http://eternalsuns888earthslight.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/Haudenosaunee4
http://www.scribd.com/WithinUsGermanyIsStirring
Anti-Racist is a Code Word 4 Anti-White !
Anti-Semite is Code Word 4 Anti-German !
Temple of Wotan
“We Must Secure The Existence Of Our People And A Future For White Children”
http://www.davidlane1488.com/14wordsdecoded.html
http://www.davidlane1488.com/sevenseals.html
“BECAUSE The Beauty Of The White Aryan Woman Must Not Perish From The Earth”
http://www.bu.edu/classics/people/faculty/carl-a-p-ruck/
The Natural Man is a Warrior !
http://www.eustacemullins.us/
http://www.youtube.com/user/truthwillout1003/videos?view=0
http://nationalprotectionism.com/http://www.renegadebroadcasting.com
http://esoterx.com/2012/12/09/ghost-riders-in-the-sky-the-wild-hunt-and-the-eternal-stampede/
http://whiterabbitradio.net/how-whites-took-over-america
http://whiteswillwinparty.wordpress.com/truthful-sites/
http://see_the_truth.webs.com/
http://whitegenocideproject.com/about-genocide-through-assimilation/
http://www.whitakeronline.org/blog
Jewish Bolshevism = Cultural Marxism = international Communism
http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Bolshevism
= Exterminate Goyim/Gentiles/Pagans/Our inDigeNous AnceStars/Nature Understanding
A People that Shall Dwell Alone
Separation and its Discontents
The Jewish problem is one of the greatest problems in the western world, and, pace counter-jihadists and other naïve conservatives, no man can be considered mature until he has striven to face it. Therefore, besides readable and very entertaining histories of the white race, a specific study on the Jewish question is fundamental. The above books comprise Kevin MacDonald’s magnum opus on Jewry.
http://kevinmacdonaldespanol.wordpress.com/category/cofcs-preface/
MacDonald’s preface to The Culture of Critique (see link above), which he wrote four years after finishing the trilogy, can be read as a didactic introduction to the whole trilogy.
Presently I am reading the sections of the second book on how otherwise individualist whites elaborated collectivist group strategies in the form of the Early Medieval Church and, more recently, the (aborted) National Socialist movement in Germany. These are mirror images of Judaism as a reaction to a perceived group conflict, precisely what the blogger Svigor has been calling “towards white Zionism.” Although MacDonald’s study is academic, what I am reading now in Separation and its Discontents is pretty captivating. It seems to me that a future movement of white collectivism inspired in these precedents is the only way to racial preservation.
“The Jewish problem is one of the greatest problems in the world, and no man, be he writer, politician or diplomatist, can be considered mature until he has striven to face it squarely on its merits.”
—Henry Wickham Steed
The Culture of Critique’s
opening paragraphs
in the Preface:
The Culture of Critique (hereafter, CofC) was originally published in 1998 by Praeger Publishers, an imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. The thesis of the book is a difficult one indeed, not only because it is difficult to establish, but also because it challenges many fundamental assumptions about our contemporary intellectual and political existence.
CofC describes how Jewish intellectuals initiated and advanced a number of important intellectual and political movements during the 20th century. I argue that these movements are attempts to alter Western societies in a manner that would neutralize or end anti-Semitism and enhance the prospects for Jewish group continuity either in an overt or in a semi-cryptic manner. Several of these Jewish movements (e.g., the shift in immigration policy favoring non-European peoples) have attempted to weaken the power of their perceived competitors—the European peoples who early in the 20th century had assumed a dominant position not only in their traditional homelands in Europe, but also in the United States, Canada, and Australia. At a theoretical level, these movements are viewed as the outcome of conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews in the construction of culture and in various public policy issues. Ultimately, these movements are viewed as the expression of a group evolutionary strategy by Jews in their competition for social, political and cultural dominance with non-Jews.
Here I attempt to answer some typical criticisms that have been leveled against CofC. (See also my website). I also discuss issues raised by several books that have appeared since the publication of CofC.
There have been complaints that I am viewing Judaism in a monolithic manner. This is definitely not the case. Rather, in each movement that I discuss, my methodology has been:
(1.) Find influential movements dominated by Jews, with no implication that all or most Jews are involved in these movements and no restrictions on what the movements are. For example, I touch on Jewish neo-conservatism which is a departure in some ways from the other movements I discuss. In general, relatively few Jews were involved in most of these movements and significant numbers of Jews may have been unaware of their existence. Even Jewish leftist radicalism—surely the most widespread and influential Jewish subculture of the 20th century—may have been a minority movement within Jewish communities in the United States and other Western societies for most periods. As a result, when I criticize these movements I am not necessarily criticizing most Jews. Nevertheless, these movements were influential and they were Jewishly motivated.
(2.) Determine whether the Jewish participants in those movements identified as Jews and thought of their involvement in the movement as advancing specific Jewish interests. Involvement may be unconscious or involve self-deception, but for the most part it was quite easy and straightforward to find evidence for these propositions. If I thought that self-deception was important (as in the case of many Jewish radicals), I provided evidence that in fact they did identify as Jews and were deeply concerned about Jewish issues despite surface appearances to the contrary. (See also Ch. 1 of CofC.)
(3.) Try to gauge the influence of these movements on non-Jewish society. Keep in mind that the influence of an intellectual or political movement dominated by Jews is independent of the percentage of the Jewish community that is involved in the movement or supports the movement.
(4.) Try to show how non-Jews responded to these movements—for example, were they a source of anti-Semitism?
Several of the movements I discuss have been very influential in the social sciences. However, I do not argue that there are no Jews who do good social science, and in fact I provide a list of prominent Jewish social scientists who in my opinion do not meet the conditions outlined under (2) above (see Ch. 2 of CofC). If there was evidence that these social scientists identified as Jews and had a Jewish agenda in doing social science (definitely not in the case of most of those listed, but possibly true in the case of Richard Herrnstein—see below), then they would have been candidates for inclusion in the book. The people I cite as contributing to evolutionary/biological perspectives are indeed ethnically Jewish, but for most of them I have no idea whether they either identity as Jews or if they have a Jewish agenda in pursuing their research simply because there is no evidence to be found in their work or elsewhere. If there is evidence that a prominent evolutionary biologist identifies as a Jew and views his work in sociobiology or evolutionary psychology as advancing Jewish agendas, then he or she should have been in CofC as an example of the phenomenon under study rather than as simply a scientist working in the area of evolutionary studies.
Interestingly, in the case of one of those I mention, Richard J. Herrnstein, Alan Ryan (1994, 11) writes, “Herrnstein essentially wants the world in which clever Jewish kids or their equivalent make their way out of their humble backgrounds and end up running Goldman Sachs or the Harvard physics department.” This is a stance that is typical, I suppose, of neo-conservatism, a Jewish movement I discuss in several places, and it is the sort of thing that, if true, would suggest that Herrnstein did perceive the issues discussed in The Bell Curve as affecting Jewish interests in a way that Charles Murray, his co-author, did not. (Ryan contrasts Murray’s and Herrnstein’s world views: “Murray wants the Midwest in which he grew up—a world in which the local mechanic didn’t care two cents whether he was or wasn’t brighter than the local math teacher.”)
Similarly, 20th-century theoretical physics does not qualify as a Jewish intellectual movement precisely because it was good science and there are no signs of ethnic involvement in its creation: Jewish identification and pursuit of Jewish interests were not important to the content of the theories or to the conduct of the intellectual movement. Yet Jews have been heavily overrepresented among the ranks of theoretical physicists.
Einstein with other Zionists
This conclusion remains true even though Einstein, the leading figure among Jewish physicists, was a strongly motivated Zionist (Fölsing 1997, 494-505), opposed assimilation as a contemptible form of “mimicry” (p. 490), preferred to mix with other Jews whom he referred to as his “tribal companions” (p. 489), embraced the uncritical support for the Bolshevik regime in Russia typical of so many Jews during the 1920s and 1930s, including persistent apology for the Moscow show trials in the 1930s (pp. 644-5), and switched from a high-minded pacifism during World War I, when Jewish interests were not at stake, to advocating the building of atomic bombs to defeat Hitler.
From his teenage years he disliked the Germans and in later life criticized Jewish colleagues for converting to Christianity and acting like Prussians. He especially disliked Prussians, who were the elite ethnic group in Germany. Reviewing his life at age 73, Einstein declared his ethnic affiliation in no uncertain terms: “My relationship with Jewry had become my strongest human tie once I achieved complete clarity about our precarious position among the nations” (in Fölsing 1997, 488). According to Fölsing, Einstein had begun developing this clarity from an early age, but did not acknowledge it until much later, a form of self-deception: “As a young man with bourgeois-liberal views and a belief in enlightenment, he had refused to acknowledge [his Jewish identity]” (in Fölsing 1997, 488).
In other words, the issues of the ethnic identification and even ethnic activism on the part of people like Einstein are entirely separate from the issue of whether such people viewed the content of the theories themselves as furthering ethnic interests, and, in the case of Einstein, there is no evidence that he did so. The same cannot be said for Freud, the New York Intellectuals, the Boasians, and the Frankfurt School, in which “scientific” theories were fashioned and deployed to advance ethnic group interests. This ideological purpose becomes clear when the unscientific nature of these movements is understood. Much of the discussion in CofC documented the intellectual dishonesty, the lack of empirical rigor, the obvious political and ethnic motivation, the expulsion of dissenters, the collusion among co-ethnics to dominate intellectual discourse, and the general lack of scientific spirit that pervaded them. In my view, the scientific weakness of these movements is evidence of their group-strategic function.
CofC was not reviewed widely. Indeed, only three reviews have appeared in mainstream publications, including a brief review by Kevin Hannan (2000) in Nationalities Papers. Hannan’s review mostly describes the book, but he summarizes his impressions by noting, “[MacDonald’s] iconoclastic evaluation of psychoanalysis, Marxism, multiculturalism, and certain schools of thought in the social sciences will not generate great enthusiasm for his work in academe, yet this book is well written and has much to offer the reader interested in ethnicity and ethnic conflict.”
The other reviews have raised several important issues that bear discussion. Frank Salter’s (2000) review in Human Ethology Bulletin discussed some of the controversy surrounding my work, particularly an acrimonious session at the 2000 conference of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society where I was accused of anti-Semitism by several participants. For me the only issue is whether I have been honest in my treatment of sources and whether my conclusions meet the usual standards of scholarly research in the social sciences. Salter notes that I based my research on mainstream sources and that the assertions that have infuriated some colleagues
are not only true but truisms to those acquainted with the diverse literatures involved. Apart from the political sensitivity of the subject, much of the problem facing MacDonald is that his knowledge is often too far ahead of his detractors to allow easy communication; there are not enough shared premises for constructive dialog. Unfortunately the knowledge gap is closing slowly because some of his most hostile critics, including colleagues who make serious ad hominem accusations, have not bothered to read MacDonald’s books.
Salter also notes that those, such as John Tooby and Steven Pinker, who have denigrated my competence as a researcher in the media, have failed to provide anything approaching a scholarly critique or refutation of my work. Sadly, this continues. While there have been a number of ringing denunciations of my work in public forums, there have been no serious scholarly reviews by these critics, although they have not retracted their scathing denunciations of my work.
Paul Gottfried (2000) raised several interesting issues in his review in Chronicles, the paleo-conservative intellectual journal. (I replied to Gottfried’s review and Gottfried penned a rejoinder; see Chronicles, September, 2000, pp. 4-5).
Gottfried questions my views on the role of Jewish organizations and intellectuals with strong Jewish identifications as agents of change in the cultural transformations that have occurred in Western societies over the last 50 years. In general, my position is that Jewish intellectual and political movements were a necessary condition for these changes, not a sufficient condition, as Gottfried supposes. In the case of the reversal in U.S. immigration policy, there simply were no other pressure groups that were pushing for liberalized, multi-racial immigration during the period under consideration (up to the enactment of the watershed immigration bill of 1965). Nor were there any other groups or intellectual movements besides the ones mentioned in CofC that were developing images of the U.S. as a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic society rather than a European civilization. Gottfried attributes the sea change in immigration to “a general cultural change that beset Western societies and was pushed by the managerial state.” I agree that multi-ethnic immigration resulted from a general cultural shift, but we still must develop theories for the origin of this shift.
Stephen Steinlight
A revealing development regarding Jewish attitudes toward immigration is an article by Stephen Steinlight (2001), former Director of National Affairs (domestic policy) at the American Jewish Committee (AJCommittee) and presently a Senior Fellow with the AJCommittee. Steinlight recommends altering “the traditional policy line [of the organized Jewish community] affirming generous—really, unlimited—immigration and open borders,” even though for “many decent, progressive Jewish folk merely asking such fundamental questions is tantamount to heresy, and meddling with them is to conjure the devil.”
Steinlight believes that present immigration policy no longer serves Jewish interests because the new immigrants are less likely to be sympathetic to Israel and because they are more likely to view Jews as the wealthiest and most powerful group in the U.S.—and thus a potential enemy—rather than as victims of the Holocaust. He is particularly worried about the consequences of Islamic fundamentalism among Muslim immigrants, especially for Israel, and he condemns the “savage hatred for America and American values” among the fundamentalists. Steinlight is implicitly agreeing with an important thesis of my trilogy on Judaism: Throughout history Jews have tended to prosper in individualistic European societies and have suffered in non-Western societies, most notably in Muslim cultures where there are strong ingroup-outgroup sensibilities (e.g., MacDonald 1998a, Ch. 2; the only exceptions to this generalization have been when Jews have constituted an intermediary group between an alien elite and oppressed native populations in Muslim societies.) Steinlight’s fears of the effects of a Balkanized America on Judaism are indeed well-grounded.
Steinlight is exclusively concerned with Jewish interests—an example of Jewish moral particularism which is a general feature of Jewish culture (see below). Indeed, his animosity toward the restrictionism of 1924-1965 shines through clearly. This “pause” in immigration is perceived as a moral catastrophe. He describes it as “evil, xenophobic, anti-Semitic,” “vilely discriminatory,” a “vast moral failure,” a “monstrous policy.” Jewish interests are his only consideration, while the vast majority of pre-1965 Americans are described as a “thoughtless mob” because they advocate a complete moratorium on immigration.
It seems fair to state that there is a communal Jewish memory about the period of immigration restriction as the high point of American anti-Jewish attitudes. Non-Jews have a difficult time fathoming Jewish communal memory.
For strongly identified Jews, the “vilely discriminatory” actions of immigration restrictionists are part of the lachrymose history of the Jewish people. Immigration restriction from 1924-1965 is in the same category as the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D., the marauding Crusaders of the Middle Ages, the horrors of the Inquisition, the evil of the Russian Czar, and the rationally incomprehensible calamity of Nazism. These events are not just images drawn from the dustbin of history. They are deeply felt images and potent motivators of contemporary behavior. As Michael Walzer (1994, 4) noted, “I was taught Jewish history as a long tale of exile and persecution—Holocaust history read backwards.” From this perspective, the immigration restriction of 1924-1965 is an important part of the Holocaust because it prevented the emigration of Jews who ultimately died in the Holocaust—a point that Steinlight dwells on at length.
Walter Benjamin
As Walter Benjamin (1968, 262) notes, “Hatred and [the] spirit of sacrifice… are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.”
This is important because whatever one’s attitudes about the costs and benefits of immigration, a principal motivation for encouraging massive non-European immigration on the part of the organized Jewish community has involved a deeply felt animosity toward the people and culture responsible for the immigration restriction of 1924-1965. (As indicated in Ch. 7, another motivation has been to lessen the power of the European-derived majority of the U.S. in order to prevent the development of an ethnically homogenous anti-Jewish movement.)
This deeply held animosity exists despite the fact that the liberated grandchildren have been extraordinarily prosperous in the country whose recent past is the focus of such venom. The welfare of the United States and certainly the welfare of European-Americans have not been a relevant consideration for Jewish attitudes on immigration. Indeed, as indicated in Chapter 7, it’s easy to find statements of Jewish activists deploring the very idea that immigration should serve the interests of the United States. That is why the organized Jewish community did not settle for a token victory by merely eliminating the ethnically based quotas that resulted in an ethnic status quo in which Europeans retained their ethnic and cultural predominance. As indicated in Chapter 7, immediately after the passage of the 1965 law, activists strove mightily to increase dramatically the numbers of non-European immigrants, a pattern that continues to the present.
And, finally, that is why support for open immigration spans the Jewish political spectrum, from the far left to the neo-conservative right. Scott McConnell, former editorial page editor and columnist for the New York Post, commented on the intense commitment to open immigration among Jewish neo-conservatives (see also Ch. 7):1
Read some of Norman Podhoretz’s writing, particularly his recent book—the only polemics against anyone right of center are directed against immigration restrictionists.
Several years ago I was at a party talking to Norman, and Abe Rosenthal came over, and Norman introduced us with the words “Scott is very solid on all the issues, except immigration.” The very first words out of his mouth. This was when we were ostensibly on very good terms, and I held a job which required important people to talk to me. There is a complicated history between the neo-cons and National Review [NR], which John O’Sullivan could tell better than I, but it involved neo-con attacks on NR using language that equated modern day immigration restrictionism with the effort to send Jews back to Nazi death camps, a tone so vicious that [it] was really strange among ostensible Reaganite allies in 1995…
The Forward, a neo-connish Jewish weekly, used to run articles trying to link FAIR [Federation for American Immigration Reform], an immigration restriction group headed by former [Colorado governor] Richard Lamm, with neo-nazism, using… crude smear techniques… None of my neo-con friends (at a time when all my friends were Jewish neo-cons) thought there was anything wrong with this…
[Podhoretz with Bush Jr.]
Read the Weekly Standard, read Ben Wattenberg. Read the [Podhoretzes]. Or don’t. But if you were engaged on the issue, you couldn’t help but being struck by this, particularly because it came as such a shock. One doesn’t like to name names, because no one on the right wants to get on the bad side of the neo-cons, but I can think of one young scholar, who writes very temperately on immigration-related issues and who trained under a leading neo-con academic. He told me he was just amazed at the neo-cons’ attachment to high immigration—it seemed to go against every principle of valuing balance and order in a society, and being aware of social vulnerabilities, that they seemed to advocate. Perhaps it’s worth some time, writing a lengthy article on all this, on how the American right lost its way after the Cold War.
♣
The Culture of Critique’s
“The decline of ethnic consciousness
among European-derived people
in the United States”
in the Preface:
Fundamental to the transformation of the United States as a result of massive non-European immigration was the decline of ethnic consciousness among European peoples. It is fascinating to contrast the immigration debates of the 1920s with those of the 1950s and 1960s. The restrictionists of the 1920s unabashedly asserted the right of European-derived peoples to the land they had conquered and settled.
There were many assertions of ethnic interest—that the people who colonized and created the political and economic culture of the country had a right to maintain it as their possession. This sort of morally self-assured nativism (even the word itself now has a pathological ring to it) can be seen in the statement of Representative William N. Vaile of Colorado, a prominent restrictionist, quoted in Chapter 7 of CofC.
Stoddard
By the 1940s and certainly by the 1960s it was impossible to make such assertions without being deemed not only a racist but an intellectual Neanderthal. Indeed, Bendersky (2000) shows that such rhetoric was increasingly impossible in the 1930s.
One can see the shift in the career of racial theorist Lothrop Stoddard, author of books such as The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy and numerous articles for the popular media, such as Collier’s, Forum, and The Saturday Evening Post. Stoddard viewed Jews as highly intelligent and as racially different from Europeans. He also believed that Jews were critical to the success of Bolshevism. However, he stopped referring to Jews completely in his lectures to the Army War College in the late 1930s. The Boasian revolution in anthropology had triumphed, and theorists who believed that race was important for explaining human behavior became fringe figures. Stoddard himself went from being a popular and influential writer to being viewed as a security risk as the Roosevelt administration prepared the country for war with National Socialist Germany.
Another marker of the change in attitude toward Jews was the response to Charles Lindbergh’s remarks in Des Moines, Iowa on the eve of U.S. entry into World War II. Lindbergh’s advocacy of non-intervention was shaped not only by his horror at the destructiveness of modern warfare—what he viewed as the suicide of European culture, but also by his belief that a second European war would be suicidal for the White race. In an article published in the popular media in 1939 shortly after the outbreak of World War II, he stated that it was a war “among a dominant people for power, blind, insatiable, suicidal. Western nations are again at war, a war likely to be more prostrating than any in the past, a war in which the White race is bound to lose, and the others bound to gain, a war which may easily lead our civilization through more Dark Ages if it survives at all” (Lindbergh 1939, 65).
In order to maintain their dominance over other races, Lindbergh believed that whites should join together to fend off the teeming legions of non-whites who were the real long-term threat.
Lindbergh was not a Nordicist. He took a long-term view that Russia would be a white bulwark against the Chinese in the East. He advocated a racial alliance among Whites based “on a Western Wall of race and arms which can hold back either a Genghis Khan or the infiltration of inferior blood; on an English fleet, a German air force, a French army, [and] an American nation” (p. 66). However, the Soviet Union under Communism was abhorrent: “I tell you that I would a hundred times rather see my country ally herself with England, or even with Germany with all of her faults, than with the cruelty, the godlessness, and the barbarism that exist in Soviet Russia. An alliance between the United States and Russia should be opposed by every American, by every Christian, and by every humanitarian in this country” (in Berg 1999, 422). Lindbergh clearly viewed the atrocities perpetrated by the Soviet Union to be worse than those of Nazi Germany.
Lindbergh’s famous speech of September 11, 1941 stated that Jews were one of the principal forces attempting to lead the U.S. into the war, along with the Roosevelt administration and the British. Lindbergh noted that Jewish reaction to Nazi Germany was understandable given persecution “sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race.” He stated that the Jews’ “greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our Government.” And, most controversially, he stated, “I am saying that the leaders of both the British and Jewish races, for reasons which are understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war” (in Berg 1999, 427).
Lindbergh’s speech was greeted with a torrent of abuse and hatred unparalleled for a mainstream public figure in American history. Overnight Lindbergh went from cultural hero to moral pariah.
Jewish influence on the media and government would be difficult to measure then as it is now, but it was certainly considerable and a common concern of anti-Jewish sentiment of the time. In a booklet published in 1936, the editors of Fortune magazine concluded that the main sources of Jewish influence on the media were their control of the two major radio networks and the Hollywood movie studios (Editors of Fortune 1936). They suggested that “at the very most, half the opinion-making and taste-influencing paraphernalia in America is in Jewish hands” (p. 62)—a rather remarkable figure considering that Jews constituted approximately 2-3% of the population and most of the Jewish population were first or second generation immigrants.
A short list of Jewish ownership or management of the major media during this period would include the New York Times (the most influential newspaper, owned by the Sulzberger family), the New York Post (George Backer), the Washington Post (Eugene Meyer), Philadelphia Inquirer (M. L. Annenberg), Philadelphia Record and Camden Courier-Post (J. David Stern), Newark Star-Ledger (S. I. Newhouse), Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Paul Block), CBS (the dominant radio network, owned by William Paley), NBC (headed by David Sarnoff), all of the major Hollywood movie studios, Random House (the most important book publisher, owned by Bennett Cerf), and a dominant position in popular music.(2) Walter Winchell, who had an audience of tens of millions and was tied with Bob Hope for the highest rated program on radio, believed that opposition to intervention “was unconscionable, a form of treason” (Gabler 1995, 294). Winchell, “the standard bearer for interventionism,” was Jewish. He had close ties during this period to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) which provided him with information on the activities of isolationists and Nazi sympathizers which he used in his broadcasts and newspaper columns (Gabler 1995, 294-298).
There is no question that the movie industry did indeed propagandize against Germany and in favor of intervention. In May, 1940, the Warner Brothers studio wired Roosevelt that “personally we would like to do all in our power within the motion picture industry and by use of the talking screen to show the American people the worthiness of the cause for which the free peoples of Europe are making such tremendous sacrifices” (in Gabler 1988, 343). Later in 1940 Joseph P. Kennedy lectured the Hollywood movie elite that they should stop promoting the war and stop making anti-Nazi movies or risk a rise in anti-Semitism. Immediately prior to Lindbergh’s Des Moines speech, Senator Gerald Nye asserted that foreign-born owners of the Hollywood studies had “violent animosities toward certain causes abroad” (Gabler 1988, 344-345). Representatives of the movie industry, realizing that they had the support of the Roosevelt administration, aggressively defended making “America conscious of the national peril.”(3)
Harvard historian William Langer stated in a lecture to the U.S. Army War College that the rising dislike of Nazi Germany in the U.S. was due to “Jewish influence” in the media:
You have to face the fact that some of our most important American newspapers are Jewish-controlled, and I suppose if I were a Jew I would feel about Nazi Germany as most Jews feel and it would be most inevitable that the coloring of the news takes on that tinge.
William Langer
As I read the New York Times, for example, it is perfectly clear that every little upset that occurs (and after all, many upsets occur in a country of 70 million people) is given a great deal of prominence. The other part of it is soft-pedaled or put off with a sneer. So that in a rather subtle way, the picture you get is that there is no good in the Germans whatever. (In Bendersky 2000, 273)
It is also interesting that the Chicago Tribune was “circumspect on the Jewish question” despite the personal sentiments of Robert McCormick, the Tribune’s non-Jewish publisher, that Jews were an important reason behind America’s anti-German policy (Bendersky 2000, 284). This suggests that concern with Jewish power—quite possibly concern about negative influences on advertising revenue (see Editors of Fortune 1936, 57)—, was an issue for McCormick. On balance, it would seem reasonable to agree with Lindbergh that Jewish influence in the media was significant during this period. Of course, this is not to say that Jews dominated the media at this time or that other influences were not important.
It is also noteworthy that U.S. military officers often worried that Roosevelt was influenced to be anti-German by his Jewish advisors, Samuel I. Rosenman, Felix Frankfurter, and Henry Morgenthau, Jr. (Bendersky 2000, 274), and they worried that Jewish interests and the British would push the U.S. into a war with Germany. Both Frankfurter and Morgenthau were strongly identified Jews and effective advocates of Jewish interests within the Roosevelt Administration. Morgenthau actively promoted Zionism and the welfare of Jewish refugees (e.g., Bendersky 2000, 333ff, 354ff). Both supported U.S. involvement in the war against Germany, and Morgenthau became well-known as an advocate of extremely harsh treatment of the Germans during and after World War II.
Moreover, there is no question that Jews were able to have a great deal of influence on specific issues during this period. For example, Zionist organizations exerted enormous pressure on the government (e.g., Bendersky 2000, 325). During World War II they engaged in “loud diplomacy” (p. 326), organizing thousands of rallies, dinners with celebrity speakers (including prominent roles for sympathetic non-Jews), letter campaigns, meetings, lobbying, threats to newspapers for publishing unfavorable items, insertion of propaganda as news items in newspapers, giving money to politicians and non-Jewish celebrities like Will Rogers in return for their support. By 1944, “thousands of non-Jewish associations would pass pro-Zionist resolutions” (p. 326). In 1944 both Republican and Democratic platforms included strong pro-Zionist planks even though the creation of a Jewish state was strongly opposed by the Departments of State and War (p. 328).
Nevertheless, whatever the level of Jewish influence on the media during this period, commentators generally focused on denouncing the seeming implication in Lindbergh’s speech that Jewish interests were “not American.” I suppose that Lindbergh’s statement could have been amended by a public-relations minded editor without distorting Lindbergh’s intentions to read something like, “Jewish interests are not the same as the interests of most other Americans,” or “Jewish interests are not the same as those of the country as a whole.” However, I rather doubt that this alteration would have assuaged the outpouring of hatred that ensued. The simple facts that the vast majority of U.S. Jews were indeed in favor of intervention and that Jews did have a significant effect on public attitudes and public policy had become irrelevant. As Lindbergh himself said, the choice was “whether or not you are going to let your country go into a completely disastrous war for lack of courage to name the groups leading that country to war—at the risk of being called ‘anti-Semitic’ simply by naming them” (as paraphrased by Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1980, 224; italics in text).
America had entered into an era when it had become morally unacceptable to discuss Jewish interests at all. We are still in that era.(4)
It is instructive to review in some detail the “Niagara of invective” experienced by Lindbergh (Berg 1999, 428). He was denounced by virtually all the leading media, by Democrats and Republicans, Protestants and Catholics, and, of course, Jewish groups. Many accused him of being a Nazi, including the Presidential Secretary who compared Lindbergh’s speech to Nazi rhetoric. Reinhold Niebuhr, the prominent Protestant leader (see below), called on Lindbergh’s organization, America First, to “divorce itself from the stand taken by Lindbergh and clean its ranks of those who would incite to racial and religious strife in this country” (in Berg 1999, 428). America First released a statement that neither Lindbergh nor the organization were anti-Semitic.
The reaction of Lindbergh’s wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, is particularly interesting because it illustrates the power of moral revulsion combined with hypocrisy that had enveloped any public discussion of Jewish interests.
September 11, 1941:
Then [he gave] his speech—throwing me into black gloom. He names the “war agitators”—chiefly the British, the Jews, and the Administration. He does it truthfully, moderately, and with no bitterness or rancor—but I hate to have him touch the Jews at all. For I dread the reaction on him. No one else mentions this subject out loud (though many seethe bitterly and intolerantly underneath). C. [Charles], as usual, must bear the brunt of being frank and open. What he is saying in public is not intolerant or inciting or bitter and it is just what he says in private, while the other soft-spoken cautious people who say terrible things in private would never dare be as frank in public as he. They do not want to pay the price. And the price will be terrible. Headlines will flame “Lindbergh attacks Jews.” He will be branded anti-Semitic, Nazi, Führer-seeking, etc. I can hardly bear it. For he is a moderate…
September 13, 1941:
He is attacked on all sides—Administration, pressure groups, and Jews, as now openly a Nazi, following Nazi doctrine.
September 14, 1941:
I cannot explain my revulsion of feeling by logic. Is it my lack of courage to face the problem? Is it my lack of vision and seeing the thing through? Or is my intuition founded on something profound and valid?
I do not know and am only very disturbed, which is upsetting for him. I have the greatest faith in him as a person—in his integrity, his courage, and his essential goodness, fairness, and kindness—his nobility really… How then explain my profound feeling of grief about what he is doing? If what he said is the truth (and I am inclined to think it is), why was it wrong to state it? He was naming the groups that were pro-war. No one minds his naming the British or the Administration. But to name “Jew” is un-American—even if it is done without hate or even criticism. Why?
Because it is segregating them as a group, setting the ground for anti-Semitism… I say that I would prefer to see this country at war than shaken by violent anti-Semitism. (Because it seems to me that the kind of person the human being is turned into when the instinct of Jew-baiting is let loose is worse than the kind of person he becomes on the battlefield.)
September 15, 1941:
The storm is beginning to blow up hard. America First is in a turmoil… He is universally condemned by all moderates… The Jews demand a retraction… I sense that this is the beginning of a fight and consequent loneliness and isolation that we have not known before… For I am really much more attached to the worldly things than he is, mind more giving up friends, popularity, etc., mind much more criticism and coldness and loneliness.
September 18, 1941:
Will I be able to shop in New York at all now? I am always stared at—but now to be stared at with hate, to walk through aisles of hate! (A. M. Lindbergh 1980, 220-230; italics in text)(5)
Several issues stand out in these comments. Anne Morrow Lindbergh is horrified at having to walk through “aisles of hate,” horrified at having to give up her friends, horrified at being a pariah where once she was idolized as the wife of the most popular man in the country. While she accepts the truth of what her husband said and its good intentions, she thinks it better left unsaid and does not dwell on the unfairness of the charges against her husband, in particular with calling him a Nazi.
Truth is no defense if it leads to morally unacceptable actions, and slander and smear tactics are warranted and understandable if the goals are morally praiseworthy. She supposes that even a disastrous war that might kill hundreds of thousands of Americans (and, as her husband believed, might result in the destruction of European culture and the white race) is preferable to the possibility of an outbreak of violent anti-Semitism. The moral demeanor of Americans is more important than their survival as a nation or people. And all of this because Lindbergh simply stated that Jews had interests as a group that differed from those of other Americans.
Their lesson learned, American politicians presumably realized that even rational, intelligent, and humane discussions of Jewish interests were beyond the boundaries of appropriate discussion. Jews had no interests as Jews that could be said to conflict with the interests of any other group of Americans.
By the time of Lindbergh’s speech, Jews not only had a prominent position in the U.S. media, they had seized the intellectual and moral high ground via their control of the intellectual and political movements discussed in CofC. Not only were Jewish interests beyond the bounds of civilized political discussion, assertions of European ethnic interest became impermissible as well.
Such assertions conflicted with the Boasian dogma that genetic differences between peoples were trivial and irrelevant; they conflicted with the Marxist belief in the equality of all peoples and the Marxist belief that nationalism and assertions of ethnic interests were reactionary; such assertions were deemed a sure sign of psychopathology within the frameworks of psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School; and they would soon be regarded as the babblings of country bumpkins by the New York Intellectuals and by the neo-conservatives who spouted variants of all of these ideologies from the most prestigious academic and media institutions in the society. There may indeed have been other forces that relegated a nativist mindset to the political and intellectual fringe—Gottfried (2000) points a finger at liberal Protestantism and the rise of the managerial state, but it is impossible to understand the effectiveness of either of these influences in the absence of the Jewish movements I describe.
The rise of a de-ethnicized non-Jewish managerial elite that rejects traditional cultural institutions—as exemplified by former President Bill Clinton and now Senator Hillary Clinton—and interwoven with a critical mass of ethnically conscious Jews and other ethnic minorities is an enormously important fact of our current political life. My claim that Jewish intellectual and political activities were a necessary condition for the rise of such an elite, while obviously difficult to verify conclusively (as any other causal hypothesis would be) is also compatible with the work of others, most notably D. A. Hollinger’s (1996) Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-20th-Century American Intellectual History and Carl Degler’s (1991) In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought.
The rise of such a de-ethnicized elite is hardly an inevitable consequence of modernization or any other force of which I am aware. Such de-ethnicized managerial elites are unique to European and European-derived societies. Such elites are not found elsewhere in the world, including highly developed nations such as Japan and Israel or the undeveloped nations of Africa and elsewhere. Moreover, the cultural shifts under consideration have also occurred in traditionally Catholic countries like France and Italy, where Protestantism has not been a factor. France in particular has been very open to non-European immigration and its intellectual life has been deeply influenced by the movements discussed in CofC. Conversely, there are many examples where Protestantism has peacefully co-existed with or even rationalized nationalism and ethnocentrism.
Developing theories of why Western cultures provide such fertile ground for the theories and movements discussed in CofC is a very useful area for research. It is instructive to look at the way Europeans in the U.S. saw themselves a century ago.(6)
Americans of European descent thought of themselves as part of a cultural and ethnic heritage extending backward in time to the founding of the country. The Anglo-Saxon heritage of the British Isles was at the center of this self-conception, but Americans of German and Scandinavian descent also viewed themselves as part of this ethnic and cultural heritage. They had a great deal of pride in their accomplishments. They had conquered a vast territory and had achieved a high degree of economic progress. They saw themselves as having created a civilization with a strong moral fabric—a country of farmers and small businessmen who had developed into a world economic power. They believed that their civilization was a product of their own unique ingenuity and skills, and they believed that it would not survive if other peoples were allowed to play too large a role in it. They saw themselves as exhibiting positive personality traits such as courage in the face of adversity, self-reliance, inventiveness, originality, and fair play—the very virtues that allowed them to conquer the wilderness and turn it into an advanced civilization.
Americans at the turn of the 19th century looked out on the world and saw their own society as superior to others. They saw themselves and other European societies as reaping the rewards of political and economic freedom while the rest of the world suffered as it had from time immemorial—the despotism of Asia, the barbarity and primitivism of Africa, and the economic and political backwardness of Russia and Eastern Europe.
They saw themselves as Christian, and they thought of Christianity as an essential part of the social fabric and their way of life. Christianity was seen as basic to the moral foundations of the society, and any threat to Christianity was seen as a threat to the society as a whole. When these people looked back on their own childhood, they saw “a simple, secure world of commonly accepted values and behavior” (Bendersky 2000, 6)—a world of cultural and ethnic homogeneity. They had a strong sense of family pride and regional identification: They had deep roots in the areas in which they grew up. They did not think of the U.S. as a Marxist hell of war between the social classes. Instead they thought of it as a world of harmony between the social classes in which people at the top of society earned their positions but felt a certain sense of social obligation to the lower social classes.
The early part of the 20th century was also the high water mark of Darwinism in the social sciences. It was common at that time to think that there were important differences between the races—that races differed in intelligence and in moral qualities. Not only did races differ, but they were in competition with each other for supremacy. As described in Separation and Its Discontents (MacDonald 1998a), such ideas were part of the furniture of intellectual life—commonplace among Jews as well as non-Jews.
That world has vanished. The rise of Jewish power and the disestablishment of the specifically European nature of the U.S. are the real topics ofCofC. The war to disestablish the specifically European nature of the U.S. was fought on several fronts. The main thrusts of Jewish activism against European ethnic and cultural hegemony have focused on three critical power centers in the United States: The academic world of information in the social sciences and humanities, the political world where public policy on immigration and other ethnic issues is decided, and the mass media where “ways of seeing” are presented to the public. The first two are the focus of CofC.
At the intellectual level, Jewish intellectuals led the battle against the idea that races even exist and against the idea that there are differences in intelligence or cultural level between the races that are rooted in biology. They also spearheaded defining America as a set of abstract principles rather than an ethnocultural civilization. At the level of politics, Jewish organizations spearheaded the drive to open up immigration to all of the peoples of the world. Jewish organizations also played a key role in furthering the interests of other racial and ethnic minorities, and they led the legal and legislative effort to remove Christianity from public places.
The first bastion of the old American culture to fall was elite academic institutions and especially the Ivy League universities. The transformation of the faculty in the social sciences and humanities was well underway in the 1950s, and by the early 1960s it was largely complete. The new elite was very different from the old elite it displaced. The difference was that the old Protestant elite was not at war with the country it dominated. The old Protestant elite was wealthier and better educated than the public at large, but they approached life on basically the same terms. They saw themselves as Christians and as Europeans, and they didn’t see the need for radically changing the society.
Things are very different now. Since the 1960s a hostile, adversary elite has emerged to dominate intellectual and political debate. It is an elite that almost instinctively loathes the traditional institutions of European-American culture: its religion, its customs, its manners, and its sexual attitudes. In the words of one commentator, “today’s elite loathes the nation it rules” (Gerlernter 1997). A good example is Stephen Steinlight’s comments on the immigration restriction of 1924-1965 (see above).
This “hostile elite” is fundamentally a Jewish-dominated elite whose origins and main lines of influence are described in CofC. The emergence of this hostile elite is an aspect of ethnic competition between Jews and non-Jews and its effect will be a long-term decline in the hegemony of European peoples in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world.
Although European peoples are less prone to ethnocentrism and more prone to moral universalism and individualism (see below), they did not surrender their impending cultural and demographic eclipse without a fight. There is no evidence for internal WASP self-destruction, but a great deal of evidence that their active resistance was overcome by the movements I discuss in CofC.
For example, Bendersky’s (2000) recent The “Jewish Threat” shows strong resistance to the decline of European hegemony among U.S. Army officers in the period from World War I to well into the Cold War era and shows that similar attitudes were widespread among the public at that time. But their resistance was nullified by the decline of the intellectual basis of European ethnic hegemony and by political events, such as the immigration law of 1965, which they were unable to control. In the end, the 1965 law passed because it was advertised as nothing more than a moral gesture that would have no long-term impact on the ethnic balance of the U.S. However, to its activist supporters, including the Jewish organizations who were critical to its passage, immigration reform was what it had always been: a mechanism to alter the ethnic balance of the United States (see Ch. 7).
The fact that the Jewish intellectuals and political operatives described in CofC did not lose their national/ethnic loyalties shows that there was no general trend to de-ethnicization. The broad trends toward de-ethnicization somehow occurred among the Europeans but spared the Jews who by all accounts continue to strongly support their ethnic homeland, Israel, and continue to have a strong sense of peoplehood—propped up now by high-profile programs encouraging Jews to marry other Jews.
My account would benefit from discussing the acceptance of Jews by the Protestant establishment after World War II. However, what I have seen thus far suggests Jewish involvement in the dramatic changes in Protestant sensibilities as well. Recently I have become aware of John Murray Cuddihy’s (1978) book, No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste. The chapter on Reinhold Niebuhr is particularly interesting in thinking about how to account for the acceptance of Jews and Judaism by the WASP establishment after W.W.II. Cuddihy focuses on the elevation of Judaism to the status of one of the “big three” U.S. religions, to the point that a rabbi officiates at the presidential inauguration even though Jews constitute approximately 2-3% of the population. Cuddihy argues that this religious surface served as a protective coloring and led to a sort of crypto-Judaism in which Jewish ethnic identities were submerged in order to make them appear civilized to the goyim. As part of this contract, Niebuhr acknowledged “the stubborn will of the Jews to live as a peculiar people”—an acknowledgement by an important Protestant leader that the Jews could remain a people with a surface veneer of religion.
Both sides gave up something in this bargain. The Jews’ posturing as a religion left them open to large-scale defection via intermarriage to the extent that they took seriously the idea that Judaism was akin to Protestantism, and to some extent this did occur. But recently, Jews have been mending the fences. There is an upsurge in more traditional forms of Judaism and an open rejection of intermarriage even among the most liberal wings of Judaism. Recent guidelines for Reform Judaism emphasize traditional practices of conversion, such as circumcision, that are likely to minimize converts, and proselytism is explicitly rejected.(7) It would appear that Conservative religious forms of Judaism will be the rule in the Diaspora and there will be a self-conscious ethnic aspect to Jewish religiosity.
What the Protestants gave up was far more important because I think it has been a contributing factor in the more or less irreversible ethnic changes in the U.S. and elsewhere in the Western world. Judaism became unconditionally accepted as a modern religion even while retaining a commitment to its ethnic core. It conformed outwardly to the religious norms of the U.S., but it also continued to energetically pursue its ethnic interests, especially with regard to issues where there is a substantial consensus among Jews: support for Israel and the welfare of other foreign Jewries, immigration and refugee policy, church-state separation, abortion rights, and civil liberties (Goldberg 1996, 5).
What is remarkable is that a wealthy, powerful, and highly talented ethnic group was able to pursue its interests without those interests ever being the subject of open political discussion by mainstream political figures, for at least the last 60 years—since Lindbergh’s ill-fated Des Moines speech of 1941.
I suppose that Niebuhr thought that he was only giving up the prospect of converting Jews, but the implicit downgrading of the ethnic character of Judaism provided an invaluable tool in furthering Jewish ethnic aims in the U.S. The downgrading of the ethnic aspect of Judaism essentially allowed Jews to win the ethnic war without anyone even being able to acknowledge that it was an ethnic war.
For example, during the immigration debates of the 1940s -1960s Jews were described by themselves and others as “people of the Jewish faith.” They were simply another religion in an officially pluralistic religious society, and part of Jewish posturing was a claim to a unique universalistic moral-religious vision that could only be achieved by enacting legislation that in fact furthered their particularist ethnic aims. The universalistic moral-religious vision promoted by Jewish activists really amounted to taking the Protestants at their own word—by insisting that every last shred of ethnic identity among Protestants be given up while Jews were implicitly allowed to keep theirs if they only promised to behave civilly.
Reinhold Niebuhr
The evidence provided by Cuddihy suggests that Niebuhr was socialized by the Jewish milieu of New York into taking the positions that he did—that his position as a major Protestant spokesperson was facilitated by alliances he formed with Jews and because his writings fit well with the Jewish milieu of New York intellectual circles. Niebuhr’s behavior is therefore more an indication of Jewish power and the ability of Jews to recruit non-Jews sympathetic to their causes than an indication of Protestant self-destruction. One cannot underestimate the importance of Jewish power in intellectual circles in New York at the time of Niebuhr’s pronouncements (see CofC, passim). For example, Leslie Fiedler (1948, 873) noted that “the writer drawn to New York from the provinces feels… the Rube, attempts to conform; and the almost parody of Jewishness achieved by the gentile writer in New York is a strange and crucial testimony of our time.”(8)
♣
Notes [the Bibliography appears in the 10th entry]
2. This listing is based on several sources: Editors of Fortune (1936); To Bigotry No Sanction. A Documented Analysis of Anti-Semitic Propaganda. Prepared by the Philadelphia Anti-Defamation Council and the American Jewish Committee. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Anti-Defamation Council (1941); Gabler 1988; Kantor 1982 (here).
3. Ben Hecht, who was a prominent Hollywood screenwriter and staunch Zionist, included pro-interventionist ideas in movies at this time (Authors Calendar). For example, in Angels over Broadway (1940), Hecht has the Douglas Fairbanks Jr. character ask, “What happened to the Poles, the Finns, the Dutch? They’re little guys. They didn’t win…” Rita Hayworth replies, “They will, some day.” Hecht also made some uncredited additions to Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940). When Hitchcock was asked about the anti-Nazi and pro-Britain message of the film, he said that it was all the doing of Walter Wanger and Ben Hecht. (Wanger was also Jewish; his birth name was Walter Feuchtwanger.) In the film a character says, “Keep those lights burning, cover them with steel, build them in with guns, build a canopy of battleships and bombing planes around them and, hello, America, hang on to your lights, they’re the only lights in the world.”
4. The only exception in recent years—albeit relatively minor—was Pat Buchanan’s 1990 column in which he referred to Israel’s “Amen Corner” in the United States advocating war with Iraq. (Indeed, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee had been lobbying Congress behind the scenes to declare war on Iraq [Sobran 1999]).
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Norman Podhoretz, former editor of Commentary, promptly labeled Buchanan an “anti-Semite” without feeling the need to address the question of whether or not American Jews were indeed pressing for war with Iraq in order to benefit Israel. As in the case of Lindbergh’s remarks a half century earlier, truth was irrelevant. While this incident has not altered the taboo on discussing Jewish interests in the same way that it is common to discuss the interests of other ethnic groups, it has resulted in a long-term problem for Buchanan’s political career.
When Buchanan ran for president in 2000, a hostile columnist writing in a prominent Jewish publication stated, “Out of the slime of the sewers and into the filth of the gutter a desperate Patrick J. Buchanan, the neo-Nazi, has crawled into the political arena using anti-Semitism as his principal device to secure a future for himself” (Adelson 1999). The columnist went on to claim that Buchanan “always was a neo-Nazi” and that he “reveals the shallow quality of his tortured, sick, defective mind.” Not to be outdone, Alan Dershowitz (1999) wrote, “Let there be no mistake about it. Pat Buchanan is a classic anti-Semite with fascist leanings who hates Israel and loves Nazi war criminals.”
The example illustrates that Jews continue to exert immense pressure, including smear tactics, to keep Jewish interests off limits in American political discussion. As with Lindbergh in an earlier generation, Buchanan’s experience is a grim reminder to politicians who dare raise the issue of Jewish interests in public debate. Buchanan became completely marginalized within the Republican Party and eventually left it for a spectacularly unsuccessful run as the Reform Party presidential candidate in 2000.
5. In a conversation with his wife on November 24, 1941, Charles Lindbergh was pessimistic about establishing a Jewish state:
C. and I get into an argument á propos of an article in the paper, a speech of a rabbi at a Jewish conference in which he said that the first thing that would have to be done at the peace table after the war was that a large indemnity would have to be paid to the Jews for their sufferings. Also speaks about having a piece of land of their own—which I am sympathetic with… [C.] says it isn’t as simple as all that. Whose land are you going to take?… He is very pessimistic of its being solved without great suffering. (A. M. Lindbergh 1980, 239)
6. The following is based on Bendersky’s (2000, 2-46) study of U.S. military officers but is representative of commonly held attitudes in the early 20th century.
7. “Reform Judaism Nears a Guide to Conversion.” New York Times, June 27, 2001.
8. Jewish pressure for altering traditional Roman Catholic attitudes on Jewish responsibility for deicide are recounted in Lacouture (1995, 440-458) and Roddy (1966). Pope John XXIII deleted the “perfidious Jews” reference from the Holy Week liturgy (Lacouture 1995, 448). He then solicited the opinions of the world’s 2,594 bishops on the Church’s relations with the Jews. Virtually all of the respondents wished to maintain the status quo. The Pope was “bitterly disappointed by the response of the episcopate” (p. 449).
The Culture of Critique’s
“The evolutionary origins of European individualism”
in the Preface:
Although there is much evidence that Europeans presented a spirited defense of their cultural and ethnic hegemony in the early-to mid-20th century, their rapid decline raises the question: What cultural or ethnic characteristics of Europeans made them susceptible to the intellectual and political movements described inCofC?
The discussion in CofC focused mainly on a proposed nexus of individualism, relative lack of ethnocentrism, and concomitant moral universalism—all features that are entirely foreign to Judaism. In several places in all three of my books on Judaism I develop the view that Europeans are relatively less ethnocentric than other peoples and relatively more prone to individualism as opposed to the ethnocentric collectivist social structures historically far more characteristic of other human groups, including—relevant to this discussion—Jewish groups. I update and extend these ideas here.
The basic idea is that European groups are highly vulnerable to invasion by strongly collectivist, ethnocentric groups because individualists have less powerful defenses against such groups.
The competitive advantage of cohesive, cooperating groups is obvious and is a theme that recurs throughout my trilogy on Judaism. This scenario implies that European peoples are more prone to individualism. Individualist cultures show little emotional attachment to ingroups. Personal goals are paramount, and socialization emphasizes the importance of self-reliance, independence, individual responsibility, and “finding yourself” (Triandis 1991, 82). Individualists have more positive attitudes toward strangers and outgroup members and are more likely to behave in a pro-social, altruistic manner to strangers. People in individualist cultures are less aware of ingroup/outgroup boundaries and thus do not have highly negative attitudes toward outgroup members. They often disagree with ingroup policy, show little emotional commitment or loyalty to ingroups, and do not have a sense of common fate with other ingroup members.
Opposition to outgroups occurs in individualist societies, but the opposition is more “rational” in the sense that there is less of a tendency to suppose that all of the outgroup members are culpable. Individualists form mild attachments to many groups, while collectivists have an intense attachment and identification to a few ingroups (Triandis 1990, 61). Individualists are therefore relatively ill-prepared for between-group competition so characteristic of the history of Judaism.
Historically Judaism has been far more ethnocentric and collectivist than typical Western societies. I make this argument in Separation and Its Discontents (MacDonald 1998a; Ch. 1) and especially in A People That Shall Dwell Alone (MacDonald 1994; Ch. 8), where I suggest that over the course of their recent evolution, Europeans were less subjected to between-group natural selection than Jews and other Middle Eastern populations. This was originally proposed by Fritz Lenz (1931, 657) who suggested that, because of the harsh environment of the Ice Age, the Nordic peoples evolved in small groups and have a tendency toward social isolation rather than cohesive groups. This perspective would not imply that Northern Europeans lack collectivist mechanisms for group competition, but only that these mechanisms are relatively less elaborated and/or require a higher level of group conflict to trigger their expression.
This perspective is consistent with ecological theory. Under ecologically adverse circumstances, adaptations are directed more at coping with the adverse physical environment than at competing with other groups (Southwood 1977, 1981), and in such an environment, there would be less pressure for selection for extended kinship networks and highly collectivist groups. Evolutionary conceptualizations of ethnocentrism emphasize the utility of ethnocentrism in group competition. Ethnocentrism would thus be of no importance at all in combating the physical environment, and such an environment would not support large groups.
European groups are part of what Burton et al. (1996) term the North Eurasian and Circumpolar culture area.(9) This culture area derives from hunter-gatherers adapted to cold, ecologically adverse climates.
In such climates there is pressure for male provisioning of the family and a tendency toward monogamy because the ecology did not support either polygyny or large groups for an evolutionarily significant period. These cultures are characterized by bilateral kinship relationships which recognize both the male and female lines, suggesting a more equal contribution for each sex as would be expected under conditions of monogamy. There is also less emphasis on extended kinship relationships and marriage tends to be exogamous (i.e., outside the kinship group). As discussed below, all of these characteristics are opposite those found among Jews.
The historical evidence shows that Europeans, and especially Northwest Europeans, were relatively quick to abandon extended kinship networks and collectivist social structures when their interests were protected with the rise of strong centralized governments. There is indeed a general tendency throughout the world for a decline in extended kinship networks with the rise of central authority (Alexander 1979; Goldschmidt & Kunkel 1971; Stone 1977). But in the case of Northwest Europe this tendency quickly gave rise long before the industrial revolution to the unique Western European “simple household” type.
The simple household type is based on a single married couple and their children. It contrasts with the joint family structure typical of the rest of Eurasia in which the household consists of two or more related couples, typically brothers and their wives and other members of the extended family (Hajnal 1983). (An example of the joint household would be the families of the patriarchs described in the Old Testament; see MacDonald 1994, Ch. 3)
Before the industrial revolution, the simple household system was characterized by methods of keeping unmarried young people occupied as servants. It was not just the children of the poor and landless who became servants, but even large, successful farmers sent their children to be servants elsewhere. In the 17th and 18th centuries individuals often took in servants early in their marriage, before their own children could help out, and then passed their children to others when the children were older and there was more than enough help (Stone 1977).
This suggests a deeply ingrained cultural practice which resulted in a high level of non-kinship based reciprocity. The practice also bespeaks a relative lack of ethnocentrism because people are taking in non-relatives as household members whereas in the rest of Eurasia people tend to surround themselves with biological relatives. Simply put, genetic relatedness was less important in Europe and especially in the Nordic areas of Europe. The unique feature of the simple household system was the high percentage of non-relatives. Unlike the rest of Eurasia, the pre-industrial societies of northwestern Europe were not organized around extended kinship relationships, and it is easy to see that they are pre-adapted to the industrial revolution and modern world generally.(10)
This simple household system is a fundamental feature of individualist culture. The individualist family was able to pursue its interests freed from the obligations and constraints of extended kinship relationships and free of the suffocating collectivism of the social structures typical of so much of the rest of the world. Monogamous marriage based on individual consent and conjugal affection quickly replaced marriage based on kinship and family strategizing. (See Chs. 4 and 8 for a discussion of the greater proneness of Western Europeans to monogamy and to marriage based on companionship and affection rather than polygyny and collectivist mechanisms of social control and family strategizing.)
This relatively greater proneness to forming a simple household type may well be ethnically based. During the pre-industrial era, this household system was found only within Nordic Europe: The simple household type is based on a single married couple and their children and characterized Scandinavia (except Finland), British Isles, Low Countries, German-speaking areas, and northern France. Within France, the simple household occurred in areas inhabited by the Germanic peoples who lived northeast of “the eternal line” running from Saint Malo on the English Channel coast to Geneva in French-speaking Switzerland (Ladurie 1986).
This area developed large scale agriculture capable of feeding the growing towns and cities, and did so prior to the agricultural revolution of the 18th century. It was supported by a large array of skilled craftsmen in the towns, and a large class of medium-sized ploughmen who “owned horses, copper bowls, glass goblets and often shoes; their children had fat cheeks and broad shoulders, and their babies wore tiny shoes. None of these children had the swollen bellies of the rachitics of the Third World” (Ladurie 1986, 340). The northeast became the center of French industrialization and world trade.
The northeast also differed from the southwest in literacy rates. In the early 19th century, while literacy rates for France as a whole were approximately 50%, the rate in the northeast was close to 100%, and differences occurred at least from the 17th century. Moreover, there was a pronounced difference in stature, with the northeasterners being taller by almost 2 centimeters in an 18th century sample of military recruits. Ladurie notes that the difference in the entire population was probably larger because the army would not accept many of the shorter men from the southwest. In addition, Laslett (1983) and other family historians have noted that the trend toward the economically independent nuclear family was more prominent in the north, while there was a tendency toward joint families as one moves to the south and east.
These findings are compatible with the interpretation that ethnic differences are a contributing factor to the geographical variation in family forms within Europe. The findings suggest that the Germanic peoples had a greater biological tendency toward a suite of traits that predisposed them to individualism—including a greater tendency toward the simple household because of natural selection occurring in a prolonged resource-limited period of their evolution in the north of Europe. Similar tendencies toward exogamy, monogamy, individualism, and relative de-emphasis on the extended family were also characteristic of Roman civilization (MacDonald 1990), again suggesting an ethnic tendency that pervades Western cultures generally.
Current data indicate that around 80% of European genes are derived from people who settled in Europe 30-40,000 years ago and therefore persisted through the Ice Ages (Sykes 2001). This is sufficient time for the adverse ecology of the north to have had a powerful shaping influence on European psychological and cultural tendencies. These European groups were less attracted to extended kinship groups, so that when the context altered with the rise of powerful central governments able to guarantee individual interests, the simple household structure quickly became dominant. This simple family structure was adopted relatively easily because Europeans already had relatively powerful psychological predispositions toward the simple family resulting from its prolonged evolutionary history in the north of Europe.
Although these differences within the Western European system are important, they do not belie the general difference between Western Europe and the rest of Eurasia. Although the trend toward simple households occurred first in the northwest of Europe, they spread relatively quickly among all the Western European countries.
The establishment of the simple household freed from enmeshment in the wider kinship community was then followed in short order by all the other markers of Western modernization: limited governments in which individuals have rights against the state, capitalist economic enterprise based on individual economic rights, moral universalism, and science as individualist truth seeking. Individualist societies develop republican political institutions and institutions of scientific inquiry that assume that groups are maximally permeable and highly subject to defection when individual needs are not met.
Recent research by evolutionary economists provides fascinating insight on the differences between individualistic cultures versus collectivist cultures. An important aspect of this research is to model the evolution of cooperation among individualistic peoples.
Fehr and Gächter (2002) found that people will altruistically punish defectors in a “one-shot” game—a game in which participants only interact once and are thus not influenced by the reputations of the people with whom they are interacting. This situation therefore models an individualistic culture because participants are strangers with no kinship ties. The surprising finding was that subjects who made high levels of public goods donations tended to punish people who did not, even though they did not receive any benefit from doing so. Moreover, the punished individuals changed their ways and donated more in future games even though they knew that the participants in later rounds were not the same as in previous rounds. Fehr and Gächter suggest that people from individualistic cultures have an evolved negative emotional reaction to free riding that results in their punishing such people even at a cost to themselves—hence the term “altruistic punishment.”
Essentially Fehr and Gächter provide a model of the evolution of cooperation among individualistic peoples. Their results are most applicable to individualistic groups because such groups are not based on extended kinship relationships and are therefore much more prone to defection. In general, high levels of altruistic punishment are more likely to be found among individualistic, hunter-gather societies than in kinship based societies based on the extended family. Their results are least applicable to groups such as Jewish groups or other highly collectivist groups which in traditional societies were based on extended kinship relationships, known kinship linkages, and repeated interactions among members. In such situations, actors know the people with whom they are cooperating and anticipate future cooperation because they are enmeshed in extended kinship networks, or, as in the case of Jews, they are in the same group.
Similarly, in the ultimatum game, one subject (the “proposer”) is assigned a sum of money equal to two days’ wages and required to propose an offer to a second person (the “respondent”). The respondent may then accept the offer or reject the offer, and if the offer is rejected neither player wins anything. As in the previously described public goods game, the game is intended to model economic interactions between strangers, so players are anonymous. Henrich et al. (2001) found that two variables, payoffs to cooperation and the extent of market exchange, predicted offers and rejections in the game. Societies with an emphasis on cooperation and on market exchange had the highest offers—results interpreted as reflecting the fact that they have extensive experience of the principle of cooperation and sharing with strangers. These are individualistic societies. On the other hand, subjects from societies where all interactions are among family members made low offers in the ultimatum game and contributed low amounts to public goods in similarly anonymous conditions.
Europeans are thus exactly the sort of groups modeled by Fehr and Gächter and Henrich et al: They are groups with high levels of cooperation with strangers rather than with extended family members, and they are prone to market relations and individualism. On the other hand, Jewish culture derives from the Middle Old World culture area characterized by extended kinship networks and the extended family. Such cultures are prone to ingroup-outgroup relationships in which cooperation involves repeated interactions with ingroup members and the ingroup is composed of extended family members.
This suggests the fascinating possibility that the key for a group intending to turn Europeans against themselves is to trigger their strong tendency toward altruistic punishment by convincing them of the evil of their own people. Because Europeans are individualists at heart, they readily rise up in moral anger against their own people once they are seen as free riders and therefore morally blameworthy—a manifestation of their much stronger tendency toward altruistic punishment deriving from their evolutionary past as hunter gatherers. In making judgments of altruistic punishment, relative genetic distance is irrelevant. Free-riders are seen as strangers in a market situation; i.e., they have no familial or tribal connection with the altruistic punisher.
Thus the current altruistic punishment so characteristic of contemporary Western civilization: Once Europeans were convinced that their own people were morally bankrupt, any and all means of punishment should be used against their own people. Rather than see other Europeans as part of an encompassing ethnic and tribal community, fellow Europeans were seen as morally blameworthy and the appropriate target of altruistic punishment. For Westerners, morality is individualistic—violations of communal norms by free-riders are punished by altruistic aggression.
On the other hand, group strategies deriving from collectivist cultures, such as the Jews, are immune to such a maneuver because kinship and group ties come first. Morality is particularistic—whatever is good for the group. There is no tradition of altruistic punishment because the evolutionary history of these groups centers around cooperation of close kin, not strangers (see below).
The best strategy for a collectivist group like the Jews for destroying Europeans therefore is to convince the Europeans of their own moral bankruptcy. A major theme of CofC is that this is exactly what Jewish intellectual movements have done. They have presented Judaism as morally superior to European civilization and European civilization as morally bankrupt and the proper target of altruistic punishment. The consequence is that once Europeans are convinced of their own moral depravity, they will destroy their own people in a fit of altruistic punishment. The general dismantling of the culture of the West and eventually its demise as anything resembling an ethnic entity will occur as a result of a moral onslaught triggering a paroxysm of altruistic punishment. And thus the intense effort among Jewish intellectuals to continue the ideology of the moral superiority of Judaism and its role as undeserving historical victim while at the same time continuing the onslaught on the moral legitimacy of the West.
Individualist societies are therefore an ideal environment for Judaism as a highly collectivist, group-oriented strategy. Indeed, a major theme of Chapter 5 is that the Frankfurt School of Social Research advocated radical individualism among non-Jews while at the same time retaining their own powerful group allegiance to Judaism. Jews benefit from open, individualistic societies in which barriers to upward mobility are removed, in which people are viewed as individuals rather than as members of groups, in which intellectual discourse is not prescribed by institutions like the Catholic Church that are not dominated by Jews, and in which mechanisms of altruistic punishment may be exploited to divide the European majority. This is also why, apart from periods in which Jews served as middlemen between alien elites and native populations, Middle Eastern societies were much more efficient than Western individualistic societies at keeping Jews in a powerless position where they did not pose a competitive threat (see MacDonald 1998a, Ch. 2).
♣
Notes [the Bibliography appears in the 10th entry]
9. Burton, M. L., Moore, C. C., Whiting, J. W. M., & Romney, A. K. (1996). Regions based on social structure.Current Anthropology, 37: 87-123.
10. Laslett (1983) further elaborates this basic difference to include four variants ranging from West, West/central or middle, Mediterranean, to East.
The Culture of Critique’s
“The evolutionary origins of Jewish
collectivism and ethnocentrism”
in the Preface:
Jews originate in the Middle Old World cultural area(11) and retain several of the key cultural features of their ancestral population.
The Middle Old World culture group is characterized by extended kinship groups based on relatedness through the male line (patrilineal) rather than the bilateral relationships characteristic of Europeans. These male-dominated groups functioned as military units to protect herds, and between-group conflict is a much more important component of their evolutionary history. There is a great deal of pressure to form larger groups in order to increase military strength, and this is done partly by acquiring extra women through bridewealth.(12) (Bridewealth involves the transfer of resources in return for marriage rights to a female, as in the marriages of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob recounted in the Old Testament.)
As a result, polygyny rather than the monogamy characteristic of European culture is the norm. Another contrast is that traditional Jewish groups were basically extended families with high levels of endogamy (i.e., marriage within the kinship group) and consanguineous marriage (i.e., marriage to blood relatives), including the uncle-niece marriage sanctioned in the Old Testament. This is exactly the opposite of Western European tendencies toward exogamy. (See MacDonald 1994, Chs. 3 and 8 for a discussion of Jewish tendencies toward polygyny, endogamy, and consanguineous marriage.) Table 1 contrasts European and Jewish cultural characteristics.(13)
[The table can be seen here]
Whereas individualist cultures are biased toward separation from the wider group, individuals in collectivist societies have a strong sense of group identity and group boundaries based on genetic relatedness as a result of the greater importance of group conflict during their evolutionary history. Middle Eastern societies are characterized by anthropologists as “segmentary societies” organized into relatively impermeable, kinship-based groups (e.g., Coon 1958, 153; Eickelman 1981, 157-174). Group boundaries are often reinforced through external markers such as hair style or clothing, as Jews have often done throughout their history. Different groups settle in different areas where they retain their homogeneity alongside other homogeneous groups. Consider Carleton Coon’s (1958) description of Middle Eastern society:
There the ideal was to emphasize not the uniformity of the citizens of a country as a whole but a uniformity within each special segment, and the greatest possible contrast between segments. The members of each ethnic unit feel the need to identify themselves by some configuration of symbols. If by virtue of their history they possess some racial peculiarity, this they will enhance by special haircuts and the like; in any case they will wear distinctive garments and behave in a distinctive fashion. (Coon 1958, 153)
Between-group conflict often lurked just beneath the surface of these societies. For example, Dumont (1982, 223) describes the increase in anti-Semitism in Turkey in the late 19th century consequent to increased resource competition. In many towns, Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived in a sort of superficial harmony, and even lived in the same areas, “but the slightest spark sufficed to ignite the fuse” (p. 222).
Jews are at the extreme of this Middle Eastern tendency toward hyper-collectivism and hyper-ethnocentrism—a phenomenon that goes a long way toward explaining the chronic hostilities in the area.
I give many examples of Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism in my trilogy and have suggested in several places that Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism is biologically based (MacDonald 1994, Ch. 8; 1998a, Ch. 1). It was noted above that individualist European cultures tend to be more open to strangers than collectivist cultures such as Judaism. In this regard, it is interesting that developmental psychologists have found unusually intense fear reactions among Israeli infants in response to strangers, while the opposite pattern is found for infants from North Germany.(14) The Israeli infants were much more likely to become “inconsolably upset” in reaction to strangers, whereas the North German infants had relatively minor reactions to strangers. The Israeli babies therefore tended to have an unusual degree of stranger anxiety, while the North German babies were the opposite—findings that fit with the hypothesis that Europeans and Jews are on opposite ends of scales of xenophobia and ethnocentrism.
I provide many examples of Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism in my trilogy on Judaism. Recently, I have been much impressed with the theme of Jewish hyper-ethnocentrism in the writings of Israel Shahak, most notably his co-authored Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (Shahak & Mezvinsky 1999). In their examination of current Jewish fundamentalists and their influence in Israel, Shahak and Mezvinsky argue that present-day fundamentalists attempt to recreate the life of Jewish communities before the Enlightenment (i.e., prior to about 1750). During this period the great majority of Jews believed in Cabbala—Jewish mysticism. Influential Jewish scholars like Gershom Scholem ignored the obvious racialist, exclusivist material in the Cabbala by using words like “men”, “human beings”, and “cosmic” to suggest the Cabbala has a universalist message. The actual text says salvation is only for Jews, while non-Jews have “Satanic souls” (p. 58).
The ethnocentrism apparent in such statements was not only the norm in traditional Jewish society. It remains a powerful current of contemporary Jewish fundamentalism, with important implications for Israeli politics. For example, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, describing the difference between Jews and non-Jews:
We do not have a case of profound change in which a person is merely on a superior level. Rather we have a case of a totally different species. The body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of [members] of all nations of the world. The difference of the inner quality [of the body] is so great that the bodies would be considered as completely different species. This is the reason why the Talmud states that there is an halachic(15) difference in attitude about the bodies of non-Jews [as opposed to the bodies of Jews]: “their bodies are in vain”. An even greater difference exists in regard to the soul. Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness. (In Shahak & Mezvinsky 1999, 59-60)
This claim of Jewish uniqueness echoes Holocaust activist Elie Wiesel’s (1985, 153) claim that “everything about us is different.” Jews are “ontologically” exceptional.
The Gush Emunim and other Jewish fundamentalist sects described by Shahak and Mezvinsky are thus part of a long mainstream Jewish tradition that considers Jews and non-Jews as completely different species, with Jews absolutely superior to non-Jews and subject to a radically different moral code. Moral universalism is thus antithetical to the Jewish tradition.
Within Israel, these Jewish fundamentalist groups are not tiny fringe groups, mere relics of traditional Jewish culture. They are widely respected by the Israeli public and by many Jews in the Diaspora. They have a great deal of influence on the government, especially the Likud governments and the recent government of national unity headed by Ariel Sharon.
The members of Gush Emunim constitute a significant percentage of the elite units of the Israeli army, and, as expected on the hypothesis that they are extremely ethnocentric, they are much more willing to treat the Palestinians in a savage and brutal manner than are other Israeli soldiers. All together, the religious parties make up about 25% of the Israeli electorate (Shahak & Mezvinsky 1999, 8)—a percentage that is sure to increase because of their high fertility and because intensified troubles with the Palestinians tend to make other Israelis more sympathetic to their cause. Given the fractionated state of Israeli politics and the increasing numbers of the religious groups, it is unlikely that future governments can be formed without their participation. Peace in the Middle East therefore appears unlikely absent the complete capitulation of the Palestinians.
The point here is not so much about the fundamentalists in contemporary Israel but that traditional Jewish communities were intensely ethnocentric and collectivist—a major theme of all three of my books on Judaism. A thread throughout CofC is that Jewish intellectuals and political activists strongly identified as Jews and saw their work as furthering specific Jewish agendas. Their advocacy of intellectual and political causes, although often expressed in the language of moral universalism, was actually moral particularism in disguise.
Given that ethnocentrism continues to pervade all segments of the Jewish community, the advocacy of the de-ethnicization of Europeans—a common sentiment in the movements I discuss in CofC—is best seen as a strategic move against peoples regarded as historical enemies. In Chapter 8 of CofC, I called attention to a long list of similar double standards, especially with regard to the policies pursued by Israel versus the policies Jewish organizations have pursued in the U.S. As noted throughout CofC, Jewish advocates addressing Western audiences have promoted policies that satisfy Jewish (particularist) interests in terms of the morally universalist language that is a central feature of Western moral and intellectual discourse. These policies include church-state separation, attitudes toward multi-culturalism, and immigration policies favoring the dominant ethnic groups. This double standard is fairly pervasive.(16)
A principal theme of CofC is that Jewish organizations played a decisive role in opposing the idea that the United States ought to be a European nation. Nevertheless, these organizations have been strong supporters of Israel as a nation of the Jewish people. Consider, for example, a press release of May 28, 1999 by the ADL:
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today lauded the passage of sweeping changes in Germany’s immigration law, saying the easing of the nation’s once rigorous naturalization requirements “will provide a climate for diversity and acceptance. It is encouraging to see pluralism taking root in a society that, despite its strong democracy, had for decades maintained an unyielding policy of citizenship by blood or descent only,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. “The easing of immigration requirements is especially significant in light of Germany’s history of the Holocaust and persecution of Jews and other minority groups. The new law will provide a climate for diversity and acceptance in a nation with an onerous legacy of xenophobia, where the concept of ‘us versus them’ will be replaced by a principle of citizenship for all.”(17)
There is no mention of analogous laws in place in Israel restricting immigration to Jews and the long-standing policy of rejecting the possibility of repatriation for Palestinian refugees wishing to return to Israel or the occupied territories. The prospective change in the “us versus them” attitude alleged to be characteristic of Germany is applauded, while the “us versus them” attitude characteristic of Israel and Jewish culture throughout history is unmentioned.
Recently, the Israeli Ministry of Interior ruled that new immigrants who have converted to Judaism will no longer be able to bring non-Jewish family members into the country. The decision is expected to cut by half the number of eligible immigrants to Israel.(18) Nevertheless, Jewish organizations continue to be strong proponents of multi-ethnic immigration to the United States.(19) This pervasive double standard was noticed by writer Vincent Sheean in his observations of Zionists in Palestine in 1930: “how idealism goes hand in hand with the most terrific cynicism… how they are Fascists in their own affairs, with regard to Palestine, and internationalists in everything else.”(20)
My view is that Judaism must be conceived primarily as an ethnic rather than a religious group. Recent statements by prominent Jewish figures show that an ethnic conceptualization of Judaism fits with the self-images of many Jews.
Speaking to a largely Jewish audience, Benjamin Netanyahu, prominent Likud Party member and until recently prime minister of Israel, stated, “If Israel had not come into existence after World War II then I am certain the Jewish race wouldn’t have survived… I stand before you and say you must strengthen your commitment to Israel. You must become leaders and stand up as Jews. We must be proud of our past to be confident of our future.”(21) Charles Bronfman, a main sponsor of the $210 million “Birthright Israel” project which attempts to deepen the commitment of American Jews, expresses a similar sentiment: “You can live a perfectly decent life not being Jewish, but I think you’re losing a lot—losing the kind of feeling you have when you know [that] throughout the world there are people who somehow or other have the same kind of DNA that you have.”(22) (Bronfman is co-chairman of the Seagram company and brother of Edgar Bronfman, Sr., president of the World Jewish Congress.) Such sentiments would be unthinkable coming from European-American leaders. European-Americans making such assertions of racial pride would quickly be labeled haters and extremists.
A revealing comment by AJCommittee official Stephen Steinlight (2001) illustrates the profound ethnic nationalism that has pervaded the socialization of American Jews continuing into the present:
I’ll confess it, at least: like thousands of other typical Jewish kids of my generation, I was reared as a Jewish nationalist, even a quasi-separatist. Every summer for two months for 10 formative years during my childhood and adolescence I attended Jewish summer camp. There, each morning, I saluted a foreign flag, dressed in a uniform reflecting its colors, sang a foreign national anthem, learned a foreign language, learned foreign folk songs and dances, and was taught that Israel was the true homeland. Emigration to Israel was considered the highest virtue, and, like many other Jewish teens of my generation, I spent two summers working in Israel on a collective farm while I contemplated that possibility.
More tacitly and subconsciously, I was taught the superiority of my people to the gentiles who had oppressed us. We were taught to view non-Jews as untrustworthy outsiders, people from whom sudden gusts of hatred might be anticipated, people less sensitive, intelligent, and moral than ourselves. We were also taught that the lesson of our dark history is that we could rely on no one…
It must be admitted that the essence of the process of my nationalist training was to inculcate the belief that the primary division in the world was between “us” and “them.” Of course we also saluted the American and Canadian flags and sang those anthems, usually with real feeling, but it was clear where our primary loyalty was meant to reside.(23)
Assertions of Jewish ethnicity are well-founded. Scientific studies supporting the genetic cohesiveness of Jewish groups continue to appear, most notably Hammer et al. (2000). Based on Y-chromosome data, Hammer et al. conclude that 1 in 200 matings within Jewish communities were with non-Jews over a 2000 year period. [The following sentence does not appear in the printed version of MacDonald’s book, only in the online version:] This is a link to a report discussing the article by Hammer et al., “Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish populations share a common pool of Y-chromosome biallelic haplotypes,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences May 9, 2000.
In general, the contemporary organized Jewish community is characterized by high levels of Jewish identification and ethnocentrism. Jewish activist organizations like the ADL and the AJCommittee are not creations of the fundamentalist and Orthodox, but represent the broad Jewish community, including non-religious Jews and Reform Jews. In general, the more actively people are involved in the Jewish community, the more committed they are to preventing intermarriage and retaining Jewish ethnic cohesion. And despite a considerable level of intermarriage among less committed Jews, the leadership of the Jewish community in the U.S. is not now made up of the offspring of intermarried people to any significant extent.
Jewish ethnocentrism is ultimately simple traditional human ethnocentrism, although it is certainly among the more extreme varieties. But what is so fascinating is the cloak of intellectual support for Jewish ethnocentrism, the complexity and intellectual sophistication of the rationalizations for it—some of which are reviewed in Separation and Its Discontents (Chs. 6-8), and the rather awesome hypocrisy of it, given Jewish opposition to ethnocentrism among Europeans.
♣
Notes [the Bibliography appears in the 10th entry]
11 . Burton, M. L., Moore, C. C., Whiting, J. W. M., & Romney, A. K. (1996). Regions based on social structure. Current Anthropology, 37: 87-123.
12 . Barfield, T. J. (1993). The Nomadic Alternative. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
13. Support for this classification comes from several places in my trilogy on Judaism and in turn depends on the work of many scholars. Besides the sources in this preface, special note should be made of the following: Evolutionary history: MacDonald 1994, Ch. 8; Marriage practices: MacDonald 1994 (Chs. 3 and 8); Marriage psychology: CofC (Chs. 4, 8); Position of women CofC (Ch. 4); Attitude toward outgroups and strangers: MacDonald 1994 (Ch. 8), MacDonald 1998a (Ch. 1); Social structure: MacDonald 1994 (Ch. 8), MacDonald 1998a (Chs. 1, 3-5), CofC (Chs. 6, 8, and passim as feature of Jewish intellectual movements); Socialization: MacDonald 1994 (Ch. 7), CofC (Ch. 5); Intellectual stance: MacDonald 1994 (Ch. 7), CofC (Ch. 6 and passim); Moral stance: MacDonald 1994 (Ch. 6), CofC (Ch. 8).
14. Grossman et al. and Sagi et al., in I. Bretherton & E. Waters (Eds.), Growing Points in Attachment Theory and Research. Monographs for the Society for Research in Child Development, 50(1-2), 233-275. Sagi et al. suggest temperamental differences in stranger anxiety may be important because of the unusual intensity of the reactions of many of the Israeli infants. The tests were often terminated because of the intense crying of the infants.
Sagi et al. find this pattern among both Kibbutz-reared and city-reared infants, although less strongly in the latter. However, the city-reared infants were subjected to somewhat different testing conditions: They were not subjected to a pre-test socialization episode with a stranger. Sagi et al. suggest that the socialization pre-test may have intensified reactions to strangers among the Kibbutz-reared babies, but they note that such pre-tests do not have this effect in samples of infants from Sweden and the U.S. This again highlights the difference between Israeli and European samples.
15 . A halachic difference refers to a distinction based on Jewish religious law.
16. The following comment illustrates well the different mindset that many strongly identified Jews have toward America versus Israel:
While walking through the streets of Jerusalem, I feel Jewish identity is first and foremost about self-determination and, by extension, the security and power that comes with having a state. I am quite comfortable in Israel with the sight of soldiers standing with machine guns and the knowledge that even a fair number of the civilians around me are probably packing heat.
The seminal event in my Zionist consciousness, despite my being born after 1967 and having serious misgivings about Israel’s control over the territories, is still the dramatic victory of a Jewish army in the Six-Day War. Put me in New York, however, and sud-denly the National Rifle Association symbolizes this country’s darkest side.
It’s as if my subconscious knows instinctively that the moment we land at JFK Airport, it becomes time to stash away those images of Israeli soldiers taking control of Jerusalem’s Old City, of Moshe Dayan standing at the Western Wall, and to replace them with the familiar photograph of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching by the side of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (A. Eden, “Liberalism in Diaspora.” The Forward, Sept. 21, 2001)
17. ADL Hails Passage of New Immigration Law in Germany (http://www.adl.org/presrele/dirab%5F41/3396%5F41.asp).
18. Jerusalem Post, March 5, 2001.
19. See, e.g., the ADL Policy Report on the prospects of immigration legislation in the George W. Bush administration and the 107th Congress [this document has been removed from ADL page].
20. In, Boyle (2001), p. 160. As recounted by Boyle, Sheean was hired by the Zionist publication, New Palestine, in 1929 to write about the progress of Zionism in that country. He went to Palestine, and after studying the situation, returned the money the Zionists had paid him.
He then wrote a book (Personal History; New York: Literary Guild Country Life Press, 1935)—long out of print—describing his negative impressions of the Zionists. He noted, for example, “how they never can or will admit that anybody who disagrees with them is honest” (p. 160). This comment reflects the authoritarian exclusion of dissenters noted as a characteristic of Jewish intellectual and political movements in CofC (Ch. 6). His book was a commercial failure and he passed quietly into oblivion.
The subject of Boyle’s book, George Antonius, was a Greek Orthodox Arab from what is today Lebanon. His book, The Arab Awakening (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1938) presented the Arab case in the Palestinian-Zionist dispute. The appendices to his book include the Hussein-McMahon correspondence of October 24, 1915, between Sharif Hussein (who authorized the Arab revolt against the Turks) and Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner in Egypt.
The correspondence shows that the Arabs were promised independence in the whole area (including Palestine) after the war. Also in the appendices are the Hogarth Memorandum of January 1918 and the Declaration to the Seven of June 16, 1918, both of which were meant to reassure the Arabs that England would honor its earlier promises to them when the Arabs expressed concern after the Balfour Declaration. Britain kept these documents classified until Antonius published them in The Arab Awakening. Antonius was pushed out of the Palestine Mandate Administration by British Zionists and died broken and impoverished.
21. Daily Pilot, Newport Beach/ Costa Mesa, California, Feb. 28, 2000,
22 . “Project Reminds Young Jews of Heritage.” Washington Post, Jan. 17, 2000, p. A19.
23. Steinlight tempers these remarks by noting the Jewish commitment to moral universalism, including the attraction to Marxism so characteristic of Jews during most of the 20th century. However, as indicated in Chapter 3, Jewish commitment to leftist universalism was always conditioned on whether leftist universalism conformed to perceived Jewish interests, and in fact Jewish leftist universalism has often functioned as little more than a weapon against the traditional bonds of cohesiveness of Western societies.
The Culture of Critique’s
“Jewish Involvement in Communism
and the Radical Left”
in the Preface:
“Beat them, Red Fighters, clobber them to death, if it is the last thing you do! Right away! This minute! Now!… Slaughter them, Red Army Fighters, Stamp harder on the rising lids of their rancid coffins!” (Isaac Babel, described by Cynthia Ozick [2001, 3] as “an acutely conscious Jew,” propagandizing for the Bolshevik Revolution; in Ozick 2001, 4).
Another recent development related to the issues raised in CofC was the publication of The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Courtois et al. 1999). Reading this book has caused me to expand on some of the ideas in Chapter 3 of CofC. I didn’t emphasize enough the truly horrific nature of the Soviet regime, nor did I place sufficient emphasis on the consequences of Jewish involvement in the rise and maintenance of Communism.
The Soviet government killed over 20 million of its own citizens, the vast majority in the first 25 years of its existence during the height of Jewish power. It was a “state against its people” (Werth 1999), mounting murderous campaigns of collective punishment (usually involving deportation or forced starvation) against a great many ethnic groups, including Great Russian peasants, Ukrainians, Cossacks, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, Moldavians, Kalmyks, Karachai, Balkars, Ingush, Greeks, Bulgars, Crimean Armenians, Meskhetian Turks, Kurds, and Khemshins as groups (Courtois 1999, 10; Werth 1999, 219ff). Although individual Jews were caught up in the Bolshevik violence, Jews were not targeted as a group.(24)
In CofC (Ch. 3), I noted that Jews were prominently involved in the Bolshevik Revolution and formed an elite group in the Soviet Union well into the post-World War II-era. [Since publication of this preface, Yuri Slezkine’sbook, The Jewish Century (Princeton University Press, 2004) provides a great deal of information showing that Jews were a hostile elite in the USSR.] It is interesting that many of the non-Jewish Bolsheviks were members of non-Russian ethnic groups or, as noted in CofC, were married to Jewish women. It was a common perception during the early stages of the Soviet Union that the government was dominated by “a small knot of foreigners” (Szajkowski 1977, 55). Stalin, Beria, and Ordzhonikidze were Georgians; Dzerzhinsky, the ruthless head of the Checka (Secret Police) during the 1920s, was a Pole with strong pro-Jewish attitudes. The original Cheka was made up largely of non-Russians, and the Russians in the Cheka tended to be sadistic psychopaths and criminals (Werth 1999, 62; Wolin & Slusser 1957, 6)—people who are unlikely to have any allegiance to or identification with their people.
The Bolshevik revolution therefore had a pronounced ethnic angle: To a very great extent, Jews and other non-Russians ruled over the Russian people, with disastrous consequences for the Russians and other ethnic groups that were not able to become part of the power structure. For example, when Stalin decided to deport the Chechens, he placed an Ossetian—a group from which he himself was partly derived and an historic enemy of the Chechens—in charge of the deportation. Ossetians and Georgians, Stalin’s own ancestral groups, were allowed to expand at the expense of other ethnic groups.
While Stalin favored the Georgians, Jews had their own ethnic scores to settle. It seems likely that at least some of the Bolshevik mass murder and terror was motivated by revenge against peoples that had historically been anti-Jewish. Several historians have suggested that Jews joined the security forces in such large numbers in order to get revenge for their treatment under the Czars (Rapoport 1990, 31; Baron 1975, 170). For example, the Cossacks served the Czar as a military police force, and they used their power against Jewish communities during the conflicts between the government and the Jews. After the Revolution, the Cossacks were deported to Siberia for refusing to join the collective farms. During the 1930s, the person in charge of the deportations was an ethnic Jew, Lazar Kaganovich, nicknamed the “wolf of the Kremlin” because of his penchant for violence. In his drive against the peasants, Kaganovich took “an almost perverse joy in being able to dictate to the Cossacks. He recalled too vividly what he and his family had experienced at the hands of these people… Now they would all pay—men, women, children. It didn’t matter who. They became one and the same. That was the key to [Kaganovich’s] being. He would never forgive and he would never forget” (Kahan 1987, 164). Similarly, Jews were placed in charge of security in the Ukraine, which had a long history of anti-Semitism (Lindemann 1997, 443) and became a scene of mass murder in the 1930s.
In CofC (Ch. 3), I noted that Jews were very prominently involved in the Soviet secret police and that they played similar roles in Communist Poland and Hungary. In addition to many lower ranking security personnel, prominent Jews included Matvei Berman and Naftali Frenkel, who developed the slave labor system which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. (The construction of a canal between the Baltic and the White Sea claimed many thousands of lives. The six overseers of the project were Jews: Firin, Berman, Frenkel, Kogan, Rappoport, Zhuk.) Other Jews who were prominent in carrying out the Red Terror included Genrik Yagoda (head of the secret police), Aron Soltz, Lev Inzhir (chief accountant of the Gulag Archipelago), M. I. Gay (head of a special secret police department), A. A. Slutsky and his deputy Boris Berman (in charge of terror abroad), K. V. Pauker (secret police Chief of Operations), and Lazar Kaganovich (most powerful government official behind Stalin during the 1930s and prominently involved in the mass murders that took place during that period) (Rapoport 1990, 44-50). In general, Jews were not only prominent in the leadership of the Bolsheviks, but they “abounded at the lower levels of the party machinery—especially, in the Cheka, and its successors the GPU, the OGPU and the NKVD” (Schapiro 1961, 165). The special role of Jews in the Bolshevik government was not lost on Russians: “For the most prominent and colourful figure after Lenin was Trotsky, in Petrograd the dominant and hated figure was Zinoviev, while anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with, and possibly shot by, a Jewish investigator” (Schapiro 1961, 165). Beginning in 1917 it was common for Russians to associate Jews with the revolution (Werth 1999, 86). Even after the German invasion in 1941, it was common for many Russians to hope for German victory to rid the country of “Jews and Bolsheviks”—until the brutality of the invaders became apparent (Werth 1999, 215).
The discussion of Jewish power in the Soviet Union in CofC notes that in stark contrast to the campaigns of mass murder against other peoples, Stalin’s efforts against a relative handful of high-ranking Jewish Communists during the purges of the 1930s were very cautious and involved a great deal of deception intended to downplay the Jewish identity of the victims. Jewish power during this period is also indicated by the fact that the Soviet government established a Jewish autonomous region (Birobidzhan) in 1934, at least partly to curry favor with foreign Jewish organizations (Gitelman 1988). During the 1920s and throughout the 1930s the Soviet Union accepted aid for Soviet Jews from foreign Jewish organizations, especially the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee which was funded by wealthy American Jews (Warburg, Schiff, Kuhn, Loeb, Lehman, Marshall).
Another revealing incident occurred when Stalin ordered the murder of two Polish-Jewish leaders of the international socialist movement, Henryk Ehrlich and Victor Alter. These murders created an international incident, and there were protests by leftists around the world (Rapoport 1990, 68). The furor did not die down until the Soviets established a Jewish organization, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), dedicated to winning the favor of American Jews. American Jewish leaders, such as Nahum Goldmann of the World Jewish Congress and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of the American Jewish Congress (AJCongress), helped quell the uproar over the incident and shore up positive views of the Soviet Union among American Jews. They, along with a wide range of American Jewish radicals, warmly greeted JAC representatives in New York during World War II.
A map of the Gulag “archipelago”
Again, the contrast is striking. The Soviet government killed millions of Ukrainian and Russian peasants during the 1920s and 1930s, executed hundreds of thousands of people who were purged from their positions in the party and throughout the economy, imprisoned hundreds of thousands of people in appalling conditions that produced incredibly high mortality and without any meaningful due process, drafted hundreds of thousands of people into forced labor with enormous loss of life, and ordered the collective punishment and deportation of Cossacks and other ethnic groups, resulting in mass murder of these groups. At the same time, actions against a handful of Jewish Communists were taken cautiously and performed with reassurances that the government still had very positive views of Jews and Judaism.
A major theme of Chapter 3 of CofC is that in general Jewish leftists, including supporters of Bolshevism, continued to identify as Jews and that Jewish support for these causes waxed or waned depending on their congruence with specific Jewish issues. However, I should have emphasized more just how much specifically Jewish issues mattered, that indeed Jewish involvement with Bolshevism is perhaps the most egregious example of Jewish moral particularism in all of history.
The horrific consequences of Bolshevism for millions of non-Jewish Soviet citizens do not seem to have been an issue for Jewish leftists—a pattern that continues into the present. In CofC, I noted that Ilya Ehrenberg’s silence about Soviet brutalities involving the murder of millions of its citizens during the 1930s may have been motivated largely by his view that the Soviet Union was a bulwark against fascism (Rubenstein 1996, 143-145). This moral blindspot was quite common. During the 1930s, when millions of Soviet citizens were being murdered by the Soviet government, the Communist Party USA took great pains to appeal to specific Jewish interests, including opposing anti-Semitism, supporting Zionism, and advocating the importance of maintaining Jewish cultural traditions. During this period, “the American radical movement glorified the development of Jewish life in the Soviet Union… The Soviet Union was living proof that under socialism the Jewish question could be solved” (Kann 1981, 152-153). Communism was perceived as “good for Jews.” Radical Jews—a substantial percentage of the entire Jewish community at that time—saw the world through Jewish lenses.
A fascinating example of an American Jewish radical who extolled the virtues of the Soviet Union is Joe Rapoport (Kann 1981, 20-42, 109-125)—mentioned briefly in CofC, but his example bears a deeper examination. Rapoport joined a Jewish detachment of the Red Army that was fighting the Ukrainian nationalists in the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Like many other Jews, he chose the Red Army because it opposed the anti-Jewish actions of the Ukrainian nationalists. Like the vast majority of Russian Jews, he greeted the revolution because it improved the lives of the Jews.
After emigrating to the U.S., Rapoport visited the Ukraine in November of 1934, less then one year after the famine created by Soviet government actions that killed 4 million Ukrainian peasants (Werth 1999, 159ff ). The peasants had resisted being forced to join collective farms and were aided by local Ukrainian authorities. The response of the central government was to arrest farmers and confiscate all grain, including reserves to be used for next year’s harvest. Since they had no food, the peasants attempted to leave for the cities but were prevented from doing so by the government. The peasants starved by the millions. Parents abandoned starving children before starving themselves; cannibalism was rampant; remaining workers were tortured to force them to hand over any remaining food. Methods of torture included the “cold” method where the victim was stripped bare and left out in the cold, stark naked. Sometimes whole brigades of collective workers were treated in this fashion. In the “hot” method, the feet and the bottom of the skirt of female workers were doused with gasoline and then set alight. The flames were put out, and the process was repeated (Werth 1999, 166). During the period when the famine claimed a total of 6 million lives throughout the country, the government exported eighteen million hundredweight of grain in order to obtain money for industrialization.
These horrors are unmentioned by Rapoport in his account of his 1934 visit. Instead, he paints a very positive portrait of life in the Ukraine under the Soviets. Life is good for the Jews. He is pleased that Yiddish culture is accepted not only by Jews but by non-Jews as well, a clear indication of the privileged status of Judaism in the Soviet Union during this period. (For example, he recounts an incident in which a Ukrainian worker read a story in Yiddish to the other workers, Jews and non-Jews alike.) Young Jews were taking advantage of new opportunities not only in Yiddish culture but “in the economy, in the government, in participation in the general life of the country” (Kann 1981, 120). Older Jews complained that the government was anti-religious, and young Jews complained that Leon Trotsky, “the national pride of the Jewish people,” had been removed. But the message to American radicals was upbeat: “It was sufficient to learn that the Jewish young people were in higher positions and embraced the Soviet system” (Kann 1981, 122). Rapoport sees the world through Jewish-only eyes. The massive suffering in which a total of nearly 20 million Soviet citizens had already died because of government actions is irrelevant. When he looks back on his life as an American Jewish radical, his only ambivalence and regrets are about supporting Soviet actions he saw as not in the Jewish interest, such as the non-aggression pact with Germany and failure to consistently support Israel.
Rapoport was thus an exemplar of the many defenders of Communism in the U.S. media and intellectual circles (see below and Ch. 3). A prominent example of malfeasance by the media was the New York Times, owned by a Jewish family and much on the mind of those concerned about Jewish media influence (see above). During the 1930s, while it was highlighting German persecution of Jews and pushing for intervention into World War II against Germany, the Times whitewashed the horrors of Soviet rule, including the Ukrainian famine, even though the story was covered extensively by the Hearst newspapers and even though the leadership of the Times had been informed on numerous occasions that its correspondent was painting a false picture of Stalin’s actions.(25)
Peter Novick’s recent book, The Holocaust in American Life (Novick 1999), contributes to scholarship on the involvement of Jews in the radical left during the 20th century. He shows that Jewish organizations in the U.S. were well aware of Jewish involvement in Communism, but they argued that only a minority of Jews were involved and downplayed the fact that a majority of Communists were Jews, that an even greater majority of Communist leaders were Jews, that the great majority of those called up by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1940s and 1950s were Jews, and that most of those prosecuted for spying for the Soviet Union were Jews (see also Chapter 3 of CofC and MacDonald 1998a, 200-201).
Indeed, the proposal that leftist radicalism represented a minority of the American Jewish community is far from obvious. In fact, the immigrant Jewish community in the U.S. from 1886 to 1920 can best be described as “one big radical debating society” (Cohn 1958, 621). Long after this period, leftist sympathies were widespread in the AJCongress—by far the largest organization of American Jews, and Communist-oriented groupswere affiliated with the AJCongress until being reluctantly purged during the McCarthy era (Svonkin 1997, 132, 166). Recently no less a figure than Representative Samuel Dickstein, discussed in Chapter 7 as a strong Congressional proponent of immigration and certainly a prominent and mainstream figure in the Jewish community, was revealed as a Soviet spy. Dickstein was motivated at least partly by his sympathy with Soviet anti-fascism (Weinstein & Vassiliev 1999, 140-150).
Novick notes that Jewish organizations made sure that Hollywood movies did not show any Communist characters with Jewish names. Newspapers and magazines such as Time and Life, which were at that time controlled by non-Jews, agreed not to publish letters on the Jewishness of American Communists at the behest of a staff member of the AJCommittee (Novick 1999, 95).
Novick also notes that Jewish Communists often used the Holocaust as a rhetorical device at a time when mainstream Jewish organizations were trying to keep a low profile. This fits well with the material in CofC indicating a strong Jewish identification among the vast majority of Jewish Communists. Invocations of the Holocaust “became the dominant argument, at least in Jewish circles, for opposition to Cold War mobilization” (Novick 1999, 93). Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, often invoked the Holocaust in rationalizing their actions. Julius testified that the USSR “contributed a major share in destroying the Hitler beast who killed 6,000,000 of my co-religionists” (p. 94). Public demonstrations of support for the Rosenbergs often invoked the Holocaust.
Although Bendersky (2000) presents an apologetic account in which Jewish involvement in radical leftism is seen as nothing more than the paranoia of racist military officers, he shows that U.S. military intelligence had confirmation of the linkage from multiple independent sources, including information on financial support of revolutionary activity provided by wealthy Jews like Jacob Schiff and the Warburg family. These sources included not only its own agents, but also the British government and the U.S. State Department Division of Russian Affairs. These sources asserted that Jews dominated the Bolshevik governments of the Soviet Union and Hungary and that Jews in other countries were sympathetic to Bolshevism. Similarly, Szajkowski (1977) shows that the view that Jews dominated the Bolshevik government was very widespread among Russians and foreigners in the Soviet Union, including American and British military and diplomatic personnel and administrators of relief agencies. He also shows that sympathy for the Bolshevik government was the norm within the Eastern European immigrant Jewish community in the U.S. in the period from 1918-1920, but that the older German-Jewish establishment (whose numbers were dwarfed by the more recent immigrants from Eastern Europe) opposed Bolshevism during this period.
While the Jewish Holocaust has become a moral touchstone and premier cultural icon in Western societies, the Jewish blind spot about the horrors of Bolshevism continues into the present time. Jewish media figures who were blacklisted because of Communist affiliations in the 1940s are now heroes, honored by the film industry, praised in newspapers, their work exhibited in museums.(26) For example, an event commemorating the blacklist was held at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in October 1997. Organized by the four guilds—the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), Directors Guild of America (DGA), Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and Writers Guild of America, west (WGAw), the event honored the lives and careers of the blacklisted writers and condemned the guilds’ lack of response fifty years earlier. At the same time, the Writers Guild of America has been restoring dozens of credits to movies written by screenwriters who wrote under pseudonyms or used fronts while blacklisted. Movies on the topic paint a picture of innocent Jewish idealists hounded by a ruthless, oppressive government, and critics like Bernheimer (1998, 163-166) clearly approve this assessment. In the same vein, the 1983 movie Daniel, based on a novel by E. L. Doctorow and directed by Sydney Lumet, portrayed the conviction of the Rosenbergs as “a matter of political expediency. The persecution is presented as a nightmarish vision of Jewish victimization, senseless and brutal” (Bernheimer 1998, 178).
A nostalgic and exculpatory attitude toward the Jewish Old Left is apparent in recent accounts of the children of “red diaper babies,” including those who have come to reject their leftist commitments. For example, Ronald Radosh’s (2001a) Commies describes the all-encompassing world of Jewish radicalism of his youth. His father belonged to a classic Communist Party front organization called the Trade Union Unity League. Radosh was a dutiful son, throwing himself fervently into every cause that bore the party’s stamp of approval, attending a party-inspired summer camp and a New York City red-diaper high school (known as “the Little Red Schoolhouse for little Reds”), and participating in youth festivals modeled on Soviet extravaganzas. It says a lot about the Jewish milieu of the Party that a common joke was: “What Jewish holidays do you celebrate?” “Paul Robeson’s birthday and May Day.” Radosh only questioned the leftist faith when he was rejected and blackballed by his leftist comrades for publishing a book that established the guilt of Julius Rosenberg. Radosh shows that academic departments of history remain a bastion of apologia for the far left. Many academic historians shunned Radosh because of his findings, including Eric Foner, another Red Diaper Baby, who was a president of the American Historical Association. Radosh writes of the “reflexive hatred of the American system” that pervades the left. It was indeed a “reflexive hatred”—a hatred that, as discussed in CofC, was due far more to their strong Jewish identifications than to anything objectively wrong with American society. Nevertheless, despite his reservations about the leftism of his past, he presents the motivations of Jewish communists as idealistic even as they provided “the ideological arguments meant to rationalize Soviet crimes and gain the support by Americans for Soviet foreign policy” (Radosh 2001b).
Despite the massive evidence for a very large Jewish involvement in these movements, there are no apologies from Jewish organizations and very few mea culpas from Jewish intellectuals. If anything, the opposite is true, given the idealization of blacklisted writers and the continuing tendency to portray U.S. Communists as idealists who were crushed by repressive McCarthyism. Because many Communist societies eventually developed anti-Jewish movements, Jewish organizations portray Jews as victims of Communism, not as critical to its rise to power, as deeply involved in the murderous reign of terror unleashed by these regimes, and as apologists for the Soviet Union in the West.
Forgotten in this history are the millions of deaths, the forced labor, the quieting of all dissent that occurred during the height of Jewish power in the Soviet Union. Remembered are the anti-Jewish trends of late Communism.
The 20th century in Europe and the Western world, like the 15th century in Spain, was a Jewish century because Jews and Jewish organizations were intimately and decisively involved in all of the important events. If I am correct in asserting that Jewish participation was a necessary condition for the Bolshevik Revolution and its murderous aftermath, one could also argue that Jews thereby had a massive influence on later events. The following is an “alternative history”; i.e., a history of what might have happened if certain events had not happened. For example, alternative historian Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War makes a plausible case that if England had not entered World War I, Germany would have defeated France and Russia and would have become the dominant power in Europe. The Czar’s government may well have collapsed, but the changes would have led to a constitutional government instead of the Bolshevik regime. Hitler would not have come to power because Germans would have already achieved their national aspirations. World War II would not have happened, and there would have been no Cold War.
But of course these things did happen. In the same way, one can then also ask what might have happened in the absence of Jewish involvement in the Bolshevik Revolution. The argument would go as follows:
(1) Given that World War I did occur and that the Czar’s government was drastically weakened, it seems reasonable that there would have been major changes in Russia. However, without Jewish involvement, the changes in Russia would have resulted in a constitutional monarchy, a representative republic, or even a nationalist military junta that enjoyed broad popular support among the Great Russian majority instead of a dictatorship dominated by ethnic outsiders, especially Jews and “jewified non-Jews,” to use Lindemann’s (1997) term. It would not have been an explicitly Marxist revolution, and therefore it would not have had a blueprint for a society that sanctioned war against its own people and their traditional culture. The ideology of the Bolshevik revolution sanctioned the elimination of whole classes of people, and indeed mass murder has been a characteristic of communism wherever it has come to power (Courtois et al. 1999). These massacres were made all the easier because the Revolution was led by ethnic outsiders with little or no sympathy for the Russians or other peoples who suffered the most.
(2) Conservatives throughout Europe and the United States believed that Jews were responsible for Communism and the Bolshevik Revolution (Bendersky 2000; Mayer 1988; Nolte 1965; Szajkowski 1974). The Jewish role in leftist political movements was a common source of anti-Jewish attitudes, not only among the National Socialists in Germany, but among a great many non-Jewish intellectuals and political figures. Indeed, in the years following World War I, British, French, and U.S. political leaders, including Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and Lord Balfour, believed in Jewish responsibility, and such attitudes were common in the military and diplomatic establishments in these countries (e.g., Szajkowski 1974, 166ff; see also above and Ch. 3). For example, writing in 1920, Winston Churchill typified the perception that Jews were behind what he termed a “world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization.” The role of Jews in the Bolshevik Revolution “is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others.” Churchill noted the predominance of Jews among Bolshevik leaders (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Litvinoff, Krassin, Radek) and among those responsible for “the system of [state] terrorism.” Churchill also noted that Jews were prominent in revolutionary movements in Hungary, in Germany, and in the United States. The identification of Jews with revolutionary radicalism became a major concern of the military and political leaders throughout Western Europe and the United States (Bendersky 2000; Szajkowski 1974). Moreover, as noted above, the deep involvement of Jews in Bolshevism was privately acknowledged within Jewish activist organizations. Lucien Wolf, a fixture in the Anglo-Jewish establishment, noted that, “I know the political history of the Jews in Europe and the part played by Jews in Bolshevism much too well not to realise the danger that we run in pretending that they always did hold aloof from revolution. There would have been no progress in Europe without revolution and I have often written and lectured—and I shall do so again—in praise of the Jews who have helped the good work” (in Szajkowski 1974, 172).
(3) In Germany, the identification of Jews and Bolshevism was common in the middle classes and was a critical part of the National Socialist view of the world. For middle-class Germans, “the experience of the Bolshevik revolution in Germany was so immediate, so close to home, and so disquieting, and statistics seemed to prove the overwhelming participation of Jewish ringleaders so irrefutably,” that even many liberals believed in Jewish responsibility (Nolte 1965, 331). Hitler was also well aware of the predominance of Jews in the short-lived revolutions in Hungary and in the German province of Bavaria in 1919. He had experienced the Jewish involvement in the Bavarian revolution personally, and this may well have been a decisive moment in the development of his anti-Jewish ideas (Lindemann 2000, 90).
Jewish involvement in the horrors of Communism was therefore an important ingredient in Hitler’s desire to destroy the USSR and in the anti-Jewish actions of the German National Socialist government. Ernst Nolte and several other historians have argued that the Jewish role in the Bolshevik Revolution was an important cause of the Holocaust. Hitler and the National Socialists certainly believed that Jews were critical to the success of the Bolshevik Revolution. They compared the Soviet Union to a man with a Slavic body and a Jewish-Bolshevik brain (Nolte 1965, 357-358). They attributed the mass murders of Communism—“the most radical form of Jewish genocide ever known”—to the Jewish-Bolshevik brain (Nolte 1965, 393). The National Socialists were well aware that the Soviet government committed mass murder against its enemies and believed that it was intent on promoting a world revolution in which many more millions of people would be murdered. As early as 1918 a prominent Jewish Bolshevik, Grigory Zinoviev, spoke publicly about the need to eliminate ten million Russians—an underestimate by half, as it turned out.
Seizing upon this background, Hitler wrote:
Now begins the last great revolution. By wrestling political power for himself, the Jew casts off the few remaining shreds of disguise he still wears. The democratic plebeian Jew turns into the blood Jew and the tyrant of peoples. In a few years he will try to exterminate the national pillars of intelligence and, by robbing the peoples of their natural spiritual leadership, will make them ripe for the slavish lot of a permanent subjugation. The most terrible example of this is Russia. (In Nolte 1965, 406)
This line of reasoning does not imply that there were no other critical factors. If World War I had not occurred and if the Czar hadn’t entered that war, then the Czar could have stayed in power much longer. Russia might have been transformed gradually into a modern Western state rather than be subjected to the horrors of Communism. In the same way, Hitler may not have come to power if there had been no Great Depression or if Germany had won World War I. Such events also would have altered things enormously.
The victory over National Socialism then set the stage for the tremendous increase in Jewish power in the post-World War II Western world. This new-found power facilitated the establishment of Israel, the transformation of the United States and other Western nations in the direction of multi-racial, multi-cultural societies via large-scale non-white immigration, and the consequent decline in European demographic and cultural pre-eminence. The critical details of these and other consequences of Jewish rise to international elite status and power are described in CofC.
♣
Notes [the Bibliography appears in the 10th entry]
24. In the early 1950s Stalin appears to have planned to deport Jews to a Jewish area in Western Siberia, but he died before this project was begun. During their occupation of Poland in 1940, the Soviets deported Jews who were refugees from Nazi-occupied Western Poland. However, this action was not anti-Jewish as such because it did not involve either Jews from the Soviet Union or from Eastern Poland. This deportation is more likely to have resulted from Stalin’s fear of anyone or any group exposed to Western influence.
25. Taylor, S. J. (1990). Stalin’s Apologist, Walter Duranty: The New York Times’s Man in Moscow. New York: Oxford University Press; R. Radosh (2000). From Walter Duranty to Victor Navasky: The New York Times’ Love Affair with Communism. FrontPageMagazine.com, October 26; W. L. Anderson (2001), The New York Times Missed the Wrong Missed Story, November 17, 2001. Radosh’s article shows that the Times’ sympathy with communism continues into the present. The Times has never renounced the Pulitzer Prize given to Walter Duranty for his coverage of Stalin’s Five-Year Plan.
26. Hamilton, D. (2000). “Keeper of the Flame: A Blacklist Survivor.” Los Angeles Times, October 3.
The Culture of Critique’s
“From the Culture of Critique
to the Culture of The Holocaust”
in the Preface:
While CofC describes the “culture of critique” dominated by Jewish intellectual and political movements, perhaps insufficient attention was given to the critical elements of the new culture that has replaced the traditional European cultural forms that dominated a century ago.
Central to the new culture is the elevation of Jewish experiences of suffering during World War II, collectively referred to as “the Holocaust”, to the level of the pivotal historico-cultural icon in Western societies. Since the publication of CofC, two books have appeared on the political and cultural functions of the Holocaust in contemporary life—Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life, and Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry. Novick’s book, the more scholarly of the two, notes that the Holocaust has assumed a preeminent status as a symbol of the consequences of ethnic conflict. He argues that the importance of the Holocaust is not a spontaneous phenomenon but stems from highly focused, well-funded efforts of Jewish organizations and individual Jews with access to the major media:
We are not just “the people of the book,” but the people of the Hollywood film and the television miniseries, of the magazine article and the newspaper column, of the comic book and the academic symposium. When a high level of concern with the Holocaust became widespread in American Jewry, it was, given the important role that Jews play in American media and opinion-making elites, not only natural, but virtually inevitable that it would spread throughout the culture at large. (Novick 1999, 12)
The Holocaust was originally promoted to rally support for Israel following the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars: “Jewish organizations [portrayed] Israel’s difficulties as stemming from the world’s having forgotten the Holocaust. The Holocaust framework allowed one to put aside as irrelevant any legitimate ground for criticizing Israel, to avoid even considering the possibility that the rights and wrongs were complex” (Novick 1999, 155).
As the threat to Israel subsided, the Holocaust was promoted as the main source of Jewish identity and in the effort to combat assimilation and intermarriage among Jews. During this period, the Holocaust was also promoted among non-Jews as an antidote to anti-Semitism. In recent years this has involved a large scale educational effort (including mandated courses in the public schools of several states) spearheaded by Jewish organizations and staffed by thousands of Holocaust professionals aimed at conveying the lesson that “tolerance and diversity [are] good; hate [is] bad, the overall rubric [being] ‘man’s inhumanity to man’” (pp. 258-259). The Holocaust has thus become an instrument of Jewish ethnic interests not only as a symbol intended to create moral revulsion at violence directed at minority ethnic groups—prototypically the Jews, but also as an instrument to silence opponents of high levels of multi-ethnic immigration into Western societies. As described in CofC, promoting high levels of multi-ethnic immigration has been a goal of Jewish groups since the late 19th century.
Jewish Holocaust activists insisted on the “incomprehensibility and inexplicability of the Holocaust” (Novick 1999, 178)—an attempt to remove all rational discussion of its causes and to prevent comparisons to numerous other examples of ethnic violence. “Even many observant Jews are often willing to discuss the founding myths of Judaism naturalistically—subject them to rational, scholarly analysis. But they’re unwilling to adopt this mode of thought when it comes to the ‘inexplicable mystery’ of the Holocaust, where rational analysis is seen as inappropriate or sacrilegious” (p. 200). Holocaust activist Elie Wiesel “sees the Holocaust as ‘equal to the revelation at Sinai’ in its religious significance; attempts to ‘desanctify’ or ‘demystify’ the Holocaust are, he says, a subtle form of anti-Semitism” (p. 201).
Because the Holocaust is regarded as a unique, unknowable event, Jewish organizations and Israeli diplomats cooperated to block the U.S. Congress from commemorating the Armenian genocide. “Since Jews recognized the Holocaust’s uniqueness—that it was ‘incomparable,’ beyond any analogy—they had no occasion to compete with others; there could be no contest over the incontestable” (p. 195). Abe Foxman, head of the ADL, noted that the Holocaust is “not simply one example of genocide but a near successful attempt on the life of God’s chosen children and, thus, on God himself” (p. 199)—a comment that illustrates well the intimate connection between Holocaust promotion and the more extreme forms of Jewish ethnocentrism at the highest levels of the organized Jewish community.
A result was that American Jews were able to define themselves “as the quintessential victim” (Novick 1999, 194). As an expression of this tendency, Holocaust activist Simon Wiesenthal compiled a calendar showing when, where and by whom Jews were persecuted on every day of the year. Holocaust consciousness was the ultimate expression of a victim mentality. The Holocaust came to symbolize the natural and inevitable terminus of anti-Semitism. “There is no such thing as overreaction to an anti-Semitic incident, no such thing as exaggerating the omnipresent danger. Anyone who scoffed at the idea that there were dangerous portents in American society hadn’t learned ‘the lesson of the Holocaust’” (p. 178).
While Jews are portrayed as the quintessential victim in Holocaust iconography, the vast majority of non-Jews are portrayed as potential or actual anti-Semites. “Righteous Gentiles” are acknowledged, but the criteria are strict. They must have risked their lives, and often the lives of the members of their families as well, to save a Jew. “Righteous Gentiles” must display “self-sacrificing heroism of the highest and rarest order” (Novick 1999, 180). Such people are extremely rare, and any Jew who discusses “Righteous Gentiles” for any other reason comes under heavy criticism. The point is to shore up the fortress mentality of Jews, “promoting a wary suspicion of gentiles” (p. 180). A prominent Jewish feminist exemplifies this attitude: “Every conscious Jew longs to ask her or his non-Jewish friends, ‘would you hide me?’ and suppresses the question for fear of hearing the sounds of silence” (p. 181).
Consciousness of the Holocaust is very high among Jews. A 1998 survey found that “remembrance of the Holocaust” was listed as “extremely important” or “very important” to Jewish identity—far more often than anything else, such as synagogue attendance and travel to Israel. Indeed, Jewish identity is far more important than American identity for many American Jews: “In recent years it has become not just permissible but in some circles laudable for American Jews to assert the primacy of Jewish over American loyalty” (Novick 1999, 34). (See, e.g., the comments by AJCommittee official Stephen Steinlight above.)
However, consciousness of the Holocaust is not confined to Jews but has become institutionalized as an American cultural icon. Besides the many Holocaust memorial museums that dot the country and the mushrooming of mandated courses about the Holocaust in public schools, a growing number of colleges and universities now have endowed chairs in Holocaust Studies. “Considering all the Holocaust institutions of one kind or another in the United States, there are by now thousands of full-time Holocaust professionals dedicated to keeping its memory alive” (Novick 1999, 277).
This effort has been very successful. In a 1990 survey, a substantial majority agreed that the Holocaust “was the worst tragedy in history” (Novick 1999, 232; italics in text). Recently, the main thrust of the Holocaust as cultural icon is the ratification of multiculturalism. Between 80 and 90 percent of those surveyed agreed that the need to protect the rights of minorities, and not “going along with everybody else” were lessons to be drawn from the Holocaust. Respondents agreed in similar proportions that “it is important that people keep hearing about the Holocaust so that it will not happen again.”
The effort has perhaps been even more effective in Germany where “critical discussion of Jews is virtually impossible. Whether conservative or liberal, a contemporary German intellectual who says anything outside a narrowly defined spectrum of codified pieties about Jews, the Holocaust, and its postwar effects on German society runs the risk of professional and social suicide” (Anderson 2001). Discussions of the work of Jewish intellectuals have come to dominate German intellectual life to the almost complete exclusion of non-Jewish Germans. Many of these intellectuals are the subjects of CofC, including Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, Paul Celan, and Sigmund Freud. “Shoah business” “has become a staple of contemporary German cultural and political life. Germans thrive on debates about the Holocaust and their ongoing responsibility to preserve its memory, campaigning to erect a gigantic memorial to the Jewish dead in the historic center of Berlin, or flocking to hear the American scholar Daniel Goldhagen’s crude and unhistorical diatribes against the German national character” (Anderson 2001). Scholars have lost all sense of normal standards of intellectual criticism and have come to identify more or less completely with the Jewish victims of Nazism.
For example, Holocaust poet Paul Celan has become a central cultural figure, superceding all other 20th-century poets. His works are now beyond rational criticism, to the point that they have become enveloped in a sort of stultifying mysticism: “Frankly, I find troubling the sacred, untouchable aura that surrounds Celan’s name in Germany; troubling also the way in which his name functions like a trump card in intellectual discussions, closing off debate and excluding other subjects” (Anderson 2001). Jewish writers like Kafka are seen as intellectual giants who are above criticism; discussions of Kafka’s work focus on his Jewish identity and are imbued by consciousness of the Holocaust despite the fact that he died in 1924. Even minor Jewish writers are elevated to the highest levels of the literary canon while Germans like Thomas Mann are discussed mainly because they held views on Jews that have become unacceptable in polite society. In the U.S., German scholars are constrained to teach only the works of Germans of Jewish background, their courses dwelling on persecution, and genocide.
Indeed, it is not too far fetched to suppose that German culture as the culture of Germans has disappeared entirely, replaced by the culture of the Holocaust. The Holocaust has not only become a quasi-religion capable of eradicating the remnants of German culture, Jews have become sanctified as a people. As Amos Elon noted in describing the German response to a new Jewish museum in Berlin, “With so much hyperbole, so many undoubtedly sincere expressions of guilt and regret, and of admiration for all things Jewish, one could not help feeling that fifty years after the Holocaust, the new republic was, in effect, beatifying the German Jews” (Elon 2001).
Like Novick, Finkelstein (2000) takes a functionalist view of “the Holocaust Industry,” arguing that it serves as a vehicle for obtaining money for Jewish organizations from European governments and corporations, and for justifying the policies of Israel and U.S. support for Israeli policy (p. 8). Finkelstein also argues that embracing the Holocaust allows the wealthiest and most powerful group in the U.S. to claim victim status. The ideology of the Holocaust states that it is unique and inexplicable—as also noted by Novick. But Finkelstein also emphasizes how the Holocaust Industry promotes the idea that anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior stem completely from irrational loathing by non-Jews and have nothing to do with conflicts of interest. For example, Elie Wiesel: “For two thousand years we were always threatened. For what? For no reason” (in Finkelstein 2000, 53). (By contrast, the basic premise of my book, Separation and Its Discontents [MacDonald 1998a] is precisely that anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior throughout history are firmly rooted in conflicts of interest). Finkelstein quotes Boas Evron, an Israeli writer, approvingly: “Holocaust awareness” is “an official, propagandistic indoctrination, a churning out of slogans and a false view of the world, the real aim of which is not at all an understanding of the past, but a manipulation of the present” (p. 41).
Finkelstein notes the role of the media in supporting the Holocaust Industry, quoting Elie Wiesel, “When I want to feel better, I turn to the Israeli items in the New York Times” (p. 8). The New York Times, which is owned by the Sulzberger family (see below), “serves as the main promotional vehicle of the Holocaust Industry. It is primarily responsible for advancing the careers of Jerzy Kosinski, Daniel Goldhagen, and Elie Wiesel. For frequency of coverage, the Holocaust places a close second to the daily weather report. Typically, The New York Times Index 1999 listed fully 273 entries for the Holocaust. By comparison, the whole of Africa rated 32 entries” (Finkelstein 2001). Besides a receptive media, the Holocaust Industry takes advantage of its power over the U.S. government to apply pressure to foreign governments, particularly the governments of Eastern Europe (pp. 133ff).
In a poignant allusion to the pervasive double standard of contemporary Jewish ethical attitudes (and reflecting a similar ethical double standard that pervades Jewish religious writing throughout history), Finkelstein describes a January 2000 Holocaust education conference attended by representatives of 50 countries, including Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel. The conference declared that the international community had a “solemn responsibility” to oppose genocide, ethnic cleansing, racism, and xenophobia. A reporter afterward asked Barak about the Palestinian refugees. “On principle, Barak replied, he was against even one refugee coming to Israel: ‘We cannot accept moral, legal, or other responsibility for refugees’” (p. 137).
The Culture of Critique’s
“Jews and the Media: Shaping ‘Ways of Seeing’”
in the Preface:
I noted above that Jewish movements opposing European domination of the U.S. focused on three critical areas of power: The academic world of information in the social sciences and humanities, the political world where public policy on immigration and other ethnic issues are decided, and the mass media where “ways of seeing” are presented to the public. CofC focused on the first two of these sources of power, but little attention was given to the mass media except where it served to promote Jewish intellectual or political movements, as in the case of psychoanalysis. This lack of attention to the cultural influence of the mass media is a major gap. The following represents only a partial and preliminary discussion.
By all accounts, ethnic Jews have a powerful influence in the American media—far larger than any other identifiable group. The extent of Jewish ownership and influence on the popular media in the United States is remarkable given the relatively small proportion of the population that is Jewish.(28) In a survey performed in the 1980s, 60 percent of a representative sample of the movie elite were of Jewish background (Powers et al. 1996, 79n13). Michael Medved (1996, 37) notes that “it makes no sense at all to try to deny the reality of Jewish power and prominence in popular culture. Any list of the most influential production executives at each of the major movie studios will produce a heavy majority of recognizably Jewish names. This prominent Jewish role is obvious to anyone who follows news reports from Tinsel Town or even bothers to read the credits on major movies or television shows.”
Media ownership is always in flux, but the following is a reasonably accurate portrait of current media ownership in the United States by ethnic Jews:
The largest media company in the world was recently formed by the merger of America On Line and Time Warner. Gerald M. Levin, formerly the head of Time Warner, is the Chief Executive Officer of the new corporation. AOL-Time Warner has holdings in television (e.g., Home Box Office, CNN, Turner Broadcasting), music (Warner Music), movies (Warner Brothers Studio, Castle Rock Entertainment, and New Line Cinema), and publishing (Time, Sports Illustrated, People, Fortune).
The second largest media company is the Walt Disney Company, headed by Michael Eisner. Disney has holdings in movies (Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group, under Walt Disney Studios, includes Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, Caravan Pictures, Miramax Films); television (Capital Cities/ABC [owner of the ABC television network], Walt Disney Television, Touchstone Television, Buena Vista Television, ESPN, Lifetime, A&E Television networks) and cable networks with more than 100 million subscribers; radio (ABC Radio Network with over 3,400 affiliates and ownership of 26 stations in major cities); publishing (seven daily newspapers, Fairchild Publications [Women’s Wear Daily], and the Diversified Publishing Group).
The third largest media company is Viacom, Inc., headed by Sumner Redstone, who is also Jewish. Viacom has holdings in movies (Paramount Pictures); broadcasting (the CBS TV network; MTV [a particular focus of criticism by cultural conservatives], VH-1, Nickelodeon, Showtime, the National Network, Black Entertainment Television, 13 television stations; programming for the three television networks); publishing (Simon & Schuster, Scribner, The Free Press, and Pocket Books), video rentals (Blockbuster); it is also involved in satellite broadcasting, theme parks, and video games.
Another major media player is Edgar Bronfman, Jr., the son of Edgar Bronfman, Sr., president of the World Jewish Congress and heir to the Seagram distillery fortune. Until its merger with Vivendi, a French Company, in December 2000, Bronfman headed Universal Studios, a major movie production company, and the Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music company (including Polygram, Interscope Records, Island/Def Jam, Motown, Geffen/DGC Records).
After the merger, Bronfman became the Executive Vice-Chairman of the new company, Vivendi Universal, and the Bronfman family and related entities became the largest shareholders in the company.(29) Edgar Bronfman, Sr. is on the Board of Directors of the new company.
Other major television companies owned by Jews include New World Entertainment (owned by Ronald Perelman who also owns Revlon cosmetics), and DreamWorks SKG (owned by film director Steven Spielberg, former Disney Pictures chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, and recording industry mogul David Geffen). DreamWorks SKG produces movies, animated films, television programs, and recorded music. Spielberg is also a Jewish ethnic activist. After makingSchindler’s List, Spielberg established Survivors of the Shoah Foundation with the aid of a grant from the U.S. Congress. He also helped fund Professor Deborah Lipstadt’s defense against a libel suit brought by British military historian and Holocaust revisionist David Irving.
In the world of print media, the Newhouse media empire owns 26 daily newspapers, including several large and important ones, such as the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Newark Star-Ledger, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune; Newhouse Broadcasting, consisting of 12 television broadcasting stations and 87 cable-TV systems, including some of the country’s largest cable networks; the Sunday supplement Parade, with a circulation of more than 22 million copies per week; some two dozen major magazines, including the New Yorker, Vogue, Mademoiselle, Glamour, Vanity Fair, Bride’s, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, Self, House & Garden, and all the other magazines of the wholly owned Conde Nast group.
The newsmagazine, U.S. News & World Report, with a weekly circulation of 2.3 million, is owned and published by Mortimer B. Zuckerman. Zuckerman also owns New York’s tabloid newspaper, the Daily News, the sixth-largest paper in the country, and is the former owner of the Atlantic Monthly. Zuckerman is a Jewish ethnic activist. Recently he was named head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, an umbrella organization for major Jewish organizations in the U.S.(30) Zuckerman’s column in U.S. News and World Report regularly defends Israel and has helped to rejuvenate the America-Israeli Friendship League, of which he is president.(31)
Another Jewish activist with a prominent position in the U.S. media is Martin Peretz, owner of The New Republic (TNR) since 1974. Throughout his career Peretz has been devoted to Jewish causes, particularly Israel. During the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, he told Henry Kissinger that his “dovishness stopped at the delicatessen door,” and many among his staff feared that all issues would be decided on the basis of what was “good for the Jews” (Alterman 1992, 185, 186). Indeed, one editor was instructed to obtain material from the Israeli embassy for use in TNR editorials. “It is not enough to say that TNR’s owner is merely obsessed with Israel; he says so himself. But more importantly, Peretz is obsessed with Israel’s critics, Israel’s would-be critics, and people who never heard of Israel, but might one day know someone who might someday become a critic” (Alterman 1992, 195).
The Wall Street Journal is the largest-circulation daily newspaper in the U.S. It is owned by Dow Jones & Company, Inc., a New York corporation that also publishes 24 other daily newspapers and the weekly financial paper Barron’s. The chairman and CEO of Dow Jones is Peter R. Kann. Kann also holds the posts of chairman and publisher of the Wall Street Journal.
The Sulzberger family owns the New York Times Co., which owns 33 other newspapers, including the Boston Globe. It also owns twelve magazines (including McCall’s and Family Circle, each with a circulation of more than 5 million), seven radio and TV broadcasting stations; a cable-TV system; and three book publishing companies. The New York Times News Service transmits news stories, features, and photographs from the New York Times by wire to 506 other newspapers, news agencies, and magazines.
Jewish ownership of the New York Times is particularly interesting because it has been the most influential newspaper in the U.S. since the start of the 20th century. As noted in a recent book on the Sulzberger family (Tifft & Jones 1999), even at that time, there were several Jewish-owned newspapers, including the New York World (controlled by Joseph Pulitzer), the Chicago Times-Herald and Evening Post (controlled by H. H. Kohlsaat), and the New York Post (controlled by the family of Jacob Schiff). In 1896 Adolph Ochs purchased the New York Times with the critical backing of several Jewish businessmen, including Isidor Straus (co-owner of Macy’s department stores) and Jacob Schiff (a successful investment banker who was also a Jewish ethnic activist). “Schiff and other prominent Jews like… Straus had made it clear they wanted Adolph to succeed because they believed he ‘could be of great service to the Jews generally’” (Tifft & Jones 1999, 37-38). Ochs’s father-in-law was the Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the founder of Reform Judaism in the United States.
There are some exceptions to this pattern of media ownership, but even in such cases ethnic Jews have a major managerial role.(32) For example, Rupert’s News Corporation owns Fox Television Network, 20th Century Fox Films, Fox 2000, and the New York Post. However, Peter Chernin is president and CEO of Fox Group, which includes all of News Corporation’s film, television, and publishing operations in the United States. Murdoch is deeply philosemitic and deeply committed to Israel, at least partly from a close relationship he developed early in his career with Leonard Goldenson, who founded the American Broadcasting Company. (Goldenson was a major figure in New York’s Jewish establishment and an outspoken supporter of Israel.) Murdoch’s publications have taken a strongly pro-Israel line, including The Weekly Standard, the premier neo-conservative magazine, edited by William Kristol.
Murdoch… as publisher and editor-in-chief of the New York Post, had a large Jewish constituency, as he did to a lesser degree with New York magazine and The Village Voice. Not only had the pre-Murdoch Post readership been heavily Jewish, so, too, were the present Post advertisers. Most of Murdoch’s closest friends and business advisers were wealthy, influential New York Jews intensely active in pro-Israel causes. And he himself still retained a strong independent sympathy for Israel, a personal identification with the Jewish state that went back to his Oxford days. (Kiernan 1986, 261)
Murdoch also developed close relationships with several other prominent Jewish figures in the New York establishment, including attorney Howard Squadron, who was president of the AJCongress and head of the Council of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, and investment banker Stanley Schuman.
Another exception is NBC which is owned by General Electric. However, the President of NBC is Andrew Lack and the President of NBC News is Neal Shapiro, both of whom are Jewish. In addition, the Bertelsmann publishing group is a Germany-based company that is the largest publisher of trade books in the world and also owns magazines, newspapers, and music. Most of Bertelsmann’s influence is outside the United States, although it recently purchased the Random House Publishing Company.
Even granting the exceptions, it is clear that Jews enjoy a very powerful position in U.S. media, a position that is far more powerful than any other racial/ethnic group. The phenomenal concentration of media power in Jewish hands becomes all the more extraordinary when one notes that Jews constitute approximately 2.5% of the U.S. population. If the Jewish percentage of the American media elite is estimated at 59% (Lichter et al. 1983, 55)—probably an underestimate at the present time—, the degree of disproportionate representation may be calculated as greater than 2000%. The likelihood that such an extraordinary disparity could arise by chance is virtually nil. Ben Stein, noting that about 60% of the top positions in Hollywood are held by Jews, says “Do Jews run Hollywood? You bet they do—and what of it?”(33) Does Jewish ownership and control of the media have any effect on the product? Here I attempt to show that the attitudes and opinions favored by the media are those generally held by the wider Jewish community, and that the media tends to provide positive images of Jews and negative images of traditional American and Christian culture.
♣
As many academics have pointed out, the media have become more and more important in creating culture (e.g., Powers et al. 1996, 2). Before the 20th century, the main creators of culture were the religious, military, and business institutions. In the course of the 20th century these institutions became less important while the media have increased in importance (for an account of this transformation in the military, see Bendersky 2000). And there is little doubt that the media attempt to shape the attitudes and opinions of the audience (Powers et al. 1996, 2-3). Part of the continuing culture of critique is that the media elite tend to be very critical of Western culture. Western civilization is portrayed as a failing, dying culture, but at worst it is presented as sick and evil compared to other cultures (Powers et al. 1996, 211). These views were common in Hollywood long before the cultural revolution of the 1960s, but they were not often expressed in the media because of the influence of non-Jewish cultural conservatives.
Perhaps the most important issue Jews and Jewish organizations have championed is cultural pluralism—the idea that the United States ought not to be ethnically and culturally homogeneous. As described in CofC, Jewish organizations and Jewish intellectual movements have championed cultural pluralism in many ways, especially as powerful and effective advocates of an open immigration policy. The media have supported this perspective by portraying cultural pluralism almost exclusively in positive terms—that cultural pluralism is easily achieved and is morally superior to a homogeneous Christian culture made up mainly of white non-Jews. Characters who oppose cultural pluralism are portrayed as stupid and bigoted (Lichter et al. 1994, 251), the classic being the Archie Bunker character in Norman Lear’s All in the Family television series. Departures from racial and ethnic harmony are portrayed as entirely the result of white racism (Powers et al. 1996, 173).
Since Jews have a decisive influence on television and movies, it is not surprising that Jews are portrayed positively in the movies. There have been a great many explicitly Jewish movies and television shows with recognizable Jewish themes. Hollywood has an important role in promoting “the Holocaust Industry,” with movies like Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) and the four-part television miniseries Holocaust (1978), written by Gerald Green, directed by Marvin Chomsky, and produced by Herbert Brodkin and Robert Berger. Both of these films were lavishly promoted by Jewish groups. The promotion for Holocaust in 1978 was remarkable (Novick 1999, 210).
The ADL distributed ten million copies of its sixteen-page tabloid The Record for this purpose. Jewish organizations pressured major newspapers to serialize a novel based on the script and to publish special inserts on the Holocaust. The Chicago Sun-Times distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of its insert to local schools.
The AJCommittee, in cooperation with NBC, distributed millions of copies of a study guide for viewers; teachers’ magazines carried other teaching material tied to the program so that teachers could easily discuss the program in class.
Jewish organizations worked with the National Council of Churches to prepare other promotional and educational materials, and they organized advance viewings for religious leaders. The day the series began was designated “Holocaust Sunday”; various activities were scheduled in cities across the country; the National Conference of Christians and Jews distributed yellow stars to be worn on that day. Study guides for Jewish children depicted the Holocaust as the result of Christian anti-Semitism. The material given to Jewish children also condemned Jews who did not have a strong Jewish identity. This massive promotion succeeded in many of its goals. These included the introduction of Holocaust education programs in many states and municipalities, beginning the process that led to the National Holocaust Memorial Museum, and a major upsurge of support for Israel.
In general, television portrays Jewish issues “with respect, relative depth, affection and good intentions, and the Jewish characters who appear in these shows have, without any doubt, been Jewish—often depicted as deeply involved in their Judaism” (Pearl & Pearl 1999, 5).
For example, All in the Family (and its sequel, Archie Bunker’s Place) not only managed to portray working class Europeans as stupid and bigoted, it portrayed Jewish themes very positively. By the end of its 12-year run, even archenemy Archie Bunker had raised a Jewish child in his home, befriended a black Jew (implication: Judaism has no ethnic connotations), gone into business with a Jewish partner, enrolled as a member of a synagogue, praised his close friend at a Jewish funeral, hosted a Sabbath dinner, participated in a bat mitzvah ceremony, and joined a group to fight synagogue vandalism. These shows, produced by liberal political activist Norman Lear, thus exemplify the general trend for television to portray non-Jews as participating in Jewish ritual, and “respecting, enjoying, and learning from it. Their frequent presence and active involvement underscores the message that these things are a normal part of American life” (Pearl & Pearl 1999, 16). Jewish rituals are portrayed as “pleasant and ennobling, and they bestow strength, harmony, fulfillment, and sense of identity upon those who observe them” (p. 62).
Television presents images of Jewish issues that conform to the views of mainstream Jewish organizations. Television “invariably depicts anti-Semitism as an ugly, abhorrent trait that must be fought at every turn” (p. 103). It is seen as metaphysical and beyond analysis. There is never any rational explanation for anti-Semitism; anti-Semitism is portrayed as an absolute, irrational evil. Positive, well-liked, non-Jewish characters, such as Mary Tyler Moore, often lead the fight against anti-Semitism—a pattern reminiscent of that noted in CofC in which non-Jews become high-profile spokespersons for Jewish dominated movements. There is also the implication that anti-Semitism is a proper concern of the entire community.
Regarding Israel, “on the whole, popular TV has conveyed the fact that Israel is the Jewish homeland with a strong emotional pull upon Diaspora Jews, that it lives in perpetual danger surrounded by foes, and that as a result of the constant and vital fight for its survival, it often takes extraordinary (sometimes rogue) measures in the fields of security and intelligence” (Pearl & Pearl 1999, 173). Non-Jews are portrayed as having deep admiration and respect for Israel, its heroism and achievements. Israel is seen as a haven for Holocaust survivors, and Christians are sometimes portrayed as having an obligation to Israel because of the Holocaust.
In the movies, a common theme is Jews coming to the rescue of non-Jews, as in Independence Day, where Jeff Goldblum plays a “brainy Jew” who rescues the world, and in Ordinary People, where Judd Hirsch plays a Jewish psychiatrist who rescues an uptight WASP family (Bernheimer 1998, 125-126). The movie Addams Family Values, discussed in CofC (Ch. 1, Note 4) is another example of this genre. Bernheimer (1998, 162) notes that “in many films, the Jew is the moral exemplar who uplifts and edifies a gentile, serving as a humanizing influence by embodying culturally ingrained values.” As discussed in CofC, this “Jews to the Rescue” theme also characterizes psychoanalysis and Jewish leftist radicalism: Psychoanalytic Jews save non-Jews from their neuroses, and radical Jews save the world from the evils of capitalism.
On the other hand, Christianity is typically portrayed as evil, even going so far as depicting Christians as psychopaths. Michael Medved describes Hollywood’s cumulative attacks in recent years on the traditional American family, patriotism, and traditional sexual mores—the Hollywood version of the culture of critique. But the most obvious focus of attack is on the Christian religion:
In the ongoing war on traditional values, the assault on organized faith represents the front to which the entertainment industry has most clearly committed itself. On no other issue do the perspectives of the show business elites and those of the public at large differ more dramatically. Time and again, the producers have gone out of their way to affront the religious sensibilities of ordinary Americans. (Medved 1992/1993, 50)(34)
Medved fails to find even one film made since the mid-1970s where Christianity is portrayed positively apart from a few films where it is portrayed as an historical relic—a museum piece. Examples where Christianity is portrayed negatively abound. For example, in the film Monsignor (1982), a Catholic priest commits every imaginable sin, including the seduction of a glamorous nun and then is involved in her death. In Agnes of God (1985), a disturbed young nun gives birth in a convent, murders her baby, and then flushes the tiny, bloody corpse down the toilet. There are also many subtle anti-Christian scenes in Hollywood films, such as when the director Rob Reiner repeatedly focuses on the tiny gold crosses worn by Kathy Bates, the sadistic villain in Misery.
Another media tendency is to portray small towns as filled with bigots and anti-Semites. Media commentator Ben Stein records the hostility of the media toward rural America:
The typical Hollywood writer… is of an ethnic background from a large Eastern city—usually from Brooklyn [i.e., they have a Jewish background]. He grew up being taught that people in small towns hated him, were different from him, and were out to get him [i.e., small town people are anti-Semites]. As a result, when he gets the chance, he attacks the small town on television or the movies…
The television shows and movies are not telling it “like it is”; instead they are giving us the point of view of a small and extremely powerful section of the American intellectual community—those who write for the mass visual media… What is happening, as a consequence, is something unusual and remarkable. A national culture is making war upon a way of life that is still powerfully attractive and widely practiced in the same country… Feelings of affection for small towns run deep in America, and small-town life is treasured by millions of people. But in the mass culture of the country, a hatred for the small town is spewed out on television screens and movie screens every day… Television and the movies are America’s folk culture, and they have nothing but contempt for the way of life of a very large part of the folk… People are told that their culture is, at its root, sick, violent, and depraved, and this message gives them little confidence in the future of that culture. It also leads them to feel ashamed of their country and to believe that if their society is in decline, it deserves to be. (Stein 1976, 22)
This is a good example of social identity processes so important in both Jewish attitudes toward non-Jews and non-Jewish attitudes toward Jews: Outgroups are portrayed negatively and ingroups are portrayed positively (see CofC passim and MacDonald 1998a, Ch. 1).
Influence on the media undoubtedly has a major influence on how Israel is portrayed—a major theme of Finkelstein’s (2000) The Holocaust Industry. Ari Shavit, an Israeli columnist, described his feelings on the killings of a hundred civilians in a military skirmish in southern Lebanon in 1996, “We killed them out of a certain naive hubris. Believing with absolute certitude that now, with the White House, the Senate, and much of the American media in our hands, the lives of others do not count as much as our own.”(35)
The election of Ariel Sharon as Prime Minister of Israel provides another study in contrast. There was a huge difference in the media reaction to Sharon and the response to the situation in Austria when Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party won enough seats in parliament to have a role in the Austrian government. Several countries, including Israel, recalled their ambassadors in response to the election of Haider. Politicians around the world condemned Austria and announced that they would not tolerate Haider’s participation in any Austrian government. Trade embargoes against Austria were threatened. The cause of these actions was that Haider had said that there had been many decent people fighting on the German side during World War II, including some in the SS. He had also said that some of Hitler’s economic policies in the 1930s had made good sense. And he had called for a cutoff of immigration into Austria. Haider apologized for these statements, but the electoral success of his party resulted in the ostracism of Austria and a continuous barrage of alarmist media attacks against him personally.
Contrast this with the treatment of Ariel Sharon’s election as prime minister of Israel in 2001. Sharon was Israel’s Minister of Defense in September 1982 during the slaughter of 700-2000 Palestinians, including women and children in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps just outside Beirut, Lebanon. New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman saw “groups of young men in their twenties and thirties who had been lined up against walls, tied by their hands and feet, and then mowed down gangland style.”(36) Radio communications among Israeli military commanders were monitored in which they talked about carrying out “purging operations” in the refugee camps. While the actual killing was done by Lebanese Christians supported by Israel, the Israeli army kept the camps sealed for two days while the slaughter went on. The Kahan Commission, an Israeli commission formed to investigate the incident, concluded that Sharon was indirectly responsible for the massacre, and it went on to say that Sharon bears personal responsibility.(37)
The reaction to the election of Sharon in the U.S. media has been subdued to say the least. No trade embargoes were threatened, no ambassadors were recalled. The Los Angeles Times dutifully printed a column in which Sharon was portrayed as having “learned from his mistakes.”(38) In June, 2001, Sharon was indicted as a war criminal in Belgium on the basis of affidavits provided by survivors of the slaughter. It is also noteworthy that Rehavam Zeevi, a close associate of Sharon and Israel’s Minister of Tourism as well as a member of the powerful Security Cabinet until his assassination in October, 2001, described Palestinians as “lice” and advocated the expulsion of Palestinians from Israeli controlled areas. Zeevi said Palestinians were living illegally in Israel and “We should get rid of the ones who are not Israeli citizens the same way you get rid of lice. We have to stop this cancer from spreading within us.”(39)
As another indication of the very large Jewish influence on the U.S. media, Eric Alterman notes that “in most of the world, it is the Palestinian narrative of a dispossessed people that dominates. In the United States, however, the narrative that dominates is Israel’s: a democracy under constant siege.” (E. Alterman, “Intractable foes, warring narratives: While much of the world sees Mideast conflict through Palestinian eyes, in America, Israel’s view prevails” March 28, 2002).
A critical source of support for Israel is the army of professional pundits “who can be counted upon to support Israel reflexively and without qualification.” Alterman lists 60 prominent media personalities in this camp including a long list of Jewish writers: William Safire, A. M. Rosenthal, Charles Krauthammer, Martin Peretz, Daniel Pipes, Andrea Peyser, Dick Morris, Lawrence Kaplan, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Mortimer Zuckerman, David Gelertner, John Podhoretz, Mona Charen, Yossi Klein Halevi, Sidney Zion, Norman Podhoretz, Jonah Goldberg, Jeff Jacoby, Seth Lipsky, Irving Kristol, Ben Wattenberg, Lawrence Kudlow, Alan Dershowitz, David Horowitz, Jacob Heilbrun, Michael Ledeen, Uri Dan, Paul Greenberg.
These writers have access to virtually all of the major media in the United States. This contrasts with a much smaller group of five columnists “likely to be reflexively anti-Israel and/or pro-Palestinian regardless of circumstance.” These include Patrick Buchanan, Christopher Hitchens, Edward Said, Alexander Cockburn, and Robert Novak. Three of these columnists are associated with the far left journal, The Nation (Cockburn, Hitchens, Said), and only Novak is presently affiliated with a major media organization (The Washington Post). Alterman points to another small group classified as “columnists likely to criticize both Israel and the Palestinians, but view themselves to be critically supporters of Israel, and ultimately would support Israeli security over Palestinian rights”; this group includes the editorial Boards of The New York Times and The Washington Post. Another columnist who should be included in the intermediate category is Michael Lind, who noted the following in a column in Newsweek International (April 3, 2002):
What passes in the United States as an evenhanded stance is perceived, not only in the Middle East but in Europe and throughout the world, as unquestioning American support of bully tactics by Israel… For more than a decade, U.S. policy toward Israel has been shaped as much by domestic politics as by grand strategy: the pro-Israel lobby is the most powerful one in Washington. This support for Israel—no matter what its policies—has given license to Israel’s hard right to employ savage means of oppression against the Palestinians, and even against their own Arab citizens. While it is rarely noted in the American media, Israel has now occupied Palestinian lands for 35 years, denying 3 million people rights, and ruling over them with brutality.
There can be little doubt that the U.S. media is dominated by a pro-Israeli perspective ultimately deriving from Jewish influence on the media. What is perhaps most interesting is the long list of non-Jews who are in the first category—those who support Israel reflexively and without qualification. These include George Will, William Bennett, Andrew Sullivan, Allan Keyes, Brit Hume, Bill O’Reilly, Michael Barone, Ann Coulter, Linda Chavez, and Rush Limbaugh.
The fact that reflexive support for Israel is not characteristic of non-Jews in other societies with less Jewish influence on the media strongly suggests that unconditional support for Israel is a critical litmus test of acceptability by the major media in the U.S.—that prospective pundits “earn their stripes” by showing their devotion to Israel (and, one might infer, other Jewish issues, such as immigration; none of these pundits is a critic of massive non-European immigration into Western societies). After all, reflexive, uncritical support for anything is rare enough for any issue, and we know that the media in other countries are not so one-sided. So it seems difficult to explain the huge tilt toward Israel as the result of individual attitudes in the absence of some enormous selective factor. And there is the obvious suggestion that while the Jews on this list must be seen as ethnic actors, the non-Jews are certainly making an excellent career move in taking the positions they do.
This litmus test for prospective opinion makers is further supported by the fact that Joe Sobran was fired from National Review because he had the temerity to suppose that U.S. foreign policy should not be dictated by what’s best for Israel—an event that was accompanied by charges by Norman Podhoretz that Sobran was an “anti-Semite” (see Buckley 1992; Podhoretz, 1986).
♣
Notes [the Bibliography appears in the 10th entry]
28. Discussions of Jewish ownership of the media include: Ginsberg 1993, 1; Kotkin 1993, 61; Silberman 1985, 147.
29. http://www.economictimes.com/today/31tech22.htm [this item has been removed from that site]
30. The Forward, April 27, 2001, pp. 1, 9.
31. The Forward, November 14, 1997, p. 14.
32. A partial exception is the Washington Post Co. Until her recent death, the Washington Post was run by Katherine Meyer Graham, daughter of Eugene Meyer, who purchased the paper in the 1930s. Ms. Graham had a Jewish father and a Christian mother and was raised as an Episcopalian. Katherine’s husband, the former publisher of the Post, Phil Graham, was not Jewish. The Post’s publisher, since 1991, is Donald Graham, the son of Katherine and Phil Graham. This influential publishing group is thus less ethnically Jewish than the others mentioned here. The Washington Post Co. has a number of other media holdings in newspapers (The Gazette Newspapers, including 11 military publications), television stations, and magazines, most notably the nation’s number-two weekly newsmagazine, Newsweek. The Washington Post Co.’s various television ventures reach a total of about 7 million homes, and its cable TV service, Cable One, has 635,000 subscribers. In a joint venture with the New York Times, the Post publishes the International Herald Tribune, the most widely distributed English language daily in the world.
33. http://www.eonline.com/Features/Specials/Jews/ [this item has been removed from that site]
34. Cones (1997) provides a similar analysis:
This analysis of Hollywood films with religious themes or characters reveals that in the last four decades Hollywood has portrayed Christians as sexually rigid, devil worshipping cultists, talking to God, disturbed, hypocritical, fanatical, psychotic, dishonest, murder suspects, Bible quoting Nazis, slick hucksters, fake spiritualists, Bible pushers, de-ranged preachers, obsessed, Catholic schoolboys running amok, Adam & Eve as pawns in a game between God and Satan, an unbalanced nun accused of killing her newborn infant, dumb, manipulative, phony, outlaws, neurotic, mentally unbalanced, unscrupulous, destructive, foul mouthed, fraudulent and as miracle fabricators. Few, if any, positive portrayals of Christians were found in Hollywood films released in the last four decades.
35. Reprinted in the New York Times May 27, 1996.
36. James Ron, “Is Ariel Sharon Israel’s Milosevic?” Los Angeles Times, February 5, 2001.
37. http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0ign0 [this item has been removed from that site].
We shall remark here that it is ostensibly puzzling that the Defense Minister did not in any way make the Prime Minister privy to the decision on having the Phalangists enter the camps.
It is our view that responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defense for having disregarded the danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by the Phalangists against the population of the refugee camps, and having failed to take this danger into account when he decided to have the Phalangists enter the camps. In addition, responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defense for not ordering appropriate measures for preventing or reducing the danger of massacre as a condition for the Phalangists’ entry into the camps. These blunders constitute the non-fulfillment of a duty with which the Defense Minister was charged.
38. Yossi Klein Halevi, “Sharon has learned from his mistakes.” Los Angeles Times, February 7, 2001.
39. Washington Post, July 3, 2001; Los Angeles Times, October 18, 2001.
40. Jewish organizations have also been strong advocates of “hate crime” legislation. For example, in 1997 the ADL published Hate Crimes: ADL Blueprint for Action, which provides recommendations on prevention and response strategies to crimes of ethnic violence, such as penalty enhancement laws, training for law enforcement and the military, security for community institutions, and community anti-bias awareness initiatives. In June 2001 the ADL announced a program designed to assist law enforcement in the battle against “extremists and hate groups.” A major component of the Law Enforcement Initiative is the development of specialized hate crime, extremism, and anti-bias curricula for training programs designed for law enforcement.
The Culture of Critique’s
“Jewish organizations and
censorship of the internet”
in the Preface:
In CofC (Ch. 8) I wrote, “one may expect that as ethnic conflict continues to escalate in the United States, increasingly desperate attempts will be made to prop up the ideology of multiculturalism… with the erection of police state controls on nonconforming thought and behavior.” As noted above, there has been a shift from “the culture of critique” to what one might term “the culture of the Holocaust” as Jews have moved from outsiders to the consummate insiders in American life. Coinciding with their status as an established elite, Jewish organizations are now in the forefront of movements to censor thought crimes.(40)
The Internet is a major gap in control of the major media, but Jewish organizations have taken the lead in attempting to censor the Internet. The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) distributes a compact disc titled “Digital Hate 2001” that lists over 3000 “hate sites on the Internet.” Both the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the ADL have attempted to pressure Internet service providers (ISP’s) like AOL and popular websites like Yahoo into restricting subscriber access to disapproved websites. Recently Yahoo removed 39 Internet clubs originally identified as “hate sites” by the SWC.(41) Internet auction sites have been subjected to protests for selling Nazi memorabilia.(42) Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com have come under fire for selling Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The ADL also published a report, Poisoning the Web: Hatred Online, and has urged the U.S. Congress to initiate a “comprehensive study of the magnitude and impact of hate on the Internet.”(43)
Online services in the U.S. are also under pressure from foreign governments, including France, Germany, Austria, and Canada, where there are no constitutional guarantees of free speech. For example, a judge in France ruled that Yahoo was violating French law by delivering Nazi memorabilia to people in France via the company’s online auctions, even though the service is based in the United States. Yahoo was acting illegally, the judge said, even though the company has created a separate French site that, unlike the broader Yahoo service, follows French law. The company was ordered to use filtering technology to block politically sensitive material from appearing on computers in France or face fines equivalent to $13,000 a day. In Germany, a court found that German law applies even to foreigners who post content on the Web in other countries—so long as that content can be accessed by people inside Germany. In this case, the court ruled that an Australian citizen who posted Holocaust revisionist material on his Australian website could be jailed in Germany. Theoretically it would be possible for Germany to demand that this person be extradited from Australia so that he could stand trial for his crime.(44)
Jewish organizations have been strong advocates of laws in European countries that criminalize the distribution of anti-Jewish material. For example, the ADL pressured the German government to arrest a U.S. citizen who distributed anti-Jewish materials. Gary Lauck was arrested in Denmark and extradited to Germany on the warrant of a Hamburg prosecutor. He was sentenced to four years in jail, served his sentence, and was deported.(45)
This sort of government-imposed censorship is effective in countries like France and Germany, but is not likely to succeed in the United States with its strong tradition of constitutionally protected free speech. As a result, the major focus of the Jewish effort to censor the Internet in the United States has been to pressure private companies like AOL and Yahoo to use software that blocks access to sites that are disapproved by Jewish organizations. The ADL developed voluntary filter software (ADL HateFilter) that allows users to screen out certain websites. However, while AOL—the largest ISP by far—has proved to be compliant in setting standards in line with ADL guidelines, the ADL notes that other ISP’s, such as Earthlink, have not cooperated with the ADL, and independent web hosting sites have sprung up to serve websites rejected by AOL.(46)
The ADL and the SWC have an uphill road because the Internet has long been touted as a haven for free speech by the high-tech community. One senses a certain frustration in the conclusion of a recent ADL report on the Internet:
Combating online extremism presents enormous technological and legal difficulties… Even if it were electronically feasible to keep sites off the Internet, the international nature of the medium makes legal regulation virtually impossible. And in the United States, the First Amendment guarantees the right of freedom of speech regardless of what form that speech takes. As a result, governments, corporations and people of goodwill continue to look for alternative ways to address the problem.(47)
Clearly Jewish organizations are making every effort to censor anti-Jewish writing on the Internet. They are far from reaching their goal of removing anti-Jewish material from the Internet, but in the long run the very high political stakes involved ensure that great effort will be expended. I suspect that in the U.S., if pressuring existing ISP’s by organizations like the ADL and the SWC fails, these companies may become targets of buyouts by Jewish-owned media companies who will then quietly remove access to anti-Jewish websites. AOL has just recently merged with Time Warner, a Jewish-controlled media company, and it had already merged with Compuserve, a large, nationwide ISP. As indicated above, AOL-Time Warner has complied with pressures exerted by Jewish activist organizations to restrict expressions of political opinion on the Internet.
I suppose that the only option for prohibited websites will be to develop their own Internet service providers. These providers—perhaps subsidized or relatively expensive—would then fill the niche of serving people who are already committed to ethnic activism among non-Jewish Europeans and other forms of politically incorrect expression. The situation would be similar to the current situation in the broadcast and print media. All of the mainstream media are effectively censored, but small publications that essentially preach to the converted can exist if not flourish.
But such publications reach a miniscule percentage of the population. They are basically ignored by the mainstream media, and they mainly preach to the choir. The same will likely happen to the Internet: The sites will still be there, but they will be out of sight and out of mind for the vast majority of Internet users. The effective censorship of the Internet by large corporations does not violate the First Amendment because the government is not involved and any policy can be justified as a business decision not to offend existing or potential customers.
♣
Notes [the Bibliography appears in the 10th entry]
40. Jewish organizations have also been strong advocates of “hate crime” legislation. For example, in 1997 the ADL published Hate Crimes: ADL Blueprint for Action, which provides recommendations on prevention and response strategies to crimes of ethnic violence, such as penalty enhancement laws, training for law enforcement and the military, security for community institutions, and community anti-bias awareness initiatives. In June 2001 the ADL announced a program designed to assist law enforcement in the battle against “extremists and hate groups.” A major component of the Law Enforcement Initiative is the development of specialized hate crime, extremism, and anti-bias curricula for training programs designed for law enforcement.
41. SWC Press Information, July 15, 1999; http://www.wiesenthal.com.
42. E.g., SWC Press Information, November 29, 1999; January 26, 2001; http://www.wiesenthal.com.
43. ADL Press Release, September, 14, 1999; http://www.adl.org.
44. AFP Worldwide News Agency, April 4, 2001; http://www.afp.com.
45 . ADL Press Release, August 22, 1996; http://www.adl.org.
46. C. Wolf. Racists, Bigots and the Law on the Internet. http://www.adl.org.
47. C. Wolf. Racists, Bigots and the Law on the Internet. http://www.adl.org.
The Culture of Critique’s
“The Question of Bias”
in the Preface:
I have several times been called an “anti-Semite” for the tone of some of my writings, both in CofC and my comments on various Internet discussion lists. To be perfectly frank, I did not have a general animus for organized Jewry when I got into this project. I was a sort of ex-radical turned moderate Republican fan of George Will. Before even looking at Judaism I applied the same evolutionary perspective to the ancient Spartans and then to the imposition of monogamy by the Catholic Church during the middle ages (see MacDonald 1988a, 1995b).
There are quite a few statements in my books that attempt to soften the tone and deflect charges of anti-Jewish bias. The first page of my first book on Judaism, A People that Shall Dwell Alone (MacDonald 1994), clearly states that the traits I ascribe to Judaism (self-interest, ethnocentrism, and competition for resources and reproductive success) are by no means restricted to Jews. I also write about the extraordinary Jewish IQ and about Jewish accomplishments (e.g., Nobel prizes) in that book.
In the second book, Separation and Its Discontents (MacDonald 1998a), I discuss the tendency for anti-Semites to exaggerate their complaints, to develop fantastic and unverifiable theories of Jewish behavior, to exaggerate the extent of Jewish cohesion and unanimity, to claim that all Jews share stereotypically Jewish traits or attitudes, especially in cases where in fact Jews are over-represented among people having certain attitudes (e.g., political radicalism during most of the 20th century). And I describe the tendency of some anti-Semites to develop grand conspiracy theories in which all historical events of major or imagined importance, from the French Revolution to the Tri-lateral Commission are linked together in one grand plot and blamed on the Jews. All of this is hardly surprising on the basis of what we know about the psychology of ethnic conflict. But that doesn’t detract in the least from supposing that real conflicts of interest are at the heart of all of the important historical examples of anti-Semitism. Most of this is in the first chapter of Separation and Its Discontents—front and center as it were, just as my other disclaimers are in the first chapter of A People that Shall Dwell Alone.
It must be kept in mind that group evolutionary strategies are not benign, at least in general and especially in the case of Judaism, which has often been very powerful and has had such extraordinary effects on the history of the West. I think there is a noticeable shift in my tone from the first book to the third simply because (I’d like to think) I knew a lot more and had read a lot more.
People often say after reading the first book that they think I really admire Jews, but they are unlikely to say that about the last two and especially about CofC. That is because by the time I wrote CofC I had changed greatly from the person who wrote the first book.
The first book is really only a documentation of theoretically interesting aspects of group evolutionary strategies using Judaism as a case study (how Jews solved the free-rider problem, how they managed to erect and enforce barriers between themselves and other peoples, the genetic cohesion of Judaism, how some groups of Jews came to have such high IQ’s, how Judaism developed in antiquity). Resource competition and other conflicts of interest with other groups are more or less an afterthought, but these issues move to the foreground in Separation and Its Discontents, and in CofC I look exclusively at the 20th century in the West. Jews have indeed made positive contributions to Western culture in the last 200 years. But whatever one might think are the unique and irreplaceable Jewish contributions to the post-Enlightenment world, it is naïve to suppose they were intended for the purpose of benefiting humanity solely or even primarily. In any case I am hard pressed to think of any area of modern Western government and social organization (certainly) and business, science, and technology (very probably) that would not have developed without Jewish input, although in some cases perhaps not quite as quickly. In general, positive impacts of Jews have been quantitative rather than qualitative. They have accelerated some developments, for example in finance and some areas of science, rather than made them possible.
On the other hand, I am persuaded that Jews have also had some important negative influences. I am morally certain that Jewish involvement in the radical left in the early to middle part of the last century was a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for many of the horrific events in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. (About this, of course, one can disagree. I am simply saying that I find the evidence compelling.) But the main point is that I came to see Jewish groups as competitors with the European majority of the U.S., as powerful facilitators of the enormous changes that have been unleashed in this country, particularly via the successful advocacy of massive non-European immigration into the U.S.
I found that I was being transformed in this process from a semi-conservative academic who had little or no identification with his own people into an ethnically conscious person—exactly as predicted by the theory of social identity processes that forms the basis of my theory of anti-Semitism (see MacDonald 1998a). In fact, if one wants to date when I dared cross the line into what some see as proof that I am an “anti-Semite,” the best guess would probably be when I started reading on the involvement of all the powerful Jewish organizations in advocating massive non-European immigration. My awareness began with my reading a short section in a standard history of American Jews well after the first book was published. The other influences that I attributed to Jewish activities were either benign (psychoanalysis?) or reversible—even radical leftism, so they didn’t much bother me. I could perhaps even ignore the towering hypocrisy of Jewish ethnocentrism coinciding as it does with Jewish activism against the ethnocentrism of non-Jewish Europeans. But the long-term effects of immigration will be essentially irreversible barring some enormous cataclysm.
I started to realize that my interests are quite different from prototypical Jewish interests. There need to be legitimate ways of talking about people who oppose policies recommended by the various Jewish establishments without simply being tarred as “anti-Semites”. Immigration is only one example where there are legitimate conflicts of interest.
As I write this (November, 2001), we are bogged down in a war with no realizable endgame largely because of influence of the Jewish community over one area of our foreign policy and because of how effectively any mention of the role of Israel in creating friction between the U.S. and the Arab world—indeed the entire Muslim world—is muzzled simply by the cry of anti-Semitism. And at home we have entered into an incalculably dangerous experiment in creating a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society in which the intellectual elite has developed the idea that the formerly dominant European majority has a moral obligation to allow itself to be eclipsed demographically and culturally—the result, at least at its inception and to a considerable degree thereafter, of the influence of Jewish interest groups on immigration policy and the influence of Jewish intellectual movements on our intellectual and cultural life generally. As noted above, the rise of Jewish power and the disestablishment of the specifically European nature of the U.S. are the real topics of CofC.
I agree that there is bias in the social sciences and I certainly don’t exempt myself from this tendency. It is perhaps true that by the time I finished CofC I should have stated my attitudes in the first chapter. Instead, they are placed in the last chapter of CofC—rather forthrightly I think. In a sense putting them at the end was appropriate because my attitudes about Jewish issues marked a cumulative, gradual change from a very different world view.
It is annoying that such disclaimers rarely appear in writing by strongly identified Jews even when they see their work as advancing Jewish interests. A major theme of the CofC is that Jewish social scientists with a strong Jewish identity have seen their work as advancing Jewish interests. It is always amazing to me that media figures like the Kristols and Podhoretzes and foreign policy experts like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle do not feel an obligation to precede their remarks on issues affected by their solicitude for Israel by saying, “you should be wary of what I say because I have a vested ethnic interest in advancing the interests of Israel.” But the same thing goes for vast areas of anthropology (the Boasian school and racial differences research), history (e.g., obviously apologetic accounts of the history and causes of anti-Semitism or the role of Jews in the establishment of Bolshevism), psychology (the Frankfurt School, psychoanalysis), and contemporary issues (immigration, church-state relations). The point of CofC that really galls people is the idea that we should simply acknowledge this bias in (some) Jewish researchers as we do in others. There are a great many books on how Darwin and Galton were influenced by the general atmosphere of Victorian England, but writing of a Jewish bias immediately results in charges of “anti-Semitism.”
But the deeper point is that, whatever my motivations and biases, I would like to suppose that my work on Judaism at least meets the criteria of good social science, even if I have come to the point of seeing my subjects in a less than flattering light. In the end, does it really matter if my motivation at this point is less than pristine? Isn’t the only question whether I am right?
he Culture of Critique’s Conclusion
CofC is really an attempt to understand the 20th century as a Jewish century—a century in which Jews and Jewish organizations were deeply involved in all the pivotal events. From the Jewish viewpoint it has been a period of great progress, though punctuated by one of its darkest tragedies. In the late 19th century the great bulk of the Jewish population lived in Eastern Europe, with many Jews mired in poverty and all surrounded by hostile populations and unsympathetic governments. A century later, Israel is firmly established in the Middle East, and Jews have become the wealthiest and most powerful group in the United States and have achieved elite status in other Western countries. The critical Jewish role in radical leftism has been sanitized, while Jewish victimization by the Nazis has achieved the status of a moral touchstone and is a prime weapon in the push for large-scale non-European immigration, multi-culturalism and advancing other Jewish causes. Opponents have been relegated to the fringe of intellectual and political discourse and there are powerful movements afoot that would silence them entirely.
The profound idealization, the missionary zeal, and the moral fervor that surround the veneration of figures like Celan, Kafka, Adorno, and Freud characterize all of the Jewish intellectual movements discussed in CofC (see Ch. 6 for a summary). That these figures are now avidly embraced by the vast majority of non-Jewish intellectuals as well shows that the Western intellectual world has become Judaized—that Jewish attitudes and interests, Jewish likes and dislikes, now constitute the culture of the West, internalized by Jews and non-Jews alike. The Judaization of the West is nowhere more obvious than in the veneration of the Holocaust as the central moral icon of the entire civilization. These developments constitute a profound transformation from the tradition of critical and scientific individualism that had formed the Western tradition since the Enlightenment. More importantly, because of the deep-seated Jewish hostility toward traditional Western culture, the Judaization of the West means that the peoples who created the culture and traditions of the West have been made to feel deeply ashamed of their own history—surely the prelude to their demise as a culture and as a people.
The present Judaized cultural imperium in the West is maintained by a pervasive thought control propagated by the mass media and extending to self-censorship by academics, politicians, and others well aware of the dire personal and professional consequences of crossing the boundaries of acceptable thought and speech about Jews and Jewish issues. It is maintained by zealously promulgated, self-serving, and essentially false theories of the nature and history of Judaism and the nature and causes of anti-Semitism.
None of this should be surprising. Jewish populations have always had enormous effects on the societies where they reside because of two qualities that are central to Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy: High intelligence (including the usefulness of intelligence in attaining wealth) and the ability to cooperate in highly organized, cohesive groups (MacDonald 1994). This has led repeatedly to Jews becoming an elite and powerful group in societies where they reside in sufficient numbers—as much in the 20th-century United States and the Soviet Union as in 15th-century Spain or Alexandria in the ancient world. History often repeats itself after all. Indeed, recent data indicate that Jewish per capita income in the United States is almost double that of non-Jews, a bigger difference than the black-white income gap. Although Jews make up less than 3 percent of the population, they constitute more than a quarter of the people on the Forbes magazine list of the richest four hundred Americans. A remarkable 87 percent of college-age Jews are currently enrolled in institutions of higher education, as compared with 40 percent for the population as a whole (Thernstrom & Thernstrom 1997). Jews are indeed an elite group in American society (see also Chapter 8).
My perception is that the Jewish community in the U.S. is moving aggressively ahead, ignoring the huge disruptions Jewish organizations have caused in the West (now mainly via successful advocacy of massive non-European immigration) and in the Islamic world (via the treatment of Palestinians by Israel). Whatever the justification for such beliefs, U.S. support for Israel is by all accounts an emotionally compelling issue in the Arab world. A true test of Jewish power in the United States will be whether support for Israel is maintained even in the face of the enormous costs that have already been paid by the U.S. in terms of loss of life, economic disruption, hatred and distrust throughout the Muslim world, and loss of civil liberties at home. As of this writing, while Jewish organizations are bracing for a backlash against Jews in the U.S. and while there is considerable concern among Jews about the Bush Administration’s pressure on Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians in order to placate the Muslim world (e.g., Rosenblatt 2001), all signs point to no basic changes in the political culture of the United States vis-à-vis Israel as a result of the events of 9-11-01.
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PROTO-GERMANIC & INDO-EUROPEAN STUDIES
A SHORT HISTORY of CHRISTIANIZING the GERMANIC PEOPLES
Why are we returning to Asatru, our native spirituality and renouncing Christianity which has been the dominant religion of our peoples for over one thousand years? An equally important question to answer is, “Why did our ancestors leave their native religion in the first place?”… Historical evidence has shown that long ago our people were taken from their ancient spirituality through deliberate treachery, deceit, threats and violent forceful means of making the various Germanic tribes accept Christianity, they did this by:
1.DECEIT; Falsifying the true nature and content of the teachings of Christianity.
2.TREATCHERY/ CO-ERSION; Christian missionaries desacralized and demonized the Germanic deities declaring that they are really demons, witches or as in the case of Odin, Satan himself. They also further lessened their status by turning many of them into Christian saints. There was strong pressure from Economic sanctions imposed by the Christian law forbidding business transactions between Heathens & Christians, unless the Heathen would accept the Christian religion and baptism.
3.THEFT; Directly and purposefully stealing many Germanic heathen Holy Days, traditions, symbolism, and vocabulary and converting these to have Christian meanings.
4.VIOLENT FORCE; Genocidal wars, murder.While the Kings and Noblemen of the various Germanic tribes were the first to be converted to Christianity, it was not quite the same Christianity as was practiced in Rome, nor that which is entailed in the Christian bible. In the Germanic lands the Christian missionaries portrayed Christ as a Germanic, spear weilding hero.
Heathen charms were converted to Christian uses. Such thoroughly Heathen ritual celebrations such as Yule-tide and Easter were forcefully converted to Christianity and given new Christian meanings. Symbel, the ritualized drinking rounds continued to be practiced, with the toasts being Christianized. And the sacred feasts continued almost unchanged. Heathen temples were destroyed or converted to churches.
For the common folk merely the names of the Gods changed. They continued to practice Heathenry in their homes, and throughout their lives. A long period of mixed faith continued long after the conversion of their tribal leaders, Heathen traditions, although not actual worship survived in many forms right up to the present day.
Plows which had been blessed in the fields in Heathen times were brought into the Churches to be blessed in the spring. Christian festivals were celebrated with Heathen customs such as Maypole dancing, and the dead honored in funeral feasts as they had prior to the conversion. Even the Heathen gods were still being invoked in charms for healing as late as the 10th century on the continent and Britain. And as late as the reign of King Canute in the 11th century, laws had to be enacted against Heathen practices.
While the Kings would convert their kingdoms to Christianity, very often their successors would simply covert the kingdoms back to Heathenry, and folks would lapse back to the old religion when the Church was not looking.
CHRONOLOGY:587AD – Missionaries start converting the Visigoths in Spain to Christianity.
589AD – Lombard King and Queen begin their conversion to Christianity, shortly thereafter they impose Christianity upon their kingdom and the population within it and became the official and supreme religion to the exclusion of all others.
601AD – Augustine convinced the English Christian king Ethelbert to destroy the Heathen temples and idols and repress Heathen worship. Missionaries were sent to the West Saxons.
626AD – King Edwin of Northumbria and his court are converted to Christianity
634AD – The completion of the conversion of the Kingdom of Northumbria
635AD – Cynegils, king of Wessex, is converted to Christianity
640AD – The newly Christianized Eorcenberth of Kent orders the destruction of temples dedicated to Odin
653AD – The Kingdom of Essex is converted to Christianity
654AD – Penda, the last heathen king in Mercia England is killed. The Mercians were then forced into conversion to Christ by the sordid son of Penda, prince Peada, who converted to Christ because he wished to take his daughter as his wife and his own native faith of Asatru prevented it.
664AD – The Synod of Whitby determines the correct manner in which the date of the newly Christianized heathen celebration of Easter is to be calculated, It’s date is henceforth moved to be in line with the Jewish passover.
686AD – Wessex England, the last true Heathen kingdom in England is finally converted to Christianity.
690AD – Willibrord, the first major Anglo-Saxon missionary to try to sell Christianity on the shores of Germania arrives in Frisia. Willibrord tried to erase all signs of heathendom, He destroyed many heathen temples and sacred forests,
695AD – Willibrord was rewarded for his deeds and appointed bishop of Utrecht. He ordered a cathedral to be built there, and restored a destroyed Frankish church. In 714, the Frisian king Radboud and his armies drove a way the Christian intruders but Willibrord managed to escape, his churches were burnt and his priest were killed. The newly liberated Frisians again worshipped their ancient gods, and rebuilt their heathen temples.
715AD – Benedictine monk Winfrith (the future St.Boniface) begins his missionary work in Germany. St.Boniface believed that converting the heathen people couldn’t be done by merely an unending power of faith and convincing, but faith had to be imposed and maintained by the force and power of the state.
At Eschwege he is said to have destroyed a statue of the Gods. Boniface then had to return to Hessia to repair the losses which occurred during his absence, many having drifted back to their native religion.
719AD – St.Boniface toured Bavaria, Alamannia, and Thuringia. He found that the population had reverted to their native heathen religion of Asatru. Duke Gotzbert and some years later his son, Hethan II, had been martyred on account of their injudicious zeal in trying to spread Christianity.
725AD – St.Bonface desecrates and cuts down the ancient Donar (Thor) Oak Tree near Fitzlar, Hesse. Subsequently the Pope appoints St.Boniface the metropolitan of Germany for his “good” work in spreading Christianity.
746AD – The Christian Frankish Duke Karlmann murdered thousands of Heathen Alemannic Germans in what became known as the “Blood bath of Cannstadt”
750AD – The Saxons avenged themselves upon their Christian aggressors by invading France and sacking 30 monasteries.
772AD – Charlemagne begins his 30 year genocidal war against the Heathen Germans to convert them to Christianity. He destroys their sacred temples, holy groves, and cuts down the sacred tree Irminsul. (Charles earned his honourific title of “The Great” – le mange – from Christian historians for spreading Christianity by force, brutality and murder). Charlemagne imposed a tithe on all Christians in his kingdom to further support the spread of Christianity by militaristic means.
774AD – Charlemagne annexes the Lombard kingdom, expanding his territories by force in the name of the church.
777AD – Widukind, the duke of Saxony and the chief antagonist of Charlemagne during the Saxon Wars, was forced to flee north to his wife’s relatives in Denmark. Thus, by this date, the Danes become fully aware of the threat of Charlemagne and Christianity. When Charlemagne went to Spain in 778, Widukind returned and revived the rebellion, and the Saxons raided Frankish regions.
785/6 AD – The Saxon duke Widukind was subdued by Christian invaders. In order to preserve his Folk from further genocide he submitted to a nominal Baptism at Charlemagne’s hands. Immediately afterwards, the VIKING RAIDS begin in 787 with the Norse raid on the monestary on Portland in Dorset (Southern England). (*Archeology and Dendro-chronology prove that already by this time the Danish kingdom had constructed the earliest layers of the great wall of Denmark the “Danevirke” or “Dane’s Work” — to guard against Frankish Christian encroachment.
782AD – Charlemagne has 4500 heathen Saxon German nobles executed at Verden, for the crime of not converting to Christ.
804AD – Charlemagne’s wages his last war against the last remaining heathen Saxons, he succeeds in conquering them and forcing them to nominally accept Christianity under pain of death, and thus extends his empire to the Elbe.
829AD – Christian missionaries arrive in Sweden. They are met with a lot of opposition from the heathen Vikings and the Sami who did not wish to convert to Christ.
870AD – Harold the Fair-haired conquers Norway in the name of Christ with fire and sword, and got his nick name because he made a vow to not cut his hair until he had killed, or driven out every heathen in Norway.
Iceland is colonized primarily by heathen Norwegian refugees that were being persecuted and killed by the newly converted Christian king Harold. Olaf later sends Christian missionaries to Iceland to convert and baptize a number of influential men, but they had to leave in a hurry after the missionaries killed several men for slandering their Christian God. Olaf threatened to maim or kill all Icelanders in his realm when he heard how much resistance there was to Christianity.
882AD – Ludvig III, the King of both West-Frankish and East-Frankish kingdoms, dies in his religious wars against the heathens from the north.
964AD – King Harold of Denmark is baptized at Mainz, Germany. He then returns to his country with missionary monk Ansgar to spread and enforce Christianity upon his own people.
993AD – Olaf Tryggvason becomes first Christian king of Norway. Undeterred by the obstinate resistance of the people, Olaf forces Christianity upon his people by threats, murder, and torture…. including having members of the heathen priesthood tied up and left on a shallow rocky reef at flood tide, a long and terrible wait for death.
994AD – Olaf Skotkonung, king of Sweden accepts Christianity and declares it to be Swedens’ official religion, with no other religions allowed. The people who refused to convert to Christ were removed from their land, beaten and / or killed. Heathen temples were destroyed and had Christian churches built in their place.
1000AD – Iceland decrees by law that Christianity will be the official religion of the island. Although heathenism is still allowed, it can only be practiced in private as public displays of the old faith are made illegal and punishable by law.
1012AD – First persecution of “Christian heretics” in Germany for deviating from the Christian Churches’ official dogma.
1018AD – Olav II Haraldsson, (St Olav) annihilated the petty kings of the Southern Norway, and crushed the aristocracy to enforce the acceptance of Christianity throughout the kingdom of Norway, including the Orkney and Shetland Islands.
1100AD – Zealous Christian missionaries destroy the great heathen temple at Old Uppsala in Sweden, replacing it with a Christian church
1100AD – 1200 – On Church orders over 2 million German men and Women in what is known today as Austria, Switzerland and Southern Germany were mercilessly slaughtered because they would not convert to Christ.
1212AD – “The Children’s Crusade” 50,000 German and French children are torn from their families and pressed into military service in the Middle East. Many died miserably of violence, Hunger, Sickness. Few ever returned home to their families.
1234AD – Over 10,000 German men, Women, and Children were killed at the command of the Bremen archbishop because they were “heritics”.
1525AD – After almost a thousand years of Christianity first reaching England’s shores, the Bible is first translated to English by William Tyndale, before this date the religious authorities made it a punishable crime to translate the Latin Bible into English because it was felt that the English people should not be able to read it for themselves
1560AD – The Bible is first translated to German by Marten Luther, previous to this it was an illegal and punishable offense to allow the common person to be allowed to read the Bible for themselves.
INTRODUCTION
Firstly, we must firmly assert that we respect the decision of all people to believe, follow and worship any religion that they see best for them and that we are not Anti-Christian in any way, nor are we trying to invalidate their right to exist as a religion. We are also firmly against the disparaging and maligning of the religious beliefs of others.
Asatru is not a religion that defines itself in opposition to Christianity or any other religion. However, we are firmly against the destruction and ignorance of our native religion imposed upon us by the persecution and oppressive deceit of the invading Christian missionaries that has carried on to this day.
We are revitalizing our native indigenous religion of Asatru and as it was Christianity that had destroyed our ancient ancestral religion, culture, and traditional way of life we MUST thoroughly examine the Christian faith our ancestors were forced and coerced into accepting. As such, we strongly assert that the Christianity that was preached by the missionaries in the 6th – 10th centuries throughout the heathen Germanic lands deliberately did NOT accurately reflect Christ’s true teachings in the Bible and we vigorously believe that had our ancestors been made aware of the true tenets of Christianity, they would have rejected it even more vehemently than they had.
While Christianity could not eradicate our native religion of Asatru, it was very successful in assimilating its festivals and traditions, thereby supplanting it. The Christian missionaries were so successful in fact, that many of our people today have no idea that Christianity is not the original religion of Europe, and that it actually had to be imposed by force and deception. In the article below we utilize some texts of the Christian bible to show that the true teachings are in direct opposition to Asatru’s ancient moral code, and value system.
In our efforts to reclaim the spiritual birthright of our people we must first reveal Christianity for the sanctimonious and contradictory teaching that it really is. We must expose its true historic origins, and analyze its duplicitous teachings and values in order to awaken our people from their slumber and hence reintroduce them with their native ancestral religion which is based on spiritual truth and the immutable laws of nature.
We feel that it is our duty to detail some of the hard and disturbing facts of this book which has become “holy” to many of our people. As we will amply demonstrate, its teachings have crippled the hearts and minds and wreaked havoc on us for far too long, shackling the minds and spirits of our people, causing the dark ages and setting back civilization and progress. One of our foremost goals is returning our folk to their native spirituality and values and to demolish and forever lay to rest some horrible Judeo-Christian spiritual concepts. We aim to return freedom to our people, namely, freedom from the fear of the Christian Hell.
Christianity has confused, crippled and divided our “native spirit”. It has changed the whole course of our history; we were conquered and brought down to our knees by false words as no empire had ever subjugated us before.
Christianity has waged a deadly war upon the higher ideals of Mankind, it has set a ban on the all the fundamental instincts of this type of humanity and have distilled the devil out of these natural instincts. Christianity has sided with everything weak, low and faulty, it has made an ideal out of the antagonism towards all the self-preservatives of a strong life, and has even corrupted the reasoning of the strongest of intellects by teaching that the highest values of intelligence are sinful, misleading and full of temptation. An animal, species or individual become corrupt and decadent when it loses these very instincts, when it purposely selects and prefers that which is detrimental to it.
While few people in modern times actually take Christianity’s’ “true teachings and tenets” seriously enough to truly live by them, many would still be in agreement that at the very least our culture passively consents to and radiates Christianitys domination on the very outlook of our society. This in itself is quite a serious concession and one that has had many catastrophic events on the culture, government and our people. After all these many hundreds of years, many of our people still don’t know what the imposition of this alien creed of fear and deception has done to us, and even less does it understand what it is still doing to us today. After over a thousand years of Christianity can our people and their thinking be brought back to their sense, and their native spirituality?
If we look at events in human history, and examine the sick and dying state of Christianity today, the answer is an overwhelming YES! This is one of our main battles – to open up the eyes and thus begin the process of straightening out the thinking of our people, it is a matter of persistence, organized education and dedication. Only once we have exposed the treachery, deceit and atrocities that were perpetrated upon our ancestors, can we begin in earnest to reestablish our own people’s traditional values, rich culture and heritage free from this alien creed.
Asatru is based on the spiritual realities of the universe in which we find ourselves. We focus on the real problems confronting the world and seek to build a better and stronger society for the betterment of us all. We have an ancient structured ethic which is complete comprehensive and constant. Properly organized and harnessed our combined potential is without limit.
CHRISTIANITY PART 1
When first introducing the Christian religion to the heathen peoples of Europe, the Christian missionaries made it a strong point in converting the peoples by comparing our many ancestral gods & goddesses with their humanlike traits of passions, loves, lusts, hates, and faults with their one perfect all powerful, all knowing, all wise god who had endless amounts of love, compassion, and forgiveness for us his creations and his followers.
This new concept and portrayal of a single superior God who could do anything was an amazingly strong argument in convincing some of our ancestors to convert to Christianity, who valued wisdom and strength very highly. But does this image of God as cast by these missionaries match that of what is written in the bible? Let us now examine what the Bible really tells us about the nature of their perfect God:
DISCORDANT GOD FROM THE DESERT:
Throughout the bible (and especially the New Testament) we are continually urged to be more perfect, more God like. We are told that our short comings and weaknesses are as numberless as the stars in the night sky, and in contrast to this we are reminded repeatedly how immanently perfect God is (See Matt 5:48, Deut 32:4…), are told that he is very loving and gracious, the very incorporation of all wisdom. He is also described as merciful, forgiving, just and that we are all equal in the eyes of God.
In church we are continually told that the Christian God created everything, he was, is, and shall always be in complete control, his power is supreme, unlimited and unchallenged. He is all-wise and never makes a mistake and he knows past, present and future. As the bible itself asserts “not a sparrow falls from the sky, nor a hair falls from your head but that God wills it”.
But since he is purported to be all of these things we must ask ourselves many things: Why did he create Hell before he made humankind? Did he plan from the very beginning to create billions of people so they could be sent into a fiery torture chamber where they will burn for all eternity with out mercy? Being wise and infallible he must have known what he wanted, what he was doing, and what the end result would be all along.
In the opening verse of the bible flatly states that in the beginning God created heaven and earth and everything that exists was created in six days. yet not mentioned in this is that since the creation was limited to this first week that two monstrosities were created at the same time, one is Hell, the other is the devil.
Satan is already mentioned in the third chapter of Genesis in which the story of the seduction of Adam and Eve by the serpent is told. So the very FIRST day that God had put Adam and Eve into the garden of Eden, God had already made Satan as well as Hell.
Since God is all knowing, and all powerful, perfect and never makes a mistake, then how is the Devil there in the first place to aggravate, challenge, oppose him, and thwart the holy trinity of God and his ardent will to save us all from hell? How come the devil seems to be winning? Why is the Christian God so tolerant of Satan? After all, how could the devil stay alive with the ability to operate at all without Gods collaboration and blessings?
If the devil is the root of all evil in this world and the next, why was he created in the first place? Did God make a mistake? And if so why doesn’t he simply destroy the devil and fix the problem? After all he is all powerful so it shouldn’t really be a problem. He certainly didn’t hesitate to drown all of humanity (with the exception of Noah and his family) in the Great Flood, so then why doesn’t he eliminate the source of the problem and eliminate Satan?
If we look in the book of Job in the Old testament an extraordinarily curious story presents itself that helps to clarify this special relationship between God and Satan: JOB 1:6 “Now there was a day when the sons of God came to be present before the lord and Satan was among them” From this we can see that God had many sons, and that Satan and Jesus were just two of them.
We wonder that if God is so anxious to save us all then why is he so obscure, so shy, so terribly confusing about the issues? There are over 17 different versions of the bible all being circulated as “the true religion”. If the issue is really more important than life itself then why doesn’t the Christian god make everything crystal clear before sending billions of his “beloved” into the fiery furnace forever? Why doesn’t he make a personal appearance once in awhile? This would certainly be more convincing than the confusing, contradictory claims of the bible.
In the Old Testament he used to hop back and forth between heaven and earth on a regularly frequent basis and had time for such nonsense as wrestling with Jacob all night (Genesis 32:21-32), so since all of our souls are on the line, why wont he make a personal appearance in the world today?
For what reasons would a good, kind and loving God heap such vengeance upon us by tossing us into Hell for ALL TIME? The reasons are almost endless: perhaps someone was thirsty and you didn’t give them a drink at the right time, perhaps you were born into another religion and never really heard of Jesus, perhaps you have taken the lords name in vain during a brief moment of anger and frustration and hence “blasphemed” ( that being a cardinal sin which is NEVER forgiven) that too would incur upon you the eternal wrath and vengeance of God. In to the fire pits of hell you go, no mercy and no reprieve.
And just to top it all off the chapters that comprise the “Revelation” in the bible is evidently supposed to show what is in store for us poor mortals, and what is in store is a pretty horrible , tragic and tremendously catastrophic mess.
Revelations is full of pain suffering and agony with the constant referral to vengeance and righteousness, and while it belabors our point to go on here about all the horrors that this “loving god” has planned for us as is detailed in these 22 chapters. Please look it up for yourself if you wish to further see proof of the “good news and glad tidings” Jesus supposedly brought to us and just exactly how kind, loving, and compassionate the wrath of the Christian God really is.
ORIGINAL SIN:We are told that it is through “Original Sin” we are all naturally born sinful, bad and tainted with evil. All of the instincts that Nature gave to us are evil, and therefore Jesus had to come to us to save us from our “wicked” natural desires and hence save us from going to Hell. This is what is referred to as “salvation” and “being saved by Jesus”. The origin of “Original Sin” was when Adam and Eve were talked into eating the apple from the forbidden tree by Satan who was in the form of a serpent.
This concept and story is generally accepted by many Christians yet it raises many serious questions: Why did the Christian God put the tree out there in the first place, if not to entrap the poor naive couple who were only ONE day old, as simple minded as a newborn babe and had no possible way of knowing what was going on? How can Adam and Eve be blamed for this mess and all of their descendants expected to pay the penalty? Adam and Eve can’t be held responsible as they were no worse than what their “creator” had made them.
They had no experience and no understanding of what was happening. If God had created the devil and Hell then why should eating an attractive fruit that would give them knowledge and enlightenment be such a heinous crime that would drastically change the course of events from the very first day they were created? After all doesn’t the serpents suggestion of gaining knowledge, becoming wise and knowing the difference between good and evil make a lot more sense than just a straight directive of “not eating the fruit”?
If you take away just this one single solitary element away from the whole, then ALL of Christianitys’ purpose and teachings fall into non-entity. The entirety of Christianity is dependant on this one single belief of “Original sin” and this is the ONLY reason that we supposedly need to be saved! The obvious conclusion to all the above is that it was a rigged deal from beginning to end, designed and created by the all loving god to send the vast majority of humans to Hell for them to suffer in agony in eternal in fire.
This is a great miscarriage of justice to punish all succeeding generations, literally billions and billions of us for the simple act of Eve eating the forbidden fruit, Especially when you consider they were conned into it by the very persuasive Serpent with the apparent collaboration of the Christian God.
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF FEAR:
The concepts of heaven and Hell were already introduced in the Old Testament, but they were of very minor importance and certainly neither were as dramatically portrayed in the spotlight as they are in the New Testament. But having firmly established the new concepts and importance of Heaven and Hell ( especially Hell ) the “new teachings” of Christ set a high premium on faith – that is “the belief in that which you cannot see nor prove”.
Simply put this means “believe what we tell you to believe, although we don’t have a single shred of evidence to offer and no matter how ridiculous and contradictory our teachings are, or you will go to hell forever!”
Hell is of such an overwhelming magnitude in the Christian religion and it is used into clubbing its victims into panic and submission for the Church. We are told that the horrible pain of Hell is relentless, it is excruciating. you cannot rest or sleep, you cannot even faint or pass out, there are no sedatives or painkillers.
You cannot die there is no relief, there is no way out, there is no reprieve, no forgiveness, no pity. The pain is intense, it is all over, it is endless and forever. Can you truly imagine such a horrible concept? Can you possibly conjure up anything more horrendous? Only the most depraved mind filled with hatred and viciousness could dredge up such a beastly idea from the lowest depths of inhuman depravity. The concept of “salvation’ is this: if you don’t become saved then you will go to hell and burn forever and ever.
By using these psychological weapons like the stick and carrot method to the ultimate extremes the human imagination could conceive, they deceived, bludgeoned and bullied our ancient ancestors into fearfully accepting the new faith of Christ. In sharp contrast to Hell was Heaven, dreamed up as the very epitome of bliss, happiness and peace by the medieval Christian church, yet strangely the Christian heaven is only described once in the Bible: Matt.13:31-32 – “The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed his field: Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof”.
There are certain natural healthy human emotions that stir mankind into action, amongst them are Love, Hate, and Anger. Conversely there are certain natural emotions that paralyze and incapacitate, foremost amongst these is Fear, Panic and Confusion. The founders and missionaries of Christianity deliberately utilized these treacherous weapons to the hilt, capitalized on these human frailties and used it as a powerful weapon to intimidate, to paralyze and to whip their victims in line and thereby enslave them. These teachings have inflicted untold mental anguish onto billions of victims by spreading its horrible concept of a monstrous Hell and its eternal torture.
These fears are real to the uninformed and the gullible. This psychological technique is exactly the same as how some parents deal with innocent little children: when a child comes into this world their minds are as blank as a piece of white paper. At first the child is extremely naive, and impressionable. The child has implicit faith in its parents. If a parent tells a child stories of Santa Claus, shows pictures of Santa then the child believes in the actual existence of Santa Claus. To the child the concept is as real as reality itself. If the child is told about an evil bogey man, he will believe that too. If the bogey man is used to frighten a child and told the bogey man will get them if they don’t behave, then the cruel deception can be used as a psychological club to keep the child in line.
To the child the concept is real, and the fear is real, because the child is easily deceived as they have yet to develop the mental capacity to discern reality from fantasy. And so it is with the concept of the ultimate Bogey man and his gruesome land of Hell.
Unfortunately, people do not stop being gullible when the become adults. Millions of adults are more gullible and superstitious than little children. Although they may be adults, the concept of Hell has so thoroughly been ingrained into the heads of these Christian victims from early childhood, that to them the concept is more real than reality itself and much more frightening. Many Christians are so thoroughly indoctrinated that they don’t even stop to question and analyze the true origins or meanings of their beliefs!
Their minds are now like concrete – all mixed up and hard set. As they succumb to the fear and panic from even contemplating such a horrible fate that is supposedly in store for them that they become docile victims, ready to believe anything, do anything, at the command of their spiritual superiors in the religious hierarchy. It is this deliberate fear and panic that has worked wonders on its gullible victims and is the essential root and foundation upon which Christianity has been able to build itself a vast, rich and powerful empire.
All this fear has had a very neutralizing and disastrous effect on the deceived and deluded. Mankind was thus hypnotized and paralyzed into inaction, waiting for the return of Christ. And after more than 2000 years the believers are still waiting, nature goes on as it has in the millions of years preceding and as it will in the millions of years to come. After 100 generations they are still holding the bag, worried, paralyzed, waiting…
Fears can be real or they can be imaginary, A real fear is one based on a genuine and imminent threat of danger (a criminal breaking in to your house with a gun for example) a fear based on something that no one has ever seen felt, or smelled and as such originates in such a contradictory book as the Christian bible is a fear based on a fantasy and is unreal.
Real fears are a helpful protective device nature has built into all creatures as an aid in the constant struggle for survival. Unreal fears are a form of psychosomatic sickness that are detrimental to the physical and mental being of its victims. They do much more than unnecessarily make people sick; they warp their personalities, paralyze their activities and make them easy prey in submitting to the will of someone stronger. Thus fear can be used as a perfect tool to control another’s thoughts and actions.
The majority of people’s fears are imaginary. Most are unreal and unreasonable, these are termed phobias. One of the oldest and most universal Phobias that has afflicted mankind since our earliest beginnings has been the fear of the unseen and the unknown.
Into this murky picture of fears, phobias, and superstition stepped the early Christian founders and missionary to aggravate and amplify existing fears and capitalize on them to the hilt. They harnessed the full potential of all such fears and exploited them in order to enslave their converts. With their ultimate weapon of fear, they added the ultimate horror concept of all time – the Christian Hell – with its endless torturing of souls burning in a fiery pit for all eternity.
All this begs the question: Why should anyone be coerced or tricked into believing anything? If you can not be freely convinced about the situation based on the evidence presented or the lack of it, why must you be threatened with torture, vengeance, and retribution?
These are the methods of Gangsters and Tyrants. ANY belief that is arrived at under false pretenses and information, threat or coercion is not a rational conviction but is instead a dishonest one. Yet throughout the bible and the history of Christianity, these means of threats, coercion, and fear is what is used to get people to follow the teachings of Christ and his father.
They constantly bombard you with concepts that tell you that you are a “sinner” and have been since birth, that you have to completely remake and remodel yourself from the form in which nature created you with all its healthy needs and instincts that were implanted within you for your own self preservation since they are all bad and wrong.
You have to be born again and “believe in the lord” so that he and his grace will save you from eternal damnation. The introduction of this horrible concept of Hell has wreaked havoc on our people and drastically altered the course of our once illustrious history for the worst.
CHRISTIAN PRIESTHOOD:
“How well we know what a profitable superstition this fable of Christ has been for us.” – Pope Leo X (1513-1521)
Hypocritically the professional preachers of Christ play their part in following the ways of Christ. In truth they neither believe in nor practice the foremost teachings of their lord as embodied in their bible. They can be categorized as the most hypocritical of all, where as they are drawing a salary and freeloading off of their flock, they would be one of the last to “sell all they have and give it to the poor”.
Where as they preach it is better to give than to receive they are the first to have out their hand and persistently urge you to give, give, and give some more.
Simply by the fact that they have their churches as a place of worship is against the bible: Jesus said prayer should be a private affair devoid of public display:- Matthew 6:5-6 “And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by men. Truly, I say to you they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room (or closet.) and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret…”
The “Salvation” that the priest keeps dangling in front of you is so ridiculous and impossible to attain that BY THIER OWN RULES not even they will qualify to be one of the very few who will gain entry into the Christian “Kingdom of Heaven”. The suppression of logic, common sense and honest questioning of their doctrines is still highly powerful today.
History has more than shown us that as long as a people can be kept ignorant, confused and in fear that they can easily be enslaved and exploited by tyrants, and none so more than the religious tyrants that have continually suppressed any honest criticism or questioning of their most effective tool – their doctrine of fear. They invented the story of Hell to frighten people and thus gain control of their minds, their money, time and resources using this fear they manipulate and exploit them. This is how it has worked for almost 2000 years.
The early Christian founders invented the concept of sin, for only by means of the belief in sin are they able to rule. The Priests true function is to denaturalize and thereby” sanctify”. The Christian Priest is not able to speak of the “facts” concerning what the bible really says without also falsifying them by his interpretation. He depreciates and desecrates nature and has made himself the sole means of “reconciling oneself with God” and as much as it is fundamental that one must render subordination to the priest for he alone is able to “save” your soul from an eternity in Hell.
To the Christian priest, sins, weakness and guilt are indispensable, they are his tools of his trade as only through them he is able to make his living. It is NECESSARY that people should sin. The priest is like any other professional that wants to retain his job. Through his training, he alone should know better than anyone else that there are no “Sinners”, “Salvation” nor the Christian Kingdoms of Heaven and Hell.
These priests who preach the self-conquest of the mind, body and spirit as it is advocated in the bible cannot claim to be ignorant of this. These worn out assertions are constantly being pushed by this overzealous group whose very existence depends on guilt of our innermost human nature, sin, and a fear of their Hell.
CHRISTIANITY PART 2
While the forceful, violent aspects from the Christianization of Germanic Europe is well documented, one will rarely hear of the equally insidious but lesser known tactics of treachery and deceit that were used by the early Christian missionaries in order to persuade the VERY resistant heathen Germanic population into converting to Christ.
In their efforts to gain followers the Christian missionaries made many grand and false assertions on two main points to help them attract new followers:
A) Christianity is a religion of love, peace, and tolerance.
B) There is easy access into the Christian heaven for the faithful believer.
These tactics were relatively successful in gaining voluntary converts to their new religion. Let us now examine what the bible and history have to say about these two assertions.
EVERY ONE IS GOING TO HELL:
Early Christian missionaries taught their potential converts that you only needed to have faith in the Christian God, then it would be simple to have “salvation” and you were virtually assured a guarantied place in heaven ( this is still preached and believed by many modern Christians across the world today) but examination of the bible tells us that not only is getting to heaven a very difficult task, it is virtually impossible! As you will soon read, the exclusions will pile up one after another until there is no doubt what the Bible is really telling us that the overwhelming vast majority of us humans are destined to go to Hell forever.
If you mention Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount” to the average Christian, they probably wont have the foggiest idea what it is all about and will most likely assume that it is a collection of beautiful and idealistic platitudes that would be nice for us all to achieve. In fact if we were to achieve any of those things that Jesus advises we would surely destroy our lives and our civilization in short order.
These concepts contained within the “sermon on the mount” are the main foundation on which Christianity stands and are in complete contradiction to all the laws of nature, and the good clean healthy natural instincts that nature has imbued in all of us for our happiness, self preservation and advancement. It is in complete contradiction to all of the sensible laws that civilization has built up over many thousands of years.
Furthermore it stands sharply in contrast to how the majority of self proclaimed Christians ( past and present) have lived. Most of the “Sermon on the Mount” is contained in Matthew Chapters 5, 6 and 7. But its teachings are repeated with additional similar ideas throughout the four Gospels in particular and also sprinkled throughout the rest of the New Testament.
So considering that the tenets contained within Jesus’ “Sermon On the Mount” represents one of THE main pillars of Christian values, and implicitly details the requirements for getting into heaven, let us now look at some of these ideas and see just how beautiful and idealistic they really are, and to the extent to which our heathen ancestors were truly deceived:
ON WEAKNESS AND STRENGTH:
– Matt 5:3 Christ says” blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” Matt5:5 “blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”
Once the ideas of heaven and hell have soaked in your mind as being real then naturally you would want to be blessed in the eyes of the Christian church ( and therefore by the Christian God), to do this you must become meek (defined by the dictionary as: being weak, manifesting patience and long suffering, deficient in spirit and courage, submissive, tame) poor in spirit (which means lazy, undisciplined, dumb, and ignorant).
Whereas before this would make one the village idiot he is now upgraded to become the inheritor of the Earth. The concept of voluntarily becoming submissive, week and stupid is completely against the laws of nature and in direct opposition to the dynamic ancestral spirit of Asatru. Everything in nature that is to survive and advance itself is quick, smart, strong, and bold. Whereas the week, stupid and slow fall by the wayside.
– Matt 5:25 Christ says “Agree with thine adversary quickly, while thou art in the way with him, lest thine adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison”. And further in Matt 5:40 Christ advise us “and if a man will sue thee at law and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.”
This tells us to let other people to take advantage of us and to let them walk all over us. In essence this says that no matter whether you are right or you are wrong, don’t put up a fight to protect your rights and property, or to uphold justice.
– Matt 5:44 Christ gives us this advice “Ye have been heard that it hath been said, thou should love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy, but I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you and pray for them that despitefully use and persecute you.”
The dictionary’s definition of enemy is this: “One that seeks the injury, overthrow, or failure of a person to which he is opposed; one who is injurious, harmful, deadly.” Therefore this kind of suicidal response to love and help one who is trying to do you, and those that you love harm is contrary to the laws of nature as well as an affront to common sense, and past experience.
ON SIN and GETTING INTO HEAVEN:
– Matt 5:29 and 30 Christ admonishes us to” if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out…if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off” This means that if your eyes, hands or any other part of your body have caused you to sin, you must mutilate and destroy those offending parts of the body.
– Matt 5:39 Christ says “Resist not evil” and “turn the other cheek.”
– Matt 7:21 Christ says “Not everyone that says to me, Lord, lord, shall enter into the kingdom of Heaven. Many will say to me in that day Lord, Lord, have I not prophesied in thy name and in thy name cast out devils, and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then I will profess unto them: I never knew you, depart from me ye that work inequity”
In other words, despite your best efforts, despite your faith and good deeds, despite your love and loyalty, Jesus says: you can go to hell.
– Matt 10:37 Christ says “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: And He that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me is not worthy of me.”
– Matt 12:31 Christ says ” wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy ghost shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.”
If you have blasphemed against the Holy Ghost ( which is also God and Jesus) then you have had it with no chance of any forgiveness or the slightest chance of mercy.
– Matt 12:36 “But I say unto you, that every idle word that men speak, they shall give account thereof in the Day of Judgment. For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.”
If these are the rules of the game, everybody is in great peril as any words that you say may be the ones by which you are condemned.
– Matt 16:24 Jesus said to his disciples, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.”
This means that to truly believe in Christ you must follow his way of living, deny your natural human instincts for survival and if you choose to abstain yourself from this harsh lifestyle which would surely kill you, then you are going to Hell.
– Matt 15:4 “For God commanded, saying Honour thy Mother and Father: and he that curseth father or mother, let them die the death.”
Another transgression that will doom the offender to the pits of Hell.
-Luke 14:26 “If a man comes to me and hate not his Father, and Mother, and wife, and children, and brethren and sister, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple”
This means you can only have room in your Heart for Jesus, His father and the Holy ghost, if you care or love anyone else at all in the least, you are going to Hell.
ON PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY:
These teachings are designed to undermine the responsibility that one would have towards their family, or a citizen might have for their country. It tells us not to work, not to plan, not to do anything that will ensure a secure and happy existence in the future. In fact it admonishes you from so much as taking proper care of your own sustenance and care of your own body.
– Matt 5:42 Christ tells us to ” Give to him that asketh of thee and from him that would borrow of thee turn thou not away.”
This bit of advice tells us that we should give away your possessions to everybody that asks anything of you, to lend money or your belongings to anyone and everyone who asks you. If this were actually put into practice as Christ demand we do if we want to get to heaven, no one would be able to continue for long.
– Matt 6:19 “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and dust dost corrupt, and where thieves break thorough and steal, but lay your treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through and steal.
– Matt 6:25 & 26 Christ says ” therefore I say unto you, take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink, nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. He says” Behold the fowls of the air for they sow not neither do they reap nor gather into barns, yet your heavenly father feedeth them. Are ye not much better that they?”
further this in Matt 6:31 where Christ tells us ” Therefore take no thought to what we shall eat or what we shall drink for after all these things do the gentiles seek”.
– Matt 6:34 Jesus tells us to “take No thought for tomorrow, for tomorrow will take thought for the things of itself”.
In the preceding pieces of advice we are told that it is completely pointless to be industrious or thrifty, and to be a constructive builder. We are urged to forget about providing for our families, planning a future or building any enterprise or constructive effort, ANYTHING that would ensure our families and our own prosperity.
ON POSSESSIONS:
Again and again we are told to get rid of all of our earthly possessions and give it all to the poor, or to sell all of our belongings and give the money to the poor. Although this in itself would make you yourself poor, we are still persuaded to give all of the hard earned possessions that you have accumulated over a lifetime. After all, he tells us if you need something from God just ask him and he will give it to you.
– Matt 7:7 Christ says “ask and it shall be granted to unto you”
– Matt 19:20 “The young man saith unto him, All these things have I kept from my youth up: what lack I yet?” and Jesus said unto him “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor and thou shalt have treasure in Heaven: come and follow me” When the young man went away sorrowful, Jesus said to his disciples.
“Verily I say unto you, that a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. Again I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”
– Matt 19:21 Jesus says ” go and sell all thou hast, and give it to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure up in heaven”.
– Matt 19:25 “When his disciples heard this, they were exceedingly amazed, saying Who then can be saved? to this Jesus said “With men this is impossible: but with God all things are possible”
– Luke 6:24 & 25 “But woe unto you that are rich! for ye shall have received consolation. Woe unto you that is full! For ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep”.
The moral here is that if things in your life are going well and you are enjoying life then you must worry all the time anyway, and see nothing but gloom and doom ahead or you will burn in Hell for all eternity.
We can clearly see from this essential component & requirement for getting into the Christian heaven, exactly how the early Christian missionaries deceived our ancestors into converting to Christ by not detailing the basic tenets of their religion; Their very first targets for conversion was the very richest segments of heathen Germanic society; The Kings and nobility.
ON INTELLIGENCE:
– Matt 7:1 Christ says “Judge not that ye might not be judged”
Nature gave us all an intelligence which sets us apart from the rest of the creatures of this world. One of the finest attributes that mankind has developed over time is the use of this intelligence and sound judgment.
We all use judgment thousands of times each and every day , and if we were all to suspend the use of our capacity for judgment, which we were all born with, we would in effect be abandoning our senses we need to survive, and we would in essence become a hopeless imbecile.
– Matt 18:3 Christ says” Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” From this we are to understand that to become as humble and simpleminded as little children, we are to forget all of the experiences and judgment that we have acquired through all of our lives, or else we will not qualify to enter the gates of heaven.
– Matt 18:6 “but who so shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea”
If we have offended any of the followers of Christ who have become as little children( as detailed above), we then are better off if you were drowned. This too disqualifies one from reaching heaven.
ON FORGIVENESS:
Apparently these mean that no matter what one does to you, how horrible, cruel and unjust the crime that was perpetrated against you or your loved ones, you must forgive them 100% completely or you will go to hell.
– Matt 18:34 – 35 Christ says “And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to his tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him. So likewise shall my father do also unto you, if ye in your hearts forgive not every one of his brothers their trespasses”.
– Mark 11:26 Christ says” but if ye do not forgive, neither will your father your trespasses”
Christianity appeals to all of the disinherited peoples, In St Paul’s words “And God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world, things which are despised hath God chosen, and things which are not, to bring to naught things that are: that no flesh should glory in his presence”Corinthians 1:27-29.
Thus Christianity stands in opposition to all those who are noble, strong, beautiful, talented, loved… As these Christian teachings spread, the obsession with “saving souls” became the main preoccupation of many of the new converts. So instead of attempting to become better, smarter, or stronger and taking care of their duties in the here and now they became increasingly obsessed with what would happen in the here-after much to the detriment to themselves, families, and their people.
The “Sermon on the Mount” attempts to destroy all reason, all human nature and the instincts – EVERYTHING that is beneficial, that promotes life, happiness, security and that has a guarantee of the future. It states that if you do not follow these rules then you are going to go to hell for all time. And by doing so it attempts to reconstruct life in such a way that it no longer has any meaning… after all, in the true Christian doctrine, only salvation is necessary and everything else is a deviation from this path.
Christianity seeks to convert every natural value into its opposite, and every honest natural impulse into a disgrace of the soul. The church fathers and priesthood had a vital interest in turning the notions “good”, “bad”, “true” and “false” upside-down as they could thereby recatagorize mankind as being sick and therefore needing their services to be “saved”.
They flourish only at the cost of denying his followers of all the healthy elements of life. Christianities expedient is to make you ill, for ONLY by Christianities own self appointed and exclusive path to the “truth” can you be saved from the eternal torments of Hell. Sinners must be constantly sustained by this hope which is actually a contradiction, and which cannot ever be realized.
It is said that one cannot be truly “converted” by the merits of Christianity – they are either born into it, or they must be confused, sick or weak enough for it.
Others who posses enough intellect, courage, health and contempt rightly eschew this religion that taught mankind to misunderstand our place in nature. The very word Christian is also highly misunderstood, it actually means “Christ like, to live and preach as he did”. Hence there was only one true Christian, and he purportedly died on the cross.
The ONLY distinguishing trait of the Christian ethos is of the Christian mode of existence, a mindset and life style that one cannot sustain and survive for long. Whither has the last shred of decency and of self respect gone if the general populace are otherwise so unembarrassed, and thoroughly anti-Christian in deed and thought yet still declare themselves Christians and flock to communion? They speak of faith, yet act according to their instincts.
THE NEW COVENANT – SALVATION ONLY FOR THE HOUSE OF ISRAEL:
Christ, the proclaimed hero and founder of Christianity is repeatedly represented as Jewish and has a genealogy stretching all the way from Abraham through King David and Joseph.
– Matt 1:1-21 “This is the family history of Jesus Christ: He came from the family of David, and David came from the family of Abraham . Abraham was the father of Issac. Issac was the father of Jacob. Jacob was the father of Judah and his brothers. Judah was the father of Perez and Zerah. Perez was the father of Herzon. Herzon was the father of Ram. Ram was the father of Amminadab.
Amminadab was the father of Nahshon. Nahshon was the father of Salmon. Salmon was the father of Boaz. Boaz was the father of Obed. Obed was the father of Jesse. Jesse was the father of King David. King David was the father of Solomon. Solomon was the father of Rehoboam.
Rehoboam was the father of Abijah. Abijah was the father of Asa. Asa was the father of Jehoshephat. Jehosephat was the father of Jehoram. Jehoram was the father of Uzziah. Uzziah was the father of Jotham. Jotham was the father of Ahaz. Ahaz was the father of Hezekiah. Hezekiah was the father of Manasseh. Manesseh was the father of Amon. Amon was the father of Josiah. Josiah was the grandfather of Jehoiachin and his brothers. After they were taken to Babylon: Jehoiachin was the father of Shealtiel. Shealtiel was the father of Zerubbabel. Zerubbabel was the father of Abiud. Abiud was the father of Eliakm. Eliakim was the father of Azor. Azor was the father of Zadok. Zadok was the father of Akim. Akim was the father of Eliud.
Eliud was the father of Eleazar. Eleazar was the father of Matthan. Matthan was the father of Jacob. Jacob was the father of Joseph. Joseph was the husband of Mary, and Mary was the mother of Jesus who was called the Christ. So there were 14 generations from Abraham to David. And there were 14 generations from David until the people were taken to Babylon.
And there were 14 generations from the time when the people were taken to Babylon until Jesus was born. This is how the Birth of Jesus came about: His mother Mary was engaged to marry Joseph, but before they were married, she learned that she was pregnant by the power of the holy spirit.
Because Mary’s husband, Joseph was a good man he did not want to disgrace her in public, so he planned to divorce her secretly. While Joseph thought about these things an angel of the lord came to him in a dream and said “Joseph, descendant of David, don’t be afraid to take Marry as your wife, because the baby in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins”
– Matt 2:1-2 “Jesus was born in the town of Bethlehem in Judea during the time when Herod was king. When Jesus was born some wise men came from the East to Jerusalem and asked “Where is the baby who was born to be the King of the Jews?”.
Further in Matt 2:4-6 Tell us this of Jesus’ mission on earth: “Herod called a meeting of all the leading priests and teachers of the law and asked them where the Christ would be born. They answered “In the town of Bethlehem in Judea. The prophet wrote about this in the scriptures. But you, Bethlehem in the land of Judea, are important among the tribes of Judah. A ruler will come from you who will be like a Shepard for my people of Israel”.
– Luke 1:68 – 77 Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them. He has raised up a mighty savior for us in the house of his servant David, as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old, that we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us.
Thus he has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors, and has remembered his holy covenant, the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham, to grant us that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, might serve him without fear,in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins.
– Luke 2:21 tells of Christ being circumcised on the eighth day as is the religious custom only of the Jewish people.
– Micah 5:3 “The Lord will give up his people until the one who is having a baby gives birth; then the rest of his brethren shall return unto the children of Israel. At that time the ruler of Israel will stand with the Lords strength and with the power of the name of the Lord his God. Then the Israelites will live in safety, because his greatness will reach all over the Earth.
He will bring peace. Assyria will surely come into our country and walk over our large buildings. We will set up seven Shepard’s, eight leaders of our people. They will destroy the Assyrians with their swords; They will conquer the land with their swords drawn. They will rescue us from the Assyrians when they come into our land, when they tread over our borders”
In the Old and New Testament, the Bible repeatedly tells us that the Jews are the chosen people, and ONLY they shall be allowed in to heaven:
Isaiah 41: 8-15 The lord says “People of Israel, you are my servants. People of Jacob I choose you. You are from the family of my friend Abraham. I took you from places far away on the Earth and I called you from a far away country and said :You are my servants’ I have chosen you and have not turned against you. So don’t worry, because I am with you. Don’t be afraid because I am your God.
I will make you strong and help you; I will support you with my right hand that saves you. All those peoples who are angry with you will be ashamed and disgraced. Those that are against you will disappear and be lost. You will look for your enemies but you will not find them. Those who fought against you will vanish completely. I am the lord your God, who holds your right hand, and I tell you ‘don’t be afraid, I will help you’.
You few people of Israel who are left do not be afraid even though you are weak as a worm. I myself will help you’ Says the lord. ‘The one who helps you is the Holy One of Israel. Look, I have made you like a new threshing board with many sharp teeth. So you will walk on mountains and crush them; You will make the hills like chaff. You will throw them into the air and the winds will carry them away; a windstorm will scatter them. Then you will be happy in the Lord; You will be proud of the Holy One of Israel. The poor and needy people will look for water, but they can’t find any. Their tongues are dry with thirst. But I, the lord, will answer their prayers; I, the God of Israel, will not leave them to die.”
– Isaiah 43: 1-7 Now this is what the lord says: He created you, people of Jacob; he formed you, people of Israel. he says, ‘don’t be afraid because I have saved you. I called you by name and you are mine. When you pass through waters, I will be with you. When you cross through waters you will not drown. When you walk through fire you will not be burned, nor will the flames hurt you. This is because I, the lord, am your God, the Holy One of Israel, your savior.
I gave Egypt to pay for you, and I gave Cush and Seba to make you mine. Because you are precious to me, Because I give you honour and love you, I will give other people in your place; I will give other nations to save your life. Don’t be afraid, because I am with you. I will bring your children from the East and gather you from the West. I will tell the North: give my people to me. I will tell the South: don’t keep my people in prison. Bring my sons from far away and my daughters from far away places. Bring to me all the people who are mine, whom I made for glory, whom I formed and made”.
– Jeremiah 31: 31-34 “Behold, the days come, says Jehovah, that I will cut a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah, not according to the covenant that I cut with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which covenant of mine they broke, although I was a husband to them, but this shall be the covenant that I will cut with the house of Israel: After those days I will put My Law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.”
– Deuteronomy 5:1-22 Moses receives the 10 Commandments from the Hebrew God, Yahweh who makes it abundantly clear that these are his spiritual laws meant only for the Jewish people exclusively.
– Deuteronomy 6:2-15 Yahweh makes it clear that he is the ancestral God of the Jewish people to the exclusion of all others.
– Deuteronomy 7:1-7 Yahweh says “For thou art the a holy people unto the lord God, The lord God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all other people that are upon the face of the earth” Here Yahweh makes it absolutely clear immediately following his deliverance of the 10 Commandments that these spiritual laws apply to the Jews exclusively as Immediately following this as he commands his “chosen people” to Rape, kill, and steal the land of their neighboring tribes and make slaves of any survivors.
-Deuteronomy 10:14 – 15 The lord owns the world and everything in it – the heavens, even the highest heavens are his. But the lord cared for and loved your ancestors, and chose you their descendants over all other nations, just as it is today.
-Deuteronomy 12:1-3 Yahweh says “These are the commands and laws you must carefully obey in the land the lord, God of your ancestors, is giving to you. Obey them as long as you live in this land. When you Inherit the land of these nations, you must completely destroy all the places where they serve their Gods, on high mountains and hill and under every green tree. Tear down their altars, smash their holy stone pillars, and burn their Asherah (a Canaanite Goddess) idols in the fire. Cut down their idols and cut down their names from those places.”
– In Exodus 29:45 & 46 God says “Behold I drive out before thee the Amonite, and the Canaanite, and the Hitite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite. And further in verse 13:”But ye shall destroy their altars and break their images and cut down their groves” In other words: kill, ravage and destroy all other peoples to make way for Gods chosen people.
– In Ezra 9: 1-15 Ezra’s Prayer About Jewish Intermarriage with gentiles:
When these matters had been concluded, the leaders approached me with this report: “Neither the Israelite laymen nor the priests nor the Levites have kept themselves aloof from the peoples of the land and their abominations (Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Jebusites, Ammonites, Moabites, Egyptians, and Amorites); for they have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and their sons, and thus they have desecrated the holy race with the peoples of the land.
Furthermore, the leaders and rulers have taken a leading part in this apostasy!” When I had heard this thing, I tore my cloak and my mantle, plucked hair from my head and beard, and sat there stupefied. Around me gathered all who were in dread of the sentence of the God of Israel on this apostasy of the exiles, while I remained motionless until the evening sacrifice. Then, at the time of the evening sacrifice, I rose in my wretchedness, and with cloak and mantle torn I fell on my knees, stretching out my hands to the LORD, my God. I said: “My God, I am too ashamed and confounded to raise my face to you, O my God, for our wicked deeds are heaped up above our heads and our guilt reaches up to heaven.
From the time of our fathers even to this day great has been our guilt, and for our wicked deeds we have been delivered over, we and our kings and our priests, to the will of the kings of foreign lands, to the sword, to captivity, to pillage, and to disgrace, as is the case today. “And now, but a short time ago, mercy came to us from the LORD, our God, who left us a remnant and gave us a stake in his holy place; thus our God has brightened our eyes and given us relief in our servitude.
For slaves we are, but in our servitude our God has not abandoned us; rather, he has turned the good will of the kings of Persia toward us. Thus he has given us new life to raise again the house of our God and restore its ruins, and has granted us a fence in Judah and Jerusalem. But now, O our God, what can we say after all this?
For we have abandoned your commandments, which you gave through your servants the prophets: the land which you are entering to take as your possession is a land unclean with the filth of the peoples of the land, with the abominations with which they have filled it from one end to the other in their uncleanness.
Do not, then, give your daughters to their sons in marriage, and do not take their daughters for your sons. Never promote their peace and prosperity; thus you will grow strong, enjoy the produce of the land, and leave it as an inheritance to your children forever.
“After all that has come upon us for our evil deeds and our great guilt-though you, our God, have made less of our sinfulness than it deserved and have allowed us to survive as we do– shall we again violate your commandments by intermarrying with these abominable peoples? Would you not become so angered with us as to destroy us without remnant or survivor? O LORD, God of Israel, you are just; yet we have been spared, the remnant we are today. Here we are before you in our sins. Because of all this, we can no longer stand in your presence.”
In Matt 10:5 Christ commands his disciples “Go not thou in the way of the gentiles and into any other cities of the Samaritan enter ye not, but go rather into the lost sheep of the house of Israel” Here again we learn that the teachings of Jesus are for the Jewish people exclusively.
– Matt 15:22 – 26 gives us the following story.
“And behold a woman of Canaan came to out of the coasts and cried unto him saying – “Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou son of David, have merry on me! My daughter is grievously vexed with a devil and she is suffering very much” But he answered her not a word. And his disciples came and besought him, saying, “Why do you send her away, for she crieth after us?”.
But Jesus answered and said “God has sent me only to the lost sheep, the people of the house of Israel” Then the woman came to Jesus again and bowed before him and said “Lord, help me!” Jesus answered “It is not right to take the children’s bread and give it to the dogs”. To understand this, we have to know who the “children” are, and who the “dogs” are. There is no argument among scholars about the meanings of these words, but they don’t like to dwell on it. The “children” are The Children Of Israel – Jews. The “dogs” are Gentiles – non-Jews. That term was used by the most racist of the Israelites.
– Luke 24: 19 – 22 One of them named Cleopas, asked ” Are you the only visitor in Jerusalem who doesn’t know the things that have been happening there these last few days?” “What things? he asked. “the things that happened to Jesus of Nazareth” they answered. “this man was a prophet and was considered by God and by all people to be powerful in everything he said and did. Our chief priests and rulers handed them over to be sentenced to death and he was crucified. And we had hoped that he would be the one who would set Israel Free!
– In John 4:22 We find Jesus is speaking to the women of Samaria and says to them ” Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews” Here Jesus is spelling it out for all the Gentiles, salvation is a Jewish thing and the Gentiles that worship me as their God are so confused they don’t know what it is that they are worshiping. In this we couldn’t agree more.
He is a vindictive God who advocated to his “chosen people” the principle an “eye for an eye” and a “tooth for a tooth” This supposedly “universal” Gods’ wild infatuation and continued exclusive privilege to salvation for only the Jewish people while everyone else is sent to burn in hell forever is nothing short of being extremely bigoted and fanatically racist.
We can see this special privileged relationship with God’s “chosen ones” in the story of the ten commandments that God gives to Moses to pass on to his people, it says “Thou shalt not kill”, but in the very next chapter the same God commands his people to “Go into Canaan and kill everybody in it.”
Again with the Commandment “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbors wife” we can see that these laws of God are to be upheld only by the Jews and only towards their own people, for while all the males were being put to the sword, the women are to be raped.
These plainly illustrate once again that he is the tribal God of only the Jewish people and these commandments are his laws for them exclusively.
As we shall see later, it is ONLY in the writings of St.Paul that the tribal God of the Jewish people becomes the universal God of all mankind.
RELIGION OF LOVE???:Similarly the Early Christian missionaries would extol the grandeur and glory of an eternal afterlife in the Christian Heaven, The bible contains only one paragraph wherein Jesus is detailing heaven, and it describes nothing of which they preached.
The adherents to Christianity continually call their religion a religion of love, peace, kindness and tolerance. So far we have seen that the most outstanding feature characteristic with the whole of Christian teachings is the horrible psychology of fear, designed to make one ready to comply and do most anything that the “Sheppard’s” of the church would urge them to do. But the trouble is that many Christians have never taken the time to actually study the New Testament to which they claim to be so dedicated too. Some have read smatterings of it but have not put all the pieces together and come to fully comprehend what it is really saying:
– In Luke 13:51-53 Christ says “suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you Nay: but rather for division, for from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three. The Father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father. The Mother shall be against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother, the mothers-in-laws against her daughter-in-law, and the daughter-in-law against the mother-in-law”.
– Matt 10:21 Jesus openly predicts the divisive effect that his religious teachings will have on mankind and says “And the brother shall deliver up his brother to death, and the father the child: and the children will rise up against their parents, and cause them to be put to death. And ye shall be hated of all men for my names sake”.
– In Matt 10:34 Jesus says “Think not that I am come to send peace on Earth. I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance with his father, the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a mans foes shall be of his own household”.
If you look at the history of all the wars that were fought in the name of the Christian God we see that this is exactly what happened time after time again, with countries being laid waste, families turning against one another, homes destroyed and literally hundreds of millions of lives lost as a result of slight differences in Christian theology, and Christians forcing their religion on to other people who do not want it.
– In Matt 12:25 Jesus really spells out what he intends: “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought into desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand”
From these teachings we can see that he did not come to unite but to divide, and divide he did. As these teachings spread throughout the lands the more the process of dissolution and the ferment of disintegration set in.
As these teachings spread it set mankind against his inner-most nature, they became increasingly confused, confounded and divided, Through the fear of Hell, they began to forsake the good judgment that they had built up over many millennia and they abandoned their good instincts, their cohesive family units became undermined and they lost much of their responsibility to their families, tribes and people.
We are continuously told that Jesus came to earth to bring us the “good news” and “glad tidings” which is supposedly to bring us “peace on earth” and “good will to men”. On the contrary it is the teaching and philosophy of gloom and doom, and if taken seriously enough by its followers it will surely destroy them. The supposed “good news” that Jesus brought to us is that there is an everlasting hell to which virtually ALL of humanity will be relegated, and even if you should escape it, most if not all of your relatives will surely end up in Hell.
As a psychological weapon, fear – the monstrous fear of Hell – is by far the most powerful. Christianity introduced into the minds of hundreds of Millions of people from their earliest tender childhood, the most vicious and hideous concept that was ever invented by the mind of man. There is no more deprived and hateful idea than sending people into confinement, to have them burn for all eternity without any chance of mercy and reprieve. No where else in the history of ALL human religions has a more fearful and atrocious concept been dreamed up and promoted as the Christian idea of Hell.
Just as Christianity utilizes fear as a powerful psychological tool so you will submit to their authority, they also use LOVE to blind you of clear thinking, for love is the state in which mankind views reality most differently from what it really is. The whole force of illusion reaches its zenith here, and is at its most powerful.
When a person is in love they will endure more than they would at any other time, and will voluntarily submit themselves to much more hardship. Through this hazy state of mind the worst in life is more easily tolerated, and to some it is no longer seen. Thus blinded by “the authority” of the church, the teachings of the bible and by the idea of the Christian God’s eternal love towards them, the disciple pays no attention to the weaknesses of its teaching. For only when mankind knows very well the strengths and weaknesses of his faith will it have any true depth of meaning and power.
While continually and contradictorily calling itself a religion of love, tolerance and kindness, Christianity has repeatedly used the most brutal means of both mental and physical torture to those who oppose it, conducting mass murders, usually with the approval of, if not the specific direction of the highest church authorities to bludgeon its way into power, both physically, economically and politically.
Let us look at how they were since the inception of the Christian church. There is NO other religion in the history of the world that has inflicted more anguish, suffering and confusion. So in sharp contrast to its image of being about love compassion, and tolerance, the methods the church and its followers used to convert our heathen ancestors included executions and many varied instruments of torture such as the breaking of bones and tearing the flesh off of living human beings, burning at the stake, thumbscrews, the rack, pouring molten metal down one’s throat or through one’s ear, branding irons, red hot metal boots.
Some of These methods being used as recently as the 19th century. The perpetrators of these methods were “civilized” men who’s hearts and minds had been infused with the loving creed of Christ. The victims of these tortures were not only their enemies whose single offense was to cling to their native spiritual beliefs, but as well as their own Christian brothers who even so much as slightly varied from those of the “official” dogma of the Church.
All the main tenets of the Christian church have been revealed in their true colours as the being calculated to depreciate and supress our natural, normal, healthy instincts and values. We have shown the real value of the horrid inventions the Christian church has made, which the priests uphold, and to what end they serve.
BIBLE AS TRUTH
While many a preacher will readily quote verses from the bible, reputed to be words spoken by Jesus himself, they will only pick and choose only certain ones which reinforce the general notion of Christianity as a positive force for mankind and which casts their religion in a positive light.
The Christian churches have always strongly discouraged anyone from seeking legitimate evidence supporting the existence of Christ or verifying any of the Biblical stories. They vigorously condemn intermixing their religion with logic, reason and the idea of freedom of thought. They do not like it if you ask questions or when you take it upon yourself to personally read the bible.
For a true Christian is supposed to be like a sheep, completely oblivious and awaiting the command of his sheppard. They say that only a trained priest can properly interpret the bible and only he can be the medium through which you are to know God. They don’t like to be challenged in theological matters, they only want accepting, gullible, susceptible minds who will blindly believe what ever they are told to believe, otherwise its Hellfire and eternal damnation as your dire penalty.
The priests assert that the only evidence you need is the “beautiful feelings” of Christ in your heart, which is supposed to be the surest sign of divinity and their conviction as the criterion of truth. Unfortunately most people do not recognize that the truth and the belief that something is true are two totally different things.
When we compare the first four books of the gospel with each other, which supposedly tell more or less the same story, we find that they contradict each other in so many numerous details that one only needs to read and compare them for themselves to truly believe it. But then after all, Christianity is a self proclaimed teaching designed to confuse, divide, and destroy the logic of this world. It not only tears apart the fabric of society itself, but also sets individuals at odds with themselves and one another by demolishing the natural instincts and inclinations that were given to us by nature to enable us to survive, live and prosper.
The Christian teachings if they are truly believed and practiced serve to dull and stifle all the good instincts that we are all born with, We are told that all of those things that we would naturally do are bad, and that to try to gain “salvation” we must follow these new artificial contradictory teachings that are completely contrary to the laws of nature. we are told that if we fail to do these things we are doomed to eternally burn in Hell.
That anyone would believe the bible to contain ANY truth without some investigation into the facts is a testament to one’s perverse naivety in allowing oneself to be deceived. It stands as a masterpiece and a tribute to the arts of propaganda and the arts of mass psychological manipulation and corruption. And it was no accident, it was designed that way.
It is hard to believe that such writings can be so blindly accepted by so many hundreds of millions as being so sacrosanct, holy, above scrutiny and hence untouchable. Does it make any sense whatsoever to have a “deep and abiding faith” in ANY religion, creed, belief, or theory that was built and is still supported by lies, treachery and fear?
CHRISTIANITY AS AN UNBALANCED RELIGION
Christian philosophy is a cowardly flight from reality, escaping into a fantasy world where faith and love will make everything turn out OK, and which relies on the destruction of reason and common sense. It warps the natural instinct and unhinges ones total outlook on life, love, sex, personal survival, death, and our role in the natural world.
Christianity has the deepest hostility towards reality, everything of nature and natural value was contrary to the churches ruling elite. With frightening consistency, it has divorced itself from everything natural and healthy as if it were “unholy” and “sinful”. They created a final formula for its instinct for power which was only achieved with successful avocation of self suppression of the masses.
With the idea of perfecting mankind by cutting off all relations with terrestrial things and detaching humanity from its own natural inner-nature and natural heritage, Christianity has attempted to make mankind confused and wander furthest from his natural inherent instincts. Through its very nature, it has brought its principle weapons against everything noble, joyful, and exalted on Earth, it is against our industriousness and our right to happiness on Earth.
The preference of pain and self denial over pleasure is an effect of that fictitious morality called the Christian religion – it is this preference that furnishes the formula for decadence. Chapter 12 of Leviticus deals with child birth being a sin for the mother that must be atoned for ( with having a female children requiring more atonement than male children).
“Judge not” they say, but they dispatch all those to Hell who stand in their way. Christianity has even closed the circle by declaring that even doubt is a sin. Even the shadow of a doubt or a subconscious questioning, any reflection on Christianity nature, foundation, and its origins are considered sinful and thereby needs to be halted immediately and asked for forgiveness through the priest.
What is wanted is a blindness and a devotion in which all reason has been drowned. Christianity as preached in the Bible by Jesus himself is dangerous to life, for when the center of gravity of life has been placed not IN life itself, but in a place BEYOND it, then life if utterly robbed of its balance and it destroys all reason and natural happiness.
Christianity has the hatred of the free intellect, pride, courage, happiness, and the joys of the senses. In spreading their religion they have had to vilify all life affirming attributes, freedom, strength, power, beauty, self assertion, and make them appear “unchristian” and therefore evil.
Christianity is called a religion of pity.
Pity is diametrically opposed to the stimulating passions which enhance the energy and feeling of life, its action is depressing and draining. A man loses power when he pities. Through pity, suffering itself becomes infectious and can thwart the natural law of development which is the law of selection. It preserves that which is ripe for death, it fights in favor of the disinherited and the condemned of life. Christianity dares to call pity a virtue, and the root of all virtues at that – most strange considering the lack of pity the Christian god has for all those he condemns to hell.
By means of pity, this most depressing and infectious Christian instinct thwarts those natural instincts which aim at the preservation and enhancement of the life value by multiplying and preserving all that is miserable. It is the principle agent in promoting its decadence. In Christianity all the depraved instincts of the subjugated and oppressed come to the forefront and seek their salvation in this religion.
The Christian concept of god has degenerated him into the very contradiction of life. He has declared war on nature, happiness and the will to life. In him non-entity is deified, and the will to non-entity is declared holy. They made illness, decrepitude and contradiction a part of man’s instinct, and encourage their followers to wage war upon these who do not share in their views.
They have monstrously castrated their God by making him a god ONLY of goodness which is contrary of the true desires of any community, for a people owe their existence to more than tolerance and humaneness. This God strictly of the good, weak, and the diseased is an unbalanced one of decadence shorn of his masculine values and passions. Formerly, a tribes’ chief God would represent the strength of a people, everything bold, noble, strong and desirous of power lying at the heart of a nation.
With the advent of Christianity he is merely the good God, of the physiologically weak and degraded – only now they dont call themselves the “weak”, they call themselves the “good”. It is with this same instinct by which those who willingly subjugate themselves reduce their Christ into “goodness in itself”.
On the contrary, when the pre-requisites of ascending life, everything strong, bold, masterful, proud and powerful has been eliminated from the concept of God then he is simply reduced and has sunk down to being the symbol of the “staff for the weary” and is the god of the sick man, the coward the weak, the sinner, the old and the poor…. the implications that such a metamorphosis and utter abasement of a God is that his empire in heaven is now an infirmary, a ghetto empire.
In regards to the human emotions of Love and hate, no where else is hypocrisy more evident than in the Christian teachings, and in no other teaching are these two basic emotions more perverted and twisted. Christianity puts on a great facade of being a religion of love, peace, and tolerance, but again we find its history and its teachings as stated in its very own bible to be something else entirely.
In no other religion’s history will you find the demented obsession to persecute, torture. and destroy those who would not knuckle under to their pressures than in the history of the Christian religion in its ruthless wars to convert, subjugate and stamp out any and all remnants and vestiges of all other religions. Love and hate are both healthy normal emotions, to be able to love you must be able to hate.
Every normal person in order to function properly and realistically must have the capability to feel and exercise both emotions. We believe that to suppress the emotion of hate towards your enemies and those that mean you harm is as abnormal as being unable able to love your spouse, children, and all others near and dear to you. Every healthy person loves and hates and anyone devoid of either emotion is mentally ill. This suppression of our essential human needs, desires and our basic instincts has had profoundly negative effects still resounding today…
CHRISTIANITY PART 3 When introducing the Christian religion to the heathen Germans, the missionaries made it well known that Christianity was the new teachings of their savior, their bible was the “Immutable word of God”, and their church, although still relatively young had a proud and noble history. Let us delve further into these assertions.
THE MYSTERIOUS ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY:
The early origins of Christianity are extremely obscure, and they are intentionally so because the early church fathers deliberately destroyed as much of their historical evidence as possible. Around the year 100 AD they set fire to the Great library in Alexandria, Egypt destroying over 400,000 volumes of books, the greatest of all libraries in the ancient world. They did this to obscure and conceal the fraudulent foundations upon which their “new” religion was being built.
Contrary to popular thinking, Jesus Christ did not invent or found Christianity, and it is quite doubtful that there was any such historical personage roaming about the desert in the 30AD (or there thereabouts) teaching a new religion.
His whole story in the bible was invented and concocted much later, and the evidence is overwhelming that “his” ideas and tenets which formed Christianity had already been circulated long proceeding the Christian era. The truth of history shows that ALL of the essential ideas of Christianity originated within a relatively unimportant religious sect called the ESSENES, who were an obscure renegade Jewish order who lived on the border of the Dead Sea.
It was THEY who had already evolved the ideals contained within the “Sermon on the Mount” that have been wrongly attributed to Jesus. The Essenians lived from approximately the 1st century BC to the fist century AD. we have many important sources of their contemporary writings in the historian Josephus and the philosopher Philo amongst many others. They are further mentioned by various Greek and Roman writers of those times in which their religious teachings are revealed in considerable detail.
At the time, Essenianism was really a revolutionary new form of religious theory and social order, an ideal cooperative commonwealth in miniature. Instead of a “messiah” the ideal of the Essences was the “teacher of righteousness”. They established a new cooperative communitarian brotherhood and was the first religious society to establish and observe the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharistic meal. They were also the first group to abolish the age old institution of human slavery.
The Essenians were pacifists, they strongly forbade the manufacture of weapons within their community, nor did they allow any makers of weapons or of any implements which might be easily converted in to mischief, nor any warriors to live among their community. They were noted for their communistic society, their extreme piety and purity, and their practice of celibacy.
They possessed all of their worldly goods in common and looked upon private property as an evil which would divert them from sanctity. They practiced the right of baptism , preceding the Christian era by over one hundred years, thus the Christian apostles can hardly be credited with having originated the practice as is claimed.
The Essenians also wrote many of the dead Sea scroll that are revealing a tremendous amount of insight into their religious teachings that above all proved that they proceeded and preempted the Sermon on the Mount almost word for word by anywhere from 50 to 150 years before any personage could claim to be the “son of god” and bring his “new” and “original” religious teachings to the world.
As the Essenians were the precursors and original practitioners of Christianity long before Christ was even supposedly born, they were dramatically persecuted by the early church fathers who did not want them around to undermine their dogma that it was Christ the son of god who was sent to earth to give us these “new” teachings for our salvation.
For their very existence made it impossible to claim that these great revelations were set forth from God himself. Not coincidentally, it was their own self defeatist and suicidal teachings of “love thine enemy”, “turn the other cheek”, and “resist not evil” that dissuaded the Essenians from even attempting to prevent their own persecution and extermination by the church fathers.
SAUL of TARSUS:
While there is absolutely not one single shred of substantiated evidence that Jesus or his four chronologicers Matt, Mark, Luke or John had ever existed, there is substantial evidence that St. Paul was genuinely a real person historically, and that he wrote a great number of letters and promoted the teachings of the Essenes with great vigor under the guise of the new religion of Christianity.
Originally known as SAUL of TARSUS, Paul is truly the inventor of Christianity and the first real person to call himself a Christian. He is known to have personally written over half of the New Testament, the basis of the Christian creed and invented for himself a god who “confounds the wisdom of this world” ( the two great opponents of all superstition: Science and Philology) and in doing so wanted to perpetuate his lies at any and all costs. The fact that Saul of Tarsus is the ONLY verifiable Biblical character in the New Testament is overwhelming.
Historically he was considered an outcast and a renegade by his own people for promoting the teachings of the Essenians to his Jewish brethren. When they rejected his religious ideals and drove him out of their community, Paul took these teachings to the Gentiles in an effort to convince them that he was preaching the message of a universal God throught a “new covenant” between Yahwea and all mankind. Paul’s goal was was essence to turn the Gentiles into “New Jews”.
Thus, it is not surprising that it is only in his texts alone that one will find that the new covenant of salvation with the Jewish God extended to the Gentiles who followed him. However, examination of the bible does not confirm this but rather contradicts it fully. This inclusion to Jewish exclusiveness is why the Catholic Pope and the cardinals all wear the Jewish skull caps, and the Jewish religious custom of circumcision became practiced by Non-Jews.
Even though he did not himself believe, this altered Essenian doctrine of his was held to be true by the various peoples to whom he spread these teachings. He wanted power, and as Paul – one of the 12 disciples of Christ – he became the first Christian priest and made good use of these “newly Christianized” concepts, doctrines and symbols through which the masses could be controlled and tyrannized over. Thus, through his doctrines of Hell, Heaven, Sin, Salvation and the last judgment his beguiled herds were formed and accordingly he attained his route to power.
BIBLE as TRUTH:
Can anyone read the bible and truly think it has any literal truth? The Christian priest and the evangelist want us to do just that. According to the “Old Testament” the Universe was created only as recently as 6 thousand years ago. It is obvious for all to see, but the most self deluded, from the mountains of evidence that our universe and earth has existed for many billions of years and that we are only a tiny speck in the total Universe.
Yet despite all of the accumulated knowledge of History, Geology, Anthropology, Astronomy, Paleontology… that overwhelming indicates that the world is well over 5 billion years old and that there has been life on Earth for more than 2 billion years, there are still many people who believe in the absolute authority of the bible as the immutable word of God and accurate in all of its aspects. Many will accept the stories in the bible without really questioning many important and glaring flights from reality: For example: Noah and the great flood, which was supposedly caused by God to drown ALL of humanity, with the exception of one family, because they were sinful.
Already from this we can see that the Loving and Kind Christian God is the biggest mass murderer of all time who kills without mercy, sending them all to Hell without even giving any of these people the chance at salvation (as that happened only through the coming of Christ).
But as described in Genesis 7:11, Noah was at that time 600 years old, and is written to have lived another 300 years afterwards. It would be impossible for anyone to gather all the required two of each “clean” animals (this in reality would actually represent hundreds of millions of specimens), as well as their food and all other provisions for one whole year AND build a boat large enough to contain all of these animals in just 40 days.
Biblical scholars have estimated the time of the biblical account of the Flood which supposedly covered the entire earth submerging the tops of its highest mountains, to be approximately 2500BC, yet even the most rudimentary inspection of the history of any of the great contemporary cultures of the time, like those of the Egyptians or the Chinese, will reveal that we know that there was no disruption whatsoever by any such local or world wide flood.
Further complicating the issue for modern Christianity is that the oldest surviving Christian bible dates approximately from the year 1100CE, when compared with the bible that is circulating today scholars have noted almost 15,000 major changes. If this oldest known bible were to be compared to the first written bible it is estimated that there would be an even greater amount of changes and discrepancies to the stories surrounding the supposed Son of God.
THE IMMUTABLE WORDS of GOD??? – The HISTORY of the BIBLE:
Setting this Christian creed down in writing, in what is now known as the New Testament evolved over several centuries. The Bible was not written by any historical Matt, Mark, Luke or Johns, in fact the oldest documents regarding the authenticity of their scriptures date no further back than around 325AD and are written in Greek (not Hebrew or Amaric the main languages of the Biblical times and region ).
Having over three hundred years between the “events” of the bible and its report is a pretty hefty gap. It was patched together out of various fables, myths and bits and pieces of other religions until finally they had enough momentum to attract the interest of the Roman Emperor Constantine who adopted the religion in the year 312AD. Suddenly the Romans, who had always been extremely tolerant to all religions, were now instructed by an edict of the Emperor that Christianity was now the official and supreme religion of the Roman empire to the exclusion of all others.
Although Christianity was at this time purportedly over 300 years old they still did not have any written text or “bible” as we know it today. Under the powerful and dictatorial direction of Constantine, a gathering of Church fathers was convened at the town of Nicaea, (now Iznik) a city in Anatolia which was formerly part of Greece but located in present day Turkey. At this meeting a great number of scripts were considered, discussed, argued over and reviewed. Some were texts revised, some rewritten, and some were discarded entirely.
The final package that emerged from this was called the “New Testament”: a contradictory conglomeration of fictional stories, to this was added a book of the ancient religious and Spiritual history of the Jewish peoples, what we now know as the “Old Testament”, and the Christian movement now had a “bible” of which Constantine was the final arbiter. He then exercised the full powers of his position with financial, military, and legal enforcement to promote Christianity to the fullest extant and brutally crush all opposition.
Christianity is a conglomeration of MANY ancient religious cults and conceptions of very diverse origins( Most notably from the Essenian Yahweh and the Persian God MITHRA .) That in part is why it has always been so successful in going almost anywhere in the world that it pleases and will always find something of subtle similarity to it which it can then adapt itself and eventually impose upon its character a Christian meaning.
Thus Christianity swept the Roman Empire, and thereby destroyed it. Then followed the Dark Ages during which all scientific knowledge and progress was stifled and stagnated, and the church promoted hysteria of “saving souls for Christ” reached its peak. Finally during the Renaissance period our people began to somewhat start to regain their senses and began once more to look towards nature and her laws.
There was a rekindled interest in the Sciences and an unprecedented flowering in the arts. The period of the Renaissance may be regarded as the dawning of a new era in which our people started to rediscover their true identity and their ancestral Gods. From this time on Christianity has been consistently been loosing ground…..
HISTORICAL JESUS:
Unlike the Islamic Prophet Mohammed, There is not one single shred of real evidence that Jesus Christ ever existed. The bible claims that the birth of Jesus Christ was ushered in with great fanfare and great proclamations. An exceedingly bright star, that was purported to be visible from all over the earth, pointed to his place of birth which was heralded and announced by angels.
Further, we are told that this news of the birth of the “king of kings” was so frightening and bothersome to King Herod that he had all male babies under the age of 2 murdered in the hopes that Jesus would also be killed. We are told that later in his life when he actually started preaching the word of god and teaching his new religion that he gathered vast multitudes around him and caused great consternation and fear amongst the religious and political leaders, as well as the legal authorities and the high king of Judea himself.
Yet strangely there is still not even one other mention of any of this other than the Biblical rendition of this story. Christ himself, who supposedly had the greatest message the world has ever known, failed to leave us the slightest scrap of paper on which he had written a single word.
There is no true claim that Christians actually “know” what date their savior was even born, let alone what year. December 25th was a date that was partially picked at random. Adulators wanted to celebrate his birth so they had to pick some date, any date… so why did they choose December 25th? There is a good reason for that: ALL of the various European heathen peoples already had an ancient tradition of celebrating their Gods during the Winter Season at around that time of year and it was a very well established traditional holiday.
The Romans for example had the long standing religious tradition of celebrating December 25th as the Birth of their Sun God. And the ancient Germanic tribes celebrated the 12 days of Yule Starting on the night of December 20th to the 1st of January which celebrated the return of the Suns’ powers and the turning of Heavens wheel, This of course eventually became the 12 days of Christmas.
The early Christian Church wanted to do away entirely with these heathen festivals, but the newly converted Emperor Constantine refused their request knowing that they were too popular, and was fearful that the people would revolt any such repression. However in 345AD under Liberius, the bishop of Rome, the date of December 25th was declared a Christian holiday honoring the birth of Christ.
Although previous to this, the church had taken a stand that it was sinful to celebrate Jesus’ birthday since that true date was unknown.
After much wrangling the Christian oligarchy decided it was more expedient to use this date to be Christ’s birthday as propaganda in converting the heathen masses and therefore turn an existing tradition to the glory of their movement, than try to fight it and set up a completely new tradition.
This tactic worked for them with overwhelming success. To this end, they did the same thing with Easter, which was already a very well established and ancient heathen tradition. The name Easter itself derives from the name of the Germanic Goddess of the Spring and fertility EOSTRE, whom for thousands of years had been celebrated by our ancestors around the spring equinox, bringing forth the return of fertility of new growth, new crops to the land, and the rites of spring.
The early Christian church, which in the first few centuries grew into the Roman Catholic Church guaranties its own authenticity and its own charter by claiming that its principle authority is contained within the gospels based on Matthew 16:18 in which Jesus purportedly gives the church its official charter: “And I say unto thee thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it”.
The Roman Catholic Church claims that it is THE church referred to and therefore has as its credentials from Jesus Christ himself. So in an interesting twist of circular logic; who guaranties the authenticity of the Gospels – the Roman Catholic Church does…who guaranties the authority and the authenticity of the Roman Catholic Church? – Not surprisingly, the Gospels do!
The bible is a book that was calculated to seduce by means of fear and morality as appointed by these power mad people.
They realized long ago that the best way to control the masses was to instill within them a great fear (of Hell) and tell them that the only way to avoid this fate worse than death is too submit to their priests and to take up their brand of morality. In this they set themselves up as the “good and the just” and hence placed themselves once and for all on the side of “the ONLY truth” and the rest of mankind on the other. This is how they began to lay sole claim to the concepts of “God”, “Truth”, “Love”, “Good” “Spirit”, “Wisdom” and “Life” as if these thing were synonymous of themselves, and in order to fence themselves off from the rest of the world.
http://www.burzum.org/eng/library/irminsul.shtml
http://www.odinsvolk.ca/WhyAsatru2.htm
http://www.hinduhumanrights.info/europes-true-identity-christian-or-really-pagan/
http://www.hammerofthorkindred.org/herman/herman.html
http://eternalsuns888earthslight.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-natural-man-is-warrior.html
http://spiritualwarfare666.webs.com/Third_Reich.htm
http://exposingthelieofislam.wordpress.com
http://see_the_truth.webs.com/
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/
National Socialism is a white-nordic, socialistic and germanophile movement! It is the worship of Nordic Aryan Man supplanting “god”. Bormann, Speer and Breker knew the truth. Nazism is a biological socialist and revolutionary movement with a liability to Germanism and cultural Hellenism. Only an adamantine combination of anti-bourgeois, racial Nationalism, Pan-Germanism, Germanization of all Aryans and leftist economic Socialism as well as anti-christian and biological Nietzscheism, Wagnerian
thought, superior aryan technology, Darwinian racial laws and the eugenic teachings of Madison Grant, de Gobineau and H. S.
Chamberlain is Nazism — revolutionary and racial-evolutionary National SOCIALISM! Nazism is its own world-view and its own “religion” based on blood, man and matter, and is SUPERIOR to all others!
It is the will to create mankind anew and is really based on the Superman of Nietzsche.
“The essence of Nietzsche calls the master Morality is having a life style & culture based on evolutionary practice’s that creates the Ubermensch,literal transmutation of genetic code.””The essence of Nietzsche calls the master Morality is having a life style & culture based on evolutionary practice’s that creates the Ubermensch,literal transmutation of genetic code.” -Metagenics
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Not in His Image
Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief
by John Lamb Lash
Excerpt from The Murder of Hypatia
On a spring day in the year 415 C.E., a Pagan noblewoman emerged from the lecture hall attached to the great library of Alexandria and called for her chariot, intending to drive herself home. Although there were many educated Pagan women of high social standing and good education in Alexandria in that era, Hypatia, as she was called, was one of the few who owned and drove her own chariot. A familiar sight to the local populace, she often halted her horses and descended into the street to chat amiably with local people, or to debate issues of philosophy with whomever might wish to engage her. Her openness, combined with her kind and elegant manner, won her the admiration and affection of the townsfolk. Hypatia was also active in an official capacity in civic affairs normally dominated by men. “Such were her self-possession and ease of manner, arising from the refinement and cultivation of her mind, that she not infrequently appeared in public in presence of the magistrates, without ever losing in an assembly of men that dignified modesty of comportment for which she was conspicuous, and which gained for her universal respect and admiration.”1
Hypatia’s beauty was legendary, and equaled only, it was said, by her intelligence. Tall and confident, commanding her chariot with ease, clothed in a long robe and the signature scarf of the teaching class, she must have cut a striking figure in the thriving streets of that most cosmopolitan of cities. No realistic image of her survives.
On that March day in 415, as Hypatia entered a public square near the Caesarean Church where Christian converts were known to gather, she found her path blocked by a menacing crowd. At the head of the group stood a rough-looking man called Peter the Reader who roused those gathered to approach Hypatia and impede her way. “Now this Peter was a perfect believer in all respects of Jesus Christ,”2 a zealous convert who admired Cyril, the Christian bishop of Alexandria. Recently, when a local prefect prosecuted one of Cyril’s protégés for openly attacking Pagan doctrines, Hypatia had sided with the prefect and the man was severely admonished. Cyril had an axe to grind with Hypatia, although he could not afford to look bad in the public eye by acting openly against her. Long after the fateful day, many of the townsfolk wondered if Peter the Reader had not been sent to avenge his master, or perhaps had acted independently, hoping to win the patriarch’s approval. Public opinion held that Cyril, who was on record for calling Hypatia a sorceress, was complicit in the attack.
Peter exhorted the crowd to throw tiles at Hypatia, and pull her from the chariot. Her long robes and scarf proved an advantage to the mob, consisting mostly of rough-handed workmen. They quickly overpowered her by yanking hard on her loose clothing from all sides. Pulled to the ground, she struggled in vain to break free and run. The mass of grappling hands now began to strip off her robes. Members of the local populace stood by helplessly, paralyzed by the horror unfolding before their eyes.
The violence of the mob escalated rapidly, its intensity fed by the raucous shouts of Peter the Reader. He called Hypatia a vile heretic and a witch who beguiled people through her beauty and her teachings, which were nothing but the wiles of Satan. Hypatia protested and cried for help, but a stiff blow broke her jaw. In a matter of minutes, she was on her knees in a pool of her own blood. Crushed under a flurry of blows and kicks, she was rapidly beaten to death. Not content merely to take her life, the mob pounded her naked body to a pulp and tore her limbs off her torso. The number of the attackers, and the ferocity of their assault, made it impossible for anyone witnessing the murder to intervene.
When Hypatia was dead, the attitude of the mob shifted abruptly from outrage to triumph. These men, who were self-declared Christians, immediately began to exalt in what they had done. The frenzy of victory was so acute, it could not be satisfied by the beating and dismemberment of the defenseless woman. As if emanating from their pores, some force of inhuman inspiration electrified the haze of violence that fumed around the murderers. Wild-eyed with excitement, several members of the mob ran to the nearby harbor and scooped up the razor-sharp oyster shells to be found there in abundance. They returned and passed out shells, and Peter encouraged his henchmen to scrap every last morsel of flesh from Hypatia’s bones. When the men were done, they took the scraped bones to a place called Cindron and burned them to ashes.
Wisdom Incarnate
Hypatia (pronounced high-PAY-sha) was the daughter of the mathematician Theon of Alexandria, the last known teacher in the age-old tradition of the Mystery Schools, the spiritual universities of antiquity.* ( *For a definition of Mystery Schools and other special terms, see the glossary.) The year and month of her death are known, the year of her birth is less certain, but 370 C.E. is generally accepted. Thus she would have been around forty-five when she was murdered. Historians have long regarded her death as the event that defined the end of classical civilization in Mediterranean Europe. It signaled the end of Paganism and the dawn of the Dark Ages. (Paganism, the generic term for pantheistic religion in the Western classical world, merits capitalization as much as Christianity.)
Theon was headmaster at the Museum of Alexandria, the place dedicated to the Muses, daughters of the ancient goddess of memory, Mnemosyne. Each of the Muses embodied a “sacred art” such as astronomy, lyric poetry, and history. The nine daughters of Memory presented a model for the curriculum of the Mystery Schools. Museums today are merely repositories of relics from the past, but the Alexandrian Museum was the setting for a wide range of living traditions, truly a center of higher education. The campus spread along the horseshoe-shaped port dominated by its Pharos, the famous four-hundred-foot-high lighthouse that ranked among the Seven Wonders of the World. It included many independent academies dedicated to subjects as diverse as geometry and sacred dance, and training guilds that produced a constant stream of graduates in fields such as sculpture, botany, navigation, herbology, engineering, and medicine. The assemblies and guilds associated with the Royal Library had their own libraries and teaching faculties.
In the year 400, when she was about thirty, Hypatia assumed the chair of mathematics at the university school. This was a salaried position, equivalent to professorship in a modern university. The daughter of Theon was noted for her mastery of Platonic philosophy and her skill in theurgy, literally “god-working,” a form of magical invocation that might be compared to Jungian active imagination, or, more aptly, advanced practices of visualization in Tantra and Dzogchen. Her dialectical powers were exceptional, honed to a fine edge by her mathematical training. When it came to debating ideas about the divine, “Hypatia eclipsed in argument every proponent of the Christian doctrines in Northern Egypt.”3 Her expertise in theology typified the Pagan intellectual class of Gnostics, gnostokoi, “those who understand divine matters, knowing as the gods know,” but she was also deeply versed in geometry, physics, and astronomy.* (*There is no scholarly consensus on the definition of Gnosis or Gnostic. The above is one of several options I propose. See the glossary for definitions of all special terms.) Ancient learning was multidisciplinary and eclectic, contrasting strongly to the narrow specialization of higher education and the sciences in our time. The word philosophy means “love (philo) of wisdom (sophia).” To Gnostics, Sophia was a revered divinity, the goddess whose story they recounted in their sacred cosmology.† (†I propose the pronunciation so-FI-ah for the mythological name of the goddess, as distinct from the common name pronounced so-FEE-ah. The adjective is sophianic. ) To the people of her time and setting, Hypatia would have been wisdom incarnate.
In addition to their religious function, the Mysteries provided the framework for education along interdisciplinary lines. The gnostokoi were polymaths, savants, and prolific writers. From around 600 B.C.E. to Hypatia’s time—a period of a thousand years—they produced the countless thousands of scrolls stored in the Royal Library of Alexandria and other libraries attached to Mystery centers around the Mediterranean basin. Hypatia is known to have written a treatise on arithmetic and commentaries on the Astronomical Canon of Ptolemy and the conic sections of Apollonius of Perga. None of her writings survive, but eight ancient sources describe her murder and her accomplishments; the latter, not always in an approving manner. Cyril, whom popular opinion implicated in her murder, became an important theologian known for formulating the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. He was later canonized by the Church, along with other early Christian ideologues, the so-called Church Fathers, men whose theological polemics and histories of the One True Faith celebrate its triumph over “heretics” such as she.
Hypatia’s accomplishments were not confined to theology and didactics. She was also involved in applied science related to geography and astronomy. Working with a Greek scientist Synesius, who was proud to be called her student, she invented a prototype of the astrolabe, a device later to prove essential in the navigation of the world oceans for the twinned purposes of conquest and conversion.
Pagan Learning
Hypatia’s birthplace was founded by Alexander the Great on January 20, 331 B.C.E.
For the next 1000 years, until the coming of Islam, it would look to the Mediterranean and the wider world. Alexandria’s full title was “Alexandria by Egypt”— not “in Egypt.” It was founded as an entrepôt through which the wealth of Egypt would flow; and within two centuries it would become the “the crossroads of the entire world”: the El Dorado of the Hellenistic Age. . . . In the first century A.D. Alexandrian merchants sailed to South India on the monsoon winds, linking up with the trade to the Ganges, Vietnam, and China; part of the explosion of ideas and contact initiated by the Age of Alexander.4
In Hypatia’s lifetime, her native city was still the greatest cosmopolitan center of antiquity, the undisputable capital of the Western world, commercially, spiritually, and intellectually speaking, but it belonged to an empire teetering on the brink of collapse. She was born around ten years after the initial wave of barbarians, the Huns, poured into Europe, and six years after the Roman Empire was divided geographically between east and west. In her lifetime the Roman legions evacuated Britain, conquered by Julius Caesar four and a half centuries earlier, and the borders of the Empire shook continually from barbarian assaults. In 410, when Hypatia would have been forty, Alaric, chieftain of the Visigoths, captured and sacked Rome, inflicting a mortal blow on the Empire. At that very moment Augustine of Hippo was writing The City of God, a book destined to become a cornerstone of Catholic doctrine. As the Roman Empire shattered and burned, another imperial entity, the institution of the Catholic Church, was rising in its place. A fateful handover of power was in progress.
The Hellenistic era lasted from the death of Alexander in 323 B.C.E. to 30 B.C.E., when Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies, killed herself with the bite of an asp. After Alexander’s death, his empire was divided among three of his generals. The southernmost part, comprising Egypt and Judea (including Jerusalem), became the Ptolemaic kingdom. Culture and custom were uniform throughout all three parts of the empire. “Natives of Galilee and Judea wore the same sort of clothes as were worn in Alexandria, Rome or Athens.”5 The entire southern region, including Palestine, was thriving with Mystery Schools, many of them founded and directed by Gnostics such as Hypatia.6 In the twilight of the Egyptian dynasties, cross-cultural exchange reached a fever pitch, but the death of Cleopatra brought a change of political regime that would permanently darken the skies of learning. Julius Caesar’s arrival in Egypt in 47 B.C.E. completed the shift that had begun in 63 B.C.E. when the Roman general Pompey, Caesar’s greatest rival, had declared Judea a Roman province. The transition from Hellenistic haven to Roman domain affected the entire Near East. In Hypatia’s time, the Royal Library had existed for over seven hundred years, but it fared far less well in the four centuries of the Roman era than in the preceding three centuries of high Hellenistic syncretism.
The Royal Library was founded by a general of Alexander the Great, Ptolemy I, as a center of learning for the vast territories united by the Greek language following Alexander’s campaigns. Ptolemy earned the title of soter, “savior,” a title that would later be applied to Jesus Christ, because Ptolemy saved the wisdom of the ancient world. His son, Ptolemy II (d. 246 B.C.E.), commanded that all boats entering the port of Alexandria be searched for scrolls and papyri. Those found were taken to the library and copied, the originals were deposited in the stacks, and the copies returned in their owners. A staff of librarians, scribes, and calligraphers worked continuously to maintain an ever-growing collection that included first editions of Homer and Hesiod, the Greek playwrights, Aristotle, and many others. Ptolemy II proudly claimed a private collection of the 995 best books of all time.
The vast archives of the Royal Library were not limited to Greek-language writings. It stocked works in other languages such as Syriac and Aramaic, and translators labored nonstop to produce Greek editions. One of these works was the Hebrew Torah (the first five books of the Bible). Rendered into Greek, it was called the Septuagint because seventy Jewish scholars worked on the translation. Upon founding the city, Alexander had guaranteed Jews the same rights as other citizens of his empire. In Hypatia’s day, it is likely that five to ten percent of the city’s population were Jews—around 40,000 people.
Ptolemy I had built a massive hall called the Bruchion to house the ever-expanding collections. When it outgrew its capacity, his successor Ptolemy III erected the Serapeum. G. R. S. Mead notes that the Royal Library where Hypatia lectured was the first great public library in Egypt, but not the first in Egypt. Each temple had its own in-house library, and Egypt was a land of many temples. In mainland Greece and in the Grecian colonies around the Mediterranean basin, temple libraries housed large and ancient collections. Since the introduction of secular alphabets to the general public around 600 B.C.E., the adepts of the Mysteries had been pouring out a vast body of writings on every conceivable subject. In 400 C.E. Hypatia had a thousand-year-old tradition of literacy and learning to draw upon when she lectured to her classes.
Modern ignorance of history in general, and of ancient history in particular, makes it difficult to grasp the scope and richness of learning in the Pagan world. Writing in the 1940s, classical scholar Gilbert Highet observed:
It is not always understood nowadays how noble and how widespread Greco-Roman civilization was, how it kept Europe, the Middle East, and northern Africa peaceful, cultured, prosperous, and happy for centuries, and how much was lost when the savages and invaders broke into it. It was, in many respects, a better thing than our civilization until a few generations ago, and it may well prove to have been a better thing all in all.
When the Roman Empire was at its height, law and order, education, and the arts were widely distributed and almost universally respected. In the first centuries of the Christian era there was almost too much literature; and so many inscriptions survive, from so many towns and villages in so many different provinces, that we can be sure that many, if not most, of the population could read and write. . . . Expeditions have found papyrus copies of Homer, Demosthenes, and Plato, fragments of what were once useful libraries, buried under remote Egyptian villages now inherited by illiterate peasants.7
In 1945, the year Highet wrote these words (not to excuse the evils of the Roman Empire, but to indicate the social and cultural achievements it harbored), a cache of texts was discovered at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. In ancient times the place of the discovery was named Sheniset, “the acacias of Seth,” indicating what may have been the sanctuary of a Gnostic sect calling themselves Sethians. The Nag Hammadi library, as it came to be called, consists of thirteen leather-bound codices, the earliest example of bound books.* (*On the Nag Hammadi Codices—not to be confused with the Dead Sea Scrolls, which also figure in the argument of this book—see chapter 7 and “Suggestions for Reading and Research.” The Dead Sea Scrolls are discussed in chapters 4, 5, 6, and elsewhere.) These fifty-two documents of fragmentary and muddled content have revolutionized scholars’ views on the origins of Christianity, but the ultimate significance of this rare material, widely assumed to be original Gnostic writings, has yet to be realized.
“Sethian” was the self-designation of some Gnostic groups who participated intimately in the Mystery Schools distributed across Egypt, the Middle East, around the Mediterranean basin, and into the depths of Europe. In The Gospels and the Gospel (1902), theosophical scholar G. R. S. Mead noted that “Gnostic forms are found to preserve elements from the mystery-traditions of antiquity in greater fullness than we find elsewhere.” 8 Mead was among the first English-speaking scholars to translate and interpret Gnostic texts known before the discovery at Nag Hammadi. His view of the centrality of Gnostic teachings in the Mysteries was shared by other scholars of his time, but this connection is categorically denied today.
Specialists such as Elaine Pagels dismiss any link between Gnostics and the Mysteries, due to a perceived lack of textual evidence.9 Pagels’ book The Gnostic Gospels (1979) introduced the Nag Hammadi materials to mainstream readers, but the scholarly specialization it represents has hampered understanding of who the Gnostics were, and why they protested so vehemently against the rise of Christianity. With their connection to the Mysteries denied, Gnostics are condemned to an obscure and uncertain place on the margins of the history of religion. Hence, the true message of the Gnostics, and the full impact of their near-complete destruction, has yet to register on the general public.
If Highet’s assessment of the ancient world is correct, we must wonder: Who devised and directed the institutions of education in antiquity? Who taught the people? Who wrote the books? Who trained the artists, architects, and engineers in the skills required to produce the long-lasting wonders of the classical Western world? In his seminal work on Gnosticism, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, Mead stated that “a persistent tradition in connection with all the great Mystery-institutions was that their several founders were the introducers of all the arts of civilization; they were either themselves gods or instructed in them by the gods. . . . They were the teachers of the infant races.” The initiates, as they were called, “taught the arts, the nature of the gods, the unseen worlds, cosmology, anthropology, etc.”10 Mead’s view is echoed by S. Angus, author of the most cited book on ancient Pagan cults, The Mystery-Religions: “The Mysteries were the last redoubts of Paganism to fall. Prior to that their adherents were the educators of the ancient world.”11
Locating Gnostics like Hypatia in the Mysteries puts ancient learning in a sacred context and points to the Pagan initiates as the educators of the ancient world, but modern scholarship leaves the Gnostics in a void, and totally ignores their centuries-long involvement in classical education.
The Inquisition
“The Christian resolve to find the world evil and ugly, has made the world evil and ugly.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Today, the xtian church does not have the power it once had, yet, we have witnessed the xtian abuses of children, child rape, molestation and other vile acts that reveal the true nature of many xtians and the effects their “god” has upon his followers. The pedophilia scandals are just a small sample of what xtians are capable of.
Years ago, when the xtian church had complete control over government, human life and spirit, we can see from the inquisition, just how sick these people are and just what lengths they will go to get you to accept “jesus.” Just as is seen in the numerous xtian abuses of children today, years ago, with the inquisition, girls as young as nine and boys as young as ten were tried for witchcraft. Children much younger were tortured to extract testimony against their parents.¹ Children were then flogged while they watched their parents burn.
A documented case in the Silesian town of Neisse reveals a huge oven was constructed, which over a ten year period, more than a thousand “condemned witches, some as young as two years old” were roasted alive.² Many victims were also extremely old, some in their 80’s. This made no difference to the church.
The xtian church murdered, tortured, mutilated and destroyed millions and millions of lives both directly through the Inquisition and indirectly through all of the wars they incited. The damage and destruction this foul religion has perpetrated against humanity is almost beyond comprehension. Most people aren’t even aware of the facts. Between the years of 1450-1600, the xtian church was responsible for the torture, and burning of some 30,000 alleged “witches.”³
During the reign of the Roman Emporer Constantine CE 306-337 the doctrines of the xtian church were regarded as the foundation of law.4 Heretics (persons who opposed church teachings) were sought out, tortured and eventually murdered. Heresy was an offense against the state as well as the church. For hundreds of years, civil rulers tried to stamp out all heresy.
As early as CE 430, the church leaders declared heresy punishable by death. In CE 906, “The Canon Episcopi” was the first church body to expressly forbid the use of witchcraft.5 Before the Inquisition was fully underway, the church accepted heretics back into the fold, under terms it considered reasonable. The following is an example:
For three Sundays, the heretic was stripped to the waist and whipped from the entrance of the town/village all the way to the church door. He/she was to permanently deny him/herself meat, eggs and cheese except on Easter, pentecost and xmas, when he/she is to eat of them as a sign of his/her penance. For twenty days, twice a year he/she was to avoid fish and for 3 days in each week fish, wine and oil, fasting, if his/her health would permit.
He/she was to wear monastic vestments with a small cross sewn on each breast. He/she was to hear mass daily. Seven times a day, he/she was to recite the canonical hours and in addition, at Paternoster ten times each day and twenty times each night.
He/she was to observe total abstinence from sex. Every month he/she was to report to a priest who was to keep the heretic under close observation. He/she was to be segregated from the rest of the community.6
There is no precise date for the beginning of the Inquisition, most sources agree it manifested during the first 6 years of the reign of the catholic pope, Gregory IX, between 1227 and 1233. Pope Gregory IX who ruled from 1227-1241 is often referred to as the “Father of the Inquisition.”
The Inquisition was a campaign of torture, mutilation, mass murder and destruction of human life perpetrated by xtians. The church increased in power until it had total control over human life, both secular and religious.
The Vatican wasn’t satisfied with the progress made by regional leaders in rooting out heresy. Pope Innocent III commissioned his own inquisitors who answered directly to him. Their authority was made official in the papal bull of March 25th, 1199.7Innocent declared “anyone who attempted to construe a personal view of god which conflicted with the church dogma must be burned without pity.”8
In 1254, to ease the job of the inquisitors, Pope Innocent IV decreed that accusers could remain anonymous, preventing the victims from confronting them and defending themselves. Many churches had a chest where informants could slip written accusations against their neighbors. Three years later, he authorized and officially condoned torture as a method of extracting confessions of heresy. 9
Victims were tortured in one room,
then, if they confessed, they were led away from the chamber into another room to confess to the inquisitors.
This way it could be claimed the confessions were given without the use of force. The Inquisitional law replaced common law. Instead of innocent until proven guilty, it was guilty until proven innocent.
Inquisitors grew very rich, accepting bribes and fines from the wealthy who paid to avoid being prosecuted. The wealthy were prime targets for the church who confiscated their property, land and everything they had for generations. The Inquisition took over all of the victims’ possessions upon accusation. There was very little if any chance of proving one’s self innocent, so this is one way the catholic church grew very wealthy. Pope Innocent stated that since “god” punished children for the sins of their parents, they had no right to be legal heirs to the property of their parents. Unless children came forth freely to denounce their parents, they were left penniless. Inquisitors even accused the dead of heresy, in some cases, as much as seventy years after their death. They exhumed and burned the accused’s bones and confiscated all property from their heirs, leaving them with nothing. 10
The actions of the inquisitors had devestating effects on the economy that left entire communities totally impoverished while the church glutted with wealth. They also crippled the economy by holding certain professions suspect. Inquisitors believed the printed word to be a threat to the church and interfered with the communication brought about by the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. Maps, cartographers, traveling merchants and traders were all placed under intense suspicion; a threat to the church.
Although the church had begun murdering people it deemed heretics in the 4th century and again in 1022 at Orléan, papal statutes of 1231 insisted heretics suffer death by fire. Burning people to death prevented spilling of blood. John 15:6 “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.”
The nazarene quote incited all of this.
The pedophilia witnessed today is just a small example of the insanity and the twisted, warped minds of most xians and where any power that they obtain leads to.
The Witch hunts, 1450-1750 were what R H Robbins (The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology) called “the shocking nightmare, the foulest crime and deepest shame of western civilization.” In this 300 year period, the church stepped up the mass murder and systematic torture of innocent human beings. Torturers were allowed as much time as they needed to torture their victims. Most courts demanded that prior to the torture, the victim be thoroughly shaved, claiming that any Demon left undetected in the victim’s body hair might intervene to deaden the pain that the torturers inflicted or answer for the victim.11
Doctors would be in attendance if it seemed the victim might die from the torture. The victim would then be allowed to recover a little before more torture was applied. If the victim died during the torture, inquisitors claimed the Devil intervened with the purpose of sparing the victim further pain or preventing them from revealing his secrets.12 Those who fainted had vinegar poured into their nostrils to revive them. The victim’s families were required under law to reimburse the courts for the costs of torture. Entire estates were seized by the church. Priests blessed the torture instruments prior to their being used. Certain devices were employed to inflict the maximum pain; indisputable evidence of the sick xtian mind:
Judas Cradle
The victim was pulled up by a rope or chain and then lowered to the point. The torturer controlled the pressure by attaching weights to the victim or rocking or raising and dropping the victim from various heights.
Brodequin (The Boots)
The brodequin was used to crush the legs by tightening the device by hand, or using a mallet for knocking in the wedges to smash the bones until the bone marrow spurted out. People who passed out were further condemned as the losing of consciousness to be a trick from the Devil in order to escape pain.
Burning the feet. Oil, lard and grease were applied to the feet before roasting them over a fire. A screen was used to control or increase the pain as exposure to the fire was applied on and off for maximum suffering. Also, as a variation, some victims were forced to wear large leather or metal boots into which boiling water or molten lead was poured.
Hanging and the Strappado
The victim’s hands were bound behind the back. They were then yanked up to the ceiling of the torture chamber by a pulley and a rope. Dislocation ensued. Xtians preferred this method, as it left no visible marks of torture. Heavy weights were often strapped to the victim to increase the pain and suffering.
Squassation was a more extreme form of the torture. This method entailed strapping weights as much as hundreds of pounds, pulling limbs from their sockets. Following this, the xtian inquisitor would quickly release the rope so they would fall towards the floor. At the last second, the xtian inquisitioner would again yank the rope. This dislocated virtually every bone in the victim’s body. Four applications were considered enough to kill even the strongest of victims.
Many were hung upsidedown as well until strangulation ensued.
Heretic’s Fork
This device was often used to silence the victim on the way to the burning stake, so they could not reveal what had occurred in the torture chamber or defend themselves in any way.
Ripping the flesh
Xtian clergy delighted in the tearing and ripping of the flesh. The Catholic church learned a human being could live until the skin was peeled down to the waist when skinned alive. Often, the rippers were heated to red hot and used on women’s breasts and in the genitalia of both sexes.
Breast Rippers
The Iron Torture Chair was studded with spikes. The victim was strapped in nude and a fire was lit beneath the chair. Heavy objects were also be used. They were placed upon the victim to increase the pain of the spikes. Blows with mallets were also inflicted. Often, other torturous devices were applied with the chair such as the flesh ripping pincers, shown above and leg crushing vices.
Skull Crusher
This one speaks for itself. Xtian clergy preferred this device because it did not leave visible marks, unless the skull was completely crushed, which happened.
The Rack
The Rack, aka the Ladder was another device that was used extensively. The procedure was to place the nude or near nude victim horizontally on the ladder or rack. Ropes were used to bind the arms and legs like a tourniquet. The knot could be steadily twisted to draw tight the ropes and stretch the victim to where the muscles and ligaments tore and bones broke. Often, heavy objects were placed upon the victim to increase the pain. This was considered by the church to be “one of the milder forms of torture.”
The Wheel
The nude victim, was stretched out, lying face downward on the ground or on the execution dock, with his or her arms and legs spread, and tied to stakes or iron rings. Wooden crosspieces were placed under the wrists, elbows, ankles, knees and hips. The inquisitor then smashed limb after limb and joint after joint, including the shoulders and hips, with the iron-tyred edge of the wheel, taking care not to bring about the death of the victim. There were splinters of smashed bones, blood spurted everywhere and the victim’s entire skeleton was crushed and smashed. Thereafter the shattered limbs were “braided” into the spokes of the large wheel. The wheel has to be one of the most gruesome of all torture devices. The idea is, that the victims’ limbs are shattered and entwined around the spokes of the wheel, attaching them to it.
The Thumbscrew
The thumbscrew was a device where the victim’s thumbs were placed and systematically crushed. Similar devices were used on the toes. Thumbscrews were often applied at the same time as the strappado and other torture devices to inflict more pain.
The Water Torture
The victim was stripped and bound to a bench or table and a funnel was inserted and pressed down into his throat. Water was poured into the funnel in jug fulls with his/her nose being pinched, forcing him/her to swallow. After this was repeated enough times to where the victim’s stomach was almost to burst, the bench or table was then tilted, with the victim’s head pointing to the floor. The water in the stomach put painful pressure on the victim’s lungs and heart. There was not only the incredible pain with this, but also, the feeling of suffocation. Inquisitors would also beat upon the stomach with mallets to the point of internal rupture.
In another variation, the victim was forced to swallow large quantities of water together with lengths of knotted cord. The cords were then violently yanked from the victim’s mouth resulting in disemboweling.
The Iron Maiden aka the “virgin mary”
Covering the front side of this device was a statue of the virgin bitch, inside were spikes, sharp knives or nails. Levers would move the arms of the statue, crushing the victim against the knives and nails.
Other devices and methods:
Forced feeding of overly salted foods that resulted in extreme thirst, then, the denial of water.
Immersion in scalding water laced with Lime.
Yanking back and forth by 2 or more inquisitors with ropes attached to a spiked iron collar. This tore the flesh on the victim’s neck. Variations used screws that could be tightened.
The prayer stool. A spike board on which the victim was forced to kneel.
Stocks which were fitted with iron spikes
Slowly roasting victims over fire.
“Walking a Witch” entailed forcing a victim to walk back and forth for days on end until completely exhausted. A variation of this was having the victim sit cross legged upon a wooden stool, being deprived of movement or sleep. Some victims were as much as 80 years old.
“Thrawing.” Similar to the spiked iron collar, only a rope was tied tightly around the head and the victim was yanked back and forth.
“Turkas.” These were a variation of pincers used to pull out fingernails.
Many were thrown in filthy dungeons with no light or human contact, in addition, often being chained or confined in the stocks.
“Scoring above the Breath” the ancient belief that bleeding a witch above the mouth and nose would break a spell incited inquisitors to tear flesh, stick with needles and other instruments upon the victim’s face.
Galileo Galilei,the famous Italian astronomer and physicist was one of the most noted victims of the inquisition. A letter in which he attempted to demonstrate the Copernican theory, that the Earth is not the center of the universe, was forwarded by some of his enemies (xtians) to the inquisitors in Rome. He was tried in 1633 and found guilty of heresy. He was forced to recant (publicly withdraw his statement) and was sentenced to life imprisonment under house arrest.
In 1979, Pope John Paul II declared that the Roman Catholic Church “may have been mistaken in condemning him,” and he established a commission to study the case.13
In 1993, the Catholic Church “officially” pardoned Galileo. In other words, they forgave him for teaching that the planets revolve around the Sun, not the Earth. (See the above link).
Loss of human life:
Salzburg, Austria, 1677-1681 over 100 murdered
Basque region of the Pyrenees; 1608, Lawyer Pierre de Lancre was sent to the region to “root out and destroy those who worshipped Pagan Gods.” Over 600 tortured and murdered.
Witch judge Henri Boguet c. 1550-1619 sent some 600 victims to their deaths in Burgundy, many of them young children who were systematically tortured and then burned alive.
A pregnant woman was burned alive and from the trauma, she gave birth before she died. The baby was tossed back into the flames.
Swedish town of Mora, 1669, more than 300 murdered. Among them, 15 children. 36 children between the ages of 9 and 15 were made to run the gauntlet and were beaten with rods upon their hands once a week for an entire year. Twenty of the youngest children, all under the age of 9 were whipped on their hands at the church door for 3 sundays in succession. Many more were severaly beaten for witchcraft offenses.
In Scotland, under the rule of Oliver Cromwell, a total of 120 in a single month were murdered in 1661. Estimates of the total dead have been as high as 17,000 between 1563 and 1603.
In Würzburg, Germany, the Chancellor wrote a graphic account in the year of 1629:
“…there are three hundred children of three or four years, who are said to have had intercourse with the Devil. I have seen children of seven put to death, and brave little scholars of ten, twelve, fourteen and fifteen years of age…”
Between the years of 1623 and 1633, some 900 “witches” were put to death throughout Würzburg. This was largely maintained by the Jesuits.
The Chronicler of Treves reported in 1586 that the entire female population of two villages was wiped out by inquisitors. Only two women were left alive.
Noted cases included the Knights Templar, Joan of Arc who was chained by the neck, hands and feet and locked in a cramped iron cage, Galileo, who stated that the Earth revolved around the Sun and was not the center of the universe as the church taught(See above).
The above accounts were taken from Cassel Dictionary of Witchcraft by David Pickering.
On Sunday, March 12th, 2002, the Pope John Paul II apologized for the “errors of his church for the last 2000 years.”
REFERENCES:
¹The Dark Side of Christian History by Helen Ellerbe, page 124
²Cassel Dictionary of Witchcraft by David Pickering, article on “Germany”, page 108
³Cassel Dictionary of Witchcraft by David Pickering, article on “Inquisition”, page 146
4 World Book Encyclopedia article on “Inquisition.” ©1989
5 Wizards and Sorcerers by Tom Ogden, article on “Inqusition.”
6 The Dark Side of Christian History by Helen Ellerbe, page 77
7Wizards and Sorcerers by Tom Ogden, article on “Inquisition.”
8The Dark Side of Christian History by Helen Ellerbe, page 77
9Wizards and Sorcerers by Tom Ogden
10The Dark Side of Christian History by Helen Ellerbe, page 80
11Cassel Dictionary of Witchcraft by David Pickering article on “Torture.”
12Cassel Dictionary of Witchcraft by David Pickering, article on “torture.”
13World Book Encyclopedia article on “Galileo.” ©1989
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