Cadaverous Schools for Communist and Liberal Massacres

The trouble with L. F. Céline is that although he is widely acclaimed by literary critics as the most unique French author of the 20th century and despite the fact that a good dozen of his novels are readily available in any book store in France, his two anti-Semitic pamphlets are officially off limits there.

Firstly, the word pamphlet is false. His two books, Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937) and Ecole des cadavres (1938), although legally and academically rebuked as “fascist anti-Semitic pamphlets,” are more in line with the social satire of the 15th century French Rabelaisian tradition, full of fun and love-making than modern political polemics about the Jewry. After so many years of hibernation, the satire Bagatelles finally appeared in an anonymous American translation under the title of Trifles for a Massacre, and can be accessed online.

The anonymous translator must be commended for his awesome knowledge of French linguistic nuances and his skill in transposing French argot into American slang. Unlike the German or the English language, the French language is a highly contextual idiom, forbidding any compound nouns or neologisms. Only Céline had a license to craft new words in French. French is a language of high precision, but also of great ambiguities. Moreover, any rendering of the difficult Céline’s slangish satire into English requires from a translator not just the perfect knowledge of French, but also the perfect knowledge of Céline’s world.

Certainly, H. L. Mencken’s  temperament and his sentence structure sometimes carry a whiff of Céline. Ezra Pound’s toying with English words in his radio broadcasts in fascist Italy also remind  a bit of Céline’s style. The rhythm of Harold Covington’s narrative and the violence of his epithets may remind one a wee of Celine’s prose too.

But in no way can one draw a parallel between Céline and other authors — be it in style or in substance. Céline is both politically and artistically unique. His language and his meta-langue are unparalleled in modern literature.  To be sure Céline is very bad news for Puritan ears or for a do-good conservative who will be instantly repelled by Céline’s vocabulary teeming as it does with the overkill of metaphorical “Jewish dicks and pricks.”

Trifles is not just a satire. It is the most important social treatise for the understanding of the prewar Europe and the coming endtimes of postmodernity. It is not just a passion play of a man who gives free reign to his emotional outbursts against the myths of his time, but also a visionary premonition of coming social and cultural upheavals in the unfolding 21st century. It is an unavoidable literature for any White in search of his heritage.

These weren’t Hymie jewelers, these were vicious lowlifes, they ate rats together . . . They were as flat as flounders. They had just left their ghettos, from the depths of Estonia, Croatia, Wallachia, Rumelia, and the sties of Bessarabia . . . . The Jews, they now frequent the guardhouse, they are no longer outside… When it comes to crookedness, it is they who take first place . . . All of this takes place under the hydrant! with hoses as thick as dicks! beside the yellow waters of the docks… enough to sink all the ships in the world . . . in a décor fit for phantoms . . . with a kiss that’ll cut your ass clean open . . . that’ll turn you inside out.

The satire opens up with imaginary dialogue with the fictional Jew Gutman regarding the role of artistry by the Jews in the French Third Republic, followed by brief chapters describing Céline’s voyage to the Soviet Union.

Between noon and midnight, I was accompanied everywhere by an interpreter (connected with the police). I paid for the whole deal. . . . Her name was Natalie, and she was by the way very well mannered, and by my faith a very pretty blonde, a completely vibrant devotee of Communism, proselytizing you to death, should that be necessary. . . . Completely serious moreover…try not to think of things! …and of being spied upon! nom de Dieu! . . . . The misery that I saw in Russia is scarcely to be imagined, Asiatic, Dostoevskiian, a Gehenna of mildew, pickled herring, cucumbers, and informants. . . . The Judaized Russian is a natural-born jailer, a Chinaman who has missed his calling, a torturer, the perfect master of lackeys. The rejects of Asia, the rejects of Africa. . . . They were just made to marry one another. . . . It’s the most excellent coupling to be sent out to us from the Hells.

When the satire was first published in 1937, rare were European intellectuals who had not already fallen under the spell of communist lullabies. Céline, as an endless heretic and a good observer refused to be taken for a ride by communist commissars. He is a master of discourse in depicting communist phenotypes, and in his capacity of a medical doctor he delves constantly into Jewish self-perception of their physique . . . and their genitalia.

The peculiar feature of Céline narrative is the flood of slang expressions and his extraordinary gift for cracking jokes full of obscene humors, which suddenly veer off in academic passages full of empirical data on Jews, liberals, communists, nationalists, Hitlerites and the whole panoply of famed European characters.

But here we accept this, the boogie-woogie of the doctors, of the worst hallucinogenic negrito Jews, as being worth good money! . . . Incredible! The very least diploma, the very least new magic charm, makes the negroid delirious, and makes all of the negroid Jews flush with pride! This is something that everybody knows. . . . It has been the same way with our own Kikes ever since their Buddha Freud delivered unto them the keys to the soul!

Mortal Voyage to Endtimes

In the modern academic establishment Céline is still widely discussed and his first novels Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan are still used as Bildungsromane for the modern culture of youth rebellion. When these two novels were first published in the early 30s of the twentieth century, the European leftist cultural establishment made a quick move to recuperate Céline as of one of its own. Céline balked. More than any other author his abhorrence of the European high bourgeoisie could not eclipse his profound hatred of leftist mimicry.

Neither does he spare leftists scribes, nor does he show mercy for the spirit of “Parisianism.” Unsurpassable in style and graphics are Céline’s savaging caricatures of aged Parisian bourgeois bimbos posturing with false teeth and fake tits in quest of a rich man’s ride. Had Céline pandered to the leftists, he would have become very rich; he would have been awarded a Nobel Prize long ago.

In the late 50’s the burgeoning hippie movement on the American West Coast also tried to lump him together with its godfather Jack Kerouac, who was himself enthralled with Céline’s work. However, any modest reference to his Bagatelles or Ecole des Cadavres has always carefully been skipped over or never mentioned. Equally hushed up is Céline’s last year of WWII when, unlike hundreds of European nationalist scholars, artists and novelists, he miraculously escaped French communist firing squads or the Allied gallows.

His endless journey to the end of the night envisioned no beams of sunshine on the European horizon. In fact, his endless trip took a nasty turn in the late 1944 and early 1945, when Céline, along with thousands of European nationalist intellectuals, including the remnants of the French pro-German collaborationist government fled to southern Germany, a country still holding firm in face of the oncoming disaster. The whole of Europe had been already set ablaze by death-spitting American B17’s from above and raping Soviet soldiers emerging in the East. These judgment day scenes are depicted in his postwar novels D’un château l’autre (Castle to Castle (French Literature))  and Rigadoon
.

Céline’s sentences are now more elliptic and the action in his novels becomes more dynamic and more revealing of the unfolding European drama. His novels offer us a surreal gallery of characters running and hiding in the ruins of Germany. One encounters former French high politicians and countless artists facing death — people who, just a year ago, dreamt that they would last forever. No single piece of European literature is as vivid in the portrayal of human fickleness on the edge of life and death as are these last of Céline’s novels.

But Céline’s inveterate pessimism is always couched in self-derision and always stung with black humor. Even when sentenced in absentia during his exile in Denmark, he never lapses into self pity or cheap sentimentalism. His code of honor and his political views have not changed a bit from his first novel.

Upon his return to France in 1951, the remaining years of Céline’s life were marred by legal harassment, literary ostracism, and poverty. Along with hundreds of thousands Frenchmen he was subjected to public rebuke that still continues to shape the intellectual scene in France. Today, however, this literary ostracism against free spirits is wrapped up in stringent “anti-hate” laws enforced by the thought police —  70 years after WWII! Stripped of all his belongings, Céline, until his death, continued to use his training as a physician to provide medical help to his equally disfranchised suburban countrymen, always free of charge and always remaining a frugal and modest man.

Selling the Cold War: A Racially-Integrated America Menaced by White Russian Communists

“The world is white no longer.”
– James Baldwin

For white nationalists — whose cyber-based “movement” is still in its infancy — simple explanations tend to be the rule.

The reductionist “anti-Semitism” that dominates WN ranks and serves as a catch-all explanation for the predicament white people find themselves in today, to cite the most prominent example, is wont to attribute every assault on white life to Jewish perfidy.

There is, certainly, no disputing the existence of this “perfidy,” for no other group — not the browns or blacks, not the former powers of international Communism, not anyone or anything — is or has been so disposed to breaching the color line, undermining America’s traditional racial hierarchy, or propelling the processes responsible for the present dispossession of the country’s white majority.

To think, however, that Organized Jewry has been the alpha and omega of this dispossession is not just simple-minded, it’s dishonorable.

It’s simple-minded because it understands complex historical processes in Kindergarten terms. It ignores other, no less culpable factors.

More fundamentally, it ignores or conflates the differences between structural imperatives and conspiratorial designs, between concrete objective forces and the subjective influences of interest and conscience.

History, as such, offers few cases where monocausal explanations suffice, for the confluence of fortune, structure, and subject (fortuna, necessita, virtu) undergirding the historical process means that significant historical changes are almost always the consequence of a combination of forces unique to their specific time and place.

By the same reasoning, monocausal explanations focusing exclusively on a demonized “other” are dishonorable because they spare whites all responsibility for their misfortunes, refuse to acknowledge the dysgenic and self-destructive forces indigenous to modern society, and ignore the numerous, inherently Jewish facets of the American project.

In criticizing this, I do so not to absolve the Jews, but to preface the subject of this essay — the anti-white consequences of the Cold War — which offers a somewhat broader explanation of white dispossession (though there are at least a couple of others that can also be made).

***

The Second World War was a watershed event in both American and world history.

It changed not only America’s relationship with the rest of the world, it fundamentally changed America.

Thomas Hart Benton, "Negro Soldier," 1942

The struggle against National Socialist Germany (despite the racial character of the Pacific War against the “Japs”) was ideologically waged as a war against fascism and racism.

As the unadmirable Gunnar Myrdal wrote in 1944, “In fighting fascism and racism, America had to stand before the whole world in favor of racial tolerance and . . . racial equality.”

Its international crusade for liberal ideals stood, though, in obvious contradiction to the exclusion of various colored peoples, blacks particularly, who were denied a place in the country’s political and social firmament — denied because whites wanted a white nation, like other Europeans.

Myrdal called this supposed contradiction between its ideals and practices the “American Dilemma.”

It would become especially conspicuous after 1945, when America’s newly assumed international role left it with numerous, new obligations that drew attention to its so-called “dilemma” (which, in actuality, was a dilemma of American liberalism).

The war, moreover, changed not just the prevailing Zeitgeist.

The colossal undertaking to put 13 million men in uniform, to arm them (and the allies), and to fight on several different fronts in distant parts of the world required a national mobilization of unprecedented scope.

The war, it followed, brought great dislocations, disrupting traditional social relations and forcing the alteration of many traditional attitudes.

America’s democratic crusade against “German racism” also brought millions of blacks north to work in defense plants. This had a major impact on housing and employment. It also heightened black self-confidence, freed them from the older Southern forms of race relations, and emboldened their challenge to white supremacy. This became especially evident in 1943, when 200 race riots flared up in more than forty-five American cities, anticipating the contentious racial battles of the postwar era, especially those of the 1960s and ’70s.

At the same time, a million negroes were drafted into the military.

Though the army remained segregated, it quickly discovered the inefficiency and expense of maintaining separate facilities. It was even forced, whenever the exhausted, ill-supplied, and depleted forces of the Wehrmacht beat back the unheroic GIs, to bypass its segregated practices and throw in blacks troops to support decimated or beleaguered white units.

Black veterans, relatedly, provided many of the shock troops that would assault Jim Crow after 1945.

These developments — combined with the retreat of “scientific racism” in the 1930s, the wartime expansion of the New Deal state, the defeat and demonization of German anti-liberalism, and the Cold War’s ensuing crusade for democracy and equality — would together undermine much of the legitimacy of traditional American racial practices.

As one Alabama governor (Frank Dixon) rather tendentiously put it (and only a Southerner could make this argument with a straight face), “The Huns have wrecked the theory of the master race.”

***

Following the war, American power in the world was supreme, unchallenged, except by the Soviet Union, which, after having lost 27 million Russians in the course of the war (compared to 250,000 US combat deaths), was not actually in a position to defy the new superpower, though its unwillingness to submit to Washington’s tutelage would automatically cast it as a potential rival.

At this pivotal historical moment, when the whole world lay prostrate before them, American leaders felt as if they had been granted the Mandate of Heaven.

Inspired by the biblical Zionism of their Puritan heritage and encouraged by the economic self-interests of the great corporations, these leaders would reshape the international arena to reflect and serve the interests of American democracy and capitalism (each the economic or ideological mirror of the other).

Before even the war’s end, New Deal planners had developed the programs and trained the personnel who would occupy Germany, Italy, and (they thought) France and integrate them into the new American-led Atlantic “coalition”; Britain had earlier been deprived of its sovereignty and integrated. At the same time, a host of American-created international organizations — especially the United Nations, whose 1945 Charter committed its members to opposing racial discrimination — were designed to ensure the American governance of this new international order.

It was left, thought, to the administration of Harry S. Truman, the architect of the Cold War, to mould the exact contours of this order.

***

Russian-Americans relations had soured in the closing phase of the war, as political differences became more important than strategic ones. By 1946 they were engaged in a war of words, with the Soviets countering American claims of tyranny by pointing to lynchings, poll taxes, and other facets of Jim Crow to expose the fraudulence of America’s democratic-egalitarian ideology.

By 1947, with the announcement of the Truman Doctrine to fight the international forces of Communist subversion, a Cold War, which would last until 1989, was implicitly declared.

In many respects, this was a phony war.

A severely exhausted and crippled Soviet Union posed no threat to the US.

But this phony war had become a political necessity for US leaders.

The New Deal, which arose in response to the breakdown of liberal capitalism in 1929, had failed (unlike Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany) to fix the depressed economy. It was only with the advent of “Defense Preparations” in 1939 and the war economy after 1941 that the American economy began to rebound.

The most pressing concern of liberal democrats after 1945 was thus avoiding another economic collapse — which meant on-going defense preparations and continued government intervention in the economy.

To justify this New-Deal created “Pentagon capitalism,” as well as a National Security State to oversee it, it was necessary, however, “to scare the hell out of the American people.”

Hence the ensuing transformation of good old “Uncle Joe” (Stalin) into the great bogeyman bent on enslaving the world.

To be continued . . .

Ben Stein

Larry King hosted a discussion between Ben Stein and Ron Paul on Monday that was ostensibly about the airline security fiasco. The discussion quickly turned into a heated debate between Stein and Paul about the root cause of the terrorist attack. Paul exhorted Stein to “think like a scientist” and try to figure out the real motivation behind these attacks. Stein tried to parrot the party line platitudes about them being enemies of America and bad people and stuff until he could no longer tolerate this sacrilege taking place right out in the open on his media . . .

Ron Paul insisted that “We’re the occupiers” one last time before Ben terminated the debate: “No, we’re not occupiers. That’s the same anti-Semitic argument we’ve heard over and over again.”

The typically unshakable Ron Paul was taken aback, blustering “That’s a vicious attack!”

Actually, no. It’s a desperate defensive maneuver. It’s a testament to the fact that the neocons have exhausted America’s reserves of jingoism and are running out of believable arguments to con the American people with. If there were a better argument, Ben Stein would have known it and used it. He’s perhaps more of a master of the zeitgeist than any other living person, simultaneously up to his (enormous) ears in legislation, economics, news media, pop culture, and religious influence.

Stein may have merely slipped up and admitted the obvious: that the entire thing is about Jewish influence on our foreign policy. Rejecting Middle Eastern imperialism is anti-Semitic. The truth is anti-Semitic. But I don’t think a man as intelligent and poised as he is would do something that consequential by accident. I believe this is the beginning of a sea change in political strategy, one in which a direct campaign tries to bury the Ron Paul Revolution and its Tea Party Movement under a tidal wave of negative publicity and accusations of neoheresy.Anti-Imperialism = Anti-Semitism

There’s a worn-out Gandhi quote that Ron Paul likes to repeat, “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.” I believe the establishment has transitioned from the phase of ridiculing the Alternative Right to fighting them. This was most likely triggered by the recent polls which showed that the American people have become more favorable toward the Tea Party movement than either of the major parties. The likelihood of a Rand Paul victory in Kentucky confirms the seriousness of the threat.

Ben Stein, the mainstream establishment’s very own Baghdad Bob, is pulling out the big guns. If the Tea Party crowd thought they were going to be able to simply nominate and elect their own candidates to topple the current regime, they’re woefully mistaken. They’ll be called anti-Semitic. They’ll be called racist. They’ll be called conspiracy theorists. They’ll even be accused of terrorism. They’ll find themselves buried in a web of guilt by association.

We’ll find out in the coming months whether Middle America has become angry enough to stand up and remain standing for their sovereignty and their way of life. My money is on the establishment winning the upcoming electoral round, but at the cost of driving tens of millions of White Americans out of the mainstream and into our sphere of influence.

From Occidental Dissent, December 30, 2009

“Why Anti-Semitism?”
Antisemitica, December 12, 2009

Why label yourself an anti-Semite? Isn’t that adopting the discursive terms of the enemy? Why not use terms like “Jew-wise,” “Jew-aware,” or “Judeophobe” instead? This is a common strategic objection made by White Nationalists.

My answer:

1) The charge is true. An anti-Semite is a person “who discriminates against or who is hostile toward or prejudiced against Jews.” I advocate discrimination against Jews. Therefore, I am an anti-Semite.

2) Appearing disingenuous. I don’t want to appear disingenuous. I believe in calling a spade a spade. It is better to be honest and upfront about my views.

3) The charge can’t be successfully dodged. Jew criticism will always be labeled “anti-Semitism.” Since I am advocating the expulsion of Jews from North America, the charge of “anti-Semitism” is highly likely to stick.

4) The term hasn’t always had negative connotations. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anti-Semitism was popular in respectable circles. Critics of Jews openly labeled themselves anti-Semites. I wish to recapture this sense of the term.

5) Discourse poisoning. The charge of being “anti-Soviet” is laughed at today, but was once taken quite seriously in the USSR. Sometimes the best response to smears is ridicule and defiance. “Anti-Semitism” is a verbal bomb that can’t be avoided. It has to be defused.

6) Morality. Dodging the charge of “anti-Semitism” suggests there is something immoral about discimination against Jews. I believe this policy is both ethical and rationally justifiable.

7) PC. I don’t want to see liberal political correctness replaced by a racialist version. I use the term “anti-Semite” for the same reason I avoid using “European-American.”

Jean Sibelius, 1865 - 1957

I am a great admirer of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, who along with Richard Strauss and Ralph Vaughan Williams, was one of the last generation (so far) of great European Romantic composers. Thus my attention was drawn to a  November 29, 2009 article about Sibelius in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “A Composer’s Ties to Nazi Germany Come Under New Scrutiny,” by Peter Monaghan.

I love exposés like these. I have devoted intense study to the long list of great composers, writers, philosophers, psychologists, conductors, film-makers, and artists who were in some way linked to National Socialism and fascism in all its varieties: figures like Martin Heidegger, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Ingmar Bergman, Arno Breker, Herbert von Karajan, Julius Evola, Mircea Eliade, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, Knut Hamsun, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Filippo Marinetti, C. G. Jung, Sir Reginald Goodall, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Henry Williamson, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Anthony Ludovici, and many more.

As a Jew-wise racial nationalist, I am always on the lookout for great minds who share some or all of my concerns, in the hope that they might add both light and luster to our cause. Although such figures arrive at their political views by different routes, they all have their reasons, motives, and goals, which repay study. Interestingly enough, none of them wanted to conquer the world, exterminate the Jews, or plant their boot on a human face forever.

With this in mind, I eagerly perused the Chronicle article. I learned that Timothy L. Jackson, a professor of music at the University of North Texas, argues that “Sibelius was culpably entangled with Nazi Germany, and should join Pound, Richard Wagner, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline in the select group of artists who have been cast into anti-Semitic ignominy.”

The article informs us that he makes his case in a long essay to appear in the first half of 2010 in a book entitled Sibelius in the Old and New World: Aspects of His Music, Its Interpretation, and Reception. This book has been co-edited by Jackson and three of his colleagues and is being published by Peter Lang Publishing Group.

When last I checked, Peter Lang was pretty much the bottom of the academic publishing barrel: a press that would take virtually any manuscript and turn it into a book that is poorly edited, poorly produced, and richly overpriced. I have no idea if Jackson and his colleagues actually paid Lang to publish their manuscript, but the fact that he himself is one of the co-editors already makes it an exercise in self-publishing. (How much do you want to bet that Jackson’s co-editors also have articles in the collection?)

I love the grab-bag title. I challenge you to find an article on Sibelius that could be excluded from a collection with that title.

All this gave me pause. But then it occurred to me that perhaps I was being a snob. The deciding factor should be the evidence, after all. So I pressed forward to see what evidences of “anti-Semitic ignominy” were marshaled by this University of North Texas musicologist in his self-published article in his Peter Lang volume. Here is the evidence that the Chronicle presents.

1. “Sibelius’s early fascination with Finnish mythology and nationalism resonated with Nazism.” Finnish myths are not the same as German myths. Finnish nationalism is not the same a German nationalism. But being a Finnish nationalist with an interest in Finnish mythology somehow “resonates” with Nazism. If there is an argument here, it proves too much. For instance, it proves that every Jew who is fascinated with Jewish mythology and concerned with Israel also “resonates” with Nazism. Does Dr. Jackson believe that Zionism is like Nazism? What other links does he have to the PLO?

2. Sibelius received royalties for the publication and performance of his works in Germany during the Third Reich. This makes Sibelius an anti-Semite, because presumably no royalties were paid to the Mahler estate, since his works were not being published and performed in the Third Reich.

3. “Sibelius in 1935 accepted a Goethe Medal that Adolf Hitler confirmed with his signature.” This makes Sibelius an anti-Semite, because Arnold Schoenberg was presumably not in the running for a Goethe Medal at that time. Heads of state often sign off on important national prizes. In itself, it proves nothing. It would be interesting to learn how many other national prizes Sibelius won and if any of them were also confirmed by heads of state.

4. “From at least 1941, [Sibelius] drew a German pension that was worth half the average German annual income.” Half the average German income? High cotton indeed. Notice that we are not told anything about the source of this pension, but we are left to believe that it was for services to the Reich. What sort of services? We are not told. But perhaps we can infer that they were at least half the average services.

5. “In 1942, Third Reich officials approved the founding of the German Sibelius Society.” This makes Sibelius an anti-Semite, because presumably no German Mahler Society was approved by Third Reich officials.

6. “No single event more clearly illustrates Sibelius’s empathy with the Nazi ethos, Jackson believes, than his reneging on his promise to help a young, part-Jewish composer, Günther Raphael. In the years 1931 to 1936, Raphael implored Sibelius repeatedly, urgently, and obsequiously to help him to retain his teaching position in Germany at a time when Jewish artists were being dismissed from their posts.”

This makes Sibelius an anti-Semite, because only an anti-Semite would say no to a Jew, even a Jew who is obsequious and pushy (five years of repeated, urgent requests is definitely pushing it). I would love to know the nature of Sibelius’s “promise.” I would lay odds that is was something politely non-committal, like “I’ll see what I can do . . .,” that was then turned into the occasion for five years of badgering and emotional blackmail.

Finnish Sibelius scholar Vesa Sirén dismisses this accusation, claiming that it “ignores that the composer received, and rejected, hundreds of such requests, and by the 1930s had had enough. In fact, says Sirén, Sibelius had given out so many recommendations, motivated by politeness rather than informed by their recipients’ qualifications, that ‘he now felt that he was in the middle of a nest of lies.’” (It is heartening to learn that all of Jackson’s charges are being vigorously disputed by Finnish Sibelius scholars as distortions and smears.)

7. “In mid-1942 . . . when it still seemed that Germany might win the war, Sibelius agreed to be interviewed at his home in Finland by Anton Kloss, an SS war reporter who had most likely taken part in war atrocities.” Sibelius apparently gave many interviews to reporters, so in itself this proves nothing.

I would love to know why Jackson thinks war reporter Kloss “had most likely taken part in war atrocities.” Was it just because he was a member of the SS? Or just because he was a journalist? Did he write a savage review of a restaurant in occupied Poland? Did he stab a résistance fighter with a fountain pen?

That’s it. That’s all the evidence of Sibelius’s “anti-Semitic ignominy” that the Chronicle finds fit to print. Clearly, Professor Jackson is operating with Joe Sobran’s new definition of an anti-Semite. The old definition of an anti-Semite is someone who hates Jews. The new definition is someone whom Jews hate.

I don’t know if Professor Jackson is a Jew, a part-Jew, or simply an unscrupulous non-Jew trying to advance himself in our Jew-dominated culture. But I do know that if he ever loses his academic job, he is definitely qualified to churn out smears for the ADL and the SPLC.

William Holman Hunt's "The Scapegoat" (1854 - 1856) (detail)

From Mechanopolis, February 24, 2009

Translated by Greg Johnson

Read Part 1 here.
Read Part 2 here.
Read Part 3 here.
Read Part 4 here.

Mechanopolis: Isn’t the desire to found a world government one of the delusions of the “enlightened,” as Taguieff would say?

Hervé Ryssen: It is quite clear that all this is being done to make us disavow our roots, our traditions, our history, our families, and our fatherlands, in order to make us more receptive to the “open” society dear to cosmopolitan hearts and to the idea of a world government. Alain Finkielkraut insists on this point: “Evil,” he writes, “enters the world with fatherlands and patronyms [par les patries et par les patronymes]”(Alain Finkielkraut, L’Humanité perdue [Lost Humanity], p.154.). The post-modern man must cease “pursuing traces of the past in himself as in others.” His claim to fame “is to be cosmopolitan, and to make war on parochialism” (Alain Finkielkraut, Le Mécontemporain [Paris: Gallimard, 1991], pp. 174-77).  From there, one can finally admit the idea of a “planetary confederation,” as advocated by the sociologist Edgar “Morin” in all his books, or better yet, to work for the introduction of world government, as Jacques Attali expresses it: “After the installation of European continental institutions, the urgent need for a world government will appear” (Dictionnaire du XXIe siècle [Dictionary of the Twenty-First Century]). All that, obviously, will still not prevent the famous anti-fascist trapper Pierre-André Taguieff from being indignant at the wild imaginings of anti-Semites and to claim that the idea of world domination is an aberration or a “deception.”

Mechanopolis: One cannot deny however that the Jews experienced atrocious persecutions down through the centuries. How do they themselves explain their misfortunes?

Hervé Ryssen: It is probably the most stunning question of all. On this point as well, the explanations are all concordant and are usually based on the theory of the “scapegoat”: in difficult times the government or the people turn against a specially designated victim who is charged with “all” faults “past, present, or future.”

Those who should be most concerned to understand anti-Semitism often express a total incomprehension of the phenomenon. Thus for Clara Malraux (the wife of the writer) anti-Semitic hatred “is less hard to bear when one knows that it is totally and absolutely unjustified and that, by this fact, the enemy is transformed into the enemy of humanity” (Clara Malraux, Rahel, Ma grande sœur . . . [Rahel, My big sister . . .] [Paris: Editions Ramsay, 1980], p. 15.). The enemy of the Jews is the enemy of all humanity. This is also what Elie Wiesel means when he writes in volume 2 of his Memories: “Thus it is and cannot be otherwise: the enemy of the Jews is the enemy of humanity. . . . By killing the Jews, the killers undertook to assassinate all of humanity” (Elie Wiesel, Mémoires, vol. 2, [Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1996], pp. 72, 319). Indeed, to kill a Jew who is, so to speak, innocent by nature, is inevitably to attack every innocent person and every other community. Thus one is correctly defined as the enemy of humanity. But there is also another interpretation, more classical, which is based on the idea that the Jews alone are defined as humanity, the other nations deriving, according to a so-called formula of the Talmud, from “the seed of cattle.”

In his  2004 book Le Discours de la haine [Hate Speech], the philosopher André Glucksmann maintains that “hatred of the Jews is the enigma among all enigmas. . . . Jews are not at all the source of anti-Semitism; it is necessary to consider this passion in itself and by itself, as if the Jews which it hounds . . . did not exist.” (André Glucksmann, Le Discours de la haine [Paris: Plon, 2004], pp. 73, 86, 88.).  You have to understand:  “the Jew” is always innocent. These too are not isolated testimonies, and this attitude seems to be that of a majority of the Jewish intellectuals. Emmanuel Lévinas also expressed this opinion, just like another Jewish philosopher, Shmuel Trigano for whom the phenomenon of anti-Semitism “remained unexplained in spite of an immense library on the subject” (Shmuel Trigano, L’Idéal démocratique… à l’épreuve de la shoah [The Democratic Ideal . . . the Test of the Shoah] [Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1999], p. 17).

Mechanopolis: One also often hears that anti-Semitism is a mental illness.

Hervé Ryssen: Since anti-Semitism is unexplained, and the Jews are innocent, logically the problem can come only from the goys. Consider the testimony of Yeshayahu Leibowitz, philosopher of religions, found in the book entitled Portraits juifs: “It is a phenomenon which is historically incomprehensible. Anti-Semitism for me is not a problem of the Jews but of the goyim” (Herlinde Loelbl, Portraits juifs, 2003). In the first volume of his Mémoires, Elie Wiesel writes: “It is their problem, not ours” (Elie Wiesel, Mémoires, vol. I [Paris: Le Seuil, 1994], pp. 30, 31).

The explanation of anti-Semitism as mental derangement is very frequently found in the writings of Jewish intellectuals. Le livre de Raphaël Draï, Identité juive, identité humaine, publié en 1995, reprend cette idée : The 1995 book of Raphaël Draï, Identité juive, identité humaine [Jewish Identity, Human Identity], takes up this idea: “The anti-Semite attributes to the Jew the intentions that he himself nourishes. . . . The psychopathological dimension of such a construction cannot be ignored. . . . The presented Jews are really projected Jews; the “Judaized” image belongs to the delusions of anti-Semites” (Raphaël Draï, Identité juive, identité humaine [Paris: Armand Colin, 1995], pp. 390-92).

The Russian writer Vassili Grossman expresses the same idea: “Anti-Semitism,” he says, “is the mirror of the defects of a man taken individually, of civil society, of official systems. Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I will tell you what you yourself are guilty of. National Socialism, when it attributed to the Jewish people traits that it itelf had invented, like racism, the will to dominate the world, or the cosmopolitan indifference to the German fatherland, had in fact given the Jews its own characteristics” (Vassili Grossman, Vie et destin [Paris: Ed. Julliard, 1960], pp. 456-58). In sum, the anti-semite rejects in the Jews his own tares. On this level, it does indeed fall into the realm of psychotherapy. But it remains to be seen whether it is really the goyim who need it most!

The End

Read Michael O’Meara’s review of Ryssen’s Les Espérances planétariennes.

Jewish “social critic” James Howard Kunstler has specialized in ridiculing suburbia while paying relatively little attention to the non-White immigration, non-White sociopathy, and forced integration motivating Whites to flock there. The disproportionately jewish race-hustlers, developers, and financiers enriching themselves in the process also get a pass. Kunstler’s made a living hyping a variety of threats, like Y2K and depleted uranium, and warning most recently that “peak oil” will cause a “long emergency”. The effect, if not intent, has been to direct attention away from the more immediate and more substantial problems for more Americans, especially White Americans — the displacement and dispossession caused by genocidal levels of immigration and systemic financial fraud, each fueling the other.

Lately Kunstler has been keeping a nervous eye on a particular facet of the fraud. In “Thinking the Unthinkable” he writes:

How bad is the situation ‘out there’ really? In my view, things are veering toward such extreme desperation that the US government might fall under the sway, by extra-electoral means, of an ambitious military officer, or a group of such, sometime in the near future. I’m not promoting a coup d’etat, you understand, but I am raising it as a realistic possibility as elected officials prove utterly unwilling to cope with a mounting crisis of capital and resources. The ‘corn-pone Hitler’ scenario is still another possibility — Glen Beck and Sarah Palin vying for the hearts and minds of the morons who want ‘to keep gubmint out of Medicare!’ — but I suspect that there is a growing cadre of concerned officers around the Pentagon who will not brook that fucking nonsense for a Crystal City minute and, what’s more, would be very impatient to begin correcting the many fiascos currently blowing the nation apart from within. Remember, today’s US military elite is battle-hardened after eight years of war in Asia. No doubt they love their country, as Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte loved theirs. It may pain them to stand by and watch it dissolve like a castle made of sugar in a winter gale.

I do believe it might pain Kunstler to watch israel dissolve. It certainly doesn’t pain him to watch and snark at “the morons” while it happens to America. Does he think what Goldman Sachs and friends have been doing is unethical, unfair, unjust, immoral, illegal, indefensible, or just plain slimy? Maybe. But for sure he’s concerned how the rubes will react when they find out. He’s afraid it might be bad for jews. And he thinks that’s unthinkable.

This isn’t the first time Kunstler has expressed such fears. Hunter Wallace (formerly Prozium) wrote about Kunstler in Cornpone Nazism toward the end of July, linking to a Kunstler essay titled “Evil Syndicated.” I’ll excerpt a few bits to illustrate how Kunstler recognizes Goldman is creating a problem, but that the real problem is the potential backlash.

By now, everyone in that fraction of the world that pays attention to something other than American Idol and their platter of TGI Friday’s loaded potato skins knows that Goldman Sachs has been caught at another racket in the stock market: front-running trades. What a clever gambit, done with the help of the markets themselves — the Nasdaq in particular — in which information on trades is held back a fraction of a second from public view, while the data is shoveled to the computers of privileged subscribers who can execute zillions of programmed micro-trades before the rest of the herd makes a move. This allows them to vacuum up hundreds of millions of dollars by doing absolutely nothing of value.

Don’t mistake Kunstler’s accurate description here for disapproval. If anything he sees it as a “clever” way to shear “the herd”.

In any sensible society — i.e. a society with an instinct for self-preservation – it would be against the law and the people doing it would be sent to prison.

Maybe the larger question is: since when did we become a society lacking the instinct for self-preservation — that is, a society bent on suicide?

Yes, a sensible society would have stopped Madoff and Hasan too. Whites have an instinct for self-preservation. We express it all the time, even though doing so has long been pathologized and is becoming increasingly criminalized. Since when? It’s been getting worse ever since jewish emancipation. The proper word for what’s happening, by the way, is genocide, not suicide. It’s done over our objections. Jews like Kunstler aid and abet the crime by hyping symptoms rather than causes, and misdirecting blame. They see “anti-semitism” everywhere because they’re not suicidal.

I think the larger question for Kunstler is: what’s best for jews? The larger question for me is: when will Whites take note of this jewish obsession with themselves and their own interests? And when will we see through the dissembling of jewish “social critics” who ridicule and pathologize everything we do to resist what they misrepresent as “suicide”?

As we turn the corner toward autumn, President Obama looks increasingly like a dupe, a tool, or a co-conspirator of Goldman Sachs.

What bothers me is that, sooner or later, the conduct of Goldman Sachs will lead the growing ranks of the unemployed, foreclosed, disentitled, and hopeless into the hands of a savage right wing seeking mindless vengeance, for instance, against “the Jews,” (as represented by Goldman Sachs), or brown-skinned people (as embodied by a vilified president).

“It’s that brown-skinned guy’s fault! Blame him!”

What bothers me is that Kunstler is saying that blaming the group who is responsible is “mindless”, because he’s acutely mindful that it might be bad for “the jews” and “brown-skinned people”. Note however that even as Kunstler does this he feels perfectly free casting aspersions on Whites (as represented by “the savage right wing”), and white-skinned people (as embodied by the “evil syndicated”/”cornpone nazis”). What we have here is a conflict of group interests. Rather than addressing it honestly Kunstler tries to obscure and caricaturize it, advising those who already have their hands on “the growing ranks of the unemployed, foreclosed, disentitled, and hopeless” how to best manipulate them.

Readers of this blog know I’m allergic to conspiracy theories. But surveying the scene out there, it is hard to not conclude that Goldman Sachs has become the “front-runner” of a criminal syndicate defrauding US taxpayers.

Kunstler knows it’s hard because he’s tried. Now he’s trying something more familiar and easier: scapegoating Whites.

In the meantime, the US economy gives the illusion of recovery – but to what? Back to a “consumer” credit card shopping orgy? Another house-buying fiesta?

There you go. One last kick in the nuts for the evil morons. Pay no mind to the hedge fund managers who might be called to account for ripping off the evil morons, if only in Kunstler’s nightmares.

Kunstler’s not the only “social critic” who’s thinks it’s important to suppress/redirect the backlash.

Oy! Noam Chomsky Compares Right-Wing Media To “Nazis”:

The memory that comes to my mind — I don’t want to press the analogy too hard, but I think it’s worth thinking about — is late Weimar Germany. There were people with real grievances, and the Nazis gave them an answer. ‘It’s the fault of the Jews and the Bolsheviks and we’ve got to protect ourselves from them, and that will take care of them.’ And you know what happened…

[...] Germany in the 1920s was at the peak of Western civilization. A decade later, it was at the pits of human history.

Chomsky’s characterization of those two decades is from a jewish point of view, which is likely the opposite of how a contemporary native German would have described them.

Unless an answer can be given to these people, unless they can be led to understand what’s really happening to them, we could be in for trouble.

“We” could be in for trouble? Me and mine are already in trouble. We are ruled by a corrupt and illegitimate regime whose highest priority is to drown us in “people of color”, each and every one of which is afforded special rights over Whites. To even question this is considered a crime. Why should we care about the trouble the fraudsters and the “social critics” spinning excuses for them might suffer? They don’t care about our troubles.

Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–1939

Mark Antliff, a professor of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University, has put together a useful analysis of the cultural-aesthetic memes utilized by French fascists of 1909-1939 to promote their visions of national renewal. Antliff’s analysis focuses on the connection between fascist ideologies and the European avant-garde, which most people would more likely associate with the anti-national left. Antliff is fairly even handed in the book, with the occasional use of scare quotes to express his skepticism/disdain for certain “fascist ideas.”

In contrast, I believe his use of the term “democracy” should always have scare quotes, as “democratic” systems deceive the populace into believing that someone other than self-interested elites are running the show; however, apparently, Antliff and I disagree on our political preferences. Antliff also concludes the book with a line about how the ideas of the French fascists were not able to stem the tide of the “bloodshed” caused by the military aggressions of Hitler and Mussolini (including the invasion of France). Very well. One hopes an academic will write about the real blood that has been shed imposing “equality” on “the people” – either that of the mass-murdering Marxists or the genocidal globalist multiculturalists and their plans for a multiracial West. So much for my complaints about the book. What about fascism and avant-garde aesthetics?

Roger Griffin, in his Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), famously described fascism as “palingenetic populist ultra-nationalism” – making the elements of renewal, rebirth, and regeneration central to all permutations of this ideology. It is also important to differentiate between real fascism and “para-fascist” ersatz fascism. Para-fascism is often confused with real fascism in the public mind, which gives the false impression that fascism is ossified reactionary conservatism, rather than a revolutionary movement interested in avant-garde themes and ideas.

The differences between real revolutionary fascism and para-fascism are easily summarized: Para-fascist regimes are authoritarian, traditionalist, reactionary regimes, often military dictatorships, that fossilize a status quo favoring traditional elites of business, nobility, religion, and the military. Such regimes want nothing to do with the revolutionary and palingenetic aspects of true fascism; the idea that the secular religious, Futuristic, and avant-garde characteristics of, say, (early) Italian Fascism has anything to do with Franco’s Spain or Pinochet’s Chile is absurd.

Indeed, as Griffin makes clear, fascists and para-fascists are usually, by their very nature, bitter enemies. While para-fascists may co-opt some superficial characteristics of their fascist opponents, in power they tend to ruthlessly suppress the expression of revolutionary fascism. When para-fascism attempts to co-opt fascism by sharing power – as Antonescu attempted in Romania with the Legionaries — conflict is inevitable, since the objectives of the two parties are completely different: para-fascist ossification vs. fascist palingenetic regeneration. Thus, in Romania, civil war between para-fascists and fascists led to the victory of the para-fascists, and the exile of the fascist forces. The idea that Antonescu was “fascist” is a byproduct of either ideological ignorance or ideological mendacity, a Marxist desire to strip their fascist competitors of revolutionary dynamism and reduce them to mere “bourgeois hooligans.”

Not all fascisms were equally “fascist” and revolutionary, and even individual fascist movements have oscillated between revolutionary ideals and borderline reactionary para-fascism.

For example, Italian fascism went through three distinct phases. In the years before the seizure of power and in the first half-dozen years of Mussolini’s regime, Italian fascism was in its “purest” form – revolutionary and palingenetic – emphasizing the regeneration of the Italian people and the Italian nation-state. Avant-garde themes and theorists, particularly Futurism, were important in this period, and individuals such as Marinetti were influential in early day Italian fascism.

However, the forces of reaction and of compromise with the establishment were always present; the presence of the King and the Vatican were two impediments to the process of “fascistization” that Mussolini could not, or would not, deal with. In the end, the Concordat was a turning point and the regime’s second phase veered to the “right” in the 1930s, becoming more conservative and reactionary, replacing internal regeneration with external imperialism. Without WW II, chances were good that Italian fascism would have degenerated into a stagnant para-fascist regime similar to that of Franco’s Spain.

Military defeat and the overthrow of Il Duce stopped that process; in the last and third phase of Italian fascism, the “Salo Republic,” the ideology shifted to the left, embracing a militant socialism, and becoming overtly pan-European in scope.

What about the Hitler and the Nazis? There has been some debate as to whether German National Socialism was a form of fascism. It seems to me obvious that it was; that differences existed between the Italian and German forms of fascism is not an argument against that conclusion. All genuine fascisms displayed important differences, yet still contained within themselves the core components of Griffin’s “palingenetic populist ultra-nationalism.”

In the case of National Socialism, the palingenesis was biological; Nazism was a heavily racialized and materialist form of fascism. The German National Socialists were tribalistic in worldview rather than Futurist, and, internal debates aside; Hitler himself was very hostile to the European avant-garde.

Thus, key differences between fascist forms are observed. The German brand had the biopolitical advantage of recognizing the importance of race. On the other hand, the Italian brand had the sociopolitical advantage of a more optimistic Futurist orientation, and was more open-minded with respect to tapping into the cultural energies created by the avant-garde artistic and sociopolitical movements extant in the first decades of the twentieth century.

In some sense, perhaps the “purest” brand of fascism was that of Codreanu and his “Legion of the Archangel Michael,” also known as the Iron Guard. This intensely palingenetic movement emphasized spiritual and moral regeneration to create a Romanian “New Man” to lead the nation to a higher level and fulfill the destiny of the Romanian people. This highly “virulent” form of “palingenetic populist ultra-nationalism” proved itself unable to co-exist with Antonescu’s conservative authoritarian para-fascism; the Legionary movement’s attempt to seize full power for itself (rather than share it with para-fascists; this sharing was correctly seen by the Legionaries as being an emasculating compromise of their ideology) was crushed by the para-fascist military apparatus.

Three fascisms, three different movements. But the revolutionary energies unleashed by these ideologies stand in sharp contrast to the moribund and ossified conservatism of the para-fascists. The political/cultural avant-garde (Italian), the biological-racialist (German), and the spiritual/moral (Romanian) components of these fascisms are important to us today.

And it is probably wrong to separate out the avant-garde mindset as being only applicable to the political/cultural sphere. After all, we really do need new, cutting-edge memes with respect to both materialist race and non-materialist morality. To quote a certain pro-fascist poet: “Make it new!”

With respect to Antliff’s book itself, chapter topics include Sorelian myth and anti-Semitism, and the fascistic politics of Valois, Lamour, and Maulnier. The importance of Sorelian myth was underscored by a recent Michael O’Meara piece that appeared on TOQ Online. Antliff stresses that culture and aesthetics were extremely important to Sorel in his quest to formulate a doctrine of instrumentally utilizing myth to overturn the hated rationalist-capitalist-democratic system. Art is part of this aesthetic emphasis and, truth be told, Sorel focused on culture over politics; indeed, he was scornful of the power of the myth being used and squandered for low-level political aims.

Further, Sorel went through a distinctly “anti-Semitic” phase, in which Jews were considered the exemplars of ultra-rationalist anti-creators, whose worldview set them in opposition to native peoples and native cultural expressions and aesthetics. Opposing the pro-Dreyfus “French” journal La revue blanche, Sorel sarcastically referred to the journal’s Jewish founders as “two Jews come from Poland in order to regenerate our poor country, so unhappily still contaminated by the Christian civilization of the seventeenth century.” Sorel accused Jewish intellectuals of wanting to promote an abstract (i.e., non-ethnic, non-national, non-cultural) concept of (French) citizenship and to also promote “cosmopolitan anarchy.”

Related to this “anti-Semitism,” Sorel admired and promoted the Classical World; the values of classical heroes, such as the Greeks at Thermopylae, were something counterpoised against the Jewish ethic and the degeneration of parliamentary democracy.

Sorel considered art as related to the creativity of work, a creativity that he wished to inculcate into the “productive workers” in place of assembly line mass capitalism and rationalized “one man-one vote” democracy. He also considered an enlightened “proletariat” as being able to reinvigorate a stagnant bourgeoisie through class conflict.

Georges Valois, 1878–1945

Georges Valois (born Alfred-Georges Gressent) went through a wide variety of ideological contortions in his lifetime, from fascism to “libertarian communism,” ending up dying in a Nazi concentration camp after being captured as a member of the “French Resistance.” While such an unbalanced individual represents much of what is wrong with the “movement” (changing your mind is one thing – completely switching your worldview from one moment to the next is another), some of his activities during his “fascist stage” are of interest.

Particularly enlightening is the focus on the urbanism of Le Corbusier, which stands in contrast to much of the American “movement” and its anti-urbanist emphasis on militant ruralism. No doubt, in the West today, the city is an anti-white, anti-Western disaster, full of racial enemies. No doubt as well that throughout much of human history, the city was an unhealthy and sterilizing place, inimical to racial survival and racial progress.

However, in our modern technological age, if we can solve our racial problems, the city itself does not necessarily have to be a racial evil. As part of a natural continuum of human ecologies – isolated rural, rural, suburban/town, small city, larger cities, etc. – the city may play an important role in the Futurist racial ethnostate of tomorrow, a place of technological advancement, racially healthy avant-garde memes, and sociopolitical dynamism. Racial nationalism can and should be reconciled to a certain degree of urbanism – not the urbanism of degeneration, but that of regeneration.

This of course underlies a schism within activism that often goes unnoticed – between modernist, technological tribalist-racialist Futurism and a ruralist anti-technological ecotribalism. It is clear that the French fascists described by Antliff for the most part fall into the first group. Thus, a major divide exists between the Futurist-Modernist fascists (think Marinetti in Italy) and the ruralist soil-oriented romantic past-oriented fascists (think Darre in Germany, or the agrarian-nostalgic Vichy regime in France).

Of course, a healthy society needs both worldviews, and in practical terms a balance is required. For example, Valois incorporated a “love for the native soil” along with his Futurist mindset. Indeed, Valois contrasted “Asiatic nomadness” associated with communism with the “Latin sedentary” style — derived from “cultured Roman legions” — of the French, tied to the native soil and inclined to fascism. He also associated the hated nomadic lifestyle with capitalism, since hyper-rational capitalism uprooted the workers from grounding in an organic society and turned them into atomized, rootless “nomads.”

A related issue is the relationship between Futurism and the veneration of the past. Antliff makes clear that the emphasis on the past in fascism (e.g., the Greco-Roman classical world) was not meant to mean turning back the clock and shunning progress. Instead, this look to the past was, paradoxically, futurist, in that the fascists wanted to take from the past certain noble values and behaviors and use these to help build the modern, technological world of tomorrow. Therefore, one need not discard the past to build a new future, but judiciously use elements of the past as necessary building blocks for the projected futurist edifice. Different strands of fascist thought need not be incompatible, just as common ground must be found between the tribalist futurist and tribalist ruralist strands of modern racial nationalist thought.

Another French fascist, Philippe Lamour, also went through many ideological “twists and turns,” ultimately rejecting fascism in favor of anti-fascism and syndicalism. Lamour originally represented the fascist variant of “machine primitivism” – that is, an anti-rationalist “new consciousness attuned to the dynamism of technology.” Thus, urban industrialism, technology, productivity, and futurist modernism need not be associated with “rational” egalitarianism but with tribalistic fascism. Lamour wished to create a “community of producers” integrating the different classes of French society to overturn liberal democracy in favor of a modernist technologically dynamic fascist state.

Early French fascists such as Lamour also promoted the idea of a European federation, and attempted to make common cause with more pan-European and “leftist” German National Socialists, such as the Strasserian “Black Front,” who favored European cooperation as opposed to Hitler’s hegemony through military conquest. Not coincidentally, before he fell into Hitler’s orbit, Mussolini also favored an alliance of European (fascist) states, promoted through the doctrine of “Roman Universality,” with practical expression through events such as the pan-fascist Montreux conference.

Lamour’s greatest contribution to French fascism was the promotion of the “conflict of generations,” pitting the younger fascistic generation of WW I against the older generation of parliamentary democrats. This latter group was seen as being out of touch with the new age of national regeneration, avant-garde culture and politics, Sorelian myth, as well as technological productivity. Lamour and his “war generation” were at the forefront of the battle of youth vs. the image of fossilized reactionary status quo politicians.

Aesthetically, the work of German artist Germaine Krull and even Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein influenced the avant-garde sensibilities of “machine primitive” young French fascists such as Lamour. Antliff summarizes Lamour’s unique contribution to the ideology of interwar French fascism as the melding of “machine aesthetics” to the concept of generational warfare. Thus, to Lamour, technological dynamism and the replacement of the ossified previous generation with fresh youth were the Sorelian myths required to spark an era of national renewal.

Thierry Maulnier, 1908–1988

Thierry Maulnier (born Jacques Talagrand), author of “Crisis Is in Man,” had as his concept of Sorelian myth “classical violence.” Within the journal Combat, Maulnier and colleagues opposed the leftist French Popular Front’s Marxist-themed “culture” with their own view of aesthetics in architecture and sculpture. Antliff describes Combat’s as focusing on “three interrelated spheres: political institutions, human spirituality, and aesthetics.” The classicism of the Maulnier school promoted the idea of a “synthesis of Dionysian energy and Apollonian restraint.”

Politically, Maulnier wished for a form of French fascism that rejected parliamentary democracy but which still supported the rights and aspirations of the individual, as opposed to what was perceived as the more authoritarian and collectivist societies of Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany. These distinctions between French and other fascisms became more salient after Mussolini fell into Hitler’s orbit and became hostile to French national interests. Indeed, before the start of WW II, Maulnier advocated a “minimal fascist program” for France that would be both a short-term “fix” to bolster the French military for confrontation with the Axis, as well as preparation for the long-term and permanent fascistic remodeling of society after the Axis threat had dissipated.

It must be noted that the Valois, Lamour, and Maulnier fascist ideologies, while linked together by a palingenetic call for national renewal and a rejection of parliamentary democracy, did differ in important ways. In particular, the classicism of Maulnier can be contrasted with the militant futurism and “machine primitivism” of Lamour. Although Antliff stresses that the French fascist focus on the classical world does not necessarily imply a rejection of modernism per se, the specific differences between Maulnier and Lamour were the greatest of any of the individuals profiled by Antliff. Valois and Lamour both embraced the image of “industrial production” as a central motif of their ideology; however, while Lamour spun together a myth of generational conflict, Valois instead emphasized a “spirit of victory” in which the heroism of WW I will now be turned to a battle of the entire nation to create an organized fascist-industrial society. Of these three men, it was Lamour who was the most steadfastly “avant-garde” in cultural-aesthetic orientation, Maulnier the least.

Crude ethnic stereotyping may lead one to conclude that an emphasis on art, culture, and aesthetics in the creation of fascist ideology was (and is) a particularly “French” phenomenon. Of course, other fascist movements were concerned with these issues, sometimes to a significant extent, but none of them incorporated such memes into the core of the political thinking as did French fascist thinkers. Indeed, the cultural-aesthetic emphasis of the French strain of fascism is a breath of fresh air after immersion in the more focused political thought of the Italian Fascists and the racialist ideals of the German National Socialists.

In fact, all three areas of focus – cultural-aesthetic, political, and racialist – are required for a complete memetic complex to promote fascistic ideals. As a biological reductionist, I would emphasize the racialist first of all, but doing so with respect to modern genetic science rather than the sort of quackery that passed as “racial science” under the Nazis. However, biological racialism by itself is not enough. Without an edifice of political and cultural-aesthetic memes, the foundation of ultimate interests will go nowhere.

Related to this issue of political aesthetics, I was impressed by Alex Kurtagic’s analysis of “semiotic systems” and the importance of style in shaping perceptions of status within nationalist memes. This is important. Of course, the enemy will, as a matter of course, attempt to oppose this approach through co-option and/or mockery.

Co-option is a problem for any memetic threat to establishment power; for example, the GOP has effectively co-opted “rightist, racist” concerns through the exploitation of “implicit whiteness.” This strategy has enabled the Republicans to retain white support while at the same time moving continuously leftward in the direction of overtly anti-white policies.

Thus, while aesthetics and style are important, they always must be innately linked to content to prevent the establishment from utilizing the same semiotic systems to promote the exact opposite of our objectives. Dealing with co-option will be difficult, and it is crucially important that the problem be analyzed from the beginning in a proactive fashion.

In other words, right from the start, the construction of unique avant-garde racial-nationalist semiotic systems must incorporate strategies for preventing co-option and dealing with co-option if these preventive measures fail. Therefore, we must identify, in advance, as many problems with each approach as possible, and develop multiple contingency plans for dealing with each emergent counter-move of the establishment.

Mockery is also a problem; the establishment, utilizing its control of the mass media and its stable of celebrity puppets, can subject any racial-nationalist semiotic system to a barrage of withering ridicule. It is important that the elitist and superior nature of the system be of sufficient strength that adherents can turn around such ridicule and assert it as a matter of pride and not shame. In other words, the establishment ridicule itself must be mocked as the pathetic attempts of a dying and out-of-touch system to delegitimize a novel movement of which they are afraid.

Again, careful planning is required to plan against the establishment’s ridicule strategy, but if both co-option and mockery can be successfully dealt with, the semiotic-aesthetic strategy has a chance to achieve its objectives. And those objectives are, in essence, to defuse the “social pricing” attacks of the establishment against racial-nationalist activists and adherents, by providing an alternative value system opposed to, and independent of, establishment standards and acceptance.

In summary, Antliff has dissected a particularly interesting and heretofore unexplored strain of French fascism characterized by an embrace of avant-garde cultural concepts, modernism, Futurism, productivity and the planned society, urbanism and industrial technology, exemplified by so-called “machine primitivism.”

With today’s worries of “peak oil,” and concerns that the multiracial West will collapse, visions of decentralized ruralistic tribalism have again become prominent in nationalist thought. However, the white man is endlessly inventive, and free of the shackles of genocidal globalist multiculturalism, the technological genius of whites, so unleashed, may provide the foundation for a Futurist, technologically advanced and tribalist society. Such a society would have options for both the urbanist technological and ruralist agrarian lifestyles for those whose preferences are for one or the other.

Although I am sure he is an “anti-fascist,” Antliff’s work helps us to consider one technological Futurist option. The major conclusion from both Antliff’s and Kurtagic’s analyses is that staid and conformist methods for sociopolitical activism may be best replaced, at least in part, by avant-garde memes that let some “fresh air” into stale “movement” environs.

Willis Carto and the American Far Right

George Michael describes Willis Carto as “undoubtedly the central figure in the post-World War II American far right.” The organization Carto founded — Liberty Lobby — was “one of the most enduring institutions in the history of the movement and provided a base where virtually all segments of the far right came together.”

The Spotlight, which Liberty Lobby published for over 25 years, was widely read as the most influential medium of the far right, appealing to militia people, antiglobalists, conspiracy theorists, Holocaust revisionists, and White racialists.

Not surprisingly, the Anti-Defamation League considered Carto and Liberty Lobby highly dangerous.

Others agree with Michael’s assessment of Carto’s importance. Leonard Zeskind, for example, positions Carto at the pinnacle of white nationalism — along with William Pierce — in his 2009 book Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream. (Oddly, Carol Swain’s fine work, The New White Nationalism in America, does not even mention Carto, a glaring omission.)

Zeskind quotes David Duke speaking about Carto to a conference full of “Aryan believers”:

There is probably no individual in this room who has had more impact on the movement today in terms of awareness of the Jewish question than this individual . . . Because he has not only influenced many of you individually . . . but he also has influenced the men and women who influenced you.

At the conclusion of his book, Zeskind writes that “More than any other individual in his time and place, he built the infrastructure and generated the resources supporting a long-standing white supremacist political movement.” George Michael’s book provides a satisfying tour of how Carto accomplished that.

These are not overblown claims. Consider that Liberty Lobby had 250,000 members in 1970, working with a budget of nearly a million dollars. At its mid-1980s peak, the budget was between $4 to $5 million. What far right or White nationalist organization is even a shadow of that today?

Observers of the America White nationalist movement will quickly note that Michael’s approach is the same as that taken by Robert Griffin in The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds: An Up-Close Portrait of White Nationalist William Pierce, in which Griffin stayed with Pierce and interviewed him at length, giving an even-handed account of Pierce’s work and thoughts.

Just as Robert Griffin did in his Pierce biography, Michael succeeds in humanizing Carto by giving an objective description of the man. Upon their first meeting in late 2000, for example, Michael had this impression:

At first [Carto's] deep-set eyes conveyed a demeanor and mood of intense seriousness. Although at the time he was in his seventies, Carto appeared mentally sharp and physically fit. He is a diminutive man, shorter than average and probably weighing less than 150 pounds. His dapper attire gave him the appearance of a newspaper reporter, as portrayed in old Hollywood films. He speaks with a Midwestern accent that leaves an impression of ordinariness. Overall, his appearance is unremarkable; one might even describe him as avuncular.

Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1926, Carto had significant French ancestry, with the family name likely being “Carteaux” originally. Carto’s grandfather anglicized it to better blend in. Interestingly, Carto believes that his salt-of-the-earth father privately agreed with his unorthodox views “but he never discussed it. People like my dad — millions of guys like him at their country clubs and in private gatherings, playing bridge or whatever — they talk [about] things. It’s so obvious that the Jews are taking over. But the last thing they want to do is get involved.”

Carto’s focus on Jews began after he left the Army in 1946 (in 1944 he was shot and wounded by a Japanese sniper and was awarded the Purple Heart). Sensing something was wrong in the country, that “on virtually every issue — whether it was immigration, foreign policy, economics, taxes, or race relations — the media supported those positions that ran counter to the interests and wishes of the America people.” (“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”!)

Eventually, Carto became politicized and launched a newsletter known as Right. Influenced by Prof. John Owen Beaty’s The Iron Curtain Over America, Carto moved further toward the opinion that “Jewish international bankers were implicated in conspiracies to control the economies of the Western world.” (Did someone just say “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”?)

Through Right, Carto saw Jews as advocating the “pollution” of America through miscegenation while at the same time striving to maintain ethnic purity among themselves. Out of fear of miscegenation, Carto also opposed the admission of Alaska and Hawaii as states, fearing Hawaii, for its part, would elect ethnic Japanese who would not support White interests in Congress.

Carto managed to cross paths with nearly every right wing group and promoter of the last half century. In the 1960s, for instance, he met and worked with American Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell, but they parted ways. In addition, the Lobby’s charges against various Jewish groups prevented Liberty Lobby from joining other rightist groups such as the John Birch Society.

Michael’s narrative really comes alive in chapter seven, when he gives a well-rounded account of the career of Francis Parker Yockey, author of Imperium. By 1960, Carto appeared to many outsiders to be moderating his views, but in fact he was further radicalized by the writing of Yockey. Michael claims that a major event in Carto’s life was meeting Yockey while the latter was in a San Francisco jail on passport violations.

Soon after this 15-minute meeting, Yockey committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide pill, and rumors swirled that Carto had provided the pill. (As an aside, Michael notes that the U.S. attorney responsible for prosecuting Yockey “inexplicably resigned, left his wife and children, and joined a monastery.”)

This was my own introduction to the life of the enigmatic Yockey, and Michael’s account ably captures the reason someone like Carto felt that while in Yockey’s company he could “feel history standing aside me.”

Yockey’s arguments certainly resonated with those Carto had been making in the previous decade. As Michael writes, “In Yockey’s worldview, Jews were the primary culprits in the decline of Western civilization.  Not unlike previous anti-Semitic narratives, he submitted that Jews excelled mainly in parasitism and were incapable of creating a civilization of their own. He characterized them as ‘culture distorters’ . . .”

In a letter purloined by an undercover mole in the organization, Carto had been very explicit about his beliefs:

Hitler’s defeat was the defeat of Europe. And of America. How could we have been so blind? The blame, it seems, must be laid at the door of the international Jews. It was their propaganda, lies and demands which blinded the West to what Germany was doing. . . . If Satan himself, with all of the superhuman genius and diabolical ingenuity at his command, had tried to create a permanent disintegration and force for the destruction of the nations, he could have done no better than to invent the Jews.

Yockey felt that Jews had taken over America in “all but name” by 1933, with Roosevelt as their agent. Using the media, Yockey argued, Jews controlled public opinion, and thereby the policies of the democracies in Europe and the United States. According to Michael, Yockey reasoned that the Industrial Revolution allowed Jews to rise to power, with American eventually becoming a “money civilization” with a “semitic countenance.” Michael notes that Yockey also asserted that Jews composed 10 percent of the population of the North American continent and that “it is a stark and gruesome fact that America today is ruled by the Jew” (emphasis in original).

From Yockey, Carto drew a lesson that he shared with his rival (and reported enemy) William Pierce, head of the National Alliance. The West, he felt, needed a new faith that would allow a spiritual regeneration. “Only a new dynamic Weltanschauung could save the West.” Opposing this civilization was an enemy that had “four millenniums of experience in guile and deception,” the Jews. One method of destroying the West, both Yockey and Carto believed, was introducing multiculturalism. As Carto states, multiculturalism “could only bring the downfall of all cultures.”

Carto believed that through media control, Jews “confused the white masses, thereby inverting their morality so that they sympathized with non-whites and convinced the former of the ‘rightness of the suicide of the White race.’ Jews were accused of waging a ‘permanent revolution’ against the underpinnings of Western civilization.” Carto continues to maintain this view.

Similar views were held by other racialists with whom Carto crossed paths. For instance, Prof. Revilo Oliver had a mixed relationship with Carto, though they shared similarly negative views on Jews. Pierce, as mentioned, was no Carto supporter. When Carto forces accused Pierce of being an FBI informant, Pierce responded by accusing Carto of embezzlement.

Amidst all this turmoil, Carto labored on. In fact, one of his greatest achievements was yet to come: the founding of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) in 1978.

One strength of Michael’s book surfaces again here. As he did in the beginning of the book with a chapter offering an overview of the far right before Carto, Michael prefaces the discussion of the IHR with an introductory treatment of the origins of Holocaust revisionism. He lists, for example, the achievements of Frenchman Paul Rassinier, the first notable revisionist, whose works include Crossing the Line and The drama of the European Jews (online edition; for the French edition, click here. For an online version of the French ed., click here). He then ties together Carto’s promotion of David Hoggan’s The Myth of the Six Million and its impact on leading revisionist Harry Elmer Barnes. We next hear about Arthur Butz and his seminal work The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry (1976).

Two years after Butz’s book appeared, Carto took the crucial step of providing an institutional setting for the disparate revisionist forces. With the founding of the IHR, the world now had “the number-one international force for Holocaust revisionism.”

Located in Torrance, California, the IHR housed the Noontide Press. More importantly, The IHR published a periodical, the Journal of Historical Review, which was a direct descendant of Carto’s American Mercury. Presented along scholarly lines, articles were properly formatted and footnoted, and at one point the IHR boasted twenty-five editorial advisory committee members, eighteen of whom held doctorate degrees.

Not surprisingly, the rise of an institution supporting Holocaust revisionism elicited a powerful backlash. Carto’s house was vandalized, followed by picketing by Jewish Defense League members. Next, a firebomb did minor damage to parts of the IHR facilities in 1981. A year later there were two more firebombings. On July 4, 1984, however, a serious arson attack by unknown forces destroyed more than ninety percent of the books and tapes at the IHR, resulting in nearly a half million dollars of damage. The case was never solved.

Michael next chronicles a depressing series of setbacks and challenges to Carto and the IHR, including a lawsuit by a Jewish businessman, (see Michael Collins Piper’s account here) and a more devastating one involving Journal of Historical Review editor Mark Weber and his allies. The upshot was that in 1996 a judge awarded the IHR $7.365 million in damages, forcing Carto, his wife, and Liberty Lobby to declare bankruptcy. This appears to be a fitting tale about the far right more generally, as squabbling amongst themselves seems to result in more harm than attacks by external enemies. As Michael notes, “Thus, in an ironic twist of fate, one of the most longstanding institutions of the far right was forced to close shop, not due to action by its watchdog opponents, such as the ADL or the Southern Poverty Law Center, but rather due to an internecine feud on the far right.”

Remarkably, Carto bounced back. In place of Liberty Lobby and its mouthpiece The Spotlight, Carto created American Free Press and The Barnes Review. The former newsletter maintains a heavy focus on Holocaust revisionism, just as The Journal of Historical Review had. (Michael notes in passing that even some Jewish scholars seek to downgrade many of the more exaggerated claims about Jewish suffering. Two men mentioned are historian Peter Novick and enfant terrible Norman Finkelstein.)

In addition, The Barnes Review holds annual conferences in the Washington, D.C. area, attracting speakers such as Eustace Mullins, attorney Edgar Steele, and Holocaust revisionists Frederick Toben and Germar Rudolf. In-house journalists such as Michael Collins Piper also speak. Even Hutton Gibson, father of Mel, has given a lecture there.

American Free Press is less heavily focused on Jews, preferring to name the Bilderberg Group as more responsible for trends harmful to Whites. The following exchange between Carto and Michael illustrates Carto’s views, while also showing the immediacy of the book’s approach:

Willis Carto: They [Jews] have the universalistic dream where everybody is going to be a slave. And the plutocrats, they want essentially the same thing. But at some point I can just imagine the Anglo-plutocrats — the Bush types and the Queen of England types — sitting around with the Jews. And what’s going to happen then? That’s going to be a watershed. And if anybody thinks that the plutocrats are going to share with the Jews or the Jews are going to share with the plutocrats, he is totally crazy.

George Michael: How do you see this relationship between the plutocrats — the so-called Eastern establishment — and the Jews? Who do you really think pulls the strings?

WC: I think it is shared interests. I don’t think they really have come to the point yet that they have to start scheming against each other . . . . They’re both after the same thing, which is mastery of the globe . . . . When they reach some point, the daggers have to come out. I mean the Jews aren’t plutocrats. And the plutocrats aren’t Jews. They are going to share power only until they get down too close to the bone, when they have to start nibbling with sharp teeth. I don’t think it will hold together.

GM: Are you optimistic that somehow these problems can be surmounted, that someday there will be an effective opposition that will be able to marshal grassroots support to effect change in America? And the western world by extension?

WC: If I understand your question right, I can see as I say, at some point, the dollar has to crack. It has to shatter. Everything has to collapse. And when it does . . . . Well, I’ll tell you what I really believe. There is one of two things. And both of them are pretty bad. Number one I sort of laugh, I find it kind of humorous that these old-line, old money people want a gold standard. They’re going to get their gold standard. When the dollar goes down the tube, they’re going to have their gold standard, because that will be the only money. That is one scenario, which isn’t good. The other scenario isn’t any better, but is really a condition of anarchy in this country where you have all these groups that are put together forcibly at each other’s throats. And it could be very bloody.

A perennial favorite of American Free Press is Mossad Conspiracy Theories, a prime one being that Israel spies extensively on its “patron,” the United States. Such a claim today appears to be on more and more solid ground, as various revelations about Jewish and Israeli spying surface. (For more, see my recent column “Spies Like Us”). In addition to mere spying, articles in the newspaper allege an Israel role in 9/11 and the anthrax attacks that followed. Finally, American Free Press strongly pushes arguments that Israel and its neoconservative operatives were behind the drive for a second war on Iraq.

Michael sees the emergence of Carto’s new media as evidence of Carto’s continuing resolve. “The survival of American Free Press has demonstrated the durability and tenacity of Willis Carto. The paper’s circulation is roughly 40,000, not far below the Spotlight’s circulation of 50,000 when it ceased publication. Furthermore, The Barnes Review is now the most widely distributed revisionist journal. Finally, Carto still organizes conferences that draw crowds in the low hundreds — a considerable feat by American far right standards. Nearly all observers wrote him off after his loss in the battle with the IHR. However, as of 2007, the eighty-one-year-old Carto works a full-time schedule that would tire most men half his age.”

Before assuming that this represents a hopeful sign, one should pay attention to what immediately follows the above quote. “[Carto's] influence on the American far right remains undeniable. But in the larger scheme of American politics, just how significant has he been?”

Michael observes that some have looked at the net effect of Willis Carto’s work and concluded it has been “virtually nothing.” If so, Carto alone is hardly to blame, as researchers on the American Right, John George and Laird Wilcox comment:

[W]hatever else one can say of Willis Carto, it is clear that he, more than any individual, has been responsible for giving form to the ragtag band of citizens who make up the [R]ightist fringe. Carto has attempted to ride herd on a very difficult and contentious band of rugged individualists, prima donnas, loners, and nut cases with predictably marginal results. Some critics on the [R]ight say that Carto’s failures have been caused by his autocratic personality, but it’s doubtful anyone else could have done better.

Surprisingly, Carto’s own take on his efforts to unite the right is similar:

That was a fundamental error. I had to learn as many, many others have learned, that such a noble sounding goal is impractical and impossible, a waste of time, a waste of effort. These various groups and organizations, and leaders, under no circumstances are they going to join together. They all have their own ideas on how to do things and none of them work. That certainly is not the way to do it.  I was wrong all those years.  It took a long time for me to find out. . . .

The only way this can be surmounted is to have one personality, one leader, extremely intelligent, with the right type of personality, a good speaker, a gregarious person, who can literally take over these other groups in the sense that half of their membership deserts to come over to his banner. That’s the only way it could be done. . . .

That’s the only way to do it.  Not to try to merge with other organizations. You have to steal their membership. He [Hitler] didn’t merge his party with anybody. But through his own abilities as a speaker and all the other leadership qualities he had, he was literally able to steal the memberships. And so these organizations would vote to dissolve and go into the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. That’s what he did. And he instinctively recognized the fallacy of what Liberty Lobby later tried to do and the Congress of Freedom tried to do and what We, the People tried to do and get one organization out of many. You can’t have it.

Surely there is a lesson in this for today’s activists. One such lesson can be drawn from Carto’s insistence that white nationalist efforts must be institutionally grounded, as he tried to do with Liberty Lobby and the IHR.

Willis Carto and the American Far Right is a personal tale of an important man in a vitally important story about an entire race. Carto saw the risks to the West over half a century ago, and to his credit has been working ceaselessly ever since to defend his people and civilization. Thus, it is cheerless to read Carto’s final words in the book: “I did my best. That’s all I can say.” Yet one cannot help but admire the man portrayed in these pages.

Carto will soon pass from the scene, but, as Michael notes, new groups of White nationalists will emerge. How could it be otherwise? Faced with undeniable decline and the threat of genocidal violence at the hands of outside enemies and traitorous or clueless Whites within, there will always be those who seek to fight back before the light finally goes out.

The late Harvard historian Samuel Huntington explained why such resistance is inevitable. In his last major work, Who Are We: The Challenges to America’s National Identity, he recorded the betrayal of American elites, who in the 1960s and 1970s “began to promote measures consciously designed to weaken America’s cultural and creedal identity and to strengthen racial, ethnic, cultural, and other subnational identities. These efforts by a nation’s leaders to deconstruct the nation they governed were, quite possibly, without precedent in human history.” (See also E. Michael Jones’s The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal As Ethnic Cleansing, Peter Brimelow’s speech at the Preserving Western Civilization conference, or the VDARE.com exchange between Kevin MacDonald and Eric Kaufman for similar perspectives.)

White backlash, Huntington argued, is to be expected, which, should it come, would put Carto in the vanguard. “The actual and prospective continuing loss of power, status, and numbers by any social, ethnic, racial, or economic group,” Huntington wrote, “almost always leads to efforts by that group to stop or reverse those losses.” The example he cites? Bosnia-Herzegovina. While he did not foresee that level of violence, he did predict that Whites — in this case those in California — would react to their dispossession with a certainty of 100%. One hopes Carto will still be around to witness Whites finally standing up for themselves.

We humans often say that we live in interesting times, and for Whites today, that is certainly true. How, for example, can we have people like Carto, Huntington and even a far-Left professor like James Petras sharing views on the plight of the West, or in the case of Carto and Petras, an insistence that Jewish/Zionist power is a leading threat? What Petras writes in books such as The Power of Israel in the United States (see his similar books Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire: Bankers, Zionists and Militants, Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of US Power, and Global Depression and Regional Wars: The United States, Latin America and the Middle East; see also my review here) would not seem out of place in one of Carto’s many publications. Now that is interesting.

Both Leonard Zeskind and Michael are in agreement about the future of far right activism. Zeskind concludes that movement activists have created “a white nationalist opposition to the status quo that will not go away in the near future” (emphasis in text). Michael believes that such activism “will probably endure well into the current century.”

Let’s hope so. And let’s hope that it finally gains traction.

Israel Shamir, in his controversial book Cabbala of Power, makes an interesting point about “hook-nosed Jews.” It seems that many Jews, far from shrinking from mention of their noses, never lose an opportunity to reinforce this particular stereotype by referring to their own noses negatively if there is no one else around to do so. When Jewish cemeteries are vandalized or swastikas are found defacing walls, the culprits on numerous occasions have turned out to be Jews. (See, e.g., here and here.) So it is with the legendary “Jewish nose”: a protected species of stereotype deliberately nurtured and kept alive by organized Jewry for propaganda purposes.

Shamir recounts several of these instances. David Mamet, Jewish American playwright, once noticed a bumper sticker on a car: “Israel, Out of the Settlements!” Mamet took umbrage. “This could well be translated,” he huffed, “as Hook-nosed Jews, Die!” Writing an article for The Age, a Jewish publication, Graham Barrett slyly invoked the same carefully cultivated stereotype. “The retired Malaysian Prime Minister,” he told his readers, “took a parting snipe at the ‘hook-nosed Jews’ who rule the world by proxy.”

But this is ridiculous. The Malaysian Prime Minister, as everyone knows, made no reference to “hooked-nosed Jews.” And Mamet is simply fantasizing about the attitudes of someone who was taking an entirely reasonable point of view on the Middle East. In his twisted world, any criticism of Israel, no matter how reasonable, is just another crazed statement of a Jew-hater whose images of Jews come right out of a Der Sturmer cartoon

With the reader’s permission, I shall continue my disquisition on Jewish noses for a bit. The legendary ‘Jewish nose’, though fairly common among non-Jews, appears to cause our Jewish cousins extra special anguish. Rhinoplasty, invented by German-Jewish surgeon Jacques Joseph in the 1890s, largely caught on because its earliest and most enthusiastic customers were Jews. When Jewish comedienne Fanny Brice had her nose job, Dorothy Parker (herself half Jewish) quipped: “Fanny has cut off her nose to spite her race!” Since then, many famous Jews have gone under the knife, including Natalie Portman (Herschlag), Winona Ryder (Horowitz), Gwyneth Paltrow (Paltrowitz), and Sarah Jessica Parker (Bar-Kahn).

Though this would appear to be a relatively frivolous subject, the intelligent reader will understand that it is not the Jewish nose per se that is of interest to me. I am really interested in Jewish power — in this case, the power to suppress any public discussion of a Jewish stereotype based to a considerable extent on the reality of Jewish noses. It’s really the same as Jewish ability to suppress statements that Jews have inordinate influence on the media. Truth is irrelevant.

In fact, it is the whole cluster of alleged anti-Semitic stereotypes and fabricated “canards“ that hover over any discussion of organized Jewry, or of Israel, and which make it almost impossible for anyone to discuss Jewish issues without being branded “anti-Semitic.”

"Obey us, or we'll weep!"

County officials today will weigh in on whether the LA Opera should hold a festival honoring the music of Richard Wagner, an anti-semitic 19th-century composer.

The opera company is scheduled to perform Wagner’s “Ring” cycle opera over several months, starting in April 2010. It will also feature lectures and other events tied the composer.

But county Supervisor Michael Antonovich, who represents parts of the San Gabriel Valley, has introduced a motion calling on the Board of Supervisors to oppose the opera company’s plans to feature Wagner’s work so prominently.

Some have charged that his music, which was admired by Adolf Hitler, represents a Nazi ideology and should not be performed. But representatives of the opera company say Antonovich is attempting censorship.

The board lacks the power to regulate what music the opera company can perform: Today’s motion, if approved, would result in a letter from the board to the opera company asking it to lessen its focus on Wagner by including works by other composers and offering lectures focusing on Wagner’s openly anti-semitic views.

“This is not an issue of censorship but of balance,” Antonovich said. “They need to include individuals who object to how Wagner’s music was used by the Nazis…he shouldn’t be glorified.”

Local attorney E. Randol Schoenberg, who serves on the LA Opera board and is president of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, said Antonovich was using the issue to generate publicity for a cause few people are concerned about. “There is no groundswell of people who are opposed to this,” said Schoenberg.

He added that nobody at the opera company is trying to deny Wagner’s contemptible views.

“He was a crazy anti-semite, and a terrible person,” said Schoenberg. “I wouldn’t have him to dinner. But his music is undeniably great.”

He pointed out that similar debates about Wagner broke out in Israel in the 1990s, but his music was ultimately performed by the Israeli Philharmonic.

Carie Delmar, who has a local opera blog and has long opposed performing Wagner, said she’s concerned with the way Wagner’s music was used by the Nazis.

“For Holocaust survivors, his music brings back horrible memories,” said Delmar. “His music was, like, a soundtrack for the Holocaust.”

“L.A. County Supervisor Antonovich weighs in on Wagner’s opera”
by Dan Abendschein
San Gabriel Valley Tribune, July 20, 2009

Like any nation, the modern state of Israel has a discernible collective psychological attitude: a communal “personality.” It is formed at its core by the conviction that Israel is a Jewish island, a people under constant siege by hostile goyim. A key ingredient of the Israeli public persona, much championed, is that Jews are tough, emotionally hardened, and ruthless, a self-image epitomized in the “sabra” (literally meaning a cactus fruit, but colloquially meaning a Jew born in Israel). In popular Israeli folklore, the Jews of Israel are “thorny and tough on the outside, but soft inside.”

The sabra image also has deep psychological sources in the nationalist “lessons” learned from the Holocaust, a situation where a perceived lack of Jewish physical force and power in the diaspora (galut) throughout the world inevitably must — sooner or later — lead to disaster at the hands of Gentiles.

Zionism, in whatever form, has invariably dovetailed with some of the central tenets of classical religious Judaism, including the old “people apart” syndrome: Jewish alienation from all other peoples. “The civil religion [of Israel],” notes Charles Liebman and Eliezer Dov-Yehiya, “has been most forceful in asserting that Israel is an isolated nation confronting a hostile world … The growing importance of traditional Judaism and Jewishness is associated with the centrality of the Holocaust as the primary political myth of Israeli society, the symbol of Israel’s present condition and the one which provides Israel with legitimacy … The Holocaust to a great extent fashions ‘our national consciousness’ and the memory is omnipresent in Israeli society.”

“Israeli political culture,” says Israeli professor Myron Aronoff, “reflects not only the general theme of the few against the many, but a growing emphasis of ‘them against us’ … The traditional concept of Esau hates Jacob [Gentiles hate Jews] and a nation that dwells alone became explanations of reality and legitimization of Israeli policy.” As former lobbyist for Israel Doug Bloomfield once noted, some Israelis tend to have a “You owe us” and “Screw the world” attitudes. Zev Chafets remembers an Israeli concert he attended in 1969, two years after he moved to Israel from America: “As the show drew to a close, the group swung into an up-temp number. ‘Ha’olam Ku’lo heg’denu,’ they sang. ‘The whole world is against us.’ The audience knew the song and joined in on the chorus … [:] ‘The whole world is against us; never mind, we’ll get by; we don’t give a damn about them anyway.’”

Jewish scholar Daniel Niewyk describes the racist dimension of this Zionist ideology of alienation from others, especially as it developed in Germany:

At the heart of the Zionist critique of liberal assimilation lay the conviction that Jews constitute a unique race. It was the belief in insurmountable racial differences that made the inevitability of anti-Semitism credible, just as it rationalizes the view that every effort to assimilate must go aground on the barrier reef of biological determinism … The maintenance of that [racial] purity was essential to German Zionism, for it acknowledged the essential prerequisite for nationhood to be [in the 1922 words of Zionist Fritz Kahn] “consanguinity of the flesh and solidarity of the soul” together with the “will to establish a closer [Jewish] brotherhood over [and] against all other communities on earth.”

Amnon Rubenstein notes the disturbing irony expressed in this world view of the Israeli people: “The establishment of Israel was an attempt to make Jews like everybody else. They would now have a state. It has not worked out that way. Israel has made Jews more, not less, exceptional. The pariah people, it seems, have simply succeeded in creating a pariah state.” Perhaps, however, this situation is inevitable. Unmentioned by Rubenstein is the religiously-based “nation apart” self-concept always so deeply embedded in Jewish mass psychology, a self-understanding and communal choice that apparently cannot be shaken, even in a secular nation-state context.

Non-Jewish scholar Virginia Dominguez, who spent long periods of time in Israel in later years doing research, noted the traditional Jewish narcissism and interest in pedigrees of identity expressed by the Israelis she met:

“What do you mean you say you are not Jewish?” I was asked on several occasions. “That you’re not religious? That your mother wasn’t Jewish? That ‘we the Jews’ wouldn’t count you as a Jew because you had some Jewish ancestry but not the right ones, according to Halacha?” I was incredulous at first. I had no way then to anticipate this reaction. Everything else seemed to point to the importance of Jewishness, and to controlling both the content and limits of Jewishness.

The omnipresent stresses of a predominantly military state, the emphatic “we versus them” paradigm of traditional Jewish identity, the glorification of power and aggression, millennia-old disdain for non-Jews, and the emotional powder keg of Holocaust death camps as a motivational tool have invariably led to the noxious Israeli collective persona that is so much remarked upon by non-Israelis (often even Israelis themselves) who spend much time in Israel. Common traits of this “national character” are arrogance, insolence (chutzpah), coldness, roughness, and rudeness, to begin a long list of unpleasant “uncivil” attributes.

Many Diaspora Jews, in describing this Israeli character, tend to romanticize it. “There is a coldness,” notes Jewish scholar Norman Cantor, “a mystery, a distance from humanity about [Israelis] that anyone from another country who lives and works in Israel for a half a year will be impressed by.” “Israelis have a reputation for bad manners,” notes Jewish American immigrant to Israel Charles Liebman, “to the extent this reputation is deserved it stems from the sense of familiarity that Israelis feel towards one another.” Adam Garfinkle adds that “Israelis are sometimes rude to an extent that it even bothers other Israelis.” “The behavior of young Israelis,” Israeli Jay Gonen writes, “… is characterized by a high degree of chutzpah or gall; it is direct, blatant, unruly, clever, humorous, and indicates a certain lack of sensitivity to social requirements … [It has a] disregard for rules, regulations, social norms, and good manners.” Melford Spiro, in his study of the kibbutzim, discusses “insolence” as an “outstanding characteristic of the sabras” (native-born Israelis).

Herbert Russcol — a Jewish American emigrant to Israel — and his sabra wife Margarit Banai described the Israeli national character this way:

“Horror stories” about the chutzpah — of the sabra-men, women, and children alike — are notorious. What appears to be (and often is) their cheek, their insolence, has shocked and enraged everyone who has met them. Sabras freely admit their chutzpah as a people, but are rarely aware of being chutzpadik themselves. They will tell you, “Oh, we’re terrible. It’s a national vice. I am not so bad, but I have some very rude friends” … Chutzpah is alarmingly close to chauvinism, and it must be admitted that the sabra is usually passionately chaunvinistic in an era when no gospel has been more discredited in the West than blind, excessive patriotism.

“The deliberate and unadorned frankness [of Israelis],” notes Zionist historian Melvin Urofsky, “so highly prized by Israelis, scornful of Westernized and ‘assimilated’ manners, struck [Jewish] Americans [who sought to live in Israel], accustomed to some courtesies in life, as downright rude. (As late as 1965, a study of bureaucratic behavior in one large Israeli enterprise disclosed that 60 per cent of officials in contact with the public did not believe in greeting a visitor, nor would they reply to his greeting; an even higher percentage would not offer him a chair, simply letting him stand during the interview.)

Such attributes, it may be recalled, are among those that Jews have been noted for across the centuries. Leon Poliakov rhetorically remarks on the inevitable echo here in the European Jewish past: “Are the Jews congenitally unsociable and rude, or are they this way as a result of having been segregated in ghettos? Such was the form of the question in which arguments raged [among non-Jewish intellectuals] in the 18th century on the eve of Emancipation.”

As Joyce Starr notes: “Among Americans who have had extensive dealings with Israelis, whether in government, business, or Jewish circles, the first adjectives that comes to their lips are arrogant, willful, and sometimes infuriating.” Ms. Starr, who is also Jewish, notes the interchange she had with a man called J.R., “a high-ranking Israeli intelligence officer”:

“Most Americans I interviewed in the government sphere — the State Department, Defense Department — use certain words when they describe Israelis.”

“Arrogant,” J. R. replied.

“Yes, arrogant is a word that comes up frequently.”

“By the way, I think it’s true. It applies to most Israelis. American fairness and Israeli fairness are different.”

“What is Israeli fairness?”

“Israeli fairness is ‘You give me 75 percent and leave 25 percent.’”

“Do they know they do it?”

“Most of them do not. I think most of them believe that by some divine decree, they deserve to get everything.”

“What is divine decree?”

“It comes from God.” He saw me laughing. “It”s not funny, Joyce.”

“To the brief tourist,” wrote Leonard Wolf, a Jewish resident of Israel in 1970, “[Israelis] are a rude, unsympathetic people, intent on themselves, irresponsive to nuances of feeling. Americans, who are instantly, if not profoundly, genial, are apt to find the slow pace of Israeli friendliness cold, comparing the Jewish hotelkeepers and tourist guides they meet unfavorably with the extraordinarily warm Arabs.”

In 2001, a Jewish ethnic newspaper, the Forward, noted that the national Israeli propensity to be cheats and hustlers (always evasive of the law) probably had roots in Jewish history in other lands:

[There is] universal awareness that something is definitely rotten in the state of Israel. This is, after all, a country in which bending the rules is said to be a national pasttime, cutting corners a way of life and cheating the authorities the proof of merit … Sticklers for the law are ridiculed and abused, where anyone who works by the book is branded a sap, a “freier,” the worst insult in modern Israeli lexicon … Many people believe Israeli laxity, which borders on anarchy, is a national personality trait that cannot be eradicated by laws alone. Some trace the trait all the way back to the historical Jewish Diaspora, where Jews often found solace in bending the rules imposed by the often anti-Semitic authorities.

In 1986, B. Z. Sobel, an Israeli sociologist at the University of Haifa, discussed his research into reasons why so many Israelis emigrate from Israel to other lands. Among the motivations for leaving, he noted that “there is indeed an edginess [in Israeli society]; tempers flare, and verbal violence is rampant … A large proportion of those [Israelis] interviewed for my study … have been abroad [overseas] or were born or raised abroad, and in almost all cases reference is made to the fact that ‘people are nice in chutz la’aretz.’ Strangers wish you a good day as they make change or pass you in the street, whereas at home [Israel] you can consider yourself fortunate to receive minimally civil treatment.”

“Americans are much more polite, I would say,” remarked Israeli journalist Ze’ev Schiff, “while we are rude and have no patience … You can see it when some of us are waiting in a queue in a bank or waiting for a bus … This is the way we deal with each other, with the Egyptians, the Europeans, whoever.” As Joyce Starr adds: “The tension [in Israel] spills out in sudden eruptions of rudeness. You can be standing in line in a gas station, and suddenly there will be an outbreak of shouts and terrible cursing for no apparent reason except that people explode in Israel.”

Moshe Shokeid notes the comments of an Israeli identified as “Eli,” and his perceptions of the Israelis he met in New York City: “When I looked at the crowd, I subconsciously saw myself in the mirror. When you see other Israelis screaming in Hebrew, you realize that you possibly look the same. Unfortunately, I rediscovered the ugly Israeli.”

In the 1980s, Virginia Dominguez, a Cuban American sociologist, fluent in Hebrew and a Fulbright scholar in Israel, worried that obnoxious Israeli behavior and Jewish self-obsession threatened to push her into the camp of the anti-Semites:

Has my obsessive, long-term encounter with Israeli society over the past six years turned me into the anti-Semite I never was? I find myself sharply intolerant of the noisy, brash behavior of most Israeli children. I coin terms of description that are even explicitly judgmental. I get exasperated with the perennial references in the [Hebrew] media to the Jewishness of well-known public figures abroad.

Wendy Orange, a Jewish American, a new immigrant to Israel, noted with irritation the commentary of a group of Christian visitors she overheard in Jerusalem restaurant:

I overheard one Ghanaian woman say, “Just ghastly, these people!” She’s talking to a pregnant Irish woman, who responded wholeheartedly: “I never imagined they’d be so crude … so rude.” The Ghanaian, tall and dignified, her hair wrapped high in a colorful African sash, became more emphatic: “No manners … They drive like madmen.” She paused. “They are far more barbarian than I was warned. And I was warned, my dear, many times.”

In 2001, Great Britain’s online Telegraph newspaper noted

Israelis — who take pride in being blunt and outspoken — are to teach children good manners in an attempt to cut the nation’s tendency towards violence. From the next school year, 12-year-olds will be taught how to behave politely, which knife and fork to use at table, and how to resolve arguments without shouting or coming to blows. Ronit Tirosh, director-general of the Education Ministry said: “We are a brutal and impatient society, and the delicacy learned through these lessons may reduce our society’s violent tendencies.” Israelis are proud not to say thank you and relish the informality of life … Israeli life is a bruising contest of one-upmanship. The deepest fear is to be thought a “sucker” who obeys the rules. Brusqueness has been cultivated by native-born Israelis as a reaction against the manners of Europe’s Diaspora Jews, who were seen as cringing and subservient … Educationalists have become worried about the level of playground violence.

Traditional Jewish chutzpah is of course an integral part of the Israeli identity. “To a large degree,” says Israeli professor Jay Gonen, “… Herzl’s impact [on Jewish nationalism] was due to a quality of chutzpah, or unmitigated gall, which became an integral part of Zionism and was subsequently elevated almost to an art form by native-born Israelis, or sabras.” An example of how far this chutzpah can go was evidenced in an incident during the Palestinian uprising — known as the Intifada — that began in 1987 against Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. Of the hundreds of Palestinians shot and killed or wounded by Israeli troops in the Intifada’s first year, one young Arab teenager, Nasir Hawwash, was shot in the head and lay in a hospital, irrecoverably brain dead. One day Nasir’s brother received a telephone call from a Jewish Israeli citizen, an emissary for the family of a fellow middle-aged Israeli in the hospital with a serious heart condition. The stranger on the phone asked that the Hawwash family donate Nasir’s heart to save the Jewish man in the hospital who needed it.

“Nasir’s older brother,” notes Glenn Frankel, “was appalled that an Israeli would ask such a thing. She told him, ‘This is how we’ll make peace between Arabs and Jews.’ He was not buying it. ‘How can you make peace when you shoot someone and then you take the heart to give life to another Israeli?’ he told her.”

As the story for the heart request made the Israeli news, one Palestinian “radical” noted that “If we give the Israelis this heart, soon they’ll be shooting us for our organs.”

The Arab boy’s father was eventually offered “more money than [his] family would have seen in a lifetime” for his son’s heart, but he told the Israeli pleaders no. “What did they want from me?” he asked. “This was my son. They took him away, then they wanted his body. This I could not give.”

This is the final online installment of F. Roger Devlin’s review-essay on volume 2 of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together: Jews and Russians during the Soviet Period. The author’s review of volume 1, Jews and Russians before the Revolution, is available here in PDF format.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008

Most of Solzhenitsyn’s Jewish sources concede that the Soviet authorities did a commendable job of evacuating Jews from the western regions of Russia at the beginning of the German invasion of 1941, given the constraints upon transport and the other urgent demands being made upon it. About 2,226,000 Jews were successfully evacuated. Another 2,739,000 Jews, mostly from borderlands recently reacquired following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, had to be left to face the German occupation (p. 375).

“During 1941–42,” writes Solzhenitsyn, “the Soviet authorities gladly allowed the synagogues of Moscow, Leningrad, and Kharkov to fill up and the Jewish Passover to be celebrated” (p. 379). Yiddish newspapers were published again. A Jewish Antifascist Committee was set up to publicize anti-Jewish atrocities committed by the invaders: “the effect produced in the West surpassed all Moscow’s expectations. . . . In allied countries, Jewish organizations were created to gather funds for the Red Army” (p. 383). The Soviet regime even cooperated with the Zionist movement for several years.

Popular anti-Semitism increased during the war years. It was commonly asserted, e.g., that Jews avoided service at the front. Solzhenitsyn goes through the statistics carefully and concludes that such accusations are unfounded. He presents evidence that some 430,000 Jews fought in the Red Army during the war, with 270 Jewish Generals and Admirals among them (pp. 388–98).

Part of the German plan of occupation was to get the local populations to initiate pogroms. This was intended to create the impression that anti-Jewish actions were undertaken spontaneously by the nations which Germany had “liberated from Jewish Bolshevism.” In their reports to Berlin, however, SS officials reported that this task was “quite difficult” in Lithuania, “much more difficult” in Latvia, and impossible in Byelorussia. Neither did they have success when they reached Great Russia. In Ukraine, the German plan enjoyed some success, especially among the Ukrainian separatists, but the SS had to take matters into their own hands eventually. Only the Crimean Tatars proved zealous in massacring the local Jews. On the whole, the German attempt to hide behind proxies was a failure (pp. 403–408).

There is nothing in Solzhenitsyn’s pages which could serve as grist for the mill of “holocaust revisionism,” nor does he ever suggest that German National Socialism was preferable to Soviet Communism.

As is widely recognized, the postwar years up to the death of Stalin were marked by an official campaign against the Jews. This was the responsibility of the dictator himself, as Solzhenitsyn explains:

[T]he very structure of the totalitarian regime meant that the weakening of the Jewish share in the leadership of the country could only be initiated by Stalin himself.

But neither Stalin’s devious character nor the hardened character of Soviet propaganda allowed an open course of action. The first transformations in the composition of the State apparatus occurred—almost imperceptibly, it is true—after the rapprochement of Stalin with Hitler in 1939. The Jew Litvinov was replaced by Molotov and “purges” took place in the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. And military and diplomatic academies were closed to Jews.

From the end of 1942, actions were taken to remove Jews from artistic institutions such as the Bolshoi, the Moscow Conservatory, [and] the Moscow Philharmonic. Later there were attempts to initiate a prorated repartitioning of [Party] cadres according to national origin, which in practice amounted to removing Jews from decision-making positions. Over the course of the years and according to circumstances, Stalin sometimes encouraged and sometimes hindered these initiatives. (pp. 424–25)

An important turning point was the arrival of Golda Meir in Moscow as Israeli ambassador. She received a triumphal welcome from the entire Jewish community, and petitions for emigration to Israel began pouring in to the authorities. Meanwhile, as Stalin was preparing for a possible war with the United States, the Israeli government was sending out pro-Western signals. Jews arrested around 1950 are said to have been confronted by their interrogators with their alleged unwillingness to fight against Israel’s ally America.

Undoubtedly frightened by the effervescence reigning among the Jews, Stalin—beginning at the end of 1948, and for the rest of his life—drastically changed his policies with regard to them. But in his own manner: acting drastically but without announcement, radically but by little steps, and in apparently secondary domains. (p. 430)

In January 1949, Pravda published a long article entitled “On an Antipatriotic Group of Theater Critics.” These theater critics, it was reported, hid their true identity behind pseudonyms. Thus, the critic Kholodov was really Meierovich; Yasny was Finkelstein; Svetov was Scheidman, and so forth. Shortly thereafter, Pravda launched a campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans.” At first, no one had any idea who the “rootless cosmopolitans” were. Eventually an official list of them was published, and every name was recognizably Jewish.

At the same time, the regime started making bizarre claims that Russians had been responsible for various advances in civilization. For example: Soviet textbooks began teaching that Russian scientists had invented the radio and the automobile. Those taken in by published accounts of “Solzhenitsyn’s Great-Russian chauvinism” may wish to note his curt dismissal of this “imbecilic and ludicrous glorification of Russian ‘superiority’ in all domains” (p. 434).

Between 1948 and 1953, Jews were kicked out of the higher circles of production, administration, cultural and ideological activities en masse; access to a whole series of higher education establishments was limited or simply refused them. Responsible posts in the KGB, the organs of the Party and of the Army were closed to them. (p. 437)

By the fall of 1952, Stalin was acting against the Jews openly. A show trial of an innocent group of Jewish doctors was inaugurated with great fanfare in January 1953. On February 9th, a bomb exploded outside the Soviet embassy in Tel-Aviv and the Soviet Union broke off relations with Israel.

Then, suddenly, it was all over. Stalin suffered a debilitating stroke at the end of February and died on March 6, 1953.

It has often been asserted that only Stalin’s death at this juncture saved the Jews from mass deportation to Siberia or the Far North the following summer. Solzhenitsyn reports:

In a recent study, the historian G. Kostyrchenko, a great specialist in Stalin’s Jewish policy, refutes this “deportation myth” with very solid arguments, showing that no fact either then or now has come to light confirming it; and that in any case, Stalin did not have the means to put such a deportation into operation. (p. 442)

We simply do not know what further developments there would have been in the anti-Semitic campaign had Stalin lived longer. Following his death, the Jewish doctors, whose trial had been filling the newspapers for weeks, were quietly released. The official anti-Semitic campaign lost steam.

Solzhenitsyn devotes the last five chapters, totaling one hundred twenty pages, to the twenty years which followed Stalin’s death. The principal circumstance of interest during this period is the gradual withering of Jewish support for the government.

At the end of the 1960s [says Solzhenitsyn] one observation which strengthened me in the conviction that the jig was up for the Communist regime was to what an extent the Jews had turned their backs on it. And without them, Bolshevik fanaticism—which was showing its age and ceasing even to be a fanaticism—was seized by a very Russian nonchalance and a peculiarly Brezhnevian inertia. (p. 475)

Solzhenitsyn notes the prominence of Jews among the dissident movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. Four of the seven men who staged an unprecedented (for the USSR) protest on Red Square following the invasion of Czechoslovakia were Jewish. The Jew Semion Gluzman paid with his freedom for his campaign against the political use of psychiatric hospitals (pp. 483–84). Solzhenitsyn writes:

In this wasted country, still subject to repression, the Russian Social Fund to which I turned over all world rights to The Gulag Archipelago [after creating it himself!—FRD], began its aid to the persecuted, and Alexander Ginzburg, competent and devoted, was its first administrator. Among its benefactors have been many Jews and half-Jews (which has given occasion in certain Russian circles, blinded by their extremism, to stigmatize the fund as “Jewish”). (p. 513)

But Jewish abandonment of Communism was too frequently accompanied by the belief that the Communist regime was something uniquely and wholly Russian—in other words, that the Jewish people bore no responsibility for it. Solzhenitsyn cites a number of recent Jewish authors who have characterized the early Soviet regime as nothing more than another chapter in the long history of Jewish persecution. According to a certain Yu. Stern, “Soviet history is marked by a consistent will to break and exterminate the Jews.” V. Boguslavsky tells his readers that “the Soviet regime ruined the Jews, deported them, destroyed families”—all of which was “just a normal disaster for the majority of the Jewish population.” F. Kolker says that “among the numerous nationalities populating the Soviet Union, the Jews have always been considered apart, as the least ‘trustworthy’ element,” to which the author replies in amazement “what sort of amnesia must one have suffered to write such things in 1983?” (pp. 478–79). Even the dissident Jewish songwriter Alexander Galich sings:

Never, Jews, shall you be chamberlains . . .

Never shall you sit in Synod or Senate.

Your seat shall be the Solovetsky Islands,[1] the Butyrka Prison.

“They have forgotten,” marvels the author, “quite sincerely—they have entirely forgotten. How difficult it is to remember the evil one has done!” (p. 490).

These blind assertions of national innocence are matched by a host of vitriolic remarks about Russia: “a country of slaves, a troop of traitors, informants, and hangmen,” according to Arkadi Belinkov (p. 497). N. Shapiro tells us that “in the labyrinthine depths of the Russian soul there invariably hides a pogromist . . . a slave and a tramp as well” (p. 498). The country is “a human pigsty,” according to G. Kopylov (p. 495). “They were crawling on all fours and bowing down to trees and stones, while we gave them the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” said Yakov Yakir, safely arrived in Tel Aviv, of his former fellow-countrymen (p. 498). “[Russian] Orthodoxy is a religion of savages,” according to M. Grobman. According to N. Shulgin, the Jewish involvement in early Communism prevented it from becoming much worse than it actually was (p. 494). Solzhenitsyn comments:

Let us note that none of these malevolent judgments upon the “Russian soul” provokes protest. If someone does not like anything Russian, holds it in contempt, or even says “Russia is a garbage dump,” this is not immoral in Russia. Here, no one addresses Presidents, Prime Ministers, Senators, or Congressmen to ask anxiously “what do you think of this incitation to hate a group of human beings because of their nationality?” (pp. 498–99)

Solzhenitsyn also remarks upon the following confusion in the Jewish attitude toward nationhood:

I have noticed that Jews more often than others insist that no attention must be paid to nationality. “What does it matter, one’s nationality?” they repeat; “national ‘traits,’ national ‘character’—do these even exist?”

But, with my hand on my heart: it is precisely Jews who scrutinize and strain to discern national peculiarities more jealously, more attentively, more secretly than others: those of their own nation. (p. 502)

A new era was ushered in by the Six Day War, which

. . . shook the entire Jewish world as well as Soviet Jews with a violence of biblical proportions. Jewish national consciousness resurged and erupted like an avalanche. After the Six Day War, a lot of things changed. . . . An impulse to action had been given. Letters and petitions flooded into Soviet and international bodies. National life recommenced: on High Holy Days it became difficult to get into synagogues they were so crowded. Clandestine circles were formed to study Hebrew, Jewish history, and Jewish culture. (p. 476)

The ultimate effect of the Israeli victory upon Russian Jews was to inspire the emigration movement of the 1970s.

For many Jews, despite a material situation clearly more favorable than that of the great mass of the population, the feeling of being oppressed was quite real (p. 518). From the end of 1969, Jews by the dozens and by the hundreds began signing petitions addressed to “foreign public opinion.” They demanded that they be allowed to leave for Israel. (p. 523)

They met with widespread sympathy. “To this day,” marvels the author, “it is hard to believe how much publicity they enjoyed” (p. 531). The American Senate refused to ratify most favored nation trading status to the Soviet Union without adding the Jackson Amendment, requiring total freedom of Jewish emigration.

And there was no one to say out loud and clear: Gentlemen! Fifty-five years ago it was not tens of thousands but millions of our compatriots who could only dream of escaping from the hated Soviet regime. No one here was given the right to emigrate. And never once did the politicians, the public men of the West protest or propose to punish the Soviet Union even if only by commercial restrictions! Fifteen million peasants were exterminated during “dekulakization,” six million were driven to famine in 1932, not to speak of mass executions and the millions who ended up in camps. During this time you were glad to sign treaties with the Soviet leaders, grant them loans, shake their hands, seek their favor. And it was only when the Jews in particular had their rights infringed that the entire Western world was seized with a burning compassion and began to understand what this regime was made of. (p. 529)

Large scale Jewish emigration began in 1971, mostly not from the Russian center but from Georgia and the Baltic Republics: 13,000 the first year, 32,000 the second, and 35,000 the third. At first nearly all the Jews went to Israel. By March 1973, 700,000 requests to emigrate had been received.

The Yom Kippur War in the fall of 1973 damaged Israel’s prestige, following which emigration slowed to 20,000 in 1974. By 1975–76, nearly 50 percent of emigrants went to countries other than Israel, principally the United States. After 1977, between 70 and 98 percent went directly to the United States (pp. 532–33).

“Only the first wave was motivated by an ideal,” admits one Jewish author (pp. 534–35).

During the Gorbachev period, by about 1987, all restrictions upon Jewish emigration were lifted.

Henceforth, a radically new epoch in the history of the now free Russian Jews and of their relations with the new Russia has opened. This period has brought rapid and substantial changes, but it is still too short to anticipate the long-term results. . . . The development of this new theme would go beyond the span of life allotted this author. (pp. 567–68)

With these words, the work closes.

* * *

The themes of national repentance and mutual understanding resonate throughout Two Hundred Years Together. Solzhenitsyn emphasizes that they presuppose an effort of historical understanding. This outlook, no doubt, is due to memories of the Communist regime under which he grew up. The Bolsheviks sought to make a clean sweep of the past, and systematically falsified history in the pursuit of a “classless” or conflict free society. Such a mindset can still be found in Russia; many reviewers warned that any study of the Russian-Jewish past would only lead to the revival of old hatreds.

In this context, the reader of Two Hundred Years Together may wish to ponder the following exchange from an interview Solzhenitsyn granted Moskovskiye Novosti (January 1–7, 2003) in connection with publication of the second volume:

Interviewer: The main premise of your wide-ranging work is this: the truth about the Russians’ relationship with the Jews is morally vital. To whom? To history? To both nationalities?”

Solzhenitsyn: Any truth is morally vital to a person. Any truth in principle.

Solzhenitsyn also has some words for the academic critics who have caviled at the sparseness of his archival research. The type of historical understanding our age requires, both in Russia and in America, is at heart an act of the imagination, in which specialized research plays an important but limited role.

Interviewer: You have addressed a subject wherein you yourself often invoke such concepts as “spirit,” “consciousness,” and “historical fate.” Were these nebulous notions not an impediment to your well-researched work, based on solid facts?

Solzhenitsyn: Far from being an impediment, they were, to a very large extent, a part of my underlying concept. My book aims to go deep into Jewish thoughts, feelings, ideas, and mentality—that is to say, the realm of the spiritual. In this sense the objective of my book is not, in fact, scientific, but artistic. It is basically an artistic work. Except that there are not two or three characters, but a great many characters, with various, most diverse feelings and ideas. Facts alone are not enough to understand them. . . . I went to them and felt an affinity with them, as one does with characters in a work of fiction. . . . Generally speaking, I regard the spirit and consciousness as the most substantial elements of history.

Editor’s Note: This review-essay on volume 2 of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together: Jews and Russians during the Soviet Period will appear online in four parts. Read part 1 here and part 2 here. The author’s review of volume 1, Jews and Russians before the Revolution, is available here in PDF format.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008

In the first years of the new regime there existed a “Jewish Section” within the Party, “more fanatical than the Soviet authorities themselves, and sometimes ahead of them in their projects.” But there seemed to be contradictory tendencies to the Jewish Sections’ activity:

On the one hand, an intense activity of communist propaganda in Yiddish, a pitiless war against Judaism, traditional Jewish education, independent Jewish organizations, political parties and movements, Zionism and Hebrew [“a reactionary and counter-revolutionary language”]. On the other hand, a refusal of assimilation, support for the Yiddish language and culture, the organization of a Soviet Jewish system of education, Jewish scientific research, and action to improve the economic condition of Soviet Jews. (p. 271)

Many members of the Jewish Section were former Bund members. One Jewish author remarks approvingly that “under the proletarian sauce, [the action of the Jewish section] carried the clear mark of Jewish national identity” (p. 272). For a time, important works on pre-Revolutionary Jewish history were supported by the Jewish Section; Solzhenitsyn makes use of some of this material himself in his first volume. There was also a very active Yiddish Theater scene, which lasted into the 1930s, and heavy Jewish involvement in early Soviet Cinema that went far beyond the well-known works of Eisenstein.

The Jewish Section took a special interest in combating its ideological rival, Zionism. They lobbied the regime to take a hard line with an ideology so incompatible with Marxist internationalism, but for several years the upper echelons of the Party showed unwonted leniency in the matter. Zionists maintained a Central Bureau in Moscow until 1924. One Zionist party, Poalei-Zion, was officially permitted to exist until 1928. Harsh punishments for Zionist activity were relatively rare, in part because the Zionists had so many friends abroad.

The Jewish religion was not (as is sometimes asserted) spared persecution during these years, but the regime’s policies were certainly milder and less consistent here than in regard to Orthodox Christianity. The fanatics of the Jewish Section called upon the Party to adopt a policy of “equal persecution” for Judaism, but this took a long time to happen. Synagogues are said to have been more numerous at the end of the 20s than in 1917: two new Synagogues were constructed in Moscow. Prayer books and religious calendars continued to be published. The authorities occasionally even permitted unleavened bread to be imported for Passover celebrations.

The central Synagogues of Vitebsk, Minsk, Gomel, Karkhov, Bobruisk, and Kiev, however, were all closed. Others were plundered: although Synagogues typically contained fewer valuables than Christian Churches, menorahs were frequently made of silver. In 1921, the Jewish Section of Kiev organized a bizarre “public trial of Judaism,” culminating in a “death sentence” handed down by Jewish Communists. This “trial” was later repeated in other towns. Heders and yeshivot were ordered closed, but continued to operate clandestinely for many years. The Jewish Sections arranged things so that Jews’ days off work never fell on the Sabbath. On the high holy days, they sometimes entered Synagogues to disrupt services.

Solzhenitsyn concludes: “in those years, we all wanted to chase out God” (p. 287). He says surprisingly little about the brutal campaign against the Orthodox Church or any Jewish role in it.

In 1926, the Party downgraded the Jewish Section to a Jewish Bureau. In 1930, it was altogether abolished. (Other national “Sections” were suffering the same fate around the same time.)

Despite their unfortunate history as agriculturalists, many Jews obtained high positions in the Commissariat of Agriculture. There are bizarre stories of peasants being ordered by these authorities to shear their sheep at the onset of the Russian Winter or receiving roasted Sunflower seeds for planting (p. 243). Eventually, Commissars with Jewish names such as Schlichter, Epstein, and Kritzman were to preside over collectivization, destroying the independence of the peasants who constituted 80 percent of the Russian population (pp. 292–93).

In summarizing the situation of Jews in the Soviet Union of the 20s, Solzhenitsyn writes:

A myth is in course of formation: “the Jews were always second class citizens under the Soviet regime.” And rare indeed are those who are willing to admit not only the participation of Jews in the deeds perpetrated by the barbaric young State, but also the virulence which certain of them demonstrated.

In the 1990s, a Jewish author [G. Shurmak] declared: “For decades, Jews were proud of their compatriots who made a brilliant career out of the revolution, without much reflecting upon what that career cost the Russian people in real suffering. . . . It is striking with what unanimity my compatriots deny any responsibility in the Russian history of the twentieth century.”

Words like these could be salvation for our two peoples if they were not so hopelessly rare. Because it is the truth: in the course of the twenties, numerous were the Jews who rushed to serve the Bolshevik Moloch, without thinking of the unhappy country which would provide the field for their experiments any more than of the consequences which would result for themselves. (pp. 298–99)

By the end of the 1920s, the New Economic Policy had served its purpose. Stalin, now an unrivalled dictator, inaugurated a policy of collectivization and industrialization. This required an influx of technical expertise from abroad, most especially from the United States. Ignoring Marx’s inconvenient teaching that capitalism was always the deadly enemy of socialism, the Soviet Union traded enthusiastically with the West, most often getting equipment and technical expertise in exchange for raw materials.

Before the Revolution, American financiers had refused, at considerable cost to themselves, to have dealings with the “barbaric” Russia of pogroms and Jewish Settlement Laws. But the Soviet campaign against Zionism and Judaism met with little indignation in the West. The general impression was that the Soviet regime was not oppressing the Jews—and was maintaining them in positions of power. The regime did what it could to reinforce this impression. In 1931 Stalin issued for the foreign press a special statement condemning anti-Semitism. And in 1936, Molotov delivered the following tirade (as Solzhenitsyn calls it) to the XVIIIth Party Congress:

Our fraternal sentiments with regard to the Jewish people come from their having given birth to the genius who conceived the communist liberation of humanity [Marx], from their having given the world eminent men in the domain of science, technology, the arts, and valiant heroes of the revolutionary struggle and, in our country, they have produced and still produce new directors and remarkable organizers whose talents are exercised in every branch of the edification and defense of the cause of socialism. (p. 304)

These words may have been intended to mark off the Soviet regime from Hitlerism in the eyes of the West, says Solzhenitsyn, but they also correspond to reality.

Today, the author asserts, it is often stated in Russia that the Jews were chased out of key positions in the 30s and had no further part in the direction of the country. Solzhenitsyn, however, denies that any significant decline in Jewish power occurred before the Great Purge of 1937–38, and provides statistics to back up the claim: e.g., the participation of Jews in the Party’s Central Committee held steady at one-sixth from 1930 to 1934. In the Commissariats of Commerce and Provisioning, Jewish participation hovered between one-third and one-half. A contemporary historian, L. Krichevsky, has written that “the first half of the 30s is marked by an increase in the role of Jews within the security organs [the secret police]. On the eve of the most massive repressions [1937–38], 407 high-level Chekists received decorations: among them, 56 (13.8 percent) were Jews” (p. 314).

The author famously included pictures of six Jewish Chekists of the 30s as an illustration in The Gulag Archipelago. This is what first gave rise to the legend of “Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Semitism.” In the present book he tells us the story behind these pictures: he did not collect and assemble them himself, but copied the set of six directly from a self-glorifying album the security organs themselves published in 1936! (pp. 317, 363).

We must not leave out the story of Isaï Davidovich Berg, inventor of the gas chamber on wheels. Frustrated at the inability of the execution squad to keep up with the numbers of “counter-revolutionaries” his men kept bringing them, this dedicated Chekist developed a vehicle which could deliver victims ready for burial. It was disguised as a bread-van. In spite of his inventiveness, Berg himself was shot in 1939.

The author reviews more than one attempt to portray the Jewish Communists of the 1930s as victims. Solomon Schwartz asserts that “under Soviet conditions, [the Jews] had no chance to survive except State service,” to which Solzhenitsyn responds:

One is ashamed to read this. What sort of situation of oppression and despair is it which leaves you no other chance of survival than to occupy positions of privilege? What about the rest of the population? They enjoyed full liberty to wear themselves out on collective farms and in prison camps, digging ditches with pickaxes, carrying loads on the sites of the five-year plans . . . (p. 335)

Jews, being so prominent in the Party, were numerous among those killed in the Great Purge of 1937–38. Before it, they had been at the head of 50 percent of the principal services for internal affairs; by January 1, 1939 they occupied only 6 percent of these positions (p. 320). It is remarkable that no one seems to assert a specifically anti-Semitic motive behind the purge, although Stalin certainly had no fondness for Jews.

The Israeli writer Yu. Margolin is another who tries to engage our sympathy for the Jewish Communists, “victims of the Soviet dictatorship, used and then liquidated without pity when they were no longer useful.” Solzhenitsyn is not buying it:

A lovely explanation! But were these persons really used for twenty years? Did they not pour all their zeal into being the engine of that same dictatorship, and before being “no longer useful,” did they not take a vigorous part in the destruction of religion and culture, in the annihilation of the intelligentsia and several million peasants? (p. 323)

For the same reasons, he has little pity for purged Jewish Chekists: “one cannot agree—it would not be decent, not honest—to include among the persecutions of the Jews the fact that they were chased out of the organs of repression” (p. 322).

The years following the Great Purge saw the continued decline in Jewish Party membership, as well as the closing of many of the remaining synagogues. In 1939, the numerus clausus system was reintroduced for Jews in Soviet Universities. Nevertheless, “up to the war, the great majority of Soviet Jews remained sympathetic to Soviet ideology and in agreement with the regime” (p. 348). And the sympathy of European Jews for the Soviet Union experienced a new upsurge in these years, courtesy of Hitler. During the period of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, following the German invasion of Western Poland, some two million Jews fled east into the Soviet Union.

At this point in his narrative, the author includes a chapter on the Jews’ situation within the Gulag, the “archipelago” of prison camps scattered across Soviet Russia. He begins:

If I had never spent time there myself, I would not have been able to write this chapter. Before camp, I thought like everyone else: one must not notice nationality; there are no nations, just humanity. But they send you to camp and you learn that if you belong to a good nation you are lucky, you can rest easy, you will survive. But if your nation is that of everyone—there is no use blaming anybody for the consequences. (p. 357)

In the Soviet camps, the Russians were the “nation of everyone.” More compact or tribally-minded peoples managed to look out for one another in the harsh conditions of camp life, and so stood a better chance of survival.

Readers of The Gulag Archipelago will recall the “trusties,” prisoners who collaborated with their keepers in return for favors which to outsiders may seem ridiculously small, but which often meant the difference between life and death. (The young Solzhenitsyn, still a believer in Communism, actually served as a trusty in the early part of his time in the camps—a story he relates at length in The Gulag Archipelago.)

Trusties were often chosen on the basis of nationality:

Any old prisoner who has had the full experience of camp life will confirm that certain nationalities were much better represented among the trusties than among the general prison population. Thus, you found almost no Balts, although they were quite numerous among the prisoners. There were always Russians, of course, but in a small proportion compared to their numbers in the camp (and they had often been recruited among the bien-pensants of the Party). On the other hand, there were many Jews, Armenians, Georgians; also a lot of Azerbaijanis and Caucasian mountain people. (p. 357)

On this subject Solzhenitsyn writes something which has evoked more outrage among Russian Jews than anything else in his thousand-page work:

If I had wanted to generalize by saying that the Jews in the camps had a particularly harsh life, no one would have stopped me, and I would not have been covered with reproaches for having generalized unjustly. But in the camps I knew it was different: insofar as one can generalize, the Jews lived there with less hardship than others. (pp. 358–59)

He relates the story of a Latvian with the convenient name Bernstein, one of his informants in writing The Gulag Archipelago, who believes he only survived the camp because in the most difficult times he could turn to the Jews for help (p. 360).

Once again, Solzhenitsyn digs up an example of a Jewish author writing of the Jewish collaborators with sympathy rather than shame: a certain unfortunate named Belinkov “got cast out among the most despised category, the ‘trusties.’” The author comments: “one must have lost all sense of humor to write [such a thing]. Cast out among the trusties—what an expression! ‘Lowered to the masters?’” (p. 359).

Solzhenitsyn also tells us about the Jews Vladimir Efroimson and Yakov Davidovich Grodzensky who refused to become trusties when they could have. Efroimson wished to dissipate the animosity toward Jews in the camp resulting from so many being trusties. The Jewish trusties mocked him and resented him for making them look bad. The rest explained his behavior by saying that he was not a “real” Jew, or was a “degenerate” Jew. Solzhenitsyn comments:

Animated by the highest motives, Efroimson and Grodzensky did the noblest and most just thing any Jews could do—loyally share the common fate . . . and they were not understood by either side! For it is always this way in History: the paths of self-limitation, renunciation of oneself, are arduous—they lend themselves to sarcasm—but they are the only paths which can save humanity.

As for me, I shall never forget these examples, and shall put my hope in them. (p. 365)

Editor’s Note: This review-essay on volume 2 of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together: Jews and Russians during the Soviet Period will appear online in four parts. Read the first part here. The author’s review of volume 1, Jews and Russians before the Revolution, is available here in PDF format.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008

One of the best promoted legends about the Russian Revolution concerns “the pogroms carried out by the White Armies” during the Civil War. Solzhenitsyn devotes several pages to examining this widely received notion.

In the first place, it is important to understand that Reds and Whites were not the only forces fighting in Southern Russia at this time. There was a powerful Ukrainian separatist movement under the leadership of Symon Petliura. There were also a number of private armed bands responsible to no one but themselves. These were led by local bosses (Solzhenitsyn names ten), and operated mainly in rural areas. Some described themselves as “Blacks” or “Greens,” and opposed both the White and Red Armies. The entire scene was extremely chaotic, and it can be a difficult chore for the historian to figure out exactly who was where when.

The pogroms which occurred across the whole of Southern Russia during this period were “unprecedented in their cruelty and numbers of victims” (p. 134)—out of all proportion to anything which had been seen in 1881–82, 1903, or 1905–06. Early Soviet sources speak of 180,000–200,000 victims and more than 300,000 orphaned children. The more recent Jewish Encyclopedia records that “according to various estimates between 70,000 and 180,000–200,000 perished” (p. 172). Who was responsible for these atrocities?

Collating various Jewish sources, a contemporary historian estimates the number of mass pogroms at 900, among which 40 percent were carried out by the forces of Petliura and the [Ukrainian National] Directory, 25 percent by [irregular] detachments commanded by Ukrainian bosses, 17 percent by Denikin’s [White] Armies, and 8.5 percent by Budienny’s First Cavalry and other Red forces. (pp. 172–73)

In other words, the great majority of pogroms of this period were not connected with the White movement at all. Those carried out by Ukrainian separatist forces were not only the most numerous but also distinguished for their deliberate cruelty and the methodical extermination of women, children, and the elderly. Sometimes they were not even accompanied by pillaging (p. 160).

And, in spite of Lenin’s declared intentions, the Red forces did not remain innocent:

In the Spring of 1918 [before the other forces had gotten started!—FRD], pogroms accompanied by the slogan “down with the Jews and the bourgeois!” were fomented by Red Army detachments returning from Ukraine. Particularly cruel were the pogroms perpetrated by the First Cavalry at the end of August 1920 during their retreat from Poland. But these pogroms fomented by the Red Army have remained nearly hidden from history. (p. 173)

So what about that 17 percent of pogroms due to the White Army?

Solzhenitsyn devotes eleven pages to the story of the Jews and the White movement. This material is difficult to summarize. The author quotes divergent and even contradictory testimonies without always taking sides. At one moment the subject is the “Volunteer Army,” a little farther along it the “White Army.” The reader is never told that the former was a part of the latter, nor what the other parts were.

A recent scholarly study affirms that “in its first year of existence [1918], the White movement was practically free of any anti-Semitism. . . . But in 1919 [the decisive year of the war] things changed radically” (p. 163). The White Army was hypnotized by Trotsky and Nakhamkis [editor of Izvestia], which led it to identify Bolshevism as a whole with the Jews. The divisions fighting in Ukraine were probably also influenced by the local tradition of anti-Semitism (p. 164).

The Jewish doctor Daniel Pasmanik, who served the Whites for a time, recalled:

The Volunteer Army systematically refused to accept into its ranks Jewish ensigns and cadets, including those who had valiantly fought the Bolsheviks in October 1917. This was a severe moral blow to the Jews. I will never forget when eleven Jewish ensigns came to see me in Simferopol to complain that they had been excluded from the armed service and relegated to the rear as cooks. (p. 168)

D. Linski reports that Jews were not allowed to occupy administrative functions, nor accepted in the propaganda department of the Volunteer Army. But he denies that the Army published anti-Semitic propaganda or let attacks against Jews go unpunished (p. 169).

The Volunteer Army was, both militarily and morally, the soundest part of the White forces in Southern Russia. But they were insufficient to stand up to the Red Army by themselves. A number of Cossack divisions were enrolled to fight in the Ukraine, to the West of the Volunteers. These men were motivated by the desire for plunder as much as by opposition to bolshevism. It was in their area that most (perhaps all) of the “White pogroms” occurred.[1]

General Denikin, overall leader of the White forces in Southern Russia, expressed shame over the pogroms committed by men nominally under his command, and no historian seems to suspect him of having ordered them (although some argue that he might have done more to stop them).

It is frequently asserted that the conduct of the White Army virtually forced the Jews of Southern Russia to side with the Bolsheviks. Solzhenitsyn remarks: “We cannot say that nothing drove them to make this choice; we also cannot say there was no other solution” (p. 149). In any case, it is difficult to see how the Whites could have forced anyone to take an active role in the Cheka.

Strengthening the public perception of Bolshevism as a Jewish movement were the brief Communist takeovers of Bavaria and Hungary in 1919. The proportion of Jews in the Bolshevik movement in Hungary was said to be about 95 percent; in the German Communist Party it was also greatly out of proportion. “That the directors of the communist revolts were Jews—this was one of the main reasons for the revival of political anti-Semitism in post-revolutionary Germany” (p. 153). In the 1920s, “the assimilation of Bolshevism to Judaism became a fashion followed by everyone,” i.e., it was not peculiar to traditionally anti-Semitic milieus (p. 188).

About two million persons fled Bolshevik Russia during the years 1918–22, with most settling in Western Europe. As Russia fell eerily silent—apart from the monotonous drone of the regime itself—all aspects of the revolution continued to be enthusiastically debated among the exiles, both Jewish and Gentile. Jews numbered some 200,000 among the refugees (i.e., 10 percent), and about half of them went to Germany. They were particularly active in the field of publishing: “In 1922, these publishers brought out more Russian books and publications [in Berlin] than German language editors did in all of Germany” (pp. 182–83). A surprising number of the Jewish exiles continued to cherish an idealized image of Soviet Russia as a promised land of equality and social justice. Among the Jewish refugees who settled in the United States, notes the Jewish Encyclopedia, “pro-Bolshevik ideas had no difficulty proliferating” (p. 196). “One cannot say that the Jewish emigration [as a whole] was pro-Bolshevik,” concludes Solzhenitsyn, “but for it the Bolshevik regime was not the principal enemy, and many were those who maintained a benevolent attitude towards it” (p. 196).

I. M. Biekerman relates a characteristic anecdote:

When a well-known Jewish public figure proposed to a Jewish religious dignitary, in one of the European capitals, to organize a meeting to protest the execution of Orthodox priests in Russia, the latter, upon reflection, answered that this amounted to combating the Bolsheviks, which he considered it impossible to do since the fall of Bolshevism would lead to the return of pogroms. (p. 198)

This Biekerman, along with Pasmanik and Linski, helped to found an extraordinary group called “The Patriotic Alliance of Russian Jews.” In 1923 they issued a manifesto stating that “for the Jews as for all the nations which inhabit Russia, Bolshevism is the worst of all possible evils” (p. 200).

Jews must fight those who are perverting Russia, shoulder-to-shoulder with all anti-Bolsheviks. A fraternal combat against a common enemy will clear the air and considerably weaken the wave of anti-Semitism which has been unleashed. (p. 203)

Later that year this group had published in Berlin a six-author volume entitled Russia and the Jews. Says Solzhenitsyn:

In the entire history of relations between Jews and Russians, I know of nothing comparable to this collection. For the Jews in the emigration, it had the effect of a bomb. Just imagine how painful it was to hear these words from Jewish mouths, from within the Jewish world.

As for us Russians, we should not take this collection lightly. On the contrary, it should serve as an example for us: of how, even while loving one’s own people, one may speak of one’s own errors and, where necessary, do so without indulgence. And without placing oneself apart, without dissociating oneself from one’s people. (p. 204)

Solzhenitsyn makes extensive use of this group of writers as sources throughout the first half of his second volume. Admirable as they may have been, they were isolated voices within the Jewish emigration. The author fills a page and a half with the dismissive or vituperative comments they elicited from other Jews (pp. 209–10).

The decade of the 1920s also witnessed a mass migration of Jews from the former Pale toward the cities of Central Russia: ordinary Russians spoke (or perhaps whispered) of a Jewish “conquest” of the cities. For example, in 1920 there were 28,000 Jews in Moscow; in 1923 there were 86,000; in 1926, 131,000; in 1933, 226,500. City residence allowed them better access to consumer goods and to professional advancement (pp. 218, 224).

Jewish representation in the Communist Party was about proportional to their share of the urban population. But with 83 percent of Jews living in towns, they were one of the most urbanized nationalities in the Soviet Union. So overall they were overrepresented in Party ranks by a factor of about 6.5 (p. 219).

The four largest nationalities represented in the Party in 1922 were Russians (72 percent), Ukrainians (5.9 percent), Jews (5.2 percent), and Latvians (2.5 percent). This means that for one thousand Russians there were 3.8 Communists, while for one thousand Jews there were 8.1. The disproportion was greater at higher levels in the Party. Jews made up 18.3 percent of the voting delegates at the XIth Party Congress that year, and 26 percent of the new Central Committee elected by this Congress (pp. 225–26).

During these years, the role of national minorities in the secret police declined overall: from 50 percent at the time of the Red Terror to 30–35 percent by the mid-1920s. Even so, the number of Jews continued to increase (pp. 227–28).

New class origin criteria for admission to universities were established. The sons of even “petty bourgeois” Russians—shopkeepers and such—were barred from advancement. On the other hand

. . . these discriminatory measures were not extended to Jews because they belonged to a “nation persecuted by the tsarist regime.” The Jewish youth, even of bourgeois origin, were greeted with open arms in the universities. Jews were forgiven for not being proletarian. (p. 221)

Thus, 15.4 percent of students enrolled in institutions of higher learning in 1926–27 were Jewish, while Jews constituted just 1.82 percent of the population. The situation was even more lopsided than these numbers reveal, because the Russians who did get admitted were “proletarians,” i.e., not the cognitive elite of the Russian nation.

Such circumstances were both noticed and resented by the rest of the population. The “new anti-Semitism” was not a continuation of the pre-Revolutionary variety, but affected demographic groups that had been entirely free of anti-Semitism in earlier days. The matter went undiscussed in the official Soviet press for several years.

Exposés first appeared in Paris by 1922. The revelations of socialists Yekaterina Kuskova and Sergei Maslov profoundly shocked the exiled intelligentsia, for whom it had always been an article of faith that anti-Semitism was caused by “autocracy.”

Even among the children of radical families, wrote Kuskova, all the talk is of the Jewish invasion: “they have shown their true face, they have made us suffer!” She maintained that an actual majority of the population had become anti-Semitic, and the younger generation more than their elders.

Maslov stated that “the power of the Yids” was a common expression. “Among the reasons for this universal Judeophobia,” he explained, “is the Jews’ strong national solidarity” which “appears especially in the recruitment of administrative agents.” In a Jewish functionary: “Soviet power reveals its bad side most ostentatiously. The intoxication of power acts more strongly on Jews” (pp. 241–44).

The New Economic Policy (NEP), launched by Lenin in the spring of 1921, was a tactical retreat on the economic front which allowed limited private enterprise while the Communists strengthened their political grip on the country. This reversal of policy created, as an unintended effect, new occasions for Judeophobia. Solzhenitsyn remarks:

One often saw Jews among those who first enriched themselves under NEP. The hatred directed against them was also due to their operating within the field of Soviet institutions, not only those of the market: many of their undertakings were made easier by the relations they enjoyed with those in the Soviet apparatus. (p. 255)

Beginning around 1926, the regime openly admitted the existence of the “new anti-Semitism” and sought to combat it. A leader in this counter-attack was Yuri Larin, previously best known as the man behind “War Communism,” the policies which wrecked the Russian economy between 1918 and 1921. In 1929, he published a book on The Jews and Anti-Semitism in the USSR. He reports hearing questions such as these in communist meetings: “Why don’t you see Jews in waiting lines? Why are the Jews rich? Why do they have their own bakeries? Why do the Jews seek out easy work? Why do they avoid physical work? Why do the Jews help each other out, while Russians do not?” (p. 246). A current saying in Moscow ran: “Siberia for the Russians, Crimea for the Jews” (p. 245).

With typical Bolshevik paranoia, Larin thought he could glimpse behind these suggestions “the hand of a clandestine counter-revolutionary organization . . . systematic propaganda orchestrated by secret organizations emanating from the White Army” (which, of course, had been driven out of Russia nine years before [pp. 246, 251]). Larin recommended applying “Lenin’s Law,” meaning a decree of 1918 authorizing the shooting of anti-Semites without trial.

In fact, the Soviet Penal Code of 1926 contained provisions against “incitement to national hatred and divisiveness” [have the EU bureaucrats been studying Soviet law?], expanded in 1927 to include “diffusion, authorship or possession of written documents” (p. 252, italics added). Solzhenitsyn remarks: “The most rabid anti-Semite could not have discovered a better means of getting the people to identify Soviet power with that of the Jews” (p. 253).

There were also, of course, plenty of ordinary Jews who had been left behind and forgotten by the revolution: older people attached to the old places and ways, or families with numerous children. They sank into utter destitution, completely dependent on charity from abroad (which was still operating in the 1920s). G. Simon, an older émigré who returned as an American businessman in the late 1920s, published a book about these forgotten Jews under the sarcastic title The Jews Reign in Russia: “The only refuge for Jews,” he wrote, “is the graveyard” (pp. 253–54, 257).

The idea of making farmers out of the Jews was once again in fashion during the 1920s. It did not originate with the Jews themselves but was based upon ideological considerations. Ignoring the decades-long efforts of the previous century, the Party claimed that Jews had been prevented from taking up agriculture, and so forced to become “exploiters.” Extensive lands were set aside for them in the Crimea, and money poured in from abroad. The regime sought by this means to steal the Zionists’ thunder and tie the fate of the Jews even more firmly to that of Soviet rule. These Crimean lands were taken back just a few years later at the time of collectivization (pp. 262–68).

A more serious effort concerned the establishment of the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidjan on the Chinese border in Eastern Siberia. This territory was once described by Khrushchev as a fertile land with a southern climate, well-watered and sunny, with immense forests and rivers brimming with fish. A more objective source calls it a “partly marshy stretch of taiga.” Great efforts were made in the 20s and 30s to encourage Jews to settle there, but the majority either returned home or moved on to larger cities such as Vladivostok (pp. 268–70). This Jewish Autonomous Region still nominally exists, with a Jewish population of just over 1 percent.

Deux siècles ensemble
Volume 2: Juifs et Russes pendant la periode soviétique
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Paris: Fayard, 2003

Editor’s Note: This review-essay on volume 2 of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together: Jews and Russians during the Soviet Period will appear online in four parts. The author’s review of volume 1, Jews and Russians before the Revolution, is available here in PDF format.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008

Early in this second volume of Two Hundred Years Together, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explains why the book is a necessary supplement to his principal work on the Revolution, the novel cycle entitled The Red Wheel:

I described the revolution literally hour by hour, and never ceased encountering episodes and discussion of the Jewish theme in the sources. Would I have been right to put all of it into the pages of March 1917? It would not have been the first time in history that a book and its readers succumbed to the facile and crude temptation to throw all the blame on the Jews, their actions, their ideas, to allow oneself to see in them the principal cause of events and thereby avoid the search for the real causes.

To avoid letting the Russians fall for this optical illusion, I systematically muted the Jewish theme throughout the entire Red Wheel, at least in comparison with the way it resonated in the press and hung in the air at the time. (pp. 45–46)

Solzhenitsyn is emphatic that “the February Revolution was not made by the Jews for the Russians; it was certainly carried out by the Russians themselves. . . . We were ourselves the authors of this shipwreck” (pp. 44–45).

Even if not the instigators of the Revolution, the Jews were the subject of its first cascade of “liberating” decrees. The Pale of Settlement, practically nonexistent since the great Russian retreat of 1915, was formally abolished; numerus clausus regulations were dropped; restrictions on the Jewish practice of law and on entry into the officers corps were lifted, etc. Measures were taken against public expressions of anti-Semitism amid widespread false rumors of pogroms in the provinces. All this occurred amid a mood of euphoria soon to dissipate.

The fundamental political fact of the eight-month period between the February Revolution and the Bolshevik coup d’état of October was the uneasy coexistence of two political authorities. A Provisional Government was formed by a group of former Duma deputies and won widespread recognition, if no deep loyalty. At the same time, the “workers’ councils” (or soviets) of the Revolution of 1905 were revived by a small group of socialist intellectuals. They proclaimed themselves the “Executive Committee of the Council of Workers’ Deputies” before any actual council was formed. And their so-called Executive Committee remained a more important body than the council it called into being and in whose name it spoke: plenary sessions of the two- to three-thousand member “Petrograd Soviet” were mostly a forum for empty speechifying.

There were no constitutional rules to define the respective spheres of authority of the Provisional Government and the Soviet’s Executive Committee. What actually happened was that the Executive Committee assumed a “supervisory” role in relation to the Provisional Government, thwarting its purposes at will but refusing to take upon itself the responsibilities of governing. In Solzhenitsyn’s words: “The EC was a shadow government of the worst sort: it deprived the Provisional Government of all real power while criminally avoiding the direct and open assumption of power itself” (p. 46). The result was paralysis at the center and the perfect conditions for an eventual takeover by a determined and ruthless minority.

For several weeks the membership of the Executive Committee was not even divulged:

. . . several of the members hide behind pseudonyms and for two months refused to appear in public: no one knew exactly who was governing Russia. Later it came out that there were ten stupid soldiers in the EC for show, kept at arm’s length. Among the rest—the thirty active members—more than half were Jewish socialists. There were Russians, Caucasians, Latvians, and Poles, but the Russians amounted to less than a quarter of the whole. A moderate socialist, Stankevitch, noted that “the most striking thing about the composition of the EC was the number of foreign elements . . . out of all proportion with their numbers in Petrograd or in the country.” (p. 47)

These men were chosen to represent neither their own nationalities nor the people of Russia, but the various socialist parties: Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, and so forth. After June, the EC was replaced by a smaller Central Executive Committee of nine persons: five were Jewish, only one Russian (p. 67).

In view of subsequent events, it has largely been forgotten that most politically active Jews in Russia that year were not involved with these socialist parties at all:

In the course of the summer and autumn of 1917, the Zionist movement continued to gather strength in Russia: in September it had 300,000 adherents. Less known is that Orthodox Jewish organizations enjoyed great popularity in 1917, yielding only to the Zionists and surpassing the socialist parties. (p. 54)

Furthermore, most Jews who did belong to socialist parties were not Bolsheviks: “during the year 1917 Jews were proportionally much more numerous in leading positions among the Mensheviks, right Socialist Revolutionaries, left Socialist Revolutionaries and anarchists than among the Bolsheviks” (p. 65). Shortly before the Bolshevik Putsch, however, the Jewish socialists “Natanson, Kamkov, and Steinberg formed an alliance with Trotsky and Kamenev in the name of the left Socialist Revolutionaries” (p. 81). This brief alliance was useful to Lenin in creating the false appearance that the new “Soviet” government was more than a front for the Bolshevik Party.

Solzhenitsyn writes: “It must be stated clearly that the October Putsch was not led by the Jews (except for the glorious Trotsky and the young and dynamic Grigori Chudnovsky)” (p. 80). He remarks that there were also some Jews in the Winter Palace defending the Provisional Government from the Bolsheviks, and recalls meeting one of them in a Soviet prison himself.

The new government’s first challenge was a mass strike of service personnel in support of the deposed Provisional Government. Ministry buildings barred their doors against the new “Soviet Commissars”; Trotsky got laughed out of the Defense Ministry. Most importantly, banks refused Bolshevik demands for funds. In 1919, Lenin specifically credited his Jewish followers for keeping him in power at this point: “immediately after October, it was the Jews who saved the revolution by breaking the resistance of the civil servants” (p. 105).

Lenin’s team claimed at first to be a mere caretaker government pending the convocation of a Constituent Assembly. Elections for such an assembly had been scheduled by the Provisional Government for November 12th, and the Bolsheviks reluctantly allowed them to go ahead in the hope of dominating the resulting body. But their rivals the Socialist Revolutionary Party won a large majority. Most Jewish voters supported Zionist parties. The Constituent Assembly was forcibly dispersed the night after it convened, January 6, 1918, and all Bolshevik pretenses to democratic legitimacy were scrapped.

During these critical first months, Lenin had no reliable Russian troops; his only armed force was a Latvian rifle brigade which he assigned to the Jewish commissar Nachimson.

The author discusses some of the arguments used by Jewish apologists to excuse or palliate Jewish involvement in Bolshevik rule. He accepts the common argument that the Jewish Bolsheviks were renegades, i.e., “not Jews in spirit.” He points out, however, that the same was true of Russian Bolsheviks and denies that any nation may simply disown its renegades: “for if we release ourselves from all responsibility for the actions of our national kin, the very concept of a nation loses any real meaning” (p. 132).

There are many Jewish authors who to this very day either deny the support of Jews for Bolshevism, or even reject it angrily, or else—the most common case—only speak defensively about it. The matter is well-attested, however: these Jewish renegades were for several years leaders at the center of the Bolshevik Party, at the head of the Red Army (Trotsky), of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (Sverdlov), of the two capitals (Zinoviev and Kamenev), of the Comintern (Zinoviev), of the Profintern (Dridzo-Lozovsky), and of the Komsomol (Oskar Ryvkin, then Lazar Shatskin). (p. 91)

Marxists are officially “internationalists,” of course, and Trotsky was especially emphatic in rejecting his ethnic heritage. But does it necessarily follow that he was not influenced by it? “To judge by the appointments he made,” Solzhenitsyn observes, “Jewish renegades were closer to him than Russian renegades” (p. 92). Particularly striking was his appointment of the incompetent Jewish doctor Sklianski to a high post in the Commissariat of War.

The author goes on to discuss the roles of the Jews Uritsky, Drabkin, and Sverdlov in dispersing the Constituent Assembly, concluding with one of his strongest formulations: “by these sorts of operations the new Jewish form of government was sketched out” (p. 93).

He reproduces the remarks of some contemporary observers:

I. F. Nazhivin records the impressions he received at the very beginning of Soviet power: at the Kremlin in the administration of the Sovnarkom “you see nothing but Latvians upon Latvians, Jews upon Jews. I have never been an anti-Semite, but here there were so many it leapt out at you, and each one younger than the next.”

[The writer Vladimir] Korolenko himself, liberal and hypertolerant as he was, entered into his Journal in the Spring of 1919: “Among the Bolsheviks there are a great number of Jewish men and women. Their tactlessness, their self-assurance are striking and irritating. . . . In their ranks, and above all in the Cheka [the secret police], you constantly see Jewish physiognomies, and this exacerbates the still virulent traditional feelings of Judeophobia [among the population].” (p. 99)

Another witness quoted by Solzhenitsyn specifies that most of the heads of prisons were Poles and Latvians, while “the section charged with combating black marketers—the least dangerous and most lucrative—was in the hands of Jews” (p. 94). Jews are also said to have been unusually noticeable in the organs charged with provisioning (p. 97). Solzhenitsyn lists the names of ten Jewish bankers who provided important financial services for the Bolsheviks (p. 115).

Some Jews were also implicated in the murder of the Imperial family, notably Sverdlov (who transmitted the order from Moscow) and Urovsky (who led the execution squad), but Solzhenitsyn believes the point has been exaggerated in recent years by certain Russian nationalists “who take a morbid pleasure in this agonizing thought” (p. 100). Most of the executioners were Hungarian prisoners of war; final responsibility for the crime rested, of course, with Lenin.

The Bolshevik Putsch led to a split in Jewish parties such as the Bund and the Zionist-Socialists. Those who would not support Lenin either emigrated or were suppressed. But the left wings of two Zionist-Socialist groupings joined the Communist Party en masse in 1919 and 1921. And the left wing of the Bund simply dissolved, with many of its members joining the Communists. According to an internal Party survey of 1926, 2,500 Bundists had become Party members. Many Mensheviks, Jewish and otherwise, did likewise. Most of these persons would face persecution under Stalin (pp. 118–19).

There were Jews who resisted Soviet power. “But,” writes Solzhenitsyn, “they did not have any way of making themselves heard publicly, and the present pages are naturally filled not with their names but with those who guided the course of events” (p. 123). He relates the stories of two Jews who are known to have sacrificed their lives fighting the new regime. Leonid Kannegiesser assassinated Moisei Uritsky, a Jewish Chekist, explaining in a letter to his sister that (among other motives) he was ashamed to see Jews helping to install the Bolsheviks in power. Alexander Abramovich Vilenkin, four-times decorated cavalry officer, was shot in 1918 for belonging to a clandestine anti-Bolshevik Organization.

“These combatants of Bolshevism, whatever may have been their motivation—we honor their memory as Jews. We deplore that there were so few of them, just as the White forces in the Civil War were too few” (p. 125).

In 1918 [writes Solzhenitsyn] Trotsky, with the aid of Sklianski and Yakov Sverdlov, created the Red Army. Jewish soldiers were numerous in its ranks. Several units of the Red Army were composed entirely of Jews, as, e.g., the brigade commanded by Joseph Forman. Among the officers of the Red Army, the share of Jews grew in number and importance for many years after the Civil War. (p. 135)

According to one of the author’s Jewish sources, “the proportion of Jews in the position of Political Adjuncts was especially high at all levels of the Red Army” (p. 136).

Of special interest to students of Communism is the Cheka, the secret political police who carried out the Red Terror and eventually built the Gulag. In their early phase, national minorities composed almost 50 percent of the central apparatus of the Cheka, and nearly 70 percent of the responsible posts. An inventory on 25 September 1918 reveals, besides a great number of Latvians and a not insignificant number of Poles, a good showing by Jews. And of the judges assigned to the struggle against counter-revolution—by far the most important section in the structure of the Cheka—half were Jews (pp. 142–43).

The Ukrainian Cheka, in what used to be the Pale of Settlement, was composed about 80 percent of Jews (p. 150). In Kiev, which was 21 percent Jewish in 1919 (p. 156), key positions in the Cheka were “almost exclusively” in Jewish hands. Of the twenty members of the commission which decided people’s fate, fourteen were Jews (p. 148).

The Kievan Cheka even published a newsletter, The Red Sword; it offers an unusual glimpse into the minds of those who carried out the Terror. In an article by its Jewish editor-in-chief Leon Kraini we read: “For us there cannot be any question of encumbering ourselves with old principles of morality and humanitarianism invented by the bourgeoisie.” A certain Schwartz echoes his sentiments: “The Red Terror which has been proclaimed must be carried out in a proletarian fashion. . . . If in order to institute the dictatorship of the proletariat in the whole world it is necessary to annihilate all the servants of tsarism and capitalism, we will not hesitate to do so” (p. 141).

Vasily Shulgin, an old political ally of Stolypin, witnessed an enormous exodus from Kiev on October 1st, 1919 as the town was about to be occupied by the Bolsheviks. Some 60,000 Russians, according to his estimate, left on foot with nothing more than they could carry. At the time, there were some 100,000 Jews living in Kiev. “But there were no Jews in this exodus; you could not see any among these thousands of Russians. They did not want to share our destiny.” Even the wealthiest “bourgeois” Jews preferred to take their chances with the Bolsheviks (pp. 149–50).

Sergei Maslov, author of Russia after Four Years of Revolution, reports: “In the towns of southern Russia, especially the Western half of the Ukraine which changed hands several times, the advent of Soviet power gave rise to ostentatious sympathy and the greatest joy in the Jewish quarters, and often nowhere else” (p. 150).

On October 16, 2004, President George W. Bush signed the Israel Lobby’s bill, the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act.  This legislation requires the US Department of State to monitor anti-semitism world wide.

To monitor anti-semitism, it has to be defined.  What is the definition?  Basically, as defined by the Israel Lobby and Abe Foxman, it boils down to any criticism of Israel or Jews.

Rahm Israel Emanuel hasn’t been mopping floors at the White House.
As soon as he gets the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 passed, it will become a crime for any American to tell the truth about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and theft of their lands.

It will be a crime for Christians to acknowledge the New Testament’s account of Jews demanding the crucifixion of Jesus.

It will be a crime to report the extraordinary influence of the Israel Lobby on the White House and Congress, such as the AIPAC-written resolutions praising Israel for its war crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza that were endorsed by 100 per cent  of the US Senate and 99 per cent  of the House of Representatives, while the rest of the world condemned Israel for its barbarity.

It will be a crime to doubt the Holocaust.

It will become a crime to note the disproportionate representation of Jews in the media, finance, and foreign policy.

In other words, it means the end of free speech, free inquiry, and the First Amendment to the Constitution. . . . More

As the opening date for the release of director Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ approached in 2004, media-orchestrated anti-Christian hysteria reached a crescendo, Jewry sputtered with rage and clamored for censorship, and organized Judeo-Christians ran interference for the world’s most privileged, brutal, and censorial ruling group. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops rushed into print a booklet expressing the now-familiar cringing Catholic servility to Jews, which it mailed to parishes throughout the land. The self-righteous bishops apparently viewed rank-and-file Catholics as latent anti-Semites liable to rush out of the theater and stage one of Abraham Foxman’s imaginary pogroms.

The furor was reminiscent of the long-forgotten Jewish attempts to censor legendary director Cecil B. DeMille’s silent film classic The King of Kings (1927). (Not to be confused with bisexual Wisconsin-born German-American director Nicholas Ray’s identically-titled 1961 film, sarcastically known in the anti-Christian trade as I Was a Teenage Jesus.)

DeMille (1881-1959), an enigmatic figure, is typically misperceived as a Christian conservative. As recently as 1990 University of Southern California history professor Kevin Starr incorrectly wrote in Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990): “Producer Cecil B. De Mille [sic], an Episcopalian of Anglo-Dutch descent in an industry dominated by Eastern European Jewish immigrants, came as close as anybody to bridging WASP Los Angeles and Jewish Hollywood . . . [T]he oligarchy allowed De Mille through the barriers that had kept (and were still keeping) other Hollywood magnates from social acceptance. His daughter Cecilia, an ardent equestrienne, became prominent in the Junior League of Los Angeles, and De Mille received invitations to the better clubs” (pp. 98-99).

Even in his own day it was not widely known that DeMille was in fact half-Jewish.

DeMille’s father, Henry Churchill de Mille, was an Episcopalian clergyman of Dutch descent who wrote several successful Broadway plays in collaboration with Jewish playwright (later producer) David Belasco. Belasco was described as follows in Henry Ford’s classic The International Jew (1921):

Belasco’s theatricalism helped to this end. He is an actor off, as well as on the stage. He affects the pose of a benevolent priest, and dresses the part, wearing a priestly collar, with clerical vest and coat. Although of Portuguese-Hebraic origin, Belasco dresses after this manner to honor, as he says, a tutor of his early days. [Henry de Mille?] Anyway, the costume is very effective, especially with the ladies. He has a tremulous, shy way about him, and he sits in his sanctum with the lights so arranged that his priestly face and splendid shock of silver hair seem to rise out of an encompassing and shadowy mystery. It is very effective—very effective. One woman declared, after being admitted to the presence and gazing on the face that rose out of the shadows into the light—“I have a better understanding of the divine humility of Jesus Christ since I have been privileged to meet Mr. Belasco.”[1]

DeMille’s mother was a well-to-do Jew from England named Matilda Beatrice Samuel. In his 465-page Autobiography (Cecil B. DeMille, Autobiography, ed. by Donald Hayne [Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1959]), DeMille goes into minute detail about his paternal Dutch ancestors, but maintains complete silence about his maternal ancestors, never even identifying his mother as Jewish. Describing his parents’ marriage, he in fact calls “Tillie” Samuel a “slim, bewitching English girl” (emphasis added), “dark-eyed, vivacious, different somehow from . . . American girls.” He also notes that his mother’s—not his father’s—family opposed the marriage. However, DeMille seems to have had more affection for his white father than for his Jewish mother, and adopted the former’s watered-down Episcopalian religiosity (as had Tillie Samuel).

Cecil DeMille had a casual attitude about sexual relations within marriage. “DeMille maintained a house for his wife, Constance [nee Adams—the daughter of an American judge], and his children, and had a ranch called Paradise, where he stayed on weekends with [his white screenwriter Jeanie] Macpherson, and later his other mistresses.” Jeanie Macpherson wrote the screenplay for The King of Kings. DeMille’s adopted son, Richard de Mille (the natural son of Cecil’s brother, Hollywood director/screenwriter William C. de Mille and one of William’s scriptwriters, Scottish-born Lorna Moon), wrote, “In 1946 I went with him [Cecil] to the hospital to visit Jeanie Macpherson a few days before she died. He held her hand and told her they would surely meet in the next world. She murmured that they would.” http://www.moviediva.com/MD_root/reviewpages/MDDynamite.htm

Cecil DeMille’s Christianity was as casual as his marital vows. He stated, “I am an Episcopalian” (Autobiography, p. 299), and had an Episcopalian funeral. The director’s “Episcopalianism” closely resembled Unitarianism. It was ecumenical, universalist, trans-denominational, trans-racial, and characterized by cloying philo-Semitism. He refers, for example, to “. . . Rabbi Abraham Shusterman of Baltimore, whose prayer at a luncheon made the Divine Presence almost tangible in the room. . . .” (Autobiography, p. 434). He invoked Protestantism, Judaism, and Catholicism as if they were three aspects of a single faith. He spoke highly of Mormonism, but warmly embraced exotic foreign religions as well. “[A movie] I wanted very much to make, and still do, was a story around the theme of unity, the unity of all mankind and the unity of man with nature and with God. I have never found a suitable story that would portray this theme” (Autobiography, p. 263).

Again: “I am not a regular church-goer. . . . To me, prayer is contact of the human mind with the Divine Mind, and that is possible anywhere, perhaps more possible in solitude than in a crowd. As I conceive of God, He is that Mind behind the universe we see, of which our minds are like small reflecting sparks struck off; and that Mind is always there, ready for us to touch and draw upon and reflect in our own minds more and more” (Autobiography, pp. 433-4).

DeMille’s version of “Christianity” carried over into The King of Kings, yet nonetheless threw organized Jewry into a frothing fit. Shooting for the film opened with a short prayer service in which representatives of more than thirty religious sects and beliefs participated, including Protestants, Catholics, and Jews—in the America of 1927! (Autobiography, p. 279).

At the time, DeMille wrote: “Not only all the religions believed in by European peoples and Americans were represented, but also the Buddhist and Mohammedan faiths. . . . [T]he motion-picture medium possessed the power to carry the story of Jesus to millions who might not otherwise be sympathetic to it, or who would find difficulty in grasping it because of racial or linguistic reasons.” “I am not referring only to those who are termed Christians. The fundamental truths brought out through the ministry of Jesus cannot be confined to belief, race, nationality or social position. . . . His ideals apply to all of us. Thus it is our earliest desire to offend no one’s religious beliefs, but to benefit uncounted millions of the world’s population by telling of the Ministry, Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus—the greatest story ever told.”[2]

No matter. According to a review in Boxoffice Magazine (June 2000):

In 1927, Cecil B. DeMille was editing King of Kings, his drama about the life of Christ. He’d gone to extraordinary measures to satisfy many points of view, including having Catholic priests and Protestant ministers on set at all times. But Jewish groups such as B’nai B’rith were upset by the crucifixion scene, which they believed was depicted inaccurately and insensitively, in a manner that would inflame anti-Semitism. In response to their criticism, a defiant DeMille responded, “Those Jews who are raising these rather violent [emphasis added] objections would crucify Christ a second time if they had an opportunity.” The Hays Office stepped in and, with the power of the industry’s Production Code behind it, negotiated minor cuts in the film. As released, King of Kings incited little Jewish protest, nor the expected anti-Semitic riots in Eastern Europe.

“The expected anti-Semitic riots in Eastern Europe.” Just as Gibson’s film didn’t spark Foxman’s projected pogroms by white Christians exiting movie theaters after viewing The Passion of the Christ. Jews and governments harbor—or purport to harbor—bizarre notions of white people.

Jewish author Felicia Herman writes:

In the late 1920s several Jewish organizations and communal leaders criticized Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927), a filmed passion play, for what they believed was the film’s antisemitic caricatures of the Jewish high priest, the Pharisees, and Judas Iscariot, as well as the film’s presentation of the Jewish role in the crucifixion—all common elements of passion plays that Jewish leaders believed were even more dangerous when they appeared in a high-profile, big-budget motion picture. In response, the MPPDA [the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association—the Hays office] asked B’nai B’rith, whom it perceived as the representative of American Jewry, to become the official Jewish consultant to the industry. B’nai B’rith turned this duty over to the ADL.[3]

Whites should likewise internalize the lesson that anti-white hatred is dangerous when depicted in high-profile, big-budget motion pictures and television programs.

In reality, of course, the Jewish attack was vicious and unrelenting. DeMille, never forthright on the subject of Jews, mentions that H. B. Warner, the actor who portrayed Jesus, was shadowed in his off-hours during the film’s production and post-production period. The implication is that organized Jewry hired private detectives to dig up dirt on “Jesus” that could be used, via the media, to discredit the film in the public mind.

In his Autobiography, DeMille goes to absurd lengths to demonstrate the purity of his motives. He cites a rabbi who gave sanction to the film. He writes that father and son actors Rudolph and Joseph Schildkraut “were Jewish. They suffered for playing the roles of Caiaphas and Judas in The King of Kings. They had taken the roles as artists, with no thought of creedal prejudice. Then they were caught in the wash of opposition to the film, and condemned by some of their fellow Jews as traitors” (Autobiography, pp. 282-83).

Just think if Jews had to suffer real traitors like George W. Bush and John McCain—literally millions of them, big and small! Then they’d learn what true suffering is.

Although he was half-white, it was the Jew in DeMille that won out. He tells of a German Lutheran who saw The King of Kings in 1928 and was so moved by it that he became a pastor. The man eventually had a parish in Prague, and in his congregation was a Jewish convert to Christianity, a doctor, “who was promptly thrown into a concentration camp” when Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia. The Jew’s courage so enraged Gestapo officers that they beat him with an iron rod so that his arm had to be amputated. Then one Gestapo officer beat the Jew’s head against a stone wall “until the blood was streaming down his face,” held a mirror in front of him, and said, “Take a look at yourself. Now you look like your Jewish Christ.” The noble Jew “raised up the one hand he had left and with his last dying breath said, ‘Lord, never in my life have I received such an honor—to resemble You.’” The Gestapo officer, struck dumb by such saintliness, was so wracked by guilt that he thereafter secretly assisted the escape of hundreds of Jews. But for The King of Kings, “350 Jewish children would have died in the ditches” (Autobiography, pp. 283-84).

Despite such BS, it is clear that even after three decades the Jewish hatred DeMille had had to endure still rankled:

What was harder to comprehend and cope with was the organized opposition [emphasis added] of certain Jewish groups to the filmed history of the greatest Jew who ever lived. Certainly one can understand and sympathize with the sensitivity of Jews to the lie that the Jewish people as a whole were responsible for the death of Jesus. Well aware of that, and of the awful consequences which have followed historically from the propagation of that lie, we went to great lengths in The King of Kings to show that the Jewish people of Jesus’ time followed and heard Him gladly, that His death came at the hands of a few unrepresentative, corrupt [Jewish] religious leaders and the cowardly and callous Roman government. Still, the opposition to the picture mounted, in some places to disheartening and alarming proportions. I am not going into a detailed account of how the story of Jesus of Nazareth was banned [by organized Jewry] from the screens of certain American cities. The painful documentation is in my files. Some day, when men learn to discuss religious prejudice dispassionately [meaning Jewish prejudice included], some historian of motion pictures or of American folkways may publish it. I will not. (Autobiography, p. 282)

So the true story of Jewish skullduggery and brutality surrounding the making and exhibition of The King of Kings remains a closely guarded secret to this day.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

See also:

Felicia Herman, “‘The Most Dangerous Anti-Semitic Photoplay in Filmdom’: American Jews and The King of Kings (DeMille, 1927),” Velvet Light Trap 46 (Winter 2000): 12-25.

Kevin MacDonald

Paul Gottfried is outside the mainstream of Jewish intellectuals in being associated with paleoconservatives rather than either the left or the neoconservative right. In my eyes, therefore, he is a force for relative good in a world where paleocons like Pat Buchanan have been relegated to the fringes of intellectual debate in the US and have long rap sheets at powerful, well-endowed organizations like the $PLC and the ADL.

Another reason I am predisposed to be positive about Gottfried is that he reviewed Cultural Insurrections respectfully, noting pointedly that there are completely different standards in discussing the activities and influence of other ethnic groups or religions. And he agrees with much of my analysis that Jews have in fact been deeply involved in erecting the culture of critique that now pervades the West.

Inevitably, however, despite a great many good things in Gottfried’s review, my reply must necessarily discuss points of disagreement. . . . More

Kevin MacDonald's CULTURAL INSURRECTIONS

Among those authors considered politically incorrect, and even those considered really politically incorrect, Kevin MacDonald holds a special place of honor or shame. A feature story in the May 9 (Los Angeles) Jewish Journal describes this small-boned, soft-spoken 64-year-old professor of psychology at California State University at Long Beach as “the professors anti-Semites love.” Alluding to the fact that university authorities have been trying to force the outspoken MacDonald out of his tenured position, the article complains about “the downside of academic freedom.” We also learn that this clinical psychologist is “considered the foremost anti-Semitic thinker by civil rights experts.” . . . More