all navies of the globe that it was impossible to prove any error on his part…Hitler studied at night all the big general staff books by Moltke, Schieffen and Clausewitz…Therefore we had the impression: Only a genius can do that…even in the simple everyday questions concerning organization and equipment of the Wehrmacht … I was the pupil and not the master… …Concerning…decisions he did not brook any influence.”

Dönitz – IQ 138: “A powerful personality…with extraordinary intelligence and energy, with a truly universal education, a nature radiating force and an enormous power of suggestion. I deliberately went to his headquarters only rarely because after a few days stay at his headquarters I felt that I must remove myself from his power of suggestion…In principle there was no question of a general consultation with the Führer.”

Göring – IQ 138: “After a certain time, when I had acquired more insight into the Führer’s personality, I gave him my hand and said: ‘I unite my fate with yours for better or for worse…in good times and in bad, even unto death.’ …With the dynamic personality of the Führer, unsolicited advice was not in order and one had to be on very good terms with him. That is to say one had to have great influence, as I had…as I had beyond for many years…Suggestions and advice were curtly brushed aside whenever he had once made his decisions or if…the would-be advisor had not that influence or that influential position…Foreign policy above all was the Führer’s very own realm…Foreign policy on the one hand and the leadership of the Armed Forces on the other hand enlisted the Führer’s greatest interest and were his main activity…He busied himself exceptionally with these details…In certain cases he would ask for data to be submitted to him without the experts knowing the exact reason. In other cases he would explain to his advisors what he intended to do and get from them the data or their opinion. Final decisions he took himself…In my opinion the Fuehrer did not know about details in the concentration camps, about atrocities…As far as I know him I do not believe he was informed.”

Schacht – IQ 143: “He read an enormous amount and acquired a wide knowledge. He juggled with that knowledge in a masterly manner in all debates, discussions and speeches. He was undoubtedly a man of genius in certain respects. He had sudden ideas of which nobody else had thought and which were at times useful in solving great difficulties, sometimes with astounding simplicity, sometimes, however, with equally astounding brutality. He was a mass psychologist of really diabolical genius…I believe that originally he was not filled only with evil desires; originally, no doubt, he believed he was aiming at good, but gradually he himself fell victim to the same spell which he exercised over the masses…He was a man of unbending energy and of a will-power which overcame all obstacles…Only those two characteristics – mass psychology and his energy and will-power – explain that Hitler was able to rally up to 40 per cent, and later almost 50 per cent, of the German people behind him.”

Some maintain that Hitler was not an ‘original thinker,’ thus denying that his IQ was much more than 140 or so. I am of the opinion that Hitler WAS an original thinker. This is based on the obvious innovations Hitler created in the fields of armored warfare and propaganda, as well as his compelling-to-Germans-of his-time synthesis of the major ideas of his day (Social Darwinism, nationalism, socialism, capitalism, etc.) into a workable ideology. My best guess was that Hitler’s IQ was around 150.

Sources: The IMT Transcripts, and Nuremberg: A Nation on Trial by Werner Maser, translated by Richard Barry.

Anatoly Karlin writes:

People tend to associate most closely with people of similar IQs.

Fortunately, uniquely for the elites of a major state, we have some detailed data on the IQs of the Nazi leadership (with the exception of a few important guys like Goebbels, Himmler, Bormann, and the Fuhrer himself) thanks to the US psychometrists attached to Nuremberg.

1 Hjalmar Schacht 143
2 Arthur Seyss-Inquart 141
3 Hermann Goering 138
4 Karl Doenitz 138
5 Franz von Papen 134
6 Eric Raeder 134
7 Dr. Hans Frank 130
8 Hans Fritsche 130
9 Baldur von Schirach 130
10 Joachim von Ribbentrop 129
11 Wilhelm Keitel 129
12 Albert Speer 128
13 Alfred Jodl 127
14 Alfred Rosenberg 127
15 Constantin von Neurath 125
16 Walther Funk 124
17 Wilhelm Frick 124
18 Rudolf Hess 120
19 Fritz Sauckel 118
20 Ernst Kaltenbrunner 113
21 Julius Streicher 106

As I recall from what I’ve read on Hitler and internal Nazi politics, of the above list, particularly “close associates” of Hitler would include: Goering; Ribbentrop; Speer; and until his “betrayal,” Hess. Their average IQ is 129.

While there was never much love lost between Hitler and the German military establishment, the closest military connection to Hitler from that list would be Keitel, who was infamous for his toadying behavior towards the Fuhrer. His IQ also happened to be precisely 129.

(Incidentally, while Jodl is regarded as far more competent than Keitel – he is the guy who actually made OKW command structure run – it’s interesting to note his IQ was actually lower than that of his boss, if marginally so).

In practice, Goering’s IQ during his time as Nazi bigwig might have actually been lower, due to his morphine addiction. On the other hand, there are suspicions that Speer was in fact considerably cleverer than his test scores indicated, because he was playing the “dumb dreamer architect” type so as to pretend ignorance of the death camps and avoid execution (if so he was successful). So these two factors might cancel out.

Adjusting for the Flynn effect – but only modestly, since the most useful (not rules-dependent) forms of intelligence haven’t improved all that radically, and we have an IQ of around 125 for Hitler normed to today’s Greenwich standards.

I think this is essentially accurate. He was a high school dropout and failed to get into the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts. He was a brilliant orator, but oratory skills have low g loadings.

Hitler did write a famous book. But Mein Kampf is a very badly written book, even ideology outside. Here is one particularly egregious example that I still recall reading a dozen years later by virtue of just how bad it was:

THE EXTENT of the fall of a body is always measured by the distance between its momentary position and the one it originally occupied. The same is true of nations and states. A decisive significance must be ascribed to their previous position or rather elevation. Only what is accustomed to rise above the common limit can fall and crash to a manifest low This is what makes the collapse of the Reich so hard and terrible for every thinking and feeling man, since it brought a crash from heights which today, in view of the depths of our present degradation, are scarcely conceivable.

And this was after Hess – with an IQ of 120 – had labored on Mein Kampf long and hard to make it at least minimally suitable for publication.

On the other hand, Hitler was always near the top of his class academically, which puts a lower limit of about 120 on his IQ. Here is is a quote from a book b y a childhood friend of Hitler’s via Pumpkin Person:

From school sources there is abundant authentic material describing his school performance. In primary school he was always near the top of the class. He learned quickly and made good progress without much effort.

He was also a good but not brilliant artist. On the basis of this, Pumpkin Person estimates his Performance IQ at 133 (Flynn-adjusted).

Hitler has some major geopolitical successes early on, but these were probably more a result of aggression and blind luck than intelligence (had France decisively reacted anytime at Munich or beforehand, the Nazis would have been finished. Not even necessarily due to the allies. The generals were interminably planning a coup throughout the 1930s, to be put into action should Hitler’s plans have blown up).

These geopolitical victories were in any case completely reversed later on – thanks in significant part to Hitler refusing to listen to and heed the advice of his generals (in contrast, Stalin realized he was hopeless on military matters after 1941, and with a few costly exceptions like the Third Battle of Kharkov, largely left the technical details to his generals thereafter).

Against that, it should be admitted that the Nazi leadership was more or less uniformly of the opinion that Hitler had a very high intellect, and was possibly a genius. Apparently, this included Hjalmar Schacht, the brightest of them all:

He read an enormous amount and acquired a wide knowledge. He juggled with that knowledge in a masterly manner in all debates, discussions and speeches. He was undoubtedly a man of genius in certain respects. He had sudden ideas of which nobody else had thought and which were at times useful in solving great difficulties, sometimes with astounding simplicity, sometimes, however, with equally astounding brutality. He was a mass psychologist of really diabolical genius…

However, there are two potential confounds here. First of all, Hitler was a brilliant orator, which expressed itself not only in his speeches but his casual “table talk.” Even very intelligent people can easily mistake this for genius, especially if they are lacking in the rhetorical/charismatic department themselves. Second, the Nazis at Nuremburg had a vested interest in presenting Hitler as a “diabolical genius” type of character in order to diminish their own share of responsibility for war crimes (and their risk of being hanged).

My (very rough) impressions/recollections from reading Nazi histories is that Hitler was certainly a step above the likes of feckless-schoolboy type Hess or the infamously callous Kaltenbrunner, but decidedly below Franz von Papen, Doenitz, and Schacht. To the contrary, his intellectual ability seems to fit right in besides that of Speer and Ribbentrop (also personal friends), and of Rosenberg (the Nazi “philosopher”).

Comments:

* John Gotti had an IQ of around 140. I am confident Hitler was at that level before taking power. Ernst Hanfstaengl said no one who heard Hitler speak in his later years could have any idea of his gifts. He was suffering from heart disease and probably had lost a bit by the end. Everyone who dealt with Hitler was amazed by his incredibly powerful and retentive memory, according to ‘The psychopathic god: Adolf Hitler’ (Waite)

He had sudden ideas of which nobody else had thought and which were at times useful in solving great difficulties, sometimes with astounding simplicity, sometimes, however, with equally astounding brutality

. He came very close to making Germany the most powerful state in the world. through the effectiveness of the combination of his decisiveness and the German army’s fighting power.

Hitler has some major geopolitical successes early on, but these were probably more a result of aggression and blind luck than intelligence (had France decisively reacted anytime at Munich or beforehand, the Nazis would have been finished

You need to read some John Mearshiemer or Brendan Simms to understand how Hitler almost alone put Germany in a position to win WW2 and lay the basis for it to become the most powerful state on Earth.

The edgiest parts of Tragedy are when Mearsheimer presents full-bore rationales for the aggression of Wilhelmine Germany, Nazi Germany, and imperial Japan.
The German decision to push for war in 1914 was not a case of wacky strategic ideas pushing a state to start a war it was sure to lose. It was … a calculated risk motivated in large part by Germany’s desire to break its encirclement by the Triple Entente, prevent the growth of Russian power, and become Europe’s hegemon.
As for Hitler, he “did indeed learn from World War I.” Hitler learned that Germany could not fight on two fronts at the same time, and he would have to win quick, successive victories, which, in fact, he achieved early in World War II.

Hitler performed a calculus as complex as any algebra to play the West and Soviets off against on another

CIA official site review of What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Barbarossa” Murphy reprints two secret letters from Hitler to Stalin that he found in the published Russian sources, hitherto unknown in the West. In these, the Führer seeks to reassure the Soviet dictator about the scarcely concealable German military buildup in eastern Europe. Hitler confides to Stalin that troops were being moved east to protect them from British bombing and to conceal the preparations for the invasion of the British Isles. He concludes with an assurance “on my honor as a head of state” that Germany would not attack the Soviet Union.[2] Some may question the authenticity of these letters, but they are difficult to dismiss out of hand. Assuming they are genuine, they add to what is perhaps the most bewildering paradox of the Soviet-German war: Stalin, the man who trusted no one, trusted Hitler.”

Stalin understood that he was freeing Hitler to strike in the west by making a pact with Hitler. In effect he facilitated it. The British considered the Soviet Union to be the real problem, Stalin had already grabbed the Baltic states plus parts of Finland and Rumania. The British were mobilizing against the USSR over the war with Finland even after declaring war with Germany. The British guarantee to Poland originally covered only their independence; the British thought allowing Germany to take Polish land was acceptable and it would make war between Germany and the USSR quite likely (Chamberlain’s strategy). Only after the Nazi-Soviet Pact was announced was the guarantee extended to Polands territory because at that point the British decided war was necessary; Germany and the USSR being friendly was not acceptable.

Clearly Stalin wanted to sit the war between the capitalists out and reap the rewards. Neville Chamberlain wanted to see the fighting done by the Germans and Bolshies, we know he thought that because he said so to a meeting of important Tories.With the the Nazi-Soviet pact the powerful Soviet deterent to any aggression was out of the equation and the British realized the balance of power had moved against them, which was unacceptable in a way that war between the Nazis and Soviets was not. If Hitler didn’t have to worry about the Soviets at his back that suddenly made all the previous calculations obsolete.

Although Stalin may have anticipated territorial demands or military pressure such as border incidents he was astounded when Hitler subjected the USSR to an all out attack with the promethean goal of conquering the soiet state. Everybody underestimated the effectiveness of the combination of Hitler decisiveness and the German army’s fighting power. There was nothing Stalin could do at that point because his forces were out of position, being in an offensive posture for they were too far forward. Stalin’s orders, when they came, were to stand and fight. That played into the Germans hands and allowed then to cut off and destroy much of the huge Soviet forces that Stalin had so foolishly concentrated along the border, especially in the south opposite Romania.

It was only because Hitler – against the advice of every military professional – decided to halt the drive to Moscow that the Soviet state was not overthrown in 1941.

* This is an exchange between Gustave Gilbert (the American chief psychologist who tested the defendants) and Hermann Göring, taken from Nuremberg Diary:

Göring: Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

Which of them was smarter, Gilbert or Göering?

* Herr Hitler did not manage merely to get himself appointed as the new Chancellor of Germany, in early 1933; he also managed to be a hands-on activist leader, once in power, who largely stabilized and reinvigorated the German nation. By the time that Germany hosted the 1936 Olympic Games, three and a half years into his reign, it was basically the economic wonder of the Western World, for its rebound to functionality and productivity. What had Russia and the Soviet Union, in nearly twenty years of revolutionary furor, under Mssrs. Lenin and Stalin, managed that was remotely comparable, despite their utilizing totalitarian coercion and violence that dwarfed what had been employed in Germany under Hitler’ infamous Third Reich?

* Many years ago I read Konstantin Simonov’s reminiscences about his meetings with Stalin. Stalin read a large amount of the literary fiction of his time, and then had authors over to talk about what they were doing wrong, who was good, who was terrible, what writers shoud write about instead, etc. Long conversations like that.

The fascinating thing is that he didn’t delegate this task. I think that subsequent Soviet leaders did. Think of all the things he could have done with his time instead.

* I had already read a lot of books about both Stalin and Hitler when I learned – to my great surprise – that both were bookish. Somehow it is never mentioned.

* Hitler was pretty lazy when he was dictator and often slept until noon; he also delegated many tasks to his underlings who competed with each other (that’s the reason why “revisionists” like David Irving can claim Hitler didn’t know about the Holocaust, though that’s obviously nonsensical). And when he did intervene, it often had disastrous consequences for the German war effort (like in the case of the Me 262).
Stalin also made disastrous mistakes, but in the end he probably was a lot more competent than Hitler (also probably more educated…didn’t he know all the classic Russian novels? Hitler’s favourite author by contrast was Karl May, who wrote adventure stories about the American west and is hardly known outside of Germany).

* Many people here seem to be under the impression that Hitler was some kind of economic genius. That couldn’t be further from the truth. He was self-admittedly ignorant of economic matters (and proud of it). Yes, he did restore pre-Depression GDP and at a faster rate than in the US or France, through a narrow focus on military Keynesianism that left consumption levels below their peaks under Weimar and was likely unsustainable in the long-run (according to Adam Tooze anyway). Regardless, during the critical years 1940-41, Germany was outmatched by the British in aircraft production, dooming them to lose the Battle of Britain and make Sealion unfeasible.

This in turn was linked to the most catastrophic decision of them all: The refusal to fully mobilize the German economy for war production before 1943, when the situation had suddenly turned critical for them (unlike the case in the USSR or Britain). Had he done this, it is difficult to see how he could have ended up losing to the Soviet Union. As it was, Hitler staked nigh everything on the sheer skill and elan of the Wehrmacht, massively discounting the value of war production and logistics to the horror of his generals. In military affairs as in economics and virtually everything else he involved himself with, Hitler was the classical example of a dilettante.

* The dilettante accusation is reminiscent of Ernst Topitsch’s pointing out that Hitler had not established himself in any profession before joining the German Army. (He had to petition the German cabinet to be granted this privilege). His WW1 feat of impressing his officers as an exemplary soldier in years of dedication to duty in extreme danger as a messenger makes this quite unsustainable (he was one of the very few private soldiers to be awarded an Iron Cross 1st class).

It’s true Hitler had Bohemian habits (Speer said he often wondered when Hitler actually worked) but staying up all night or very very late was something Stalin and Churchill did as well. Hitler had an efficient civil service and could devote himself to his architectural scheme for Linz, and plans for conquering Russia. When he needed to Hitler came up with truly brilliant ideas all on his own such as the “military masterpiece” (according to Stolfi) assault on Fort Eben-Emael, he also accepted (as coinciding with his own intuitions) the Manstein plan for the battle of France, and alone asked Guderian what he would do one breaking through, and authorised the driving for the coast. Add up his clever father who rose as high as possible in the customs for one with his lack of education, ability to impress very clever people in conversation, his speech-writing/making ability and ability to play Britain and Russia off against one another, and finally choosing the right moment to strike; I think Hitler’s IQ can’t have been under 140.

* Hitler was no psychopath. In 1943 his secretary’s husband was killed on the front. He got very nervous and depressed when he heard that, because he had to break the news to the secretary. When others proposed that he could delegate the task to one of his minions, he insisted that this – obviously highly unpleasant – task was his duty, but tried to avoid meeting his secretary for several hours before finally gathering the strength to tell her. Were he a psychopath, 1) he wouldn’t have found telling this so unpleasant and 2) in any event would have avoided it altogether. I don’t think psychopaths have such strong feelings of personal duty towards a secretary when they are all-powerful dictators and so no social pressure could have any effect on them.

Another story is that in February 1945 he complained to his doctor of insomnia. He said the moment he closed his eyes he could see the map with the battalions around Stalingrad. It’s obvious he felt he had made some terrible and irreversible mistake at Stalingrad for which he alone was responsible. Not a psychopathic trait.

Hitler was a non-psychopathic mass murderer.

* This may be apocryphal, but apparently Stalin was passionate about chess and when he stayed in Vienna he was unbeatable; Trotsky among others was no match for him.

Stalin seems to have had more psychopathic traits than did Hitler, though neither one would probably be diagnosable as a psychopath (psychopathy includes traits that limit long-term success in life). In essence Stalin was a brilliant and ruthless Caucasian gangster who had embedded himself within a revolutionary movement that took over a nascent superpower, who was able to outmaneuver a lot of other scheming, intelligent and ruthless people to become absolute ruler. This required much more intelligence than what was required of Hitler.

Hitler also seemed to have genuine affection for animals, something that would not be true of psychopaths. This is why I stated that although Hitler certainly had psychopathic traits he would probably not be diagnosable as a “pure” psychopath.

As I had written, psychopathy involves traits that make it very difficult to succeed in life long-term. Psychopaths usually eventually slip up and fail.

* He was a brilliant orator, but oratory skills have low g loadings.

This is most likely truth. As a kid growing up in urban poor ghetto, my observation is that underclass kids are extremely verbal and social. They spent most their enery on social relationship with complicated gang or gang like structure. Using their words to manipulate each other is the core of their activities plus constant physical violence as part of game. They are less interested in figuring out natural truth/knowlage.

Poor people tend to live in close proximity due to reduced personal space (personal space reflecting size of property/wealth). Three generations living in the same room and single wall seperating neighbours are very much common in poor ghetto. Constant dealing with other people become necessary and unavoidable. Also poor people need supporting each other to survive. So dependency is sign of poverty. Self-actualizers style of isolation (few friends) and aloofness are truely luxury only avaible for the rich. So called top out of sight class.

Almost universally any gain in wealth often leads to increased personal space (your own private bedroom, more space in room, larger size of property, distance from neighbor ect). With higher g associated with more wealth over generations, characters associated with self-actualizer behavior might become genetically fixed. Especially during feudal time, the social status is inherited. After thousands years, the personality might be genetically fixed due to confortable fitting of such self-actualizer personality (enjoying being alone/intravert). All they need is to have intelligence to gain and control large amount of wealth which can be used to control hired army and police to protect the rule or laws efforcement.

* The fact remains, in just a few years’ time, his regime turned around both the German economy and the German mindset– and that was not the result of his enemies’ stupidity. In the same amount of time in office, the lauded, nearly deified, Franklin Roosevelt, in my own country, did nothing but flail about, and generally waste unprecedented amounts of borrowed money. In 1937, as he was starting his second term, the unemployment rate was back up around 17%, after four years of Keynesian-style deficit spending– which he himself had run against, back in 1932. In order to counter deflation, his administration actually went around killing lifestock and destroying goods! If Hitler was merely luckier than Roosevelt, than luck indeed favors a prepared mind. At the end of the day, as someone trained in History, Psychology and Business Administration, inter alia, I simply find it very hard to believe that Herr Hitler was no smarter than, say, George W. Bush or O. J. Simpson!?!

* But (speaking in general) winning power struggles is not highly g-loaded. It isn’t perhaps so much that IQ doesn’t make a difference but rather that it can make an adverse difference. If you’ve ever had the misfortune to work in a large organization, you’ll know there are always alliances and power struggles, and the winner is often a dimwit. This is partly because dimwits can assemble alliances because their intellects challenge no one.

Consider the pre-Stalin power struggle between Stalin, Bukharin, and Trotsky. Bukharin was smart; Trotsky brilliant; Stalin (almost) universally recognized as a mediocrity. If you read their works, the intellectual difference is enormous.

Yet Bukharin was got a bullet and Trotsky the ice pick.

* Hitler’s moustache hid a long narrow philtrum. If people had seen it they would have thought ‘I would not put anything past this man.’

* There’s a theory (I wish I could track it down) that seems plausible to me. It holds that the IQ level of a movement leader and the next level of followers won’t exceed 18. That sounds about right, although of course I can’t be confident about the exact number. After 18, communication breaks down. (What was communication between Streicher and Schacht like.) I think we can reasonably expand the theory to say that the members of the leader’s circle will neither be exceeded nor exceed the leader by more than 18 points. (A skillful leader can tolerate someone smarter than he, but not someone beyond his comprehension.)

It’s a tight fit, and IQ 124 or 125 comes very close.

* Lenin’s theories had little relation to real life, in practice he was a fool who handed a key position to Stalin, Hitler outmaneuvered everyone. It seems the type of IQ that copes best with real life difficulties is accounted worthless. Hitler identified the source of communist power as street intimidators not theoretical dialectic. I have already said that the figure for Streicher seems to0 low. Gotti sometimes tested low when in prison and one would wonder what the incentive is for a person on trial for their life to seem highly intelligent. An IQ of 125 is possible for Hitler but it would be rock bottom, and you could give that figure for Mozart too. Neither could be properly assessed by an IQ test, they had a highly specialised type of intelligence.

* I have a problem with the following types of whitewashing:

– role of specific persons’ personal decisions minimized (as you can see with my conversation with Silviosilver), when in fact people did make decisions, it’s the same thing with ‘structuralists’ in the case of Nazism: while there were local excesses and local SS commanders often escalated (and/or proposed Berlin how to escalate) the originally modest orders, long term only the decisions made in the center (personally by Hitler) were the ones that counted, as Hitler’s will always prevailed when he wanted to (and it must be noted that most ordinary Nazis never wanted to exterminate all Jews, but many were willing to go along with some central policy to that effect, and those unwilling self-selected themselves out of the machinery of extermination)
– famine deaths are counted as “well, just a famine”, when in fact all Soviet famines in the 20th century claimed more (in the case of 1921 and 1933, way way more) lives, than the last Czarist famines, and there were disturbing deliberate actions by the central government which can only be seen as government action to induce the deaths of the famine victims (in 1921 confiscating grain with the calculated effect of causing a famine and thereby putting an end to the peasant guerrilla movement, in 1933 deporting back people who had fled famine-stricken areas to the very same famine-stricken areas, or preventing them to leave in the first place); famine in the Warsaw ghetto was always counted as part of the holocaust, so famine victims can be victims of mass murder anyway
– splitting the Soviet totals 1917-39 based on “Stalin wasn’t in power before 1925″ and giving only the 1925-39 totals, when he was part of the earlier regime, did participate in its mass murder (and in fact was among the more ruthless) and approved of all the murderous policies of the regime (yes, you can give a 1917-24 total for Lenin and a 1924-39 or 1924-53 total for Stalin, but always add that Stalin was a very high ranking official of Lenin’s regime already, and always give the total for the two added together)

There might be more, these are what I don’t like.

I thought about which one was ‘worse’ or ‘better’, but I think there’s no good answer. The Soviet regime “only” wanted to kill maybe 5% (according to Zinoviev in 1918, maybe 10%) of the population it conquered (wherever it took power), and in the end it only killed a few thousand people in most Eastern European (non-Soviet) countries (but they did kill the 5% in China and I think in Vietnam, too), and they wanted to conquer the whole world, not just a however huge part of it, so the intended body count (for which they never had a chance to reach) might be 100 million (if we calculate with the 2 billion population in the 1940s). Hitler of course wanted to get rid of most of the Slavic (and all of the Jewish) population where he conquered (that could be 100 million, too), and not only did he have realistic chances of conquering that area but also it’s possible he would have wanted to conquer even more, had he won. A total Nazi conquest of the Earth would have resulted in the death of 90% of humanity (had the Nazis followed up on Hitler’s theories after expanding so much his original goals). On the other hand, a total Stalinist conquest of the Earth would have killed off probably only 5% of the population, but it would have been disproportionately from among the most worthy 5% capable of creating arts and sciences. Moreover, Nazi Germany was freer (from the point of view of a German) than the USSR (from the point of view of a Soviet citizen, be it a Politburo member or an average Ivan Ivanovich) and so probably life for the future humanity would have been better.

It must also be kept in mind that the Nazis were conscious of the fact that they had to hurry up with their genocide because after the war (and they were counting on a victory) they wouldn’t be able to do that any more. In other words, probably after a victory the genocide would have stopped or at least slowed down. Same thing after Hitler’s death – who knows what his successors would have done? I also sometimes think that even if for example my ancestors would have been exterminated by Hitler, I have German ancestors as well, and Germans are closely related to Slavs and other non-Southern Europeans, so if the present Eurabia scenario turns reality, maybe even Polish etc. genetic interests would be better served by their extermination at the hands of close genetic relatives (the Germans) as opposed to distant peoples (MENA and SSA peoples). Also the Nazi vision was based on human nature. The Communist vision was based on a false view of human nature. This kind of honesty might have been better after the system cooled down and stopped mass murder.

But yes, the Nazis were probably worse from a purely humanitarian point of view. It’s a question how much worse. The 60 million victims of Mao might have been spared (no Soviet victory, no Maoist victory in China), same thing for Pol Pot’s victims, etc. The Japanese might have killed several millions, though.

* Stalin’s key position didn’t mean automatic power for him, though. He needed to outmaneuver the other Politburo members.

In the Soviet ‘democratic centralism’ the Politburo could remove Stalin from his position and expel him from the party. Then they could replace most people below them, and then get their acts retroactively approved at a new party congress. So Stalin what needed to avoid was Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev getting together. He managed to split them (because all three of them underestimated him), and only then was he finally safe.

I agree that Hitler had special talents for some things. I think he could have been a great architect (according to Spotts in Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics basically all Nazi public structures could be considered his personal creations, almost all of them were based on his sketches, and he kept modifying the plans until they were exactly how he imagined them), and he definitely had an aesthetic sense (see those cool Nazi uniforms that were all designed based on his sketches and then modified… or his Parteitagen… you get the point), I’m not sure if it would show up in his IQ.

He had a very good memory, and I think there’s a good correlation between memory and IQ. But savants also have very good long-term memory (but low IQ and also bad short-term memory), and I’m not sure how good his short-term memory was.

I’d think AK’s 125 estimate is within the bounds of what I’d think right, but my guess would be at least 5 points higher. (Maybe even 10-15 points higher.) It’s also my impression that he liked to listen to his own voice a lot, and most of the people he surrounded himself with had to be good listeners. This might mean that he surrounded himself with lower-IQ types who worshipped him for being a genius because he told them things they could never have come up with themselves.

* The organized mass murder of Jews only started in the summer of 1941 in the territories captured from the USSR. Most holocaust historians now accept that the decision to kill all Soviet Jews only came at the earliest in August 1941 (but possibly sometime later), and the decision to kill all Jews was probably made later (according to Christian Gerlach, only in December 1941).

It is well known that Hitler openly threatened that “if international Jewry once more starts a world war”, then the result will be the end of European Jewry. According to Jewish historian Jeffrey Herf (in The Jewish Enemy) this meant that Hitler essentially tried to use European Jews as hostages against the Americans whom he believed to be under control of a Jewish cabal. Now America was definitely not under the control of a tightly knit Jewish cabal, but contrary to what Herf tries to prove, Jews were definitely influential there.

Sorry for the distraction, but let me cite a few examples of how Herf tries to make the Nazi viewpoint more irrational than it was. Herf for example mentions that the Nazi propaganda “irrationally” painted New York mayor LaGuardia as Jewish, when in fact he was raised a Catholic and born to a Catholic Italian father. He fails to mention that his mother was Jewish, so many Jews, including the secular leaders of present-day Israel, would consider him Jewish. Similarly, he mentions how Nazi propaganda “irrationally” mentioned that all Hollywood studios were under Jewish control, when in fact not all of those studios were controlled by Jews. Herf, again, fails to mention what percentage of Hollywood studios were Jewish. (The vast majority, maybe 75%.)

So contrary to Herf, Jews really were influential. They just weren’t a closely knit cabal who could make decisions – it was simply many Jews in influential positions, and all of them making decisions based on both their emotions and rational analysis (as all other humans do). Obviously they hated Hitler already in the 1930s (and with good reason – while I don’t deny it wasn’t irrational of Hitler to try to get rid of Jews, I cannot deny that it was with reason that the Jews hated Hitler after he started his anti-Jewish policies in the 1930s).

This is why Hitler’s policy of trying to blackmail Americans (American Jews) into not pushing for war with him became irrational: by his declarations of how European Jewry will get exterminated, he only made those American Jews hate him even more, so they kept pushing for war just as they had before. (I think since they had been pushing for war with him already in 1939-40, it’s difficult to see how it worsened Hitler’s position, but it didn’t help him either.)

And so once the Americans started to get even more involved in the war against him (by sending free weapons to the USSR) and got into a shooting war with him (already in late summer of 1941), he started executing his hostages. And once it became irreversible (after December 1941), he went on to enhance it to a thorough extermination program.

Since anti-war movements had little chances anyway, I fail to see how it made his position worse. He spent probably less than 1% of his resources on the holocaust, and for example according to John Keegan the fact that most people in Europe knew or suspected that all or most Jews might be killed simply because they are Jews helped keep the (largely nonexistent) resistance movements’ heads down. When you’re ruling very large populations who hate you a lot, it helps if you keep advertising how ruthless you are.

* Lenin’s thought was derived from Marx (who hdd drawn heavily on Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon). Hitler’s speeches can stand with Lenin’s writing for effectiveness, and if anything Lenin deluded himself no less about the world than Hitler did. Certainly once in power Hitler’s ideas were put into practice, while Lenin found many of his were unworkable. Lenin was roughly comparable to Hitler inasmuch during their rise to power both established themselves in their chosen mode of expression as leaders of vision who overcame obstacles. Philosophers took Lenin seriously because he like all Marxists claimed to be espousing a true science, not the dead weight of prior generations’ actual experience. But we can see that he was actually advancing nonsense. Lenin and was skilled at writing as Hitler was at speaking. Note that epistemological authority Richard H. Popkin published a conspiracy theory about JFK.

In the subjects he was interested in (especially music and architecture) , Hitler throughout his life could converse with experts. He had unusual knowledge of biology and medicine, and though not a military professional came up with brilliant ideas that took him to shattering victories.

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