Post-Judaism for the Aryan Hebrew, Pt. II

the road less travelled

(Part I here)

Leo Strauss, in his noted 1962 lecture, “Why We Remain Jews,” remarked that the purpose of the Jews is to prove that there’s no salvation.

Have you ever received unsolicited advice from a sallow, embittered elder about why some ambition or endeavor of yours is futile, “don’t get your hopes up,” “don’t quit your day job,” etc.? That’s exactly what Strauss was saying. Our religion didn’t work for us, so yours must be shit as well. You’re just too stupid to realize it.

Not long ago, TED-talk charlatan—I mean, “public intellectual”—Douglas Rushkoff expanded on Strauss’s concept:

The thing that makes Judaism dangerous to everybody, to every race, to every nation, to every idea, is that we smash things that aren’t true, we don’t believe in the boundaries of nation-state, we don’t believe in the ideas of these individual gods that protect individual groups of people; these are all artificial constructions and Judaism really teaches us how to see that. In a sense our detractors have us right, in that we are a corrosive force, we’re breaking down the false gods of all nations and all people because they’re not real and that’s very upsetting to people.

We are nihilists, Lebowski. We suck all the enchantment out of the world and replace it with data.

A digression: it’s a very unfortunate inference to have to make, but the significant role of Jews in radical politics is analogous to Milton’s Satan, when he declares it “better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” From the high-ground of an insular, high-functioning community, Jews provide leadership to the debased and low-functioning, whose resentful agitating remakes the world into hell.

Anyhow, aside from the obvious fact that, contra Rushkoff, Judaism is so committed to the idea of a God who plays favorites that it has managed to incubate the boundaries of nation-state throughout two millennia of exile, the question arises whether, from a perspective like Rushkoff’s, there is anything Jews do believe?

Well, how different is Rushkoff’s thesis from ours? Is he not agreeing that Judaism entails being congenitally more special, intelligent, persevering and misunderstood than all other peoples? (Of course, he wouldn’t say that this is “congenital,” but if it isn’t, then we don’t have Judaism, we just have neoliberalism and granola.)

But this is quite odd. On the one hand, we have Judaism, the ancient religion: insular, xenophobic, theistical. On the other, we have “Judaism”: open, cosmopolitan, and atheistic. Yet the iconoclastic new kids agree with the elders that Jewishness makes us more special, intelligent, persevering and misunderstood than all other peoples, and that this necessitates insularity, and justifies lax scruples. The elders aren’t excommunicating the new kids, and the Zionists agree with both sides.

Menachem Begin once said, “What have the Jews not done to prove that they do not stick together? The multiplicity of their parties and trends is proverbial.” The prime minister is right, and we have here raised the question of what that multiplicity has in common, that it could all fit under the single heading, “Judaism.” Well, I think we’ve found the answer: it is narcissism. And this leaves us with a further question: is there a way, hiding somewhere in all this detritus, to dispense with Jewish pathology while remaining proud of who we are?

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Post-Judaism for the Aryan Hebrew, Pt. 1

end of an error

(Part II here)

There comes a time when apostasy is fidelity to God. If you’re Jewish, this is going to be very hard for you to read, but the light at the end of the tunnel will be mental liberation. 

Before charging ahead, please understand what I am not going to argue: I am not going to argue that an Elders of Zion-style conspiracy is responsible for all the world’s ills. I am not going to argue that Jews don’t have a right to cultural or religious self-assertion, or to pursue whatever program of group preservation they think best. I am not going to argue that no good has come from Jews, Judaism, or Zionism; and I am not going to argue that any anti-Semitic persecution was ever justified. 

Rather, what I will argue is that Judaism, as a worldview, is uniquely misguided; that it is not just anachronistic, but a dead weight on mind and soul, a net error that inevitably gives rise to psychic fistulae, a tortured relationship with gods and men, and deep-seated misapprehensions of truth, beauty, and the nature of the universe. It should be circumscribed down to its extremely few serviceable fundamentals, with the rest recognized definitively as pernicious, and conscientiously discarded. 

Why?

Foremost because Judaism, as a worldview, is fundamentally vindictive. Not incidentally, but fundamentally and uniquely vindictive, snide, self-pitying and mean-spirited. When this reality is described in more flattering terms, however, no Jew will hesitate to acknowledge it. This is because Judaism inculcates a tantalizing and tenacious sense of purpose in its adherents by assuring them that they are the elect of God or of history, congenitally more special, intelligent, persevering and misunderstood than all other peoples. 

If you were one of only 1000 people alive on earth, concentrated in a single village, and ten of your fellow villagers, together as a group, thought of themselves this way, would you trust them? The whole racket’s insufferably juvenile when you think about it, and such solipsism all but requires a concomitantly hostile view of the remainder of humanity it supposes to be less special. (“Hostile” here is a matter of degrees that would include condescension, suspicion, and much else that doesn’t necessarily rise to the level of outright aggression.)

Any strongly identifying Jew reading this will be undergoing a savage attack of whataboutism right now. Yes, the reality of human psychology is that any enduring group identity will involve a measure of obduracy, separatism and competitiveness. But is there any human group that has taken this as far as the Jews? Mark Twain sure didn’t think so:

The Egyptians, the Babylonians and the Persians rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greeks and Romans followed and made a vast noise, and they were gone; other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, and have vanished. The Jew saw them all, survived them all, and is now what he always was . . . All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains.

What Twain has given us is a mirror image of the thesis I’ve put forward here, but one that a Jew who disagrees with my version would accept and find flattering. Yet it is primarily a testimony to the sustaining power of piss and vinegar, for Jewish collective memory is one great accounting of wrongs done to us by others. The Jews aren’t immortal. We’re undead.

Either way, we’re not healthy. In daily life we rightly avoid those who are constantly sniveling, castigating fortune and accusing others of not caring about them. Obviously, individual Jews don’t often do this, but Judaism certainly does, and the fact that historically the Jews have gone passively to the slaughter hardly counterbalances the fact. That other peoples rose and fell means they took greater risks. That some are more impulsive in seeking vengeance makes Judaism’s long-unsettled accounts appear creepier, not benign, by comparison. That such things can be kept going, that embittered losers can skulk around like this for millennia, haunting the moral imagination of history which has moved on from them, is a frightful pity. 

Perhaps you want to reply that this arises solely from persecution. I think I’ve already addressed this but if not, do you really want to have that argument? Do we typically believe people who claim that all their misery is the fault of others? Do we often accept the proposition that someone who is widely disliked has no role in the opinions others have of him? This is what Judaism is asking its adherents to believe about themselves. It is doing them a grave psychological disservice. There was a time when Israel’s sins determined its misfortunes, but today official Judaism feels that its debts are more than paid, and it is owed interest by all and sundry.

Zionism, by the way, has altered nothing about the fundamental relationship of Judaism to the rest of mankind. Defeat me once, shame on you. Defeat me such that I don’t get up again, shame on me. After two millennia of crawling on our bellies, taking our ball and going home to strike at whichever hapless third party has taken up constructive possession there in the interim is no kind of vindication. I am in no way advocating for or against the state of Israel, or trying to rationalize any given course of action on the part of its Arab enemies. But the prevailing view among the Jews, that they are no more responsible for the problem than the Arabs they picked a fight with, and can presume to morally judge the way their enemies react to them, doesn’t pass the sniff test. Neither does a long view of the matter allow for much solace to be derived from Israel’s temporal strengths, because not being able to finish a fight that you started is not a stalemate, it is defeat by default, and the stronger one is, the more embarrassing this should be.

Those liberals who hang so much of their Jewish identity on the hope of seeing what they would regard as a moral improvement to Zionism are likewise missing the point entirely. Zionism began with the woefully belated flicker of a dim lightbulb reminding us that nature is a contest of physical strength, with every man for himself. But while the State of Israel thunders out of one side of its mouth, it snivels out of the other. Rather than keeping that initial, lucid light bulb flickering, in all its ample senility Zionism inevitably turns on a dime, right back to victimology, insisting that the world has a moral duty to the Jews, one that it has shirked, entitling us to a superlative unscrupulousness that we never have to own.

So regardless of the honor and decency of any given Jew or group of Jews, there is simply no parallel to the snideness and vindictiveness with which Judaism, as a system of thought and of engagement with the world, regards itself, not just relative to the neighbors or to a given historical foe, but to the rest of humanity in total. It then classes distaste for itself as a pathology, but one it cannot stand to ignore, or fail to uncover everywhere. Who in their right mind would partake in this madness, and teach it to children?

You might reply that you, your Jewish family or community members do not really regard themselves this way. That’s terrific! It’s also highly suggestive: the extent to which we or our families aren’t really all that Jewish is often a point of pride for Jews. If you treat gentile neighbors and friends with the same solidarity and regard with which you treat fellow Jews, it means that to some extent you don’t really buy the fundamental tenets of Judaism, i.e., the sacredness, importance, and moral superiority of the Jewish people. If your contributions to your majority-gentile community touchingly underscore the humanity of Jews in common with gentiles, it should not only be food for the thought that they were wrong about us, but should provoke the question of whether we have been wrong about us, and whether we have been wrong about them. 

Sodom Janitorial

when the toxoplasmosis comes before the cat shit

If God exists, it’d probably be best to worship him. But the Devil, if he exists, seems to have managed just fine all these years without a fan club. Worshipping him is not only optional, but superfluous.

This is why I can’t stand Luciferians. For one thing, they’re only considering one side of the story—which ought to be their foremost grievance against the competition. For another, in terms of what he has to offer, a disaffected lieutenant can only contrast poorly with the boss. Worst of all, Luciferians either worship Satan, in which case they’ve altered none of what they object to about religiosity, or else they’re frivolous, i.e., they don’t really believe in the Dark One, but conceptualize him instead as just an elaborate metaphor for humanism. Well, the Devil may get along fine without a following, but (to channel my inner Mark Twain) I don’t see why he ought to be insulted this way.

In The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov’s rollicking satire of 1930s Soviet life, Satan comes to Moscow with his retinue, and gets up to all kinds of mischief. Ironically, the only Muscovites Bulgakov’s Satan seems to attack are those who really deserve it. Before destroying Moscow, he rescues a blacklisted novelist and his mistress, who has literally sold her soul in order to rescue her love and his condemned manuscript from the authorities. In the end, even Bulgakov’s Jesus looks kindly on this ultimate sacrifice, and intercedes with Satan to spare her from eternal torment.

Why would Satan do God’s work for him? And why would God allow Satan to get up to any kind of mischief at all? It isn’t only in Bulgakov. It’s in Genesis, and Job, the Islamic Story of the Cranes, and the betrayal of Christ in the Gospels. We might surmise that it gives the universe a certain balance, but perhaps there’s another explanation.

Bear with me.

What separates man from beast? Language? Other apes can be taught sign language. Even robots can talk nowadays. Bipedalism? Opposable thumbs? Here I can even refer you to monkeys. But according to all three Abrahamic faiths, only free will—reason—distinguishes man.

Does God give us free will in order to amuse himself? This is what Nietzsche said about the Olympians in Homer. But supposing you were Richie Rich, and could never know who your true friends are. Wouldn’t that suck? I imagine that is why God gives man free will.

Hasidic Rabbi Manis Friedman, in a click-baity YouTube video entitled “Only Judaism Will Tell You This,” makes the similar suggestion that man’s relationship with God is a two-way street—that God needs us as much as we need him, because just as God is infinitely powerful, he is also infinitely vulnerable. The only problem I can see with this supposition is that Judaism is certainly not the only religion that will tell you this. After all, don’t the Christians believe God came to earth in mortal form only to live as a despised itinerant preacher and be executed excruciatingly?

Nearly six decades after Bulgakov completed his masterwork, and nearly six years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, one Yevgeny Rodionov, a Russian soldier and Orthodox Christian, was captured by Chechen insurgents and executed after refusing his captors’ offer to spare his life in exchange for converting to Islam. Supposing (just supposing) that Rodionov was mistaken, and that Islam is the one true religion. Even so, given the limitations of what he knew, it can hardly be the case that his refusal to compromise was wrong. Faith is something indelible, not interchangeable. Refusal to compromise—to the point of martyrdom—deserves the utmost respect. One could even imagine Mohammed interceding with Satan to spare the young soldier hellfire.

According to Sheikh Imran Hosein, when the Dajjal (“deceiver,” i.e., the Antichrist) emerges, he will have the word kafr (unbeliever) written on his forehead; the mu’amin (believer) will be able to read this, and therefore identify the Dajjal, even if he is illiterate; but the kafr will not be able to read it, even if he knows how. For Hosein, the mu’amin can of course only be Muslim. The only caveat he proffers that would disqualify a nominal Muslim is that the belief must be complete and heartfelt. Obviously, this wouldn’t include believers of other faiths. Still, there is something to this idea about the ability to discern evil being dependent on a fixed inner guidance that resides in the heart.

Maimonides teaches that emunah tmima, i.e., innocent (or simple) faith—as opposed to a faith that depends on great learning—is the truest and strongest form of faith. The New Testament says something very similar. Let me tell you how I got mine.

My great-grandfather came to the United States from Moldova in 1908. He was offered work with his brothers-in-law at the Studebaker factory in South Bend, Indiana, but turned it down when he was informed he couldn’t have a Saturday sabbath. Though not haredi (ultra-orthodox), he was a masorti (traditional) Jew. Instead of settling for a Sunday sabbath, he went out and bought a few heads of lettuce, then sold them on the street for a meager profit. Eventually he became a green grocer with his own shop. His refusal to compromise his faith is a simulacrum of Daniel’s refusal to bow before Nebuchadnezzar.

My grandfather was the only one of his siblings born in America, in 1911. He sat me down, starting at the age of four, and taught me Hebrew liturgy, scripture and midrash. I remember the lessons only vaguely, a few aphorisms at most, but they imbued me with an abiding faith in the Almighty, and this is the heartfelt simplicity that Maimonides calls the truest form of faith, and the foundation which eventually enabled me, after many trials, to discern wickedness, just like Imran Hosein’s mu’amin, who can read the writing on the forehead of the Dajjal, even if he is illiterate.

At the age of 19, I moved to Israel. Nobody leaves an affluent country for Israel unless they’re in search of some sense of purpose in life—some inner guidance—that they feel devoid of, that they believe the holy land can give them. I’ll spare you the details, but at the time, this described me perfectly.

At one point shortly after I arrived, I took a bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and walked to the Old City. At the Kotel, there are haredim (ultra-orthodox Jews) who stand around waiting for tourists to come. They ask if you’re Jewish, and if you reply that you are, they either invite you to a sabbath dinner, or to lay phylacteries and pray with them. They believe that prescribed prayer hastens the coming of the messiah, and that the more Jews they can get to perform it, the faster the messiah will come.

Well, rather than lay phylacteries with the haredim, I prayed on my own at the wall. According to rabbinic law, the son of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother is not Jewish, and I didn’t want to disrespect the beliefs of the haredim by partaking in their rituals without full disclosure. However, as I was leaving the Kotel plaza, a white-haired and frock-coated old haredi with a Brooklyn accent approached and asked if I would like to stay for free in a Jewish youth hostel. I said that I would, and he led me through the winding alleys of the Jewish Quarter, peppering me with questions about my upbringing and knowledge of Judaism. His name was Rabbi Meir Schuster, and he explained that he ran a Jewish outreach program for diaspora youth in Israel. When we arrived at his youth hostel, the place was empty except for a few rucksacks on the beds. He showed me to a bunk, but as I laid down my pack, he suddenly remembered to ask whether both my parents are Jewish. (I suppose I don’t quite resemble a Ferengi as nearly as a good Jewish boy ought to.) I answered honestly. He became irate and told me to get lost.

Rav Schuster was right: rules are rules, and he didn’t make ’em. The Hebrew liturgy is hauntingly beautiful to me, the Hebrew language has a deep spiritual resonance, and as I said, my grandfather’s emuna tmima is the foundation of my strength and discernment in God. But in sum total, none of this amounts to Judaism in any official sense. Besides, if the Jewish people are in error, should I compromise my ethnic affinity, or my faith? For instance, according to poll data, 76% of American Jews are pro-choice. This is nothing but Moloch-worship. In fact, Jews are disproportionately involved in all kinds of white collar scams and unnatural sexual hijinks. If these are my people, then ethnic solidarity has no meaning. So I want as little to do with the Rav Schusters of the world as they want to do with me.

Secondary to ethical and theologic precepts, my grandfather also taught me to despise Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Islam. (Rav Schuster would’ve surely approved.) I used to think this was part and parcel of the faith he imbued me with. But when I eventually married a Christian, I agreed to her desire to baptize our sons. As distasteful as the prospect was for me, given my upbringing, I realized that denying a sacrament to a believer would contravene the ethics my grandfather taught me. This cognitive dissonance gave rise to an open-minded exploration of Christianity and Islam that I never would have undertaken before. The blinders fell off, and I finally acknowledged the salience of the many aspects of Judaism I object to, rather than feeling the need to minimize or rationalize them, or serve in the Israeli army to prove Rabbi Schuster wrong (which I actually did, from 2006-2008.)

In essence, what I had to acknowledge was the fact that since 70 CE, Judaism has been a defeated and subterranean culture. Rabbinic Judaism took out of the old Hebrew faith the virility and jihad that once gave rise to successive Jewish uprisings against foreign domination, replacing them with vindictiveness and snide intellectual superiority.

Zionism has done relatively little to reverse these tendencies. But whereas pre-emancipation conditions required some spiritual fortitude of the Jews (which was much remarked upon and commended by Nietzsche), in the world of democratic values, the modus operandi of repulsive, manipulative weaklings is to constantly demand deference from others to their own sense of insecurity, which they lack the self-awareness (or the honesty) to ascribe in any proportion to their own failings, or to circumstances beyond what can readily be blamed on others. Those who nurse grudges also tend to lack scruples. Thus, we can discern an essential similarity between the ends-justifying lack of moral restraint in Zionism, on the one hand, and the various minority grievance rackets in the developed world that you’d think would have nothing in common with a highly militaristic ethno-state, or with a people that gave the world the Old Testament.

Yet somehow, especially since the end of the Cold War, Israel always finds itself on the side of international liberalism: Davos, Hollywood, the EU, CFR, international banks, Silicon Valley, and NATO destabilization of illiberal regimes. But while Israel practices certain liberal restraints in relations with its Arab subjects, this proves Israel’s humaneness no more than it displays the same profound unease of conscience that lies unexamined at the heart of all cosmopolitanism and technological progress. Certainly there are socially conservative elements in Israeli society, but Jewish solipsism dictates that they can never consider themselves in terms of the traditional, monotheistic values under assault by the centrifugal tendencies of the wider modern world. Thus, what is holding Israel and the Jewish people together is not primarily values, but fear, and roiling, pathos laden feelings of superiority. Meanwhile, the Jewish state’s leaders are accomplices to the idolaters of this world, the ultra-rich and libertine. They express the values of the state in the pithy phrasing of human liberty, even as they operate from pure machiavellianism.

But there’s a widespread and long-standing tendency to see fault only in the Jews, when the fact is that the Churches have long been worldly, pharisaical, and sycophantic. It’s difficult not to notice the pro-Caesar bent in parts of the New Testament. And of course, Islam has its own problems, from the marriage of the prophet to a six year old and consequent doctrines allowing sexual exploitation of minors to the outright murder of non-Muslim children with clerical sanction.

Yet for Sheikh Imran Hosein, the Dajjal can only be a Jew. It has likewise been said by certain Christians that Islam is Satanic, or that the Antichrist will be Jewish; and of course, rabbinic authorities have propounded some very ugly doctrines regarding Gentiles, and Christianity. For the simpleton and the demagogue—which any of us may be at times—the Antichrist is always on the other team. Despite his best intentions, the proverbial beam is always in the eye of the neighbors. When we use religion as a mask in this way, we need unbelievers, for the negative transference of our own ungodly impulses.

From the Devil’s perspective, what could possibly be better for business?

Last of the Kike Wiggers

I even like a song or two by One Republic

Okay, look: on this blog, I’ve been critical of the alt-right. In my salad days, I even visciously battered a couple of neo-Nazis, and that was back when “neo-Nazi” meant something. I certainly wouldn’t call myself a white nationalist. But….

There’s a lot going on that the alt-right is reacting to. If I had to really boil it down, my thesis would be two-pronged:

(1) Capitalism (the pretense of endless technological progress) is inextricable from progressivism (the pretense of endless moral progress); and

(2) the cultural assault on whiteness is inextricable from the destruction of the middle class.

Of course, there are many qualifications we could make here about capitalism, but I use the word for lack of one that better captures the ideology and methods of the present planetary managerial class (Davos, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Madison Avenue, Fortune 100, MSM, EU, NATO, IMF, etc.) In any case, the cultural assault on whiteness is part of a larger assault on teleology, on organic loyalties (ethnic, confessional, communal, familial, conjugal) that make people difficult to manage. In the near-term, there may appear to be winners and losers, e.g., Islam as opposed to Christianity, Zionism as opposed to Islam, the rising tide of color as opposed to white supremacy, etc. But in the long term, all these groups’ adherents lose the ability to maintain independent communities. Consciousness itself is collectivized and fed into a cybernetic panopticon. As a web-based subculture, the alt-right actually perpetuates this a great deal, and so can never serve to restore the medieval values it fetishizes, any more than Western backpackers in Kathmandu or pilgrims in Jerusalem’s Old City can really experience something deeper than is possible anywhere else in the modern world.

In these circumstances, white nationalism is a low grade, one-dimensional reaction, but not an entirely illogical or emotionally illegitimate one, and I concur with a great deal of the WN critique. So while I personally am not a white nationalist, I wouldn’t disavow the label. Yes, me, a not self-hating half-Hebrew. If a left-leaning colleague or fellow dinner guest were to accuse me of being a white nationalist, not only would I not genuflect, I would defend white nationalism. (The same goes for a lot of ideologies I disagree with. If voting Republican makes me a Nazi according to some deluded person, then if I choose to answer him, I’ll be answering as a Nazi in any case. If you wouldn’t split a hair, why split a tree trunk?)

The most common argument from those on the far right who want to disassociate themselves from white nationalism is to deride it as inauthentic (i.e., merely an internet phenomenon), its followers as largely mouth-breathing, autistic, and pathetic; and to argue that race is an inadequate criteria to judge people by, because it’s too inclusive, rather than local and pragmatic. Jack Donovan’s variation on this argument, in a 2017 essay entitled “Why I am not a White Nationalist,” is one of the most widely read that I’ve seen:

I’ve learned to hate white people and White Nationalists more than any of their opponents. Not because they are evil monsters, but because they generally suck. I hate white people and White Nationalists because they are weak, broken, phenomenally autistic, or all three.

I agree 100%. But no nationalist loves all his people, and there are ardent believers in every cause who personally can’t stand the bulk of their fellow travelers. Freud called this “the narcissism of the small difference.” Its rich history can be seen in intra-party purity squabbles and religious schisms of every kind. So why would someone who might otherwise be associated with white nationalism want to distance himself from it?

Having used Richard Spencer’s conferences to promote himself, Jack Donovan now has a pinky toe in the mainstream (and, unlike most ruthlessly self-promoting internet personalities, has earned his stripes to talk shit about whomever he pleases.) So there’s nothing mysterious about his disavowal, whatever the rationale may be. But what about those who have less visibility, and less concern for the opinions of the multitude, with all its potential customers? Why would some anonymous and otherwise right-leaning person draw the proverbial line at the alt-right? Clearly, all this demonstrates is the desire to remain neutral on a moving train. Whiteness as an end in itself is plainly retarded, but right-wingers of nearly any stripe who have misgivings about white identity politics are nevertheless going to have to stop beating around the bush and acknowledge, sooner or later, that whiteness is an unavoidable distinguishing factor in their views and interests, and that non-whites who side with them are, to some degree, siding with whiteness. If saying so gets me labelled a white nationalist, then turning around like Donovan does and projecting that label on ol’ Neckbeard McJergens or some similar straw man out of central casting, is bad faith, not to mention collusion with those doing the labelling.

Mencius Moldbug’s 2007 essay on the subject (like Donovan’s, entitled “Why I am not a White Nationalist”) argues from the class-not-race angle (as if class and race are mutually exclusive considerations), and that white nationalism is inherently ineffective, due to its taboo radioactivity in the mainstream. All true—again, whiteness as an end in itself is clearly retarded. But at the risk of forfeiting all nuance and aloofness, this line of argument avoids the issue. So if whiteness and white people per se don’t mean anything to you, just wait and see how you like it when there is no more whiteness to mean anything.

 

An Introduction to Hermeticism

Bapholment

Okay: I’m going to reveal something crazy deep that sounds counter-intuitive. Stay with me. Are you ready? Here goes:

Hermeticism is bullshit; elaborate riddles and intimations of great profundity masking empty smugness and rapacity. It’s a cool-kids’ circle jerk, and the cool-kids are all Dorian Gray with one fuckin’ mirror in front and another behind:

“There is a substance that comes from your…..” wherever, the obvious implication (because Christianity “has been altered”) being that, once revealed, the esoteric is the only real insight in scripture. Of course, a narcissistic minion like Jim Carey is not the finest exponent of this thinking, but he’s the perfect product of it.

Keep in mind that I’m not denying that the Bible is full of pre-Abrahamic wisdom and imagery. I’m not saying you’re going to burn in hell if you don’t hew only to the exoteric and take it all literally. But the esoteric, astrologic and pre-Abrahamic stuff is embedded in scripture because it’s being made subordinate to the moral order of the Supreme Being. It’s not saying “do what thou wilt” between the lines.

This solipsistic pop-exegesis and schlock number magick is utterly literalistic and narrow, amounting to what is referred to in Judaism as making use of the Crown (as in Pirke Avot, “He who makes use of the Crown shall perish.”) Whatever control-freak nonsense made its way into the Talmud, Hadith, the Pauline epistles, etc., whatever may or may not be encoded in scripture from the Egyptians or the Babylonians or the Pythagorean Hermaphrodites, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the simplicity of faith. If Christianity’s Jewish roots are any indication, the only real way to the Son is through the Father. The Kingdom of Heaven, the Tao, the Brahman, the Son, morphic resonance (whatever you want to call it) is a gift contingent upon good will and moral restraint. Just because you’re a special snowflake doesn’t mean there can be more than one non-contingent entity. “As above, so below” becomes the credo of Babel when metaphysics becomes atheistic. This is why monotheism opposes “star worship” and magic. It isn’t a divorce of metaphysics from nature, it’s the only way nature can be understood metaphysically.

By the way, Christianity and Islam are at bottom no more universal than ancient Judaism was. They highlight boundaries in the world. All three place the believer at odds with corporeality, fundamental error, and self deception. Whereas all you need to know about the Occult is its emphasis on secrecy, and personal attainment.

May I humbly suggest the following sources instead?:

“There is no enchantment against Jacob; no divination against Israel.” (Numbers 23:23)

“Be not wise in thine own eyes: fear the LORD, and depart from evil.” (Proverbs 3:7)

“Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.” (Mark 10:15)

“Do not be sure of yourself until the day of your death.” ―Pirke Avot

“Understand that for every rule which I have mentioned from the Quran, the Devil has one to match it, which he puts beside the proper rule to cause error.” ―Al-Ghazali

A fig leaf for sanity

This dude has a problem with homos?

I just read the SCOTUS decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission and I have to say, Justice Ginsburg’s dissent—though disingenuous on numerous points—is more logically consistent than the majority opinion. The fact is, gay marriage cannot, and was never meant to coexist with the free exercise of religion. “Well if your stupid Flying Spaghetti Monster wasn’t such a goddamned bigot….” I rest my case. (See also: “Real Jesus loves everybody just the way they are.”)

But Masterpiece is not actually a victory for religion, or the free exercise thereof. All this case does is differentiate conscientious objection from actual freedom. It’s a protracted religious test at the behest of scorned, chubby poofters, with the result that only the inscrutable fig-leaf of religion at its most passive and irrational now merits a carve-out, so long as you can satisfy a roulette wheel of vindictive bureaucrats that it’s all just in your head; whereas a straightforward moral rationale against the enfranchisement of sexual deviance would never, on its face, have stood a chance here. With Obergefell, such uncomfortable questions about public morality were effectively rendered hypothetical, merely philosophical, historical curiosities. With Masterpiece, they’re now conveniently quarantined (unlike AIDS.)

Of course, like killing a fetus, the scope of the Court’s purview is procedural, not moral. So: does a retailer have a right to inquire what I intend to use his product for, as a prerequisite of doing business? If so (a big “if”), does he have a right to refuse if he dislikes my answer? That depends. In Masterpiece, Phillips (the baker) was presumably being asked to include some message (“Congratulations Adam and Steve,” a couple of little plastic grooms, etc.) That would be compelled speech, a matter the Court already settled in Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian & Bisexual Group of Boston. But that’s not the issue this decision focuses on. Rather, Masterpiece is about whether Phillip’s religious beliefs were duly taken into account by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission (boy, that sure sounds like an impartial body, doesn’t it?)

Indeed, the inverse case cited by Philips’ attorneys—of one William Jack, a hellfire-and-brimstone Okie from Muskogee who submitted complaints to the Commission against three separate bakers for their respective refusals to decorate cakes for him with biblical verses condemning homolingus—is a bad analogy to Masterpiece, because in the latter case, the Commission was considering (or refusing to consider) a religious exemption; whereas, in the former three cases, it was compelled speech that was the issue.

But according to the majority, there was another problem with the way speech was treated by the Commission:

The Commission ruled against Phillips in part on the theory that any message on the requested wedding cake would be attributed to the customer, not to the baker. Yet the Division did not address this point in any of the cases involving requests for cakes depicting anti-gay marriage symbolism.

This is highly telling, and Ginsburg doesn’t really have a rebuttal, so she ultimately addresses another difference between the two cases, one that’s more pliant to her purposes:

The different outcomes the Court features do not evidence hostility to religion of the kind we have previously held to signal a free-exercise violation, nor do the comments by one or two members of one of the four decisionmaking entities considering this case justify reversing the judgment below.

The first half of that sentence seems to me factually sound. But there are two problems here. First, Ginsburg comes very close to saying that the Commission’s rationale is irrelevant. Secondly—of course the different outcomes do not evidence hostility to religion per se. Rather, the peculiar way Phillips’ case was adjudicated evidences hostility to his religion in particular. Obviously, the “love-wins” Unitarian community did not file an amicus brief in support of Masterpiece Cakeshop. Neither is Phillips alleging that the Commission’s ruling implied disapproval of Reform Jews, androgynous Episcopalians, or anglo-Buddhist hot-tubbers. In fact, the notion that a ruling against Phillips would compromise such peoples’ rights, even just in principle, involves quite a stretch of the imagination. So the Court’s decision necessarily grants “religion” a wide berth because otherwise, we persons of Sodom might have to acknowledge what religion actually is, and this here ain’t America if you can’t have your cake and eat it, too.

In any case, the comments Ginsburg is referring to are treated more seriously by the majority:

As the record shows, some of the commissioners at the Commission’s formal, public hearings endorsed the view that religious beliefs cannot legitimately be carried into the public sphere or commercial domain, disparaged Phillips’ faith as despicable and characterized it as merely rhetorical, and compared his invocation of his sincerely held religious beliefs to defenses of slavery and the Holocaust. No commissioners objected to the comments. Nor were they mentioned in the later state-court ruling or disavowed in the briefs filed here. The comments thus cast doubt on the fairness and impartiality of the Commission’s adjudication of Phillips’ case.

A lot hinges there on the word thus, and Ginsburg’s dissent sidesteps and downplays most of it. But she’s right that a carve-out is being created here for discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, and to that extent her dissent has greater rhetorical force and logical consistency than the majority opinion.

Ultimately, however, the Masterpiece decision does not merely create a carve-out for religious discrimination against gays. Rather, it creates a carve-out for religious discrimination against gays that affirms the otherwise wholesale banishment of religion from public life; an exception that proves the rule.

Ginsburg again:

Colorado, the Court does not gainsay, prohibits precisely the discrimination Craig and Mullins encountered. Jack, on the other hand, suffered no service refusal on the basis of his religion or any other protected characteristic.

Again, William Jack wanted a cake with anti-homosexual Bible verses on it; three bakers refused, and were vetted by the Commission. They should no more be compelled to make him a cake than Phillips should be compelled to provide one for Craig and Mullins’ wedding. But if objection to decorating a cake with biblical verses on it—on the basis of what those verses say—isn’t “refusal on the basis of religion,” I don’t know what is. And that’s not a carve-out that will ever require defending before the Supreme Court. On the other hand, the carve-out that Masterpiece provides for is tenuous, and remains open to challenge: Jack Philips is being allowed to discriminate not on account of his sincerely held beliefs, but because those beliefs were belittled and not taken seriously prior to being rejected by the Commission.

Reductio ad Iudaeoram, Pt. V

The world’s foremost problem

(Part I here, Part II here, Part III here, Part IV here)

“The persistence with which the Jewish-conspiracy myth has been pushed suggests that it may well be a deliberate device to divert attention from the real issues and the real causes.” —Antony Sutton

In The Forest Passage (1951), Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) references Oedipus and the Sphinx to illustrate that the psychic scar tissue obscuring our inmost vitality represents a fear to be overcome, just as the forest is at once a refuge, and a place of deep foreboding.

Jünger was a radical individualist, a believer in the ultimate prerogative of the rarified spirit—in some sense intensely Christian, yet also a Nietzschean relativist of sorts—and it occurred to me when reading him that Heidegger, in contrast, by asking “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” took man’s confrontation with the void in the exact opposite direction, i.e., outward. This suicidally literal-minded question is analogous to Nazism’s misspent intensity and titanic hubris.

Perhaps not incidentally, Heidegger was an enthusiastic party member, while Jünger openly disdained the NSDAP, resigning from his WWI veteran’s association when its Jewish members were expelled.

We’ve covered neofascism quite a bit here at Utter Contempt. It certainly has its virtues. It’s highly transgressive, for one. But is it off the plantation? Well, if you buy the kabuki theater that the Mueller investigation is anything other than a tour bus for Biff Tannen to throw his used-up associates under, that Vince McMahon’s sparing partner was in earnest with his Father Coughlin impersonation (only to slip on a banana peel and wind up co-opted by Jared from Subway), or that white nationalism is a real heavy counterweight to DARPA, the Syndicate and the Bank for International Settlements, then you may just be the type who’ll love Red Ice Radio‘s asinine slogan: “The future is the past.”

Don’t get me wrong: I love the alt-right. The destruction of the middle class is inextricable from the war on whites, and the alt-right is the only remotely cogent perspective on this. Every time I open up my web browser to take in a Red Ice podcast, or a Daily Stormer article, I tell myself emphatically, “God bless the Daily Stormer. God bless Red Ice. These people are truly doing God’s work.” And their criticism of Jews is usually, mostly apt. But there are plenty of Jews who aren’t part of the problem, and plenty of the problem that isn’t caused by Jews, and a dyed-in-the-wool alt-right perspective just doesn’t include headspace for nuance. I’ll readily concede that fascism and Nazism are vastly more complex and interesting than mainstream discourse suggests. But the simple fact is, if you can bring yourself to strongly, consistently sympathize with Hitler and to believe his regime essentially “did nothing wrong,” you’re a pawn. You’re part of the problem.

I can already hear the chorus of execration: “We know your game, Jew. You’re just plugging your ethnic interests.” Quite so. Obviously I’m alt-right because I’m half-Aryan. But I’m relieved as hell to have this half-Jewish splinter in my red-pilled eye, because if I didn’t, I’d have been spergging out at Charlottesville with all the other career suicides. Rather than a casual listener, I’d be an outright camp traveller of that real life Eric Cartman, Mike Enoch. I’d be drinking the red Kool-Aid, instead of just wistfully admiring the beads of condensation on the glass. So if our impulse as humans beings is to go full retard then I’m relieved as hell to’ve been born in goggles and an orthopedic bicycle helmet (with half a star of David on it.)

Every alt-right webzine has the obligatory post denouncing “(((Hollywood Nazis)))”, bad optics, people who see Jews in their sandwiches, etc., but this all comes with at least a smidgeon of bad faith, because there can be no moderates among pamphleteers. Of course it’s possible to be moderately anti-semitic, but not when you’re podcasting about it, and counter-signaling ol’ Cletus McJergens just shows disdain for your intended audience. But then, we’re talking about a movement that distributes its redpills exclusively via the matrix. Obviously, a cybernetic panopticon can only free your mind so much. After that, if you’re still online, you’re just making excuses.

For example, the following pile of garble from Patreon panhandler Chateau Heartiste (I’m a fan, but I’m not going to go easy on him here):

Ted Colt notices,

“One needn’t look further than a Wikipedia article describing NeoConservative history to comprehend the connection between neocons & free trade

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism

EVERY! FUCKING! TIME!

If your Alt-Right brand isn’t ‘anti-semitic’ then you’re not alt-right”

I prefer the more accurate term of art “countersemitic”. (The ADL, unsurprisingly, does not.) We are countering the malicious agenda of a hostile minority intent on drowning us in foreign invaders, trite consumerism, backbreaking debt, endless interventionist wars, and basically anything that destroys the historical and cultural bonds of the majority’s community, neighborhood, town, and nation.

Wow. Ted Colt, huh? “Branding,” while bitching about consumerism. “No further than Wikipedia,” indeed. (Isn’t that a Jew-run outfit?) It tires me to argue with this middle-school caliber copy-pasta, to rattle off litanies of phenomena that are driving world events, other than a conspicuous handful of Jews being wealthy, disgusting, and politically active; or to point out that Zionists are about as sinister as every other foreign and domestic grifter-set milling around, raining bukake on the bloated, insensate pudding vagina we have for a system in this country, hoping the next queef out of Congress will blow their direction.

What has been analogized to humor can be analogized to so-called game: you can dissect a frog, but the thing dies in the process. And of course, if sincerity doesn’t work for you, the problem isn’t your tactics, it’s you. If you have to ask, you’ll never know, and Chateau caters to a readership that’s always asking. That’s the problem with alt-media, it’s like couple’s therapy, the point is to pay the therapist. So what do I care about some vindictive little self-help feed for beta-anons with anxious delusions of Clevon-like virility?

Well, anthropologically-speaking, what interests me here is that Chateau’s JQ-woke Aspergers is obviously cribbed without blinking from Kevin MacDonald, the evolutionary psychologist [in]famous for his thesis that Judaism is a “group evolutionary strategy” aimed at subverting Gentile host societies. Now, I’m no fancy-pants evolutionary psychologist, but if by “group evolutionary strategy” we mean anything that involves, you know, not being legally handicapped and regularly massacred for twenty centuries at a stretch everywhere from Malaga to Mosul (plus a millennium of cousin marriage, which is evidently bad for selection) then the suggestion that Judaism is a “group evolutionary strategy” is ridiculous on its face. I’m happy to hear out any conspiracy theory, but if your culprit is evolutionary psychology, then you’re getting a bit ahead of yourself.

But these are all just superficial arguments. Who wouldn’t agree that ethnic groups have fixed qualities? That stereotypes have a basis? So it’s not that you can’t fill in an awful lot of blanks with MacDonald’s theory, it’s just that, in the big picture, it doesn’t explain nearly so much of what it purports to, e.g., “foreign invaders, trite consumerism, backbreaking debt, endless interventionist wars, and basically anything that destroys the historical and cultural bonds of the majority’s community, neighborhood, town, and nation.” Who else but Jews could’ve been the ruin of a nation founded by lawyers, speculators, mercantilists and Dr. Johnson’s “drivers of negroes”? Do you really want to hang all your righteous fury at this world on the victimization-by-Jews theory? Have you seen Jews? (Can you show me on the doll where they hurt you?)

If nothing else, however, what you might take from MacDonald’s work is that inter-ethnic enmity is a two-way street—especially if you’ve been fire-hosed your entire life with the liberal narrative of perennial white guilt. But his thesis is the exact inverse of that, so the street is still one-way:

With his thousand-year-old mercantile dexterity he is far superior to the still helpless, and above all boundlessly honest, Aryans…. While he seems to overflow with ‘enlightenment,’ ‘progress,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘humanity,’ etc., he himself practices the severest segregation of his race…. His ultimate goal in this stage is the victory of ‘democracy’…. It is most compatible with his requirements; for it excludes the personality and puts in its place the majority characterized by stupidity, incompetence, and last but not least, cowardice….

….und so weiter. I guess a plurality’s better than a full majority. (As for boundless honesty, that point can probably best be disputed by the Plains Indians. Or Thucydides, or Chaucer, or Shakespeare, or Dale Carnegie. Was PT Barnum of Hebrew descent, or just the bearded lady?)

The full-retard anti-semite will usually balk at being associated with Hitler, calling it a libel although he agrees with der führer entirely. But I didn’t just quote Mein Kampf in order to associate Kevin MacDonald with the Austrian corporal—there’d be no need for that. Rather, I’m quoting Hitler in order to provide the smidgeon of contrast necessary for pointing out how incredibly innovative and thoughtful a theory like MacDonald’s would be, in spite of every flaw—if it was original. But it isn’t. On the contrary, it’s the most recycled theory of history in all of history. If you stumbled upon it as if upon a revelation, and felt your scattered erudition suddenly bundle itself tightly into a faggot (or fasces, if you prefer) of clarity and purpose, then you may as well be holding a bouquet of balloons there, luftmensch. 

Perhaps for this reason, the utility of this shibboleth is not lost on up-and-coming merch-pimps, aspiring alt-media gadflies and PayPal/Patreon panhandlers. Getting slapped on an ADL hate list is now marketable martyrdom, such that cookie-cutter manifestos and Hitlerian little memoirs of awakening are regularly produced by non-entities as varied as (for example) Roosh V and Squatting Slav. The former, a self-styled manosphere pick-up artist, writes prolifically at a seventh-grade reading level about his sexual encounters on the road in developing countries. Undoubtedly by mawwing the requisite JQ-dribblings, he was able to secure a time slot to hustle his fetid, unedited self-publishings one year at Richard Spencer’s NPI conference (a controlled-opp termite’s nest if ever there was one), despite being a patently non-white immigrant with a beady-eyed sociopath’s countenance. Squatting Slav, meanwhile, hawks hoodies on a satirical pan-Slavic FB meme-page that can claim the minor feat of having gained a few hundred-thousand former-Yugoslav followers, not only despite their own intractable enmities but in spite of the admin’s unabashed Serb-posting. Apparently unaware (or unashamed) of the arming of the Serbs by Israel during the 1990s, and of the singularly barbaric WWII massacres perpetrated against his people by and with the support of the Nazis, even Mr. Squat could not get past the apparent need to clear the air by regurgitating the MacDonald-redux of their theories into a handful of v-log tutorials. Because you can’t fully appreciate repetitive jokes about rakia and pickled tomatoes without being JQ-woke, I guess.

Then there’s wall-eyed Lana Lokteff of Red Ice Radio (I actually enjoy her work, though I won’t go easier on her here than I have on Chateau Heartiste), whose antipathy to all things yiddish is such that she is able to read rootless cosmopolism into the Hasmonean revolt against the Seleucids, recounting it as an instance of Jewish meddling in the sovereign prerogatives of Gentiles (ROFL.) With logic like this being pervasive on the alt-right, one is entitled to ask whether JQ-spergers is the punchbowl, or the turd—which brings us back to Chateau Heartiste, in an essay defending kid-fucking:

Say what you will about Roy Moore, at least his girls agreed to date him (even if they retconned a discomfort 40 years later). The Synagogue of Seediness doesn’t bother with the formality of mutual agreement, they just passive-aggressively jam tongues down throats “to rehearse our lines”.

Of course, Chateau absolutely condones those tactics (that’s half of what his blog is about— assuming the sale) unless the perp is tribal—the latter reference being to Al Franken, who at least targeted grown women. But if this twerp really believes his forever hypothetical 14-year old daughter would be qualified to give Roy Moore consent, you’ve at least got to commend his intra-Gentile solidarity.

But this is all just grist for the infotainment landfill. What do a bazillion YouTube views and Twitter followers really add up to? Just look at the Charlottesville dumpster fire of mouth-breathing self-abusers and agents provocateurs, with Richard Spencer condemning violence in a therapeutic lilt as cops and revelers died of tidbit-nipply passive aggression gotten out of hand, and his associates went to jail. Even if he’s a fed (or a lizard person or an ancient alien) so what? You may not consider him your personal führer (who really consciously has leaders nowadays, anyway? The whole reason we have the internet is for distancing and plausible deniability) but the fact is, Spencer’s as alt-right/WN as it gets—and the sum total of his activity is to expose himself and a half-dozen sycophants to jeering and tomato throwing at huge cost to municipal resources. He’s nothing more than Milo with street-cred. Pure clownworld—or worse, the apotheosis of Nietzsche’s “worm-eaten men” to compliment clownworld.

Can it really be the case that the bulk of alt-right people don’t remember the aughts? A mere ten, twelve years ago we were finding out on obscure websites and YouTube channels that a cabal deep inside corporate and government elite circles had murdered 3,000 Americans on September 11th as part of a nefarious long-term agenda. Clearly this agenda is anti-white, in part. Clearly this cabal is disproportionately made up of Jews. But if you think that Judaism is what their agenda is all about, you don’t have a beam in your eye, you have your eye in a beam.

One of the Delphic maxims was “When you are a stranger, act as one.” This is not about cultural relativism or individualism. It means that we can only measure the unfamiliar by our own experience. To approach others as best we can on their terms is to abide by the golden rule. Julius Evola once said, “[A] woman who is perfectly woman is superior to a man who is imperfectly man, just as a farmer who is faithful to his land and performs his work perfectly is superior to a king who cannot do his own work.” To be red-pilled, for the intellectually low-caliber, is to be appalled, over and over, that the system is against you, and to be upset, and point the blame. But even the intellectually or racially or socially inferior deserve to be measured only against their best selves. And whatever you may think of Jewish leftists, lobbyists, pornographers, and tech oligarchs, a Jew you don’t know is a stranger to you, and if you can’t regard a stranger with the forbearance the Delphic maxim demands—or bear the malfeasance of a confirmed enemy with an ordered mind and a basic cognizance of his humanity—then your pronouncements about what ought to or shouldn’t be are meaningless.

As Jünger puts it in The Forest Passage:

An assault on the inviolability, on the sacredness of the home, would have been impossible in old Iceland in the way it was carried out in 1933, among a million inhabitants of Berlin, as a purely administrative measure. A laudable exception deserves mention here, that of a young social democrat who shot down half a dozen so-called auxiliary policemen at the entrance of his apartment. He still partook of the substance of the old Germanic freedom, which his enemies only celebrated in theory…. Naturally, he did not get this from his party’s manifesto….

But he sure as shit didn’t get it from Mein Kampf, and you’re not gonna get it from Kevin MacDonald, either. How many people on the alt-right are the “so-called auxiliary policemen, celebrating in theory” and how many are the young social democrat? To ask the question is to answer it.

Gaying Away the Prey, Part Trois

an allegory of the power of acceptance

(Part 1 here, Part Deux here)

We’ve all heard the refrain:

“There’s no such thing as pure homo- or hetero- sexuality, because sexual preference is spectral, rather than a set of fixed categories.”

The problem with this assumption is that it reflects an overeagerness to categorize. For example, I sometimes have thoughts of self-harm. These thoughts do not arise in response to social situations where I’m upset with myself or with someone else. They hit me quite out of the blue, every several weeks, and I find them momentarily quite disturbing, but basically tolerable. This has been going on for decades, and my theory is that these thoughts reflect my fear of real possibilities, with my brain’s fear-centers overzealously doing their job by magnifying them into eventualities, then taking the additional step of telling me to rip the proverbial band-aid clean off. I’ve never acted on these thoughts—as I mentioned, I find them disturbing, but not the least bit compelling.

Does this make me someone who is prone to self-harm? If those categories are spectral and not fixed, where do I fall on the spectrum? Supposing we all—every member of the species—harbor such thoughts in varying degrees. If the vast majority of us don’t experience them as compelling but find them revolting, never act upon them, and harbor a consistent and far stronger sense of imperative not to commit them, would it still be fair to say that we’re all relatively prone to self-harm, and that no truly fixed categories exist in this regard? Even if it were a true statement, would it be a fair or practically actionable one?

The mythologist Joseph Campbell recounts an ancient Persian myth about a couple who were so enamoured of their toddler offspring that they ate them, and were punished for it by the gods. Abraham, the patriarch of three religions, turned his bastard son and the boy’s mother out to die in the wilderness, and was ready to sacrifice his only heir. Anyone who is minimally self-aware and honest with themselves surely realizes that a great many unspeakable primordial impulses are latent in us, from murder, rape and incest to scapegoating, witch hunting and child sacrifice, but we only categorize people by those impulses who experience them frequently, with deep viscerality, and find them compelling. So pure heterosexuality exists as surely as people who don’t eat their young aren’t child-eaters.

Another problem with this refrain about sexuality being spectral and therefore not truly amenable to standard categorization is that it’s as much a rationale as a plain finding. In any case, the only time anybody feels the need to point it out strictly in regard to non-normative orientations is when they’re trying to assure themselves that they’re normal, (i.e., only a closeted dude who’s in bed with Larry ever says, “You know, there’s no such thing as a true homo, Larry.”) Like Tony Montana’s “Say goodnight to the bad guy” monologue in Scarface, the criminal likes to remind everyone else that in principle they’re no better than he is. Only after you’ve stolen something do you start to ask yourself, “Well, what is theft, really?”

But just as we all harbor certain icky, primordial impulses to some degree, our revulsion toward what we innately feel is repulsive in others is informed by what we ourselves feel ashamed of.

That’s why gay pride parades and now Pride Month are backed by Fortune 100 companies that sponsor compulsory diversity and sensitivity training. It’s why every elite-astroturfed media outlet machinates conspicuously to expose audiences to non-normative sexuality, and why California passed a law in 2012 requiring public schools to teach about “LGBT Americans” in every grade from K through 12. What’s good doesn’t require that anyone be convinced to accept it—other than a colonoscopy.

Sanctuary of Shamelessness

The secret of a master deal-maker

I never would’ve thought Donald Trump and Mahmoud Darwish had anything much in common, but hearing Trump make his announcement this morning recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital reminded me of the same banality of holiness evoked in Darwish’s “A Soldier Dreams of White Lillies.”

Like anything—not least our 45th president—that poem has its flaws. Not incidental to those flaws, the Arab threats of violence in the matter of Jerusalem are frivolous, narcissistic and—above all—boring, even if they’re followed through upon. But then, so is Jewish whining, and threats of counter-measures. 

The first Arab riots against Zionist designs on Jerusalem were sparked in 1929 by allegations that the placement of a dozen chairs and a cloth mekhitza for elderly Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall was a prelude to the destruction of the al-Aksa mosque. As of 2017, fifty years of Israeli administration has entailed a great deal of covetous malfeasance, but not the slightest disrespect of the Noble Sanctuary. Yet the Muslims never tire of this pretext, and such outbreaks are veritably seasonal in Jerusalem, because the original Zionist provocation has always been assertiveness on the part of a non-Muslim minority. Political repression is par for the course in the mideast, with or without Israel, and in almost every Muslim land, some ethnic or religious minority is constrained to know its place, and know it well. 

Not incidentally, Jewish non-combatants are better protected today than they were in 1929, because a Palestinian protest is rarely just that, and international audiences witnessing Israeli troops fire tear gas canisters into throngs of Arab men don’t generally realize the appetite of the Palestinian resistance for violent confrontation is not restrained by scruples regarding age, gender, or non-combatant status—nor, until quite recently, has it ever been readily divisible into violent and non-violent branches.

So for Trump to be deterred by the Arab street’s predictable reaction would be pusillanimous, regardless of whether his Jerusalem decision was a wise one. But the arbitration of highly sensitive religious matters by the star of The Apprentice may not be the biggest irony here. That among all the gravely concerned world leaders opposing him in the matter, the one whose objections carry the most moral force is the sinister pope, Francis—a gilded, pharisaical career accomplice to the foulest possible acts of sexual predation—is a commentary all its own. The conventional wisdom is that the international community indulges Israel and tolerates Palestinian suffering, but generally speaking, the extent of world outcry on the Palestinians’ behalf is greater, more sustained and less proportionate to the corollary offenses against them than any sympathy the Jews have ever managed to elicit, certainly from the Vatican, and including during the Holocaust. Palestine sympathy comes so much more naturally, and massacre of Jews just feels too familiar to be condemned without nuance: a consensus that Israel ought to be prepared at all times to absorb a modicum of civilian casualties—without response, as a matter of course—exists among world bodies, governments, NGOs and news agencies that would never be so much as whispered to Muslims as a suggestion.

Since the Oslo Accords went into effect not only Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the PFLP but the PLO (through its bad-cop Tanzim faction—essentially a death squad) has carried out dozens of attacks on Israeli civilians. So when PLO officials and PLO-affiliated scions of Palestinian civil society like Marwan Bishara, in his capacity as a TV host for Al Jazeera, warn that bloodshed will result from Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, they aren’t forecasting the weather—they’re making a threat. Of course they don’t mean to be understood this way by anyone but the Jews. Surely (to some degree) they don’t even understand themselves this way, because the Palestinians are always supposed, and suppose themselves, to lack agency. Like the dozen chairs which provoked them to a frenzy of murder in 1929, they don’t think, they only react. Supposing we grant this premise, then when Ismail Haniyeh warns that Trump has “opened the gates of hell” with his decision: who are the demons?

But if the Muslims are evil to covet Jerusalem, the Jews are evil for clinging to it, and ought to be put in mind of an Arab proverb: “Where there is concession, there is strength.” For what is Jerusalem? I recall it as a dusty, mildewy disappointment, like a woman who has to be gazed from a very peculiar angle to be thought beautiful; the Dome of the Rock as a lid rattling precariously atop a broiling, apoplectic sense of entitlement; the Holy Sepulcher as a dreary, vulgar little tourist trap akin to an amusement park haunted house. And the Western Wall? That Jews should venerate and kill and be killed for that stupid, ugly pile of bricks left behind by Herod—a sadistic Quisling—is the very definition of idolatry that Judaism once cut its teeth rooting out.

So I don’t use the word “evil” lightly. Israeli administration of Jerusalem has from the very beginning involved strategically needless property theft, selective destruction of historical sites and expulsion of innocent people from their homes. In 2007, this was ratcheted up to the worst form of desecration: the wholesale removal of medieval Muslim graves to a trash dump and their replacement by a Wiesenthal “Museum of Human Dignity” (seriously) atop the former grounds of the Mamilla Cemetery, just over the Green Line from the Old City. But Israel’s “unified eternal capital” is, indeed, an interactive museum, teetering precariously on the nape of what normal, everyday life still manages to persist there. It belongs in the same general category as Florida’s Holy Land Experience, or the Kentucky Creation Museum, but at least those institutions’ proprietorship doesn’t require recurring blood sacrifice (or grave robbery.) There is so beauty in Israel, but to the extent the place is ugly, it’d be a lot less so without the Old City of Jerusalem and the mischief that the coveting of holy relics always inspires:

Reductio ad Iudaeoram, Pt. IV

Comes in handy

(Part I here, Part II here, Part III here)

One upshot to the profusion of online Hitler sympathy this past decade is that it shows how brittle American liberal indoctrination really is, despite its insidiousness. Of course, it also shows that older habits tend to die harder.

To wit: every now and again some earnest little yid blogger pokes his head up on an alt-right podcast and tries to explain that we’re not all that bad—while agreeing that indeed, we are all that bad. It’s a bit like playing dead: contrition itself is supposed to be a point in the Jews’ defense.

Now, if your experience tells you that Jews are oily, pushy, whiny, loud, snide, solipsistic and cheap, well…. Join the club: so does mine (though only a couple of those apply to me). Perhaps you live in a community somewhere back east where the ethnic fault lines are long standing, and over the decades each of the local constituencies has made a certain impression on its neighbors—well and good. If it’s a matter of navigating daily life and real relationships, stereotype away, for all I care. But when we refer here to anti-semitism, what we mean is the full-retard pamphleteering variety, a worldview mediated secondhand, a partial flight of fancy:

Though it exposes me as a third-rate intellectual at best, and although he was a bit of a huckster and a charlatan, I’ll go ahead and quote the late Christopher Hitchens in this connection:

The Nazis thought of Slavs and Gypsies as racial inferiors by all means, but the organizing principle of their racism, the thing that gave it its energy and its consistency was the hatred of the Jew….. Would it be believed by anybody, if it was said that all the Armenians left the World Trade Center before the planes hit, or all the Irish? I don’t think so. It has to be the Jews, it’s not exciting if it’s not. It would be a mere vulgar prejudice; there’s not enough traction and grit and flavor to it, unless it’s the real thing.

Again: if experience recommends wariness of a given human group, then be wary—end of story. Self-defense, after all, is a dish best served cold, and sparingly. And xenophobia is clearly evolutionary—it needs no laborious rationale, no theory, no social approval. But for the full-retard anti-ZOG pamphleteer, there’s no adrenaline in that, no hard-on, no quasi-mystical shivers. For them, the case is so open-and-shut they can never shut up about it.

Henry Kissinger once said that a people that’s been persecuted for 2,000 years is doing something wrong. A certain Luke would beg to differ that being persecuted necessarily means you’re in the wrong, but he didn’t much like Jews, either. In any case, a people that beats those kinds of odds has also got to be doing something right.

All the same, you might think it would be worthwhile for the Jews’ own sake to at least engage with their worst critics and try to learn something from them. But hesitance to fully recognize hostility can only play as sycophancy. Indeed, when you reach out to full-retard anti-semites (lots of those abroad in the world nowadays) what you’re invariably going to find is that the burden of proof falls exclusively upon the semite. Your every overture is taken both as subterfuge and servility. Your every word short of utter self-abnegation amounts to proof of incorrigibility, no matter what you’ve conceded—and so does self-abnegation. There is literally nothing that can be proved to these types. Perhaps you share alt-right or far-left concerns about the complicity of Jews in systems of power you oppose, but that’s never how anti-semites see you, and the only effective way to deal with execration is with a grin, and a middle finger. Full-retard anti-semitism (right or left) is not about opposing systems of power per se; rather, it is the vocation of finding fault with yidden. It’s a manichaean template that confers total absolution from shame, and earnestness is poison when you’re dealing with a shameless interlocutor. As soon as you give him the time of day, you’re taking on all the shame in the equation.

Take, for example, the following aside (~29:00-30:00) from alt-right agitator Mike Enoch on that episode of The Daily Shoah podcast I hyperlinked above (the one with the yiddle-diddle blogger guest interviewee.) Here Enoch’s talking about the HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm:

We had this conversation today where we were talking about Larry David, that fucking stupid show where he runs around being Jewish…. and someone [some fellow anti-semite] was like, ‘Oh no, but it’s hilarious because he’s so Jewish [that] he’s fucking over even other Jews.‘ And I’m like, yeah, but at some point I just want to be done with this Jewish psychological shit, I don’t want to be sucked into this world of the Jewish fucking inner turmoil, I just want to be done with it.

Um…. excuse me? You guys are the ones with a three-times weekly podcast called The Daily Shoah (“shoah”=Hebrew for Holocaust) that’s going on its 200th episode at 2+ hours apiece, and in every single one, you discuss Jews at length. No schtick fatigue? I get that plutocrats and media mandarins are disproportionately Jewish, that such power ought to be accessible to satire, and I can at least respect the alt-right for its irreverence, but…. You “want to be done“? The fuck outta here. What would you even do with yourselves at that point?

Someone who claims to have caught a whiff of sulfuric old Beelzebub is liable to be reminded that whoever smelt it dealt it (it’s called negative transference.) Yet the self-flagellating little yid blogger guest on the podcast ends up agreeing with Enoch about yiddishkeit in showbiz: “Right, this is 2% of the population, why is this the thing that’s being constantly put in front of us?” I don’t know, why are there so goddamned many steers in Texas? In the words of the great Marshall McLuhan: if you’re seeing it, it’s for you. Someone got you straightjacketed to a theater seat? Lots of options what to watch nowadays. Last I checked, HBO is premium cable. So I’ve heard a lot of anti-semitic tropes in my day, but as these things go, “wanting to be done with the Jewish inner turmoil” that’s “sucking me in” is revealingly bizarre. Whether it’s only tortured logic, or also tortured, sub-rosa yiddishkeit, what it reveals about anti-semitism is the same.

Back in the mid-aughts I was sitting around one weekend with a friend—also Jewish—smoking something stupid and watching one of the hundreds of conspiracy documentaries then mushrooming on the new-fangled YouTube. Up until that time, my conception of Jewish success was that it confirmed the old stereotype about Jewish brains. But due to events like 9/11, the NSA spying scandals and the 2008 financial crisis it was starting to become painfully clear that the height of success in America is something profoundly dark, and that one’s ethnic group being disproportionately implicated in it can be a very bad thing. At one point during the documentary, my friend turned to me and asked, “How are we supposed to cope with the fact that we come from a race of deceivers?”

You might ascribe that sentiment to the influence of drugs, or to half-baked YouTube documentaries. But would you know who agrees with it? Larry David. Here’s how David treated the Weinstein/#MeToo scandal in the opening monologue of a recent episode of Saturday Night Live he hosted (executive summary here):

What’s awkward about this performance? It isn’t the references to sex, or to genocide. It isn’t the uncouthness, or even David’s openness to discomfort. No, what’s awkward about this performance is its sincerity, its utter lack of irony. It’s a public service announcement concealed behind only the most implausible veneer of comedy. Larry David means exactly what he says: he reflexively feels that allegations against a handful of fellow Jews reflect on him, fundamentally. And what’s ironic about the tenebrous self-awareness he exhibits is not some corollary intellectual benefit, but that it’s avoidable, unnecessary, and entirely self inflicted. A gallery of perennially offended professional Jews squawked a bit online the week after this performance, but that’s because they suffer from the same pathology that David does—they aren’t mad because they disagree with what he said, they’re mad because he said it—they feel that he reflects on them, same as David feels about Weinstein. The assumption of responsibility for another person’s crime speaks to a need to feel rejected in order to feel validated. This is why the vindictive sniveling inherent in so much of Judaism locks Jews into a sadomasochistic relationship with anti-semites—the Purim and (to a lesser extent) Passover holidays are great examples of this. (Only Hanukkah represents a genuine triumph of the will.) So unless you limit your Judaism to a given understanding of the divine, an answer to the need for a certain modicum of ritual, and communion with your ancestors, you’ll always be spinning your wheels in a mud puddle of Talmudic agony like some kind of OCD sufferer. (By the way—I don’t know too much Talmud, but I know there’s at least one volume of it that ought to be as popular as the Gospels or the Tao te Ching. It’s called Pirke Avot. Check it out sometime. Guide for the Perplexed is also very good, for similar reasons.)

Professional Jew Jeffrey Goldberg typifies this masochism. I’ve bagged on him here before, so I hate to do it twice, but he’s just too typical. As a teenager, he served as an MP in the IDF (that part’s atypical), then came back to the US and wrote a stupid memoir about his one-sided friendship with a Palestinian terrorist he guarded in a military jail, entitled Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide. The tone-deafness of the title (equating a gaoler with his charge, conflating people’s religion with their entire being) is bad enough. Per the NY Times review:

Rafiq Hijazi [is] the Muslim of the book’s title. The story of their unusual and complicated friendship is at the core of Prisoners, weaving its way through the narrative like a serpentine question mark. It begins with their meeting in 1991 at Ketziot, the Israeli prison filled with thousands of Palestinians arrested during the first Intifada. Rafiq (Fatah-affiliated and deeply religious) was Goldberg’s ”favorite” prisoner. ”I wanted to make Rafiq my friend,” he says. ”I liked that he had the dispassion of an analytical academic in a place notable for its absence of thought. He also had an open-mindedness that to me was a clear sign of inner benevolence.” After their first conversation—separated by a fence—Goldberg had ”a feeling of connection. It was a strange and traitorous feeling, but it was also a true feeling, and it was accompanied by a satisfying frisson of danger and dissent.”

He could be describing an illicit love affair. Except, more than once, and increasingly so as their relationship is tested against the backdrop of violent political developments, it appears to be a case of unrequited love—Rafiq does not seem to be in need of their friendship. They continued to meet, over many years, in different places: at Rafiq’s parents’ home in Gaza, in Washington, where they both lived with their wives and where Rafiq was completing a Ph.D. in statistics, later in Abu Dhabi. There were also frequent long breaks between their meetings, especially after Rafiq—who, Goldberg tells us, had become a fundamentalist—announced that he would not demonstrate against suicide bombings or when he said that if he had to kill his friend, ”it wouldn’t be personal.”

Goldberg is invariably the one to make the next approach: ”I was raised to search out the familiar in the stranger, on the theory that we are all alike. I looked for the familiar in Rafiq, and found it.” The almost pathetic one-sidedness of this friendship, the need to be accepted, liked and understood not only by Rafiq but by other, less moderate political enemies (”I was fascinated by them”) would be almost moving if it didn’t point so obviously back to the old trauma of the rejection by the anti-Semitic bullies in that Long Island playground. Beneath the physical pain and the humiliation, there was always the perennial Jewish question: Why don’t they like me?

Who gives a shit? Does Rafiq have this problem, this tortured relationship with gods and men? Of course not. Rafiq has a proper respect for his place in the natural order of things. His “analytic academic’s dispassion” is a tool, not a ball-and-chain. But at least Jeffrey Goldberg has a choice about whether and what kind of ball and chain to carry around. Not all Jews have been so lucky.

Mihail Sebastian was a Romanian-Jewish linguist and novelist who kept a diary of life in Romania between 1935 and 1944. The manuscript was smuggled to Israel by his brother in 1961 and eventually published as a book after the Cold War. What’s interesting about it is that many fellow Romanian intellectuals whom the author maintained friendships with were vehemently pro-Nazi. According to a 2001 book review in The Irish Times, Sebastian had a remarkable tendency to make excuses for them:

Sebastian’s friend, the charismatic philosopher and teacher Nae Ionescu, who enthusiastically supported the Iron Guard, agreed to write a preface to one of Sebastian’s novels, but when he did, it turned out to be vigorously anti-Semitic.

Ionescu warned the younger man against imagining that he could become assimilated into the gentile community, asking of him “Are you . . . a human being from Braila on the Danube? No, you are a Jew from Braila on the Danube.” Sebastian, in typical fashion, continued to look upon his friend and mentor with fondness, regarding him indulgently merely as a rogue and an opportunist whose heart nevertheless was in the right place; when Ionescu died prematurely in 1940, Sebastian wept in sorrow.

He even found excuses for his friend the novelist, and fascist, Camil Petrescu. When the private houses of Jews were confiscated by order of the government, Petrescu complained to Sebastian that he would probably not be given one; Sebastian said that surely, under the circumstances, his friend would not accept a house even if it were offered to him, at which Petrescu stared at him in surprise and asked: “Why not?”

The type of person who countenances this kind of treatment today will be a school shooter tomorrow, or a mental patient, or a Great Gatsby, but he’ll never be content. So is there anyone more pathetic than the person who devotes time and energy to authoring broadsides about his unmatched malevolence? Our next installment will be about Kevin MacDonald, and his acolytes.