Orientation
The Old Testament trumps the Founding Fathers
For many people in the United States the heart of America was the Founding Father’s Enlightenment: The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But as Barry Alan Shain wrote in his book The Myth of American Individualism, America was a deeply protestant country way before the end of the 18th century. This article is not only about the legacy of Protestant of the United States but also the Jewish interpretation of the Old Testament that the Puritans drew from.
Soft totalitarianism anyone?
Furthermore, both the Puritanism and Judaism were used in very heavy-handed in not just religiously but in how those elites they controlled America politically. Typically, being a liberal was interpreted by liberals as the opposite of totalitarian societies, whether fascist or communist. However, we will soon find out that in the hands of the Protestant Puritans or the followers of Judaism, in very important areas the U. S. exerts a kind of political totalitarianism control based on the Old Testament. This theory of soft liberal totalitarian in the West is an argument made by many of those on the New European Right.
Where are we going?
First we explore the differences between classical theories of totalitarianism and the liberal totalitarianism proposed by the New Right. Then we will apply the theory of liberal soft totalitarianism to the views of paleoconservative American writers who up to the end of World War II contested liberal theories of what it meant to be an American. The same soft totalitarian tactics worked on the treatment of paleoconservative Southerners. From there I turn to Biblical roots of soft totalitarian in both the Puritans and the Jews. Next we see how The Frankfurt school pathologized paleoconservatives, reducing their beliefs to psychological disorders. We explore how the Frankfurt school also attacked non-Jewish Europeans for defending their ethnicity. As many of you know, paleoconservatives are not the only kind of conservatives in America. After World War II not only did the left-wing Frankfurt School criticize non-Jewish ethnics but Neoconservatives of the right did the same thing. Next I turn to how the Old Testament of the Bible is present in the justification of US foreign policy.
The rest of the article discusses the evolutionary origins of Judaic ethnocentrisms. First I discuss the five dimensions of evolutionary group strategies. Then I shall cover how well Judaic evolutionary strategies worked. I ask why Judaism was more successful in Europe than in West Asia and then why Judaism was more successful in America than in Europe. I use the treatment of German’s by Americans at the end and after World War II as an example of Judaic success in the US. I close by stating it is no wonder that Europeans, especially Germans, act like scared vassals of the United States, even though America is in deep decline.
Older Theories of Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism according to the anti-communist book Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy by Friedrich and Brzezinski describes totalitarianism:
- usually emerges in industrial countries;
- tolerates no dissent;
- encompasses the entire citizenry;
- controls the means of communication and
- resorts to police surveillance and terror.
Several other theories of totalitarianism were developed by Raymond Aron, Hannah Arendt and Jacob Talmon. Arendt writes that totalitarianism started to proliferate in reaction to the disintegration of traditional social structures. It triggered uprootedness and a feeling of being superfluous among the masses. She concludes that the acute sense of social alienation, loneliness and isolation is the first harbinger of totalitarianism. Talmon identifies the root of totalitarianism much earlier in history. He traces it to millennial utopias and the French Revolution. He argues that that modern secular religions that spur totalitarianism become visible in Mably’s and Condorcet’s teachings, and especially in Rousseau’s theory of general will. Also included among the first instances in the French Revolution were the Reign of Terror. Both Louis Antoine de St. Just and Gracchus Babeuf displayed a messianic temperament. Tomislav Sunic claims that more than any other author Raymond Aron sees the overevaluation of the political and the binding character of ideology as the main origins of totalitarianism. Like Talmon, Arendt Aron makes a distinction between Nazi and Communist totalitarianism in his book Democracy and Totalitarianism. The furthest back theorists go in looking for the roots of totalitarianism is the work of Karl Popper. The first volume of the Open Society and Its Enemies called The Spell of Plato, Popper writes of Plato’s political program far from being morally superior to totalitarianism, but fundamentally identical with it. None of these authors:
- lays any blame on Christianity for totalitarianism, let alone Judaism nor
- can imagine that liberalism could ever be totalitarian.
Authors of the New Right draw on the books of Claude Polin, Alexander Zinoviev, Michel Maffesoli, Alain Besancon and Louis Dumont to show that:
- the Old Testament and the consequent following of it by Protestant and Jews form a part of liberal totalitarianism and
- far from being the opposite of totalitarianism, liberalism itself can be totalitarian.
Liberal Totalitarianism
English New Right author Michael Walker writes that the classical totalitarianism must be treated with great caution. The main issue for him is that a given system aims at embracing the totality of man’s existence. But he claims there is a liberal totalitarianism. Liberalism becomes totalitarian at the moment when it subordinates every aspect of human life to one sphere of social activity that is, economics, specifically capitalism. In their book The Soft Ideology Francois-Bernard Huyghe and Pierre Barbes contend capitalism has imposed its own religion of commodity fetishism. Anyone lucky enough to have read Chapter 1 of Kapital on community fetishism can begin to understand the reification and idolatry involved in living in a capitalist society. The power of capitalist ideology over people in thew USA can be seen to the extent that people can more easily imagine the end of the world than they can the end of capitalism. The reduction of commodities to a single quantity, money, also reduces the individual to an interchangeable quantitative human subject to atomization, the same atomization that Arendt and others claim is true for communist and fascist totalitarianism.
Social compliance for liberal totalitarianism is insured through:
- soft conditioning;
- voluntary apoliticism and
- hidden persuaders of advertising.
Louis Dumont challenges liberal notions that pre-capitalist societies were somehow closer to totalitarianism than modern capitalist societies. He contends that traditional collectivism and holism in European societies is not necessarily conducive to totalitarianism. Organicism and holism are the opposite of totalitarianism. For Dumont, totalitarianism occurs when the holistic structures have broken down. Polin and Dumont lay the blame for the rise of totalitarianism on unrestrained economism and disruptive individualism are the prime factors causing superfluousness and loneliness that Arendt and others claim is part of totalitarianism.
Dumont traces them, like Sombart, Spann and Rougier to Judeo-Christianity. De Benoist sees the early stages of totalitarianism in the Bible and the Judaic religious legacy. Biblical monotheism is for de Benoist a religion of totality, which excludes opposing truths. Spann and Sombart say these are decisive elements for a possible disintegration of liberalism. Maffesoli also writes totalitarianism is the logical reaction to the process of atomization, to the loss of organic solidarity.
Paleoconservative Views of Being an American
In his book Homo Americanus, Tomislav Sunic asks what does it mean to be an American? Sunic identifies these characteristics:
- belief in progress,
- egalitarianism and
- uprootedness as a virtue.
Sunic claims these kinds of values are the result of a successful propaganda by liberal Protestants and Jews over other claims of what it means to be an American. He says that ironically the most cynical remarks made about Americanism do not originate among European critics or the colonized periphery of African states but are voiced by isolated, yet well-known American writers. He cites Henry Miller in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. Miller describes the American obsession with the idea of progress and the uglification of the country as seen in gigantism. Somewhat ironically, Miller seemed to be rediscovering true America only in the mystical Deep South in the bayous of Louisiana and the deserts of Arizona. He thinks that the Deep South has not been steam-rolled by Americanization. There is another anti-American writer and journalist, H.L. Mencken. To him America is a country of third-rate half-wits. Ezra Pound, whom many consider a fascist, is critical of the psychology of Homo Americanus and the ruling class of Washington DC. In his book Impact: Essays on Ignorance and the Decline of American Civilization he complains about the ever-present American inability to put things in perspective. Pound left the US after his release from an insane asylum. He writes, “I have left for good a psychiatry asylum of 180 million people. all America is an insane asylum”.
Alain de Benoist also claims that America has slide into “soft totalitarianism” when it comes to the treatment of paleoconservatives. Sunic points out the manner in which social sciences have been taught since 1945 in Europe and America has been heavily determined by the references of:
- fascism (in Europe) and
- democracy (in America).
There are some serious academics in the first half of the 20th century who used the field of eugenics in studying social changes and who left some impact on the decision-making circles in the US. Numerous essays have been written by European traditionalists and conservatives including the revolutionary conservatives and anti-egalitarian novelists, essayists and poets critical of the USA and an American way of life. Knut Hamson was attacked after World War II for sympathies to fascism. Yet authors such as Lothrop Stoddard, Revilo P. Oliver or Francis Parker Yockey also viewed themselves as exemplary American patriots. Sunic argues that Yockey and Oliver could have easily passed for European revolutionary conservatives in the 1930s or as the godfathers of modern conservative anti-Americanism in Europe. They were harshly critical of the American ideology of Yankeeism and of the Constitution of the US.
Soft totalitarianism at work?
Following World War II, hundreds of European and American authors were removed from library shelves on the basis of their allegedly extremist, racist and unscientific character. An average reader, whether a European or an American rarely has a chance to judge for himself the other side of the story surrounding the epoch in Europe that stretched between 1933 to 1945. Authors even when mildly critical of liberalism, parliamentary democracy and multiculturalism have had marginal readership. Dissenters are not beaten and then marched off to jail but are quietly ignored or marginalized. They may also be held up to public disgrace and whenever possible removed from their livelihood. At worst, the person can end up in prison. In most cases they will find themselves cut off from academic discourse and political debate. Academics are removed for stating their beliefs even on scientific evidence on race differences in intelligence or criminality. They won’t be invited to deliver papers at other universities on important conferences and their sources of funding will dry up. Any revision of the intellectual heritage linked to nationalism and racialism is severely reprimanded. Most European and American authors do not necessarily end up in prison, but their professional lives are crippled by defamation and smear campaigns orchestrated by the ruling class and media.
Sunic goes so far as to say that Americans and the Americanized masses in Europe are better fooled and deceived by official propaganda than were the Sovietized and communized masses in Eastern Europe. “Human rights”, “democracy” the thought control and intellectual repression in America function far better. Professors must parade with sentimental and self-deprecatory statements which denigrate European cultural heritage. There is a syndrome of guilt by association. All academic discussions about genetic or racial differences are quickly neutralized by the all-encompassing words such as racism and hate speech. For fear of being called confrontational or racist, an honest politician or academic must practice self-censorship. Academic language is also subject to hygienic rules. New qualifiers emerge among the would-be heretic serving as disclaimers for their controversial thoughts. Guilt by association hampers someone’s career and ruins the life or a diplomat, a politician an academic who ventures in as a speaker into some right wing or racialist literacy circles or who attends a venue where the contents of a revisionist book are discussed.
Suppression of Writers Defending the South
Less than one hundred years ago, with the end of the antebellum South an important chunk of American history has also been lost to Americanism—a pattern which was to be repeated a hundred years later in Europe as we shall see. The revival of old American antebellum customs that are long gone stand in sharp contrast to the American Yankee ideology of progress. Ideally a Southern man saw himself as anti-mercantile, anti-capitalist and anti-egalitarian values which differed radically from those Pilgrims, “Errand in the Wilderness” displayed when disembarking from the Mayflower. The cultural heritage of the South has been deliberately suppressed. As a result, anti-egalitarian and anti-liberal American authors who sporadically thrived until the early 30s in America were relegated to oblivion. Christopher Lasch, a Euro-American author was one of those rare observes who spotted the vestiges of a rudimentary and honorable Americanism in the South.
The destructive nature of progress was well described in the early 1930s by American traditionalist authors, known as “The Southern Agrarians”. In many instances their prose is reminiscent of European revolutionary conservatives of the same epoch, for example George Fitzhugh’s book Sociology of the South or the Failure of The Free Society. There was also a Manifesto of Southern Agrarians. It was written by scholars who had a good sense of literary metaphor and who were not victims of academic overspecialization. They conceived of a true rebirth of the American human, not Homo economus of the liberal Puritan/Judaic North.
The South after the Civil War underwent a process of forcible re-education, similar to the European mind about fascism by the Americans after 1945. The South was forced to deny its history. The problem is the South was not just a geographic slice of North America. It was a separate civilization. Sunic writes that if they continue to write and speak they are quickly silenced or framed by educational authorities on trumped-up charges. This is why Pound, Francis Yockey and Christopher Lasch were rapidly neutralized and only used in narrow intellectual and political circles. It is the theory of progress that has been the centerpiece of Americanism, particularly since 1945, that the South challenges.
But Why Are You Defending Conservatives and Fascists?
Some of you may feel uncomfortable by my defending paleoconservatives and wonder why I am doing this. You might be more deeply troubled that I am challenging Judaism as part of liberal totalitarian control. After all, weren’t the Jews the victims of totalitarianism? After all, isn’t it a good thing that conservatives and fascists views were suppressed? Given that fascism that went on between 1920s and the end of World War II it understandable to suppress these writings. However, my point in this article is to challenge the liberal moral contention that it is above and immune to using totalitarian tactics of its own. Liberals act like they are absolute civil libertarians when they are not. They certainly do represses free speech of the rights of paleoconservatives and can control their livelihoods. In fact many of the tactics Cold War liberals used against Communists in the 50s were also used against paleoconservatives.
The Biblical Origins of American Soft Totalitarianism
Puritan origins
Sunic claims it is mandatory for a Yankee if he wants to move up in the world, to be on good terms with the churches. Indifference to the churches will most certainly be punished. In the US it is virtually unheard of to openly declare oneself an agnostic or an atheist and to aspire at some time to a high political office. After all, America is the land of the Bible. Over the course of the last couple of decades with the presence of the neocons, biblical vocabulary has played a much stronger role in American public affairs than the much-lauded American constitution. Despite the American Enlightenment, the Calvinist heritage has continued to have the upper hand. This heritage goes all the way back to Oliver Cromwell. Just as Cromwell used the Bible to justify the murder of King Charles, he later did the same thing in his expeditions against the Scots and Irish. The rulers of America have been doing this ever since. Sunic throws down the gauntlet and contends that Cromwell’s unwitting political legacy had more influence on the American mindset than Lenin’s rhetoric did on the future of Communist Russia.
Jesus and the Bible make up the main rhetorical ingredients of all American politicians. This is in contrast to European Catholicism or Lutheranism. Its obsession with moralistic preaching borders on mass delirium. It was New England, not Washington DC that was the birthplace of Americanism. It was to be expected with the Puritan idea of self-chosen that America took special delight in the Old Testament which justified religious persecutions and Indian wars. The Puritans wanted to create a Promised Land which would become a universal republic. The notion of “the City on a Hill” and “God’s Own Country” were borrowed from the Old Testament and the Jewish people. Of all Christian denominations, Calvinism is the closest to the Jewish religion.
Judaic Origins
Sunic points out that white gentiles’ acceptance of Jewish apostles instead of their own leaders is an unconscious decision that has been brought to perfection in America by the early Puritan Pilgrim Founding Fathers. Furthermore, Judaic-Americanism represents the most radical departure from the European Indo-European pagan traditions. Many Jewish scholars rightly acknowledge deep theological links between America and Judaism such as in Milton Konvitz’s book Judaism and the American Idea. For what we call Americanism, writes Werner Sombart, is nothing else than the Jewish spirit distilled in America. From Perry Miller’s book Errand Into the Wilderness America is now an extended form of globalized Israel.
Left-Wing: The Frankfurt School Puts Paleo-Conservativism on the Couch
In the aftermath of WW II, the role of the American-based Frankfurt School scholars and European Marxist intellectuals was decisive and shaping the new European cultural scene. Most of the new American educators were former disciples of Freud and Marx. Their social theories focused on how to cure Germany of its authoritarian character. In the decades to come it sufficed to be labeled a “Neo-Nazi” or a radical right-winger in order to lose the right of free speech. As a result of Frankfurt school re-education endeavors in Germany thousands of books in the fields of genetics and anthropology were removed from the library shelves. Particularly harsh were the Allied powers’ treatment of German teachers and academics. The allegedly repressive European family was for the Frankfurt school the breeding ground for political neurosis, xenophobia and racism among young children.
Frankfurt School theorists claim that any European who identifies with family, nation, religion or race suffers from psychiatric disorders. As a result, successful families who teach family pride in their children were seen as sources of pathology as in Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality book. On the other hand, those who are socially isolated, who have negative and rebellious attitudes towards their families, who are ambivalent and insecure about their sexual identities, have low self-esteem, who are moving downward in socio-status have negative attitudes toward high socio status and the acquisition of material resources are viewed as the epitome of psychological health. Since psychoanalysis never required any empirical evidence, that allowed Frankfurt school authors to make up any story and explanation they wanted about non-Jewish Europeans. Members of the Frankfurt school were overwhelmingly Jewish. The Authoritarian Personality was funded by The American Jewish Committee. Political prejudice, notably a sense of authority and the resentment of Jews were categorized as mental illnesses rooted in traditional European childrearing. A scholar who would slightly diverge from antifascist pedagogical methods would have little chance for career advancement, if not fired outright.
The Frankfurt School Attacks Non-Jewish Working Class Europeans
The Frankfurt School was a critical part of the intellectual justification for the intergroup relations movement against racism. See Stuart Svonkin’s 1997 for an account of the Jewish role in the intergroup relations movement. The aim of the Judaic Marxian ideologues influence in the intergroup relations movement was to prevent the development of a mass anti-Jewish movement in the US. There was no mention that some groups, particularly European derived non-Jewish working class groups would lose economic and political power and decline in cultural influence. This weakening of European identity in the US can be seen in my teaching. When I used to teach a college class on Race and Ethnic Relations I would ask my American students what their ethnic background was. They said they didn’t know or that they were “mutts” or they would drop into the American cliché that America was a “melting pot”. Negative attitudes toward groups were viewed not as the result of competing group interests but the result of individual psychopathology. This is ethnic warfare.
Why would the supporters of Judaism support the intergroup relations? When intergroup relations theory developed with the work of Asch on conformity in the 50s and Milgram’s work on obedience in the 60s, America was overwhelmingly white (at about 85%). Blacks were 10%, Hispanics 3-4% and Native Americans were less than one percent. Judaists were 2% of the population. If Jews supported racial minorities they might gain their support without being threatened because racial minorities then were overwhelmingly poor and working class and no threat to Judaism. However ethnic whites were a threat in both numbers and distribution into many different classes. If some ethnic whites were racist they could come after racial minorities, antisemitism attacks were reasoned to be not far behind. Also many Jews were “middleman minorities” with grocery stores who were inadvertently on the front lines of any racial riots that might erupt. It is understandable to try to protect a group in competition with other groups. What I want to call attention to is hiding what you are doing while proclaiming moral superiority.
Right-Wing Neo-Conservativism and the Holocaust Industry
Neo-conservativism has been championed by a well-defined group of mainly Jewish authors. First and foremost, we see the close relationship between Judaic activist organizations and academic writing on the subject of Israel. Jewish organizations, particularly the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress and the Antidefamation league were the leaders. These organizations provided the major sources of funding, devised the tactics and defined the objectives of the movement. The Holocaust has become a cultural icon as a direct result of Judaic activism.
The Judaization of the West is nowhere more obvious that in the veneration of the Holocaust as the central icon of the entire civilization. In the US there is no topic more heavily controlled than the subject of Israel. The Jewish role in the process of Americanization are indispensable factors in studying the different aspects of Americanism and anti-Americanism. The dreaded word “antisemitic” functions like the word “anti-Soviet”. It is a linguistic propaganda of a loaded vice word with zero neutrality. Despite much of the US bragging about universal rights to freedom of speech, the subject of Israel and Judaism in the role of the Jews in Americanism is carefully avoided. Zionist American lobbyists control the research of major think tanks.
Judaism and Totalitarian Tactics
Each time American gentiles write critically of the Judaic role in the 20th century the US, they are likely to find marginal readership and will hardly gain credibility in the mainstream media. Although being a tiny minority in America, Jews play an influential role in the opinion-making industry film, industry media and higher education. During the period of the Soviet Union behind communist semantics people and politicians made fun of it. In the US many serious people, politicians and scholars, let alone the mass population believe in the message of the media. The same is true in England.
Predicably Zionists create a cultural smear campaign. A good example is the response to the unflattering portrayal of the Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. The vast majority of Americans in politics, the media and the academic world are terrified of being labeled antisemite. Critical analysis of Judaic influence on America or overt description of the preponderance of the Jewish role in public life in America is likely to result in verbal attacks and isolation. How does one dare critically talk about the predominance of the Judeo-American spirit in America without running the risk of social isolation or of landing into psychiatric asylum as Ezra Pound once did? Thus “anti-Semitism” provides Zionists with alibis to project themselves as victims while Zionist elites control the competition in other ethnic groups. Only a few authors dare critically address the issue of Judaism in America.
Zionists act as thought police who monitor critical inquiry about Israel by American professors. Students are encouraged to report remarks that are considered hostile to Israel. A new form of political theology “Americanism” is a derivative of Puritanism and Judaism. The scarecrow of antisemitism or the charges of holocaust denial are the best weapons to silence heretics. Instead of submitting anti-Semitism to the free play of idea, instead of making it a topic for debate in which all can join, Zionists and their liberal supporters have managed to organize an inquisition and a threat to the moral order of mankind. Israel is an archetype and pseudo-spiritual receptacle of American ideology and its Puritan founding fathers. Sunic claims Israel functions as American democratic Superego.
In Yahweh We Trust: A Divine Foreign Policy
The War Crimes of the Bible
In their analysis of the holy alliance between Israel and America, American scholars tend to forget that the Old Testamentties between the two countries. Generally, only a few American authors acknowledge the self-serving influence of the Bible in American political and military affairs. It is common in the US academia and film industry to criticize national Socialism. But the American way of conducting World War II was just as violent, if not even worse. Puritanism had given births to a distinctive type of American fanaticism which does not have parallels anywhere else in the world. Just as in 17th century England, Cromwell was persuaded that he had been sent by God almighty to purge England of its enemies. Bradford notes this type of Puritan self-righteousness could easily be observed from Monroe to Lincoln.
It is largely a Biblical message which stood as the origin of America’s imperial endeavor to make the world safe for democracy. Whoever militarily challenged America ran the risk of being placed:
- outside the category of humanity and
- labelled as a terrorist.
With the consolidation of the Judeo-Christian belief in its puritanical form in the US we have the logic of either/or, true or false, good or evil with seldom shading in between. Woodrow Wilson was an ardent pro-Zionist. Most American presidents followed his lead. American evangelicalisms’ mostly residing in the Bible Belt were leading the charge and whose behavior were often more Jewish than that of American Jews themselves.
Carl Schmitt demonstrated that the majority of modern political principles are secularized theological principles brought down to earth. American intolerance of other political systems can be interpreted as a violent response against those who have departed from the Yahweh path. The Talmudic laws were incorporated into the American legal system. More than any other monotheistic religion, Americanism, similar to Judaism, has rationalized and imposed the formulas for all aspects of humanity’s life. Spiritual ordinances are very much alive in American foreign policy.
Therefore, a person, nation or a regime could be disposed of at will. Naturally an absolute foe needs to be destroyed absolutely. American wars became total wars aimed at eradicating evil. But why not point out that the Bible-inspired American ideology can be as intolerant as Islam? Because outbursts of anti-Islamic feelings in America is a handy instrument for dominating competing religious and ethnic groups it? Sunic points out:
“The crisis in Americanism in our epoch wrote a German scholar Giselher Wirsig who had close ties with propaganda officials in the 3rd Reich “falls short of the degeneracy of the Puritan mindset. In degenerated Puritanism lies side by side with Judaism, America’s inborn danger.” (127)
The Evolutionary Origins of Judaic Ethnocentrism
So far, Sunic and other European Right authors have argued that Judaism has had a hand in the operation of the Frankfurt School’s attack on non-Jewish Europeans and the right-wing neocons setting up a “Holocaust Industry”. These authors have pointed out the totalitarian tactics used against anyone who challenges the line of the Israel state. suggest that there were Judaic group strategies alongside or They drew parallels between the Bible and US foreign policy. When we talk about Zionists and the Holocaust industry many socialists will get on board. But the arguments in this article were present even before Zionism. How are these European right arguments different from fascist arguments?
Can Judaism be reasonably viewed as an evolutionary group strategy? To understand this we need to look at the work of evolutionary psychologist of intergroup relations Kevin McDonald and his books Separation and Its Discontents and The Culture of Critique. MacDonald contends that all ethnic groups compete for resources and develop strategies. Judaism is no different than any other group exhibiting universal tendencies toward self-interest, ethnocentrism, competition for resources and reproductive success. MacDonald compares the Judaic strategies to the evolutionary strategies of Roma (the old term was gypsies), the Amish, the Chinese in Indonesia, and the Puritans. All these ethnic groups rely ultimately on human abilities to monitor and enforce group goals, prevent defection and create ideological structures that rationalize group aims both to group members and to outsiders.
The five independent dimensions of human group evolutionary strategies
- The dimension ranging from complete voluntarism to complete coercion;
- the dimension ranging from complete genetic closure to complete genetic openness;
- the dimension ranging from high level within group altruism and submergence of individual interest to within group selfishness;
- a dimension ranging from high between group resource and reproductive competition to little between group resource and reproductive competition at the other and
- a dimension ranging from high level ecological specialization at work to ecological generalization of occupations.
How does Judaism shape up as a group evolutionary strategy?
Judaism has a self-imposed and non-coerced evolutionary strategy. Secondly, it has a fairly closed group strategy. The gene pool became significantly segregated from that of the surrounding society. Judaists have engaged in resource and reproductive competition with gentile societies, often successfully. There has been a significant but limited degree of within-group altruism. Lastly, it has a significant degree of role specialization above the level of primary production such as those who violated group norms against and were severely punished.:
- intermarriage with gentiles;
- patronized businesses own by gentiles and
- accepting important elements of gentile culture.
Qualifications
Typical criticisms of MacDonald have been that he is seeing Judaism in a monolithic way. This is not true. First, he is not arguing that it is only Zionism that has been responsible for world events in the past 100 years. MacDonald identifies the ethnic struggles of Jews in the ancient and medieval worlds before Zionism was predominant. Furthermore, ADL and the AJ Committee are not creations of just Zionist or Orthodox Jews but represent a broad Jewish community including non-religious Jews and Reform Jews. Secondly, claiming that Judaism has been an ethnic strategy does not mean that all Jews have been involved. Most weren’t. Thirdly, even those who were involved did not do so as a conscious strategy. Fourth, some furthered the interests of Jews as a group while not identifying as Jewish. Nonpracticing Jewish scientists or committed communists are examples. In short, the influence of an intellectual or political movement dominated by Jews is independent of the percentage of the Jewish community involved.
How successful was Judaism as an evolutionary strategy?
MacDonald reports that of all the hundreds of human groups in the ancient world, only Judaism avoided the powerful tendencies towards cultural and genetic assimilation. There was, however, intense socialization towards group identification. There was a very high degree of control over education of children and avoidance education in secular schools. In an extremely competitive human environment there was a high degree of specialization in work that was not in primary production. In the case of Judaism, the central authority of the kehillah system of self-government in the diaspora provided a powerful mechanism for excluding Jews who failed to conform to group goals. A strategy of Judaism is to hide their own ethnocentrism as a cultural survival mechanism in cohesive groups. Instead, their struggles with other ethnic groups are presented as a psychopathology among non-Jews. Judaists present themselves as victims of irrational gentile pathologies while their own successes or failures are presented as only being victims of oppression. They pretend there is no strategy of ethnic competition operating.
Why Was Judaism Relatively Successful in Europe?
European cultural origins
Middle Eastern societies were much more efficient than Western societies at keeping Judaism in a powerless position throughout history. Jews have tended to prosper more in individualistic European societies and have suffered more in non-Western societies. To understand the relatively success of Judaism as an ethnic strategy we need to begin with geography. According to MacDonald, Europeans back in the Ice Age endured a harsh environment. Nordic people evolved in small groups of hunter-gatherers which were socially isolated. It required a great deal of group conflict to trigger mechanisms of group competition. They were both less aware of in-group or out-group competition and less emotionally committed to their in-groups. They had a mild attachment to many groups and were good at dealing with strangers. There was less pressure for natural selection for extended kinship networks. Punishment for free riders was intense while betrayals from other groups were more tolerated because their attachment to them was mild to begin with. Children were socialized to stress independence and self-reliance. Because early Europeans had less strong identification with groups and a stronger association with strangers as out-groups, their morality was broader. What is moral is what happens between in-group and out-group. Much later Christianity expanded European values into this to a more universalistic morality.
Judaic cultural origins
On the other hand, in West Asia the Jews were living as pastoralists in less harsh environments than the Europeans. They were interdependent with agricultural civilizations. They grew used to ethnic conflict and developed sensitive triggering mechanisms to detect manipulation among competing groups’ strategies to keep from being overwhelmed. They were very aware of both in-group and out-group competition and they were very committed to their in-groups. They isolated themselves from attachments to out-groups and strangers were not treated well. There was much more pressure for natural selection to operate within extended kin networks. Punishment was more intense both in betrayal within the in-group and betrayal within kin networks. Socialization stressed group identification and intense socialization. There was no universal morality among Jews in these early years. What was good for the group was all the morality needed.
European vs Jewish Cultural Origins
| Category of Comparison | European Cultural Origins | Jewish Cultural Origins |
| Geography | Harsh environment of the Ice Age, Nordic people evolved in small groups which are socially isolated Require more group conflict to trigger competition |
Less harsh environment Interdependent with agricultural states |
Turning Europeans Against Themselves
A lack of particularist morality among ancient Europeans
What are the sacred characteristics that predispose Westerners to willingly accept their weakening as a group as a moral necessity? As it turns out European groups are highly vulnerable to invasion by collectivist, ethnocentric groups because individualists have less powerful defenses against such groups. The key for a group intending to turn Europeans against themselves is to trigger their strong tendency toward altruistic punishment within the group to find an evil among their own people. European majorities rise up against their own people whom they perceive as free riders. Judaists play off Europeans majorities against people of their own minorities to trigger a sense of moral bankruptcy which Judaists exploit. On the other hand, Europeans could never convince Judaists of their moral bankruptcy because they are not open to others to combining Judaist morality with the morality of surrounding strangers.
Puritan moralism keeps Europeans quiet
Here Sunic emphasizes the heritage of Christian universalism and especially in the case of America, the heritage of Puritan moralism. In the 17th century Puritan areas had low levels of personal violence but high levels of public violence directed at heretics and those suspected of witchcraft. A major theme of MacDonald’s Culture of Critique is that the most influential intellectual and political movements of the 20th century presented European civilization as morally bankrupt. MacDonald contends that not a single American politician will ever admit that America is a theocratic system with a peculiar political theology, a Judeo-Puritan theology rooted in the Old Testament.
The Decline of Ethnic Consciousness Among 20th Century European-Americans
MacDonald points out that in the 1920s Europeans would assuredly assert that as a people who colonized and created the political and economic culture of the country they had the right to maintain it as their possession. But between the twenty years from the 1940s to the 1960s you would be called a racist and intellectual Neanderthal. Because the Bosnian revolution in anthropology had triumphed any theorist who believed that race was important for explaining human behavior became fringe figures. Anthropologist Franz Boas said genetic differences between people were trivial.
The famous Charles Lindbergh was attacked for his anti-war stance leading up to World War II. The pilot advocated a racial alliance among whites on a Western Wall of Race so that so many Europeans wouldn’t be killed. Lindbergh had the nerve to say that Judaic interests are not the same as those of the country as a whole. The US Military officers often worried that Roosevelt was influenced too much to be anti-German by his Jewish advisers including Henry Morgenthau Jr. who actively promoted Zionism. Morgenthau become well-known as an advocate of extremely harsh treatment of Germans during and after WWII. By 1944 thousands of non-Jewish associations would pass pro-Zionist resolutions including both political parties America had entered into an era when it had become morally unacceptable to discuss Jewish interests at all. Sadly, MacDonald says, the high moral ground is more important to European Americans than the survival their European ethnicity in America.
Among the middle and upper classes liberal Protestants gave up their ethnic identity as Germans, Dutch or Scandinavians who rejected their traditional cultural institutions. Gottfried points the finger at liberal Protestantism and the rise of the managerial state which de-ethicized their managerial elite. He points out that such de-ethnicized managerial elites are unique to European and European-derived societies. They are not present in Israel, Japan or Africa. Every last shred of cultural identity among Protestants should be given up while the Judaists were implicitly allowed to keep theirs. Jewish intellectuals played a decisive role in opposing the idea that the United States ought to be a European nation.
Why do Judaic elites prevail more in America than in Europe?
Why is this control more prevalent in the United States than in Europe? MacDonald points out there is an America absence of what the Germans called Kulturvolk, a rooted cultural and national community which is the main prerequisite for any sound state-anchored nationalism or ethic solidarity. MacDonald points out this is the weakness of American nationalists, racialists and conservatives while not hiding their hostility to Jews and are unable to muster up common cultural and national energy for establishing cultural national uniqueness. Harping only on genetic determinism to promote an abstract white man identity is self-defeating. On the other hand, in Eastern Europe people are highly homogeneous with relatively few non-Europeans living on their soil. They are well aware of their racial and European roots more so than are Western Europeans or Americans. Eastern Europeans have retained a sense of historical and racial identity with a distinct feeling of nationhood.
European self-hate campaigns against Germany
Just as everybody in America and Europe is obliged to know by heart the body count of the Fascist and National Socialist victims, nobody still knows the exact number of German forces killed by US forces during and after WWII. Worse, a different perspective in describing post-war foreign policy towards Europe and Germany is considered politically taboo.
Purges carried out by the American military in post-war Germany remain an uneasy topic for official American historians. Freda Utley, an English-American writer depicts graphically in her book The High Cost of Vengeance, the barbaric methods applied by the US military against German civilians and prisoners of war. Although popular among American conservatives her works fell quickly into oblivion. She describes in graphic detail how Germans were molested. This left deep scars on the German psyche and explains why Germans, and by extension all of Europe, are behaving today in foreign affairs like the scared lackey of American geopolitical interests.
MacDonald informs us that Eisenhower utilized a whole fleet of aircraft to bring journalists, congressmen and churchmen to see the concentration camps. He did this so the sight of starved victim would obliterate consciousness of any American guilt over American war crimes against Germany because knowledge of American crimes would put a damper on anti-fascist victimology, including the Holocaust. The number of German dead varies wildly, ranging from 6 to 16 million, including civilians and soldiers. The entire European continent was affected by the American military victory. Mentioning extensively Germany’s war losses runs the risk of eclipsing the scope of Jewish war losses which makes many Jewish intellectuals very nervous.
In the following decades European political elites went a step further. In order to show to their American sponsors their liberal credentials, they introduced strict legislation forbidding any historical revisions of WW II statistical dead. These included the study of negative socio-economic consequences of multiculturalism and multiracialism. They stipulated a prison sentence for a written comment or uttered word that minimizes the Jewish Holocaust or makes fun of multiculturalism. Sunic throws down the gauntlet and says following the end of communism in the East, the German criminal code appears is in substance more repressive than the Soviet Union
One would have expected that after the Cold War and especially after the end of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, a more tolerant intellectual climate would have developed in Europe and America. But this has not been the case. Despite the fact that under the US-sponsored German Basic Law of 1949, Germany acquired all the prerogatives of a sovereign country, its sovereignty has in reality been highly questionable.
The larger public in the US and Europe have little knowledge that in Germany alone, in the last decade of the 20thcentury, thousands of individuals ranging from German teenagers cracking jokes about non-European immigrants to scholars dealing critically with the Jewish Holocaust has resulted in financial fines or considerable prison terms. It is completely understandable that political scientists, sociologists and historians do not want to be called by their names. Sunic informs us that what has happened is a loss of elementary civic courage among most German intellectuals. It is no wonder that Europe appears defenseless against Israel and the United States.
Conclusion
My article argues that the heart of Americanism is rooted in the Old Testament, embodied first in the Puritans and then with Judaic ideology. Secondly, I argue that contrary to what Cold War liberals contend, liberalism is far from the opposite of totalitarianism. I give many examples of liberal totalitarianism in the treatment of paleoconservatives in the United States shortly after World War II and the treatment of the Germans and the conduct of US foreign policy. I combine the ideology of the Old Testament and liberal totalitarianism by exploring the evolutionary psychology of ethnocentrism, with application to Judaic evolutionary strategies. I point out how Kevin MacDonald’s evolutionary psychology work in group dynamics explain how Judaist forces:
- hid the ethnic basis of their attacks on “gentiles” by making antisemitism to be about religion rather that an ethnic strategy and
- attacked European rights to their own ethnic identity.
The intention of the European Right movement is to defend Europeans both in Europe and in America from attacks from Old Testament forces in both the US and in Israel.