Luke Ford | No sacred cows.

Israel As Atonement For The Holocaust

Posted on November 8, 2015 by Luke Ford

American Jewish historian Peter Novick writes in his book The Holocaust in American Life:

…It’s not clear how the myth of Israel as the world’s atonement for complicity in the Holocaust developed… There has been an apparent slide from the belief that the United States and its allies were guilty, to the belief that they did feel guilty — a tenuous progression. Some seem to confuse sympathy for the survivors, which there was in abundance, and guilt for the Holocaust, of which there is no contemporary evidence — a strange equation. American sympathy for the victims of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, or the Armenian earthquake of 1988, and the offering of aid to their victims implied no feelings of guilt for the events that produced the suffering.

…Emissaries from the Yishuv deliberately concentrated Jewish survivors in the American Occupation Zone of Germany so that the United States would be led to demand that the British allow them into Palestine. Recruitment for illegal immigration was shifted to relatively intact Jewish communities so that the Yishuv could be reinforced while the DP camps would keep up the pressure. Overall, illegal immigration was only secondarily meant to help survivors. In the words of the Israeli historian Anita shapira, it was “first and foremost a theater in the battle for the Jewish state.” And it was to a great extent a public relations battle. The voyage of the Exodus, loaded with survivors who eventually were returned to Germany, was the greatest triumph of this battle. The captain of the ship believed it would be possible to land the passengers of the shores of Palestine, but he was overruled by the senior Mossad representative on board: the goal was to “show how poor and weak and helpless we were, and how cruel the British were.”

Inside the DP camps, emissaries from the Yishuv organized survivor activity — crucially, the testimony the DPs gave to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry and the UN Special Committee on Palestine about where they wished to go. The results were gratifying to the proponents of a Jewish state. In response to a UN survey, more than 97 percent said that Palestine was their goal. Many wrote down, “First choice, Palestine. Second choice, crematorium.” …The Jewish Agency envoys reported home that they had been successful in preventing the appearance of “undesirable” witnesses at the hearings. One wrote to his girlfriend in Palestine that “we have to change our style and handwriting constantly so that they will think that the questionnaires were filled in by the refugees.”

…By the time of the birth of Israel there was a certain weariness with the DP problem in Germany among some Jewish elites. Chaplain Abraham Klausner, a militant Zionist who had worked with Jewish survivors and, earlier, closely identified with them, sounded the alarm:

“The great majority of the people are idle… The number of people involved in the black market is estimated at a minimum of 30%… There is hardly a moral standard to which the people adhere.”

…The goal of the campaign’s initiators was to bring in 100,000 Jewish survivors. But since it was impolitic and contrary to American tradition for legislation to specify the religion of immigrants, and since Jews were estimated to comprise 25% of all DPs, they pressed for a law that would bring in a total of 400,000 DPs over four years. To this end, the Citizens’ Committee on Displaced Persons was established — ostensibly nondenominational, but in fact largely funded and staffed by Jews.

…An official of the American Jewish Committee described the desired kind of publicity: “where the case story is of a non-Jew, or one who plans to settle elsewhere than in New York or Chicago.” A Jewish CCDP staff member responded with frustration to a photograph in the New York Daily News that showed a Jewish-looking couple disembarking: “Something has got to be done to ease up or completely eliminate [this] type of publicity… We have been spending thousands of dollars to try to get across the idea that displaced persons are not all Jews, and if we continue to see such photographs…our campaign — public-relations-wise — is a dead duck.

…To an unknowable extent, survivors’ silence was a response to “market” considerations: few were interested. (Thirty and forty years later, with increased demand, there was increased supply.)

…Just as Jewish groups’ principled declarations against totalitarianism did not prevent them from seeking entry for Jews who had been Communists, so the Christian groups’ equally sincere hostility to totalitarianism did not prevent them from seeking admission for their coreligionists who were former Nazis.

…One constraint was fear of confirming a long-standing and widely held negative perception of Jews. No lesson in comparative theology was as assiduously taught in Sunday schools across the United States as the contrast between the Old Testament God of Vengeance and the New Testament God of Love and Forgiveness. Recent experience had shown its continued currency. Toward the end of the war, President Roosevelt had casually endorsed, then quickly repudiated, a plan advanced by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau for the permanent deindustrialization (“pastoralization”) of Germany. Secretary of War Henry Stimson privately called the Morgenthau Plan “semitism gone wild for vengeance.”

…The popular association of Jews with Communism dated from the Bolshevik Revolution. Most of the “alien agitators” deported from the United States during the Red Scare after World War I had been Jews. In the interwar years the Communist Jew was a staple of anti-Semitic propaganda in both the United States and Europe….

Lucy Dawidowicz — later well known as an historian of the Holocaust, but in these years the American Jewish Committee’s expert on the percentage of Jews among ‘hostile witnesses’ before various investigative bodies. Jews, she found, often made up 75 percent or more of the totals. Worst of all, producing something near panic among mainstream Jewish organizations, was the number of Jews figuring in espionage prosecutions: the Amerasia case, the Canadian Spy Ring, the Judith Coplon case — culminating in that ultimate disaster for Jewish public relations, the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Morton Sobell, Harry Gold, and David Greenglass.

Jewish organizations worked frantically to combat the Jew-Communist equation, but it was a difficult brief. They could insist, correctly, that only a small proportion of Jews were Communists, or even well disposed toward the Soviet Union. But it was also correct, and becoming manifest, that a great many — perhaps most — American Communists in these years were Jews.

…Jewish organizations, throughout the fifties and well into the sixties, worked on a variety of fronts to prevent, or at least limit, the association of Jews with Communism in the public mind. Their principal co-operative venture was the ‘Hollywood Project,’ in which they jointly employed a West Coast representative who lobbied movie producers to avoid any unsympathetic representations of Jews. A good deal of this lobbying dealt with the Jew-Communist issue. The producer of I Married a Communist promised to see that no Communist character had a ‘name that can even remotely be construed as Jewish…

The inward turn on the part of much of American Jewish leadership, their insistence that ‘Is it good for the Jews?’ be the first, if not the only, question that Jews ask themselves — inevitably mandated a rightward turn as well. By the 1970s Jews were preeminent among the ‘haves’ in American society, and the gap between Jews and non-Jew, in income as well as in representation in all elite positions, widened over subsequent decades. Jews had everything to lose and nothing to gain from the more equal distribution of rewards which had been the aim of liberal social policies … The political movement called neo-conservatism was almost exclusively a Jewish affair; Commentary, published by the American Jewish Committee, became America’s best-known conservative magazine.

…The hard-line anti-Soviet articles in its monthly magazine, Commentary, were, according to Norman Podhoretz, “part of a secret program to demonstrate that not all Jews were communists.” One of the [American Jewish] Committee’s staff members secured agreements from Time and Life and several New York newspapers not to publish letters from readers commenting on the Jewishness of accused Communists…

One Jewish official complained to a colleague that American Jews were “not taking anywhere near the measures or using the efforts in combating Communism as they do against Nazism.”

…One should never confuse the calculated public posture of Jewish officialdom with the “around the kitchen table” feelings of American Jewry, and especially not with respect to cold war inhibitions about discussing the Holocaust… Without official sanction, it could not become a public communal emblem; without official reinforcement, it tended, at least for many, to decline in salience…

While the principal impact of the cold war was to limit talk of the Holocaust, there was one realm in which it could be conscripted to the new crusade. At the center of American Jewish foreign policy during the early cold war was protest against anti-Semitism in the Soviet bloc. A particular target was the trial of Rudolph Slansky and other Jewish leaders of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia in late 1952. There is no doubt that Jewish groups were sincere in their protests, and in their anxiety — which abated somewhat after the death of Stalin in early 1953 — that “anti-Zionist” campaigns threatened wider circles of Eastern European Jews. But neither is there any doubt that they were aware of the domestic “defense functions” their protests served. One memorandum on the objectives of the American Jewish Committee’s program to combat Soviet anti-Semitism noted that “even if no Jewish lives were at stake abroad, concern for the security of Jews in the United States would require us to act. Soviet policy opens up opportunities which must not be overlooked…to reinforce certain important aspects of ACJ’s domestic program.” “The Prague trial,” said another, “is the best opportunity we ever had to ‘dissociate Jews from Communism’ in the eyes of the general public.” The summary of a staff discussion noted general agreement that “tremendous Jewish public outcry on the subject will serve to dissociate Jews from Communism in the public mind.” The editor of Commentary was also struck by the “great opportunity” that protests against Soviet anti-Semitism offered at a time of anxiety about the public relations consequences of the Rosenberg case.

Holocaust references abounded. With the Prague trial, announced an article in The New Leader, “Stalin is ready for his ‘final solution of the Jewish question.’ Stalin’s goal, said an editorial a week later, “is the liquidation of the remnants left by Hitler.” “Stalin will succeed where Hitler failed,” said an article in Commentary. “He will finally wipe out the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe…”

* Despite the broad scope of the language adopted, over the next fifty years, which saw tens of millions die in actions that were, by the UN definition, clearly genocidal, the United Nations has never invoked the procedure for charging the crime of genocide. From the outset, “genocide” was a rhetorical rather than a juridical device, employed for purely propagandistic purposes.

* Genocide was a generic category, and example could be found to fit the needs of the moment. The Holocaust had an awkward specificity, and it was the “wrong atrocity” for contemporary purposes.

* Rabbi Eugene Borowitz in the 1950s: “To raise a cry against the God who tolerated such an enormity [Holocaust] would expose the full extent of Jewish unbelief to Christian America, thereby undermining Judaism’s status as one of America’s equivalent faiths.”

*…An official of the American Jewish Committee recalled that her first assignment, in the late forties, was promoting stories in the press that would show “Jews were as nice as anybody else; show them that they’re football players, they’re not all intellectuals.” It’s worth noting that the three leading promoters of the postwar “consensus school” of American history — which stressed what united Americans rather than what divided them — were all Jews.

* In recent decades, the leading Jewish organizations have invoked the Holocaust to argue that anti-Semitism is a distinctively virulent and murderous form of hatred. But in the first postwar decades their emphasis — powerfully reinforced by contemporary scholarly opinion — was on the common psychological roots of all forms of prejudice. Their research, educational, and political action programs consistently minimized differences between different targets of discrimination. If prejudice and discrimination were all of a set piece, they reasoned that they could serve the cause of Jewish self-defense as well by attacking prejudice and discrimination against blacks as by tackling anti-Semitism directly.

* What was Anne Frank’s national consciousness? “My first wish after the war is that I may become Dutch! I love the Dutch, I love this country… Even if I have to write to the Queen myself, I will not give up until I have reached my goal.”

* A film about Nazism was shown to thousands of high school students across the country to test its impact. The percentage of students who thought Jews were treated unequally in the United States fell by more than a third after seeing the film: it set a standard of “unequal treatment” that made discriminatory practices in America not worth nothing.

* From a Catholic newspaper called The Tablet: “All this Eichmann business that has been filling the papers lately sadly reminds us that there are still some influential people around who — like Shylock of old — demand their pound of flesh….This identical thinking was back of the notorious Nuremberg trials. And the same believers in ‘an eye for an eye’ continue today unregenerate and unashamed. Forgiveness is not in their makeup, not even forgiveness of the completely vanquished. For these warped minds there is no such word as pardon.”

* The general-circulation magazine that outdid all others in the frequency and vehemence of its attacks on the trial was William F. Buckley’s National Review.

In one editorial, the magazine wrote:

We are in for a great deal of Eichmann in the weeks ahead….We predict the country will tire of it all, and for perfectly healthy reasons. The Christian Church focuses hard on the crucifixion of Jesus Christ for only one week out of the year. Three months—that is the minimum estimate made by the Israeli Government for the duration of the trial—is too long….Everyone knows the facts, and has known them for years. There is no more drama or suspense in store for us. …Beyond that there are the luridities….The counting of corpses, and gas ovens, and kilos of gold wrenched out of dead men’s teeth….There is under way a studied attempt to cast suspicion upon Germany….it is all there: bitterness, distrust, the refusal to forgive, the advancement of Communist aims…
And finally, who will undertake to give as much publicity to those wretched persons, Jews and non-Jews, who are alive today, but will be dead before this trial is over—the continuing victims of Communist persecution, in China and Russia and Laos and Indonesia and Tibet and Hungary?

* In a meeting with radio and television executives, whose purpose was to influence the spin put on trial coverage, the American Jewish Committee leader John Slawson told them that the object of the [Eichmann] trial was to confront “hatred and totalitarianism…and their continued presence in the world today.” The themes to be stressed were “this must never happen again anywhere to any people” and “this is the result of letting bigotry grow.”

* …almost all scholars have come to accept [Hannah] Arendt’s thesis that the typical Holocaust perpetrator was “terrifyingly normal” and by no means a driven anti-Semite. Yehuda Bauer, an Israeli Holocaust historian, writes: “The Germans did not have to hate the Jews in order to kill them.. One suspects that, had they received instructions to murder all the Poles, or all the Frenchmen, they would have performed equally well.”

* Why, then, was it so often claimed that [Hannah Arendt] had blamed Jews for not resisting? One partial explanation is that by her offhand characterization of Jewish resistance as inconsequential, she was breaking with the myth of widespread Jewish resistance which, for various reasons, had been assiduously promoted since the war. This was not a Jewish peculiarity: all people who had lived (and died) in Hitler’s Europe inflated their resistance credentials…

* Hannah Arendt: “But the whole truth was that there existed Jewish community organizations and Jewish party and welfare organizations on both the local and the international level. Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people. (p. 111) . . . he [Eichmann] did expect more than compliance, be expected—and received, to a truly extraordinary degree—their cooperation. This was “of course the very corner stone” of everything he did. . . . To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story. . . . (p. 104)”

* Raul Hilberg tells of presenting to his Doktorvater at Columbia, the tough-minded Marxist emigre scholar Franz Neumann, the portion of his dissertation that talked of how “the Jews had cooperated in their own destruction”: “Neumann did not say that this finding was contradicted by any facts; he did not say that it was underresearched. He said, ‘This is too much to take — cut it out.’ I deleted the passage, silently determined to restore it to my larger work.”

The Holocaust had not, at this point, become as sacralized as it was subsequently to become. But there was already a great deal of visceral resistance to its being discussed in terms other than the confrontation of pure evil and pure virtue. Arendt’s failure to abide by these norms — her insistence on stressing complexity and ambiguity — was clearly, and understandably, one of the things that gave the greatest offense.

* Oscar Cohen, a long-time official of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote to a friend that by the 1970s organized American Jewry had become “an agency of the Israeli government…follow[ing] its directions from day to day.” Popular Jewish attitudes underwent a profound “Israelization.” The hallmark of the good Jew became the depth of his or her commitment to Israel. Failure to fulfill religious obligations, near-total Jewish illiteracy, even intermarriage, were all permissible; lack of enthusiasm for the Israeli cause (not to speak of public criticism of Israel) became unforgivable.

* Leonard Fein, editor of the Jewish magazine Moment [September 1975], wrote:

A complex fear has taken hold of us since October 1973. Its roots lie in our renewed awareness of Jewish vulnerability, now widely perceived as permanent, perhaps even ultimate. . . . The terrible isolation of Israel, the dramatic ascendance of the Arabs . . . Israel’s near total dependence on the United States – all these are aspects of our present gloom.
We cast about uncertainly for a way of making the case for Israel, a way that will be sufficiently compelling to overcome the threat of an oil embargo, of Arab economic reprisal…a way sufficiently compelling to persuade a post-Vietnam America to assume the burdens and the risks of Israel’s defense… With the stakes so large, and the perils so manifest, we search for the most powerful arguments…. We speak tentatively, testing the strength of one approach against another…

Two ADL officials laid out the new case for Israel after the Yom Kippur war:

For a long while after World War II, sympathy for the six million Jewish victims of Nazi genocide . . . helped to open doors long closed to Jews here and abroad. Certainly the State of Israel was one direct beneficiary of world empathy with the Jewish victims of Nazism.
In the postwar world . . . the time during which the non-Jewish world continued to view Jews as oppressed was incredibly short. Within twenty-five years after the photographs of the bestiality in the concentration camps shocked the world . . . Jews had ceased being victims.

We are all attracted to explanations that make clear that our troubles are someone else’s fault, that we are blameless.

* The Holocaust framework allowed one to put aside as irrelevant any legitimate grounds for criticizing Israel, to avoid even considering the possibility that the rights and wrongs were complex…

Of course, invoking the Holocaust was far from the only rhetorical strategy pursued in mobilizing support for Israel. Depending on the audience and the context, one might argue that Israel was an important American strategic asset or stress the support given to Israel’s enemies by the Soviet Union. With some Christian audiences, biblical claims were effective…

Israel’s cause has never much concerned the American public, whose interest in international affairs is usually limited to those situations which directly engage American interests — and troops. If there has been, over the years, a generally pro-Israel tilt among Americans, this had mostly to do with the fact that Israel was aligned with the West in the cold war; to an unknowable but probably significant extent, it has reflected pervasive, often racist anti-Arab attitudes. The memory of the Holocaust has probably tended to inhibit public criticism of Israel. (The Holocaust made most Americans bend over backward to avoid anything that could be represented, or misrepresented, as anti-Semitism.)

Posted in America, Communism, Holocaust, Israel | Comments Off

Who’s Got The Most Victimhood Points?

Posted on November 8, 2015 by Luke Ford

American Jewish historian Peter Novick writes in his book The Holocaust in American Life:

…the decline in American of an integrationist ethos (which focused on what Americans have in common and what unites us) and its replacement by a particularist ethos (which stresses what differentiates and divides us). The leaders of American Jewry, who once upon a time had sought to demonstrate that Jews were “just like everybody else, except more so,” now had to establish, for both Jews and gentiles, what there was about Jews that made them different…

What does differentiate American Jews from other Americans? On what grounds can distinctive Jewish identity in the United States be based? These days American Jews can’t define their Jewishness on the basis of distinctively Jewish religious beliefs, since most don’t have much in the way of distinctively Jewish religious beliefs, since most don’t have much in the way of distinctively Jewish religious beliefs. They can’t define it by distinctively Jewish cultural traits, since most don’t have any of these either. American Jews are sometimes said to be united by their Zionism, but if so, it is of a thin and abstract variety: most have never visited Israel; most contribute little to, and know even less about, that country. In any case, in recent years Israeli policies have alternatively outraged the secular and the religious, hawks and doves — a less than satisfactory foundation for unity. What American Jews do have in common is the knowledge that but for their parents’ or (more often) grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ immigration, they would have shared the fate of European Jewry…

At bar and bat mitzvahs, in a growing number of communities, the child is “twinned” with a young victim of the Holocaust who never lived to have the ceremony, and by all reports, the kids like it a lot. Adolescent Jews who go on organized tours to Aushwitz and Treblinka have reported that they were “never so proud to be a Jew” as when, at these sites, they vicariously experienced the Holocaust. Jewish college students oversubscribe courses on the Holocaust, and rush to pin yellow stars to their lapels on Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day)…

Another, parallel development in contemporary American culture has furthered this development. There has been a change in the attitude toward victimhood from a status all but universally shunned and despised to one often eagerly embraced. On the individual level, the cultural icon of the strong, silent hero hero is replaced by the vulnerable and verbose antihero. Stoicism is replaced as a prime value by sensitivity. Instead of enduring in silence, one lets it all hang out. The voicing of pain and outrage is alleged to be “empowering” as well as therapeutic…

The historian Charles Maier of Harvard…has described modern American politics as a “competition for enshrining grievances. Every group claims its share of public honor and public funds by pressing disabilities and injustices. National public life becomes the settlement of a collective malpractice suit in which all citizens are patients and physicians simultaneously.” All of this…meshes with the new emphasis on separate group identity rather than on “all-American” identity. In practice, the assertion of the group’s historical victimization — on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation — is always central to the group’s assertion of its distinctive identity.

American Jews were by far the wealthiest, best-educated, most influential, in-every-way-most-successful group in American society — a group that, compared to most other identifiable minority groups, suffered no measurable discrimination and no disadvantages on account of that minority status. But insofar as Jewish identity could be anchored in the agony of European Jewry, certification as (vicarious) victims could be claimed, with all the moral privilege accompanying such certification.

The grounding of group identity and claims to group recognition in victimhood has produced not just a game of “show and tell,” with members of the class waving their arms to be called on to recount their story. In Jewish discourse on the Holocaust we have not just a competition for recognition but a competition for primacy. This takes many forms. Among the most widespread and pervasive is an angry insistence on the uniqueness of the Holocaust… “Your catastrophe, unlike ours, is ordinary; unlike ours is comprehensible; unlike ours is representable.”

Matter-of-fact references by blacks to their “ghetto” (a century-old usage) are condemned as pernicious attempts to steal “our” Holocaust. Let Ted Turner, denouncing what he regards as Rupert Murdoch’s autocratic behavior, refer to Murdoch as “fuhrer”, and the ADL (I’m not making this up) sends out a press release demanding an apology for Turner’s having demeaned the Holocaust. The greatest victory is to wring an acknowledgment of superior victimization from another contender. Officials of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum tell, with great satisfaction, a story of black youngsters learning of the Holocaust and saying, “God, we thought we had it bad.”

Aaprt from being our ticket of admission to this sordid game, American Jewish centering of the Holocaust has had other practical consequences. For many Jews…it has mandated an intransigent and self-righteous posture in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As the Middle Eastern dispute came to be viewed within a Holocaust paradigm, that tangled imbroglio was endowed with all the black-and-white moral simplicity of the Holocaust. And in this realm the Holocaust framework has promoted as well a belligerent stance toward any criticism of Israel: “Who are you, after what you did to us (or allowed to be done to us), to dare to criticize us now?”

…Judaism has consistently disparaged excessive or overly prolonged mourning. Cremation is forbidden because it would dispose of the body too soon, but also forbidden is embalming, because it would preserve the body too long. Mourn, to be sure, is the message, but then move on: “choose life.” One of the things I find most striking about much of the recent Jewish Holocaust commemoration is how “un-Jewish” — how Christian — it s. I am thinking of the ritual of reverently following the structured pathways of the Holocaust in the major museums, which resembles nothing so much as the Stations of the Cross on the Via Dolorosa…

We are not just “people of the book,” but the people of the Hollywood film and the television miniseries, of the magazine article and the newspaper column, of the comic book and the academic symposium. When a high level of concern with the Holocaust became widespread in American Jewry, it was, given the important role that Jews play in American media and opinion-making elites, not only natural, but virtually inevitable that it would spread throughout the culture at large.

Whatever its origins, the public rationale for Americans’ “confronting” the Holocaust…is that the Holocaust is the bearer of important lessons that we all ignore at our peril… Individuals from every point on the political compass can find the lessons they wish in the Holocaust; it has become a moral and ideological Rorschach test…

If there are, in fact, lessons to be drawn from history, the Holocaust would seem an unlikely source, not because of its alleged uniqueness, but because of its extremity. Lessons for dealing with the sorts of issues that confront us in ordinary life, public or private, are not likely to be found in this most extraordinary of events. There are, in my view, more important lessons about how easily we become victimizers to be drawn from the behavior of normal Americas in normal times than from the behavior of the SS in wartime. In any case, the typical “confrontation” with the Holocaust for visitors to American Holocaust museums, and in burgeoning curricula, does not incline us toward thinking of ourselves as potential victimizers — rather the opposite. …And it is accepted as a matter of faith, beyond discussion, that the mere act of walking through a Holocaust museum, or viewing a Holocaust movie, is going to be morally therapeutic, that multiplying such encounters will make one a better person.

…A June 1942 Government Information Manual for the Motion Pictures feared that “there are still groups in this country who are thinking only in terms of their particular group. Some citizens have not been aware of the fact that this is a people’s war, not a group war.”

…It was during the Hitler years that American philo-Semites invented the “Judeo-Christian tradition” to combat innocent, or not so innocent, language that spoke of a totalitarian assault of “Christian civilization.”

…When downplaying Jewish victimhood was conscious and deliberate, the purposes were hardly vicious: to emphasize that the Nazis were the enemy of all mankind, in order both to broaden support for the anti-Nazi struggle and to combat the charge that World War II was a war fought for the Jews.

…The very visible presence of so many Jews among Roosevelt’s closest aides led anti-Semites to call his administration the “Jew Deal.”

…In recent years it has become not just permissible but in some circles laudable for American Jews to assert the primacy of Jewish over American loyalty. “We are Jews first and whatever else second,” says Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, the author of a searing indictment of American Jews’ reaction to the Holocaust. But in the early forties such assertions weren’t just (publicly) unsayable; they were, except for some members of the immigrant generation, unthinkable for most American Jews.

…If since the 1960s there has been a revival of ethnic identity in American culture, this followed on a period in which ethnicity as a basis of identity seemed of dubious legitimacy. Indeed, the very word hardly existed… Identity was properly based not on “blood” but on the values, habits, and animating vision of the culture in which you were raised. And that, for most American Jews except older members of the immigrant generation, was American culture. The revulsion against identity (and politics) based on “blood” or tribal loyalties was, of course, powerfully reinforced after 1933 when such notions came to be embodied in Der Sturmer.

…There was an enormous range of responses to the Holocaust among American Jews: on the one hand, instances of psychic devastation verging on derangement; on the other, indifference verging on obliviousness…

The one thing that can be said with reasonable certainty is that, on the whole, recency of immigration — which meant stronger family connections to Europe — was closely tied to the depth of feeling the Holocaust evoked among American Jews. Baldly stated, it was the difference between contemplating that abstraction “European Jewry” being destroyed and imagining Aunt Minnie at Treblinka…

One can’t, of course, infer grassroots Jewish framings of the Holocaust from the statements of Jewish organizational spokesmen or from journalists who wrote for the Jewish press. Such people are unrepresentative of American Jewry as a whole, being simultaneously more Jewish and less Jewish than those for whom they claimed to speak. They are “more Jewish” in the obvious sense that most Jews don’t have their degree of full-time commitment to Jewishness. And they are “less Jewish” in that their public role, the fact that they know what they say is being listened to by a gentile audience, may make their utterances less frank, less expressive of spontaneous feelings, more “correct,” than conversation around the kitchen table…

During the war, Republican campaigners, referring to Roosevelt’s prominent Jewish associate Sidney Hillman, put up billboards across the nation: “It’s Your Country — Why Let Sidney Hillman Run It.” And without necessarily willing it, Republicans were well aware that it was they who benefited from all the talk of “Jew Deal” and “President Rosenfeld.”

…In the early 1940s hardly anyone inside government — and hardly anyone outside it, Jew or gentile — would have understood the phrase “abandonment of the Jews.” The verb “to abandon” has a perfectly straightforward meaning: to withdraw support or help in spite of an existing obligation. The notion that the rescue of threatened foreign civilian populations was an obligation of a country involved in total war didn’t occur to Americans during World War II or in its immediate aftermath.

At the end of the war almost all Americans, certainly the overwhelming majority of American Jews, were proud of the role of the U.S. armed forces in defeating Hitler; justifiably or not, proud of whatever their own contribution to victory had been. What we now call “the Holocaust” — what seemed to most people at the time simply the Jewish portion of the worldwide holocaust that had consumed between fifty and sixty million victims — had come to an end…

…Jews accounted for about one-fifth of those liberated from concentration camps in Germany by American troops.

Posted in America, Holocaust, Jews | Comments Off

What’s Good For Jews Is Sometimes Bad For Others

Posted on November 8, 2015 by Luke Ford

American Jewish historian Peter Novick writes in his book The Holocaust in American Life:

…From the 1970s on, the growth sector in the Jewish organizational world consisted of old and new “schrei gevalt” agencies, while those with other agendas, like the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress, declined. The Anti-Defamation League, together with the enormously successful Simon Wiesenthal Center, bombarded Jews with mailings announcing new anti-Semitic threats. (The ADL was especially assiduous in giving wide circulation to anti-Semitic remarks by obscure black hustlers and demagogues, thus vastly increasing their audiences.) Of the dozens of local Jewish newspapers in the United States, all but a handful were organs of local Jewish Federations, whose success in fundraising was directly proportional to the level of anxiety among potential contributors. (pg. 176)

Posted in ADL, America, Holocaust, Simon Wiesenthal | Comments Off

Time & Tension

Posted on November 8, 2015 by Luke Ford

The two primary causes of unnecessary muscular tension are feeling like you need to hurry (too much to do and not enough time to do it in) and feeling like you have to be perfect.

As I was getting some Network Spinal Analysis the other day, the practicioner told me, “Time is your best friend.” It was just what I needed to hear, because I walk around thinking time is my enemy, I don’t have enough, and that causes unnecessary muscular tension and tight ankles in particular. When I walk down the street thinking, “Time is my best friend,” I feel happier and I expand into life.

Posted in Alexander Technique, Personal | Comments Off

Conversations With A Jewess

Posted on November 8, 2015 by Luke Ford

She said: I started telling white liberals I’m racist. They actually love it. They think all whites are racist regardless of political affiliation including themselves by virtue of being white. Funny how these things work out sometimes.
Do Jews have a sense of beauty? Another reason I don’t fit in with them. That is like my thing. Every time I have been to an orthodox persons house for dinner the wife can’t cook or decorate.

I went for a drive with my family to the country today and I’ve never been so aware of being jewish in my life.

My neighbor down the hall is a Nazi. Yeah I told him I liked his 1488 tattoo lololol. I said we should talk. Gonna go knock on his door with milk and cookies or something. He’s very stoic. I’ve been infatuated with him for months actually but hadn’t worked up the guts to talk to him. Then today I saw his tattoo and couldn’t believe my eyes. Yeah I was just going to bring up that it feels like a sign from hashem.

Posted in Jews | Comments Off

Blacks Sleep Less Than Whites

Posted on November 8, 2015 by Luke Ford

Peter Frost writes: African Americans sleep on average almost an hour less than do Euro Americans. The two groups have mean sleep times of 6.05 hours and 6.85 hours. This finding has recently been discussed by Brian Resnick in National Journal and by our Steve Sailer.

Researchers reject a genetic explanation: “There is a consensus that innate biological differences between blacks and whites are not a factor” (Resnick, 2015). So what is the cause?

One study points the finger at racism: “If you can take out that discrimination piece, the average African-American and the average Caucasian look at lot more similar. […] “It’s not perfect, but in terms of sleep, a lot of the disparity goes away” (Resnick, 2015).

The study is by Tomfohr et al. (2012). It found that duration of deep sleep and duration of Stage 2 of light sleep correlated in African Americans with perceived discrimination, which is defined as “the extent to which an individual believes that members of his or her ethnic group have been discriminated against in society.”

Nonetheless, as the authors note, sleep duration still differs significantly between African and Euro Americans even when the difference is adjusted for the effects of perceived discrimination. So we are left with a curious finding: two separate causes, one genetic and the other environmental, are producing the same pattern of effects. Both are reducing deep sleep and Stage 2 light sleep in African Americans while not affecting Stage 1 light sleep…

So African Americans are getting enough sleep at night. It’s just that they’re not getting enough afternoon naps. But aren’t naps for kids? Or old fogeys? Actually, they’re quite normal for adults in much of the world. In the Nigerian study, 82% of the participants regularly took afternoon naps.

It’s ironic that the “r word” has been injected into this debate. If a behavior deviates from the white American norm, and if racism is held responsible either directly or indirectly, one is assuming that this deviation is pathological. It is “deviant.” It shouldn’t exist and something should be done about it. The white American norm thus becomes a norm for all humans, and all humans—if they want to be fully human—should strive toward it.

In reality, there is no single human nature. Genetic evolution didn’t slow down when humans began to split up and settle the different continents. It accelerated. And not just because our ancestors were adapting to different natural environments. Most of the acceleration took place long after the globe had been settled from the equator to the arctic. It happened when humans began to adapt to an increasingly diverse range of cultural environments. And those adaptations were mostly behavioral and psychological.

One of them is the way we sleep. The African sleep pattern is normal in its native environment. It is simply an adaptation to a particular set of circumstances, just as the northern European sleep pattern is an adaptation to another set of circumstances.

COMMENTS:

* Sleep is not really about preserving energy or recharging the body’s physical batteries, although these can be secondary effects of sleep. The primary and quintessential purpose of sleep, however, is maintaining proper mental functioning.

We sleep so that we may dream. We dream so that we may integrate new sensory perceptions into our existing patterns of behavior and respond accordingly to an ever-changing environment. This is a necessity of animal existence.

Plant life is defined by the nutritive faculty only and is the simplest form of life. Plants neither sense, move, nor reason; they just take in nourishment and grow, all of it unconsciously. A plant is not entirely separate from the landscape and setting in which it appears; rather it forms a part of that setting. Using a bit of poetic license, one might say that the plant is an extension from the soil in which it grows. It is the soil in which it grows–the life bearing capacity of the soil at highest potential.

Animal life is defined by the both the nutritive and sensory faculties. Animals also take in nourishment and grow (indeed, the animal “body,” considered in abstraction, is just a plant); but in addition to the body there is also the animal “self.” Unlike the plant, every free-living animal is an individual, a microcosm within a macrocosm, and stands separate and apart from its environment. The ability to sense means that there is a distinction between that who senses and everything else in creation. The animal is not unconscious like the plant; it has to care for itself. It senses, and it must respond to that which it perceives. Such responses we call “motion,” using the word in an expansive sense. Thus sensory perception and motion go together.

In the higher animals, the interface between the microcosm and the macrocosm increasingly becomes embodied in the functioning of the nervous system, whose job it is to integrate the impressions left on the sense organs and to modulate the organism’s responses to them. The nervous system’s ability to perform this function, however, is not unlimited. When the organism can no longer receive sense impressions or generate responses, tiredness is experienced and sleep ensues. The body becomes a plant again; and the mind, temporarily cut off from pressing demands, is free to digest the material of the day.

For human beings there is an additional element. Human life is defined by the nutritive, sensory, and rational faculties–man is the rational animal. Therefore, in addition to the mere sense impressions of the animals there is added to our experience the whole new dimension of words and concepts. This is what gives human dreams their particularly surreal quality, as the relationship between material sense impressions and immaterial concepts is undergoing constant adjustment in the theater of the mind.

All of this can be summed up in a simple relationship: The greater the strains of mental activity, the more need there is to sleep and to dream, and in fact this is exactly what we find. Children, to whom the world is constantly affording new experiences and who are actively learning all the time, sleep and dream more than adults; intellectual workers dream more than manual laborers; people in new circumstances (e.g. moving or changing careers) experience an uptick in dream activity; and people under great duress, who have just endured the loss of a loved one or a divorce, or are otherwise in the depths of some spiritual crisis, even though they often suffer from sleep disturbances, are prone to have the most piercing and lurid dreams of all. Finally, people who are deliberately deprived of sleep in psychological experiments are known to undergo a pronounced mental deterioration which ultimately results in psychosis and death. Well-adjusted adults with settled lives and few existential concerns infrequently remember their dreams and can get by on the least amount of sleep.

The relevance of these data to the present article I will leave to the reader to determine, but my guess is that the exact opposite of the article’s contention is in fact the truth. Blacks today are generally less worried and stressed out than whites.

And that only stands to reason.

Posted in Blacks, Sleep | Comments Off

Five Scenarios For The White World

Posted on November 8, 2015 by Luke Ford

John Derbyshire writes: How will the mass invasions of European or European-founded nations by the wretched refuse of the Third World’s teeming shores work out? I see five scenarios:

Scenario One: Absorption. All will be well. The migrants, in whatever numbers choose to come, will enrich and energize our tired, aging societies. They will take on our liberal values and become good Europeans, Americans, and Canadians.

Scenario Two: Restriction. Political pressure from their native populations will force receiving nations to stem the flow. Fences will go up, coastal patrols will commence; but those illegals who are in, will be allowed to stay in.

Scenario Three: Rejection. There will be a real uprising of native peoples. Illegals will be deported en masse to their countries of origin.

Scenario Four: Surrender. The native European and European-descended populations, enervated by soft living and psychologically disarmed by globalist propaganda, will yield up their societies to the invaders.

Scenario Five: Fragmentation. Some part or parts of the First World will opt for one of the foregoing scenarios, some other part or parts for a different one.

Posted in Whites | Comments Off

Why Is Europe Using Its Navy To Bring In Migrants, Rather Than To Keep Them Out?

Posted on November 8, 2015 by Luke Ford

The Guardian: Italy coastguard: 3,000 migrants rescued in one day in Mediterranean

“No casualties reported as Italy reports navy ships, patrol boats and other vessels picked up migrants crammed aboard various craft off the Libyan coast.”

I thought armed forces were for keeping invaders out, not rescuing them at sea and bringing them in?

Steve Sailer writes: One of the more curious aspects of the coverage of “Europe’s migrant crisis” is the apparent assumption that Europe couldn’t possibly do anything to keep Asians and Africans from crossing the Mediterranean because that would require naval forces, and whoever heard of Europe having boats in the water?

But European navies not only exist, they are currently policing the Indian Ocean to keep down Somali pirates.

COMMENTS TO STEVE SAILER:

* The problem is 100 per cent one of will, not of ability. Even if EU countries had no naval capacity, they could still track the movement of vessels by satellite and know exactly which part of the European coast they were heading for. They would then have three chances to stop them.

They could prevent them from disembarking. If they failed to do that, they could arrest the “migrants”, detain them until they know where they came from, and then send them back.

If the invaders made it past all of these controls, they could still be prevented from finding work or claiming welfare benefits. European countries have always had a high level of state surveillance, both of their own citizens and resident foreigners. Carrying a government-issued identity card at all times is mandatory in many of them, and it’s impossible to work legally or claim benefits in any of them without proving your identity.

* Do you think it is your influence or a total coincidence? Too hard to tell. I often wonder how widespread your influence is. I notice a lot of topics you are the only one to bring up are being spoken about in mainstream media. One obvious one is the Chinese women using our 14th amendment to make little American citizens.

I wonder if Coulter or other well known voices are whispering into Trump’s ear about you.

* I think you point out the obvious while msm is wilfully ignorant, but here the issue is a lot more complex. I live far closer to the action than you do. It’s not that affected NATO members, and in particular the defense ministries of first-arrival countries, haven’t considered naval intervention to defend their sovereignty. Of course it would be totally possible to turn away trafficked boats, ridiculously simple at some popular points of arrival, in fact. But it opens a whole other can of worms. The difficulty is in laws and treaties, and protection of human lives, not practical feasibility.

There are a lot of complicated laws and treaties concerning military/police intervention at sea, not least concerning treatment of refugees (or alleged refugees, i.e. economic immigrants in the midst of genuine war/political refugees; in this case it doesn’t make a practical difference). I’m most familiar with the case of Greece and Turkey, but a lot of this applies to other countries too. The Greek navy or even local police on boat cannot just approach a boat and turn them away, much less chaperone them back to where they came from. This is only compounded by their volatile relationship with Turkey. Also, seeking out and punishing traffickers requires murky negotiations for which laws and protocol are mostly not in place. Turkey (and to be fair, this would be true of other countries) doesn’t even actually want to host the migrants, so they have a further incentive to obstruct the legal process (or even protect the traffickers?).

Also, I’m not going to get too much into the non-military, human element, but there is pure evil emanating from this modern migrant crossing. Regardless of where you stand on the rights of migrants in Europe, the thousands of capsized boats and drownings are a tear-your-hair-out tragedy. As we know, many of these deaths are not accidents, but brought on by the traffickers and migrants themselves. There is also this film footage of policemen at sea yelling and hitting at migrants to turn them away. If there are other, similar instances of this happening, it could easily have cost lives. I fear more robust naval intervention and its potential for violence, on both sides, and murder of the most vulnerable.

* The lives of at least 2 billion people on the planet are a “tear-your-hair-out tragedy”. In a few decades that number will double. By the end of the century it will triple. What’s your point?

I do respect your moral sensitivity, though. I encourage you to move to Africa and save some of them.

* If humanitarian concerns gives a boat filled with refugees right-of-way and license to violate territorial waters and to disembark on the shore, can not these same humanitarian concerns give the very same boat filled with refugees but towed by a coast guard ship right-of-way into the territorial waters of their country of origin and license to disembark on their home shore?

* Can such patrol physically stop migrants, and does it save lives? Yes and yes. As I said, the major issue here is the volatile bilateral relations between the respective countries of arrival and departure, and conflicting pan-European protocol concerning refugees. Australia this ain’t. Would hardline patrol deter migrants from continually trying to reach Europe? No.

Migrants have destroyed their own boats, ones carrying infants, in order to gain speeded access to care and rights, and used their own children as props in revolts against European border control and other authorities. We cannot begin to grasp their desperation and the lengths they will go to. Have you seen the easy descent into chaos at border control areas and refuge camps within Europe? Now imagine that at sea.

* The results of the two missions are for the same reason.

The anti-pirate patrol is in support of globalism and the profits of the globalists. Can’t have pirates cutting into the profits of the globalist trading system. So they shoot up the small boats of the pirates.

The ships in the Mediterranean are there to assist the mass movement of people into Europe in support of the globalist goal of destroying national borders. So they pick up the “refugees” from small boats a few miles off the African coast and deliver them to Europe.

* If the Brits could fend off the mighty Nazis, Europeans can keep out the ragtag hordes.

It is all a matter of will.

But the will has wilted. Not because of any fear of what illegals think but what the globo-elites think.

Illegals don’t own the western media.

* To me it’s entirely absurd that we have to “prove” that Europe is capable of stopping the migrants. Of course they’re capable. And of course they have boats in the Mediterranean to address the issue. The problem is that they’re using those boats to facilitate the invasion rather than stop it.

Many of the boats coming from Libya send distress signals just miles from Libyan waters. Rather than taking them back to Libya, which would put the ships back in action far sooner, the Europeans pick them up off their boats or out of the water and carry them the entire rest of the way to Europe.

This invasion is being facilitated by the governments of Europe.

There is not remotely any argument to be made that Europe doesn’t have the resources to secure its borders. The cost per migrant of supervising their arrival and then providing them government welfare is far higher than the cost of simply returning each one to the country from which he left, usually Turkey or Libya. You can then multiply that cost by the far larger numbers of migrants they have to deal with because the migrants know they will be allowed to settle in Europe. The total cost of facilitating this invasion will ultimately come to hundreds of billions of Euros. If Europe turned them back they would stop coming almost immediately.

* Let’s not build a roof to keep out the rain. It will never work.

Let’s not build a wear a coat to protect ourselves from the cold.
It will never work.

Let’s not close and lock the door to keep out burglars. It will never work.

Seriously, what is the point of having a nation if you can’t protect it?

* Try walking into the White House or George Soros’s house uninvited and see if they don’t yell at you, subdue you, and even beat you to keep you out. Worse comes to worse, I’ll bet they might even shoot you. It might easily cost you your life. Would a video of that prove that Barack Obama and George Soros are cruel and inhumane?

The videos of police ‘inhumanity’ are propaganda tools of the smugglers and invaders.

These laws and treaties are merely an excuse for facilitating the invasion of Europe. They have no real power to bar European governments from securing their borders and turning back the migrants.

Posted in Europe, Immigration | Comments Off

Trump on “SNL” Open Thread

Posted on November 8, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* It was YUUGEEE. And surprisingly honest about race. Actually joking a lot about race. I haven’t watched in years but this Trump one was pretty good. Or maybe I’m such a Trump fan that I am easily amused.

* Cast members seemed afraid to hug Trump at the end. Trump did well, though the show wasn’t too funny, for the most part. Opening with Larry David was funny though.

* Trump doesn’t like to be touched.

He sleeps 4 hours a night, he claims he hasn’t cried since he was a baby and has stated he doesn’t like to shake hands.

I like that Trump doesn’t want people hanging on him and hugging him.

* I think SNL really dropped the ball, in that they had a chance to grab some more frequent viewership from people who were watching only for Trump, but they couldn’t deliver a funny product. Some of the sketches were just really awful.

There were a few mildly funny parts, and Trump was entertaining but really underutilized in my opinion, but overall there is just not a whole lot of talent putting together that show.

Is just an overall lack of talent, or is it that it is near impossible to be politically correct and funny at the same time? A little of both, in my opinion.

* He has never held public office or government employment of any kind. If he’s elected, I’m pretty sure he’ll be the first such President. As far as I know, everyone from Washington to Obama had held some kind of political, legal or military position at some stage in their lives. If he becomes President, that fact would surely have huge symbolic significance, although of course it’s the power conferred by his wealth that allowed him to bypass the usual route to the White House.

* There were reports that Trump nixed some ideas so as not to alienate Iowans, but that doesn’t seem a convincing explanation. Fox News’s Greg Gutfeld suggested the writers underwrote the show as a protest.

Some low-hanging fruit the show could have gone for and didn’t:

1) Had Trump play Jeb. The audience would have started laughing as soon as Trump walked out, and there’s plenty of ways they could have run with that. How about Thanksgiving at his parents’ house with W. there and everyone ripping on Jeb’s lousy campaign? The heavyset white gal cast member could have played Jeb’s wife, and all of her dialogue could have been in nonsense Spanish. Or what about a riff on Jeb’s lame slogan “Jeb’ll fix it”. Set the skit in 2017, where Jeb, having flamed out of politics, is a handyman in overalls in Florida, and all of his customers mock him with his old slogan.

2) Had Trump play General William Westmoreland tossing his car keys to one of the black male cast members playing a young Ben Carson. Then Carson tells all of his friends at the place where he’s a teen parking valet that he was just offered a scholarship to West Point. One of the friends doubts Carson’s claim, so he stabs him to death, then hijinks ensue when he tries to hide the body.

3) Had Trump play himself at his Florida golf club mistaking a visiting Marco Rubio for a caddy or waiter.

* The dancing segment was funny. There were other times where it seemed like the sketches were deliberately meant to hammer home the association between Trump and sleaziness. But, it’s not like they slobbered all over Hillary and Bernie either. I’d imagine the cast were vary weary about appearing cozy with Trump. Larry David has no idea the backlash he’s about to get making light of those offering to pay to call Trump racist. Larry is very liberal but he may not understand just how batshit crazy pc activism has gotten.

* Trump knows when he actually needs to be pc…and the networks’s producers & directors must tow the corporate line…pc wins. I agree, it was boring. Nothing ventured, nothing gained night. Ho hum.

Posted in Donald Trump | Comments Off

Steve Sailer: Best & Worst Small Cities

Posted on November 8, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Steve was just being modest about his home state by only showing the bottom 13. California actually claims all of the bottom 23, and 33 of the bottom 37 (that’s out of 1,268 total – no small feat).

The highest ranking city is Los Gatos, at 109. I didn’t take the time to look at all 108 cities above, but a quick skim suggests that just about all 49 other states have at least one city that outranks Los Gatos.

* If Hawthorne were to suffer from its own version of the Chicago Fire, after it was rebuilt it would be one of the most affluent communities in So Cal. Great weather, right next to LAX, and less than 5 miles from the beach.

* It would be interesting to see an MSM article “analysing” this phenomenon, and watch how the journalist carefully manoeuvres his way around the elephant in the room.

* OT, but amusing: Bill Burr and Conan O’Brien reveal some quaint respect for Donald Trump, channeling Heartiste a little. Title of the short clip: “Bill appreciates that Donald shoots from the hip, even if he’s still a filthy rich plutocrat. ” There are some seemingly mundane things The Donald gets quite right. Also, Bill mentions Hillary and her Bilderberg association and is not pleased by it.

Posted in America, California | Comments Off