Habakkuk on “incitements to anti-Semitism”

Habakkuk

I find this comment by DH to be so striking that I have made it a post. There will be complaints about a lack of paragraphing.  If DH wants to revise it I will re-post it.  pl

————-

I had not looked back at this thread, so had missed your response.

There will, I think, be better occasions to take up the issues you raise, which are very important ones.

For now, a few remarks.

In the interests of clarity, I should perhaps say that insofar as I am ill at ease with the ‘Hobbits’ of Tolkien’s ‘Shire’, it is because of forefathers who were ‘dwarves’ in the coalfields and smelters of South Wales.

My possessing the name of an Old Testament prophet betokens Calvinist origins, not Jewish. But then, radical Protestants have commonly been philo-Semitic.

There is a figure called Kevin Macdonald, whose writings on Jews as an ‘hostile élite’ you may well know.

(See https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/2068070204_Yuri_Slezkine .)

As it happens, I do not much like him. His reference to ‘the Germans, from Wagner to von Treitschke to Chamberlain and Hitler’, disliking the irony of Heine, seems to me to demonstrate an inability to grasp that groups, be they Germans, Jews, Muslims, or whoever, are rarely monolithic wholes.

That said, an important part of the background to his writing – as of the piece by Lawrence Auster to which you link, which seems to me far superior to Macdonald’s writing – is that very many of the most influential American Jews seem to be queuing up for starring roles in versions of the ‘hostile élite’ drama.

Quite a few of them appear to be doing their level best to persuade people who place any value on the traditional ‘Anglo’ culture of the American Republic that they are something close to an ‘existential threat’ to it.   (editor bolding) 

In Britain, also, ‘tribal’ Jews – ‘ghetto Jews’ sometimes seems to me an appropriate term – have claimed the right to speak for some kind of coherent ‘Jewish people.’

So, for example, concluding his May 2015 article ‘We never forget Jerusalem’, our former Chief Rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, wrote:

‘We have had the privilege to be born in a generation that has seen Jerusalem reunited and rebuilt. We have seen the Jewish people come home. ‘

Today God is calling on us all to be Guardians of Zion. Never has this been more important. We must all stand up for the one home our people has ever known and the one city our people has loved more than any other. We are all shagrirey medinat Yisrael (ambassadors for the State of Israel) and we must all make Israel’s case in a world that sometimes fails to see the beauty we know is here. Let us all take on that task. With Hashem’s help, we will succeed and we pray may the world make its peace with Israel so that Israel and Israel’s God can bring peace to the world.’

(See http://rabbisacks.org/we-never-forget-jerusalem/ .)

As it happens, I think this is an ‘open-and-shut’ case of ‘incitement to anti-Semitism.’

That there are some Jews who have their ‘home’ in this country – and are more than temporary residents – seems to be beyond our former Chief Rabbi’s capacity to imagine.

That he cannot see the possible implications of implicitly defining all Jews as ‘resident aliens’ is, I think, indicative of extraordinary stupidity and recklessness.

It also completely obscures the fact that, for many Jews here, their history is one of lost homes, and the equally important fact that very many of them had long abandoned the Jewish religion.

I mentioned Peter Ganz, for whom ‘home’ had clearly been Mainz: clearly not a Jew, in Rabbi Sachs’s definition.

What then can I say about Peter Stern, who likewise made it over here just before the outbreak of war, leaving relatives who died? He also ended up as a professor of German, having been a sergeant in His Majesty’s Armed Forces.

Again, the comparison with Maxwell is interesting, in that like him Stern came from Czechoslovakia – he served in No 311 Squadron, the Czech bomber squadron in the RAF, hunting U-boats over the Atlantic.

I well remember two fingers clawed around a pipe, a relic of one of the ultimate lucky escapes, when the Wellington bomber in which he served as ‘tail gun Charlie’ was shot down by Ju-88s, and the survivors were picked up, by pure fluke, after fourteen hours in the water.

While Peter Ganz was an agnostic brought up as a Lutheran, Peter Stern was brought up a Catholic, and remained a kind of ‘Jewish Christian’ to the end of his life.

Like so refugees from ‘assimilationist’ families, both completely failed to maintain the concern for group survival which Macdonald appears to think a Jewish characteristic, marrying out.

And then, what can I say of a lifelong friend of my mother’s from schooldays, the daughter of a secular Jewish lawyer, who herself ended up as a pillar of the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Kensington?

I vividly remember their house, with the walls covered in prints of the St. Petersburg which the father had left in the Civil War, leaving his coat on the door, before finally making it over here through Crimea.

My ‘few remarks’ have got longer than I intended.

What is important is that the kind of ‘tribalism’ which Macdonald sees as a general Jewish characteristic is found among some Jews, but not others.

An obvious fact is that ‘assimilationist’ Jews tend over time to disappear.

However, a situation where the ‘tribal’ Jews who do not want to ‘assimilate’ attempt to shape the fate of non-Jewish polities is, quite patently, fraught with potential for disaster.

That however, does not provide good reason for accepting the simplicities either of Sacks or Macdonald – who agree on a ‘totalitarian’ vision of all true Jews as essentially the same, but simply differ on whether the largely mythical identity in which they believe should be given a ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ sign.  DH

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136 Responses to Habakkuk on “incitements to anti-Semitism”

  1. Barbara Ann says:

    Until or unless it is reformatted, for readers’ convenience the original comment (with paragraphs) is here.
    I hope David has made a report to the ADL on the British Chief Zionist’s Rabbi’s speech – I wholeheartedly agree with his sentiment re its anti-Semitic nature.
    A central tenet of Zionism; that to be a ‘good’ Jew one must unconditionally support Israel, is profoundly prejudicial to the large section of Jews who may never wish to return ‘home’ (also to ultra-orthodox ‘Israelis’ who presumably already are). Further, as DH highlights and I have said previously in this place myself, it is profoundly dangerous for Zionists to hold all Jewry hostage in this way by associating them (many unwillingly) with the deeply racist policies of an apartheid state. Not so long ago a very different set of people set about defining Jews as a monolithic whole of “resident aliens” and history records what happened next. Well said Mr Habakkuk.

  2. Diana C says:

    I did try to read it. It is indeed hard to follow without paragraphing.
    The topic is one of great interest to me, but I would appreciate some paragraphing. As I tried to scroll down the article, I kept losing my place.

  3. jdledell says:

    David – Very interesting summary of a very complex issue. The most important point you made is there is no universally accepted definition of who is or who not Jewish and we are far from monolithic. I know many devout Jews, who try to keep ALL the life characteristics of a Jew as defined by the Talmud, Frankly there a very few who can avoid straying from strict adherence and still live in a modern world.
    In my youth I was raised Orthodox and but when I met the modern world in college and employment, it no longer seemed to be relevant that there was only one correct path to G-d. 51 years ago I met and married the daughter of a Lutheran minister (ps we’re still married). The earthquake this decision made among my family has not yet disappeared. I still consider myself to be Jewish but now attend a Reform Temple.
    What is interesting is how my relatives in Israel handle my visits. There are some who are accepting and some where I am shunned and not allowed in their home. I do not consider myself to be a secular Jew and I attend Services regularly. Here in the U.S. a Reform Jew is still treated as Jewish but in Israel we might as well be considered an atheist, a lower category than Christian or even Muslim.
    Your comment about Jerusalem is quite accurate. I know a number of American Jews but especially Israeli Jews whose religious focus on Jerusalem and/or Israel has become more important than their relationship with G-d. I’ve always considered the focus on Jerusalem as almost a false idol that we were warned about. All of us live in very interesting times and among very interesting people.

  4. David Habakkuk,
    I took the liberty to add the paragraph breaks from your original comment. Hope you don’t mind.

  5. turcopolier says:

    TTG
    Neither do I but I thought it quite readable.

  6. turcopolier says:

    DianaC
    Is English your native tongue?

  7. turcopolier says:

    Barbara Ann
    Ah! You are a German?

  8. Vegetius says:

    That the land of Edward I has a “Chief Rabbi” and that the natives of Britain are attacking him because they believe his words are not good for the Jews is a perfect demonstration of the ‘pathological altruism’ which Kevin MacDonald has been talking about all these years, to an audience that now numbers in the millions globally.
    People ought to read MacDonald before attempting to de-construct him, although I doubt you will have either the will or the ability to afterwards. His ideas have not been ‘debunked’ although Nathan Cofnas’ critique of the Culture of Critique is worth reading.
    Here DH (hereafter You) have misrepresented the ideas he has spent the last quarter century developing. He is a far subtler thinker than has been presented here, and has been defending and explaining his ideas publicly for years – when he is not being hounded by anti-white and anti-free speech groups like the SPLC. I do not agree with his theory in its entirety – but at least I understand it.
    Some points:
    I have been kicked out of a bar and tell you it wasn’t my fault, would you believe me? If I was kicked out of a second bar, and told you it was someone else causing the problem, would you believe me? How times would I have to be kicked out of bars before you started to think maybe it had something to do with my own behavior? Three? Thirty-Three?
    Jews have been asked to leave by their hosts over a hundred times in the last two thousand years and we are expected to believe that at all times and in all places it was due to some sort of irrational, psychopathic behavior of the inhabitants, or some scapegoating tactic by a ruler? And yet everywhere the proffered reasons for the expulsion are twisted and lied about to keep the expelled free from blame, thus allowing them to plead innocence when they ask for refuge from the next mark. It is possible that they themselves actually believe their own lies. And the cycle begins again.
    Ponder the case of Leo Frank and the ADL and believe me when I tell you that in fifty or one hundred years Jeffrey Epstein will be rehabilitated and the female goyim he assaulted – and to my knowledge they were all non-Jews – will be called whores and blamed or simply accepted as a small price for the security and glory of Greater Israel.
    Similarly, having your own on both sides of a conflict (thereby ensuring some part of the group’s survival, per Jacob) or issue (and so attempting to control the intellectual borders of it: see any news commentary in the English speaking world) is an ancient tactic. That this does not jibe with a Western man’s sense of what is proper or even immediately intelligible is to be expected. Westerners’ morality is in theory universal. Jewish morality has two sides in theory and practice, one for themselves and one for everyone else. “Judeo-Christian” is pernicious and misleading.
    Jews are of the West, and the dirt of the West is not so magic that it makes someone a Western man the moment they step foot on it. If so, Britain would not be subject to so many Rotherhams or in such peril from mass non-white immigration (which Jews tend to see as benefitting them and so promote it wherever they live, except of course Israel).
    Is it possible someone here is being played for a fool, and is so turned around that he thinks he is behaving virtuously? Try to imagine that others do not see things as you do. Try to imagine that some people will see your sense of what is fair or reasonable as a weakness and exploit it to harm you. Similarly, the historic divisions between English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh will be exploited to keep them from working together to stop what is happening to their native lands.
    A couple of war heroes and a personal anecdote prove nothing. This is what is called the NAXALT fallacy. That is: Not All X Are Like That. This is simply explained. An outlier does not render the median illegitimate.
    Suppose that once you step on a viper and it does not strike you. Does this therefore mean that a pattern of recognition which evolved over a million years is to be ignored?
    You will note that while Jews constantly use the outlier as a way of keeping goyim from criticizing Jews or defending themselves, Jews never extend it to their own enemies, or indeed anyone they are vying with for any reason. In fact, they will reverse it completely to obtain the advantage and not lose a moment’s sleep over this.
    Whatever atrocities German soldiers committed in Eastern Europe, those that committed them represented a tiny fraction of the Nazi state apparatus, not to mention the nation as a whole. Yet Jews blame not just the perpetrators, or even all Germans, but Western – which is to say European, which is to say white – civilization as a whole, and seek to undermine it, not just in Germany, but anywhere the natives’ appearance would allow them to play the part of a German soldier in one of their propaganda movies like Schindler’s List. Western ethnocentrism is a threat to Jewish ethnocentrism.
    Thus a Holocaust or Nazi piece on the BBC approximately every 96 hours, forever.
    Thus the ugly Moloch they are trying to erect in London.
    Despite being on the ‘good’ side of the conflict, the people of Britain must forever have their noses rubbed in guilt and shame – in what was once their own capital city, and the greatest city on earth – for something that happened in the middle of Europe in the middle of last century, and which they actually fought against. Did their ancestors fight and die so that their descendants could be shamed and subject to a blood libel in their own lands?
    And if anyone thinks these memorials have anything to do with the preservation of European culture or identity or cultural norms you need to wake up and not go gently into oblivion. The Shoah is flexible and can be repurposed so that yesterday’s victims become tomorrows perps. Go ask the Poles.
    The answer to this endless cycle is simple: Jews need to return to their homeland, and that homeland needs to be defended. Their bifurcated sense of identity is causing no end of problems, both to themselves and to everyone around them. Tikkun olam means, in practice, the transformation of other cultures to meet Jewish needs. It is a form of cultural genocide. But, like Sweden, Britain seems destined to become a squalid little police state rather than admit that the ‘tolerant’ multicultural experiment is failing. The corruption and degeneracy of their royalty is complete, and a Muslim is mayor of London, looking the other way while non-English gang violence spreads across the city.
    Some have tried resisting and some resist still:
    Morgoth is from the North and you would do well to pay him some attention.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66zOYSghrjA
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWvlW_O1IEk
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6STp1ogk_qE
    Bowden was from the South, and you ought to check him out, too.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vLFI8Q75cY
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhC5ob8RGQg
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_ylhKAWqME

  9. Babak Makkinejad says:

    All:
    From an essay titled: “It is time to declare war” placed by one Professor Leonard Peikoff – a Jew – in the New York Times, in the Washington Post, and numerous university news papers in the United States on September 20, 2001 –
    “What Germany was to Nazism in the 1940s, Iran is to terrorism today. Whatever else it does, therefore, the U.S. can put an end to the Jihad-mongers only by taking out Iran.
    Eliminating Iran’s terrorist sanctuaries and military capability is not enough. We must do the equivalent of de-Nazifying the country, by expelling every official and bringing down every branch of its government. This goal cannot be achieved painlessly, by weaponry alone. It requires invasion by ground troops, who will be at serious risk, and perhaps a period of occupation. But nothing less will “end the state” that most cries out to be ended.”

  10. Petrel says:

    Habakkuk –a great article, but your caustic remark about Tolkien’s Shire may have been misplaced.
    The Shire described in Tolkien’s first Lord of the Rings book is commonly considered a realization of Belloc and Chesterton’s DISTRIBUTIST theories — of small scale ownership of production, by many, many craftsmen, shopkeepers and farmers. Tolkien was a great admirer of these theorists.
    In contrast, the Shire shown in the third book is a bare, eroded and treeless expression of the reverse — in which the means of production is held by a few Capitalists. The task of Merry, Pippin, Sam and Frodo in the last chapters of book three is to restore ownership to the many and thereby rehabilitate the Shire to its former happy self.

  11. harry says:

    Thank you. Excellent observations some of which had been brewing somewhere in the back of my mind but had not fully taken form.

  12. Babak Makkinejad says:

    The mythos of Jerusalem of David and Solomon is so central now to the contemporary Jewish identity that nothing short of the dicovery of King Solomon’s palace in Saudi Arabia can dislodge it.

  13. Babak Makkinejad says:

    I think this is the same person who stated that Professor Bloch, a hero of La Resistance, was not a (real) Jew.
    A low life, I should think.

  14. Cortes says:

    Maybe Ferdinand and Isabella (the “Catholic Kings”) knew what they were doing?
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Jews_from_Spain

  15. doug says:

    Thank you for posting this.
    A Jewish refugee and friend of my dad made a rifle as a gift for me back when I turned 12. I’ve known a lot of Jews in my life and the only thing I’ve noted that they seemed to have in common is that most were educated.

  16. Babak Makkinejad says:

    Vegetius
    To my knowledge, Jews were never expelled from Iran over the last 2500 years.

  17. JohnH says:

    The New York Times had an article yesterday on how anti-Semitism has become a major issue in the UK elections, particularly in regards Labour. True to the Times style of reporting “the facts,” it didn’t really discuss the basis for the charges against Labour. Are they really more anti-Semitic than the Tories, who haven’t been condemned?
    My suspicion is that Labour has made some statements that might be interpreted as sympathetic with the plight of Palestinians or worse, (gasp) unsupportive to Netanyahu. Obviously Labour’s attitude would bother tribalists like Chief Rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, who are simultaneously British and Israeli. But the NYT doesn’t bother with helping us understand details like that.
    The Times does mention that Jews represent 0.5% of the British population. Subtracting those who are not tribalists, we are left with a population of tribalists that is probably equivalent to the rounding error in most polling.
    And yet it’s a ‘major issue’ in this election!?! I mean, what’s with that? Are any voters really going to make their decision on this trumped up issue? And if so, who really benefits? Probably not 99%+ of the population.

  18. catherine says:

    ”However, a situation where the ‘tribal’ Jews who do not want to ‘assimilate’ attempt to shape the fate of non-Jewish polities is, quite patently, fraught with potential for disaster.”
    It has already been a disaster. Furthermore imo it is perfectly legitimate to hold both a neutral/positive and negative view of a group or people.
    So when it comes to the “Jew qua nation’ as opposed to ‘Jew qua individual’ I am very definitely negative.
    I had probably never given 2 seconds thought to Jews prior to 911..after which I set out to educate myself on the ME. I started with the British National Archives where I tripped upon ‘Zionism in the ME. I knew little about Israel and had never heard of Zionism before but what I learned there sent me back to the US, the US Department of Historical documents, the Presidential libraries, etc.. what stood out in Presidential/political
    decisions on policy for Israel ….straight from the horses mouths in every single administration was….”domestic political considerations”.
    I truly did not want to believe that our leadership was so corrupt that it could be bought off and intimidated into actions immoral and detrimental to this country by a group of Zionist who operated like a organized crime family….but that’s the way the cookie crumbled on the facts.
    I have followed the activities of this Fifth Column and Israel and our congress now for 16 years….and this Isr’merica abomination continues
    to grow.
    I have no patience for betrayal, lies, bullies, traitors, foreign influence, etc.. so I make no apology for my total opposition to these people.
    As for the ‘average Jew” while most may not be actively involved with Israel many have been ‘lulled’ by their leaders and our politicians
    into believing they are indeed a ‘special case of eternal victims’ and therefore ‘entitled’ to hold a equal or superior loyalty to their Jewish homeland.
    Frankly, and I think I speak for many, I am fed up with the character assassinations of principled people who try to speak up against this subversion and against Israeli crimes, fed up with anti Semite slurs, the lies, the spin,the pilpul psycho and bible babble they pretend are legitimate arguments.
    I also do not care about the sensitivities and ‘hurt feelings’ …hurt feelings don’t kill you. Call Israel and their congressional minions in the US what they are for heavens sake….while we still have some free speech.

  19. catherine says:

    ‘ Zionists to hold all Jewry hostage in this way by associating them (many unwillingly) with the deeply racist policies of an apartheid state.”
    Zionist think of Jews as ‘safety in numbers’ They appeal to Jews on religion, anti-Semitism fear and a mythologized version of Jewish history, a tale of the vanquished now lifted to their rightful power.
    In ancient times it was the Rabbis who propagandized their followers to keep them from running off and joining a bigger more powerful and therefore protected tribe.

  20. catherine says:

    ”And the cycle begins again”
    Self-fulfilling prophecy, …..“a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true.
    A process through which an originally false expectation leads to its own confirmation.
    The actors within the process fail to understand how their own belief has helped to construct that reality; because their belief is eventually validated, they assume that it had been true at the outset. ”

  21. catherine says:

    Frankly I think the US should sign Peace Treaties with Russia and Iran.
    This would cause the Zios and Neos the world over to bust into flames from spontaneously human combustion.
    Problem solved.

  22. Mathias Alexander says:

    What’s “white civilisation”?

  23. ted richard says:

    my own story somewhat parallels, yours. i do think that a large part of the problem has been the hugely successful effort over the course of the 20th century by certain jews to conflate zionism with being a member of the hebrew religion…. of being jewish.
    in fact i think it is the zionists who have stirred up most of the ancient hatred towards jews through their treatment of the paletstinians.
    hollywood films have been a primary force for zionism and to keep the holocaust industry well financed. has it ever occurred to anyone why 74 years after the end of WW2 there are numerous films about jews, the holocaust and nazis every year?
    no other race, religion or group of any kind has been as well treated with victimhood as the jews of the holocaust. i submit this is intentional on the part of the zionists.
    that is the source of real antisemitism in the modern world.

  24. BrotherJoe says:

    The Israelis will never be satisfied until the entire Middle East is reduced to small enclaves of farmers and shepherds living under Israel’s hegemony. I believe a significant percent still cling to the vision of an Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates.

  25. Corbyn has to be demolished if the English Tribal Conservatives, who have shown a tendency to stray recently, are to be brought back into the fold.  I won’t go further into that because it’s to do with Brexit and to understand What’s happening on Brexit “you have to be there.”  But the line is that Corbyn is a Marxist antisemitic supporter of terrorists who is intent on destroying our economy and possibly our way of life.
    Which is a lot to load onto a mildish Islington prog.  DH, who knows the English political scene far better than do I and is also better acquainted with the American, might be able to come up with an American equivalent but from what I’ve seen Corbyn isn’t up to the weight of, say, Bernie and nowhere near as off the wall as AOC.  He’s also a pretty shrewd political operator, if finding the nearest fence and sitting on it ’til it collapses under him is shrewd.
    He’s been around a while and over the years has accumulated a number of hostages to fortune that the media is busy unearthing.  He has a penchant for brotherly meetings with terrorists/freedom fighters, among them Palestinians and the IRA, it seems.
    On foreign policy he’s no George Galloway but is discreetly on the side of the angels when it comes to disapproving of the chaos we’re causing in the Middle East.    
    For me that aversion to bombing brown people is his one good quality but it’s a black mark in English politics.  It’s an article of faith, I’d guess for most Conservative voters at least, that the Russians are devils incarnate and that bombing brown people or otherwise smashing up their economies and societies is good for them if it gets rid of their evil dictators.
    That aside he is, as said, just another mildish Islington prog.  When it comes to progs I’m like the Duke of Edinburgh with the Chinese.  They all look the same to me and I don’t see much to distinguish Corbyn from progs like Boris Johnson or like whatever her name is who is leading the LibDems to glory.
    He could be on a loser when it comes to “antisemitism”.
    1.  His party is Labour and Labour tends to get the immigrant vote, that including the Muslim vote.  Since not a lot of Muslims approve of Israel Corbyn is open to the charge of pandering to antisemitism to get those votes.  I don’t know whether that’s true but certainly antisemitism would do him no harm there, particularly since the Muslim vote is at the start of the process of breaking clear of Labour and is showing signs of becoming a political force in its own right.
    2. He’s up against the ultra-Zionists, who are something of a force in English politics.  With the Shoah behind them they get a lot of traction and for them any criticism of Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is clear proof that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is your bedtime reading.
    3. But he also has people in his party who are genuinely antisemitic and whom he doesn’t crack down on hard enough.  In the opinion of well-informed people I meet who are Labour supporters he goes further than that and gives them support.
    I think that’s true.  That is not to his credit.  In the worst case he shares that prejudice himself.  In the best, he’s found another fence to sit on that is busy collapsing underneath him.
    How much damage this will do him electorally is uncertain.  Not forgetting those Tribal Conservatives.  It’s their desperate fear of Corbyn the Red Peril that’s sending those Tribal Conservatives scampering back into Mr Johnson’s pen.  But those Tribal Conservatives aren’t always that philo-semitic themselves.

  26. Fred says:

    “Quite a few of them appear to be doing their level best to persuade people who place any value on the traditional ‘Anglo’ culture of the American Republic that they are something close to an ‘existential threat’ to it. ”
    The hostility to traditional ‘Anglo’ culture here across the pond has accelerated with such fine things as the 1610 project, courtesy of the NYT, and a renewal of anti-American educational policy by, to use your phrase, a ‘hostile élite’. Hollywood, academia, the political left and even many on the right. Nikki Haley’s couragous erasure of history in South Carolina comes to mind, it was certainly a political accelerant to her career. In this new millenial era there are only victims and oppressors, guess who did what to whom, which party contains the mosaic of victims easily pitted against the (hereditary) opprossors, and please don’t ask who enslaved whom in 1618 and then sold them off in 1619.
    “Collective memory is the toolshed, tomorrow’s ideological arsenal, from which political concepts and symbols are selected, reinterpreted, and manipulated both by established governments and opposition groups.”
    Those in opposition to “traditional Anglo culture of the American Republic” have been quite successful since the mid-1960s in erasing from public view the collective memories of the American people.

  27. Diana C says:

    English is indeed my native tongue. I have an MA in English and modern linguistics. My minor as an undergrad was German–since my parents and grandparents came to the U.S. as “Volga Deutsch” and Black Sea Deutsch”
    As I was growing up, I attended a church for that group of Germans from Russia. We had a sermon first in English and then a shorter one in German. We sang out of the Volga Gesangbuch.
    My problem with the posting without paragraphs stems from the fact that I suffer from myopic retinal degeneration. I must often use a magnifier to read now. Do not confuse that condition with macular degeneration.
    And please don’t even think about feeling sorry for me. I saw the world, so to speak, by always having a book by by side. I didn’t get glasses until I was almost eleven when I finally realized I did have to see the chalk board in school as the teacher’s notes on the board became harder to follow by simply listening.
    I graduated top in my high school class. I graduated with honors in my under-gard program and with the Dean’s citation for excellence in my MA program (with comps in American and English Literature and in Modern Linguistic Theory.

  28. turcopolier says:

    DianaC
    Good for you. I see why your handicap may have been a problem. Sorry. As a teenager in Maine the pastor in the Catholic Church my parents attended always gave the same sermon first in English and then in French.

  29. Diana C says:

    I should mention that I can also read Old English and English from the Middle Ages. (Actually, I used to recite the opening passage of Beowulf IN Old English to my children when I was angry with them for something they were doing or something they had done. They thought I was cursing them since Old English is very gutteral in its probable pronunciation.

  30. The Beaver says:

    @ Babak
    He is from the so-called Ayn Rand Institute. This article gives a whole list of his articles:
    http://ariwatch.com/RelentlessPropagandaReduxForIran.htm
    He has been at it since 1989.
    And it may seems that Steve Miller must be one of his followers when one reads this , from him:
    Severely limit visiting and immigration from the Third World, and after a period of imprisonment deport any visitor or immigrant convicted of a felony
    “Religious Terrorism vs. Free Speech” by Leonard Peikoff, published as an advertisement in the New York Times on March 30, 1989

  31. Babak Makkinejad says:

    He means the Protestant-dominated polities of the Western Diocletian civilization.

  32. TTG,
    Very many thanks. Much appreciated.

  33. Diana C says:

    I can also read a little Latin, but I haven’t had reason to do that much over the last few years.
    The many base words and common words of English are Germanic, from the early Anglo-Saxon invaders in England. The sentence structure of English is the Latinate structure of the language of the Norman-French Invaders who came later. Sir Walter Scott in his novel Ivanhoe often illustrated the struggle between opposing languages during that time in England–the struggle caused by the loyalty for the native language of the Anglo-Saxons and the need to understand the language of the conquerors–The Norman French.

  34. J says:

    Did you see the news week that was shaking the foundations of the Israeli State?
    The staunch Anti-Zionist Anti-Israeli State religious leader, the Satmar Rebbe began a 10 day visit to Israel to hand out at least $5 Million to those communities and institutions who maintain themselves as staunch Anti-Zionist and Anti-Israeli State, and who refust any handout or stipend of any kind whatsoever from the Israeli State.
    The Satmar Community here in our U.S. is one of the largest Chasid חסידות communities in the world, it is also one of the richest in the world. Originating from Hungary, the Satmar have maintained traditions, and see the creation of the Israeli State by other than Divine Hands as a slap to Heaven and to the Nations of the World. That the non-Divine hand created Israeli State poses a grave danger to Jews in the world as the man-made Israeli State causes animosity against Jews world-wide. That the non-Divine created Israeli State that we currently have on the world’s stage is preventing the coming of the Messiah.
    Many know them as Neutra Karta also, who every week protest against the Israeli State at several locations in NYC where the Israeli State has properties as you will.
    On another note one of the large Chasid communities the Ger has split in two because of a family rift.
    Back to the man-made Israeli State, Zionist Israeli lawmakers had their short bunched up between their legs that the Minister of Security even let the Satmar Rebbe into the country, and was providing crowd, traffic, and security control for the Rebbe’s visit. One of the staunch Zionist lawmakers is a lady who emigrated from the Ukraine that was flapping her gums the most at the Rebbe’s visit.
    Here for your listening and viewing enjoyment is Levy Falkowitz and Yedidim singing
    Neshome’le (Abie Rottenberg) Shimmy Levy ft Levy Falkowitz & Yedidim | שימי לוי, פאלקאוויטש, ידידים
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-3mrRTOWj4

  35. johnf says:

    I think that is probably true, which makes them the second oldest jewish community on earth.
    The oldest is, I think, the Samaritans at Kiriyat Luza on Mount Gerizim near Nablus, West Bank under joint Israeli and Palestinian control.
    They were and probably are the last practitioners of pre-Exile Judaism. They did not go into Exile but stayed in the Holy Land practising the form of Judaism they had always known. But when the Exiles returned with a reformed type of Judaism with Persian and Babylonian influences, the returnees did not take kindly to this primitive nonsense. Their faith was just about tolerated, but they have not fared well, now being reduced to one small village with problems of inbreeding.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiryat_Luza
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samaritans

  36. Petrel,
    It only seems like a caustic remark because the context is missing.
    I was responding to a response by Keith Harbaugh of my attempt to elucidate the role of the Maxwells in the Epstein affair, provoked by a query from ‘Ishmael Zechariah.’
    At the end of his comments, Keith said, ‘I, for one, feel the need to “defend the Shire.”’
    As it happens, my late mother’s family was English High Anglican, (also a Scots admixture), with a bizarre mixture of country and small town Tory and Anglo-Catholic Christian socialist, so the worlds of ideas one finds in Tolkien and his fellow ‘Inklings’ are part of my own history. (He was Catholic, C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams Anglican.)
    There is however an unresolved conflict with elements of the culture of industrial South Wales, which my father left. In his case ‘Enlightenment’ ideas and values were superimposed upon a ‘Nonconformist’ culture with strong Calvinist undercurrents.
    These however are tensions one finds on both sides of the Atlantic.

  37. Ligurio says:

    “However, a situation where the ‘tribal’ Jews who do not want to ‘assimilate’ attempt to shape the fate of non-Jewish polities is, quite patently, fraught with potential for disaster.”
    To risk all the dangers of historical analogies, this present situation reminds me of the post-Tridentine rhetoric of the 16th century papacy, and the sudden discovery of the “traditional” temporal indirect power of the pope by Jesuits like Bellarmine et al. A group of hard-line Romanists on the continent do their best to convince old Catholics of England that their *real* and *primary* allegiance is to Rome and that they are duty bound to relinquish their loyalty to the English monarch on the say so of the Pope etc. Zionism today is much like the extreme Romanism of the latter Reformation.

  38. J says:

    DH,
    Another group that has endured much persecution, that is the Armenian communities of Anatolia all because they were Christian in an environment dominated by their Muslim neighbors. The Orthodox Church Armenians suffered at the hands of the Young Turks shortly after the beginning of the 20th century, and had suffered discrimination at the hands of the nomadic Kurds.
    Here’s a brief look at the Armenians of Anatolia
    Վրեժ Ճղրիկյան – Ելեք հայեր
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkkicyZ2QV0
    And
    Yarkhushta / Յարխուշտա
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q13BMlWKZWU

  39. Seamus Padraig says:

    Making peace with Russia and Iran would be a good thing in itself, but seeing all those zios and neos “burst into flames,” as you put it, would be a terrific fringe benefit!

  40. Babak Makkinejad says:

    Ayan Rand was a crypto-Jew, very much like Lenin or Yelena Bonner; forever trying to escape both God and the Judaic Tradition. In all 3 cases, what lured them was the demon of Reason.

  41. Seamus Padraig says:

    He has a penchant for brotherly meetings with terrorists/freedom fighters, among them Palestinians and the IRA, it seems.

    What I find so bizarre about the UK media’s treatment of Corbyn is how they give hi such an amazingly hard time for his pro-Palestinian stance, while seeming almost indifferent to his support for the IRA–even though the latter launched bomb attacks in Britain several times, while no Palestinian group ever has! It’s almost as though, to the British press, the life of an Israeli is worth more than the life of a Briton. Very odd …

  42. Babak Makkinejad says:

    Not at all odd from my perspective. IRA was attacking the Crown, Palestinian were attacking the bedrock of Anglo-American Protestanism.

  43. Tidewater says:

    You were reminding them that Grendel had a Mother?

  44. sova says:

    Any and all,
    Among the many very well considered and researched thoughts here one very important is missing: jews, their history, religion and their entire many faced existence are now completely hijacked and misused by the governments which are using the current state of israel as their stronghold/outpost among the people and cultures seeking emancipation and recognition. All topics mentioned here however valid and well argued are irrelevant because “the owner” of all those topics and issues currently is this state of israel empowered into this role by those governments which use it as their weapon. This situation is skewing the constellation of religious/historical/political contents of everything said here to a point that any true debate about any of it is simply irrelevant at the moment. Once the current state of israel let’s its inhabitants become true neighbours with all other peoples among which they live we MAY see the true face and feel the true soul of the modern jewry. Before this happens everything we’re talking about here is a theatre of absurd.

  45. Fourth and Long. says:

    Murdoch owns sky news and times of london – he’s jewish. BBC is conservative old tories and royalists – watching average brits be thrown off cliffs, die in war defending their privlege or lose lives to terrorists gladdens the icy cockles of their icy hearts. They are the ruling class for gods sake.

  46. catherine says:

    ” Those in opposition to “traditional Anglo culture of the American Republic” have been quite successful since the mid-1960s in erasing from public view the collective memories of the American people.”
    A snippet from the agenda of one group out to erase American memory. If it weren’t for the fact that they have already achieved
    several of their goals we could laugh it off as another Protocols
    of the Elders conspiracy theory.
    ”An end to antisemitism!..catalogue of policies to combat Antisemitism”
    By the European Jewish Congress, New York University, Tel Aviv University and the University of Vienna.February 2018,
    https://anendtoantisemitism.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/p_anendtoantisemitism/PDF/Catalogue_FINAL_webversion_complete.pdf
    ”The key to the eradication of antisemitism in a group is to change its cultural and religious heritage”
    »» Any cultural organization, institution or cultural decision maker and influencer who propagates antisemitism should be exposed to legal punishments ranging from fines to prison sentences, depending on the severity of the case.
    » Each country should fund the fight against antisemitism with 0.02% of its Gross Domestic Product annually.
    » Each group, organization, and institution should spend 1% of its budget to fight antisemitism inside its own context annually.
    › Jewish achievements for a given society or country should be highlighted by memorials celebrating Jewish contributions to the world’s heritage.
    › Schools need to teach the history, culture, and religion of Judaism on all levels from pre-school to universities and continuing education.
    › Schools need to teach the history of antisemitism from its ancient beginnings until today from the earliest educational level advisable up to universities and continuing education.
    »» Removing the authority of antisemitic role models such as saints or highly respected authorities that provide guidance to the members of a religious group or institutions Examples include John Chrysostom, Martin Luther and others
    »» Removing antisemitism from the private beliefs of the members of a religious group or organization.
    »» Antisemitic cultural decision makers or influencers as well as anti-Semitic employees or antisemitic members of cultural organizations and institutions need to be dismissed, suspended from duty, or expelled. This includes the membership in scholarly and scientific organizations but also such positions as university professors, museum directors, or the editor-in-chief of a newspaper or news channel. In case of elected offices, antisemitism should be treated as an attitude that forces a cultural decision maker to resign.
    »» For new employees of a cultural organization or institution, it should be a mandatory requirement for their appointment to have taken classes in the history, culture, and religion of Judaism as well as in the history of antisemitism.
    »» Neither virtual nor real libraries should provide anyone with anti-Semitic literature, films, music, etc. Only scholarly and national libraries should hold antisemitic items. Access to these antisemitic items should be restricted to researchers (including advanced students) who need them for their work in studying and combating antisemitism, and those civil servants, politicians, and journalists who need them for their work.
    »» Publications of central written, oral, and visual parts of a cultural memory should include introductions, marginal notes, subtitles or captions that warn about antisemitic passages and depictions in them (examples include the antisemitic stereotypes in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice).
    »» Buildings, streets, ships, army barracks, universities, etc. should not be named after antisemites.
    »» Antisemitic artwork at churches and other places needs to be removed, Antisemitic music and plays should not be performed in opera houses or theaters
    »» Plaques should explain changed names, removed memorials, and
    removed art
    Highlighting Jewish achievements for a given society or country. For this purpose,
    ››Memorials should be created to celebrate Jewish contributions to the world’s heritage.
    ››Streets, places, parks, houses, universities, schools, etc. should be named after Jewish persons of achievement.
    ››Memorials should be erected for Jewish persons of achievement.

  47. Vegetius says:

    No, I do not.
    No one has a problem identifying white people when they are to be blamed for the problems of modernity, when ‘privilege’ is being discussed, or when they shaken down for reparations.
    Yet when a white makes an affirmative statement about themselves or their culture suddenly things get very Talmudic and the hairs begin to be split.
    This little game worked well on high-trust (and naïve) Baby Boomers, but not more.

  48. Vegetius says:

    Are you white?

  49. Well, you’re right about the sound of OE. Having read your comment I tried out those opening lines at the dinner table. General view – “Sounded like a declaration of war.” And yet that’s from the some of the most euphonious and accomplished verse in existence.
    For some fun, here’s a fairly recent thesis on the relationship between OE and ME verse. Used to be that most OE scholars had a tin ear and were more interested in the text than the sound. Not any more. I’m not up on it enough to know if the thesis is bomb proof but hell, it looks sensible and I am now a fervent Yakovlevian.
    https://ora.ox.ac.uk/catalog/uuid:02e46bb4-0abb-479d-9c50-64be689e013e/download_file?file_format=pdf&safe_filename=Nicolay%2BYakovlev%2B-%2BDPhil%2Bthesis.pdf&type_of_work=Thesis

  50. JP Billen says:

    J –
    Armenians are still being persecuted to this day by the Turkish invasion of Northeast Syria. Their churches in Ras al-Ayn have been desecrated – along with many others in villages of that region. Their priests are being murdered. These people currently being subjected to ethnic cleansing are descendants of a few survivors of the Turkish genocide from over a century ago.

  51. Babak Makkinejad says:

    It is illegal, within her legal structures and codes, for the United States to enter any kind of instrument of peace with either the Russian Federation or the Islamic Republic of Iran. The time for them was 2002.

  52. JerseyJeffersonian says:

    Thousands of ours killed/maimed, trillions blown on Israel’s wars, subversion of the US culture/politics. Steely Dan nailed it: I don’t wanna do your dirty work no more.

  53. artemesia says:

    O/T: When were the Volga Deutsch expelled from the lands they had been invited to settle? Were they ever repatriated or recompensed?
    Half a lifetime ago I worked for a very fine attorney named Wolgemuth — I’m guessing he was Volga Deutsch.

  54. I don’t know the frequency of reporting on the various terrorists/freedom fighters he meets. I see material sometimes on meetings with the IRA –
    https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/survivor-of-enniskillen-remembrance-day-bombing-labels-jeremy-corbyn-sympathiser-for-terrorism-38677585.html
    But the Guardian fights back, though Tribal Conservatives don’t read the Guardian. Come to think of it that’ll be one of the things they do get right.
    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/20/corbyn-terrorist-sympathiser-double-standards
    Above I should have put “bombing brown people” in quotation marks. And I’m not sure anyway if people still remember George Carlin.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHZtQsKQg7c
    I suppose Corbyn gets an amazingly hard time from our neocon equivalents simply because he isn’t one. He’s weird all right – how else does one get let into the House of Commons? – but not that sort of weird.

  55. artemesia says:

    I wonder if I’ll be able to look upon the world from whatever post-life state I’m in, to see how zionist Israel is getting along, the later-comers having decided that the traditions, statues, monuments, governing institutions of the zionists who created the place in the early 20th century are “supremacists” and need passionately to be overthrown and replaced with _____ ? (Who will be zionist Israel’s millennials in 2119? Palestinians? Syrians? Iranians !! )

  56. Babak Makkinejad says:

    I will let your stupid insults to me, as a commentator here, pass. But to call “irrelevant” the on-going religious war, first declared through Balfur Declaration, over the disposition of Palestine is even more stupid.

  57. Babak Makkinejad says:

    I am Beige and not Brown.

  58. Babak Makkinejad says:

    You are not American else you would have known that neither Italians, nor Jews, nor Armenians, Poles, Romanians, Spaniards were considered “White” in the United States not too long ago.

  59. Babak Makkinejad says:

    Zionists are not holding anybody hostage, almost every Jew the world over believes and accepts Zionism: a Jew being against Zionism is like an American being against Democracy & Freedom. I doubt you know any Jews.

  60. ex PFC Chuck says:

    Are these the same Samaritans who were discriminated against by other Jews as related in the incident of the Good Samaritan in chapter 10 of the Gospel of Luke?

  61. Fred says:

    Catherine,
    You sure pumped out a bunch of propaganda in guise of a “snippet”. Do you get paid by the word?

  62. fanto says:

    Peter Scholl-Latour mentions in one his books that the Israeli flag was originally two vertical blue strips, idealized two rivers, Nile and Euphrates, but it was changed to horizontal ones, divided by white . Relata refero.

  63. catherine says:

    ”Among the many very well considered and researched thoughts here one very important is missing: jews, their history, religion and their entire many faced existence are now completely hijacked and misused by the governments which are using the current state of israel as their stronghold/outpost among the people and cultures seeking emancipation and recognition.”
    What governments are using Israel as their stronghold/outpost and for what purpose?

  64. Vegetius says:

    Odd that someone who wanted to escape from the Judaic tradition would surround themselves with Jews.

  65. Vegetius says:

    Haman wanted to, but yeah: it’s almost like the Persians make a distinction between Zionists and Jews.
    Strange this is never reported in the press. I wonder why.

  66. Vegetius says:

    >we MAY see the true face and feel the true soul of the modern jewry
    We ARE seeing the true face of modern jewry: the mask is slipping and this is why mistrust, fear an loathing of Jews is rising all over the world.

  67. Babak Makkinejad says:

    Don’t look at me, I had nothibg to do with it.
    Likely, like Einstein or Freud, she only felt comforted with other Jews.

  68. Babak Makkinejad says:

    It is not reported because fot the first time in 2500 years Yehud have harmed Iran.

  69. catherine says:

    ”You sure pumped out a bunch of propaganda in guise of a “snippet”. Do you get paid by the word?”
    I see you are still hanging on my every word….I ‘am flattered, but seriously you should find a commenter more on your particular wave length to engage with.

  70. Kilo 4/11 says:

    Yes, we had high standards once.

  71. johnf says:

    Yes, they are.

  72. sova says:

    Thanks for confirming my most important assumption: you ARE confusing the face and soul of jewry imposed on it by their current govenment with the one we MAY see if it was free to show itsef! The most accurate and profound messages from otherwise excellent discussion in this entire tread is that thie face and sould are NOT monolitic – the abusers did their best (as DH points out MILDLY) to hide it and place instead an adversarial front. BUT this is only the front of face and soul of that abuser!! Wake up please and look further around – there’s lots more to see.

  73. sova says:

    On stupidity & insults:
    I wish this didn’t have to go through the entire thread as it’s personal – it would appear I need to be enlightened: which words from my comment were stupid and insulting to you?? I honestly do not see them and would appreciate education! I would appreciate this education because none of insulting stupidities were not intentional even if it’s only you who see them.. sincerely!
    On religious wars: Thanks again for confirming my original thesis: religious wars have always been started and used as means by religious entities. NOT religious individuals (like those discussing the matter here). Those (individuals) have mostly always accepted recruitment by one or the other parties in the war. IN this discussion I see many who ARE NOT AT WAR. IF you really want to be honest you could tell us to which warring sides you belong so we all can be placed more accurately on the map of this discourse..

  74. And I’m brownish because I work outside a fair bit. Come on Babak – we’re in danger of sinking into broad stereotypes that don’t match the reality.
    I don’t like Carlin. Not constructive and he went in for an easy and fashionable dissidence that gets us nowhere and that often throws the baby out with the bathwater.
    But when a man you don’t like makes a valid point that point is all the stronger.
    We cringe when someone uses the “wrong” term to refer to this or that group or race. “Brown people” is of course an offensive term – it presupposes that the vast differences that exist between cultures and nations can be boiled down to the accident of skin colour. It suggests a derogatory or condescending attitude to those who live in the ME. And you will cause great embarrassment at an Islington dinner party if you use such a term.
    So we pride ourselves on an acute sensitivity to the feelings of those who are “brown”. We take great pains, often use the most convoluted periphrases, to demonstrate how liberal and free from prejudice we are.
    And then bomb the hell out of them without a second thought. Or cause entire swathes of their countries to be wrecked on a scale not seen since the mayhem on the Eastern Front in the Second World War.
    That is the crazy set of double standards Carlin is exposing to view, and dislike his style and approach as much as we may he is right to do so.
    .
    As for all this talk of Jews, most of it’s beside the point. One does not run the Americans down because the neocons are at the helm at present. Nor my own country because we have a set of neocons running things who are in my view even more objectionable. The Likud coalition in Israel is about as nasty as you could get. They remind me of nothing so much as those Right Sector activists who seized control of the Verkhovna Rada. They talk in much the same way and do much the same if they can.
    Appalling people all. They do appalling things. But are we to tar entire populations with that brush? Of course not.

  75. Fred says:

    Catherine,
    yes indeed, as your actual words in this comment were longer than the ones in the prior, the rest being an extensive quotation from some academics.

  76. Richard Ong says:

    I very much doubt that Prof. MacDonald is unaware of divisions or distinctions between Jews or that he believes they respond like schools of minnows on all issues. Too, I’m sure he would agree that “very many” or “quite a few” Jews engage in the behaviors he is trying to illuminate. One can note the behavior and attitudes of Barbara Lerner, Sheldon Adelson, David Gelbaum, Sandra Bernard, Emanuel Celler, AIPAC, the HIAS, the SPLC, BB, the ADL, and the Board of British Deputies without embracing the stupidity of “all Jews.”

  77. Babak Makkinejad says:

    The word that irks is “irrelevan”.
    If our views are so irrelevant, then why are you here?
    “Soukof the Jewery”? So you are Zionist, and do’t like what you hear? Tough!

  78. Barbara Ann,
    There is a lot here around which I am still trying to get my head.
    To illustrate the fact that it is nonsense to see Jews as monolithic, it may be helpful to hark back to two pieces by Benjamin Schwarz which I have found helpful.
    In May 1995, he published a piece in the ‘Atlantic’ headlined ‘The Diversity Myth’; the sub-heading read: ‘The hortatory version of our history, in which America has long been a land of ethnic tolerance and multicultural harmony, leaves us with nothing useful to say to the failed states and riven polities of the post-Cold War world.’
    (See https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/politics/foreign/divers.htm )
    A central claim he was making, I think it was fair to say, was that, historically, the unity of the United States had come from the imposition of an ‘Anglo’ culture by a self-confident élite.
    He argued, in essence, that resistance to confronting the difficulties of ‘multiculturalism’ at home led to an inability to psychological resistance to confronting the realities of ethnic and religious conflict abroad.
    In January 2016, Schwarz published an article about Britain in ‘The American Conservative’, headlined ‘Unmaking England: Will immigration demolish in decades a nation built over centuries?’, which had useful things to say about the backlash against ‘multiculturalism’ and so the background to the ‘Brexit’ vote that June.
    Unfortunately, the version available on the website leaves out both the second part of the headline, and all the discussion it provoked, so one needs to go back to that on the ‘Wayback Machine.’
    (See https://web.archive.org/web/20160115052926/https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/unmaking-england/ .)
    As I pointed out in my comments, the article was excessively ‘Marxist’, in its discussion of the background to the ‘New Labour’ enthusiasm for unrestricted immigration, but and I also wanted to qualify his – in general rather good – portrayal of the late Enoch Powell, who I actually met a couple of times.
    This also brings up a rather important difference, in you have always been a ‘settler’ society, while we historically have not. (This is not said to approve our condemn, in either case.)
    In a ‘settler’ culture, a ‘second identity’ is natural, in a way that, historically, it simply was not here.
    To cut a long story short, the outcome, over here, is a bizarre polarisation
    On the one hand, we have a very active, not to say strident, ‘Jewish community’, partly I think modelling itself on its American counterpart, which is trying to hold on to two patently contradictory positions.
    It insists that to be a be a Jew is to belong to a ‘people’, whose central history is of ‘exile’ from, and return to, their ‘homeland’ in Palestine, while also claiming that it is ‘anti-Semitic’ to suggest that ‘dual loyalty’ may be an issue.
    But, on the other, there is an extensive body of people, wholly or partly of Jewish ethnic origin, whose lives are inextricably intertwined with those of non-Jews, and who have an extraordinary variety of attitudes to their own Jewish roots, the countries from which their forbears came, the complexities of the culture of the host country, Israel, etc etc.
    Where, as often, such people have no desire at all to identify with the version of Jewish identity put forward by the likes of Rabbi Sacks, a common response is not to attempt to assert an alternative version of that identity, but simple to move further away from it.

  79. Diana C says:

    Very funny! Thanks!

  80. Babak Makkinejad says:

    “Neo-cons” again? What about the Balfour Declaration? What about the relious ideas that causes a Welshman to change his surname to a Hebrew prophet rather than a Percy-Jones?

  81. Babak Makkinejad,
    I think this illustrates the difficulty of making generalisations about Jews in different places,
    It is certainly not true here that all people of Jewish origin and ethnicity are enthusiastic Zionists.
    See my response to Barbara Ann, above.

  82. Diana C says:

    Thank you for this. I will read it as I find time.
    I pronounced the O.E. as I heard my Volga German grandparents pronounce German. My professor liked my pronunciation better than that of the other students’ pronunciation since they had little foreign language experience.
    Even in Middle English there were Germanic influences–despite the Normans’ influence. One I recall is from Canterbury Tales when Chaucer described some people were were not very delicate in their eating habits as “fressen” rather than “essen.” She turned to me to enlighten the rest of the class about the difference.

  83. Diana C says:

    I hope you get this, as I am coming back to the thread late.
    The Volga Deutsch and Black Sea Deutsch were not “expelled.” They left on their own illegally. As for my family, my great uncle had been taken into the last Czar’s army–which was against the agreement that had brought them into Russia under Catherine the Great. He ended up in a Japanese prisoner of war camp for a year until Teddy Roosevelt brokered the peace between Russia and Japan. The army allowed him to return for a while “on leave.” By then, the Bolsheviks were already coming down the Volga and causing chaos in the villages. Our German farms were the ones taken over by the communists for their factory farming and communal farming experiments.
    The Germans who did not get out in time were sent to Siberia. I helped my Grandmother and Great Aunt write a few letters to her at one time when Russia allowed them through.
    There are several very good books available from the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia on the history of my ethnic group–who came to America and gladly became Americans.

  84. Babak Makkinejad says:

    I had qualified my statement by “almost”. In US, the non-Zionists are derided as “self-hating Jews”. I have never met an Iraian Jews that had not imbibed Zionism: they were soft-Zionists.

  85. Babak Makkinejad says:

    I think Pakistanis are more of a threat to the cultural coherence of the settled English culture than the Zionist Jews with their divided loyalties, as you state. Intermarriage, in my opinion, is the only way forward.

  86. prawnik says:

    Unfortunately, Zionism has done wonders to create anti-Semites where none previously existed. God help the Jews if American support for the Zionist project ever were to weaken.
    For the record: I am NO anti-Semite.

  87. jdledell,
    As ever, I find your explications of matters to do with Israel extremely illuminating.
    A very great many of the most interesting Jews here have always ‘married out.’ Sometimes this was because refugees came from assimilated or assimilating families, and simply did here what in other circumstances they would have done in their native countries. But there were all kinds of other reasons – among other things, people often married spouses they met at work.
    The effect though is that there are a great number of people for whom Jewish origins are important, but who do not belong to any kind of ‘Jewish community’ – which tends to become more isolated and out of touch with the surrounding society.
    At the same time, the gap between the conditions of life in Israel and those over here, always wide, gets wider.
    It may be that there is actually a kind of desperation between Rabbi Sacks injunction to be ‘ambassadors for the State of Israel.’ I think the last thing a lot of young people of Jewish origin want to do is to cast themselves as alien in this way.

  88. Diana C, EO:
    Similarities between dialect English and German were the subject of one of the poems that Thomas Hardy wrote during the First World War. It opens:
    ‘I walked in loamy Wessex lanes, afar
    From rail-track and from highway, and I heard
    In field and farmstead many an ancient word
    Of local lineage like “Thu bist,” “Er war,”
    “Ich woll”, “Er sholl”, and by-talk similar,
    Nigh as they speak who in this month’s moon gird
    At England’s very loins, thereunto spurred
    By gangs whose glory threats and slaughters are.’
    (See https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57339/the-pity-of-it .)

  89. smoke says:

    @ BabakM
    Actually, as an American, I’d venture that most Americans today probably don’t know about those past distinctions. Americans are notoriously unconcerned with history, even quite recent history, except perhaps in parts of the South and Massachusetts. That historical interest may have diminished even in those regions today.
    Meanwhile, there is a national mythology of glorious progress, welcoming all comers, which simply overlays the prejudices and resentments of the past.

  90. Mathias Alexander says:

    Yes I am white.
    If European civilization (or any civilization) is a matter of ideas and not of genetics then all the white people in Europe could be replaced by black people and the civiliztion would still be the same as long as they had the same ideas.

  91. Babak Makkinejad says:

    That is fine, only a foreigner, evidently, knows US history better than an American. Haing forgotten the more unattractive aspects of the Past is quite common elsewhere in the world too.

  92. Babak Makkinejad says:

    You are wrong.

  93. LondonBob says:

    Of course, those that constitute the British media couldn’t care less about British people but they care very much about Israel. In reality Israel is very unpopular in Britain so attacking Corbyn for being anti Israel is a big own goal. If the Israeli embassy were a bit smarter they would highlight the IRA angle.
    For the record the Anglican church has always been very pro Palestinian.

  94. Vegetius,
    What I was talking about was one kind of crap producing another. It is absolutely fair comment that the application of modern ‘victim culture’ to Jews, which is actually the responsibility of ‘Anglos’ as well as Jews – the notion that hostility to them is always and invariably a matter of irrational prejudice – is BS.
    And the point of my post was quite precisely to argue that the behaviour of large sections of the Jewish élites in both the United States and Britain is destructive for everyone, up to and including themselves, and it is causing a very great deal of extremely unsurprising resentment.
    (If I was David Brooks, I would not be keen on sending young American men from ‘flyover country’ to fight unwinnable wars, while having no objections to my own son serving in the Israeli, rather than American, armed forces. That again seems to me a clear case of ‘incitement to anti-Semitism.’)
    But then, one of my central objections is to all kinds of ‘totalitarian’ thinking, which treats groups – be they Jews, Germans, Muslims, Americans, Brits, or whoever – as though they were monolithic wholes.
    Among what I find particularly insufferable about Rabbi Sacks is quite precisely the fact that he has had the infernal arrogance to imply that, for instance, Marc Bloch or Osip Mandelstam were not Jews. Rather more serious consideration might have told him that the positions of Jews, and their relations with non-Jews, have been very different in different places at different times.
    What counts is ‘local knowledge.’
    You write:
    ‘A couple of war heroes and a personal anecdote prove nothing.’
    Do you know any Jews from Britain? As it happens, my SWMBO and I have quite a lot of relevant ‘local knowledge’. So, I was mentioning a tiny fraction of a very large sample we have known, some very well, over a rather long time, ranging from erstwhile members of the German and Czech ‘haut bourgeoisie’, to people from the East End of London (many of them.)
    The sample includes some of the admirable people we have known, some of the most contemptible, and a lot in between.
    As it happens, the last thing which Peter Stern suggested was that he was some kind of ‘war hero.’
    As to Peter Ganz, in the light of your somewhat roseate view of what happened on the Eastern Front in 1941-5, I suggest you might usefully dip into the 2011 study ‘Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying – The Secret Second World War Tapes of German POWs’ by Söhnke Neitzel and Harald Welzer’. It is based on the tapes that Ganz and others like him recorded, at Trent Park and elsewhere.
    Having done so, what strikes me as interesting is that he was not anti-German – and nor indeed was Peter Stern.
    This brings me to your suggestion that:
    ‘Here DH (hereafter You) have misrepresented the ideas he has spent the last quarter century developing.’
    As I have already made clear, I think that a good deal of Macdonald wrote he wrote in response to a silly triumphalist account by Sletzkine is cogent.
    However, the piece to which I linked made it absolutely clear that Macdonald is every bit as much in the grip of ‘totalitarian’ thinking as Rabbi Sacks.
    What I learnt from Peter Ganz and Peter Stern is that there were always many different Germanies.
    Unfortunately, it is clear that this is not something Macdonald is prepared to concede – or rather, he denies the legitimacy of any but the rather grim ones he likes.
    So the sentence which I quoted reads:
    ‘Slezkine cites Heinrich Heine as a prime example of a Jewish intellectual with sincere and tender love for German culture, but the Germans, from Wagner to von Treitschke to Chamberlain and Hitler, didn’t see it that way.’
    As it happens, Houston Stewart Chamberlain was not German at all, but a self-hating Englishman, who wanted to be German, of a certain kind – the Wagner/Treitschke kind. And then becomes material that, while I have only qualified belief in the self-evident virtues of ‘Anglo’ culture, it just happens to be my own culture.
    So, you must understand, I am not very keen on Chamberlain. (In ill-tempered moments, I might indeed say ‘traitor.’)
    Let us then see who else is given the same treatment that Rabbi Sacks gives to Bloch and Mandelstam.
    Obviously, the gentle genius of Robert Schumann, some of whose greatest songs are settings of Heine, is excommunicated.
    And what can one say about Friedrich Nietzsche? This deplorable human being – clearly a traitor to the ‘Volk’ – started out as an acolyte of Wagner. Later, he changed his mind, declaring Offenbach (a Jewish refugee from Germany to France, who converted to Roman Catholicism!!!???!!!) the appropriate antidote. Also, you might read Nietzsche’s tribute to Heine in ‘Ecce Homo.’
    And then, Macdonald suggests that Hitler should also be seen as the representative of the ‘true’, ‘real’, ‘authentic’, Germany.
    As you may, or may not, be aware, there was this entity known as the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I had a rather complicated history, and the relations of Germans, and Jews, as well as other peoples, from its territories, with people elsewhere are not exactly a simple story of black and white.
    This brings me on to another figure whom Macdonald has, implicitly, excommunicated, the novelist Thomas Mann. Among other things, he was the author of a classic German statement of what many in the country felt they were fighting for in the First World War, the ‘Reflections of an Unpolitical Man.’
    He also had a Jewish wife. However, his radical change of view, towards support for the Weimar Republic, was decisively shaped by a concrete event: the assassination of Walter Rathenau in June 1922.
    It was actually the Jewish industrialist Rathenau who had kept the German military-industrial machine functioning, in the face of the British naval blockade. After the war, he had taken on the ultimate poisoned challenge, the role of Foreign Minister.
    Unfortunately, the last thing the German High Command wanted to do was to accept their – quite large – share of responsibility for their country’s defeat. So, they enthusiastically embraced the ‘stab in the back’ myth.
    And one of the ‘StratCom’ experts the ‘Reichwehr’ hired to disseminate it was a – somewhat traumatised – veteran called Adolf Hitler. And he enthusiastically embraced the notion that the German defeat was really the responsibility of ‘the Jews.’
    In the event, he also radicalised the ‘geopolitical’ thinking which had shaped the war aims defined by figures like Ludendorff in the later period of the war.
    If you want, I can supply more references for this.
    A key point, however, is that Hitler had spent his war fighting forces from the British Empire. Unsurprisingly, he had been impressed by the fact that Germany had ended up fighting a coherent ‘Anglosphere’ – which came to include the decisive presence of the United States.
    What Hitler concluded – see the ‘Zweites Buch’ of 1928 – was that Germany needed to conquer ‘Lebensraum’ in the East.
    One key presumption being that the Slavs could be treated as the Americans had the ‘Red Indians.’ Supposedly, it was only the diabolically clever Jews who could prevent the – slavish – Slavs receiving their just deserts, so creating a situation where Germans could face Americans on equal terms.
    (I do not much like Timothy Snyder, any more than Rabbi Sachs or Kevin Macdonald, but a 2017 piece entitled ‘Hitler’s American Dream: The dictator modeled his racial campaign after another conquest of land and people – America’s Manifest Destiny’ – is I think to the point.
    See https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/03/nazi-germanys-american-dream-hitler-modeled-his-concept-of-racial-struggle-and-global-campaign-after-americas-conquest-of-native-americans.html .)
    However, precisely as Peter Ganz and Peter Stern taught me, the fact that, at a time of great crisis, Germans did come to see Hitler as their ‘representative individual’ did not mean that ‘Anglo’ Germanophobes were right in seeing this as representing a fundamental truth about German culture, a direction in which it had been heading for centuries.
    Likewise, the stupid abuse of the ‘cult of the Shoah’, to use Babak Makkinejad’s term, does not justify turning it on its head, and inverting a kind of silly – ‘Disneyland’ one might say – drama of Jews as eternal victims so it reverts to something close to Hitler’s vision, which destroyed Germany.

  95. J says:

    That’s what the Satmar Rebbe has been saying that Zionism and the creation of the Zionist Israeli state is an affront to Heaven and to the Nations, and because of it, endangers Jews world wide with hatred against them that did not exist before. The Zionist State of Israel is doing to the Palestinians exactly what the Nazi SS did to Jewish old men, old women, and children. Herd them like cattle and use their rifle stocks to knock them down into the dirt, and if they rise and show independence, the IDF shoots them down like dogs, and there is little to no legal action taken against them. It was just a Palestinian, who cares is their attitude and actions. Thing is that Heaven is watching, and they’re going to pay a heavy price for it, when Heaven decides enough is enough and takes action.

  96. Babak – the reason I don’t buy your civilisational clash is simply because I don’t see it. I do see an ideological clash getting under way but I see it as being within the West. There’s always the possibility on that that you are the wise man and I the fool.
    On the points you touch on above –
    1. I don’t know how much it’s permissible to stretch the term neocon from its specifically American meaning to cover those loosely referred to as such outside the States. Not much, to judge from Wiki –
    Historically speaking, the term “neoconservative” refers to those who made the ideological journey from the anti-Stalinist left to the camp of American conservatism during the 1960s and 1970s.[4] The movement had its intellectual roots in the Jewish monthly review magazine Commentary, edited by Norman Podhoretz and published by the American Jewish Committee.[5][6] They spoke out against the New Left and in that way helped define the movement.
    Well, that’s not a definition that’ll serve for Johnson or Mogherini even though their actions, as far as their more limited capacities allow, are potentially as vicious as those of the American neocons. But words have a habit of running free from their original or specialist meanings so it’s not too much of a stretch. “Mini-neocons”, perhaps?
    And Macron and his mates don’t want to be that mini either –
    https://www.politico.eu/article/france-european-army-pesco-macron-merkel/
    But if we need another word the concept itself is not limited to a specific area or time. The settlement of large numbers of Jews in the Holy Land, were it done today, would certainly be regarded as a neocon venture now whatever the right term was then. Vice-President Biden in 2013 –
    http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/if-there-were-no-israel-wed-have-to-invent-one-biden-55494
    2. As for names, they’ve been taken out of the Old Testament here since the conversion of England. Not my fault. I put forward powerful arguments for Outsider infants to be given such names as Hereward or Aethelstan or Ethelfrida, but they were firmly and repeatedly ruled out of court by SWMBO. Such is fate.
    Hereward would have been good though, given what May and Johnson did with Brexit. Looks like the freedom fighters of today are in for the long haul too.
    Don’t mention any of this last to the Colonel. His forefathers beat up Hereward & Co. something cruel and he still refuses to discuss reparations.

  97. turcopolier says:

    EO
    And then they took the heiresses. So I have both Norman and Saxon blood.

  98. Babak Makkinejad says:

    You are raised not to see this religious clash across civilizational boundaries.
    The war over Palestine, which even the United States with all her powers cannot bring to an end, has lasted long enough to make it clear that the Balfour Declaration was the equivalent of Urban II call for a Crusade, but this time by Protestants.

  99. Babak Makkinejad says:

    Very valiant effort at untangling all of these threads of historical process. But Chamberlain was only articulating a very common attitude towards Jews in Europe. Thete once was a magical country called Germany that Prussian Germans destroyed.

  100. Just a note to say I was wrong about names. OE texts mention enough Biblical names but such names did not become commonly used as Christian names until later. Pre-conquest almost all had English names.
    On the clash of civilisations are you sure you are not attributing this to a natural tendency to assume other cultures or outside groups are inferior? The Chinese, the Japanese, the French and of course the Scots being noted for such a belief?
    More seriously, you may be picking up trends or views I don’t come across. Whether that is the case or not our internal conflicts are real enough and for most of us far outweigh any desire the average person might have to impose our values on others, would you not agree?

  101. harry says:

    Indeed! At a minimum, 70,000 Satmars argue that Israel doesn’t represent them and they wish nothing to do with it. Perhaps you might think them bad Jews, but who would argue that they are not Jews? It is clearly nonsense.

  102. Babak Makkinejad says:

    When George Bush declared enemies of Israel to be those of United States, UK joined her in that endeavour. In fact, the sitting PM at the time, one Tory Blair, has often spoken since his retirement of the absolute need to crush Iran. Iran, Iraq, Syria: where Muslim Civilization was formed. How you cannot be aware of all of this is beyond me.

  103. harry says:

    Thank you for your thought provoking observations. But surely Tel Aviv is home top many secular Jews?

  104. Babak Makkinejad says:

    The United States is home to the most of non-observant, non-religious Israeli Jews and not Tel Aviv.

  105. optimax says:

    Babak,
    You’re thinking of WASP. All WASPs are White, not all Whites are WASP. First the progs attacked the WASP as the oppressive American elitebut have since broadened their shot to include all Whites. Don’t even here the word much anymore. I was raised a WASP, found out I had Irish blood, thought I had to give up my exalted status,but am reclaiming it.

  106. johnf says:

    This morning’s papers in Britain run banner headlines of Britain’s Chief Rabbi denouncing Jeremy Corbyn (who has extremely close relationships with the jewish communities within his own constituency) as a demonic anti-semite.
    He is playing with fire. Especially among the young who have no memories of The Holocaust.

  107. vig says:

    sova, I liked your comment, thus am a bit surprised about Babak’s response.
    I did find Ligurio’s comment above interesting too, but would want to know more about the larger context of the Counter-Reformation, Reformation and/or European Jews over the centuries up to rhe respective secular states responses to the 19th century Papal infallibility dogma. 😉
    … Religous communities on the other hand still are a dominant pillar in elections I suppose especially in the US. Elsewhere?
    Now that we have a (historically late, Jewish settler state?) or a democratic “Jewish State” where secular and religous power are closely connected this obviously changed matters dramatically.
    Considering the burden of history no easy comparisons or analyses possible? But why not try anyway?

  108. vig says:

    prawnik, I am somewhat hesitant of easy acolytes or followers. Maybe I always was.
    Random link to Steve Sailer, who was clearly on the (extreme?) right when I first stumbled across him. Nevertheless, I found his critique of Mac Donald interesting when I stumbled across it more then a felt decade ago. Long before that time Slavoj Zizek drew my attention via then still odd usenet channels and thus long, long before he gained his status as tEurope’s hippest philosopher.
    Anyway it seems that Steve Sailer picked up on a bit of his earlier intest via Cultural Marxist Slavoj Zizek:
    http://www.unz.com/isteve/slavoj-zizek-on-kevin-macdonalds-culture-of-critique/

  109. Great comments, Mr Habakkuk. Great article. Loved it. Purely from my own personal perspective, you understand, you are exploring that tricky ground where patriotism shades into ultra-nationalism, whether we are Jewish, Ukrainian or Anglo.
    Reading around the Likudniks are on a loser. Partial ethnic cleansing with the displaced ringing your borders? Never going to work. Must have been obvious since before Jabotinsky. Becoming increasingly obvious to the young. I believe that accounts for the shrill and often imperious tone of desperation we see so much of at the moment from the ultra-Zionists.
    Wish there was some way of talking them down. It’s not my background but I have a lot of time for Jewish culture and Jewish scholarship. Don’t like to see so many racing into a cul-de-sac.

  110. Ah, the mystery of Blair! How did such a low-life get whirled up to the summit of UK politics? And it was scarcely a temporary fluke. We kept re-electing the bastard. Doesn’t that support the thesis that his psycho foreign policy mirrored a deep psychosis in the English?
    I say no. 1. Voting here has been “least worst option” voting for most as far back as I can remember. 2. Blair was shallow enough but the information operation Alastair Campbell set up was vicious and formidable. Remains so.
    As far as foreign policy goes, Babak, you will I hope permit me the assertion that we are in an information war, not a civilisational one. If the average English man or woman knew a tenth of what we get up to abroad they’d be horrified.

  111. The heiresses too, Colonel? I suppose if one steals an entire country a few heiresses are neither here nor there.
    On the issue of reparations we aren’t after anything as vulgar as money. We just want to borrow your President for a day or two. There’s a little local difficulty here he’d sort out in two seconds flat. He already has a large fan club waiting for him and he gets on well with the Queen, so he won’t mind.

  112. Richard Morcoe says:

    Don’t need a treaty. Nothing stopping us from leaving but us. Just hop on the bus, Gus.

  113. vig, (aka?)
    While I know little about what Steve Sailer’s history, a great deal of what he has written recently seems to me very much to the point.
    Yesterday, his blog on the ‘Unz Review’ site featured a piece headlined:
    ‘David Frum Accuses Tucker Carlson of Dual Loyalties to the Moscow-Fox Axis of White Evil’
    As it bears rather directly on what I was trying to argue, and Sailer is – characteristically – succinct – it seems appropriate to quote what he wrote in full:
    ‘As I mentioned yesterday, a lot of the current push for World War III is coming from media types who are getting themselves all worked up over their feelings that the World Is Already At War between the Moscow-Tehran-Fox News Axis of Evil and the Beltway-Jerusalem-Kiev Alliance of Niceness. For example, just now:
    ‘“David Frum @davidfrum
    ‘“Major theme of Trumpapocalypse: Trump admirers like @TuckerCarlson describe themselves as ‘nationalist.’ But their nationalism attaches not to the multiracial American nation and its capital in Washington, but to a multinational white race with a capital in Moscow.”
    ‘But really, if David could just come visit the Ethnic Foods aisle in my dad’s old Jon’s Supermarket in Valley Village, CA, he could see how all sorts of people who are some fraction of both sides in this conflict inside David’s head. Yet, they all seem to get along well enough. So we really don’t need to get into a tank war on the Eastern Front.’
    (See https://www.unz.com/isteve/david-frum-accuses-tucker-carlson-of-dual-loyalties-to-the-moscow-tehran-fox-axis-of-evil/ .)
    In fairness to Frum, he has advocated reducing immigration, so I cannot regard it as a completely open-and-shut case that he is ‘guilty as charged’ in relation to the indictment of Jews which Kevin Macdonald presents.
    The ‘tweet’ which Sailer quotes however does generate a rather strong ‘prima facie’ case that he is one of a very significant body of influential Jews in relation to whom Macdonald’s analysis has great force.
    It is highly relevant that there are many Jews in whom ‘universalist’ pretensions have in the past, and still do, masked concern for the interests of their own group; and it is also rather important that some such people patently do have an almost hysterical fear of traditional ‘Anglo’ culture, and think that Jews will be safer if it is diluted by ‘multiculturalism.’
    The suggestion that somehow ‘Whites’ who see they are being targeted, and perceive this as an ‘existential threat’, are part of some kind of ‘multinational white race with a capital in Moscow’ lets slip the undertones of manic hysteria which one can often find in these people.
    Another very revealing piece was the article headline ‘A Return to National Greatness’ which David Brooks published in the ‘New York Times’ in February 2017.
    (See https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/03/opinion/a-return-to-national-greatness.html .)
    He explains his version of the ‘American myth’, which, he claims was ‘embraced and lived out by everybody from Washington to Lincoln to Roosevelt to Reagan’, claiming that:
    ‘It gave America a mission in the world – to spread democracy and freedom. It gave us an attitude of welcome and graciousness, to embrace the huddled masses yearning to breathe free and to give them the scope by which to realize their powers.’
    Having noted some of the reasons the ‘myth’ had been ‘battered’ – and here, he is partly right – Brooks continued:
    ‘And so along come men like Donald Trump and Stephen Bannon with a countermyth. Their myth is an alien myth, frankly a Russian myth. It holds, as Russian reactionaries hold, that deep in the heartland are the pure folk who embody the pure soul of the country – who endure the suffering and make the bread. But the pure peasant soul is threatened. It is threatened by the cosmopolitan elites and by the corruption of foreign influence.’
    Here, I have to take a deep breath, before trying to work out how far sheer ignorance and intellectual incompetence is at issue, and how far trauma, often understandable, but which, if people cannot even try to work their way through it, renders them totally unfit to have a shaping role in the politics of any country, anywhere.
    Perhaps Brooks might usefully read the 2006 Elie Kedourie Memorial Lecture, ‘Nation and Covenant: The Contribution of Ancient Israel to Modern Nationalism,’ by Anthony D. Smith.
    (See https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/pba151p213.pdf .)
    Ironically, Kedourie, a Jew who found refuge here from the shipwreck of the Ottoman Empire, together with his fellow Jew Ernest Gellner, who found refuge here from the ruins of the Hapsburg Empire, and is also referred to in the lecture, are among the key theorists of ‘nationalism.’
    There are two pathetically primitive delusions which Brooks might not have put on show, had he displayed any indications whatsoever of having made the least attempt to read any of the relevant scholarly literature.
    To suggest that ‘ethnonationalism’ is somehow distinctively Russian tells you 1. that one is ignorant of the history of nationalism, which is hardly a invention of that country, and 2. one is unable to escape the traumas relating to some of its effects there.
    It also suggests a total inability to cope with the fact that ‘nationalism’ is a part of the modern world, and is shot through with ambivalences. Anyone who tells you that there is some kind of simple thing, which can be categorised as simply ‘bad’ or ‘good’, is either a fool or a knave, if not both.
    And then, there is the subject matter on which the lecture by Antony D. Smith is illuminating, although he does not draw out some implications of his argument.
    Put simply, Frum and Brooks are trying to use some of the resonances of the ‘Old Testament’ roots of common ‘nationalist’ narratives, in a ‘post-Holocaust’ world, to suggest that when ‘Whites’ incline towards ‘ethnonationalism’, we are on the slippery slope towards genocide, but when Jews do, nobody can object.
    As to the notion that ‘ethnonationalism’ is a distinctive characteristic of contemporary Russia.
    Perhaps Frum and Brooks are too ignorant to know what the late Yevgeny Primakov, the shaping influence behind Putin’s foreign policy was, technically speaking, a Jew: his maternal grandmother was a Jewish mill owner’s daughter, who rebelled, and married a common worker.
    As for the ‘Old Mohican’ General of the Army Makhmut Akhmetovich Gareev (note names), founder-President of the ‘Academy of Military Sciences’, where, supposedly, the schemes for the destruction of the West by ‘hybrid warfare’ are worked out, he is an ethnic Tatar, who from time to time invokes Allah.
    (See https://realnoevremya.com/articles/220 .)
    Anyone who takes the trouble to do quick searches with ‘Google’ on key figures – try Sergei Shoigu, Vladislav Surkov, Margarita Simonyan, Sergei Lavrov, and Valery Gergiev – should be able to see how utterly intellectually incompetent Frum and Brooks are.
    It would not be simply silly to suggest that Putin is a certain kind of ‘cultural nationalist’ – in which case, the appropriate analogy, in an American or British context, would be with people who are not worried about the ‘ethnic’ identity of immigrants, so long as they are prepared to assimilate to ‘Anglo’ culture.
    Also relevant is the fact that Putin rather clearly represents a reaction against the Bolshevik version of the kind of ‘universalistic messianism’ of which Frum and Brooks have been leading champions.
    A corollary of this, of course, was well-expressed in the phrase ‘axis of evil’, which Frum coined for George W. Bush, and which was the title of the book he subsequently co-authored with Richard Perle. The enemies of a supposedly universal truth are naturally cast as demons.
    And the ‘axis of evil’ notion would, of course, be further ‘grist’ to the ‘mill’ which Kevin Macdonald is ‘grinding’, as the universalist ideology was being used to demonise enemies of Israel.
    From my own point of view, another part of the indictment against Frum relates to the fact that, from 2014 to 2017, he was Chairman of the Board of Trustees of a British ‘think tank’ known as ‘Policy Exchange’. Its Director is Dean Godson, brother of Roy and son of Joseph. His successor in the post was Alexander Downer.
    From an item on their website from September 2016:
    ‘Policy Exchange’s Director, Dean Godson, has been recognised as one of the most influential figures in London. The Evening Standard’s ‘Top 1000’ list references Godson’s work in their annual index.
    ‘“Fiercely bright Godson, formerly chief leader writer at the Daily Telegraph, has been described as Britain’s acknowledged expert on the problem of social cohesion. The establishment of an “integration hub” at the think tank this year may prove timely as the Government looks to tackle issues connected to immigration and integration.”’
    (See https://policyexchange.org.uk/news/the-evening-standard-names-policy-exchanges-director-dean-godson-one-of-the-most-influential-figures-in-london/ .)
    The notion of Godson as ‘fiercely bright’ is a bad joke. In fact, he is a silly man – as is indeed illustrated by his inability to see that the natural effect of attempt to disseminate, and defend, patently absurd ‘narratives’ is that the ‘counter-narratives’ of Kevin Macdonald and people like him gain increasing traction.
    But at that point, I have to say, ‘a plague on both your houses’.
    Precisely as Steve Sailer suggests, there are all kinds of people, of many different origins, including very many Jews, both here and on your side, who have no desire to fight some kind of ‘war’ against ‘Anglo’ culture.
    Such people can often see that ‘invade the world, invite the world’ is suicidal for us all, but can also often value many things not only about ‘Anglo’ but also other, include prominently Jewish, heritages.

  114. Babak Makkinejad says:

    You are in denial.

  115. Eric Newhill says:

    Babak,
    Vegetius makes sense to me. He’s exactly right. When leftists and minorities are making excuses for their failures, they blame white people. When white people talk about race, they are told that it’s an artificial concept. Typical bait and switch from the usual suspects.
    As someone who’s real name has multiple syllables and ends in “ian” am I entitled to reparations, free pass to the university of my choice, preferential hiring? My father and grandparents didn’t think they were discriminated against in the US – now in Muslim Land, yes, of course. But not here. Armenians worked hard and assimilated into US culture. It’s all about attitude and actions and intelligence and discipline at the end of the day. People from backwards cultures fail to grasp that. They are too primitive; perhaps right down to their very genes.

  116. Eric Newhill says:

    Very funny cannon cocker

  117. anon says:

    Ahhh so.Jews must take there anti semitism lying down because it is well deserved.Zionism is anti semitisms bastard child,the reaction against anti semitism.Let us not confuse what came first.At least have the courage to acknowledge this.Rabbi Sacks is no fool.He knows exactly what is at stake.

  118. anon says:

    A.semites are useful idiots for a countries enemies.Anti semitism is a useful tool for divide and conquer of western countries.Attack the jews and you attack the economy.Britain is in its final stages of collapse.When the jews leave a country its all over.

  119. turcopolier says:

    anon
    When are you leaving Australia?

  120. artemesia says:

    Thank you for informative reply.

  121. Babak Makkinejad says:

    And is he God to decide if a hero of French Resitance was not a Jew? How the Hell does he think he is?

  122. artemesia says:

    My mother came here from (central) Italy in 1934 when she was 12 or so; Dad was born here but his mother and father came from same village as Mom, a village that was established by a German prince in the 1600s. So I’m Italian. Also pinkish-white skin, green-eyed, medium brown hair — when I visited Iran, Iranian women remarked at my green eyes, but that’s not the point I wanted to make.
    Italians from Naples and other points south were frequently considered in the same category as Blacks — they looked dark, did the same types of work. Italian men were lynched in Louisiana in 1891.
    I used to live in Charlottesville and the events there were distressing. They did not fit the character of C’ville as I had experienced and enjoyed the place. So when the opportunity arose, I participated in a ‘sensitivity training’ designed by the Episcopal Diocese of DC — C’ville is old-line Episcopal, and under the authority of the DC hierarchy.
    The seminar was conducted by Black men and women, and the approach was basically a shake-down: “You should be ashamed of being white and of having taken advantage of us Black people. We’re here to help you apologize.” This message was conveyed through sets of “speed-dating” — a question or statement was posed, then Group A had 2 min. to react to his counterpart in Group B, then Group A moved down the line and the question/reaction was repeated.
    And so, this first generation Italian-American, child of laborers and ditch-diggers, was called to account by the 6th generation son/grandson of college professors, himself a PhD, and challenged to apologize for having participated in his family’s enslavement.
    I was astounded at the number of (mostly) women, long-time members of Episcopal church, i.e. WASPs, who completely abased themselves in the course of this ‘training.’
    The seminar was capped by a dinner. I did not stay for dinner.
    There is so very much more to “diversity” and race relations than just Black and white-ish, and also as witness the discussion raging on Unz just now over the hyphenation of Judeo- and -Christian.
    It is not likely that my immediate Italian ancestors were educated, nor even able to write their names: Italy remained feudal for much longer than some other European states. I believe Germans probably had greater literacy when they came to US, as did many Irish, and of course the English.
    If we can’t make distinctions that are both more nuanced and more important then just “Black-White, Christian-Jew (Muslim),” how in the world are we ever going to integrate millions of Hispanics, Arabs, Eastern Europeans, Middle Easterners, all with their widely varying habits of mind and levels of cultural development, literacy, skills and employment experiences and expectations. We have to talk about these issues in a much more specific and far less self-censoring, PC manner.
    The difference between my own background and that of the person I married, whose family members owned farms from which they watched men fight in the Civil War, gradually revealed itself to be a huge chasm between cultural backgrounds that was extremely difficult to bridge.

  123. turcopolier says:

    Artemesia
    A lot of “sensitivity training” is highly abusive and has been so for a long time. Watch what happens now as the whole commonwealth of Virginia is subjected to “sensitivity training” by the radicals.

  124. Kilo 4/11 says:

    Thanks for the compliment, but it’s an honor I can’t claim – I lived mostly in the FDC bunker by day and out on the perimeter at night.

  125. artemesia says:

    “It was actually the Jewish industrialist Rathenau who had kept the German military-industrial machine functioning, in the face of the British naval blockade.”

    When Bloomberg announced his candidacy, I thought of Rathenau. “International Jewry” had a fraught relationship with him, many thinking him insufficiently concerned with what “is good for the Jews.”
    As regards Rathenau keeping “the German military-industrial machine functioning,” in The Transfer Agreement, Edwin Black implicitly blames Rathenau for the starvation-deaths of 800,000 German civilians. In a chapter titled, The Weapon Hitler Feared, Black wrote:

    ” Before the blockade was lifted, 800,000 malnourished German civilians perished. Actually, the blockade created less of a food shortage for Germany, which was 80 percent food self-sufficient before the war, than did the short-sighted policy of pulling Germans off the farms to fight without compensating for reduced food production.”

    If it was Rathenau who “kept the military-industrial machine running,” then it was Rathenau who influenced that “short-sighted policy” that caused starvation.
    Be that as it may, the starvation was real, and as Black explains in detail, within a very few weeks of Hitler’s chancellorship and at least five years before the hair on the head of a single Jew had been harmed, “International Jewry” met, decided, published and implemented a program of economic war against Germany, intended to pose a threat to Germany’s economic existence, but also, as the chapter’s title suggests, deliberately playing on the present memory of many German people of having been starved to death. Jews deliberately used the psychological terror of starvation against an already fractured and demoralized people.
    That scenario is being repeated this very day.
    Mike Pompeo declared that Iran’s

    “leadership has to make a decision that they want their people to eat. . . . that they want to use their wealth to import medicine and not use their wealth to fund Qasem Soleimani’s travels . . .”,

    to which Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif responded at Astana Conference:

    ““Today the Secretary of State of the United States says publicly: ‘If Iran wants to eat, it has to obey the United States.’ This is a war crime. Starvation is a crime against humanity.”

    The British imposed the WWI blockade that cost the lives of 800,000 German civilians. Chaim Weizmann played a major role in prolonging that war in order to squeeze out of the British sponsorship of “a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.” In his autobiography, Trial and Error, (read it online) Weizmann cavalierly dismisses the charge that he “prolonged the war by two years” after detailing his maneuverings to derail a peace-keeping mission of Henry Morgenthau, Sr.
    In June, 1917, before the Balfour declaration was sealed, Morgenthau, former ambassador to Turkey, thought he could persuade the Turks to quit the war. Louis Brandeis alerted Weizmann to this plan, whereupon Weizmann, in consultation with Felix Frankfurter, concerned that such an outcome “would compromise the Zionist project,” arranged to divert Morgenthau from his planned meetings: “It was no job at all to persuade Mr. Morgenthau to drop the project. He simply persuaded himself, and before long announced his intention of going to Biarritz instead of Egypt.”
    Weizmann, Brandeis and Frankfurter had, indeed, been responsible for prolonging the war, for the benefit of the zionist project.
    We, the American people supported the blockade that, as Lesley Stahl reminded Madeleine Albright, cost the lives of half-a-million Iraqi children.
    Since 1995, when AIPAC agents drafted the D’Amato Sanctions legislation, we the American people have provided the enforcement muscle behind the Jewish desire to economically destroy Iran. In 2007 Ed Royce, then-representative from heavily-Iranian Jewish Orange County, CA, stated that the goal of sanctions was to so rile the Iranian people that they would riot and overthrow their government.
    That is no different from the tactics Jewish leaders used against Germany in 1916-1919, and again 1933 -1940. When collective punishment by threat of starvation of civilians did not work, British and USA resorted to a campaign of terror bombing.
    Is that what’s next for Iran?
    Never again?
    —-
    I disagree with several other elements of Habakuk’s narrative, but that’s for another day.

  126. Babak Makkinejad says:

    Hey, you won’t ever get me to say anything bad about Armenians: many were my classmates in Alborz Highscool and many more served honorably in Engineering units during Iran-Iraw War. A few were martyred. In Iran, in Lebanon, or in Syria, Armenians are not the ones who aim to destroy the state; Sunni Kurds are.

  127. Babak Makkinejad says:

    I agree, sensitivity training as you describe it is foolish. And its indulgence by Americans indicates, quite patently, the intellectual failure of the Enlightenment Tradition; where such distinctions were supposed to have been obliterated by the Cult of Reason.

  128. Babak Makkinejad says:

    But Sally Henning’s treatment was another indication of the shortcomings of the Enlightenment Tradition; marrying her would have socially destroyed Jefferson. And a similar situation obtained in France and in England. I think intermarriage is the only way forward, then and now.

  129. Babak Makkinejad says:

    Lastly, I think Italy is the greatest country on Earth, without a doubt, and the most civilized. I feel sorry for where they are, perennially choosing bad leaders since before Mussolini. I confess that I do not know why, they are a great people.

  130. JP Billen says:

    In the Iran-Iraq War tens of thousands of Kurds, both Sunni and Shia, were martyred fighting for Iran.
    But lately, it appears that ordinary Shia Persians are trying to destroy the state. They have burned over 700 banks (many owned by the IRGC), gas stations, and government sites in Tehran and throughout the country. 4000 arrested. It is being blamed on outside influence. The leadership apparently believes that life is so wonderful in Iran that all citizens are content an everything would be fine if only the Pahlavis, the CIA, the Saudis, and the Gulfies would leave them alone.

  131. turcopolier says:

    JP Billen
    I was a participant in that war. I would say that the northern Kurds fought for themselves, not for Iran. The great makority of them were Sunni and had no particular adherence to Shia causes.

  132. Babak Makkinejad says:

    JP Billen
    2500 Revolutionary Guards were killed by Kurds to restore – again for the hundreth time – the writ of the central government in Western Iran.
    Hey, you guys started this long war and cannot expect it to be a picnic for Iranians.

  133. Leith says:

    You are right about the Peshmerga in northern Iraq. With Iranian support they liberated Sulaymaniyah and came within an inch or two on the map of liberating Kirkuk. But they fought for themselves and NOT for Iran and the Ayatollahs. Ironically they fought under the command of General Shirazi, the man who had butchered as many Kurds as Saddam had. But there were many Iranian Kurds conscripted into the Regular Army and even some into the Basij. I was speaking of them.
    I for one and I think most here would like to hear of your experiences during that war.

  134. JJackson says:

    “Once the current state of israel let’s its inhabitants become true neighbours with all other peoples among which they live …”
    That seems wildly optimistic and highly unlikely to happen. The Israeli voters are not going to resolve the problem with their neighbours without giving up much of the occupied territories and with about a tenth of the electorate now living there suggesting such a thing would be political suicide.

  135. turcopolier says:

    leith
    My memoir is at DoD for security review. We will see what they will let me publish about that.

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