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Contents
Whig Metahistorv
Harari’s Ignorance
The Testimony of Mickey Mouse
Genesis and Evolution
The Gorging Gene
The War on Logos
7
Biological Determinism
8
Truth
Heaven on Earth
to
Super-Qxycontin
li
Animal to God
Endnotes
What is cannot come out of what is not.
Parmenides
And I have noticed that most modern history is driven to something like
sophistry, first to soften the sharp transition from animals to men. ... Most
modern histories of mankind begin with the word evolution, and with a rather
wordy exposition of evolution, for much the same reason that operated in this
case. There is something slow and soothing and gradual about the word and
even about the idea. As a matter of fact, it is not, touching these primary
things, a very practical word or a very profitable idea. Nobody can imagine
how nothing could turn into something. Nobody can get an inch nearer to it
by explaining how something could turn into something else. It is really far
more logical to start by saying ‘In the beginning God created heaven and
earth’ even if you only mean ‘In the beginning some unthinkable power
began some unthinkable process.’ ... In other words, every sane sort of
history must begin with man as man, a thing standing absolute and alone.
How he came there, or indeed how anything else came there, is a thing for
theologians and philosophers and scientists and not for historians.
G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
1
Whig Metahistory
Metahistory is back in style. In 1951, when it was already in decline,
Christopher Dawson drew an analogy between metaphysics and metahistory
by citing Aristotle, who “proceeded to discuss the ultimate concepts that
underlie his physical theories: the nature of matter, the nature of being and
the cause of motion and change” after he had written his books on physics.
Similarly, “metahistory is concerned with the nature of history, the meaning
of history and the cause and significance of historical change.” 1 ^ Metahistory
is a philosophical meditation on the meaning of human history in its entirety
which came into being during the Christian era when thinkers like St.
Augustine synthesized the Hebrew tradition, which had history but no
philosophy, and the Greek tradition which had philosophy but lacked a theory
of cosmic history.
Even though he never uses the term metahistory, Yuval Noah Harari,
professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is a practitioner
of this art. Anyone who writes a book which “surveys the entire length of
human history, from the evolution of Homo sapiens in the Stone Age up to
the political and technological revolutions of the 21st century,” as his
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind does, should acknowledge thinkers
like St. Augustine, because he invented the idea, and more immediate
forebears like Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, but neither
metahistorian is mentioned in Sapiens. In fact, the term metahistory isn’t
mentioned at all, probably because of its association with German idealism
and the reputation things German have among Jews.
According to Christopher Dawson, the most recent wave of metahistory
came into being in the wake of “the great movement of philosophical
idealism which dominated the 19 th century.” Its greatest proponent was
G.W.F. Hegel. As of the mid-20 th century, “the great movement of
philosophical idealism that dominated the 19 th century” had “come to an end
and consequently the idealist interpretations of history have become
discredited.” 1 ^ 1 Historians writing in the mid-20 th century were in “revolt
against the metahistory of Hegel and Croce and Collingwood, not because it
is metahistorical, but because they feel it to be the expression of a
philosophical attitude that is no longer valid; just as the liberal historians of
the 18 th century revolted against the metahistory of the previous period.” 1 ^
Although Dawson doesn’t put it this way, the idea of metahistory, like the
notion of God upon which it was necessarily based, died at Auschwitz, as
Elie Wiesel might have put it. While there have been Jewish Hegelians like
Karl Marx and Samuel Hirsch in the past,^ they are a rare breed anywhere
these days, and certainly much rarer at Israeli universities, where Jews like
Harari are busy now resurrecting what they destroyed.
Harari may teach at an Israeli university but the historical school that
informs his book is not Jewish in any definable sense. Harari received his
DPhil from Jesus College, Oxford under the supervision of Steven J. Gunn.
The worldview which informs Sapiens is both Jewish and English, but it is
English in its own peculiar way. Sapiens is what one might call, with
apologies to Sir Herbert Butterfield, Whig metahistory, with all of the
contradictions that term entails. 1 ^ Like the English Ideology from the time of
Newton, Sapiens aspires to erect an intellectual skyscraper on a foundation of
philosophical mud. Reading Harari, I was reminded of John Maynard
Keynes, who felt that the world of political philosophers “believe themselves
to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences,” but “are usually slaves
of some defunct economist.” 1 ^ Harari is what Keynes would call the slave to
some defunct metaphysician.
In order to write the metahistory he aspires to write, Harari needed to
learn more about metaphysics than he was evidently able to learn at one of
England’s two premier universities, because he begins his book at the
absolute beginning of everything, which is by necessity outside of history and
just as necessarily within the realm of first philosophy or metaphysics. And
how did the “Timeline of History” begin? “Matter and energy appear,” Harari
tells us with a straight face. Harari erroneously identifies the beginning of
everything with the “beginning of physics,” which got invented by Aristotle
in Greece some time later. Reiterating what he already said in a different key,
Harari tries to give an account of the beginning once again, telling us this
time that at the beginning: “Atoms and molecules appear.” In other words,
“shit happens.” Or, as a more forthright historian might have put it: “I don’t
know how anything came into being” because Whig metahistory doesn’t
believe in metaphysics. They haven’t taught this course at Oxford since the
days of William of Ockham. What they now teach there goes by the name of
“science,” which tells us that:
ABOUT 13.5 BILLION YEARS AGO, MATTER, energy, time and space
came into being in what is known as the Big Bang. The story of these
fundamental features of our universe is called physics. About 300,000 years
after their appearance, matter and energy started to coalesce into complex
structures, called atoms, which then combined into molecules. The story of
atoms, molecules and their interactions is called chemistry. About 3.8 billion
years ago, on a planet called Earth, certain molecules combined to form
particularly large and intricate structures called organisms. The story of
organisms is called biology. About 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to
the species Homo sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures called
cultures. The subsequent development of these human cultures is called history.
13
There you have it: Whig metahistory in a nutshell. Shit happened, just
the way the mural at the Museum of Natural History said it did. Harari makes
his first big mistake when he claims that the story of how everything came
into being “is called physics.” The science of how everything comes into
being is called, on the contrary, metaphysics. Physics can only deal with
matter and energy once they have come into existence. The fact that Harari
doesn’t know this dooms his metahistory from the outset. Since Harari is not
a physicist, he can’t really explain what he thinks he needs to explain. As a
result, his history rests uneasily on a shaky foundation of exploded myths and
discredited junk “science,” which has been abandoned by scientists and is
now taught only in high school biology classes, where the children of the
deplorables learn scientific “facts” about how “atoms formed,” followed by
life emerging from a lightning bolt striking a primeval soup of amino acids.
This is what Harari could legitimately call a fiction because it derives from
the writings of “scientists” like Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein based
on “facts” culled from people like Galvani, who made frog legs twitch from
electric shock, and Erasmus Darwin, Charles’ grandfather. Mary Shelley
wrote Frankenstein, not because of her knowledge of “science,” but because
she was plagued by guilt for violating what the Enlightenment considers to
this day an imaginary moral law.
During phase three of Harari’s history of everything, “certain molecules
combined to form particularly large and intricate structures called
organisms.”^ 1 In keeping with his understanding of himself as the universal
polymath, Harari calls “the story of organisms” biology when in fact he
means to say Darwinism, which is the ideological weaponization of biology.
The same metaphysical principles apply here as well. Natural selection, the
mechanism at the heart of Darwin’s ideology, can only explain how
modification takes place in already existent beings. It cannot explain how
those beings—be it a species or an organ like the eye or life itself—came into
existence. This is so because biology is no more metaphysics than physics is.
“Science,” as we understand the term, can explain how things function once
they exist, but it cannot explain how anything comes into existence. Coming
into existence is another way of saying creation. Evolution “offers us a
scientific account of changes, of how a later state of the material world might
have emerged from an earlier state—whereas creation offers us a
metaphysical account of where the material world itself ultimately comes
from.” 1 ^ 1 Similarly, natural selection, the philosophical engine which pulls the
Darwinian train, can only select traits that already exist. It cannot favor, for
example, more acute sight in an organism which is blind. Since everything
had to evolve from a “blind amoeba,” according to Christopher Hitchens,
sight cannot exist according to the principle of natural selection because at
the beginning it had nothing to work on.
As natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive, favourable
variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification; it can act only by
very short and slow steps. Hence the canon of ‘Natura non facit saltum,’ which
every fresh addition to our knowledge tends to make more strictly correct, is on
this theory simply unintelligible. We can plainly see why nature is prodigal in
variety, though niggard in innovation. But why this should be a law of nature if
each species has been independently created, no man can explain. 1 ^ 1
Let’s then deal with the beginning according to Whig metahistory, one
preposterous claim at a time. The most preposterous claim of all, of course,
is, as Harari puts it, the claim that “Atoms and molecules appear.” How
exactly did this happen? If Harari knows, he isn’t telling. If he doesn’t know,
then he has no business making the claim. In the absence of any evidence to
the contrary, we must assume, therefore, not only that Harari began his book
with a horrendous philosophical blunder but that, blinded by Whig
metahistory, he was unaware that he had made it.
So let’s help him out by explaining what he needs to know. We know
that something exists. We also know that nothing can come from nothing.
Was there nothing before the first atom appeared? If so, then the first atom
could not have appeared because nothing can come from nothing. It is
obvious that there is now a whole universe of impressive somethings, so
there was never nothing. This something could not bring itself into existence
because in order to do that, it would have to exist before it existed, which is
impossible. Therefore, something else had to bring it into existence, and that
something is what all men call God. This means that anyone who aspires to
write a metahistory of the scope of Sapiens, which begins with the
appearance of the first atom, will of necessity have to talk about creation and
God because the universe could not create itself. The fact that the universe
exists means that God is necessarily the creator of the universe. The universe
had to have a cause, even if the universe is eternal, which no one believes
anymore. The universe could not exist unless something created it.
Needless to say, this is not how Professor Harari begins his book.
Harari’s mind is the slave of a defunct biologist by the name of Charles
Darwin. Because there is no creator, Harari must of necessity believe in a
myth that is totally preposterous, namely, that shit just happened. There is no
way to prove this assertion. Harari simply asserts the claim in an aggressive
—dare we say Jewish—way, substituting chutzpah for reasoned argument.
Harari’s Darwinism, in other words, has blinded him to an understanding
of how things come into being. Because he is incapable of understanding the
most rudimentary metaphysical principles, Harari fails to see that any real
beginning is a form of creation and that, therefore, the only rational
explanation of any real beginning necessarily involves the existence of God.
Harari becomes, therefore, an atheist by default. Harari’s atheism, as a result,
commits him to a view of the universe and history which is fundamentally
irrational—as irrational as the statement “atoms formed”—and which dooms
his metahistorical project from the start. Because Whig metahistory is a
contradiction in terms, Sapiens isn’t really history at all. It is the Jewish take
on English “science,” which began as magic under the direction of John Dee
and then, thanks to Isaac Newton, became a materialistic ideology which has
been full of contradictions for centuries. Harari’s materialism flows naturally
from his atheism with the same blindness as its consequence.
Harari’s materialism turns the world upside down. The things he
considers real are fictions, and the things he considers fictions are real.
According to Professor Harari’s view of the universe, “atoms”—which at the
time of Democritus and Leucippus were the fundamental building blocks of
everything else but which have since that time dissolved into a bottomless
morass of subatomic particles—are real, but justice is not. Justice is a
“fiction.” Tacitly admitting the incoherence of his book, Harari tries to float
“fictions” as the missing link which connects cognition, which is by
definition immaterial, with biological materialism:
How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually
founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling
hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large
numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common
myths. Any large-scale human cooperation whether a modern state, a medieval
church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe—is rooted in common myths that
exist only in people’s collective imagination. Churches are rooted in common
religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go
together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe
that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to
redeem our sins.^
Until those deluded Catholics bumped into Professor Harari, they failed
to understand that “none of these things exists outside the stories that people
invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no
money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common
imagination of human beings.” 1 ^ In Professor Harari’s universe we have
“On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the
other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations.” 1 ^
Professor Harari makes this statement blithely unaware of the philosophical
problems which follow in its wake. If, for example, only physical things are
real, what are we to say about the idea that “only physical things are real”? Is
that idea “real” or, better, true? If it is true, then it refutes itself. What about
“biology”? Is that real? What about “natural selection”? Is that real? It’s not
something that I can touch.
Is Professor Harari’s idea that only physical things are real itself real? Or
is it a “fiction” like the Catholic belief “that God was incarnated in human
flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins”? 1 ^ 1 Either
Professor Harari is saying that his ideas are real, but that the ideas of other
people are not, or he is saying that all ideas are unreal, including the idea that
all ideas are unreal. Either way, his claim is problematic. Is Sapiens a work of
fiction or is it, as he claims, a “history of humankind” that is to be accepted
as rooted in factual, “scientific” claims to be both real and true? Which is it,
Professor? How is it that your “fictions” are true and everyone else’s false?
2
Harari’s Ignorance
How is it that Professor Harari’s “fictions” are true and everyone else’s
“fictions” are false?
Once again, the only plausible explanation is Professor Harari’s
ignorance. Harari is unaware that his materialism is self-contradictory. This is
something that Harari could have learned at Jesus College because the
paradox of materialism was formulated by both J.B.S. Haldane, who studied
at Oxford, and C.S. Lewis, who used to teach at Cambridge. As they put it,
“If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in
my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true ... and hence I
have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.
If, as he seems to believe, history is nothing more than the description of
the motion of atoms in the brain, Harari could have written a much shorter
book and spared us the effort of slogging through his 400-page tome. Tacitly
recognizing this fact, Harari changes philosophical horses in mid-stream,
abandons his materialism without telling us, and claims that human history
began with something he calls the “Cognitive Revolution.” 1 ^ 1 From this point
onward,
historical narratives replace biological theories as our primary means of
explaining the development of Homo sapiens. To understand the rise of
Christianity or the French Revolution, it is not enough to comprehend the
interaction of genes, hormones and organisms. It is necessary to take into
account the interaction of ideas, images and fantasies as well.
If this is the case, then Harari’s case for materialism, along with its
foundations in Darwinism, collapses because the “Cognitive Revolution”
must be based on cognition, which is another word for mind or reason, which
means that materialism is no longer true. But it turns out Harari doesn’t
believe in cognition either. Later in his book, Harari remounts the materialist
horse he previously abandoned and, in a gloss on the American Declaration
of Independence, informs us that:
Just as people were never created, neither, according to the science of biology,
is there a ‘Creator’ who ‘endows’ them with anything. There is only a blind
evolutionary process, devoid of any purpose, leading to the birth of individuals.
‘Endowed by their creator’ should be translated simply into ‘born’. Equally,
there are no such things as rights in biology. There are only organs, abilities and
characteristics.-^
Certain political consequences flow from Harari’s atheism. To begin
with, “liberty” does not exist because “there is no such thing in biology. ...
liberty is something that people invented and that exists only in their
imagination.”^ Well, the automobile is also something that “people
invented,” does that mean that traffic jams exist only in the imagination? Is
the social order like “liberty” or is it like the automobile? Or should I say
“automobile”? Harari tries to evade the contradictory conclusions his
premises demand by claiming that “We believe in a particular order not
because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to
cooperate effectively and forge a better society.” 1 ^ 1
Harari’s use of the word “we” reminds one of the joke about Tonto and
the Lone Ranger, whose punch line is: “What you mean ‘we,’ paleface?”
Who, in other words, gets to determine whether believing in a particular
“imagined order” really “enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a
better society”? If there is nothing “objectively true” about that order, it will
get chosen because some people like it. If the people who like it have
political power they will impose this “imagined order” on the rest of us. If
“the social order” has no basis in nature, its only other possible source is
human will, but not just any human will. In the absence of a moral order
based on the logical structure of the universe, the only possible alternative
social order is the one in which the powerful get to impose their will on the
weak, and this is precisely the order which Harari is proposing. And if the
people who don’t like it lack power, that order will get imposed on them
whether they like it or not. So, in the final analysis, Harari’s philosophy
comes down to might makes right. If justice is just a “fiction,” then truth, or
what is “scientific” or “real,” is the opinion of the powerful.
As I said, certain political consequences flow from Harari’s description
of the universe. The first is that there is no such thing as a natural social
order. The only things that qualify as “natural” are derived from physics or
biology, as interpreted by intellectual commissars like Professor Harari.
Anything else is a human construct or “fiction” which gets imposed on
“nature,” which can refer to the physical order or, in this instance, other men.
So the social order is an “imagined order,” which is to say, imagined by some
people and then imposed on others. This order is “always in danger of
collapse because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop
believing in them. In order to safeguard an imagined order, continuous and
strenuous efforts are imperative. Some of these efforts take the shape of
violence and coercion.”^ 1
So, oddly enough, the “universe,” according to Professor Harari, ends up
looking a lot like the Israeli occupation of Palestine, which is based on theft
and injustice. The Israelis, who impose this order with “violence and
coercion,” needn’t feel guilty because in the big scheme of things there is no
such thing as justice:
Hammurabi and the American Founding Fathers alike imagined a reality
governed by universal and immutable principles of justice, such as equality or
hierarchy. Yet the only place where such universal principles exist is in the
fertile imagination of Sapiens, and in the myths they invent and tell one another.
These principles have no objective validity.^
Harari’s claim that universal principles have no “objective validity” is
objectively and demonstrably false. The fact that no one has ever touched a
circle—something which does not exist in nature, as Harari defines that term
—does not mean that we cannot make objective and true statements about the
radius and circumference of every possible circle. But Harari quite rightly
goes on to say that ideas like “justice” and “equality” are “inextricably
intertwined with the idea of creation.”^ Harari can only base his claim that
there is no such thing as “justice” on the previous claim that there is no such
thing as God, which is an irrational statement first of all because it is
impossible to prove a negative, and secondly because it is possible to prove
the existence of God. Because the existence of an orderly universe
necessarily implies the existence of a creator God as the source of that order,
the social order by which man orders his existence is the logical corollary of
the order of that universe. Harari willfully ignores all this in claiming that
Darwinism has proven there is no God as the basis for his claim there can be
no such thing as “justice.” With an airy wave of the hand, our Jewish
professor dismisses any possible just social order as well by linking it to
“Christian myths about God”:
The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that
every person has a divinely created soul, and that all souls are equal before God.
However, if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God, creation and
souls, what does it mean that all people are ‘equal’? Evolution is based on
difference, not on equality. Every person carries a somewhat different genetic
code, and is exposed from birth to different environmental influences. This
leads to the development of different qualities that carry with them different
chances of survival. ‘Created equal’ should therefore be translated into ‘evolved
differently’. 1 ^ 1
Notice how Harari frames the issue in order to arrive at his justification
for an unjust social order. Ignoring the fact that God’s existence is a matter of
reason, not of faith, Harari turns the tables on those who are rational by
claiming that creation is based on “Christian myths about God.” The
existence of God is, thereby, removed from the realm of reason and placed
within the realm of faith, which is ipso facto the realm of the irrational. How
could anyone expect a Jew to believe in Christian myths? How can anyone
expect a Christian to believe in them if they are myths? Harari then proposes
something fundamentally irrational, namely, atheism as the essence of
rationality. The world has been turned upside down in one more instance of
what I have characterized elsewhere as the Jewish Revolutionary Spirit,
which began when the Jews crucified the logos incarnate. That event
inaugurated the Jewish war on logos which has perdured to our day and
which finds expression in Professor Harari’s book.
Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Harari’s book is one long
attack on language, speech, and rationality, all of which are subsumed under
the Greek word logos. Speech, it turns out, is the main characteristic that
distinguishes man from animals. The ancient Greeks understood that man
was different from all other animals because he could speak. The word they
used for rationality was “logos,” which is also the word for speech, discourse,
language, and other related concepts. Logos is “the word or that by which the
inward thought is expressed”; it is equivalent to the Latin words “ratio,”
“vox,” and “oratio,” or “that which is said or spoken.” It is frequently
translated as “word,” “language,” or “talk,” as in a saying, or statement, or
maxim, or resolution. It can also be translated as speech, discourse, or
conversation, as well as the power to speak. From these more basic ideas
flows the idea of rationality itself. Logos means both thought and reason.
When Democritus says that something is “kata logon,” he means that it is
“agreeable to reason.” Logos becomes, therefore, the distinguishing feature
of a human being. “En Andros logo einai” means “to be reckoned as a man.”
“Ho Logos” comprises both the sense of thought and word when it is used in
the New Testament.^ After meditating on the by then thousand-year-old
concept of logos, the medieval scholastic successors to the Greek
philosophers coined the term “rational animal” (animale rationale ) as the
essential definition of man. Unlike angels, man had a body similar to the
bodies of other animals. His distinguishing characteristic, however, was the
fact that he could speak and reason, terms subsumed under the Greek term
logos.
Given the Jewish revolutionaries’ relationship to logos, it comes as no
surprise that Harari’s book is a protracted attack on all of the concepts the
Greeks associated with that word. Materialists believe that consciousness is
an ignis fatuus which flutters over a swamp of stuff called atoms or matter or
whatever. Given that “fact,” human beings get demoted from being a
“rational animal” to, as Harari puts it “an animal of no significance.” In
stating his thesis, however, Harari immediately contradicts himself:
There was nothing special about humans. Nobody, least of all humans
themselves, had any inkling that their descendants would one day walk on the
moon, split the atom, fathom the genetic code and write history books. The
most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were
insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas,
fireflies or jellyfish.^
If, the perceptive reader might ask, there is “nothing special about
humans,” how did they accomplish all of the things Harari just mentioned?
Harari claims that “people were outraged” when Charles Darwin claimed that
homo sapiens “was just another kind of animal.” He then proceeds to give the
Jewish reductio ad absurdum of Darwin’s already absurd idea, by claiming
that, “like it or not,” we are “members of a noisy family called the great
apes,” whose nearest relatives are chimpanzees. In fact, “Just 6 million years
ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all
chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.
Harari, it seems, can’t expunge the Book of Genesis from his mind,
perhaps because its central assertion about the human race, namely, that all
humans have descended from one man and one woman, has been validated
by the genome project. Harari’s “Cognitive Revolution” corresponds in time
with the emergence of Chromosonal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve:
In 1987, after some calculations, it was concluded that “Ychromosomal Adam”
lived about 60,000-90,000 years ago in Africa. The date is rather approximate,
since such calculations are not very exact because of some uncertainty about
mutation rates. In a similar way, everyone alive today can also be linked back to
“mitochondrial Eve.” She must have lived about 140,000-120,000 years ago.
But as usual in science, things keep updating. Recently, the difference in years
has been estimated for “Adam” between 120,000 and 156,000 years ago, and
for “Eve” between 99,000 and 148,000 years ago.^
It turns out that human language, what Harari calls the “Cognitive
Revolution,” and the two humans from whom all other humans descended
apparently emerged at around the same time. The coincidence puts Professor
Harari in a bind. If there is no real difference between humans and
chimpanzees, how can Harari say that, “Homo sapiens conquered the world
thanks above all to its unique language.” 1 ^ 1 If homo sapiens has a “unique
language,” how can Harari claim that he is “just another kind of animal”?
Harari never resolves this contradiction. He makes both contradictory
claims throughout his book. If homo sapiens has a unique language, then he
is not “just another kind of animal.” He is completely unique. The same is
true of his uniqueness vis-a-vis any other hominid, like Neanderthal Man,
which Harari proposes as the intermediary step between apes and man.
Abandoning his materialism in the light of irrefutable evidence surrounding
man’s ability to speak, Harari identifies this turning point in history as “the
Cognitive Revolution”:
The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000
and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution. What caused it?
We’re not sure. The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental
genetic mutations changed the inner wiring of the brains of Sapiens, enabling
them to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate using an altogether
new type of language. We might call it the Tree of Knowledge mutation. Why
did it occur in Sapiens DNA rather than in that of Neanderthals? It was a matter
of pure chance, as far as we can tell.^
Harari attempts to have his cake and eat it too when he claims that
language makes man unique among all of the other animals on earth, because
“genetic mutations changed the inner wiring of the brains of Sapiens.” First
of all, how does he know this is true? He is stating as true something for
which there is no evidence. He has simply extrapolated the claim from the
premises of Darwinism. Leaving aside the cause for a moment, we are still
confronted with a problem. If, as Harari claims, all humans had a common
ancestor, one which he identifies as a chimpanzee, how did the Cognitive
Revolution take place? Did a monkey suddenly start talking? If so, to whom?
To another monkey? If what he calls “the Tree of Knowledge mutation” took
place in just one monkey, that monkey would have no one else to talk to. No
communication would be possible because humans can talk but monkeys
can’t.
The linguist Noam Chomsky, who does not believe that animals are
capable of human speech, agrees that the transition to human language was
sudden: “It looks as if—given the time involved—there was a sudden ‘great
leap forward.’” 1 ^ 1 Like Harari, however, Chomsky feels that the cause was
“some small genetic modification” which “somehow ... rewired the brain
slightly [and] made this human capacity [for language] available.”
Like Harari, Chomsky is intellectually crippled by his adherence to the
claims of defunct biologists. Because he limits the cause to genetic mutation,
Chomsky is forced to conclude that the advent of human language “had to
have happened in a single person” without evidently thinking through the
consequences of that claim. If human language came about through genetic
modification, the same fully formed language would have to appear
simultaneously and by chance in the minds of two human beings living in
close enough proximity that these two humans could speak to each other,
something which is so improbable that it is virtually impossible. If the
Cognitive Revolution is another term for the emergence of speech, and if the
defining characteristic of man, even according to Harari, is his ability to
speak, then man had to emerge full-blown as homo sapiens from the moment
he began to speak, at the time of what Harari calls “the Cognitive
Revolution.”
Beyond that, homo sapiens had to emerge as a pair of human beings who
could speak to each other simply because of the exigencies of language. If
there is only one man, communication is not only unnecessary; it is
impossible because it is not communication. Communication requires two
human beings and a language that allows them to communicate effectively
immediately. Language can grow in vocabulary and sophistication once it
exists, but it cannot evolve from something that it is not. Evolution, in other
words, can play no role in the Cognitive Revolution. It’s an all or nothing
proposition which necessitates creation as its cause because all of the parts—
man, rationality, and speech—had to come into existence out of nothing
simultaneously in order to function.
One term is a function of the other. An ape which can speak is by
definition a man. A man can either speak or he cannot speak. He cannot
speak by himself. Language involves not only speaking but understanding as
well. It involves, of necessity, a speaker and a listener. Because of that, man’s
language had to come into existence full-blown in two humans at the same
moment in time. The moment one man spoke to another man in a human
language he ceased to be anything other than a man.
This fact gives new meaning to the first sentence of The Gospel of St.
John: “In the beginning was the Word.” En arche een ho Logos. The human
race began, in other words, when one man spoke the first word to another
man, or as the author of Genesis would say, to another man who happened to
be a woman. The fact that we have all grown accustomed to cave man stories,
Mickey Mouse cartoons, and the opening scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey
does not change the fact that only humans can speak and that they can only
speak to each other and that in order to do that they must share a common
language from the moment they begin to communicate, a moment which is
co-terminus with their existence as human beings.
After finally making some progress in explaining why human beings are
unique, Harari returns like a dog to the vomit of materialism and takes it all
back by claiming that there is nothing special about language because “every
animal has some kind of language.” 1 ^ 1 “Even insects,” we are told, “know
how to communicate in sophisticated ways.” 1 ^ It’s difficult to infer what
Harari means by “sophisticated,” especially since he immediately contradicts
himself when he describes “our language” as something that can “produce an
infinite number of sentences, each with a distinct meaning,” something which
distinguishes it from the language of insects, who know how to inform “one
another of the whereabouts of food” and the language of a green monkey,
which “can yell to its comrades, ‘Careful! A lion!”’ Unlike both of these
animals, “a modern human can tell her friends that this morning, near the
bend in the river, she saw a lion tracking a herd of bison.
Harari gets away with contradictions like this by using verbal sleights of
hand based on the equivocation of crucial terms. His use of the term
“language,” for example, is completely equivocal. In fact, his entire argument
is reducible to the equivocal use of one term—namely, “language”—to
describe two completely different forms of communication. Animals can
communicate by barking, chirping, growling, hissing, etc., but only man “can
connect a limited number of sounds and signs to produce an infinite number
of sentences, each with a distinct meaning.” 1 ^ 1 Language is, therefore, proof
that man is unique, which is precisely what Harari denies when he describes
him as an ape.
Apes, we know from experience, can communicate, but they do not talk.
Anyone who has had children and a dog as a pet understands this. Dogs bark
and wag their tails from almost the moment they are born but never progress
beyond this form of communication, either with their masters or each other.
Children begin their lives as communicators on roughly the same level as the
family dog by smiling or crying, but by the time they are around a year old
they begin speaking words and within the next year of their lives begin
speaking in sentences. Children pick up their native language effortlessly
from their mothers, which is why the Germans refer to it as their
“Muttersprache.” Children, in other words, have a natural aptitude for
something that non-rational animals can’t learn at all, in spite of some
species’ ability to mimic sounds.
Everyone knows this, but the Darwinian insistence that humans were
only different from animals in degree rather than kind led to various
campaigns to teach animals to talk. The simple fact that a laborious campaign
needed to be mounted to bring about what happened effortlessly among
children was studiously ignored. Since the great apes resembled humans most
closely in physical appearance, they became the preferred candidate, even
though parrots had more suitable vocal chords.
After years of failure in their attempt to teach nonhuman primates to
imitate human speech, two cognitive researchers, R. Allen Gardner and
Beatrix T. Gardner, came up with the brilliant idea of teaching American
Sign Language to Washoe, 10-month old chimp they had rescued from
military scientists. Ignoring the fact that sign language was speech only by
analogy and that it was made up of gestures that were intrinsically
ambiguous, the Gardners soon convinced themselves that Washoe was
communicating with them in a way that was “reliably understandable.”^ 1
Three years later, the Gardners issued a report on Washoe’s progress
which indicated that the speech barrier separating humans and animals had
finally been broken. Duane Rumbaugh, scientist emeritus at the Great Ape
Trust of Iowa, described the Gardners’ success in teaching Washoe how to
“talk” as “absolutely frontier-breaking work.” Inspired by the reception of
their study, the Gardners soon had Washoe not only “speaking” via sign
language but also writing poetry. After seeing a swan, Washoe signed
“water” and then “bird,” something which Harvard psychologist Roger
Brown described as “like getting an SOS from outer space.” Washoe’s
“poetry” inspired other cognitive researchers from around the world to teach
their monkeys how to speak.
Then in the late 1970s, the excitement died down after other cognitive
researchers failed to replicate the results of the Gardners’ experiment. When
Columbia professor Herbert Terrace showed that what the Gardners thought
was speech was merely imitation in anticipation of reward, the enthusiasm
that characterized the early phase of the talking monkey craze collapsed into
embarrassed silence. Washoe’s eloquence was in reality nothing more than a
manifestation of the same stimulus-response mechanism that men had used to
train dogs and other domestic animals from time immemorial. After viewing
videos of various chimp-human interactions, including those of Washoe with
the Gardners, Terrace concluded that “there was no spontaneity, no real use
of grammar” of the sort that characterized human speech. Washoe’s
“conversations” with the Gardners consisted of roughly 130 signs which the
monkey learned in reaction to prompts from her trainers. Washoe, in other
words, made the sign language gestures the Gardners wanted not because she
had anything to say or because she understood what the Gardners said, but in
anticipation of a reward. She was “not engaging in anything like human
conversation.
The excitement surrounding Washoe had more to do with Darwinism’s
unfulfilled hopes than any real ability of human speech to jump downward
over the species barrier which separated humans from animals. Cognitive
research was committed to materialism, atheism, and Darwinism. Getting a
monkey to talk was important to maintaining that worldview because
Darwinism assumed that there are “no discontinuities but just ongoing and
gradual continuity, with small incremental steps’’ 1 ^ 1 between apes and
humans. The Gardners and other cognitive researchers wanted Washoe to
talk because they, like Harari, were deeply committed to Darwin’s
proposition that “the difference in mind between man and higher animals,
great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.” 1 ^ 1
3
The Testimony of Mickey Mouse
In spite of the testimony of Mickey Mouse, there is no possible evolutionary
link between a mouse’s squeak and a man’s speech. They exist on
fundamentally different ontological planes, even though both are forms of
communication. Hamlet and Shakespeare are certainly related, but Hamlet
cannot become Shakespeare, or vice versa, because they inhabit different
planes of being. “The doctrine of gradualism basically denies that there is any
clear transition point from pre-human to human,but the existence of
language among humans constitutes a clear refutation of that idea.
Genetic, physiological, and anatomical features are not the determining factors
for being human. Although we do breed, feed, bleed, and excrete like they do—
yes, we are connected all the way down—what does in fact set us apart from the
animal world is something not necessarily of a biological nature, namely our
faculties of language, rationality, morality, self-expression, and religion. ^1
Taken together this is what the Greeks referred to as logos. The
Scholastics referred to man as the animal rationale in recognition of the fact
that he is the only animal that possessed these qualities. There is no evidence
that human language evolved gradually from animal communication. Both
are what they are. Neither can derive from the other. After years of fruitless
attempts to teach monkeys how to talk, the evolutionary linguists were forced
to conclude “that the emergence of human language” is “an embarrassment
for evolutionary theory.”^ What the Dutch geneticist Gerard Verschuuren
considers the fossil evidence for human speech, a piece of ochre with a
crosshatch design carved in it which was found in the Blombos Cave in
South Africa, indicates that language emerged “quite suddenly”^ some
80,000 ago, a period that corresponds roughly to Harari’s “Cognitive
Revolution” and the emergence of Y-Chromosal “Adam.”
Once again, the existence of language confounds those who seek its
cause in lower forms of life, forcing Verschuuren to conclude that “The
power of using language and the power of conceptual understanding are both
uniquely human, and therefore cannot be inherited from the animal
world.”^ Man’s capacity for logos and all of its activities eventually became
associated with psyche or the soul, which, after a long and complicated
debate, Aristotle defined as the form or eidos of the body. Aristotle got the
term from Plato his teacher but refined it from being a pre-existing ghost in a
machine into a function of man’s activity, which was an expression of his
essential being. Arguing by analogy, Aristotle said that if the body were an
axe its soul would be chopping. Similarly, if the body were an eye, its soul
would be seeing, something he defined as its first act, which is similar to our
concept of purpose. In other words.
That which makes a person a human being is a human soul. So how and when
did the human soul emerge? Since a soul does not admit of degrees—you either
have one or you don’t—in our ancestry there must have been a first creature, or
set of creatures, endowed with an immortal human soul and the mental powers
of language, rationality, morality, self-awareness, and religion. You either have
those faculties or you don’t. They don’t come in degrees either.^
The human race began when the first man spoke the first word, which he
probably spoke to the God who created him by endowing him with the soul
which allowed him to speak before he spoke to a fellow human being. Such a
moment does not admit of gradualist explanations. Then as now, animals can
either speak or they cannot. Those who can are known, ipso facto, as human
beings. In order to continue in existence, the human race needed to be
sexually differentiated, which required the creation of another rational
creature, just like first one, who differed in gender. In the Genesis account of
creation, man preceded woman. At this point man could talk to woman in the
same way that man had previously talked to God, his Creator, because what
God and man shared was logos, which he shared in a unique way which
separated him the from the same logos which was the operating system for all
of creation.
Verschuuren attempts to reconcile the Genesis account and the fossil
record by claiming that the ‘“preparatory work,’ had to be done gradually” as
part of “a biological process.” 1 ^ This gradual biological process was then
followed by a “spiritual process,” in which God chose to raise two members
of a population of “anatomically modern humans” to the spiritual level of
language, rationality, morality, self-awareness, and religion. Pope John Paul
II spoke of “an ontological leap,” 1 ^ which corresponds in time with Harari’s
“Cognitive Revolution.” Verschuuren claims that “the human faculties of
language, rationality, morality, self-awareness, and religion emerged” both
simultaneously and suddenly “somewhere in Africa some 80,000 years
ago” 1 ^] as part of an event which was by definition spiritual and, therefore,
“beyond the scope of science.”^
4
Genesis and Evolution
Verschuuren’s attempt to reconcile Genesis and evolution leads him,
unfortunately, into a Platonic dualism which allows a previously existent
spiritual soul to inhabit a previously existing biological body, when he tells
us that “the bodies of human creatures must have been apt to receive a human
soul, which includes the right genes and the proper brains.” 1 ^ If the soul is
the form of the body, it is difficult to understand how a body could exist
without its form. Plato felt that a pre-existent soul inhabited a material body
in the same manner in which a pilot was “in” a ship. If the soul is its form,
the body is not an empty vessel waiting to be filled by a soul, in the sense that
a car sits fully formed in the drive-way waiting for a driver. The human body
is an expression of the human soul; it had to be created with that expression
in mind. It could not exist apart from its existence as the material expression
of the soul’s first act of rationality, speech, etc. The idea that at some point in
time there were physical human beings with animal souls is simply untenable
and flies in the face of any sophisticated understanding of what the soul is
and how it acts. The first man’s body, therefore, had to be a special act of
creation every bit as much as the creation of the first man’s soul was because,
according to Aristotle’s more sophisticated understanding of their
relationship, neither soul nor body can exist independently of the other.
Either way, science cannot document the emergence of man. The first
man may have resembled other hominids at this time even more closely than
we resemble apes in our day, but both his body and soul were of a
fundamentally different nature and could only have come into being as a
special act of creation, which will remain forever undocumentable to science.
Pope John Paul II claimed that “The moment of passage into the spiritual
realm is not something that can be observed with research in the fields of
physics and chemistry.” 1 ^ His immediate successor made that moment even
less accessible to science by identifying it with the first word of human
speech. Like St. John the Evangelist, Pope Benedict XVI believes that the
beginning of mankind was identical with man’s utterance of the first word:
The clay became man at the moment in which a being for the first time was
capable of forming, however dimly, the thought of ‘God’. The first Thou that—
however stammeringly—was said by human lips to God marks the moment in
which the spirit arose in the world. Here the Rubicon of anthropogenesis was
crossed. For it is not the use of weapons or fire, not new methods of cruelty or
of useful activity, that constitute man, but rather his ability to be immediately in
relation to God. This holds fast to the doctrine of the special creation of man ...
herein ... lies the reason why the moment of anthropogenesis cannot possibly
be determined by paleontology: anthropogenesis is the rise of the spirit, which
cannot be excavated with a shovel.^
Certain things follow from this conclusion. First of all, there is no such
thing as history without logos. In order to write his history, Harari must
periodically abandon his materialism because, as even he has figured out,
animals do not have histories because they do not have reason. The lives of
dogs do not combine to create a history that spans centuries or millennia,
which is the scope of Sapiens. The lives of dogs do nothing more than
recapitulate each other in the opposite direction until they finally collapse
into one life which recapitulates the life of the species. Man is the only
creature on this earth which has a history because he is the only creature on
this earth that is rational. Rationality allows man to discern patterns in the
changing flux of temporal events; it also allows him to discuss these patterns
with other men, and eventually to write them down so that future generations
of rational creatures can discuss them as well. There can be, therefore, no
history without rationality.
To get around the contradictory and equivocal nature of his
understanding of language, Harari creates the idea of “fictions,” which
involve “the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at
an ”[53] The ability to speak about things which do not exist “is the most
unique feature of Sapiens language.” 1 ^
5
The Gorging Gene
One of Harari’s “fictions,” which involves “the ability to transmit
information about things which do not exist at all,” is morality. Just as
Darwinism tries to obscure the boundary separating animal communication
from human speech, it also tries to come up with a materialistic explanation
of morality by reducing it to a function of genetics. Like Professor Dawkins,
who believes in a “selfish gene,” Harari believes that a “widely accepted”
“gorging gene,” rather than an inability to impose rational or moral control
over appetite, is the cause of obesity. People are fat because “The instinct to
gorge on high-calorie food was hard-wired into our genes. ... That’s what
makes some of us spoon down an entire tub of Ben & Jerry’s when we find
one in the freezer and wash it down with a jumbo Coke.”^
Since the “instinct to gorge on high-calorie food” is “hard-wired into our
genes,” the next question should be “Why isn’t everybody fat?” If we are all
biologically programmed to gorge ourselves, why is it that some people eat
moderately and some people do not? Why is it that some people are thin and
fit and other people are morbidly obese? Does moderation, which is to say,
rational control over appetite, have something to do with this? According to
Harari, “moderation” or the virtue of temperance qualifies unambiguously as
a “fiction,” which is another word for unreal, whereas the “gorging gene” is
just as unambiguously a “scientific” fact which is “widely accepted.”
Not surprisingly, the same inability to subject appetite to rational control
extends to human sexuality. “Evolutionary psychologists,” we are told,
argue that ancient foraging bands were not composed of nuclear families
centred on monogamous couples. Rather, foragers lived in communes devoid of
private property, monogamous relationships and even fatherhood. In such a
band, a woman could have sex and form intimate bonds with several men (and
women) simultaneously, and all of the band’s adults cooperated in parenting its
children. Since no man knew definitively which of the children were his, men
showed equal concern for all youngsters. Such a social structure is not an
Aquarian utopia. It’s well documented among animals, notably our closest
relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos.^1
How do we know that the first humans were promiscuous? Well,
because monkeys are. But humans are different from monkeys, aren’t they?
No, of course not. Just look at how ancient foraging bands behaved. This is
proof that they behaved just like monkeys. The perceptive reader may have
noticed a certain circularity in this argument. Neither the fossil record nor
archeology provides any evidence for Harari’s theory of human sexuality.
Why then does Professor Harari believe that it’s true? Well, because “it’s
well documented among animals.” If animals are different from humans,
however, the argument immediately collapses.
Harari could, of course, point to the sexual mores of primitive peoples as
indicative of how the first humans behaved. In fact, he seems to have
consulted anthropologists like Margaret Mead at some point before making
his claim that:
A good mother will make a point of having sex with several different men,
especially when she is pregnant, so that her child will enjoy the qualities (and
paternal care) not merely of the best hunter, but also of the best storyteller, the
strongest warrior and the most considerate lover. If this sounds silly, bear in
mind that before the development of modern embryological studies, people had
no solid evidence that babies are always sired by a single father rather than by
many .^ 3
Well, as a matter of fact, this does sound silly. For once, we find
ourselves in complete agreement with Professor Harari. Depending on how
he defines the term, modern embryological studies began either in 1827, with
the germ layer theory of embryonic development, or the 1950s, with the
discovery of the helical structure of DNA.^ 1 If people living before either
date were unaware that babies “are always sired by a single father,” how does
Harari the historian explain things like primogeniture, inheritance laws, and
the stigma of illegitimacy? Is Professor Harari familiar with the Hebrew term
“ mamzer ”? It appears in both Deuteronomy and the Talmud, which means
that for somewhere between two and three millennia Jews knew that a child
was sired by one father, who was either married to the mother or not. If the
child was sired outside of marriage, he was known as a “mamzer” or a
bastard, and certain legal consequences followed from what was clearly seen
as a violation of the moral law. You would think that a professor at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem would know things like that.
Preposterous claims like this lead the perceptive reader to wonder about
the sources for the professor’s theories. Do “evolutionary psychologists”
have some mystical insight into the sex lives of the cave men? Or is Professor
Harari talking about something closer to home when he tells us that
the frequent infidelities that characterise modern marriages, and the high rates
of divorce, not to mention the cornucopia of psychological complexes from
which both children and adults suffer, all result from forcing humans to live in
nuclear families and monogamous relationships that are incompatible with our
biological software .^ 1
The best aid in understanding passages like this derives from Harari’s
theory of language. “Our language,” he tells us, “evolved as a way of
gossiping.”^ 1 This means that it wasn’t “enough for individual men and
women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison. It’s much more
important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping
with whom, who is honest, and who is a cheat.
Confirming the thought that immediately popped into my mind.
Professor Harari writes:
The gossip theory might sound like a joke, but numerous [albeit uncited] studies
support it. Even today the vast majority of human communication—whether in
the form of emails, phone calls or newspaper columns—is gossip. It comes so
naturally to us that it seems as if our language evolved for this very purpose. Do
you think that history professors chat about the reasons for World War One
when they meet for lunch, or that nuclear physicists spend their coffee breaks at
scientific conferences talking about quarks? Sometimes. But more often, they
gossip about the professor who caught her husband cheating. 1 ^
So making use of the hermeneutic which Professor Harari himself
provides, we are forced to conclude that when he purports to talk about the
sexual mores of cave men, Harari is in reality talking about the sexual
behavior of the history faculty at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and—
dare we say it?—about himself. Our suspicions are confirmed by Harari’s
Wikipedia entry, which announces that he is “openly gay.” 1 ^
6
The War on Logos
The school of disguised autobiographical anthropology has a long, if not
venerable, history. Margaret Mead achieved fame as an anthropologist by
projecting her adulterous relationship with Edward Sapir onto the
unsuspecting natives of Samoa.^1 Sigmund Freud, who once claimed that
“all men” desired to have sexual relations with their mothers or sisters,
purported to find the “Oedipus Complex” after years of scientific
investigation. Subsequent research has shown [if Harari can routinely make
claims like this, why can’t I?] that its real source was the adulterous affair he
had with his sister-in-law Minna Bernays.^ 1 Freud went to his grave hating
the Rev. Wilhelm Schmidt, SVD, because Schmidt exposed Totem and
Taboo, Freud’s foray into anthropology, as equally baseless. One of the most
notorious fictions of English intellectual history is the “state of nature,”
which Hobbes described as “nasty, brutish, and short.” If Hobbes can project
the English religious wars of the 17 th century back onto the first humans, why
can’t Professor Harari do the same thing with the catty, gossiping
homosexual professors at Hebrew University as his model?
The answer to this question is not only that he can but that he does. It’s
all part of the war he wages on logos. There is no “science” here, but there is
lots of projection. “Science” is another word for the Jewish hatred of logos,
which takes on new ferocity when combined with the homosexual’s rage
against nature. By combining these two identities, Harari becomes what
Bryan Singer, who is also a Jew and a homosexual, called a “mutant” in his
X-men movies. “Mutant” is a term derived from Darwinism, which Jews and
homosexuals use as a weapon to attack morality, one of the most significant
manifestations of logos in human life.
If homo sapiens is part of nature, then morality is part of nature as well
because morality is the manifestation of logos which Immanuel Kant called
“practical reason.” Pure reason allows the mind to apprehend what is true;
practical reason allows man to achieve the good. The man who achieves the
good is happy. Therefore, morality is essential to human happiness:
“Morality is not about what the world is like, but about what the world ought
to be like; it is not a matter of description but prescription.”^ 1 Morality,
which guarantees the rationality of human action, also determines whether
human acts bring about freedom for the human subject. This explains why
Jewish Darwinism is so determined to undermine morality by claiming that it
has non-human origin in the animal world. People like Harari dispute man’s
rationality because they want to undermine his freedom, which only exists if
he acts in conformity to reason. Morality is also the only protection which
man has against the rule of Libido Dominandi, which is the operating system
of every world empire. The American Empire differs from its predecessors
only in the sophistication of its forms of control. Because of their expertise in
moral subversion, the Jews play a crucial role in administering the American
Empire’s system of control through “liberation,” which invariably means
liberation from the moral law, which invariably means slavery for any
rational creature. When sociobiologists like Richard Dawkins “use their
‘magic wand’ of natural selection to explain [i.e. undermine] moral
behavior,” they are collaborating in the Empire’s system of political control
by depriving man of any possible ground for objecting to their schemes.
When right and wrong become the opinions of the powerful, those who lack
political power have no way to formulate their objections, much less
implement them. When Dawkins makes human behavior a function of
“selfish genes,” he appeals to the guilty conscience of those who are
burdened their own transgressions of the moral law by absolving them of
responsibility. But in giving them absolution, Dawkins lures them into a trap
from which there is no escape. Those who have abandoned the moral law to
justify their sexual sins cannot suddenly do an about face and appeal to the
same moral law to object to their economic subjugation. No, they have been
caught in the trap of materialism which professors like Dawkins and Harari
have prepared for them. Harari promotes materialism, rather than logos,
because materialism is a form of control and logos is its opposite. In spite of
what he says, Harari knows that the
key to understanding humans and their moral beliefs ... will not be found in
something material, such as genes, but in something immaterial, the mind.
Morality comes from the immaterial mind, not from the material brain or
genome. The brain is governed by laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, but
thoughts and beliefs are not. It should not surprise us then that people have
known the contents of their own minds from time immemorial without knowing
anything about brains and genes. They knew also about morality without
knowing anything about brains and genes. Claiming differently reduces the
working of the mind to the materialism of the brain. That is basically what
Charles Darwin said in an early private notebook, “Why is thought, being a
secretion of brain, more wonderful than gravity as a property of matter ?”^ 3
“Modern science,” Harari tells us dogmatically, “has no dogma.” 1 ^
Coming from a man who believes that “atoms formed,” as well as in the
existence of the missing link, and who feels that he has knowledge of the
most intimate details of the sex lives of cave men, this proposition is nothing
short of preposterous. He gets closer to the point when he tells us:
Scientists have provided the imperial project with practical knowledge,
ideological justification and technological gadgets. Without this contribution it
is highly questionable whether Europeans could have conquered the worldA^
Science is, in other words, a form of control primarily because it has
become a replacement for “dogmas” like the moral law. Why are Jews like
Hariri so interested in overturning the moral law? First of all because they are
at war with logos. Secondly, because they are interested in control. Jews are
always a minority, which means that they need an instrument to project their
power over the majority. Empire has always been congenial to the projection
of Jewish power. “It goes without saying,” Harari tells us, “that the political,
economic and social practices of modern Jews, for example, owe far more to
the empires under which they lived during the past two millennia than to the
traditions of the ancient kingdom of Judaea.”^ Jews have been able to thrive
in empires throughout history because they are good at administering those
empires’ systems of control. The American Empire is no exception to this
rule. If the broad sweep of history has any direction in Harari’s view it is that
successive empires have unified more and more territory under their
hegemony, culminating finally in the American Empire, as administered by
Jews like Professor Hariri, who claims that the American Empire is founded
on science and capitalism. Darwinism plays a crucial role in the
administration of the American Empire because it uses “science” to rule out
of court any moral objection to the economic exploitation that is an intrinsic
part of the oligarchic system known as capitalism. Control means, in the first
instance, decertifying any and all forms of logos or rationality which restrict
the power of the oligarchs. Harari couches this concept in the language of
science and progress but the meaning is the same: “One of the things that has
made it possible for modern social orders to hold together is the spread of an
almost religious belief in technology and in the methods of scientific
research, which have replaced to some extent the belief in absolute truths.” 17 ^
This means that the Jews who have been at war with logos for the past two
millennia will have a natural advantage in rising to the top of an empire
which is based on Libido Dominandi and the intellectual decertification of
any challenge to oligarchic hegemony. Control, in other words, becomes the
Rosetta Stone which unlocks the meaning of the contradictions which litter
his book from beginning to end.
7
Biological Determinism
Because Professor Harari has abandoned reason in favor of biological
determinism as the front for Libido Dominandi, it is not surprising that his
reasoning is flawed or that his narrative is plagued by one contradiction after
another. Shortly after telling us that everything human is natural, i.e., a
function of biology. Professor Harari switches horses in mid-stream and tells
us that nothing is natural. It turns out that one of the main things we associate
with biology, namely, differentiation according to sex, is a “product of the
imagination, like the caste system in India and the racial system in America.”
It is not a “natural division with deep biological roots.
Just when we thought that Harari was a biological determinist, it turns
out that he believes that biology is a social construct too. Anyone, he tells us,
who believes that “relations between two people of the opposite sex are
natural and between two people of the same sex unnatural” is not in touch
with “biological reality” but is rather suffering from “cultural bias,” 12 ^ unlike
homosexuals, who are constitutionally incapable of suffering from any
cultural bias whatsoever. It turns out that when it comes to sex, all biological
bets are off. To make his point Harari even invokes “Mother Nature,” who—
unsurprisingly, given Harari’s sexual orientation, “does not mind if men are
sexually attracted to one another. It’s only human mothers and fathers
steeped in particular cultures who make a scene if their son has a fling with
the boy next door.”^
If there is no such thing as “unnatural” behavior when it comes to sex,
then biology has become a fiction too, along with morality and religion.
Biology, in other words, ceases to be real the moment it is used to defend a
stable order of being which the oligarchs and their lackeys find uncongenial.
Professor Harari has finally made contact with the ontological realm only to
deny its existence. When it comes to sex, the “imaginary” is more real than
the biological. When it comes to religion we have the exact opposite
situation. Religion is a purely imaginary ignis fatuus hovering over the marsh
of biological determinism. When it comes to sexual differentiation, nature
has no meaning at all. Which is it, professor? Harari’s a Darwinist, which is
to say a biological materialist, when it comes to religion. But he’s a
Foucauldian when it comes to biology, especially when it comes to sexual
differentiation, which it turns out is completely imaginary, just like religion,
and a purely cultural construct. The best explanation for this contradiction is
Harari’s guilty conscience. But that is not the only explanation. The other
explanation is political control. The ultimate determination about whether an
idea is “real” or not depends on whether it can be used as a form of control.
Biology, as a result, gets discarded the minute someone makes use of it to
defend a stable order of being, as manifested in differentiation by sex.
Darwinism is a system of control which is effective because it denies the
reality of any stable being. If everything is in flux, there is no such thing as
justice and no way to object to an unjust social order. Not surprisingly, Harari
titles Chapter 8 of his book “There is no Justice in History.”
Instead of just leaving it at that and telling us that might makes right,
Harari attempts to justify his elimination of justice from history by
distinguishing “what is biologically determined from what people merely try
to justify through biological myths” by claiming that “a good rule of thumb is
‘Biology enables. Culture forbids.’” 1 ^ Culture, he continues, “tends to argue
that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective,
nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A
truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply
cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.”^ According to Harari’s
definition, culture is the only thing that is unnatural, and this is so because “in
truth, our concepts ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ are taken not from biology, but
from Christian theology.” 1 ^ 3
8
Truth
It’s reassuring to know that Professor Harari believes in the truth, even if he
uses the phrase to promote what is obviously false, but is it true to say that
differentiation according to sex is not part of the biological or natural world?
That would be hard to maintain. What Harari is really telling us is that he is
the self-appointed, undisputed commissar of all meanings when it comes to
biology. Anyone who insists that male and female have a meaning which our
homosexual professor does not like gets ruled out of court immediately by
being associated with “Christian theology,” which is an insult if you’re a Jew.
In doing this. Professor Harari strains our credulity, and endangers
thereby his own role as a successful commissar for the American Darwinist
Empire of political control through state-managed appetite. The entire edifice
of imperial control is based on one non-existent premise, namely, the
unprovable non-existence of God.
The theological meaning of ‘natural’ is ‘in accordance with the intentions of the
God who created nature’. Christian theologians argued that God created the
human body, intending each limb and organ to serve a particular purpose. ... If
we use our limbs and organs for the purpose envisioned by God, then it is a
natural activity. To use them differently than God intends is unnatural. But
evolution has no purpose. Organs have not evolved with a purpose, and the way
they are used is in constant flux.-^
We agree completely with what Harari had to say about God and
purpose in nature, but Harari is so intent on disproving “Christian theology”
that he failed to see that he undermined the fundamental tenet of natural
selection when he told us that “organs have not evolved with a purpose.”
Isn’t success in the struggle for survival the whole point of natural selection?
Doesn’t that qualify as purpose? Isn’t that the purpose at the heart of the idea
of survival of the fittest? Isn’t survival a purpose? Isn’t that why an organism
with sharper eyes wins out over one which can’t see as well? Does the eye
have no purpose? Does the eye see? Does the ear hear? Does the nose detect
odors? Does the wing enable flight? Everywhere we look in nature we see
purpose. The purpose of the lion is to catch the deer. If we are Darwinists, we
see natural selection aiding the purposeful behavior of some organisms over
others, unless we are blinded, as Professor Harari is, by a Jewish animus
toward Christianity and a homosexual animus against Nature. At this point, I
can imagine Darwin, if not rolling over in his grave, then certainly rolling his
eyes and feeling vindicated in his belief that the Anglo-Saxons race was
intellectually superior to the Semitic.
“Scientists studying the inner workings of the human organism,” Harari
informs us at another point,
have found no soul there. They increasingly argue that human behaviour is
determined by hormones, genes and synapses, rather than by free will—the
same forces that determine the behaviour of chimpanzees, wolves, and ants. Our
judicial and political systems largely try to sweep such inconvenient discoveries
under the carpet. But in all frankness, how long can we maintain the wall
separating the department of biology from the departments of law and political
science ?^ 1
As we have already shown, there is no separation. “Biology,” as
interpreted by the professors of Darwinism, has been given the force of law
in a system of complete control. All objections based on logos are ruled out
of court by this ideological system. All religious and moral claims are
debunked as unreal by an appeal to “biology,” which is to say biological
determinism. Yet any appeal to biology as proof that sexual differentiation is
part of nature gets debunked by the claim that all sex roles are culturally
created. It’s heads I win, tails you lose. Or as Professor Harari puts it:
“myths, rather than biology, define the roles, rights and duties of men and
women.”® Words mean what the professor wants them to mean.
Harari’s book is not so much a history as a celebration, as he puts it, of
“The Marriage of Science and Empire,” which united to create the operating
system of the American Empire. Jews like Harari play a crucial role in
bringing the two together by giving us a reading of Wealth of Nations, “the
most important economics manifesto of all time,” 1 ®! which sounds as if it had
been cribbed from the writings of Murray Rothbard:
In this view, the wisest economic policy is to keep politics out of the economy,
reduce taxation and government regulation to a minimum, and allow market
forces free rein to take their course. Private investors, unencumbered by
political considerations, will invest their money where they can get the most
profit, so the way to ensure the most economic growth—which will benefit
everyone, industrialists and workers—is for the government to do as little as
possible. This free-market doctrine is today the most common and influential
variant of the capitalist creed
Adam Smith, as a result, comes off sounding a lot like Gordon Gecko.
“What Smith says,” Harari tells us, as if letting us in on the inside story, “is,
in fact, that greed is good.” 1 ^ 1
9
Heaven on Earth
According to Professor Harari, the combination of science and capitalism is
going to lead to heaven on earth. Jews always promise heaven on earth and
then deliver the opposite as soon as they get their hands on the reins of
political power. Bolshevism in Russia is one example. Zionism in Palestine is
another. The Neoconservative End of History, which followed on the heels of
Communism’s collapse, is still another. Professor Harari is no exception to
this rule. “Paradise,” he tells us toward the end of his book, “is right around
the corner.”^ 1 All we need is “more patience” and docility to Professor
Harari’s utopian view of the world in order to get there. And what does this
paradise look like? Well, it looks a lot like New York City, capital of the
American Empire, where: “The new ethic promises paradise on condition
that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money, and
that the masses give free rein to their cravings and passions—and buy more
and more.” 1 ^ But there are other reasons.
Paradise is just around the corner because for “the first time in history ...
the world is dominated by a peace-loving elite—politicians, business people,
intellectuals and artists who genuinely see war as both evil and avoidable.” 1 ^ 1
We know that Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize while
simultaneously conducting seven wars in the Middle East. Professor Harari
unfortunately failed to give us the names of the individuals who make up this
“peace-loving elite,” which is a shame because we would surely like to know
who they are, if for no other reason than out of a desire to follow their
instructions more faithfully, so that we can hasten our arrival in “paradise.”
But the implication is clear. It is the same group which tried to create heaven
on earth in the past: Simon bar Kochba, Shabbetai Zevi, Karl Marx,
Theodore Herzl, Lev Trotsky, Irving Kristol, David Brooks, David Frum—in
short, the Tikkun Olam crowd. It turns out that the one thing the members of
this “peace-loving elite” has in common, from the Zealots at the time of
Christ to the Neocon Chickenhawks who got us into the current morass in the
Middle East, was their love of what Trotsky called “perpetual war.”
Be that as it may. Professor Harari has very definite ideas about the
Jewish paradise that he and his friends are preparing for us. The End of
History corresponds to the arrival of the perfect social order, which is based
on capitalism and science, which tell us that:
As far as we can tell, from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has
absolutely no meaning. [Is the preceding sentence a meaningful statement?]
Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without
goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan, and if
planet Earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably
keep going about its business as usual. As far as we can tell at this point, human
subjectivity would not be missed. Hence any meaning that people ascribe to
their lives is just a delusion. The other-worldly meanings medieval people
found in their lives were no more deluded than the modern humanist, nationalist
and capitalist meanings modern people find.^
Hence it should come as no surprise to learn that the goal of history as
manifested by the American Empire and administered by Jews like Harari, is
not the happiness of its inhabitants:
the dynamics of history are not directed towards enhancing human well-being.
There is no basis for thinking that the most successful cultures in history are
necessarily the best ones for Homo sapiens. Like evolution, history disregards
the happiness of individual organisms .^ 1
This is not reason for despair, however, because happiness is still
possible even if “life has absolutely no meaning” because:
Biologists hold that our mental and emotional world is governed by biochemical
mechanisms shaped by millions of years of evolution. Like all other mental
states, our subjective well-being is not determined by external parameters such
as salary, social relations or political rights. Rather, it is determined by a
complex system of nerves, neurons, synapses and various biochemical
substances such as serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin.^
It turns out that history has a meaning after all, and that the ultimate
meaning is pharmaceutical:
If we accept the biological approach to happiness, then history turns out to be of
minor importance, since most historical events have had no impact on our
biochemistry. History can change the external stimuli that cause serotonin to be
secreted, yet it does not change the resulting serotonin levels, and hence it
cannot make people happier.^
If “the only thing that matters” is the level of serotonin in my blood, 1 ^
why did I waste my time reading Harari’s book? Was it only to learn that:
There is only one historical development that has real significance. Today,
when we finally realise that the keys to happiness are in the hands of our
biochemical system, we can stop wasting our time on politics and social
reforms, putsches and ideologies, and focus instead on the only thing that can
make us truly happy: manipulating our biochemistry . 122
After wasting our time by slogging through 400 pages of illogicality
couched in bad prose, we learn to our chagrin that history is bunk, and true
happiness lies in ingesting the right chemicals. The same Jews who used to
promote revolution are now promoting a docile drugged out population,
probably because the Jews are now in control and want to remain there.
Turning Karl Marx upside down, Professor Harari feels that opiates should be
the religion of the masses:
If we invest billions in understanding our brain chemistry and developing
appropriate treatments, we can make people far happier than ever before,
without any need of revolutions. Prozac, for example, does not change regimes,
but by raising serotonin levels it lifts people out of their depression. Nothing
captures the biological argument better than the famous New Age slogan:
‘Happiness Begins Within.’ Money, social status, plastic surgery, beautiful
houses, powerful positions—none of these will bring you happiness. Lasting
happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin . 22
Or did he mean OxyContin? According to Harari, “each day, each
person” should take “a dose of ‘soma’, a synthetic drug which makes people
happy without harming their productivity and efficiency.” 122 Aldous Huxley
popularized the originally Indian concept of “Soma” as a form of control in
his dystopian novel Brave New World, which appeared in 1932. The
Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor which goes by the brand name of
Prozac entered medical use in 1986. 1221 Soma in its current form came on the
market in 1995 and is known as OxyContin. OxyContin—which is the time-
release version of Oxycodone, an opiate which has been in existence since
1916—is a Jewish invention. It was created by the Sackler family and
marketed by their drug firm Purdue Pharma. In 2007, Purdue Pharma had to
pay a $600 million fine for “lying to doctors about the potential for patients
to abuse OxyContin” 1221 and thereby almost single-handedly igniting what is
now being called the opioid crisis. The $600 million Purdue Pharma paid was
a drop in the bucket compared to the billions OxyContin has earned for it
since the drug was first approved by the FDA. The Sackler family alone has a
net worth of $13 billion, which places them above the Rockefellers and the
Mellons on the list of America’s richest families. 1221
Purdue Pharma’s founder Arthur Sackler along with his brothers grew up
in Brooklyn during the Depression as the child of Jewish immigrants from
Galicia and Poland. His genius lay not so much in the chemistry of the brain
as in the chemistry of modern advertising. “In 1997, Arthur was
posthumously inducted into the Medical Advertising Hall of Fame, and a
citation praised his achievement in ‘bringing the full power of advertising
and promotion to pharmaceutical marketing.’” Sackler was, in other words, a
drug dealer who knew how to change the system to accommodate what was
previously known as either unethical or illegal activity. In this, he was no
different from other Jews of his generation—like Meyer Lansky or Moe
Dalitz, for instance—who accomplished the same feat by bringing about the
decriminalization of gambling and usury.
The Sackler family epitomizes in our day the perfect marriage of science
and capitalism which Hariri celebrates in Sapiens. Like the English
involvement in the opium trade in the 19 th century, Arthur Sackler provided
the imperial project with practical knowledge, ideological justification, and
pharmaceutical gadgets which turned Americans into Harari’s idea of the
ideal citizen, which is to say, into a mass of drugged out zombies who made
the Jews rich by becoming their docile chemical slaves. Without the
collaboration of the Jewish pharmaceutical industry, “it is highly
questionable whether Europeans [i.e., the Anglo-American empire] could
have conquered the world.
10
Super-Oxycontin
When the original patent for OxyContin was about to expire in the 1980s, the
“scientists” at Purdue came up with a dose that was eight times stronger than
the original pill, creating the equivalent of “an nuclear weapon ... in terms of
narcotic firepower.” 12 ^ Soon the same people who had gotten hooked on the
drug were grinding up multiple tablets of the new super-OxyContin and
injecting it into their veins to maintain the original high, which had worn off
as original highs always do. Graduating to the needle meant that those who
began their addiction to OxyContin under a doctor’s supervision for things
like athletic injuries soon moved on to heroin, which at a certain point
became cheaper than the drug Purdue Pharma was peddling.
Within five years of its release in 1995, OxyContin was earning Purdue
Pharma $1 billion a year. During this time
there were signs that people were abusing it in rural areas like Maine and
Appalachia. If you ground the pills up and snorted them, or dissolved them in
liquid and injected them, you could override the time-release mechanism and
deliver a huge narcotic payload all at once. ... As more and more doctors
prescribed OxyContin for an ever-greater range of symptoms, some patients
began selling their pills on the black market, where the street price was a dollar
a milligram. Doctors who were easily manipulated by their patients—or
corrupted by the money in play—set up so-called pill mills, pain clinics that
thrived on a wholesale business of issuing OxyContin prescriptions.^^
The Sackler family’s $13 billion net worth was accumulated from a load
of human suffering and death which is only now coming to light:
Since 1999, two hundred thousand Americans have died from overdoses related
to OxyContin and other prescription opioids. Many addicts, finding prescription
painkillers too expensive or too difficult to obtain, have turned to heroin.
According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, four out of five
people who try heroin today started with prescription painkillers. The most
recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that
a hundred and forty-five Americans now die every day from opioid overdoses.
non
In Pike County, Kentucky, where Purdue Pharma reached an out of court
settlement, 29 percent of the county’s residents said that they or their families
knew someone who had died as a result of using OxyContin. At the time of
the lawsuit, nearly half of the players on the 1997 Pikeville High School
football team “had died of overdoses or were addicted.” In some parts of
West Virginia ten percent of newborns come into this world addicted to
opioids.
The story of the Sackler family gives new meaning to Harari’s
celebration of drugs as the “only” source of “lasting happiness.It also
puts in stark relief the difference between the Jewish heaven on earth based
on Darwinism, “science,” Libido Dominandi, and dope and St. Augustine’s
City of God. We now have a clear idea of the slavery which Harari’s Jewish
utopia entails. Can anyone in his right mind choose that over a social order
based on logos as articulated by the tradition of the natural law which was
abandoned at around the time of the Scientific Revolution? According to that
concept
moral laws are based on human nature, on the way we are. As a consequence,
morality is a function of human nature, so that reason can discover valid moral
principles by looking at the nature of humanity and society, no matter where on
Earth. This means that what we ought to do is related to what we are. “You shall
not kill,” for instance, is based on the real value of human life and the need to
preserve it. “You shall not commit adultery” is based on the real value of
marriage. 1 ^ 1
There is, in other words, no radical dichotomy between the mind and the
universe. Logos is common to both, or as Aquinas would say, “the light of
reason is placed by nature in every man to guide him in his acts.” This means
that
the laws of morality are not rules that we invent but principles that we discover,
similar in a way to the laws of a science such as physiology. Just as our
physiological nature makes it necessary for us to eat certain foods and to
breathe oxygen for our bodies to be healthy, so our moral nature makes certain
moral rules and laws necessary for our souls to be healthy. Not only is there a
physical order in nature, but also a moral order. ^^1
The order of creation is eminently rational. True science could not exist
if it were not. Science and mathematics are not possible in the Darwinian
universe which Professor Harari is proposing as “paradise.” They are only
possible if we accept the proposition that:
The most fundamental assumption of the rational mind is that the world
perceived through reason is true—that the world itself is reasonable. This
presupposes that the mind interpreting the world through reason is somehow
apprehending the world as it actually exists J- !1 U
The “mysterious conformity here between the rationality of our minds
and the ‘rationality’ found in the world around us” has a very simple
explanation: both were brought into being by “an intelligent, rational,
orderly, and lawgiving Creator God who made this Universe the way it
j s ӣ 106 ]
Creation could not exist without a Creator. Creation is rational because
the Creator is the epitome of all rationality. God is logos and logos is God.
The mind of man fits into that order like a key into a lock:
Only the existence of God can explain that there is a Universe, that there is
order in this Universe, that this Universe is intelligible, that there are universal
laws of nature, and that there are universal moral laws. This is the only way we
can take the world as something created according to an intelligible plan
accessible to the human intellect through the natural light of reason. This is the
only way we can understand the natural order and moral order of this Universe.
Because there is a Creator, we have not only a rational Lawgiver—who
guarantees order, intelligibility, and predictability—but also a moral Lawgiver
—who guarantees decency, integrity, conscience, responsibility, justice, and
human dignity that comes with human rights.^SZ]
In spite of his allegiance to Darwin, philosophical materialism, dope, and
even dopier “science,” Professor Harari can’t seem to get Genesis out of his
mind. He ends his book not as the disinterested scientist but by taking on the
role of the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, who told Eve “ye shall be like
gods” if she and her husband followed his instructions. Harari titles the
afterword to his book: “the animal that became a god,” arguing that man can
become divine by following what Harari calls “intelligent design.”
11
Animal to God
Like the United States of America, which went from barbarism to decadence
without ever finding civilization along the way, Harari’s Sapiens went from
being an animal to a god without ever becoming human. Which vision is
more plausible? The idea that man evolved from an amoeba into a god, or the
claim that “At the dawn of humanity, there appeared quite suddenly and
abruptly the faculties of language, rationality, morality, self-awareness, and
religion, all combined in an immortal soul—practically all at once.” 1 ^ 1
By now it should be obvious that what Harari calls intelligent design is
another word for logos. The event that he predicts for the future actually
happened 70,000 years ago. It is now time for Sapiens to abandon the
illusions of the Serpent and return to being what he has been all along, the
rational animal who occupies an intermediary position between angels and
beasts.
Endnotes
m Christopher Dawson, Dynamics of World History (Wilmington, DE: ISI, 2002), p. 303.
m Dawson, p. 305.
^ Dawson, p. 305.
^ http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/7477-hegel-georg-wilhelm-friedrich
^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Butterfield
^ https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/158386-the-ideas-of-economists-and-political-
philosophers-both-when-they
m Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: HarperCollins,
2015), Kindle file, p. 3.
^ Harari, p. 3.
^ Gerard Verschuuren, At the Dawn of Humanity: The First Humans, to be published in
2018, p. 12.
^ Verschuuren, p. 30.
mi Harari, p. 27.
mi Harari, p. 28.
^ Harari, p. 32.
mi Harari, p. 27.
mi Verschuuren, p. 113.
^ Harari, p. 37.
mi Harari, p. 37.
^ Harari, p. 109.
^ Harari, pp. 109-19.
^ Harari, p. 110.
mi Harari, p. 111.
mi Harari, p. 108.
mi Harari, p. 108.
mi Harari, p. 109.
mi An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon founded upon the Seventh Edition of Liddell
and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1889), logos, pp. 476-
7.
m Harari, p. 4.
^ Harari, p. 5.
^ Verschuuren, p. 51.
^ Harari, p. 19.
^ Harari, p. 21.
^ Verschuuren, p. 65.
^ Harari, p. 22.
^ Harari, p. 22.
^ Harari, p. 22.
^ Harari, p. 22.
^ http://www.nytimes.com/2007/ll/01/science/01chimp.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/ll/01/science/01chimp.html
^ Verschuuren, p. 43.
^ Verschuuren, pp. 43-4.
^ Verschuuren, p. 46.
^ Verschuuren, p. 52.
^ Verschuuren, p. 57.
^ Verschuuren, p. 64.
^ Verschuuren, p. 80.
^ Verschuuren, p. 190.
^ Verschuuren, p. 194.
^ Verschuuren, p. 194.
^ Verschuuren, p. 191.
^ Verschuuren, p. 192.
^ Verschuuren, p. 191.
^ Verschuuren, p. 196.
^ Verschuuren, pp. 197-8.
^ Harari, p. 24.
^ Harari, p. 24.
^ Harari, p. 41.
^ Harari, p. 41.
Harari, p. 41.
^ http s: //en.wikip edia. org/wiki/Embryolo gy
^ Harari, p. 42.
^ Harari, p. 22.
^ Harari, p. 22.
^ Harari, p. 24.
^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wikiAf uval_Noah_Harari
^ See chapter one of my book Degenerate Moderns for more details.
^ Again, see Degenerate Moderns for details.
^ Verschuuren, p. 99.
^ Verschuuren, p. 114.
m Harari, p. 254.
^ Harari, p. 304.
^ Harari, p. 192.
^ Harari, p. 254.
^ Harari, p. 145.
^ Harari, p. 146.
^ Harari, p. 146.
^ Harari, p. 146.
^ Harari, p. 147.
^ Harari, p. 147.
^ Harari, p. 147.
^ Harari, p. 236.
^ Harari, p. 149.
^ Harari, p. 311.
^ Harari, p. 328.
^ Harari, p. 311.
^ Harari, p. 333.
^ Harari, p. 349.
^ Harari, p. 374.
Harari, p. 391.
m Harari, p. 243.
^ Harari, p. 386.
^ Harari, p. 388.
Harari, p. 389.
^ Harari, p. 389.
^ Harari, p. 389.
^ Harari, p. 390.
^ https: //en. wikip edia. or g/wiki/F luoxetine
^ https://forward.com/fast-forward/385375/the-jewish-family-making-billions-from-the-
opioid-crisis/
^ https://www.newyorker.eom/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-that-built-an-empire-of-
pain
^ Harari, p. 304.
^ https://www.newyorker.eom/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-that-built-an-empire-of-
pain
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-that-built-an-empire-of-
pain
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-that-built-an-empire-of-
pain
Harari, p. 389.
Verschuuren, p. 118.
Verschuuren, p. 134.
1^1 Verschuuren, p. 179.
Verschuuren, pp. 157-9.
Verschuuren, p. 165.
Verschuuren, p. 200.
HEBREW
NAZIS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE
TheDeathofMulticulturalism?
JewishMassMurderers
Pro-LifeJew The
Believer Judaismis
Nihilistic
JewishNihilisminNineteenthCenturvRussia
ObviousPresence
EnliqhtenmentLedtoNihilism
DavidCooper
SurvivaloftheFittest
GeorqRatzinqer
ProudofH isGreatUncle
TheEmancipationoftheJews
EspeciallvProphetic
Notlmpressed
BioqraphicalNote
Footnotes
PREFAC
E
Seven years after Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Palestinians in the cave of the
patriarch in Hebron, and less than 5 years after Shahak and Mezvinsky explained how
Goldstein was a Jewish Nazi, The Believer , a film written and directed by Henry Bean about
an orthodox Jew who becomes a neo-Nazi won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2001 Sundance film
festival. The film is based loosely on the life of Daniel Burros, a neo-Nazi who committed
suicide in the mid-‘60s after a New York Times reporter wrote an article exposing him as a
Jew. According to Bean:
Burros was staying at a camp in the Poconos with the neo-Nazis when the
story in the New York Times claiming that he was Jewish came out. The Nazis
weren't upset. They were saying just sit down; we can talk about this. But
Burros went up to nis room, put on a Wagner record and shot himself. He killed
himself within an hour of the story coming out.
Bean began discussing the Danny Burros story in the ‘70s when he was a writer living on
the West Coast. He began to see Burros as typifying a particular kind of Jew. “He was a rabbi
manque. Antisemitism is a form of practicing Judaism. He’s sort of a rabbi after all. A Jew by
day, a Nazi by night.... He was desperately hiding something and compulsively trying to
bring it out at the same time. People are drawn to contradiction. He undergoes a conversion,
but not back to the Torah.” By telling the story of the Jewish Nazi, Bean concluded, “I began to
understand what Judaism was.”
When Danny Balint, the character Bean created out of the story of Danny Burros, gets a
call from a New York Times reporter, he gives an eloquent articulation of anti-Semitism.
Judaism “is a sickness... . The real Jew is a nomad and a wanderer. He has no roots and
no attachments. He universalizes everything. All he can do is buy and sell and manipulate
markets. It’s all mental. Marx, Freud, Einstein: what have they given us? Communism,
infantile sexuality and the atom bomb. They want nothing but nothingness, nothing without
end.”
The main issue in The Believer is theological. Danny has penetrated to the heart of the
Jewish religion by understanding that the Jew worships Nothingness. If Hitler is the biggest
Nihilist of the 20th century, he is the chief rabbi in the religion that worships “nothing but
nothingness, nothing without end.” He attained that position by default when the Church
stopped working for the conversion of the Jews.
Dorothy Rabinowitz recently announced the death of multiculturalism in the Wall
Street Journal . Citing the pronouncements of the prime ministers of England, France, and
Germany, she crowed:
Who would have believed that in the space of a few weeks the leaders of the
three major European powers would publicly denounce multiculturalism and
declare in so many words that it was a proven disaster and a threat to
society?
Rabinowitz claimed that multiculturalism had “led to segregated communities”; it had
also “helped nurture radical Islam’s terrorist cells.” Rabinowitz goes on to claim that
multiculturalism, which she describes as “the unofficial established religion of the
universities,” is, in fact, “a faith whose requirements have shaped every aspect of cultural,
economic and political life in Western democracies for the last 50 years. ”111
Twenty years ago Rabinowitz was worried about Pat Buchanan and Joe Sobran. Twenty
years ago she was writing to the
editors of papers like the Philadelphia Inquirer demanding that that paper drop Joe Sobran
as one of its columnists. Now she’s worried about Major Hasan. For those of you who have
trouble keeping mass murderers straight in your mind, in November 2009 Major Nidal Malik
Hasan opened fire in Fort Hood killing 12 fellow soldiers and wounding 32 others.
Rabinowitz attributes this attack to a combination of “Hasan’s well-documented jihadist
sympathies” and multiculturalism. She ends her piece by claiming that when Major Hasan goes
on trial, “The forces of multiculturalist piety, which played so central a role in advancing this
Army major and concealing the menace he posed, will be the invisible presence on trial with
him”
Associating multiculturalism with Islam is a daring rhetorical move, especially when that
rhetorical move is made by a Jew, because Dorothy Rabinowitz must know, even if the dumb
goyim who read her columns in the Wall Street Journal do not, that multiculturalism has been
a completely Jewish creation from start to finish. For over 100 years now, Jews in America
have been promoting multiculturalism as a strategy for weakening the dominant culture and
thereby enhancing Jewish power.
In his essay “Jewish Involvement in Shaping American Immigration policy, 1881-
1965: A Historical Review” 121 University of California at Fong Beach Professor Kevin
MacDonald shows in exhaustive detail how Jewish organizations supported multiculturalism
almost from the moment when eastern European Jews arrived in significant numbers on these
shores. According to MacDonald, the “historical record supports the proposition that making
the US into a multicultural society has been a major goal of organized Jewry beginning in the
19th century.” The main way in which Jews promoted multiculturalism is by changing this
nation’s immigration laws. “Jews,” according to MacDonald, “have been ‘the single most
persistent pressure group favoring a liberal immigration policy’ in the US in the entire
immigration debate beginning in 1881.” MacDonald goes on to cite one Jewish authority after
another to back up his case. According to Neuringer:
Immigration had constituted a prime object of concern for practically every
major Jewish defense and community relations organization. Over the years
their spokesmen had assiduously attended congressional hearings and the
Jewish effort was of the utmost importance in establishing and financing
such nonsectarian groups as the National Liberal Immigration League and the
Citizens Committee for Displaced Persons.
According to Nathan C. Belth:
In Congress, through all the years when the immigration battles were being
fought, the names ofJewish legislators were in the forefront of the liberal
forces: from Adolph Sabath to Samuel Dickstein and Emanuel Celler in the
House and from Herbert H. Lehman to Jacob Javits in the Senate. Each in this
time was leader of the ADL and of major organizations concerned with
democratic development.
Indeed, writing in 1914, the sociologist Edward A. Ross had a clear sense that
liberal immigration policy was exclusively a Jewish issue.
The Jewish promotion of multiculturalism in America had two main goals: 1)
“maximizing the number of Jewish immigrants” and 2) “opening up the US to immigration
from all of the peoples of the world.” Both goals paradoxically used “diversity” as a stalking
horse to advance Jewish ethnocentrism. This is so because the whole point of multiculturalism
is not so much the promotion of diversity as it is the demographic dilution of homogeneity.
Jews wanted to weaken the majority culture because they always felt uncomfortable in
unified coherent cultures. The defenders of immigration restriction during this period made it
clear that America was a country which had been settled and was then inhabited by
Christians from northwestern Europe. This implied racial superiority in the minds of the
Jewish proponents of restrictionism but not the legislators, who claimed that
the northern European, and particularly Anglo-Saxons, made this country... . It
is a good country. It suits us. And what we assert is that we are not going to
surrender it to somebody else or allow other people, no matter what their
merits, to make it something different." Representative Leavitt saw through the
diversity
Dloy when he complained that the Jews were "the one great historic people who
nave maintained the identity of their race throughout centuries because they
believe sincerely that they are a chosen people, with certain ideals to maintain,
and knowing that the loss of racial identity means a change of ideals.
The restriction!sts complained that the Jews were attempting to shape U.S. immigration
policy according to Jewish interests and not in the interests of the country which welcomed
them as immigrants:
Hence the endeavor of the Jews to control the immigration policy of the
United States... . The systematic campaign in newspapers to break down all
arguments for restriction and to claim nativist fears is waged by and for one
race. Hebrew money is behind the National Liberal Immigration League and its
numerous publications... . literature that proves the blessings of immigration to
all classes in America emanates from subtle Hebrew brains.
The reference to “subtle Hebrew brains” probably excludes Dorothy Rabinowitz from our
discussion, but the purpose of multiculturalism has remained constant, as has the Jewish
support for it. The purpose of multiculturalism has always been to subvert coherent cultures,
weaken the majority, and thereby enhance the Jews’ power. Or, as MacDonald puts it,
ethnic and religious pluralism serves external Jewish interest because Jews
become just one of many ethnic groups. This results in the diffusion of political
and cultural influence among the various ethnic and religious groups, and it
becomes difficult or impossible to develop unified, cohesive groups of gentiles
united in their opposition to Judaism. Historically, major anti-Semitic movements
have tended to erupt in societies that have been, apart from the Jews,
religiously and/or ethnically homogeneous.
The restrictionists included organized labor, who feared competition from the new
immigrants who were a perennial source of cheap labor.
“During this period, the immigration issue was also economic. Native businesses feared
cutthroat Jewish business practices.” Jewish factory owners, the group most likely to be the
backers of Jewish organizations favored immigration as a source of cheap labor. During this
period [1914] Edward A. Ross described gentile resentment for “being obliged to engage in a
humiliating and undignified scramble to keep his trade or his clients against the Jewish
invader—suggesting a rather broad- based concern with Jewish economic competition.”
The early opponents of multiculturalism also feared Jews as agents
of cultural subversion:
Our whole system of amusements has been taken over by men who came
here on the crest of the south and east European immigration. They produce
our horrible film stories; they compose and dish out to us our jazz music, they
write many of the books we read, and edit our magazines and newspapers.
Jewish immigrants were also “widely perceived to be ... disproportionately involved in
radical political movements,” a fact often acknowledged by the Jewish press. In one of its
editorials, The American Hebrew pointed out that “we must not forget the immigrants form
Russia and Austria will becoming from countries infested with Bolshevism, and it will
require more than a superficial effort to make good citizens out of them.”
The fact that Jewish immigrants form Eastern Europe were viewed as “infected with
Bolshevism ... unpatriotic, alien, unassimilable” resulted in a wave of anti-Semitism in the
1920s and contributed to the restrictive immigration legislation of the period. Almost a decade
after the immigration debate ended with the triumph of the restrictionists in 1924, Jewish
immigration was still having consequences for American identity. As MacDonald points out,
“In Philadelphia in the 1930s, fully 72.2 percent of the Communist Party members were the
children of Jewish immigrants who came to the US in the late 19^ and early
20th century.”
During the 1920s, Franz Boas, the Prussian Jewish anthropology professor from
Columbia University, turned the social sciences into a form of ethnic warfare. Arguments
from anthropology, no matter how absurd, could then be marshaled as “scientific” refutation
of restrictionist immigration policies:
Carl Degler notes that Boas's professional correspondence "reveals that an
important motive behind his famous head-measuring project in 1910 was his
strong personal interest in keeping America diverse in population." The study,
whose conclusions were placed into the Congressional Record by Representative
Emanuel Celler during the debate on immigration restriction ... concluded that
the environmental difference consequent to immigration caused differences in
head shape.
The Battle over multiculturalism continued unabated after World War n. Senator Pat
McCarran, a Catholic from Arizona, was subjected to psychoanalysis on the pages of
Commentary magazine, published by the American Jewish Committee, as a way of
explaining his opposition to the progressive Jewish view on immigration. As before the war,
the opposition to McCarran’s bill—which became the McCarran-Walter act—“was led
by Jewish members of Congress, including Celler, Javits and Lehman, all of whom ... were
prominent members of the ADL.”
There is a direct link between Jewish anthropology as practiced by Franz Boas during the
1920s and Jewish immigration policy as implemented by Senator Jacob Javits in 1965. In
other words, if New York City resembles Mogadishu these days, we have Dorothy
Rabinowitz and her co-religionists to thank for this. The main reason people like Major Hasan
are American citizens and serving in the United States Army is the immigration bill of 1965,
which was a Jewish operation from start to finish. It turns out that the Jewish organizations
that promoted multiculturalism all shared the view of America proposed by Philip Roth in his
recent paranoid fantasy novel The Plot against America. America, in spite of waging war on
Hitler’s Third Reich, was always in Jewish eyes a country waiting to be taken over by Nazi
extremists. Multiculturalism was the Jewish way of ensuring that that would not happen. As
MacDonald points out:
Earl Raab ... remarks very positively on the success of revised American
foreign policy in altering the ethnic composition of the United States since 1965.
Raab notes that the Jewish community has taken a leadership role in changing
the Northwestern European bias of American immigration policy, and he has
also maintained that one fact inhibiting anti-Semitism in the contemporary US is
"an increasing ethnic heterogeneity as a result of immigration, has made it even
more difficult for a political party or mass movement of bigotry to develop/' Or
more colorfully: "The Census Bureau has just reported that about half of the
American population will soon be non-white or non-European. And they will all
be American citizens. We have tipped beyond the point where a Nazi-Aryan party
will be able to prevail in this country." ... Indeed the "primary objective" of
Jewish political activity after 1945 was ... to prevent the emergence of an anti-
Semitic reactionary mass movement in the United States."
Charles Silberman notes that
American Jews are committed to cultural tolerance because of their belief that
Jews are safe only in a society acceptant of a wide range of attitudes and
behaviors, as well as a diversity of religious and ethnic groups. It is this belief,
for example, not approval of homosexuality, that leads an overwhelming majority
of American Jews to endorse 'gay rights' and to take a liberal stand on most
other so-called 'social' issues.
Silberman’s testimony leads MacDonald to conclude that:
The 1965 law is having the effect that it seems reasonable to suppose had
been intended by its Jewish advocates all along: the Census Bureau projects
that by the year 2050, European-derived peoples with no longer be a majority
of the population of America. Moreover, multiculturalism has already become
a powerful ideological and political reality.
In promoting their multicultural agenda, the Jews claimed that it would lead to
collaboration and brotherhood. Writers like Boas protege Israel Ehrenberg, who wrote under
the name of Ashley Montagu, claimed that human beings were “innately cooperative.” Any
evidence that increasing ethnic diversity led to ethnic conflict, i.e., violence, was ignored by
the Boasian social science establishment, which had an a priori and overriding commitment to
Jewish universalism. Conflict and violence, however, were inevitable, especially since the
dominant philosophy of post-Christian America was then and is now Capitalism, which
is the economic version of the war of all against all:
If one adopts a cultural pluralism model in which there is free
competition for resources and reproductive success, difference between ethnic
groups are inevitable, and history suggests that such differences would result in
animosity from the groups that are losing out... . Under present policies, each
racial/ethnic group in the world is encouraged to press its interest in
expanding its demographic and political presence in America and can be
expected to do so if given the opportunity.
According to MacDonald, the American Jewish Committee, the main proponent of both
multiculturalism and unrestricted immigration, succeeded in changing the ethnic make up
of the United States by a combination of “strong leadership [particularly Louis
Marshall], internal cohesion, well-funded programs, sophisticated lobbying techniques, well-
chosen non- Jewish allies and good timing.”
If timing is everything the timing was all wrong in Rabinowitz’s attack on the connection
between Major Hasan, Islam and multiculturalism One the one hand, Islam was changing the
political face of the Middle East through non-violent, pro- democracy rallies. Egypt had just
toppled its dictator in a bloodless revolution. (Paradoxically, the same pro-democracy
forces that neocons like Rabinowitz had promoted as agents of change in the Middle East were
finally having their day, and the neocons were upset being pro-democracy in the Middle East
means invariably being anti-Israel.) On the other hand, at the very moment when the Islamic
world was becoming a paradigm of non-violent democratic revolution of the sort that the
neocons all claimed they desired in the mid-East, Americans were treated to a spate of mass
murders perpetrated by Jews.
That you may not have noticed this is not surprising. Ever since the Leo Frank trial in
America, the Dreyfus case in France, and the Mendil Beilis case in Russia, the Jewish-
dominated press has adopted a policy of 1) suppressing the evidence whenever a suspect in a
crime turns out to be a Jew and 2) accusing anyone who brings up this fact of anti-
Semitism. In
addition to that, the Jewish dominated media work for the exoneration of any Jew brought to
trial. The pattern had already been established in the 19^ century. Once Jews gained
significant control over the press, they instituted a policy which suppressed the identification
of Jews as criminals, or as a fallback position, once the Jewishness of the perpetrator was
inescapable, of proclaiming the suspect as an innocent victim of anti-Semitism. The trial of Leo
Frank is a good case in point, and it has served as a template for the Jewish press ever since.
As one writer put it in 1892:
It is a strange phenomenon which otherwise is evident in no other religious
group that the Jewish public opinion in the Austrian press always shows
solidarity with Jewish criminals. Every time a Jew is convicted of a crime, it is
take as new proof for pervasive anti-Semitism. Every conviction is
evidence of anti- Semitism.Ol
Dorothy Rabinowitz could have bolstered her case against multiculturalism if she had
cited the story of Maksim Gellman. One week before her article appeared in the Wall Street
Journal , Maksim Gelman, a recent Ukrainian immigrant, who became an American citizen in
2005, went on a two-day killing spree from February 11 to February 12, 2011, which
resulted in the stabbing deaths of four people, including his girlfriend’s mother, and the
wounding of five others. The only problem in this scenario, at least from Rabinowitz’s point
of view, is that Gelman is a Jew. He was certainly a product of Jewish-inspired
multiculturalism which opened this country’s borders in 1965, but it is unlikely that he was
inspired by jihadism, especially since his father drove an ambulance for a Jewish
organization. If Rabinowitz were interested in understanding the psychology of mass
murderers, she should have focused on the Jews because it was they who were making the
news as mass murderers in early 2011, not the Muslims.
The story of Jared Loughner is another case in point. Roughly one month before Maksim
Gelman’s homocidal rampage in New York, on January 8, 2011, Loughner went on a shooting
spree that resulted in the death of six people and left 14 wounded. One of the people whom
Loughner shot but did not kill was United States Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who is
Jewish. The response to the killings was both predictable and immediate. Loughner was
accused of being a right-wing anti-Semite whose actions had been set in motion by right-wing
talk radio and politicians like Sara Palin, whose website featured a picture of Giffords in the
cross hairs of a gun sight. The hate crime story circulated widely until the facts started to
emerge. Loughner, it turns out, was a Jew himself. In fact, according to some reports, he was a
member of the same synagogue that Giffords attended. To make matters more complicated,
his favorite book was Mein Kampf. Loughner was, in other words, a Jewish Nazi.
According to the Jewish Telegraph Agency:
Bryce Tierney, a friend of Loughner from high school, told Mother Jones
magazine that the alleged gunman posted "Mein Kampf" as a "favorite book" on
a social media site in part to provoke his mother, who Tierney says is Jewish.
Once it became apparent that Loughner was Jewish, and once it had become clear that it
was going to be impossible to maintain the right-wing, anti-Semite story line, the story began
to change. The ADL then released an “analysis of the messages written by Arizona shooting
suspect Jared Lee Loughner” which “revealed Wednesday that the he may not have been
motivated by anti-Semitism when shooting Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, but rather by a
profound mistrust of government.”
“While there is still much we don’t know about Loughner, his online footprint offers one
window into his mindset in the months leading up to the killings,” said Abraham H. Foxman,
ADL National Director. “The writings that have come to light so far suggest someone who
probably was not associated with any extremist group or movement, but who has a generic
distrust of government and a vague interest in conspiracy theories.”
In other words, the ADL was telling us that the fact that Mein Kampf was Loughner’s
favorite book had nothing to do with his attempted assassination of a Jewish member of
Congress. The only way this makes sense is if we look at the already mentioned pattern of
Jewish organizations and newspapers, who exonerate automatically any suspect who happens
to be Jewish. But even granting that, it’s probably just as accurate to say that the concept of a
Jewish Nazi is simply too difficult for the media to process.
The historic precedent of Jewish Nazis assassinating Jewish politicians, however, has
already been established, no matter how alien it seems to 21 st American media categories.
Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley was a Jewish Nazi in the most literal sense of the term. In
February 1919, he assassinated Kurt Eisner, the Jewish premier of the Bavarian soviet
republic. Arco Valley had served in the German army during World War I and upon his return
to civilian life in Munich he was appalled at what he saw as the Jewish influence which took
over German culture in the wake of their defeat. Some speculate that he decided to kill Eisner
to prove himself to his nationalist friends in the Thule Society, but the mystery remains. Why
would a Jew other than Groucho Marx want to be part of an organization that would not accept
him as a member? Politics may have had something to do with it. Arco Valley is reported to
have said that “Eisner is a Bolshevist, a Jew; he isn’t German; he doesn’t feel German; he
subverts all patriotic thoughts and feelings. He is a traitor to this land.”MI Once Arco Valley
killed Eisner, the students at the university which he was attending proclaimed him a hero.
Hitler was grateful to his Jewish supporter because Eisner’s death led to the creation of the
Bavarian Soviet Republic, under another Jew, Eugen Levine, and this convinced groups like
the Bavarian Freikorps that things had gone too far and caused them to intervene and put an
end to the Communist, i.e, Jewish takeover of Bavaria. Arco Valley was sentenced to death
for his crime, but a sympathetic judge overturned the ruling and commuted it to a five-year
prison sentence. Four years into his sentence, he was evicted from his cell to make room for
Adolf Hitler, who wrote Mein Kampf during his stay there.
Jewish mass murderers remain invisible in America in the 21 st century because the
concept of the hate crime was created with a political purpose in mind. Murder as already a
crime in every state in the union; hate crimes were created to demonize a certain group of
people. As a result, the hate crime went on to become a self-fulfilling prophecy because it is
only applied when the perpetrator fits a certain profile. As the late Tom Herron pointed out in
these pages, the Jew who deliberately set fire
to the church of the little flower in Royal Oak, Michigan as retaliation against Father
Coughlin, could not be construed as the perpetrator of a hate crime because he was Jewish.
Needless to say, the Rabinowitz theory that mass murders came about when jihadism
mixed with multiculturalism was looking less plausible by the minute. On February 10, 2010,
which is to say one year before Rabinowitz discovered the key to mass murder in a
combination of jihadism and multiculturalism, a white professor walked into a faculty meeting
of the biology department at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and murdered the
African-American department chairman and other persons of color in the department. This
would seem to constitute the quintessential hate crime. That’s how the media would have
played the story had they not discovered that the mass murderer in this instance turned out to
be a woman and Jewish. Once those facts were established, the story, deprived of its political
usefulness, disappeared from the headlines.
Amy Bishop, the Jewish lady who gunned down her black department chairman, had
murdered her brother a few years earlier but had never been prosecuted because her parents
were both wealthy and members of powerful Jewish organizations. Once it becomes apparent
that a mass murderer is Jewish the story changes dramatically. Suddenly, we are out of the
realm of hate crime and into the realm of dynamic silence, or back to the ’60s therapy
explanation of why basically good people do bad things when under stress because they have
not been granted tenure, etc.
Just as the recently deceased Bernard Nathanson found that he ceased to exist as a person
in the public record when the became a Jew who opposed abortion (there is not such thing as
a pro-life Jew according to the categories of the New York Times ) so there is no such thing as
a Jewish Nazi or a Jewish mass murderer. The category simply doesn’t exist.
Unless, of course, you read Israel Shahak’s account of Baruch Goldstein, yet another
Jewish mass murderer, and how he murdered 29 men, including children, at the Patriarch’s
cave in Hebron on February 25, 1994. Goldstein was born into an Orthodox Jewish family
from Brooklyn, where he attended the Yeshivah of Flatbush, Yeshiva University and Albert
Einstein College of Medicine. One of Goldstein’s boyhood friends was Rabbi Meir Kahane,
founder of the Jewish Defense League, and so it came as no surprise when Goldstein joined
that organization.
Goldstein emigrated to Israel in 1983 and served as a physician in the Israeli Defense
Force, where he refused to treat Arabs, even if they were members of the IDF. The IDF
ignored his disobedience of a direct order and sheltered him instead of punishing him until the
day he died at the hands of the Palestinians he had failed to kill in his attack.
According to the Wikipedia entry under his name, “Goldstein was immediately
denounced with shocked horror even by the mainstream Orthodox,’ and most in Israel
classified Goldstein as insane.” Israel Shakak tells a different story in his book Jewish
Fundamentalism in Israel, which documents Goldstein’s apotheosis as a Jewish saint,
complete with monument and pilgrimages to his gravesite. The canonization procedures started
at Goldstein’s funeral when Rabbi Yaacov Perrin announced that the lives of one million
Arabs were “not worth a single Jewish fingernail.” Goldstein had become a Jewish saint
because he was a Jewish mass murderer:
While the government seemed determined to play down the magnitude of
the massacre, the Jewish masses had turned Goldstein into a saint... . In 2010,
Jewish settlers were criticized that during celebrations of Purim they sang
songs praising Baruch Goldstein's massacre demonstratively in front of their
Arab neighbours. A phrase from the song reads "Dr. Goldstein, there is none
other like you in the world. Dr. Goldstein, we all love you ... he aimed at
terrorists' heads, squeezed the trigger hard, and shot bullets, and shot, and
shot."
According to Shahak, “Goldstein’s behavior had deep roots in the Jewish religion, and
that religion had a profound influence on political culture in Israel.” The main connection
between Goldstein’s act of mass murder and the Jewish religion lay in the halachic teaching
that “the killing by a Jew of a non-Jew under any circumstances is not regarded as murder.”
Hence, in the ensuing discussion, “the terms ‘murder,” “massacre” or “killing” were avoided;
instead the terms used were “deed,” “event” or “occurrence.”’
The fact that “at least 50 percent of Israeli Jews” approved of the massacre led Katz to
claim that “the most obvious conclusion” is that “we, the Jews ... have been programmed by
the same racist computer program that is shaping the majority of the world’s nations.”
Katz’s mention of Jewish racism then led to a discussion of Jewish Nazism. Goldstein
was a Jewish Nazi because, unlike Christians who believed in conversion of the Jews, he,
like Hitler and Goebbels, believed in exterminating his enemies because of ineradicable racial
characteristics. The esteemed Israeli journalist Teddy Preus made Jewish-Nazi connection in
article which appeared in Davar on March 4, 1994:
Compared to the giant-scale mass murderers of Auschwitz, Goldstein was
certainly a petty murderer. His recorded statements and those of his comrades,
however, prove that they were perfectly willing to exterminate at least two
million Palestinians at an opportune moment. This makes Dr. Goldstein
comparable to Dr. Mengele; the same holds true for anyone saying that he [or
she] would welcome more of such Purim holiday celebrations. [The massacre
occurred on that holiday.] Let us not devalue Goldstein by comparing him with
an inquisitor or a Muslim Jihad fighter. Whenever an infidel was ready to convert
to either Christianity or Islam, an inquisitor or Muslim Jihad fighter would, as a
rule, spare his life. Goldstein and his admirers are not interested in converting
Arabs to Judaism. As their statements abundantly testify, they see the Arabs as
nothing more than disease-spreading rats, lice or other loathsome creatures; this
is exactly how the Nazis believed that the Aryan race alone had laudable
qualities that were inheritable but that could become polluted by sheer contact
with dirty and morbid Jews. [JDL founder Meir] Kahane, who learned nothing
from the Nuremberg Laws, had exactly the same notions about the Arabs.
Shahak and Mershinzky conclude their book with a condemnation of “those who are
silent and do not condemn Jewish Nazism, as exemplified by the ideologies of Goldstein and
Ginsburgh, especially if they are Jews, [because they] are guilty of the terrible consequences
that may yet develop as a result of their silence.”
Seven years after Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Palestinians in the cave of the
patriarch in Hebron, and less than 5 years after Shahak and Merzinsky explained how
Goldstein was a Jewish Nazi, The Believer , a film written and directed by Henry Bean about
an orthodox Jew who becomes a neo-Nazi won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2001 Sundance film
festival. The film is based loosely on the life of Daniel Burros, a neo-Nazi who committed
suicide in the mid-’60s after a New York Times reporter wrote an article exposing him as a
Jew. According to Bean:
Burros was staying at a camp in the Poconos with the neo-Nazis when the
story in the New York Times claiming that he was Jewish came out. The Nazis
weren't upset. They were saying just sit down; we can talk about this. But
Burros went up to nis room, put on a Wagner record and shot himself. He killed
himself within an hour of the story coming out.
Bean began discussing the Danny Burros story in the ’70s when he was a writer living
on the West Coast. He began to see Burros as typifying a particular kind of Jew. “He was a
rabbi manque. Antisemitism is a form of practicing Judaism. He’s sort of a rabbi after all. A
Jew by day, a Nazi by night.... He was desperately hiding something and compulsively
trying to bring it out at the same time.
People are drawn to contradiction. He undergoes a conversion, but not back to the
Torah.” By telling the story of the
Jewish Nazi, Bean concluded, “I began to understand what Judaism was.”
Bean’s explanation of how a Jew can become a Nazi is at root theological. Through a
series of flashbacks, the viewer sees Danny Balint, as he is called in the movie, arguing with
his Yeshiva teacher about whether Abraham spared Isaac’s life, as recounted in the Genesis
account, or whether, as Danny maintains, he died on Mt. Moriah. Danny’s problems with
religion stem from the fact that he takes the Torah much more seriously and literally than his
fellow Yeshiva bokkers. When one of them tells Danny that “Fear of the Lord is the
beginning of wisdom,” he becomes rhapsodic: “Fear of the Lord,” he responds, “makes you
afraid of everything. Do you even believe in God? I’m the only one who does believe. I see
Him for the power- drunk madman that he is. And we’re supposed to worship such a deity? I
say never.”
At this point the teacher tells one of the students “to ask Rabbi Singer remove Danny
from my class,” something which prompts Danny to turn his eyes upward and say to God,
“Then let Him destroy me now. Let Him destroy me like the conceited bully that He is. Go
ahead.”
Like Jared Loughner, Danny Balint is a Jew who has read Mein Kampf and thinks it’s a
great book. “Did you ever read Mein Kampf .?” Danny asks his fellow skinheads when they end
up in jail after a fight with two blacks. “Hitler had some of his best ideas in prison.” Danny
admires Hitler, especially his views on race. In the middle of a meeting of more moderate
right- wingers at an upscale Manhattan apartment, Danny, who is wearing a red T-shirt
emblazoned with a black swastika, interrupts the speaker to opine that “race is central to
everything we’re talking about tonight. Race is the source of religion.” When the speaker
objects that this would mean “Germany all over again.” Danny responds by saying, “Isn’t that
what we want? Germany all over again but done right this time?”
When Danny gets a call from a New York Times reporter, he gives an eloquent articulation
of anti-Semitism. Judaism “is a sickness... . The real Jew is a nomad and a wanderer. He has
no roots and no attachments. He universalizes everything. All he can do is buy and sell and
manipulate markets. It’s all mental. Marx, Freud, Einstein: what have they given us?
Communism, infantile sexuality and the atom bomb. They want nothing but nothingness,
nothing without end.”
The main issue in The Believer is theological. Danny has penetrated to the heart of the
Jewish religion by understanding that the Jew worships Nothingness. As he says to the Times
reporter, the Jews “want nothing but nothingness, nothing without end.”
The Times reporter is impressed, but as we have come to expect from reporters, at the
moment when the real issue is framed, the reporter changes the subject. “Wow,” he tells
Danny, “You’re incredibly articulate, but how can you believe all this when you’re a Jew
yourself?”
When confronted by the contradiction at the heart of his identity, Danny becomes violent.
At first he denies he’s Jewish, then he threatens to sue the Times if the reporter publishes the
article: “It’s reckless disregard. I’m going to sue your fucking Jew paper.” Finally, he takes
out a gun and puts it into the mouth of the reporter and announces, as if unaware of the
contradiction: “If you publish that article, I will kill myself.”
All of the themes we have been discussing—Jews, racism, Nazism, nihilism, and
violence—are all present in this powerful scene. At this point, they begin to coalesce into a
coherent picture. The Jewish Nazi is a political terrorist, but he is, first of all, a Nazi, which is
to say a particular kind of socialist. Jews were drawn to socialism and communism throughout
the
19^ century. In fact Jews made up the backbone of those movements. Jews were drawn to
those movements because they provided both an antidote and a way to give political
expression to the Jewish nihilism which came into being when the Enlightenment arrived in
the shtetl and destroyed rabbinic Judaism. Deprived of a coherent worldview, the Jew still
had a sense of himself as a member of the chosen race which could now only find expression
in revolutionary violence. The best way
for the shtetl Jew to bring about tikkun olan was via dynamite and the Colt revolver.
Because Danny lives in an age in which socialism has failed, he is unsure of how to focus
the revolutionary violence that is going to deliver him from the strong pull toward non-being
which Jewish nihilism creates. Should he kill the reporter from the Jew newspaper or should
he kill himself? Actually, the question needs to be reframed in light of what Danny actually
said, namely, “If you publish that article, I will kill myself.” Should Danny the Nazi kill
Danny the Jew? In a fantasy he picked up after hearing a holocaust survivor describe how a
Nazi soldier killed his son, Danny plays the role of both Jew and Nazi soldier.
Judaism, according to the theology proposed by The Believer, is essentially nihilistic.
The Jews “want nothing but nothingness, nothing without end.” This theme gets developed
throughout the film. When Danny’s girlfriend asks him to explain the difference between God’s
apophatic character and “Him not existing at all,” Danny replies, “there is no difference.”
When she tells him that “Christianity’s silly but at least there’s something to believe in,”
Danny responds by saying, “Judaism is nothing. Nothing but nothingness.” Then as if
reconsidering the issue, Danny says, “Judaism isn’t really about belief. It’s about doing
things.”
“And belief follows?” his
girlfriend asks. “Nothing
follows.”
Eventually his girlfriend catches on. After setting out a seder meal for Danny, she says he
should sit down and take part in the meal because God “commands it whether he exists or
not.”
Like Jacob, Danny’s girlfriend concludes that there is no point in fighting God. “We can
fight Him and be crushed. Or we can submit.”
“And be crushed,” says Danny.
After their rejection of Christ, the Jews confected a religion which is based on the absence
of Logos, which is to say, the absence of Being, which is to say, nothing. If the Eucharist in the
tabernacle in the Catholic Church can be termed “the real presence,” then what the Jew who
rejected Christ worships in his synagogue can be termed “the real absence,” which is
another word for nothing. The Jew worships nothing; or better, the Jew worships nothingness.
The Jew, as Jacques Derrida has pointed out malgre lui but amply in his deconstructive
literary criticism, is obsessed with the absence of presence or the presence of absence.
Nihilism leads inevitably to violence because violence, which is a manifestation of the
arbitrary and autonomous will, is the only way that the acting person can assert his existence
in a world without Logos. Violence is an extreme form of self- assertion, and only extreme
forms of assertion are powerful enough to prevent the slide into non-being to which the
Jewish nihilist is exposed by the very fact that he is Jewish. That is so because Jews worship
the absence of being and as a result “want nothing but nothingness, nothing without end.”
Judaism is about doing things because nihilism is ultimately about doing things, because
action is the only thing that prevents dissolution into non-being in a universe based on
nothingness.
Nihilism, in other words, leads inevitably to violence. So to get back to the plot of The
Believer, when Danny goes to a Jewish bookstore, he meets one of his former Yeshiva
classmates, who invites him to the synagogue for services—the same synagogue, it turns out,
where Danny planted a bomb, which failed to go off. This time he plants another bomb, timed
to go off during Sabbath services, at which he decides to read the Torah. When Danny goes to
the synagogue, he meets one of his former Yeshiva classmates, who calls him a “Jewish Nazi.”
By showing up to davin at the synagogue where he has planted a bomb, Danny the Nazi
finally succeeds in killing Danny the Jew. But since he dies reciting the Torah, it is equally
accurate to say the Danny the Jew ends up killing Danny the Nazi.
At the end of the film, after Danny blows up the synagogue in which he is praying, we
next see him running up a flight of stairs at the Yeshiva. At the top of one flight, Danny sees
his former teacher, who now agrees with Danny, claiming now that “Isaac died on Mt.
Moriah and was reborn in the world to come,” but Danny runs past him up yet another
flight of steps, causing the teacher to ask, “Danny, where are you going. Don’t you know?
There’s nothing up there.”
Jewish nihilism, in other words, leads to Jewish violence.
Russia was plagued by nihilism and the violence which it inevitably spawned throughout
the course of the 19^ century. This was nowhere more evident than in the Jewish shtetls
which dotted the Pale of the Settlement which made up Russia’s predominantly Jewish
border with the West during the 19 th and early 20th centuries. After centuries of rabbinic
despotism, Jewish nihilism became too obvious to ignore about when the German
Enlightenment came in contact with the Talmudic culture of the shtetl and destroyed it by
showing its futility and intellectual obsolescence. The shtetl Jew was released from his
bondage to the rabbis and the kahal, the Jewish courts which enforced Talmudic nihilist
culture, but without being granted access to the Logos which made Christian Europe and hence
the Enlightenment (by way of reaction, of course) possible. Using the Enlightenment to split
the Talmudic atom released enormous amounts of destructive energy, energy which eventually
destroyed Russia itself in 1917.
In his magisterial treatment of Jews and revolution in 19th century Russia, Erich Haberer
claims that “Nihilism was the most spontaneous and radical expression of the Russian
renascence of the 1860s. Essentially, it was a ‘cultural revolution’ of the young generation
against the existing order”:I^l
Convinced that their native culture was an anachronism that was kept alive by
an equally anarchistic surrounding society, these men were rebels without firm
social and/or national moorings in either the Jewish or Russian world. They
were strangers who. like all men cast adrift on a turbulent sea, sought security
by boarding and helping to navigate any ship which would sail into the
sunrise. The only vessel that came into sight and took them aboard as full
members of the crew, sailed under the flag of revolution. Here they found
brotherhood, recognition, and a place they could call their own; here they
regained a sense of identity, of belonging and fulfillment, that they had sought
desperately in so far as they ceased to identify with their Jewishness. Cut off
from their original sources of Jewish existence, they planted - or rather
replanted - themselves firmly on the deck of this life-saving vessel which
promised a safe, albeit stormy, journey to the promised land. Succinctly put,
their cosmopolitanism was really the obverse side of Jewishness - a search for
identity that was predicated on their estrangement from the community in which
they were raised and which had shaped their spiritual being. Hence the
religious-existential nature of their identification with socialism and its Russian
'church' - the revolutionary movement.
If the Enlightenment could overturn a Logos-based culture like Catholic France in a
matter of decades, it is not difficult to imagine the devastating effect that it would have on a
fragile anti-Logos culture like the Talmudic shtetl. We are still experiencing the fall out from
the explosion that destroyed the shtetl. The Believer , as well as the phenomenon of the
Jewish Nazi which it describes, is part of that ongoing cultural fall out.
Nihilism in Russia, including the writings of Nikolai Chernyshevksy, “the Russian
‘philosophe’ par excellence,” was based on the French Enlightenment. As in France, the
Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment called for “the destruction of all authority” and “the
ridiculing of all res sacrae.”I^l If the 1860s in Russia were a preview of what the 1960s were
going to be in the West, it was largely because of Chernyshevsky’s novel What is to Be Done?
The Tales of the New People (Lenin later appropriated the title Shto Delat? for his famous
revolutionary pamphlet.) The main characters of the novel, Vera Pavlovna and Pavel
Rahkmetov became role models for the youth of the 1860s by espousing free love and a
primitive vaguely religious sounding communism.
If the past century and a half has shown anything, it has shown how vulnerable the
Logos-based west has been to the
weaponizing of sexuality and the secularization of the Gospel that people like Chernyshevsky
were proposing. If Catholicism in the West, strengthened by Scholasticism’s appropriation of
Greek philosophy in the Middle Ages proved to be no match for the Enlightenment, then it’s
not difficult to see that an essentially xenophobic anti-intellectual Russian orthodoxy was
going to fail even more spectaculary. Similarly, if the weaponizing of sexuality and the
secularization of the Gospel that people like Chernyshevsky were proposing devastated the
West for the next century and a half, they were going to have an even more devastating
effect on the culture of the shtetl, which had no Logos to defend itself. The result of this
obliteration of shtetl culture was nihilism, or as Haberer puts it, “As a Philosophy of
emancipation Russian nihilism can be viewed as an extension of the Jewish Enlightement: it
reinforced and radicalized its ideals of secular learning, self-improvement, and
social responsibility.”121
Nihilism took over the ’60s generation in the shtetl even more rapidly and completely
than it took over the mind of the Jews’ Russian counterparts because the Logos of an anti¬
intellectual Christianity provided more resistance that anti-Logos of the Talmud.
Nihilism had served them well in their maskilic, individualistic desire to emancipate
themselves from their religious- traditionalist bound Jewish society. But it had left them
frustrated, isolated, and marginal in trying to transform themselves and the Jewish people into
universal citizens in the image of modern European culture. In socialism, regardless of its
Populist
form, they discovered a philosophy of social action which was concerned with, the
collective rather than the individual, the
‘emotional’ rather than the ‘rational’, and ‘the people’ rather than the ‘critically thinking’
intelligentsia. While Aptekman’s
‘Christian socialism’ captures very well the underlying religious-existential motif of this shift
to socialism, it is Akselrod who best exemplifies the Jewish radical’s infatuation with the
new grandiose perspectives of building “churches of the future” which would “conquer the
whole world” and establish “universal brotherhood.”
As a result Jewish nihilism became a cultural movement that swept through the Pale
of the Settlement spawning revolutionary violence in its wake:
Spear-heading this crusade were Jewish gymnasium students and rabbinical
seminarians. In places like Vilna, Mogilev, Zhitomir, and Kiev, they formed
'circles of self-education' which, in turn, proliferated by attracting talmudists,
pupils of Jewish crown schools, and privately educated children of wealthy
Jewish merchants. Meeting more or less regularly, members would read and
discuss Russian literature, articles from the Russian-Jewish periodical press,
and works of the German-Jewish Haskalah. Some ventured to write their own
Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish compositions criticizing and satirizing Jewish life
and its Orthodox leadership.I^]
The anti-Logos of the Talmud found its natural fulfillment in the anti-Logos of revolution.
And nihilism, which was the new term for anti-Logos, found expression in revolutionary
violence. This trajectory is best explicated from the lives of the revolutionaries themselves.
Before long the philosophy of nihilism gave birth to revolutionary organizations. The first
“genuine revolutionary organization, theSociety of Land and Freedom (Zemlia i Volia) came
into existence in 1861. In 1864 Nikolai Ishutin and Dmitrii Karakazov created another
revolutionary society known as “Organization.” The terrorist arm of Organization was a
“highly secretive inner group called ‘Hell,’” which “stripped nihilism of its humanistic
content by advocating unrestrained revolutionary violence. ”121 From the mid-’60s onward,
“ultra-extreme nihilists” like Karakazov, who “attempted to assassinate Alexander II on 4
April 1866” dominated radicalism in Russia. The fact that Karakazov was executed only
“vindicated the terrorist legacy of the Ishutintsy and made Karakazov, who was promptly
executed, a hero in the eyes of future generations of revolutionaries.”1121
Haberer claims that “only a small number of Jews were attracted to the revolutionary
experiments of nihilist radicalism
between 1856 and 1868” because nihilism—for the time being, at least—was “a cultural
experience which, while contributing to their radicalization within a traditional Jewish setting,
was devoid of direct or immediate revolutionary implications.” But that would change soon
enough.
Before long the Russian revolutionary movement split into above ground essentially
educational organizations like Chernyi Peredel, and under ground terrorist organizations
like Narodnaia Volia, which were dominated by Jews. The connection between Jews and
revolutionary violence is not coincidental. In its initial phase, the Russian revolutionary
movement pursued what would be viewed in retrospect as an essentially Romantic attempt on
the part of Russian intellectuals to move to the countryside and live among the peasants,
enlightening them about the true extent of their oppression at the hands of the Russian ruling
class. In practical terms, this often took the form of revolutionary Jews preaching to orthodox
Russian peasants. The peasants invariably perceived the Jews as foreigners espousing some
alien, godless ideology, and more often than not the revolutionary proselytizing backfired
when the peasants reported their would-be liberators to the local police. The failure of the
Jewish participation in the back to the land movement led to a change in strategy. Jewish
revolutionaries decided to concentrate on what they could do best as praktiky, i.e., organizers
but especially, as techniky, which brought to bear their skills as printers, forgers, smugglers,
counterfeiters, and technicians, particularly in their expertise in handling explosives.
Despite the obvious presence of Jews in Chernyi Peredel, it has been argued that Jews
qua Jews were more attracted to Narodnaia Volia because political terrorism was more
congenial to Jewish participation than the theory and practice of traditional Populism. In this
view - most forcefully put forth by Elias Tscherikower - the new political orientation and
its urban-centred terrorist activity significantly ‘broadened the range of possibilities for
Jewish revolutionaries - both psychologically and factually’. Factually, it provided Jews with
the unprecedented opportunity to be active in an urban environment that was much more
conducive to their natural abilities and national characteristics: instead of acting as
propagandists in the name of an alien ideology in an alien peasant environment, they now
were able to partake in activities where their Jewishness was less of a liability than
previously. Without feeling a sense of inferiority, without necessarily divesting themselves of
their Jewish traits, as Narodovoltsy they could participate fully and effectively in the sort of
work for which they were ideally suited as Jews. In short, their characteristically Jewish
abilities of ‘underground organization’ and
‘technical know-how’ were a real asset readily appreciated and sought after by their Russian
comrades. Psychologically, Narodnaia Volia provided Jews with a political rationale for
revolutionary action that was much more in tune with their experience of Jewish rightlessness
than Populist abstractions of social revolution.
Haberer’s explanation of Jews’ attraction to revolutionary violence is good as it goes
but it ignores the ontological connection between nihilism and violence. Jews were more
attracted to violence because they came from a more nihilistic background. The Talmud had
trained them to treat both the moral order and the goyim with contempt, and this
dehumanization made it easier to kill people for a sacred cause. As Salo Baron has pointed
out, Russians who ended up being interrogated by the Cheka, the Soviet secret police, after the
revolution were more likely to be tortured by Jews because Jews did not view the goyim as
fellow citizens. The Jews who had been taught as children to hold the goyim and their
Christian moral law in contempt were going to be less inhibited in engaging in violence and
mayhem than their Christian counterparts. If the entire Jewish people could be sacrificed to
the abstractions of the Talmud, it was only a short step to claim that goyim should be
sacrificed to the revolutionary cause.
If we combine both internal and external reasons, it is easy to see why the revolutionary
movement in Russia would become both more Jewish and more violent as the 19^ century
progressed. That progression is mirrored in the lives of the revolutionaries themselves. For
Mark Natanson,
nihilism proved to be an ideology of salvation. Having been sensitized from
early on to the discrepancy between the reality and ideals of traditional Jewish
society and beginning to lose, if not having already lost, faith in Judaism, he
readily identified himself with the sort of'nihilist personality' that emerged from
Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? and Pisarev's characterization of Bazarov -
a person that would 'help cure society of its moral and physical ills by his
exemplary life and useful work' and whose 'rational egoism was really a form of
Puritanism based upon the discipline of scientific work and a "scientific" ethic... .
The influence of nihilism and Jewishness in shaping Natanson's personality was
also recognized by his contemporaries. Lev Deich and Osip Aptekman imply that,
as in their own case, maskilic ideals and nihilist prescriptions contributed to
Natanson's radicalization. Others have noted that while Natanson's practical
and businesslike approach to revolutionary affairs was due to his
upbringing in a Jewish merchant household, his intellectual perseverance
bordering on dogmatism derived from his talmudic studies.!- 1 U
Natanson’s Jewishness made it more likely that his nihilism would find expression in
violence rather than attempts to educate the benighted peasantry.
The degree to which nihilism retained its hold on Natanson was, as will be
shown later, quite commonly replicated among Jewish intelligenty of the 1870s.
In the person of Natanson, however, this translated itself politically into a
concrete Jewish revolutionary contribution in the form of a programme that
introduced a party-political dimension into an ostensibly apolitical Populist
movement. Therefore, to put it succinctly, it was his Jewish background and
Jewish-tinted nihilism which, in formulating the original programme of the future
Chaikovtsy, made Natanson emphasize 'scientific rationalism' rather than
romantic peasantism, political rather than social revolution, the intelligentsia
rather than 'the people'. U21
In 1875, Mark Natanson returned to St. Petersburg after four years of exile. In response to
the disillusionment which police repression, peasant inertia and the xenophobic hostility of
the masses had created in the revolutionary movement,!!!! Natanson answered
Chernyshevsky’s question, “Chto delat?” by building “a party of struggle.” Because of the fear
of being labeled anti-Semitic, scholars cannot address the issue of “‘how and why’ a Jew
created Russia’s first truly revolutionary party. ”!!41
One of the Jews attracted to Natanson’s revolutionary party of struggle was Aron
Zundelevich. In his novel The Career
of a Nihilist, Sergei Kravchinskii has Zundelevich say that he loves the Nihilist more
than he loves his fellow Jews:
We Jews, we love our race, which is all we have on the earth. I love it deeply
and warmly. Why should I love your peasants, who hate and illtreat my people
with, blind barbarity, who to-morrow will perhaps loot the house of my father,
an honorable working-man, and brutally assault him, as they have done to
thousands of other poor hard-working Jews? I can pity your peasants for what
but contempt can one feel for such wholesale cowards? No, there is nothing in
your Russia worth caring for. But I knew the Nihilists, and I loved them even
more than my own race. I joined and fraternized with them, and that is the only
tie which binds me to your country. As soon as we have done with Your Tsar's
despotism, I shall expatriate myself forever, and settle somewhere in Germany
... Germany is the only land where we are not total strangers.ti^l
The nihilist was in some sense the ultimate Jew, the apotheosis of the Jew, and the if
activity is the expression of essence, then the essence of nihilism was violent revolutionary
action. Without action of this sort nihilism becomes nothing more than non-being. The nihilist
needs violent action to prevent the slide into nonexistence which his philosophy brings about
as its ultimate telos. The more violent the action the better it acts as the antidote to non-being.
This probably explains Zundelevich’s attraction to dynamite, a new form of explosive that
became increasingly important in revolutionary circles during the latter part of the 19^
century. Kravchinskii, who before becoming a novelist was a fellow nihilist and terrorist,
“conducted experiments in the Swiss mountains to test the efficacy of dynamite and other
explosives” at Zundelevich’s behest.fi^l Zundelevich told Kravchinskii that dynamite, out of
which the nihilists fashioned “elegant and slender bombs,” was the “most modern means
available” to kill the Tsar and that it “corresponds best with the targets singled out for
terrorist acts.” £171
Natans on attracted more and more Jews to the revolutionary movement, and Jews like
Ginzburg, Epshtein, Finkelshtein
and Zundelevich created an organization that mirrored their need for revolutionary violence
rather than educating the peasantry:
With Zundelevich's extensive underground organization at their disposal, the
Natansonvtsy controlled a network of illegal border crossings which connected
them via Berlin, Koenigsberg and Vilna with the two most important centres of
Russian revolutionary printing activity abroad, London and Geneva. This line of
communication and its central transfer points for goods and people was
manned almost exclusively by Jews. In the border region between Koenigsberg
and Vilna, Jewish smugglers - chief among them Zalman and his family - took
care of the revolutionary ware, conveying it across the frontier by all sorts of
ingenious enterprise." Particularly sensitive and valuable items such as printing
press accessories and, later on, dynamite were taken directly to St Petersburg by
Zalman himself and sometimes by Zundelevich. But generally the 'port of entry'
was Vilna, which since the days of the first Vilna circle served as the main post
once for'red mail'to and from Russia.Li£]
When Natanson visited Zundelevich in the fall of 1875 most of this underground
infrastructure was already well in place. On June 11, 1876 Zundelevich and Natanson’s
organization attempted to murder the suspected agent-provocateur Nikolai E. Gorinovich by
pouring sulphuric acid on his face. Gorinovich survived and provided the police with
evidence about Zundelevich and Natanson’s terrorist cell. In 1877 nihilism led to terrorism
in the most literal sense of the term when Zundelevich and Natanson’s organization murdered
“the railroad worker N. F. Sharashkin for betraying Mark Natanson and a large number of
workers associated with his so-called ‘Society of Friends.’” As a result of the Gorinovich
affair, “assassinations were increasingly viewed as an acceptable, even legitimate, weapon of
revolutionary revenge and defense.”
Soon the south of Russia was awash in terrorist attacks. The reason that “the virus of
terror spread first in the south” of
Russia is because of the overwhelmingly Jewish participation in the revolutionary movement
there:
The statistical findings of Kappeler (as they relate to Jews) show up in the
presence of Jewish radicals in almost all "southern circles" which were directly or
indirectly involved in acts of terrorism or physical resistance against the
authorities. For instance, the Elizavetgrad circle of Lev I. Rozenfeld, which
was closely linked with the Kiev Buntarists and helped them in organizing
the Gorinovich assassination, consisted almost exclusively of Jews. The same
was the case in Nikolaev where the "rebels" were in contact with, Solomon
Vinenberg, Aron Cornbet, Lev and Savelii Zlaropolskii, all of whom were leading
activists among the local, Predominantly Jewish, radical youth. Indeed, Jews
were a major and very active component in virtually all radical circles which in
the south of Russia acted as catalysts of political terrorism.[191
In the spring of 1878, Solomon Vittenberg returned to Nikolaev after a trip to Odessa in
the south of Russia where terrorism was is full swing and announced that he was going to
introduce a “new style” of terrorism by blowing up Tsar Alexander II’s train with pyroxylin
when it passed through Nidolaev on its way to St. Petersburg in August. Vittenberg was
arrested on August 16, 1878, when police discovered his address on someone sent from
Odessa to assist in the assassination
attempt, and hanged one year later. All of the conspirators in the Nikolaev plot to assassinate
the Czar but one were Jewish. 1201
According to Haberer,
Scholars have justly cautioned against perceiving Judaism as a motivating
force of Jewish radicalization. But to ignore or deny the workings of this religious
dimension in the psychology of revolutionary Jews would be short-sighted. It
prevents us from comprehending the mental processes which drove alienated
men and existentially troubled individuals like Vittenberg to sanctify socialism
and to commit themselves to terrorism. 1211
The revolutionary career of Grigorii Davidovich Goldenberg (1855-80) is another
example of how the Enlightenment led to Nihilism and Nihilism to revolutionary violence. In
1865, Grigorii’s parents moved out of the shtetl town of Berdichev to Kiev, where his father
opened a successful hardware business. With success came assimilation, and with
assimilation an end to the practice of Jewish culture and religion. All of the Goldenberg
children were given a secular eduction, and all of them were as a result “caught up in the
revolutionary movement. ”1^=1 Grigorii, the oldest and most talented, was the “first to fall
victim to the siren call of revolution.” On February 9, 1879, Grigorii entered the inner circle
of the terrorist elite when he assassinated Prince Dimitri Kropotkin, Governor of Kharkov.
One month later he was plotting the assassination Tsar Alexander II with the Zemlevoltsy
of St. Petersburg:
Goldenberg himself was a perfect, and timely, example for demonstrating
the supposed truth that behind every terrorist plot there was a Jew. Here was a
Jewish terrorist par excellence who had not only assassinated the Governor
General of Kharkov, but who had advised others to kill the Tsar - a task,
moreover, which he desired to execute himself. In addition, his written testimony
was full of Jewish names implicating Jews like Aronchik ana Zundelevich in
terrorist activities. In the light of the previous arrest of Vittenberg and Jewish
associates of his circle, including Gobet, all this merely confirmee! the
government's suspicion that Jews were principal agents of terrorism.
Eventually, on March 1, 1881, Narodnaia Volia succeeded in assassinating Tsar
Alexander II and the government began to see Jewish nihilism as the source of revolutionary
activity in Russia.
The ever growing Jewish participation in the revolutionary movement, and
its increasing visibility as Jews became more frequently linked to highly
oublicized acts of terrorism, was duly registered by those who had least to gain
: rom it - the government officials. Although some noticed that there was a nexus
Detween the radicalization of Jews ana yiddishe rektlozikeyt. the general
feeling was that from time immemorial tne 'Hebrew race' had been an alien
and subversive element in society and that its decomposing powers had reached
epidemic proportions due to the influx of Jews into Russian society via
educational, professional, and commercial channels. This feeling gained in force
as more and more Jewish names appeared conspicuously on the pages of
government reports and newspaper articles dealing with political subversion in
general and terrorist plots in particular.
A consensus was forming among the Russian elites. As a result of the Enlightenment,
Jews had been “set free but not satisfied.” The name for that unhappy state of affairs was
Jewish Nihilism. Jewish nihilism was the source of revolutionary violence in Russia. “To all
the other good qualities which you Jews possess,” the governor of Vilna told a group of
Jewish leaders sarcastically in 1872, “about the only thing you need is to become nihilists
too.” Commenting on Mlodetskii’s execution, Novoe vremia opined that “these Jews, being
from time immemorial the representatives of the revolutionary spirit, stand now at the head of
Russian Nihilists.”
Though highly prejudiced in its assertion that Jews, along with Poles, were the
mainspring of the revolution, the tsarist government obviously had a case in blaming ‘Jewish
nihilists’ for the wave of terrorism that had rocked the ship of state since
1878-79 and even claimed its captain in 1881. In some ways, and in spite of their
exaggerations, its officials had a more accurate appreciation of the role of Jews in the
terrorist movement than the revolutionaries themselves or historians who joined them in
downplaying die Jewish contribution.1231
In spite of the crackdown following the assassination of the tsar in 1881, Jewish
commitment to revolutionary violence
only intensified. In 1884 Shternberg wrote an influential pamphlet entitled Political Terror in
Russia, in which he advocated “systematic terrorism” including the “systematic killing of the
tsar and the most important, the most outspoken enemies of the people and the intelligentsia.”
Terror, Shternberg concluded was “the only form of struggle possible against autocracy.”
Arguments like this caused a split between Jews and Gentiles in the movement. During
debates at the socialism congress, Jews argued for “‘the systematic and uninterrupted
repetition of terrorist acts’ as the only means to destroy tsarism.” Haberer concludes that, all
anti-Semitism notwithstanding, there was a “factual basis underlying the phobia in official
and reactionary circles that the Jew was poised to destroy Holy Tsarist Russia.” Starting of
with Shebeko’s claim that 80 per cent of socialists in southern Russia were Jews, Haberer
makes it plain that statistical evidence alone “makes it hard to ignore that throughout the
1870s and 1880s Jews were a substantial element in Russian revolutionary activity.”
What they sought can best be described as an abstract and futuristic idealism of
assimilation qua emancipation in a denationalized and secularized democratic society, ideally
of universal scope. Leaving the world of their childhood did not necessarily imply its total
abandonment in one act of irreversible forgetfulness. For many this departure under the sacred
halo of socialism was the next best solution to their own existential problems
Father Seraphim Rose, an American convert to Russian orthodoxy, dealt with these
“existential problems” which led to
and flowed from nihilism from an orthodox perspective. Rose claimed that “Violence is no
merely incidental aspect of the Nihilist Revolution, but a part of its essence.” According to
Marxist “dogma,” “force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one”;[41]
appeals to violence, and even a kind of ecstasy at the prospect of its use, abound in
revolutionary literature. Bakunin invoked the “evil passions” and called for the unchaining of
“popular anarchy” in the cause of “universal destruction,” and his “Revolutionary Catechism”
is the primer of ruthless violence; Marx was fervent in his advocacy of “revolutionary terror”
as the one means of hastening the advent of Communism; Lenin defined the “dictatorship of the
proletariat” (the stage in which the Soviet Union still finds itself) as “a domination that is
untrammeled by law and based on violence.” Demagogic incitement of the masses and the
arousing of the basest passions for revolutionary purposes have long been standard Nihilist
practice.
If metaphysics, which is the science of being qua being, can also be called “theology,”
then the root of nihilism, which was an attack on God qua being, had to be theological.
Hence, Rose claims that nihilism is ultimately a “war against God.” Nihilism prosecutes this
war against being by a violent attack on Old Order. Political categories like right and left are
irrelevant; both Bolshevism and Nazism grow out of nihilism and find their expression in
violence:
The most violent revolutionaries—a Nechayev or Bakunin, a Lenin or Hitler,
and even the demented practitioners of the "propaganda of the deed"—dreamed
of the "new order" their violent destructions of the Old Order would make
possible; Dada and "anti-literature" seek not the total destruction of art, but
the path to a "new" art; the passive Nihilist, in his "existential" apathy and
despair, sustains life only by the vague hope that he may yet find some kind of
ultimate satisfaction in a world that seems to deny it.T^ 4 !
Violence is inseparable from nihilism. Nihilism finds its fulfillment in violence.
Both Bolshevism and National
Socialism are equally violent forms of Nihilism. Both find their
fulfillment in violence:
Hitler's role in the Nihilist program was more specialized and provincial, but
nonetheless essential. Even in failure — in fact, precisely in the failure of its
ostensible aims — Nazism served the cause of this program. Quite apart from
the political and ideological benefits which the Nazi interlude in European history
g ave to the Communist powers (Communism, it is now widely and erroneously
elieved, if evil in itself, still cannot be as evil as Nazism), Nazism had another,
more obvious and direct, function. Goebbels explained this function in his radio
broadcasts in the last days of the War.
The bomb-terror spares the dwellings of neither rich nor poor; before the
labor offices of total war the last class barriers have had to go down. ...
Together with the monuments of culture there crumble also the last obstacles to
the fulfillment of our revolutionary task. Now that everything is in ruins, we are
forced to rebuild Europe. In the past, private possessions tied us to a bourgeois
restraint. Now the bombs, instead of killing all Europeans, have only smashed
the prison walls which kept them captive. ... In trying to destroy Europe's future,
the enemy has only succeeded in smashing its past; and with that, everything
old and outworn has gone.
Nazism thus, and its war, have done for Central Europe (and less thoroughly,
for Western Europe) what Bolshevism did in its Revolution for Russia: destroyed
the Old Order, and thus cleared the way for the building of the "new."
Bolshevism then had no difficulty in taking over where "Nazism had left off,
within a few years the whole of Central Europe had passed under the
"dictatorship of the proletariat" — i.e., Bolshevist tyranny — for which Nazism
had effectively prepared the way.
The Nihilism of Hitler was too pure, too unbalanced, to have more than a
negative, preliminary role to play in the whole Nihilist program. Its role, like the
role of the purely negative first phase of Bolshevism, is now finished, and the
next stage belongs to a power possessing a more complete view of the whole
Revolution, the Soviet power upon whichTHitler bestowed, in effect, his
inheritance in the words, "the future belongs solely to the stronger Eastern
nation."
The thirty years of Nihilist war and revolution between 1914 and 1945 have been an ideal
breeding-ground for the “new human type.” The new man was “deracinated” by the nihilist
revolution. The old Christian civilization was destroyed by this
30 years
war.
What, more realistically, is this "mutation," the "new man"? He is the rootless
man) discontinuous with a past that Nihilism has destroyed, the raw material of
every demagogue's dream; the "free-thinker" and skeptic, closed only to the
truth but "open" to each new intellectual fashion because he himself has no
intellectual foundation; the "seeker" after some "new revelation," ready to
believe anything new because true faith has been annihilated in him; the
planner and experimenter, worshipping "fact" because he has
abandoned truth, seeing the world as a vast laboratory in which he is free to
determine what is "possible"; the autonomous man, pretending to the humility
of only asking his rights," yet full of the pride that expects everything to be
given him in a world where nothing is authoritatively forbidden; the man of the
moment, without conscience or values and thus at the mercy of the
strongest "stimulus"; the "rebel," hating all restraint and authority because he
himself is his own and only god; the "mass man," this new barbarian, thoroughly
"reduced and "simplified" and capable of only the most elementary ideas, yet
scornful of anyone who presumes to point out the higher things or the real
complexity of life.
As the foregoing passage makes clear, the new civilization which emerged from the ashes
of World War II was Jewish. The new man was a Jew because only the deracinated could
flourish in a world where the old order had been destroyed. Rose describes the post-World
War II era and its culture as “the most concentrated era of Nihilism in human history.” The
war turned everyone into Jews by making Nihilism the world’s regnant ideology. Yuri
Slezkine, another Russian, noticed something similar in his book The Jewish Century:
It is easy to dismiss as fantasy the "new humanity" foreseen by a Hitler or a
Lenin; and even the plans of those quite respectable Nihilists among us
today who calmly discuss the scientific breeding of a "biological superman,"
or project a utopia for "new men" to be developed by the narrowest "modern
education" and a strict control of the mind, seem remote and only faintly
ominous. But confronted with the actual image of a "new man," an image brutal
and loathsome beyond imagination, and at the same time so unpremeditated,
consistent, and widespread in contemporary art, one is caught up short, and the
full horror of the contemporary state of man strikes one a blow one is not likely
soon to forget.
Superman was created by two Jews in the ’30s. So it should come as no surprise that the
“Biological superman” is also a Jew. He has super DNA. Obsession with DNA among the
deracinated was another sign that we had all become Jews in the wake of Nihilism’s
destruction of the old order.
In The Believer , the Jewish Nazi gets a call from a New York Times reporter. In real life,
the editor of Culture Wars gets a call from one of his subscribers, who praises The Jewish
Revolutionary Spirit and then announces, “I’m a Jew, and I agree with everything you have
written about the Jews.” It turns out that my Jewish admirer is not just a Jew but an anti-
Semite as well, because, as he puts it at another point in our conversation, “Jews make the best
anti-Semites.”
In the winter of 1992 David Cooper was working as a painter in New York, when one
of his colleagues asked if he would mind if he turned on the radio. What began as an interest
in the Clarence Thomas hearings ended up as a long-term commitment to listening to the
local NPR station, whose orientation he described as totally Jewish. One afternoon he
remembers hearing a report on a drive-by shooting which took place in Israel. The fact that
they were in Brooklyn at the time and that drive-by shooting were commonplace there but
never reported on led him to conclude that Jews control the media, and that controlling the flow
of information allows them to control the world. Exposing that control then became his mission
in life.
David was born in 1966 in Manhattan, which he describes as “an expensive Jewish
ghetto.” David was born into an intact family, but he soon became a casualty of the sexual
revolution. He blames his mother for the destruction of their family.
“My dad was a doctor (GP) and my mom was the daughter of a wealthy judge. She was
a virgin when she married my dad, but the ’60s definitely impacted her. When I was three
years old, she threw my dad out of the house. Dad then used that divorce to check out from
normalcy. She became what some people would call a whore. She had three small children
in the house and a new boyfriend every six months. I don’t accept that kind of behavior. It’s
dissolute and amoral and typically Jewish.
“My created a new future for himself which involved sleeping around. My mom got into
‘law’ after she threw my dad out. She started as a court reporter and retired as a lobbyist for
SUNY Binghamton. In the meantime she ran a couple of bar associations; one was in New
York, where she slept with half the lawyers (I jest). She [eventually] got out of running the
bar because ‘that was too many ‘nasty Jewish kunts even for her.’”
David claims that his childhood became a function of his mother’s career as a lawyer and
sexual libertine.
We weren't raised religious. We were barely 'raised' at all. We were left to our
own devices and demise. The baby sitters were around just long enough 'til my
older brother could 'manage' us on his own, probably when I was like eight years
old. I'm sure there was no babysitter after that.
"Our dad got us on Thursday nights and every other weekend. He did what
he could, I guess. He tried to be a good dad, but he didn't really provide any
moral compass. He just told us that if we ever rode a motorcycle we'd need to
wear a helmet, and that if we wanted to be a doctor we couldn't marry. And he
told me that if I ever got caught dealing drugs that he'd execute me, with a
needle, on a table—a medical table of some sort, I imagine, a gurney, I guess.
David now claims that his parents’ divorce had a devastating effect on everyone involved.
It ruined my childhood and much of my adulthood. I'll probably never get over
it. She sure didn't provide any moral compass. I couldn't keep track of all her
boyfriends. They were around from my earliest memories. It was like a revolving
door.
"When I was growing up, my best friends were typically Jewish, but I never
viewed her as a "Jew until I came to understand Jewish values. I can't really
explain this. (I could try.) I didn't identify as such. Like attracts like I suppose.
That may explain why probably half my best friends throughout my life have
been Jews, and why I've datecf countless Jewish women, at least a dozen that
I've identified so far.
In 1978, when David was 11 years old, his mother moved him and his siblings to the
Catskills. The move effectively changed nothing. David’s mother brought the hippie
commune mentality she adopted when she divorced his father with her when she moved.
Finding no guidance at home, David took a job at a restaurant shortly after arriving in the
Catskills. By this point his siblings were starting to imitate his mother, which is to say, they
were in his mind becoming “moral degenerates.” Soon he found himself working for his
brothers who were now in the restaurant business. He worked as a sales manager for his older
brother’s import business in New York but lost that job when the company when bankrupt
because of embezzlement. His brother then built a restaurant which was a tremendous success
until “he cheated someone else into buying it based on his famous bookkeeping. He is able to
cook books so that anyone, including bank auditors, believe whatever he wants them to
believe about the success of his business.”
My older brother is the least guilty of them all, but he has no moral standing
in the world. His life is a lie. They all lie, to themselves and most everyone else
about themselves. They all live lies. Their lives are lies. They are all morally
repugnant. They are all so typically Jewish. There's not a moral bone between
them all combined.
His experiences as a child left him full of anger and may have contributed to the
alcoholism and substance abuse with which he has battled for most of his adult life. Although
David doesn’t make the connection himself, it’s difficult not to see his alcoholism as one of the
sequelae of his parents’ divorce.
My life was totally dissolute, but I didn't live lies—not like they do. I lied to
myself, but I didn't lie to others, besides the women when they asked me if I
had a girlfriend or if I drank too much. I lied to women, about alcohol and other
women, where I'd been and the like. I typically had a couple girlfriends at any
given time, but these women really wanted to hear the lies.
David’s mother threw him out of the house when he was 15. The issue was attendance at
school. David claimed that he didn’t have time for school since he was now working full-time
in the restaurant business. Finding himself homeless on the streets, he met “some old queen
who took me in. He could hardly keep his hands off me, but I managed. I was his houseboy. I
was his chauffeur. I was his handyman and his friend.”
David became involved in music, but, given the circumstances in his life, that led to
trouble too. In 1993 he got into a fight with a Negro who used a baseball bat to rearrange
David’s facial features. $75,000 later his face is “still kind of lopsided,” but not noticeably
so. He has subsequently been assaulted by “a dozen African-Americans for being too white,
I guess.” Or maybe the brawls came about as a result of “being careless, like about were I was
and stuff.”
Through it all, David’s family life has been a constant source of anger, which he projected
onto the Jewish race. “Jews,” he opined, “are the worst thing that happened to mankind, and
the ’60s revolution was a Jewish revolution.” When I mention that he sounds a lot like
Samuel Roth in Jews Must Live. David admits to having read the book and agreeing with
Roth’s negative take on the Jews. Roth earned a place in the Valhalla of Supreme Court
decisions when he lost a landmark obscenity case. He earned literary immortality when he
ended up being excoriated in James Joyce’s unreadable novel Finnegans Wake for having
pirated an edition of Ulysses. Roth claims that he ended up serving time for an obscenity rap
because a Jew lured him into sending obscene material through the mail. Roth then
extrapolated from his unhappy experience to the Jewish race. “It dawned on me suddenly,
blindingly,” Roth wrote in a book which set out to prove “what a hideous swamp the Jews
have made of Western Civilization,” “that all the evils of my life had been perpetrated by
Jews... . On every side I was being eaten alive by Jews.”1^1
Some might call Roth a Jewish Nazi. “Do you believe a whole civilized nation would
stand aside, witness what Hitler is doing to the Jews without a protest, unless there were
real abuses on the part of the Jews which justified what is
happening?”!^! Roth is aware of the contradiction but insists on the truth of the claim when
he writes “I am myself a Jew, I know it. But I am a Jew who has been brought to the point
where he so loathes his people that he thinks in terms of their destruction. ”I^ZI
The explanation of Roth’s feeling is fairly straightforward. The main cause of anti-
Semitism is Jewish behavior. “Anti-
Semitism is the natural effect of such a social cause. I cannot understand why such a deep
mystery is made of this simple cause.” Since their behavior renders Jews, as St. Paul put it,
“enemies of the whole human race,”1^1 and since Jews have more contact with Jews than the
goyim, and since they often bear the brunt of Jewish behavior, it is only natural that a Jew
would become an anti-Semite. It would be a bit of a stretch to call St. Paul a Jewish Nazi, but
there are some Jews who might see him as the archetypal self-hating Jew. Whatever the case,
his views are not that dissimilar from fellow Jew Roth, who writes, “We are a people of
vultures living on the labor and the good nature of the rest of the world.”I2^1 Roth cites
Edward I, king of England, who expelled the Jews from that land in 1290 and in doing so set
a precedent for other Christian lands. Roth puts the blame for these expulsions squarely on the
shoulders of the Jews:
Wherever they come that are welcomed, permitted to settle down, and join in
the general business of the community. But one by one the industries of the
country close to them because of unfair practices— until it being impossible to
longer hold in check the wrath of a betrayed people, there is violence and,
inevitably, an ignominious ejection of the whole race from the land. There is not
a single instance when the Jews have not fully deserved the bitter fruit of the
fury of their persecutors. T301
David claims:
Israel gets his shabbas goy to do his dirty work. Judah doesn't get his
hands dirty unless he has to. Judah gets the shabbas goy to fight nis wars for
him. Israel called for Hitler's head on March 24, 1933.Twelve years and 48
days later, they got it. At what cost? Upwards of 70 million dead gentiles and
well over 4 trillion american dollars. At what cost to Judah? How much did
Judah's war on Hitler cost Judah? And what did Judah get from this war? He got
Israel and much, much more.
Back to the present. Why are we the sole superpower? How did it get to be
this way? Of course we had no stake in either of those world wars. Nothing, but
Israel dragged us into them, and she built a military
empire using American tax dollars and men as their shabbas goyim. What is
this vast military empire protecting? Not America. Judah has ruined us.
When he’s not sounding like Samuel Roth, David sounds a lot like Danny Balint:
Israel gave us communism, Lenin, and Stalin, and this all led from Israel's war
on Germany to the cold war and Korea and Vietnam. This is all Israel's doing
with her Juaeo-communism. Multiculturalism is part of Judah's strategy to
destroy us and to destroy western civilization. The Jews were behincfthe sexual
revolution. Everything they did related to culture was a form of revolution.
In the year 2000, David discovered the writings of Professor Kevin MacDonald. As a
result, David, like Danny Balint in The Believer, became convinced that race was central to
understanding the human condition. In 2008 he was celebrating Thanksgiving with relatives
when the topic of race came up. “Wouldn’t it be great if we were Jewish?” he asked one of
his cousins, who answered, “Well, as a matter of fact, we have many Jewish relatives.”
David then went and had his DNA tested and discovered that he was a Jew. Which
means, of course, that up until that time he wasn’t a Jew. What was he then? It turns out that
David was baptized as a Catholic; as was his mother, as was his mother’s mother. At this
point the geneology gets a bit misty, and it is at this point that the Jewish ancestors begin to
appear on his family tree.
Before going any further, it should be noted that the phenomenon of suddenly discovering
Jewish DNA in the family tree is not uncommon these days. The most famous example of this,
of course, is Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens sees Judaism is as something racial. After
discovering that one of his grandmothers was Jewish, he claimed that this helped him to
understand why he had been a revolutionary for his entire life. The idea that Jewish
revolutionary behavior is a function of Jewish DNA and is, therefore, ineradicable is an idea
that Hitchens shares with Adolf Hitler, which brings us back once again to the Jewish Nazi
theme.
Hitchens’ brother Peter, who shares ipso facto the same genetic make-up, remains an
Anglican, which is how both brothers were raised, and has apparently experienced a
conversion away from revolutionary behavior, which he now associates with the Zeitgeist
of the ’60s and not his own DNA. As to Christopher’s conversion and his subsequent
atheism, Peter feels that it has more to do with his brother’s sexual behavior, specifically his
abandoning of his pregnant wife and taking up with a Jewish woman, rather than some
irresistible urge emanating from his chromosomes, or the 12.5 percent of which he inherited
from one of his grandmothers.
In the end, Christopher Hitchens’ Judaism comes down to hatred of Christ and the Logos
he embodies, a point which he made clear when he delivered the Daniel Pearl Memorial
Lecture a UCLA on March 3, 2010:
Any real Christian, any serious believing Christian, would give everything he
owned to have a personal meeting with Jesus of Nazareth. Nothing more could
be desired than that, they yearn for it, they thirst for it, they hunger for it. No
serious Moslem could want anything more than to have met himself with the
messenger of God, with the prophet Mohammed.
But there were no Ukranians around at that time. There were no Poles at the
crucifiction. There were no Irish people in Mecca and Medina. There's only one
people that's still around that both of these imposters and said 'No', 'No sale',
Don't believe it'. Do you think that's ever going to be forgiven? Of course it's not.
Of course it will never be forgiven. They say Jesus and they spat in his face.
They saw the prophet Mohammed and they said, 'this guy's just a warlord'. And
of Jesus they said 'he's a just a crackpot rabbi' and also a great blasphemer -
Maimonides, in one of his sharper passages 'our sages never did a better thing
than when they got rid of that rabble-rousing imposter.'
"Well, [it] makes you proud, I hope. You shouldn't want to be forgiven for
getting a thing like that right. But don't go to any mushy ecumenical outreach
meeting with these people - it's a waste of time.
Another even more unlikely example of someone discovering via DNA that he was
Jewish is Minister Louis Farrakhan, who announced his Jewishness at a synagogue prayer
service in Jamaica. Not surprisingly, this ongoing narrative of surprising conversions reached
the level of paroday in a recent issue of Forward that announced that Glenn Beck was really a
Jew.
Following the recent revelations that Glenn Beck, born Bekershteyn) shares
the Jewish genetic marker, the Cohen Modal aplotype, he has been brushing up
on his Yiddish and planning his holidays ... Beck fiddled nervously with a red
kabbalah thread around his wrist. "I guess I'd always had doubts," he mumbled.
The irony in David’s conversion is almosgt as overpowering as the moral pleas
bargaining and opportunism in the case of Christopher Hitchens’ conversion. David became a
Jew largely because of reading Kevin MacDonald. When he got his DNA test back and
found at the he was (probably) 1211 a Sephardic Jew, David welcomed the results because
“it gives me credibility. That’s why I joined the synagogue. I needed the credibility. If you’re
not a Jew, you can’t talk about the Jews. If
you’re not a Jew, you’re going to be marginalized. Only Jews are authorized to discuss these
subjects in public.” As if to give the indisputable proof of what he just said, David cited the
case of E. Michael Jones. “The greatest gift I have ever gotten is to learn that we were
Jewish.” And then to make matters even more confusing, David confides to me that “there are
lots of Jews on our team.”
Upon reflection, this is less surprising that it might seem at first. In fact, David’s
transformation from a baptized Catholic to a practicing Jew flows fairly logically from his
engagement in MacDonald’s writing. In an essay on anti-Semitism, MacDonald admits
candidly at one point:
But the reality is that I greatly admire Jews as a group that has pursued its
interests over thousands of years, while retaining its ethnic coherence and
intensity of group commitment. There have been ups and downs in Jewish
fortunes, to be sure; but their persistence, at times in the face of long odds, and
their spectacular success at the present time are surely worthy of
emulation. £321
At another point in the same essay, MacDonald claims: “The point is that Jewish elites
have been hugely influential in advancing the interests of their people. This is surely a goal to
emulate.” [33]
MacDonald’s involvement with the Jews dates back to his days at the University of
Wisconsin when he was involved
with radical politics. In his memoir Commies, Ron Radosh has documented how the largely
Jewish Communist Party targeted the University of Wisconsin at Madison for takeover in the
’60s. When MacDonald got swept up into New Left politics, he became involved in the
sexual revolution, and because of his involvement in that, he ceased practicing the Catholic
faith. Sociobiology then filled the vacuum which the abandoned Catholic faith left behind.IMJ
As a result there are at least three competing Kevin MacDonalds out there, and the
permutations involved in the differing
positions which each MacDonald persona represents can lead to strange results, as they did
when David decided to become a
Je
w.
There is, first of all, Kevin MacDonald the scholar. This man does admirable research
into Jewish influence on our culture. Then there is Kevin MacDonald the sociobiologist, who
has to claim that Jews are racially superior because they, as a small minority constituting only
around two percent of the population in the United States, have triumphed in the struggle for
existence that is the crucible of all value. The Jews have taken control of all of this country’s
cultural choke points and now control American culture, and they have accomplished this feat
in the face of overwhelming demographic odds.
Survival of the fittest is a preposterous tautology, but it is, nonetheless, the cornerstone of
sociobiology. If it is true that only the fittest prevail in the struggle for existence, then the
inescapable conclusion which we must draw is that the Jews are the master race, and that they
deserve their position of pre-eminence because they earned it on the battleground of
evolutionary conflict, which is the only arena of significance. The sociobiology crowd must
conclude that Jews are racially and biologically superior because they have triumphed against
all other ethnic groups, including ethnic groups much larger than their own, in the struggle for
existence. End of story. Non datur tertius. It was this aspect of sociobiology that led David
paradoxically to admire the Jews and to want to become one, even if deploring all the while
their pernicious effect on society. After all, Kevin MacDonald, the sociobiologist, has written
in response to John Derbyshire:
Derbyshire complains about my statement that, "the human mind was not
designed to seek truth but rather to attain evolutionary goals/' I was merely
expressing a principle of evolutionary biology that has been of fundamental
importance since the revolution inaugurated by G. C. Williams and culminating in
E. 0. Wilson's synthesis: Organisms are not designed to communicate truthfully
with the others but to persuade them — to manipulate them to serve their
interests.
And this leads us to the third Kevin MacDonald, the lapsed Catholic who still retains the
moral indignation which he learned from his religious training as a child. This persona leads
MacDonald to impose moral judgements on the conclusions he has derived from
sociobiology, even if they completely contradict his sociobiological premises. So the final
conclusion— Jews have triumphed in the ethnic struggle for existence, but this is a bad thing—
is an oxymoron based on a combination of two completely incompatible world-views,
MacDonald’s sociobiology and the residual moral consciousness which he retains as a lapsed
Catholic.
Catholicism as practiced in the wake of Vatican II was hardly an unclouded mirror of
Catholic tradition or without its own inconsistencies and self-contradictions, but for those who
dug hard enough, a coherent position on the Jews could still be mined from the deposit of
faith and the writing of the evangelists and the Church fathers. In fact, as late as 1892, Georg
Ratzinger, great uncle of the present pope, had not only carried the teaching of the Church on
the Jews known as Sicut Iudeis non into the present, he had applied it to the economic crisis
that was gripping Europe at the time:
The great medieval popes Innocent III and Gregory IX as well as the ecclesial
synods and councils felt themselves called to take legal measures against the
excesses of the Jews. They protected the life and existence of the Jews, but
only under certain specific conditions. The Jews had to recognize the Christian
social order and had to submit themselves to it. Whatever they had appropriated
through usury and exploitation, they had to pay back to their victims. They were
not allowed to occupy the choke points in the culture; they were not allowed to
employ Christian servants in their houses, and when it came to their clothing
they had to wear the so-called Jew hat in order to be immediately
recognizable as Jews. Jews were in no way allowed to undermine the Christian
social order. Jews who defamed Christ or Christians were punished. They were
not allowed to do business on Christian holidays ... and were not allowed to
make usurious loans. During Holy Week they had to remain in their homes.
Jews couldn't live wherever they pleased, but were confined to specific districts.
It was also forbidden to sell house or real estate to Jews, or to rent to them,
was also forbidden, as was living under the same roof with Jews. Similarly, Jews
were forbidden to hire Christian nursemaids, servants, or day laborers.
Traditional Catholicism, in fact, provides the only coherent explanation of what came to
be known in Georg Ratzinger’s day as the Jewish question. As some indication of its
coherence, the explanation is fairly simple. Following Napoleon’s emancipation of the Jews,
they took over the economies of one nation after another in Europe because their sharp
business practices. What Ratzinger calls “Juedisches Erwerbsleben ” allowed them to cheat
the Christian natives, who had been taught to work hard, be trusting, and love their
neighbor. IMl Jewish immorality, in other words, gave the Jews an unfair economic advantage
in Catholic countries:
The emancipation of the Jews, whose views and concepts contradicted the
laws and customs of the Christian nations, could not help but have a
destructive and corrupting effect on the entire Christian society... . This fact
alone explains why Jews are able to accumulate riches so quickly... .The
example of moral corruption has a contagious effect, and that explains the
corrupting effect of Jewish influence on commerce.
It was an act of supreme foolishness when in the years following 1789 the
necessary protections for the social order were lifted immediately and
universally. Once this happened it was only a matter of time before the Jews
with their attitude toward business and commerce would gain the upper hand.
This was particularly the case among the benevolent peoples who made up the
population of Catholic nations, who had all grown up and been raised... . Others
fell into the hands of the usurers and in spite of their frugality could not
extricate themselves from its tentacles. Just about everyone was
impoverished; and only the Jews got rich. 136]
Ratzinger’s book appeared in 1892, at around the same time as Rerum Novarum, Pope
Leo XHI’s encyclical on the condition of the working classes, and the three-part series in
Civilta Cattolica which warned Catholics about “the voracious octopus of Judaism.”I321 The
anger at Jewish business practices had reached the boiling point:
The situation of the lucrative professions is totally different. In a few years,
riches are amassed but at the cost of others. This form of profit is obscene, and
the hatred and revulsion which the working classes feel toward these practices is
fully justified. Envy isn't the cause of this hatred, but rather indignation at the
unjust appropriation of value, that and the perception that this unjust
appropriation constitutes an assault on the foundations of social life, evokes in
the breast of the honest working man, bitter feelings. When the industrious and
skilled worker, the honest civil servant, and the circumspect merchant in spite of
all out exertion can't earn a living, when on the other hand this or that
speculator, without any effort, can earn thousands or hundreds of thousands
through IPOs or the issuing of T-bills, then this is a sign that the economic
organism is so diseased that society is in urgent need of medicine and
reform. £381
Georg Ratzinger ’s GermanWikipedia page accuses him of “publishing antisemitic hate
literature,” but in making the charge they ignore the fact that Ratzinger goes out of his way
in the same book to attack anti-Semitism as an un-Christian
ideology. The anti-Semites of Ratzinger’s day were capitalizing on the hatred which Jewish
business practices had created in the working classes. The source of that hatred is Jewish
behavior, not Jewish DNA. And Jewish behavior has gotten out of control because the
Christian majority was no longer willing to enforce the laws which had been enacted to
defend the Christian social order. And the Christians lack the will to enforce the laws which
protect the social order because they have become, by and large, Jews. Christian idealism has
been disappearing all the while being replaced by the Jewish Weltanshauung in Christian
circles. In the circles which feel and think like Christians, however, the revulsion at Jewish
dealings and those of the baptized conversos is becoming more and more apparent. The
reason that Christians now look on Jews with intense anger in their eyes is not to be found in
race, and not in national origin, and not in anti-Semitism. The real path of resistance lies not
anti-Semitism and its excesses. The real basis of the contemporary Jewish question lies in the
moral inferiority of the Jewish view of commerce in comparison with the demands of
Christianity.
“The solution to the Jewish question” lies in the application of the traditional Catholic
teachings like Sicut Iudeis non. That means “not in allowing Christians in general to sink to
the level of the lucrative occupations, but rather in raising the Jews to a higher sense of
productive work, in higher numbers than is the present case, to the level of Christian mores as
propounded by Christian teaching on commerce and property.”
And that means rejecting anti-Semitism:
We totally reject the anti-Semitism that is now being proposed ... in Austria
and by a number of the exalted German nationalists. Anti-Semitism understood
as a matter of race stands in total contradiction to the Commandment of love of
neighbor, without regard to race or national origin. On the other hand, it is the
duty of every true Christian and patriot to take a stand against the dangerous
errors of numerous Jews in the business world and to warn their fellow
Christians about the dangerous illusions of the philosemites who predominate
among the ruling elites.
Georg Ratzinger’s accusers also ignore the fact that Jews from Heinrich Graetz to
Samuel Roth have said far worse things about the Jewish business ethics which the
Ashkenazi have learned from the Talmud. According to Roth, the Jews are taught that they are
“the salt of the earth” and that everything they
see before them... is only to be won away with the superior brain with which
God has endowed his chosen ones? Each of them, when he grows up, becomes
an agency of cunning to defeat the civil law. The Polish Jew does not remain in
Poland. He migrates. Eventually he finds himself a rich nest in England, in
France, in Germany, in America, in one of the South American countries. To each
of the counties of his invasion the Jew brings the whole bag of commercial tricks
and statutory maneuvers with which he poisons the arteries of the civilized
world. £4Q1
The short hand term for “Jewish business practices” is capitalism. Given the pernicious
effects which capitalism has on every traditional culture, especially traditional Catholic
cultures, the nations of Europe at the end of the 19^ century were faced with a choice:
either enforce the laws (e.g. the prohibition against usury, child labor, etc.) which were
erected by the state to protect Christian culture against the Jews who were the cutting edge of
capitalist subversion or become Jews.
By now, it should be obvious which course Europe and America chose. It comes out in
The Believer when Danny, the
Jewish Nazi, attempts to solicit a $5,000 contribution from a wealthy Wall Street banker. The
banker tells Danny, “Forget the
Jewish stuff; it doesn’t play anymore. There’s only the market now and it
doesn’t care who you are.” Danny: “You’re a Jew. You may not
realize it but you are.”
Banker: “Maybe I am. Maybe we’re all Jews now. What’s the difference?”
The current pope mentions his Georg Ratzinger in an interview conducted by Peter
Seewald:
He was my great uncle, my father's uncle. He was a clergyman who had a
doctorate in theology. In his capacity as a representative in the Bavarian state
legislature and in the Reichstag, he was an early advocate for the rights of
farmers and of the average man in general. I read the passages in the
congressional record in which he attacked child labor, something which was
unheard of at the time and considered by many an affront. He was obviously a
tough guy, and because of his achievements and his political stature we were all
proud of him.l^U
Proud or not, there is a significant gulf which separates the present pope from his great
uncle. The most significant area of disagreement is their disparate views on the Jews. On the
last day of February 2011, Joseph Ratzinger released volume II of his book Jesus of Nazareth.
The big news surrounding the release of the book had to do with the Jews. As the AP headline
put it, “Pope exonerates Jews for Jesus’ death in new book.” According to the same report,
“Benedict concludes, it was the
‘Temple aristocracy’ and a few supporters of the figure Barabbas who were
responsible,” not the Jewish people.
The current pope should be proud of his great uncle. The real issue is whether the feeling
would be reciprocal. Would a man who wrote that “There is nothing more repugnant than
having to listen to educated Christians slandering their own people while at the same time
glorifying the Jews” be proud of a great nephew who exonerated the Jews’ of responsibility for
Christ’s death? Or a prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith who presided
over the publication of an apology to the Jews issued by his predecessor? Probably not,
because Onkel Georg had written even more pointedly:
There would be no Jewish Question if the educated elites among the Christian
peoples hadn't betrayed their own principles. At a time when Jews stand by
even their own criminal element, we see Christian politicians and legislators
betraying their own Christian faith on a daily basis and vying with each other to
see who has the privilege of harnessing himself to the triumphal car of the Jews.
In Parliament no Jew need defend another Jew, when their Christian lackeys do
that for them. £421
No matter how the traditional Catholic critique of the Jews has been effaced by recent
Church pronouncements it remains both extant and coherent; it remains more coherent than the
sociobiological position, because it is based on moral principles, which are then integrated
into a coherent political and theological structure. The Catholic position is the opposite of the
Darwinian position. According to Darwin and his epigoni, the superior race of necessity ends
up victorious in any economic struggle for existence. According to the Catholic position, the
exact opposite is true. Or as Georg Ratzinger puts it:
In a contest between two rival world views the worse element often wins the
upper hand and becomes the cause for the moral corruption of the people and
the collapse of the state. ... Under the mild and benign character of the
Catholic nations there was no resistance to the exploitation practiced by the
Jews and the devastation it was to cause. £441
According to Georg Ratzinger, the Jews succeeded in getting the economy of states like
Austria and Hungary under their control, not because they were more intelligent (or had
“higher IQs than Caucasians,” as Professor MacDonald claims) but because their
internalization of Talmudic culture had allowed them to become “skilled in the deceptions of
economic warfare”:
It was to be expected that the Jews, who with centuries of practice became
skilled in the deceptions of economic warfare and acquired the arts of
exploitation to perfection, it was to be expected that they would take center
stage under the regime of free competition. The Christian, among whom the
overwhelming majority were accustomed to performing productive work, and
who had been taught to avoid as immoral the type of deception that was
typical of the arts of economic warfare, became the first victims of this
exploitation, which made the Jews rich. Not talent, but rather sharp business
practices; not knowledge and ability, not productive capabilities and production,
but rather deception and exploitation of others is what makes the Jew rich and
admired in society. The stock exchange, lending money, usury, paying in truck,
in short all of the business practices which lead to easy and quick profits
without productive work are the preferred trades of the Jew. If they devote
themselves to study at the university, they turn more often than not to
journalism, medicine and the law, because these occupations lead most
easily and quickly to riches.M^l
The same can not be said for sociobiology, which presents a radically incoherent picture
of the Jewish question, by simultaneously praising the Jews for their intelligence and
excoriating them for its application. In the article we have already cited on Jewish
involvement in multiculturalism MacDonald wrote, “There is indeed evidence that Jews, like
East Asians, have higher IQs than Caucasians.”
Ratzinger, however, dismisses the idea of superior intelligence as an explanation for
the Jews’ dominant role in quondam Christian societies:
It isn't talent but rather sharp business practices; it isn't productivity but
rather deception and the art of exploitation which earns the Jew his money
and ensures his position of dominance among the big capitalists... . There is
a curse upon all this egotistical business activity which leads to the wreck of
society and the destruction of the social order. Everywhere where we find
destruction and corruption, we find the Jew hard at work. The worst attack
against the Christian religion and against the Church are all mounted by
Jews. £461
Unlike Professor MacDonald, Georg Ratzinger considers the Jew clever and conniving
but morally defective. That means that his economic system is intellectually inferior to
Christian economics. Ratzinger comes to the anti-Darwinian conclusion that Jewish
economics succeeds because it is inferior, both morally and economically. If economics is
defined properly, as the science of how to achieve the common good through economic
exchange, it is ultimately inferior to the
Christian economic system:
We discover the quintessential nature of the present day Jewish question in
the moral inferiority of the Jewish worldview in relation to the limitation of
competition. To be precise, the overwhelming majority of Jews have no sense
whatsoever of the role which morality plays in economic life. The only form
of limitation which they recognize in business is the penal statute. If an
opportunity to make money appears whose profit seems greater than the
penalty imposed by the law, the Jew doesn't hesitate to treat the law with
contempt.M J.
Jewish commerce can be characterized by two manifestations: 1) it is based on the
exploitation of the work of others without any productive activity of its own and 2) it is
characterized by gambling and speculation on the differentials in exchange as the way to
achieve riches. The Christian view is the exact opposite. Christianity ensures decency in
commerce by promoting honest toil or by promoting honest inheritance. Christianity
forbids the exploitation of his neighbor through excessive economic power, and insists on
the subordination of the good of the individual to the common good, as well as concern for the
economically vulnerable. There is a direct contradiction between Christianity and Judaism,
and any Christian community which allows the unrestrained exercise of Jewish business
practices is committing suicide.M^l
As a result of succumbing to Jewish influence:
The banks in Austria have become dens of usury and casinos, and the
businessman in the Austrian sense of the word is nothing more than a stock
market speculator or a small time chiseler. The Austrian press is nothing more
than an extortion racket. Political life is calculated according to financial profit. In
short, commercial life in Austria is permeated not by a Christian spirit but by a
Jewish one. Economic life is dominated not by the Christian dedication of the
individual to the common good, but is dominated instead by Jewish Egotism.
The state has become nothing more than an agent of the powerful, oblivious to
the fact that the Christian ideal demands the dedication of the individual to the
common good and especially for the protection of the weak.l~491
The problem is not bad DNA; the problem is the Talmud, which is the ultimate source
of all sharp Jewish business practices:
The Jew displays in this regard an unbelievable ruthlessness so that in little
transactions they begin to accumulate the capital that allows them to exploit
others. It is in this ruthlessness and in their tireless pursuit of almost
imperceptible profits wherein lies the secret of Jewish success in business, but it
is also therein where the danger to which the Christian population is exposed
when they sink to the same level. As soon as the Polish Jew gets his foot in the
door, wages are driven down and working hours are extended. Once this
happens the Christian masses find themselves as if by a force of nature driven
from a state of modest prosperity into the deepest misery. The Polish Jew is so
deeply enmired in the teaching of the Talmud that any notion of a Christian
society or a state based on the common good becomes impossible once the Jew
gains the upper hand. The Polish Jew, precisely because of the influence of the
Talmud, is universally a force for corruption and destruction. Wherever one finds
elements of dissatisfaction which threaten to overturn the Christian social order,
Jews jump to the forefront of the movement and adopt the role of agitator.
Jewish agitators can be found in leadership roles throughout the socialist
movement. In Vienna and Pest, the leadership of the socialist movement is
entirely in Jewish hands.
Implicit in Ratzinger ’s thinking is a chain of propositions which begins with a survey
of the economic situation in Germany and Austria at the end of 19^ century and ends with a
radical redefinition of the problem. There are no technical, Enlightenment solutions to this
problem. The technical thinking of the Enlightenment brought the problem about in the first
place by striking down the laws which had been erected under the guidance of the Church for
the protection of Christians and their culture.
The emancipation of the Jews dealt a fatal blow to the Christian social order. That is
another way of saying that the social question (the exploitation of the worker, usury’s
appropriation of land, etc.) can only be solved by dealing with the Jewish question, which can
only be solved by bringing about the conversion of the Jews, either completely through
baptism, or formally by forcing their behavior to conform to Christian custom, as specified
by Sicut Iudeis non. There is no point in dealing with an economic factor like state credit in
isolation, especially
when private persons determine the terms of credit. Jewish banks are now in
the process of using state credit as a way of taking control of all industrial
Droduction. Herein Ties the secret of the omnipotence of modern capitalist
negemony with all of its cancerous growth. Any social reform has to begin with
the state establishing its independence from private equity firms as its source of
credit. Only then will the source of all of capitalism's debilitating excesses be
contained. To call anything else social reform is a waste of time.
It is pointless to talk about economics as if it were a science like physics when it is so
closely bound up with the moral law. In order to deal with the crisis effectively, state
authorities need to admit that:
Seduction and crime are the main components of Jewish commerce. When the
scions of wealthy families go astray, the easiest way to find the culprit
responsible is to seek him among the Jews. The Jew supplies riding and wagon
horses, equipage and dogs; he encourages the acting our of all base desires and
the adoption of degenerate lifestyles; he is the fence and the pimp. Once he has
established his influence over his rich young protege, he encourages him to
speculate on the stock market in order to win back the money he squandered on
his vices. In this way the Jew brings about his complete ruin in a few years,
which is when his fortune ends up in hands of his Jewish seducer. Anyone who is
familiar with the realities of social life in Paris, Vienna, and Pest sees this sort of
thing all the time. These seductive arts are closely allied with prostitution. Every
aspect of trafficking in young females is firmly in Jewish hands and organized on
an international basis. It's only a short step from this immoral trafficking to
criminal activity. When it comes to embezzlement, misappropriation, fraud,
usury, blackmail, etc., the Jew is involved to a much greater percentage than the
Christian.
Capitalism, which is another term for “Juedisches Erwerbsleben,” or Jewish business
practice has its roots in looting:
In this way, Jewish business practices are similar to those of desert nomads
who make use of their fleet horses of the steppes to conduct looting
expeditions on settlements which pursue settled economic pursuits. In doing
this they appropriate what they can drag off on their raids. They then live like
kings off of "what they have earned" in the desert until the loot is all gone and
another looting expedition is necessary. Jewish "commerce" has never been able
to grow beyond its roots in looting. The majority of Jews has no idea of how to
make a living from honest toil, nor do they want to learn how to do such a
thing. 50J
There are many forms of slavery that need to be abolished. What the Arab is
to Africa, the usury Jew is to Europe. Both Semitic races live only off the
exploitation of others, by looting. That is the revenant of the nomadic life of
these tribes. Thousand years of living in the desert accustomed them to sudden
attacks, and they learned through this booty off of the work of others. The
entire Jewish-oriental way of doing business is deeply suffused with the
characteristics of looting. One industry after another is singled out for looting,
until finally whole nations have been plundered.
Because of this, Jewish business practices are totally antithetical to the economy of a
Christian culture, which is based on an understanding and appreciation of the value of work:
In the instruction manuals from the Middle Ages, the people were taught that
"Man is born to work, as the bird is created to fly." The Catholic Church raised
the nations under her care to be workers and made earning by work the
foundation of our civilization. There is only one way of earning a living which is
worthy of respect and esteem, and that is earning a living by toil, whether that
entails labor of a physical or an intellectual sort. It makes no difference whether
this labor takes place on the lowest rung of the economic ladder among day-
laborers or among the professions of the elite. In doing this the Church
erected civilization upon an entirely new foundation. The pagan world proposed
a life lived at the expense of others (slavery); Judaism preached preferential
treatment for its own people, but permitted the exploitation and practicing usury
on alien nations. And until this day Jewish business practices exhibit this dual
nature. On the one hand, we see concern for the family and for his fellow Jew,
but on the other a totally heartless exploitation via usury of the goyim, which
becomes the source of the wealth accumulated by Jewish
billionaires... . The ancient principle of the Catholic Church, which only honors
commerce when it is based on honest work, is drowned out by the Jewish
screeching which encourages speculation and gambling on the stock
market.
By the last decade of the 19^ century, it had become clear to thinkers like Georg
Ratzinger that the laws enacted in the wake of the Enlightenment and its concomitant
revolutions spelled economic disaster for Europe. The only solutions to the economic crisis
was a return to Christian-inspired state regulation of the economy. “The Jews,” Ratzinger
opined,
must once again learn to subordinate themselves to Christian social
reform and to conform their business practices to Christian norms. All of the
money which they have earned through state-sanctioned usury and the
exploitation of the worker must be returned to the people. The legislatures must
now criminalize all of the fraud and exploitation which now has established itself
under the rubric of free enterprise. The state needs to prosecute in a public
manner all forms of usury ana fraudulent exploitation. The current laws against
usury and fraud are much too one-sided, ana they do not correspond either to
the experience or the plain sense of Christian jurisprudence.
There is no middle ground here; there are no neutral scientific laws. Either the Christian
State must force Jews to acknowledge the superiority of their laws and conform to them, or,
under the guise of tolerance and enlightenment, Christians will end up by becoming Jews via
an unregulated, capitalist, Jewish economy:
Just think how contagious usury was then [during the middle ages] and how
quickly public morality declined as a result, what germs are to epidemics, so is
bad example on the moral level. It is irresponsible to give a free pass to
contagious toxins by promoting a false view of life, unless you want the entire
social organism to get sick. The disease of our culture consists in the cancerous
spread of the Jewisn-heathen worldview over the moral norms of Christendom.
The inferiority of the Jewish-heathen worldview to Christianity must be made
apparent, by the actions of the Christian state.
The solution to the social question can only come about when the Christian idea of
commerce has vanquished the Jewish- heathen idea. True protection of the social order is only
possible in the confessional state. “Business practice must be made to conform once again to
Christian morals”:
Intoxicated by revolution, Christian nations have pawned their most precious
ewel — the teaching and the grace of their savior—and have rejected their most
precious asset, their character as redeemed children of the Lord, by abandoning
:he Christian basis for their culture. The Lord as a result has let the Christian
nations go their own way, which has led to the debt bondage which flows from
the obdurate hegemony of capital, which will end up concentrated in the hands
of a small minority of Jews and their lackeys.
The Jews will also benefit from
these reforms:
Clear limits on Judaism in not only necessary for the interests of the Christian
nations; it is also in the interest of the Jews themselves. Only when the sane
principles of Christian reform have been put in place, can we hope to disarm the
specter of anti-Semitic racial hatred. It is only then that we can hope to avoid
tne path of the violent taking the law into their own hands. Those who think
that a small minority of Jews with the help of the power of the state can solve
this problem, are deceiving themselves.
To put the case another way, if reform is not forthcoming, the Jews will be
the first to suffer because:
The hegemony of social corruption has ended in every age in terror. This solution is no
longer plausible. Either we are going to have Christian reform in our future or we are going
to have the reign of racial hatred. The Jews should be under no illusions about what they can
expect from the racial hatred that is waiting for them in the near future. Their arrogance is
going to turn quickly into bitter disappointment in the future.
Ratzinger was especially prophetic when he wrote in 1892:
A reaction against the jewification of our culture is now building momentum
among the common man. That movement is hardly perceptible today, but it is
going to grow like an avalanche. That movement would be irresistible at this
very moment if it weren't lacking a leader. (Ratzinger's word was, of course the
German word "Fuehrer," which took on a whole new dimension some 40 years
later.)
What he said of working class Christians in the 1890s is now true of Muslims in 2011:
What the Christian earns by the sweat of his brow, the Jew lays hold of via
usury, fraud, and cheating the worker out of a decent wage, and he squanders
the money he appropriates in luxury and wretched excess, confronted with
these excesses, the moral consciousness of the working class finds itself
consumed with rage, and since the government and the legislature provide no
protection against the usurious and exploitative Jews and their lackeys, the
people take to the streets. That is the meaning of anti-Semitism ana the
uproar it is now causing. We see in this a kind of economic self-defense and the
moral defense mechanism of the exploited. It's a sign to the government and
the legislature that the necessary legal protection isn't there, and a sign that the
administration and the legal system aren't offering the assistance that they need
to offer. Anti-Semitism is a serious and ultimate warning to the ruling class. If
this warning is ignored, if the ruling class thinks that they deal with the people
with bayonettes, then we are heading toward a revolution that is going to make
the Reformation and the French revolution look like child's play by comparison.
Ratzinger is aware of the Darwinian notion that life involves struggle among individuals
and ethnic groups as well. He simply takes that notion of struggle out of the biological realm
and re-situations it n the moral cultural arena, as when he writes: “Any ethnic group which is
totally lacking in moral restraint when it comes to economic life will end up the winner in any
struggle for existence. This is the secret of Jewish success in Austria-Hungary.”
Similarly, Ratzinger isn’t denying that life is a struggle; he is simply unwilling to say, as the
sociobiologists must, that the cause of the victors in cultural warfare is ipso facto just:
The life of nations is like the life of individuals. Fie who fails to engage in
battle daily to secure his position in society will soon disappear. The Catholics in
Austro-Flungary have failed to engage in the daily battle for their possessions,
and as a result they lose year after year one institution after another. They
have been dispossessed from top to bottom, from their universities as well as
their kindergartens. The Jews, who make up less than 10 percent of the
population, have as a result of their energetic and unified and self-confident
activity won a victory over the 90 percent of the population which is Catholic
and have everywhere occupied the positions which the Catholics have
abandoned. £ 54 ]
If survival of the fittest is the fundamental law of sociobiology, then Jews must be in fact
the master race. Hitler got it almost right. Conversely, when it comes to the struggle for
existence, white guys are losers; from the sociobiological perspective, the highest thing
anyone can aspire to be is a Jew. Hence, David’s delight when he found that he had Jewish
DNA in his cells. He was now a member of the master race, which of course, was at the same
time, the enemy of the entire human race. This leads him to the contradictory assertion “I’m a
product of my times. I am my genes.” What he means to say is that the upheaval in his life
caused by the sexual revolution left him totally uprooted and without any sense of identity.
Since he lives is a materialist scientistic culture, finding his roots took a biological turn,
helped of course by the sociobiology he imbibed from the writings of Professor MacDonald.
Talk about race is the ultimate sign of deracination.
If Georg Ratzinger’s explanation of the rise of Jewish power is superior to Kevin
MacDonald’s, a different picture begins to emerge. David became a Jew not because he
discovered superior DNA in his cells, but because the Catholic Church failed to preach the
gospel. We are talking about failure on a massive scale here. In Georg Ratzinger’s day when
the Catholic confessional state was in power in places like Bavaria and the double monarchy
of Austro-Hungary, Catholic elites refused to enforce the (largely economic) laws on the books
which protected the weak in a Christian culture
Then came the Thirty Years War (1915-1945) which put the revolutionary elites in
power after World War II By nineteen sixty farseeing church men like Alfredo Cardinal
Ottaviani saw that European Christian culture needed to strengthened against assaults from the
Jewish elites in both the East and the West, as represented by Freudianism and
Communism, Hollywood movies, fast food, rock n roll—in short, everything that Federico
Fellini discussed in La Dolce Vita, the seminal
1960 document.
Instead of regaining the initiative, the Catholic Church used the council which Ottaviani
persuaded Pope John XXIII to convoke as a way of internalizing the commands of her
oppressors. The Church which used Dignitatis Humanae as a pretext to
abandon the confessional state (even though the document affirms the opposite) and Nostra
Aetate as a pretext to abandon its efforts to preach the Gospel to the Jews and work for their
conversion, created a world in which Jews who recognized the synagogue’s attack on logos
and recoiled from it in disgust had no alternative but to become Jewish Nazis, because Hitler
had succeeded Christ as the antithesis of what it meant to be a Jew. David Cooper and Danny
Balint are infallible signs that the Church is not doing its job. Whenever a Jew recoils in
disgust from the Nihilism which is the essence of the Jewish religion, his first thought should
be, “This is what St. Paul meant when he said the Jews are ‘the enemy of the entire human
race.’ This is what the Church has been saying all along.”
The fact that this thought did not pop into David’s mind is a sign that the Church has
abandoned its mission of evangelization to the people who need it the most, the people to
whom Christ preached exclusively when he walked this earth.
When pushed on the matter, David will admit, “In theory I was a Catholic. But they
didn’t tell me anything. My dad left Church” as a result of the divorce, and after that
David’s exposure to Catholicism was attending “the hippie Mass at St. John’s” in the
company of his sexually liberated mother. As part of his Catholic upbringing, David’s mom
told him that “the priest at St. John’s is gay.” The net result of this failure on the Church’s
part was deracination. David felt totally rootless, totally cut off from any familial or cultural
or religious tradition. As a result, he began to see those roots in his DNA. Race would
provide what David’s church and family failed to give him.
“I wanted to know who I am Race is not a social construct. Race and ethnicity is about
biology.” Then after discovering his Jewish DNA, David joined the synagogue, where he
learned that “Judaism doesn’t involve a relationship with God.” Now after learning that the
rabbi and most of his congregation are atheists, David is feeling spiritually restless again.
“Technically I’m a Jew,” he says, “but my
heart’s not in it.
The logic here is not as convoluted as one might think. After being exposed to the full
nihilism of the Jewish “faith,” the Jew recoils in horror and disgust. At that point, he either
devotes himself to some lesser god such as money or sex, or he recoils completely and looks
for the opposite of what he learned in the synagogue. The Catholic Church is the true opposite
of what gets taught in the synagogue, but the Church simply has not been proclaiming Church
teaching on the Jews for decades. As a result, in his search for the antithesis of everything
Judaism stands for the Jew discovers the Nazis, whose racial beliefs are simply the mirror
image of Judaism anyway, and the Jew becomes a Nazi.
By virtue of his baptism, David is a Catholic, something he admits in more candid
moments, “I’ve been to Mass more times than I’ve been to the synagogue.” Why then does he
think he’s a Jew? The initial answer to that question is Kevin MacDonald and DNA testing.
The real answer to that question, however, lies in the massive failure of the contemporary
Catholic Church either to live or proclaim the gospel. To begin with the living part, the priest
he got to know best as a child was a regular guest at their house because he was having an
affair with his mother.
When I was 11 years old, my mom met and seduced a monsignor. The
relationship lasted for as long as
20 years. Maybe more. I don't know when it ended. He died a few years ago. I
don't know how much more I'll say about it, but I'd like for you to let it lie.
Please don't poke around about it. Thank you. Of course, it takes two to tango. I
couldn't exactly say who seduced whom. She wanted to marry him, and she
says he talked about that as a possibility for many years. The whole thing
disgusts me. Talk about sacrosanct and profane. I'll probably never forgive her
forthis, or some other transgressions.
The failure of the church to proclaim the gospel is not unrelated to moral failure. The
contemporary Church’s intellectual cowardice in proclaiming the Gospel teaching on the Jews
simply puts its moral turpitude in sexual matters in the shade by comparison. Everything the
contemporary Catholic Church has to say about the Jews is either insipid or flat out wrong
and a contradiction of everything the gospels and the Church fathers had to say on the matter.
The Church has all but officially proclaimed that it is not interested in converting the
Jews. The American bishops had proclaimed in their own catechism that the Mosaic covenant
was eternally valid and that Jews could be saved by following it. That this was a heretical,
flat out contradiction of the gospel finally dawned on the bishops and they deleted the
offending statement.
Those organizations which do claim to be interested in the conversion of the Jews, turn
out to be, upon closer inspection, the opposite of what they claim to be. The Association of
Hebrew Catholics is a good case in point. Instead of working for the conversion of the Jews,
the AHC works instead for the preservation of pockets of Jewish DNA within the Church.
Instead of working to integrate Jewish converts into Church life, the AHC attempts to create
Jewish ghettos based on what can only be construed as racial and therefore heretical
principles.
In the February 2006 issue of CultureWars , Theologian Raymond Kevane, theological
advisor to the AHC pointed out these heretical principles publically to David Moss, the
organization’s president, after years of trying to get an answer from him privately:
Not too long ago (March 2005) in a public statement on EWTN. Dave Moss
rejected the idea that the Church replaced the people of Israel. He clearly
identified the latter idea as an "erroneous theology" that was taught for 2000
years by the Catholic Church. He further stated that the Church no longer
reaches that
he people of Israel are superseded. They are an eternal people with an
irrevocable calling. How can any individual declare that the Catholic Church ... .
has taught erroneous theology for 2000 years.
Both statements are heretical. The most important "irrevocable calling" for
the Jews is the same as for the rest of us—to save their immortal souls. In one
stroke Dave Moss denied the Scripture as inspired by God, the infallibility of the
Pope and Ecumenical councils and the fact of Tradition (the office of the
Magisterium of the Catholic Church). No Catholic can say that the Church has
held and erroneous theology for 2000 years and still remain a Catholic. 56}
In almost every century there has been an effort to bring the rites of the
Jewish religion into the Catholic Church. Every time it has arisen it has caused
great harm to the Catholic Church before finally being discredited.
So when Dave Moss said that the Church was in theological error for 2000 years, he
denies the infallibility of the pope and the councils of the Church
The Council of Florence... firmly believes and profess, and teaches ... that
whoever, even after the passion , placed hope in these mattes of the law and
submitted himself to them as necessary for salvation, as if faith in Christ could
not save without them, sinned mortally... .
To reinstate, in the Catholic Church, any of the Judaic rituals of the Old Testament would
be to suggest that the Sacrifice by Christ is not perfect.
It turns out that the AHC isn’t interested in Jewish conversion at all:
David Moss told me ... that he doesn't believe that the AHC should be involved
in "targeting" other Jews
. but rather to simply "converse" or "dialogue" with them. But if that's true,
then the converted Jew is not obeying the command of Christ "Go forth and
preach the Gospel to all nations."
On August 5, 2010, David Moss, president of the Association of Hebrew Catholics,
interviewed Archbishop Raymond L. Burke, who was then head of the Apostolic Signatura in
Rome. Moss’s tendentious questions were largely formulated in response to the objections
which Raymond Kevane raised in his Culture Wars article but remained unanswered. In
response to a question about the special role the “Hebrew” Catholic might play in the Church,
Burke ignored the issue and thinking that he was agreeing with Moss claimed that “We [ i.e.,
Catholics] are the sons and daughters of Abraham, and we feel the closest bond to the
Jewish people.” Burke, of course, implies here that we feel this bond because the Jews
can also construe themselves as children of Abraham, even though this assertion is
contradicted by the Gospel of St. John, which states quite clearly that followers of Christ
can call themselves children of Moses, but those who reject Christ, i.e., the Jews, cannot.
Burke then goes on to add:
A Hebrew Catholic has a distinctive witness to give in the church. They
are particularly cherished because of the rich heritage they bring to the church.
Is his excellency referring to the Talmud here? If not, it's difficult to see what
other heritage the Jew can bring to the church, since that rejection of logos is
the heart of the Jewish religion.
David wasn’t impressed by this sort of outreach. In fact, he’s hoping that the Church
maintains its position as “a last bastion of anti-Semitism” because American Protestants in his
view have been Judaized. The Catholic Church is a repudiation of Judaism, in David’s view
because Jesus Christ’s teaching was a repudiation of the religion of that time and place. The
Talmud is not based on the Hebrew Bible. They start with the Mishna, spoken word brought
down from Mt. Sinai. From there it is only a short step to concluding as the rabbi did at Baruch
Goldstein’s funeral, that 10,000 Palestinian children aren’t worth one Jewish fingernail.
David’s experiences in the synagogue confirmed the nihilism which Danny Balint
discovered at the heart of Judaism as a
Yeshiva student:
“I’ve never met a Jew who believes in God,” David opined. “My rabbi does not believe
in God. None of the Jews in my congregation believes in God. I have yet to find a Jew who
believes in a divine God.”
It was this discovery of nihilism at the heart of Judaism which led David to conclude
that “Jews make the best anti- Semites.” It also led him to conclude that the greatest anti-
Semite of all time, as well as one of the modern era’s greatest nihilists, was Jewish.
“Hitler’s dad’s dad was Jewish,” David said. “His dad’s mom worked in a Jewish
household and the man of the house impregnated her when she was around 40.” It led
Danny Balint to the same conclusion in The Believer, when he asks rhetorically, “So
Hitler’s the chief rabbi now?”
Danny is right. Hitler is the chief rabbi now. He attained that position by default when
the Church stopped working for the conversion of the Jews.
* *
*
Footnotes
£U Dorothy Rabinowitz, "Major Hasan, 'Star Officer'" WSJ, 2/18/11
£21 http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/Immiaratbn. pdf . All subsequent quotes on immigratbn have been taken from this article.
£21 Georg Ratzinger, Juedisches Erwerbsleben: Skizzen aus dem sozialen Leben der Gegenwart (Passau: Verlag von Rudolf Abt, 1892). p. 30. All
translations from the German are mine.
£21 Wikipedia, Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley
£21 Erich Haberer, Jews and revolutbn in Nineteenth-century Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 14. The subsequent
discussbn of Jewish nihilism in 19^ century Russia is taken from Haberer.
Haberer, p. 15.
£21 Ibid.
£21 Haberer, p. 16.
£21 Haberer, p. 18.
£121 Ibid.
Haberer, p. 24.
Haberer, p. 43.
Haberer, p. 117.
£121 Haberer, p. 120.
£121 Haberer, p. 175.
£121 Haberer, p. 189.
Ibid.
Haberer, p. 124.
Haberer, p. 151.
£201 Haberer, p. 154.
£0U Haberer, pp. 155-6.
£001 Haberer, p. 159.
£001 Haberer, p. 201.
£ £1 Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose, Nihilism: The Root of the Revolutbn of the Modern Age
£ £ Samuel Roth, Jews Must Live: An Account of the Persecutbn of the World by Israel on all the Frontiers of Civilizatbn (No place of publication,
1934), pp. 12-3.
£021 Roth, p. 11.
£0Z1 Roth, p. 17.
£021 1 Thessabnians 2:15.
£021 Roth, p. 18.
£201 Roth, p. 20.
David thinks the DNA testing business is rife with fraud, especially when it comes to Jewish ancestry.
£201 "Can the Jewish Model Help the West Survive?" Chapter 14 Cultural Insurrectbns: Essays on Western Civilisation, Jewish Influence and Anti-
Semitism (Atlanta: Occidental Press 2007), pp. 355-6.
£221 Op. cit., p. 363.
£211 MacDonald gave this account of his life in a video documentary filmed by Byron Jost. Jost died before the video could be formally released.
Segments are now on the internet.
£221 Robert Waldhausen (Georg Ratzinger) op. cit. The German Wikipedia page on Robert Waldhausen identifies him as Georg Ratzinger. Their
explanatbn folbws:
Georg Ratzinger werden aber auch die beiden nachfolgend genannten pseudonym veroffentlichten antisemitischen Hetzschriften zugeschrieben. Zwar
kann Ratzingers Identitat mit deren beiden Verfasserpseudonymen nbht anhand schriftlbher Zeugnisse belegt werden, jedoch gilt sie in der Forschung auf
Grund von Indizien als gesbhert und wird nbht in Frage gestellt. Unter dem Pseudonym "Dr. Robert Waldhausen" erschien 1892 das Buch Judisches
Erwerbsleben. Skizzen aus dem sozialen Leben der Gegenwart, in dessen Einleitung es z. B. heiBt: Die Emanzipatbn der Juden [...] konnte nbht anders,
als zerstorend und zersetzend auf die ganze christlbhe Gesellschaft wirken. Und 1897 wurde unter dem Pseudonym "Dr. Gottfried Wolf" ein
antisemitisches Pamphlet mit dem Titel Das Judentum in Bayern. Skizzen aus der Vergangenheit und Vorschlage fur die Zukunft publiziert. Auch in
anderen, nbht pseudonym veroffentlbhten Schriften Ratzingers, z. B. in Die Volkswirthschaft in ihren sittlbhen Grundlagen, und in seinen Parlamentsreden
lassen sich antisemitische AuBerungen und Tendenzen finden.
£221 Georg Ratzinger, op cit, pp. 1-2.
£221 cf. E. Mbhael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit (South Bend, IN: Fidelity Press, 2009), pp. 676ff.
Ratzinger, op. cit, p. 3.
£221 Georg Ratzinger, op cit., p. 5.
^21 Roth, op cit, p. 34.
Joseph Kardinal Ratzinger, Salz der Erde: Christentutn and katholische Kirch an der Jahrtausendwende (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt,
1996), p. 47, my translation.
Georg Ratzinger, op. cit., p. 84.
Georg Ratzinger, op cit, p. 32.
Georg Ratzinger, op. cit., p. 3.
^51 Georg Ratzinger, op cit, p. 4. My translation.
Ibid.
tEl Georg Ratzinger, op. cit., p. 18.
Georg Ratzinger, op. cit., p. 11.
Georg Ratzinger, op. cit., p. 12.
Georg Ratzinger, op. cit, p. 29
Georg Ratzinger, op.cit.,p. 58
Georg Ratzinger, op. cit., p. 38.
Georg Ratzinger, op. cit, p. 53.
Georg Ratzinger, op, cit., p. 49.
1 Raymond Kevane, "An Open Letter to the Hebrew Catholic Conference," Culture Wars, February 2006, p. 9.
!bid.
SfSl
PREFACE
Chapter I; Wednesday, August 1
Booirerdaemrerung
Chapter 2: Thursday, August 2
C annon Fodder
HiiaHoop
Chapter 3: Friday, August 3
Taste for Deviance
The Last Circle
Chapter 4: Saturday. August 4
Chapter 5: Sunday, August 5
Author's Biographical Note
PREFACE
Whenever I thought of the fact that I had lived in Europe for years before I
had been west of the Susquehanna River, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was the
American version of a Nestorian or an Arian because I had flagrantly denied two tenets
of the American creed. I did not own a car, and I had never driven the car that I did not
own to California.
The big western moment for Philadelphians of my generation took place
40 years ago during the summer of 1967. It was known as the summer of love, and
whatever emotional attraction that hajj in a cramped VW beetle had was again
associated with music, songs like "If you’re going to San Francisco . .." which prompted
Philadelphians of a certain persuasion to head out in their VW beetles with the flower
decal and the McCarthy bumper sticker.
So, 40 years too late and thousands of dollars short, Peter and I,
representing the baby boomers who hadn’t made our summer of love hajj then, made our
pilgrimage, not in the cramped and narrow confines of a VW beetle, but with all of the
luxury a brand new Gass C motorhome can afford.
As we sat in die 21 st century version of die Conestoga wagon and watched
America’s landscape roll by at the stately Conestoga pace of 50 miles per hour (Peter is
paid a lump sum for gas, and so the slower he goes the more money he earns), the main
topic of discussion was what do you do when you have ruined your life. America has
various answers to that question, and most of diem have to do with die West, which is
where you go when your past becomes too complicated.
The KV is a home on wheels for the permanendy deracinated. It entered
the canon of American literature 110 years after Hawthorne wrote die House of the
Seven Gables, when John Steinbeck wrote Travels with Charley In Search of America, the
story of Steinbeck’s 10,000 mile long RV trip from Maine to California and backagain.
Steinbeck, his biographer tells us, "was afraid that fatherhood would
interfere with his writing." It turns out that Steinbeck; fears were misplaced. Abortion, not
fatherhood, destroyed him as a writer.
If die RV is the modern version of the Conestoga wagon, then the
motorcycle is die modern equivalent of the horse. The biker is die modern day equivalent
of the cowboy. The cowboys were veterans of the Civil War who never made it back
home to the America that war destroyed. So, too, biker culture is a reaction to war.
Cowboys were the disaffected veterans of the Civil War, bikers were die disaffected
veterans of World War II and Vietnam, the boys who never made it back to the world
those wars destroyed
America never really felt comfortable with social engineering; as it
became more repugnant in die average American’s eyes, Hell’s Angels took on the aura
of outlaw heroes. Burdened by increasingly onerous social control, the average, which is
to say, the clueless socially engineered citizen became increasingly fascinated by
deviance, which he incorrectly saw as the antithesis of and antidote to social control.
Eventually the dominant culture exploited this fascination as it developed even more
sophisticated forms of control based on the arousal of sexual passion.
E. Michael Jones
December 2011
It seems that there are two contenders for tire KV capital of the world. One
is Elkhart, Indiana, which is 15 miles east of where I live. The other is Forrest Gty, Iowa,
500 miles west, home of Winnebago Industries, the brand name, like Kleenex, that
became synonymous with the recreational vehicle. RVs are simply a part of life when
you live where I live. If s one of those things that you immediately recognize as some sort
of culturally promoted fantasy and then forget about it while cruising along the Interstate
trying to get where you've got to go. Your kids end up with KV toys because they end up
playing with trucks. Someone you know buys an KV and then wonders why he did that
and what he plans to do with the thing now that it has broken down for the thousandth time
and is filling up his driveway.
Then suddenly it becomes an existential issue. During the summer of 2007
I needed to attend a wedding in Spokane, Washington. Flying was out of the question;
driving was too expensive. It was during a weeks' long quandary that I thought of Peter.
Peter is a man of many talents. He hosts a cable access talk show; he also delivers RVs.
When I asked him if he were planning to deliver any RVs to die West coast at the
beginning of August, he not only said he was but that I could go along for the ride.
What I found out later is that the KV was leaving not from Elkhart but from
Iowa. In the end it was all the same, three days straight of somewhere between 600 and
700 miles a day over terrain that I had heard about but never seen (at least not at ground
level) and had coalesced under the rubric of the mythic American West. In spite of
having been bom in America and having lived here all of my life, I had always felt a
little bit like a Muslim who had never made the hajj to Mecca because I had never driven
across die country.
Never mind that I hated cars. Never mind that my father did not own one
until I was in high school growing up, and that my wife and I did not have one until our
oldest son was in high school too. Never mind the fact that I had flown over the same
terrain a number of times. I had this inchoate sense that America really was a creedal
nation, and that the automobile and the West were parts of that creed. Whenever I thought
of the fact that I had lived in Europe for years before I had been west of the Susquehanna
River, I couldn't escape die feeling that I was the American version of a Nestorian or an
Arian because I had flagrandy denied two tenets of die American creed. I did not own a
car, and I had never driven the car that I did not own to California.
Growing up in Philadelphia, I came to this understanding of the American
creed from cowboy shows on TV. One of the things that attracted me to cowboys back
then was die fact that, more often than not, guys like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry were
singing cowboys. Music goes a long way toward making people attractive in my book I
can even conceive of a TV show about artichoke pickers from Watsonville. As long as
they were singing artichoke pickers, I'd consider giving diem a second look or listen. Even
the Lone Ranger stands out among movies whose names and plots I no longer remember
because of his association with Rossini's Wilhelm Tell overture.
As far as I was concerned die mythic west began somewhere just on the
other side of 69^* Street, which was, and still is, die westernmost stop on the Frankford El.
It was all terribly important, that stretch of territory from Upper Darby to the Pacific
Ocean, because it symbolized hope, even if no one could really explain why. The big
western moment for Philadelphians of my generation tookplace 40 years ago during the
summer of 1967. It was known as the summer of love, and whatever emotional attraction
that hajj in a cramped VW beetle had was again associated with music, songs like "If
you're going to San Francisco..." which prompted Philadelphians of a certain persuasion
to head out in their VW beeties with the flower decal and the McCarthy bumper sticker.
We were a whole generation with a new explanation, as die song put it Eventually the
summer of love turned into a miasma of drug overdose, venereal disease, and, worst of
all, hippie commercialism. It eventually got so bad that the hippies held a funeral for the
movement and abandoned San Francisco to the homosexuals.
So, 40 years too late and thousands of dollars short, Peter and I
representing the babyboomers who hadn't made our summer of love hajj then, made our
pilgrimage now, not in the cramped and narrow confines of a VW beetle, but with all of
the luxury which a brand new Gass C motorhome can afford. I didn't know Peter 40
years ago, so I don't know what we would have talked about then, but I am fairly sure that
it would not have been what we talked about now, because 40 years represents the great
hump of life, and we were now on the down side of that hump rushing downhill toward
60, j ust 10 years from the three score and 10 that God allots to man as his portion on this
earth.
The West was still tire West. It still embodied America's hope in the future.
But if the West embodied America's vision of hope and the future unencumbered by the
dead hand of tire past, our conversation had a distinctly eastern cast to it As we sat in the
21 st century version of the Conestoga wagon and watched America's landscape role by
at the stately Conestoga pace of 50 miles per hour (Peter is paid a lump sum for gas, and
so tire slower he goes tire more money he earns), the main topic of discussion was what
do you do when you have ruined your life. America has various answers to that question,
and most of them have to do with the West, which is where you go when your past
becomes too complicated.
The traditional American answer to tire question is move. In particular,
move West The American answer to the great American question has always been the
same. What changes is the technology. In 1850, when Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The
House of the Seven Gables, the answer was still "move," but then the vehicle for moving
was the railroad. The railroad allowed Clifford Pyncheon, scion of a New England
family in terminal decline, to escape from his past Or at least it gave him that illusion,
because
looking from the window, they could see the world racing past them. At one
moment, they were rattling through a solitude—tire next a village had grown up
around them—a few breaths more, and it had vanished, as if swallowed by an
earthquake. The spires of meeting houses seemed set adrift from their foundations,
the broad-based hills glided away. Everything was unfixed from its age-long rest,
and moving at whirlwind speed opposite to their own. (Nathaniel Hawthorne, The
House of the Seven Gables (New York W. W. Norton, 1967, p. 256)
Clifford and Hepzibah Pyncheon were escaping from the house of the
seven gables because that house, acquired by ancestral acts of theft and murder, had
become tire locus of sin, history, and the dead hand of the past over their lives. Their lives
were ruled by a curse—quite literally, Maule's curse—and when they realized that they
were powerless to lift this curse from their blighted lives, they had recourse to the
remedy which millions of Americans would seekin years to come: they left They pulled
up stales; they moved. Moving always involves technology of one sort or another, and in
1850 tire state of the art technology for moving was the railroad. Hawthorne was writing
in an age when his peers drew metaphysical lessons from physical improvements. One
of tiie great essays of his day was on the moral influence of steam, and so it comes as no
surprise that Clifford got swept up into the same delusion, namely, that the railroad was
going to solve his spiritual problems. The logic behind the escape plan goes roughly as
follows: If a man is no longer bound to one place, then sin will have no hold over him,
because sin always happens in a particular place and time. Since one of the great sins in
history (in particular the history of the English speaking world) is theft of land and real
estate, the railroad will abolish this sin by abolishing the home:
"This admirable invention of tire railroad," Clifford tells the train's puzzled
conductor, who feels that "The best chance of pleasure in an easterly rain... is in a man's
own house with a nice little fire in the chimney," "can abolish history and all tire misery
bound up with it by turning men backinto nomads." The railroad, Clifford continues, "with
its vast and inevitable improvements to be looked for, both as to speed and convenience, is
destined to do away with those stale ideas of home and fireside and substitute something
better. . . . My impression is that our wonderfully increased and still increasing facilities
of locomotion are destined to bring us round again to the nomadic state...."
Railroads give us the ability to leave the past behind us. Since Americans
are invariably people who have left some other place to come here, this prospect
corresponds to toe selection process that created America and is, therefore, doubly
attractive. Railroads "are positively toe greatest blessing that toe ages have wrought for us.
They give us wings; they annihilate toe toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel.
Transition being so facile, what can be any man's inducement to tarry in one spot? Why,
therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily be carried off
with him?'
Had Hawthorne been able to see 150 years into toe future and contemplate
toe Class Amotorhomes that were coverging, like our Gass C motorhome, on Redmond,
Oregon, he would have most probably been amazed at just how cumbrous a habitation
Americans would eventually be able to carry off with them. But toe psychological
motivation behind moving—whether by railroad or RV—would have been no more a
mystery to him now than it was to him then.
"Why," Clifford continues, "should he make himself a prisoner for life in
brick and stone and old worn eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one
sense, nowhere—in a better sense, wherever toe fit and beautiful shall offer him a
home?'
"I should scarcely call it an improved state of things," toe conductor
replied, "to live everywhere and nowhere!"
But Gifford is just getting started. The possibilities of railroad travel as toe
solution to his problems have intoxicated him and loosened his tongue accordingly:
Morbid influences, in a thousand-fold variety, gather about hearths, and pollute
toe life of households. There is no such unwholesome atmosphere as that of an old
home, rendered poisonous by one's defunct forefathers and relatives! I speak of
what I know. .... rusty, crazy, creaky, dry-rotted, damp-rotted, dingy, dark and
miserable old dungeon with an arched window over toe porch and a little shop door
on one side, and a great melancholy elm before it Now, sir, whenever my thoughts
recur to this seven-gabled mansion ... I have a vision of an elderly man . . . dead,
stone dead, with an ugly flow of blood upon his shirt bosom.... I could never flourish
there, nor be happy nor do nor enjoy what God meant me to do and enjoy! . . . it
were a relief to me if that house could be torn down .... For, Sir, toe farther I get
away from it, toe more does toe joy, toe lightsome freshness, toe heart-leap, toe
intellectual dance, die youth, in short—yes, my youth, my youth—the more does it
come back to me. No longer ago than this morning was I old . . . But now do I look
old? If so, my aspect belies me strangely, for—a great weight being off my mind—I
feel in the very hey-day of my youth, with the world and my best days before me.
Abolish real estate and you will abolish sin! Victims of the subprime bust
might agree. Clifford is both loquacious and prophetic in a way he fails to understand:
What we call real estate—die solid ground to build a house on—is die broad
foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests. A man will commit
almost any wrong . . . only to build a great, gloomy, dark-chambered mansion for
himself to die in and for his posterity to be miserable in.... Within the lifetime of the
child already born ... All this will be done away. The world is growing too ethereal
and spiritual to bear these enormities a great while longer. ... the harbingers of a
better era are unmistal<able.
Hawthorne, of course, viewed this sort of pretension with an irony that was
as rare in his own day as it is in our own. After the trauma of the Civil War—only ten
years over die horizon at the time Hawthorne wrote his bool^-America would become
coarsened, and after that happened its inclination to find technological solutions for moral
and spiritual problems only intensified. The technology increased in power and scope as
well, until 157 years later when Walt Whitman's dictum "Every man his own priest" had
changed into "Every man his own railroad," largely because of die introduction of the
Interstate and the RV. The only thing that didn't change was the motivation to get moving
in the first place, which remained moral and spiritual, as is the case when a man "feels to
be over-filled with the dead man's presence" and flees "Heaven knows whither, at the
speed of a hurricane, by railroad" or Qass C Motorhome (Hawthorne, p. 265).
Both Peter and I were getting close to Clifford Pyncheon in age (if in fact
we hadn't superceded him), but somehow Hawthorne's irony had spoiled the Great
American Escape for us. Peter started out in life as die scion of German and Norwegian
immigrants who had settled in the Wisconsin Dells. Peter's father graduated from Notre
Dame in '43, trained as Navy pilot, but die war ended before he could be deployed.
Attending Notre Dame created in his mind the standard image of God, country, and
Notre Dame which that generation had carried away with it. What Peter's father never
learned is that nothing stays the same in this life, and that the only definitive explanation
of life in America after World War II was The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And so it
was ordained early on that Peter was to attend Notre Dame, as his father had, without
anyone telling Peter that the pod people had taken over what still called itself a Catholic
university in the years following his father's graduation.
One year before he entered Notre Dame, Peter went to visit his sister, who
was attending St. Mary's College across die street at the time. It was Mardi Gras 1970.
Peter was a naive high school senior student athlete who believed in the culture which the
Wisconsin Dells had bequeathed him, and so was not prepared for what the Notre Dame
students told him when he arrived to stay for the weekend in their dorm room. The
testimony of the students was unanimous. "This place will really fuck you up." The
students told Peter. "We're all fueled up and we don't know why."
Peter returned to Wisconsin convinced that he should not go to Notre
Dame, but his uncle convinced him otherwise. Like Ishmael in Moby Dick, Peter ignored
the mene tekel of his peers, and as a result Peter's life took a turn for the worse when he
arrived at the University of Notre Dame in 1970.
After three years of deliberately instigated intellectual confusion, Peter
couldn't take it anymore. He returned to Wisconsin and moved into the family cabin
along the Wisconsin River and started reading Nietzsche, the only author he had picked up
from his stay at Notre Dame. One night he took speed and stayed up all night trying to
figure things out When the sun came up the next morning, the only phrase left in his mind
was "the name of Jesus." Peter then dropped out of Notre Dame; he had dropped out of
the Catholic faith shortly after he arrived in South Bend.
He asked his father to let him stay in their hunting lodge, and his father
agreed to let him stay on one condition: that he go to a psychiatrist, which in this instance
meant going to Dr. Hahn, the famous Jewish psychiatrist from Poland, who let him rattle
on at $50 an hour until one day Peter mentioned that he had been thinking about God. At
that point Dr. Hahn said, 'Peter, you are having a fantasy, and I fear you are entering
into psychosis." He then threatened to put him on medication and into a mental hospital if
he continued to talkabout God.
Peter, as I mentioned, threw out toe Catholic baby with toe Notre Dame
bath water. Peter eventually got his degree. He now considers himself an itinerant
preacher in toe Protestant mode, who travels around toe country and pays his bills by
delivering KVs. The big issue in Peter's life right now is getting his Commercial Drivers
License. Given his state in life, getting a CDL makes perfect sense. He will be able to
deliver toe whole gamut of KVs now and make more money. But toe CDL has taken on a
metaphysical meaning in toe Wisconsin Dells. If he gets it, that means that Peter has
finally made something out of his life. It means that Peter is no longer a 55-year-old
loser. He is now a 55-year-old who has been certified by toe state to drive big rigs.
Peter's father, in whose heart hope springs eternal, stops people on toe street in toe
Wisconsin Dells to announce that Peter is on the verge of getting his CDL. It may even
male the papers there since it is the first time he has gotten a degree in his entire life.
Shortly after our odyssey ended, Peter called to say that he had gotten his CDL, so with
this achievement under his belt he can hold his head high in die Dells now. Regret should
be the farthest thing from his mind, and yet. . . Perhaps if s the times; perhaps if s the
mores. O temporal O mores! Perhaps it's a bad case of Boomerdaemmerung. Whatever,
but now Peter wonders whether he should have gone to the seminary when he was 13
years old, which was his original plan in life. More than once he mentioned the attractions
of die monastic life. I make a note to mention Peter when I visit the monastery in
Norway.
Or maybe regret is the new demographic issue for the baby boomer
generation, which is now pushing 60. "Regrets I've had a few," is how Frank Sinatra put it
when he sang "My Way," but this generation never tiled Frank Sinatra, and so ifs
understandable that they might have a different attitude toward regret
While speaking in Maine, I ran into another baby boomer, one year older
than me, someone whom I hadn't seen in years, someone who had gotten me a speaking
engagement there in the early '90s. When I asked "How are you doing?' my question
elicited die sad story that this man's wife had left him for another man and ruined his life.
James was 61 years old at the time and still interested in meeting other women, even
though the affair he had had with the divorcee of a year ago hadn't gone particularly
well. All of this sexual trauma had forced James to brood on the past, in particular on a
trip he had made to California 40 years earlier. On that trip he had met a woman, had
entered into a sexual relationship with her (as many had then), and then left her to come
back to something or other on the East Coast and had forgotten her pretty much until his
wife left him. Now James is full of regret "I should have married her," is how he put it to
me on that foggy evening in Maine, putting me in the position of trying to offer some
consolation. "I can't un-mess up your life for you," is what I blurted out at tire time. It
wasn't the most consoling thing to say, I suppose. It also wasn't the only thing I said. But in
many ways, it was the most pertinent thing to say to someone who was contemplating
another sexual relationship to make up for the failures of the past I spoke of redemption
too, but it became clear as I spoke, that redemption is not a time machine. We can still
make contact with God's plan for us as long as we are alive, but we can never go backand
marry the woman we didn't marry, or bring backto life the children we killed.
James was fortunate enough to have three children by tire woman who left
him for another man. One of the biggest sources of regret for the baby boomer
generation is the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution blinded them to the people they
were supposed to marry. But worse than that, it seduced them into killing their own
children. If there is one thing that can ruin a life, it is abortion. Abortion devastates the
lives of everyone involved in it
Peter, who now feels he should have joined die seminary when he was 13
years old, lives like a monk, and in fact talks with enthusiasm about die monasteries of the
middle ages, so abortion is not part of his story. But it is part of Daniel Smith's story,
which is now in print ("How Did I Get So Far from Who I Am?' By Daniel Smith, in
Kevin Burke LSW, David Wemhoff, Marvin Stockwell, eds, Redeeming a Father's Heart:
Men Share Powerful Stories of Abortion Loss and Recovery (Bloomington, IN:
Authorhouse, 2007, p. 51).
Like Peter, Daniel Smith went to Notre Dame. Unlike Peter, Daniel Smith
went on to a fairly successful career as a lawyer. Daniel never heard the mene tekel that
Peter heard from Notre Dame students in 1970. If he had, it is not clear that he would
have heeded any more than Peter did. Experience, as Ben Franldin said, keeps an
expensive school, but fools will leam in no other.
In retrospect, Smith feels that he and his classmates at Notre Dame in the
late '70s "were under attack," because even though Notre Dame claimed to be Catholic,
its main mission in life after Father Hesburgh stole the university from die Catholic
Church in 1967 was disabusing Catholic undergrads of die last vestiges of sexual morality
so that they could go off and become loyal FBI agents and docile wage slaves. "All
around us," Smith continues, "were messages that said sex is good, sex is fun, sex is
natural. ... Of course, no one told us, no one showed us, where all this 'free love,' this
sexual liberation would lead us. No one showed the hurt feelings, die broken hearts, the
shattered dreams, the suffering and the years of pain and emptiness. No one showed us
the truth." Smith as a result holds Notre Dame responsible for the trainwreckthat his life
was to become. "Where," he wonders, "were die shepherds who were to protect the flock?
. . . They were wolves in sheep's clothing. Abortion? Never heard of it Sex outside of
marriage? It was tacitiy approved." In short, Father Hesburgh and the people under him
"either did not believe, or they sold out. ... At the place some call the preeminent
Catholic university we were immersed in the sex and booze and the rock and roll of the
destructive mainstream society."
Smith bought into the American dream of material success, as brokered by
Notre Dame, which made a name for itself among America's elites by giving its students
the illusion that there was no conflict between the American Dream and the Catholic
Faith. The net result of that deception is that Smith became so involved in the selfish
pursuit of sexual pleasure that he became willing to kill anyone who threatened to
interfere with that pleasure, even if that person was his own child. Or, perhaps, better put,
especially if that person were his own child.
Smith recounts a conversation with his girlfriend of tire time, Ann, who
aslcd him, "Hypothetically, if I told you that I was pregnant, what would you want me to
do?' Smith lost no time replying: "I would want you to have an abortion." That was the
day on which, as he puts it "It was then that the Devil entered me." That was day that
ruined the rest of David Smith's life. From then on his life was "an emptiness broken by
strife, and infused with sorrow."
The first tiling to die after their child was Smith's relationship with the
child's mother. In the same book, Fr. FrankPavone talks about "the overwhelming despair
that comes from abortions that" people like Smith "insisted upon." Daniel Smith's
testimony corroborates Pavone's claim:
A wave of despair engulfed me. The despair included physical pain and a
withdrawal from everyone around me. I took time off from my job and spent days
away from friends and family.... The pain was in every fiber of my being, during
the hours I was awake, and even during my sleep. There was no respite. There was
no end in sight. I had lost the love of my life. I knew it, and felt it and did not know
how I would live with it I despaired.
Sex and booze are the normal antidotes to bad conscience. One father had
an affair with a co-worker which led, when discovered, to the break-up of his marriage.
The break-up in turn led to alcoholism, pornography addiction, and, ultimately, a suicide
attempt before this man could bring himself to admit that abortion was the cause of all of
it
Smith "turned to sex with several women and to partying as a way to
deaden my feelings. But it didn't" Nor did recourse to frenzied activity solve the
problems other fathers faced after their involvement with abortion. Sometimes the
frenzied activity involved otherwise laudable activity. One woman became a model
student and devoted all of her waking hours to study to distract herself from the fact that
she had killed her own child. Careers for women as well as political activism are often the
unacknowledged sequelae of abortion. Ultimately all of the books contributors learned
with Smith, that "denial cannot last forever" because "it costs too much energy."
Justifying an abortion is psychically exhausting. Redemption is possible, but
if s important to understand just what redemption is and not to be deceived by the illusions
which the culture of death proposes as its surrogate. The trauma the abortion wreaks is so
great that Smith is forced to admit that "Even after confessing the sin of abortion to my
parish priest, it all remained in the closet. With time, it pushed against the door, wanting to
come out. Seeing no way for that to happen, anger started to build." Smith's sin may have
been forgiven, but his anger remained: "Dealing with the anger required that I accept
what had happened and put it all in its proper place. To do that, I had to face the events of
the past, and that in turn meant remembering every tiling. That is a difficult thing to do."
The ultimate cause of sin is the will, which is free. But the will can be
influenced by culture. And one of the main cultural influences in the stories recounted in
Redeeming a Father's Heart was tiie military. Virtually every narrative involved the
military. The military facilitated abortion because it promoted deracination. Virtually
every testimony in Redeeming a Father's Heart came from someone who had been in
the military. Some of the writers had been raised in military families, and the constant
moving that involved made "making and breaking relationships . .. easy." Jonathan Flora
writes:
For me, making and breaking relationships was easy—I had done it my whole
life. I had learned early and it was all I knew when growing up. Because of my
father's Naval career, I attended seven different schools (two outside the US) from
the first grade through my senior year in high school.... Because military kids were
always moving, maybe a third or less of the class that stayed tire year together
would be intact by the time summer break rolled around. Making and breaking
relationships was easy. . . . Later in life breaking up with girls was handled just as
easily.
And since breaking those relationship had become easy, it was even easier
to breaka relationship with a child which, according to the canons of the dominant culture,
did not exist Any unpleasant memories of that child could be exorcised by joining the
military and allowing it to put him on tire merry-go-round of constant transfers and
mindless activity. "In my last semester of high school I signed up for the Air Force," Flora
writes, completing the circle that began when he was born into a military family.
Daniel Smith touches on the connection between abortion and deracination
obliquely when he blames "radical autonomous individualism" for the fact that "we were
isolated from the sources of our lives and so could fall for anything" (p. 58). He also
claims that I have helped him understand those forces:
These nefarious ideas did not simply fall out of the sky ... it was years later after
having read the work of Catholic scholars like Gerry Bradley and Michael Jones that
I came to see that the myths which we grew up, that surrounded ourselves with late
in 20^ century USA, were j ust that—myths. Or, to be more blunt, lies.... We were
told there was a "we," all Americans are one big family and we believed it. But
reality was different, as it always is in times of delusion.... Smarter? No, we were
just arrogant and ignorant of the sophisticated means by which we were being
manipulated. Freer? No, j ust promiscuous and isolated.
The men who ruined their lives became haunted by the ghosts of the
children they had killed. One father wrote: "I would have dreams of a phantom male
child coming to see me but I couldn't see the face." Abortion causes ghosts; and since
those ghosts are a product of guilt, die guilt ridden soul quickly concludes that there is no
escape from the past At this point getting out of town seems like an attractive option. So if
motion is a sign of guilt, America must be the most guilt-ridden nation on the face of the
earth.
Daniel Smith found redemption in Christ, but like a character in a Hawthorn
novel, he realized that the expiation of his sin would take years:
Even after facing the events of long ago, I had to deal with the rage that comes
from the knowledge of the reality of what happened. This anger does not easily drain
because at the base of it is the sense that we have been emasculated for not
protecting our own flesh and blood. With time, that empty chair, that silent room, the
hole in my soul left by the loss of this child and his mother, took root in me, and I
came to realize that this loss was permanent. . . . Going to Confession, reading
tirelessly about abortion, working feverishly in the prolife movement, being nice to
people. These things did not bring me backto health. If anything, they caused me to
ask, "Why doesn't anyone seem to care about my little one and his mommy?'... I
learned that I had a Father in heaven who did care and learned that healing would
take years of prayer and hard work
Daniel Smith says that he was a victim of war, or perhaps a victim of the
cultural version of "friendly fire." He and the mother of his child "were the targets of
what I can only now call a war—a war against people, a war against families, a war
against the Truth.. . . Those who created die toxic culture that gave our son less than an
even chance must bear responsibility for the little one's death, and for our suffering.... I
have come to see clearly how abortion and the culture of death that surrounds it, must,
and will one day be brought to an end."
Daniel's story doesn't end when the narrative in the book ends. Unlike the
Protestants who gave their testimony in the same bool; Daniel did not remarry, nor did he
have children by the second wife to replace the child he killed. Daniel lived alone, and so
the ghost of die child he killed returned to haunt him in die house he occupied all alone.
Perhaps it was the prospect of those long years of expiation, perhaps he needed to forgive
himself as God had forgiven him, perhaps it was the fact that he hadn't sired a child to
replace the one he killed, perhaps it was the disappointment which came when he realized
that the redemption that Christ offered was not a time machine, perhaps he was simply
overwhelmed with regret—whatever the reason, Daniel chose the geographical cure,
facilitate not by the railroad or the KV but by the US military, which is eager to send you
to the Middle East these days. Eventually, in spite of the religion he professed on his lips,
Daniel, like Clifford Pyncheon, had to flee tire house, go someplace else to get away
from the past That meant Iraq. Daniel re-enlisted. Daniel is fighting the war on terror but,
after hours of discussing his story on Interstate 80 in Iowa, Peter and I conclude that
Daniel is AWOL in the culture wars.
So 40 years after the summer of love, two baby boomers conclude that the
mood is pessimistic. Nothing can turn back time. Time flows in one direction only. The
past is immutable. There is nothing you can do to change what you have done. Regret is,
of course, anti-American. It contradicts toe fundamental American premise, which is if
you mess up your life in one place, you can always move farther west and start all over
again, as if nothing had ever happened.
The rise of toe Mobile Home industry is premised on toe institutionalization
of that hope. To achieve that end, toe mobile home industry promotes deracination as a
way of life. It promotes deracination as an identity. The KV is a home on wheels for toe
permanently deracinated. It entered toe canon of American literature 110 years after
Hawthorne wrote toe House of toe Seven Gables, when John Steinbeckwrote Travels with
Charley In Search of America, toe story of Steinbeck s 10,000 mile long KV trip from
Maine to California and back again. Steinbeck mentions both South Bend, Indiana and toe
Wisconsin Dells, Peter's current and ancestral homes. Wisconsin is a state where
"everything I saw brought a delight." Most delightful of all were toe Wisconsin Dells, "toe
weird country sculptured by toe Ice Age, a strange, gleaming country of water and
carved rock, black and green." The main thing Steinbeck remembers about South Bend,
Indiana is toe Toll Road, which
strings toe northern border of Indiana, bypassed Elkhart, South Bend and Gary.
The straightness of toe way, toe swish of traffic, toe unbroken speed are hypnotic,
and while toe miles peel off an imperceptible exhaustion sets on. Day and night are
one. The setting sun is neither an invitation or a command to stop, for toe traffic rolls
constantly.
Steinbeck tells us that he avoids toe Interstates because there is nothing to
see on the Interstates and that leads him to think about his past, bringing up "die areas of
regrets. If only I had done so-and-so, or had not said such-and-such—miy God, die damn
thing might not have happened." As a result, Steinbeck "avoided the great wide traffic
slashes which promote the self by fostering daydreams."
It turns out that Steinbeck, like many Americans from die time of Clifford
Pyncheon and after, wanted to travel because he has regrets, but in Travels with Charley,
he never gets around to telling us just what caused those regrets. Instead, he tells us about
his RV. Steinbeck got Ford to build him a customized RV, which he named Rocinante,
after Don Quixote's horse. The name gave his quest a literary flavor, even if ultimately
the allusion, unlike the RV, went nowhere. More important was die symbolism of die RV,
which Steinbeck tells us symbolized the fact that "I had to go alone and I had to be self-
contained, a kind of casual turtle carrying his house on his back" (John Steinbeck Travels
with Charley in Search of America [New York Penguin, 2002]).
Steinbeckwas younger than I am when he wrote Travels with Charley, but
he sounded like an old man. He was not in good health at the time, having suffered a
stroke that was the result of a lifetime of overindulgence in passions that impaired his
health. But before long it becomes clear that die main disease pushing Steinbeck toward
"senility" is not physical; it is rather "the virus of resdessness" which has taken "possession
of a wayward man." Over the course of his 10,000 mile journey, Steinbeck notices "a
burning desire to go" all over America:
I saw in their eyes something that I was to see over and over in every part of the
nation—a burning desire to go, to move, to get underway, anyplace, away from
Here. They spoke quietiy of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free
and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and
heard this yearning everywhere in every state I visited, (p. 9).
He describes this desire as a disease for which there is no cure. 'He (19
year old) had a dream I've had all my life, and there is no cure."
Steinbeck is no Dante; he was well past "the middle of life's road" when he
wrote Travels with Charley, but like Dante he does find himself in the middle of a dark
wood when he gets to Maine. Unlike Dante, however, he never really finds his way out
again, most probably because he likes being lost, or at least in the state of perpetual
motion that characterizes, as the Marquis de Sade told us, those who live in and support
revolutionary societies.
As of 1960, when Steinbeck set of on his trip across America, it was not
clear that he had ruined his life. In fact, when looked at from the outside, it looked as if his
life was a stupendous success. Steinbeckhad achieved heights of fame and fortune which
few American writers either before or after him would ever achieve again. When he
arrived back home from his RV odyssey, an invitation to the Kennedy inaugural was
waiting for him. Two years later Steinbeck went on to receive the Nobel Prize. The
publication of Travels with Charley in the same year established him as a national
treasure, which is the word which always gets used when a writer has nothing more to
say, but is still useful to the regime as a propagandist
In many ways, Steinbecks travelogue is the antithesis of the memoirs in
Redeeming a Father's Heart, and yet what both have in common is abortion, and how
abortion ruined their lives.
Both men ruined their lives by procuring abortions. The difference is that
Steinbeck never understood how he ruined his own life. The very fame and fortune he
craved prevented him from ever understanding why a writer who began his career with
such promise ended up such a mediocrity.
The Grapes of Wrath, which was published in 1939, was a huge success.
After years of living the life of the starving artist—his happiest years, of course—
Steinbeck awoke to hear fame calling him on the telephone and offering him $5,000 a
week if he would come to Hollywood and write movie scripts. At the height of his
success, shortly after toe publication of The Grapes of Wrath, when Hollywood was
beating down his door, offering him $5000 a week as a script writer (having already paid
$75,000 for toe movie rights to Grapes ), Steinbeck ordered his wife to abort their child.
Carol, who happened to be his first wife and (in Iceping toe formula which would become
depressingly familiar over toe course of toe next 60 years) toe one who stood by him
when he was a nobody and stayed up late at night typing toe manuscripts that would make
him famous, wanted a child desperately but put it off in toe interest of Steinbeck s career.
Now that his career was flourishing all he could think to do was order her to
have an abortion. Carol acquiesced to his request in spite of her better j udgment and got a
bad infection as a result of toe botched abortion. Eventually toe infection led to a total
hysterectomy, something which Steinbecks biographer refers to as "an utterly
devastating operation for a woman of childbearing age who wanted a child very badly."
Needless to say, Carol "never got over toe bitterness of this." This bitterness led to bitter
recriminations, which were needless to say unpleasant, which in turn drove Steinbeck to
seek female companionship outside their marriage. Eventually, Steinbeck divorced Carol
and married a singer/actress 19-years his junior by toe name of Gwyn Gonger, who bore
him two children, both of whom ended up hating their father.
Steinbeck, his biographer tells us, "was afraid that fatherhood would
interfere with his writing." It turns out that Steinbecks fears were misplaced. It was
abortion, not fatherhood, that destroyed him as a writer.
Steinbeck had been bom and raised on a farm near Salinas. His forbears
were forty-niners, which in terms of America, meant that they were quasi-aborigines
and deeply rooted in their native soil. Abortion changed all that After Steinbeck pacled
the invalid Carol off on a trip to Hawaii, he moved in with Gwyn Conger. When Carol
returned and confronted him with his infidelity, Steinbeck filed for divorce.
The divorce traumatized Steinbeck His reputation had been built more on
his moral compass—as the man who understood the plight of migrant workers—rather
than on any spectacular writing ability, and now that moral compass had been shattered
by acts of cmel and gratuitous selfishness, at the height of his career, when he should
have been at his magnanimous best Steinbeck moved in with his friend Ed Ricketts, the
main character in Cannery Row, who did his best to calm his friend down with "whiskey
and conversation," but it soon became apparent that this self-inflicted wound could not be
medicated out of existence:
Tve been very raddled and torn out by the roots," he told Ricketts,
"Nightmared, etc.... I... am working hard but I get die horrors pretty often." The only
thing, he claimed, that saved him from going crazy was his work He resolved "not to try
to thinkbut to let die workgo on."
If s interesting that Steinbeck should mention being "torn out by die roots" as
one of die symptoms of his malaise. The abortion uprooted Steinbeck When Carol
threatened to return to California after die divorce, Steinbeck had to flee. California was
now full of unwelcome ghosts. In fleeing Steinbeck destroyed himself as a writer,
because if there were ever a writer who was rooted in one place, it was John Steinbeck
Steinbeck was the quintessential California writer. It was die one place he could write
about with confidence as Tortilla Flat, Grapes of Wrath, and Cannery Row had shown.
But abortion and the return of his wife and the ghosts she brought with her changed all that
and brought about the deracination which ultimately ruined him as a writer. Like Clifford
Pyncheon, Steinbeck thought he could escape the dead hand of the past by changing his
locale, but die move—to New Yorle-eventually destroyed him as a writer. Elia Kazan
was one of many New York writers who noticed that Steinbeck did not fit in, no matter
how hard he tried.
"It was a mistake," Elia Kazan said. "Steinbeck was a Californian, never a
New Yorker. It was a great mistake for him to leave the West Coast. That was the source
of his inspiration. He was himself there. In New York, he was awkward, out of place. I
think it hurt him as a writer."
Arthur Miller noticed the same thing:
He seemed an ungainly, small-town fellow out of his element, grabbing the
check like a provincial—a New York writer would not have thought to pay for ten
people he had not invited for dinner; it smacked more of inner uncertainty than
confident noblesse. It was cold but he wore not overcoat and enjoyed breathing the
sharp wind as we walked toward the park He seemed like a shackled giant of a man
fit for sun, water and earth and not sidewalks and smart people.... That the author of
prose so definite and painterly could be so personally unsure was beyond my
experience. (Jay Parini, John Steinbeck A Biography (New York Henry Holt and
Company, 1995, p. 486).
Eventually, toe disparity between toe promise that Steinbeck showed in toe
'30s and toe hack he had become by toe '60s, began to be formulated as what Daniel R
Noble called "toe Steinbeckquestion":
Why is it that toe work of this enormously popular author is disappearing from
toe pages of anthologies even faster than toe works of Hemingway, Faulkner,
Fitzgerald and other maj or figures of toe traditional canon?
The answer to that question is abortion. Steinbeck destroyed himself as a
writer when he murdered his child. In order to survive from one day to toe next Steinbeck
had to medicate his conscience with booze and amphetamines. Medicating toe conscience
is never a good idea, but it is especially fatal for a writer whose main claim to fame was
being toe conscience of a nation.
As is so often toe case in history, war provided Steinbeck with toe deus ex
machina that would release him from toe psychic prison which his selfishness had created
for him. In toe fall of 1941 he was called to Washington to consult with toe Roosevelt
administration about setting up a propaganda ministry, one that eventually came into
being under toe name of The Foreign Information Service.
Steinbeck then devoted himself to propaganda, an addiction that proved
more powerful than his dependence on booze and amphetamines. Because of his new¬
found career as a government propagandist, Steinbeck s life had "become frenetic and
confusing." The first fruit of this collaboration was The Moon is Down, a novel which
Parini characterizes as "as an unabashed piece of propaganda." Steinbeck, according to
Parini, "was never paid for his work But he enjoyed saying rather facetiously that he
wrote his next novel, The Moon is Down, on assignment for this agency."
To toe impecunious writer, propaganda may seem like an easy way to
earn money. But Steinbeck was hardly impecunious at this point in his life, and so we
must seek for the attraction which propaganda held for him elsewhere. Parini provides a
clue when he notes that, "propaganda is after all the art of deception." Steinbeckwas now
being paid to deceive people, his own people, about the war effort The prospect seemed
attractive to him not because he needed the money but because he was interested in
deceiving himself about the kind of person he had become. War was good for that
because it made his duplicitous behavior to his wife seem insignificant in the grand
scheme of things, a scheme which he was now weaving. Steinbeck now had the full force
of the government on his side in his ongoing battle with his own troubled conscience. With
a plausibility that could convince everyone but the man for whom the deception was
intended, Steinbeck could say that the decision to go east was prompted not by Carol's
decision to return to California but by America's entry into the war.
Steinbeckwas once a writer whose conscience moved the nation. After the
abortion, he became a propagandist and then a standing j ole in the publishing world that
continued to promote him because of the money he could bring in. After Steinbeck
received the Nobel Prize in 1962, Arthur Mizener wrote a critique in the New York Times,
in which he claimed that "after The Grapes of Wrath, most "serious readers" had stopped
reading Steinbeck whose work was marred everywhere by "sentimentality.' Mizener
swept through the writer's career, stopping at every book from In Dubious Battle on to
mockand belittle." (p. 448).
When Steinbeckwas sent to Russia as the representative Homo Americanus,
One Russian reader .. . began harassing John with questions about why he once
wrote books that attacked the capitalist system but caved in later. This made John
furious and he would scream backat them things like, 'You son-of-a-biteh, don't you
realize that times change, that America in toe 30s was different from America in toe
’50s" and so on. (p. 452).
Once Steinbeck succeeded in anesthetizing his conscience, he no longer
saw toe injustices that had moved him when he was younger. After receiving toe Nobel
Prize, Steinbeckwas invited to tour Israel, but while there he ignored toe Palestinians, who
were living in camps much worse and much more permanent than toe camps of migrant
workers in California which had inspired him to write The Grapes of Wrath. "The
Steinbeck of three decades earlier," Parini writes, "would surely have sniffed out toe
injustice—or at least toe tragic contradictions—inherent in this situation" (p. 470). But
Steinbeck did not because his conscience had now taken a back seat to other
considerations, like his career and toe sensibilities of Harold Guintoerg, to whom he
dedicated Travels with Charley, and toe New York publishing industry.
Steinbeck could no longer write even short fiction because "nothing would
cohere," (p. 471). Instead, spurred on by the success of Travels with Charley and the
Nobel Prize, Steinbeckreinvented himself as a cracker-barrel moral theologian who could
now fulminate against the moral decay plaguing his country. "Why," Steinbeck wonders
in America and Americans, the 1966 sequel to Travels with Charley, "are we on this verge
of moral and hence nervous collapse?' Based on his reading of history, Steinbeck
concludes that "it is because we have reached the end of the road and have no new path to
take, no duty to carry out, and no purpose to fulfill" (p. 140). At this point we begin to
wonder whether Steinbeck is addressing his fellow Americans or himself. Instead of
answering that question, Steinbeck wanders off into an attack on overpopulation, a ruling
class obsession in the mid— ! 60s.
The same unfortunate tendency to propaganda is evident in Travels with
Charley, a book in which Steinbeck becomes a shill for deracination in general and the
mobile home industry in particular. Product placement became commonplace in the
movie industry by die end of the 20^ century, but so far no one has located its beginning
in literature. Travels with Charley might be a good place to start In Travels, Steinbeck
never tells us how much he paid for his KV. In reading Travels, one gets die impression
that the RV was comped in exchange for favorable publicity.
The mobile home, Steinbecktells us, is "wonderfully built," with "aluminum
skins, double-walled with insulation and often paneled with veneer or hardwood.... They
have two to five rooms, and are complete with air-conditioners, toilets, baths, and
invariably television. . . . A mobile home is drawn to the trailer park and installed on a
ramp, a heavy rubber sewer pipe is bolted underneath, water and electric power is
connected, the television antenna is raise and the family is in residence."
Steinbeck is impressed: "It seemed to me a revolution in living and on a
rapid increase. Why did a family choose to live in such a home? Well, it was
comfortable, compact, easy to keep clean and easy to heat." And on top of that the
factory workers who live in these rattletraps don't have to worry about job security or
decent wages any more because "If a plant or a factory closes down, you're not trapped
with property you can't sell.... if he has a mobile home he rents a trucking service and
moves on and he hasn't lost anything. He may never have to do it, but the fact that he can
is a comfort to him" (p. 76). After dining with the folks in the mobile homes and watching
football games on their television sets with them, Steinbeck concludes "that permanence is
neither achieved nor desired by mobile people."
"From start to finish I found no strangers," Steinbeck wrote of his travels in
search of America. This, however, is not what he wrote to his third wife Elaine, in one of
the many letters that served as the basis for the book he would write when he got back
home. "These are Martians," he told Elaine, referring to die mobile home people he had
just praised, "I wanted to ask them to take me to their leader. They have no humor, no
past and their future is new models." He added: "If ever I am looking for a theme—this
restless mobility is a good one" (Parini, p. 424).
We have no record of what he talked about in the cramped metallic living
room of the RV in front of the TV, but the esoteric Steinbeck felt that sports were "the
national distraction designed to keep the mind of the nation preoccupied and away from
dangerous subjects like foreign policy or the economic system" (p. 425). "The
Conscience of America" had concluded privately that the country was "a corpse":
There were wishes but no wants. And underneath it all die building energy like
gases in a corpse. When that explodes, I tremble to think what will be the result Over
and over I thought we lack the pressures that make men strong and die anguish that
makes men great The pressures are debts, die desires are for more material toys
and the anguish is boredom. Through time the nation has become a discontented
land.
This, of course, is not die impression one gets from reading Travels with
Charley, especially when Steinbeck interviews Joe from Tuscany and his Irish wife and
the subject of roots comes up. "One of our most treasured feelings concerns roots,"
Steinbeckbegins, "growing up rooted in some soil or some community. How did they feel
about raising their children without roots? Was it good or bad? Would they miss it or not?'
Joe from Tuscany has no patience with this kind of talk because Joe's father
came from a home which lacked a television and other modem conveniences, like the
modem kitchen Joe's Irish wife is bustling around in after their meal together.
"My father came from Italy," Joe opines to the Conscience of America:
He grew up in Tuscany in a house where his family had lived maybe a thousand
years. That's roots for you. No running water, no toilet, and they cooled with
charcoal or vine clippings. They had just two rooms, a kitchen and a bedroom where
everybody slept, grandpa father and all the kids, no place to read, no place to be
alone, and never had had. Was that better? I bet if you gave my old man the choice
he'd cut his roots and live like this.
Joe then adverts to his wife. 'Now you take my wife," he continued
sounding like Henny Youngman. "She's of Irish descent; her people had roots too_" and
before Joe can finish his sentence, his wife adds, "In a peat bog... and lived on potatoes."
Steinbeck then looks at her as "she gazed fondly through the door at her fine kitchen" (p.
79).
Once again Steinbeck drags the labor issue into the discussion of roots but
not in tire way he treated the issue in The Grapes of Wrath. There is not such thing as
"permanence" in American life because when the "Factory closes down, you move on.
Good times and things opening up, you move on where if s better."
If "You got roots," Joe concludes, "you sit and starve."
Once again Steinbeckthe propagandist (or the people into whose mouths his
words get put) invariably parrots the ruling class line on anything of importance. Reading
Travels is a bit like hearing Ma Joad give a glowing endorsement of the California
Growers Association. If cheap labor is the greatest commandment of the unwritten
American constitution, labor mobility is its second greatest commandment, and here we
have two deracinated Catholics extolling the very thing that the American ruling class has
desired ever since the country was founded. Is it any wonder the ruling class considered
Steinbecka national treasure? With a conscience like this, America needed no corrupting.
Lest Joe's point be too subtle for the average reader, Steinbeck concludes
with a panegyric on deracination that follows in an uncanny way from Clifford
Pyncheon's declamation on the railroad. Hawthorne viewed rootlessness as a technology-
fueled temptation for Americans. One hundred and ten years later Steinbeckclaimed that
Americans are by definition rootless:
Could it be that Americans are a restless people, a mobile people, never satisfied
with where they are as a matter of selection? The pioneers, the immigrants who
peopled the continent, were the restless ones in Europe.... Roots were in ownership
of land, in tangible and immovable possessions. In this view we are a restless species
with a very short history of roots, and those not widely distributed. Perhaps we have
overrated roots as a psychic need. Maybe the greater tire urge, the deeper and more
ancient is the need, the will, the hunger to be somewhere else.
At the end of day one we arrive at the Winnebago plant in Forrest City,
Iowa. In order to get there we have to travel north on Interstate 35, which is the road
which crosses die bridge that collapsed when we were heading toward Minneapolis. Had
we continued on that road we might have ended up in the Mississippi like the rest of the
commuting crowd, but Forest City isn't that far north. The dusty lot is full of the
behemoths of die Interstate, veritable castles on wheels, Gass AMotorhomes with metal
blisters on their roofs concealing state of die art electronic devices that allow them to
communicate through the ether with each other, watch television broadcast from
satellites, and, for all I know, deflect incoming missiles. Because Peter did not yet have
his CDL, we had to content ourselves with a Class C Ithasl<a, mounted on the updated
version of the Ford truck that was the basis of Steinbecks Rocinante. Wandering around
inside what was to be our home on wheels for the next three days, I find myself
wondering what is in the Qass A motorhomes, because our Ithasl<a had a bunk over the
cab, a sofa which converted into a bed, a kitchen table with chairs, a stove and sink a
bathroom with a sink and shower, and a master bedroom hanging out behind the rear
wheels. Peter is relieved that our vehicle is relatively modest, because the bigger they
come the harder they are to drive, and the fewer possibilities there are to parkthem.
Having spent the day on toe road, we decided to spend toe night in Qystal
Laic, a small Iowa town a few miles down toe road. The main attraction from our point
of view is toe laic, which offers swimming to two sweaty and cramped Hoosiers. At this
point a dip in toe crystalline waters of toe eponymous laic seems even more inviting that
a hot meal. And so after pulling into toe parking lot we plunge into Crystal Lake. Actually,
we had to wade about a hundred yards into toe lake before toe water reached our thighs.
We then sort of plunged into toe muddiest water I have ever immersed myself in and
paddled around in it for toe next hour or so. When we drove into town past toe statue of a
massive catfish, we learned toe mystery of toe wildly misnomered Qystal Lake. The
lake is in toe process of being dredged to get back to its pristine clarity. The locals also
plan to kill all of toe fish in toe lake and replace them (which j udging from toe statue in toe
center of town means catfish) with fish of a better sort
The proprietors of toe only restaurant in town, reopen their establishment to
feed us. They are amazed that we have come all toe way from far-away Indiana, but toe
main topic of conversation that evening is toe bridge that collapsed. Since we now have
our own RV we can sleep pretty much where we damn well please, which in this instance
means a parking lot next to Qystal Lake. It is toe best spot of toe trip.
Qystal Lake brings to mind toe fact that America and Americans are in
many ways two separate things. America was once a continent full of promise; it was
succeeded by a metaphysical concept which espoused one thing (freedom) and delivered
something else (bondage). People from all over toe world have been trying to live in this
brave new world for centuries now, failing or succeeding, but becoming who they are,
which for toe most part means open and friendly, if a bit superficial, and willing to open
up a restaurant for two strangers, whose bill comes in at somewhere under $12. After our
meal at toe town's only restaurant, we stop at toe town's only gas station and admire a
motorcycle on display surrounded by toe town's young men.
"Are you heading to Sturgis?' I ask
We stop for breakfast at a McDonald's and before I can complete my
order, die cashier, a plump corn-fed middle aged blonde interrupts me to ask if I'm a
movie star. I tell her, no, I'm Senator John Kerry (During die 2004 election campaign,
blackpeople would greet me on the street as Senator Kerry), but she doesn't believe me.
She also doesn't believe me when I tell her that I am neither a movie nor a TV star. When
we get up to leave, she comes over to me and the questioning continues, this time with
physical contact included. She keeps poking my arm and shoulder, as if to see if I'm real
and not j ust a phantasm of her TV drenched imagination.
Iowa is nothing but an endless sea of genetically modified corn and
soybeans, destined to become either the staff of life for junk food culture (80 percent of
everything in die supermarket has com in it) or fuel for the nation's cars (either ethanol or
biodiesel). As a sign of the future, a sign in north central Iowa announces die construction
of yet another ethanol plant. Trying to see die silver lining in this cloud, I concluded that if
ethanol fails as a fuel we can all drink ourselves into oblivion, since die nation will
probably lead the world in alcohol production.
The terrain in southern Minnesota isn't much different. It's pretty much
wall to wall com and soybeans until we cross die South Dakota border; then the cornfields
begin to alternate with fields of grazing land we reach Mitchell. After Mitchell, the
countryside turns into a vast ocean of brownish yellow grass, with an occasional sparse
tree, not unlike what I saw in the rift valley in Kenya. By the time we reach the end of the
state, the savannah has begun a gradual change into the high plains of western legend. In
the high plains there are hills and they are topped with pine trees.
Before long, it becomes apparent that there are no towns anymore. There
are cities, and there are gas stations. Gas stations have replaced the towns and villages that
people like Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis, of nearby Sauk Centre, South Dakota,
used to write about. I'm talking about big Gas stations, like the Flying J truck stops, which
include restaurants, convenience stores, showers, casinos and clothing stores which seem
to specialize in Harley-Davidson lingerie. The proliferation of Harley products at die gas
station convenience stores, as well as the proliferation of motorcycles on Interstate 90, is
an indication that we are nearing Sturgis, South Dakota just in time for the annual biker
rally.
As with the summer of Love, I feel that I'm 40 years too late, or in the
case of the biker rally, maybe four. The Biker Rally, which has taken place every year
since 1938, is in a period of probably permanent decline. Attendance at die rally pealed
in 2003, when 600,000 bikers showed up. The cause of the decline is demographic. In
spite of a large influx of baby boomers into Harley Culture in the late '80s and '90s, the
median age of a Harley Rider is now pushing 50, and the earlier generation, not known
for the moderation that leads to longevity, has a tendency to die young.
The sidewalks of Sturgis are full of venerable bikers, with lack of
moderation written on their leather-like faces, sitting in the shade, stroking their gray
beards, regaling each other with stories of biker rallies past or the merits of various
customized motorcycle parts. Main Street is full of motorcycles but not yet closed off to
traffic. At that point, a double row of motorcycles will run down the middle of the street,
parallel to the two rows of motorcycles already parked by the curb, making the normal
flow of traffic impossible.
Peter and I arrive in Sturgis at the end of the day, just in time for the
tentative beginnings of this year's biker rally, which is to say, before the bacchanal begins
in earnest. Sturgis is a blue-collar Dionysian festival; it is an annual Woodstock for folks
with grease under their fingernails.
Back in toe day, which is say in 1965 when toe publishing industry was
pushing rape fantasies, people like Freewheelin' Frank Reynolds of toe Hell's Angels
created toe Dionysian ambiance that places like Sturgis and Daytona have been living off
of ever since, according to toe law of diminishing returns. Back then toe biker rally began
with "what looked like a barbarian sale of women." Then, "as toe evening shadows closed
in" and
toe trees seemed covered with black smoke. The moon was full and toe howls of
he women as they were being raped rang out in toe night. This was toe biggest sex
orgy we had ever had in our lifetime. Everyone by this time was covered with filth
from falling in toe laic and wallowing in toe dust and sloshing wine over each other.
The smell of sexual orgies reeled along with toe honey wind of marijuana. In some
jagged stumplile corners of toe forest certain characters were rolling up their
sleeves and geezing their arms full of crystal and opiates, jacking themselves
completely off toe ground in their insane way. Everyone was completely mad.
(Frank Reynolds as told to Michael McGure, Freewhee/in Frank: Secretary of the
Angels (New York Grove Press, 1967, pp. 104-5).
Those were toe days, weren't they? But in Sturgis these days, as at Bike
Week in Daytona, toe bacchanal isn't what it used to be. Indecent exposure, i.e., ladies
bearing their breasts within toe city limits, is now punishable with a $150 fine. As if to test
toe limits of toe law early on, a young woman wearing a red-white-and blue costume
(Sturgis is nothing if not patriotic) bears her breasts on toe sidewalk in front of us,
attracting a gaggle of graybeards who line up to be photographed standing next to her. Just
to be sure she is on the right side of the law, however, the young lady has placed red,
white and blue bandaids over her nipples. Lite Notre Dame, and John Steinbeck s
Monterey, Sturgis has become a theme park, which evotes a spirit of lawlessness in a
setting carefully calibrated to mate sure that it doesn't go beyond the law and no one gets
hurt, seriously that is.
Of course, every year a number of people die while riding their
motorcycles to Sturgis, and this year was no exception. William Xaver of Plymouth,
Indiana, 30 miles south of South Bend, died on his way to Sturgis when "his beloved
Honda Gold Wing... suddenly swerved onto the gravel roadway and flipped over, tossing
Xaver, who was reportedly not wearing a helmet, from his motorcycle." According to a
story which appeared in the Fort Dodge, Iowa Messenger, "witnesses to die crash
reported that Xaver was not speeding or riding recklessly, but appeared to be having
trouble controlling his motorcycle prior to the crash." Xaver left behind a widow, who told
Adam Jackson of The South Bend Tribune, "I guess if there is one tiling that helps us feel a
little better, it's that we know he died doing something that he loved" (Adam Jackson,
'Plymouth motorcyclist killed in Iowa crash," South Bend Tribune, 8/7/07).
Less than fatal injury is also evident in the crowd walking (or hobbling) up
and down Main Street in Sturgis. Mare than one man was walking on a prosthetic foot The
casualty statistics are uniformly grim. Depending on the agency which compiles the
statistics, anywhere between 70 and 90 percent of all motorcycle accidents result in
serious inj ury. A biter is five times more likely to die in an accident than the driver of an
automobile. This explains the proliferation of insurance companies among the vendors on
Main Street Geico, in keeping with its usual ad campaigns, tries to be cheek/ and talks
about biters having bugs between their teeth while one of the few black men in town
hands out shopping bags with the Geico logo on them. Allstate, perhaps having pondered
the above statistics more deeply, takes the "we deeply respect your decision" approach
and sounds a bit like the doctor who hears that you're not going to undergo chemo for the
cancer that has spread throughout your body.
Aside from the bites and the broads and the tattoos, Sturgis is pretty much
wall-to-wall vendors. In fact, when I asked a biter at a gas station on the way, what drew
him to Sturgis, the first word out his mouth was not bites or broads but "Vendors." The
vendors, of course, all bring their own girls, who look to be old enough to be the
grandchildren of the biters. The Jaegermeister girls are perched on their colorful orange
Jaegermeister motortricycle and surrounded by another gaggle of graybeards eager to
have their pictures taken with them.
I'm sure you could learn more than you want to know about biker culture
by attending, say, the coleslaw wrestling contest at Bike Week in Daytona, but to
understand biker culture in any depth, you need to go to Sturgis, because biker culture is a
cultural phenomenon which never would have come into being if the West, with all of its
mythic associations, had not been there to spawn it
If the RV is the modern version of the Conestoga wagon, then the
motorcycle is the modern equivalent of the horse. This means, of course, that the biker is
the modem day equivalent of tire cowboy. Since the cowboys were veterans of the Civil
War who never made it back home to the America that war destroyed, tire other
important thing you need to know to understand biker culture is that it is a reaction to war.
Hunter S. Thompson, recently deceased as die result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound,
wrote a book on the Hell's Angels which appeared in 1967 and remains to this day the best
analysis of the genesis of biter culture and its connection to die American West. If the
cowboys were die disaffected veterans of the Civil War, die biters were die disaffected
veterans of World War II and Vietnam, the boys who never made it back to the world
those wars destroyed. Biter culture is both a creation of and a reaction to war. "Ever since
the end of World War II," Thompson writes,
the West Coast has been plagued by gangs of young, wild men on motorcycles,
roaming the highways in groups of ten to thirty and stopping whenever they get
thirsty or road-cramped to suck up some beer and mate noise. .. . The whole thing
was born, they say, in die late 1940s, when most GIs wanted to get back to an
orderly pattern: college, marriage, a job, children—all die peaceful extras that come
with a sense of security. But not everyone felt that way. Lite the drifters who rode
west after Appomattox, there were thousands of veterans in 1945 who flady rej ected
the idea of going backto a prewar pattern. They didn't want order, but privacy and
time to figure things out. It was a nervous, downhill feeling, a mean kind of angst that
always comes out of wars. . . a compressed sense of time on the outer limits of
fatalism. They wanted more action, and one of the ways to look for it was on a big
motorcycle. By 1947 die state was alive with bites, nearly all of them powerful
American-made irons from Harley-Davidson and Indian [now defunct], . . . The
root definition remains the same ... a dangerous hoodlum on a big, fast motorcycle.
And California has been breeding them for years (Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's
Angels: the Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs [New York
Random House, 1967], p. 59).
Thompson claims that the concept of the "motorcycle outiaw" was "as
uniquely American as jazz"
Nothing like them had ever existed In some ways they appeared to be a kind of
half-breed anachronism, a human hangover from the era of the wild west Yet in
other ways they were as new as television. There was absolutely no precedent, in
the years after World War II, for large gangs of hoodlums on motorcycles, reveling
in violence, worshipping mobility and thinking nothing of riding five hundred miles on
a weekend (Thompson, p. 68).
The biker as an American icon made its first appearance over the 4^ of
July weekend in Hollister, California. A motorcycle gang called the Booze Fighters
arrived there to attend the motorcycle races and, after hours of drunken carousing and
fighting, overpowered the local gendarmerie, and took over tire town.
Just as the Mass is the solemn re-enactment of the drama of Calvary,
Sturgis is a not-so-solemn liturgical re-enactment of the Hollister riot. It is a modern day
Feast of Fools in which die normal order of life is turned up-side down. The j ester gets to
sit in the bishop's chair and all of die prayers are said backwards. Once a year in Sturgis,
the bilcrs get to talc over die town j ust at they did in Hollister, California in 1947.
Just as die Booze Fighters took over Hollister, die media of the dominant
culture took over die Booze Fighters and turned diem into a parable of troubled youth and
a cautionary tale for die nation. The Booze Fighters became symbols of deviance when
Life magazine ran a short-hundred word article on the Hollister incident, complete with
staged photo of motorcycle thug astride his bike swilling beer amid a sea of empty bottles.
According to Daniel Wolf,
The national exposure that was given the Hollister incident by Life magazine and
others resulted in the stigmatization of an image: the motorcyclists as deviant Life' s
account started a mass-media chain reaction that saw the Hollister incident grow
considerably in its sensationalistic portrayal, and, as a result, die image of the
motorcyclist as deviant became more defined and immutable. In 1949, Frank
Rooney wrote a shart narrative entitied "Cyclist Raid," based on Life's 115-word
documentary. In 1951, "Cyclist Raid" was published in Harper's magazine. The
Harper's serial was read by Stanley Kramer, a Hollywood producer, who
immortalized die 'motorcycle riot' in the movie The Wild One, released in 1953. The
anti-hero image of the motorcyclist was cast in the person of Marlon Brando, while
Lee Marvin personified the motorcyclist as villain (Daniel R Wolf, The Rebels: A
Brotherhood of Outlaw Bikers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991, p. 5).
Hollywood tried to turn the Hollister riot into an enigmatic parable about
troubled youth but instead rendered the story incomprehensible because they left out the
essential element, namely, the fact that it was disaffected veterans who drove the biter
phenomenon. To hint that veterans could be disenchanted with the land that they fought to
defend was medicine too strong for Hollywood to either tate or sell, since Hollywood had
been heavily involved in making propaganda for the war effort. However, Booze Fighter
'Wino Willie' Forkner tells a different story. He was neither Marlon Brando nor Lee
Marvin, but rather "had returned from die Second World War after fighting the Japanese
as a waist gunner and engineer for the American Seventh Air Force." His account mates
Hollister sound less apocalyptic than the voice over in The Wild One and more lite the sort
of thing that drunken sailors got involved in while on shore leave:
The worst thing that happened was that a bunch of guys wanted to break Red
Daldren out of j ail. I was in a bar and somebody came in and said there were about
500 biters ready to break him out, and I thought, 'Shit, that's all we need, something
lite that.' So I ran down to where die crowd was assembling and told 'em, 'Hell, old
Red's drunk and he needs a good night's sleep. Leave him stay—he'll be out in the
morning.' Then I turned around and went back to the bar, and damned if the cops
didn't come and nail me for inciting a riot [the charges were dropped] ... but no big
bad things happened. There were a few broken windows that we paid for (Interview
in Easy riders, Sept 1986, p. 107 also in Wolf, p.7).
Once Hollywood got involved in the Hollister riot, they created an image
of deviance—complete with a line of clothing: denim jeans, black leather jactets,
engineer boots—that took on a life of its own. In 1972, Life magazine, which got this ball
rolling 25 years before, tookstockof what it and Hollywood had wrought: "The Wild One
became a milestone in movie history, launching the cult of gang violence in films. It also
helped create an image of motorcycling that non-violent bite riders have been trying to
live down for a quarter of a century now" (Life, September 1972, p. 32).
Law enforcement agencies came to see biters increasingly as a criminal
subculture. In 1984 toe Giminal Intelligence Service of Canada claimed that outlaw
motorcycle gangs had become as much of a threat as toe Mafia. But toe biters viewed
themselves "as nothing less than frontier heroes, living out toe 'freedom ethic' that they
feel toe rest of society has largely abandoned." War, once again, is toe only concept that
reconciled these conflicting accounts.
The cowboy is toe soldier who never made it back after toe Gvil War. The
biter is toe soldier who never made it back after WW II and Vietnam. The biter is toe
modern-day cowboy. Hell's Angels began as WWII veterans; The Wild One is The Sun
Also Rises, but for unliterary proles, the mechanics of the land, who had no future in
corporate America. Hunter Thompson cites Frenchy, a 29-year-old veteran who was a
submariner when he was in the Navy as the typical Hell's Angel, because he is "unskilled
and uneducated, with no social or economic credentials beyond a colorful police record
and a fine knowledge of motorcycles." Frenchy and his Hell's Angels buddies
are out of the ball game and they know it Unlike die campus rebels, who with a
minimum amount of effort will emerge from their struggle with a validated ticket to
status, the outlaw motorcyclist views the future with the baleful eye of a man who
knows no upward mobility at all. In a world increasingly geared to specialists,
technicians, and fantastically complicated machinery, die Hell's Angels are obvious
losers and it bugs them. But instead of submitting quiedy to their collective fate, they
have made it the basis of a full-time social vendetta. They don't expect to win
anything, but on the other hand, they have nothing to lose.
Missing from all of the hype was a simple fact: the biker gangs of the late
'40s and '50s were a lower class protest movement against die social engineering which
followed World War II. The motorcycle became a potent symbol of lower class
rebellion against the culture of social engineering which they could not understand.
Hollywood, in this regard, engaged in an act of deliberate mystification by obscuring the
real roots of the men they portrayed in The Wild One. Daniel Wolf talks about die lower
class nature of die biker gangs and about how he used the motorcycle to transcend the
narrow confines of the lower-middle class neighborhood where he was raised:
I rode my motorcycle in anger; for me it became a show of contempt and a
way of defying die privileged middle class that had put me down and had kept my
parents 'in their place.' I felt that the Establishment had done me no favours and that
I owed it even less. At that time I saw outlaw bikers as a reflection of my own dark
side. I made them the embodiment of my own youthful rebellion and resentment In
retrospect, I believe that it was this aspect of my nonacademic background—the fact
that I had learned to ride and beat the streets—that made it possible for me to
contemplate such a study, and eventually to ride with the rebels.
Wolf says, "Becoming a biker constitutes a search for identity" (p. 30). The
outlaw motorcycle gang is "a class-specific response to the general problem of self-
actualization." Modern industrial culture, driven by the twin demons of cheap labor and
labor mobility, promotes deracination as the simplest way to create a pool of docile
worker. This deracination, however, creates an intolerable cultural and psychic vacuum.
In a world in which neither work nor community can provide either psychic rewards or
identity, the worker is forced to lookelsewhere. "Why," Wolf asks,
Why does the lower working class produce candidates for biker subculture? The
answer lies in die culture of the streets and in the workplace. It is a modern-day
urban setting that lacks symbols and activities around which to build a personal
identity, and is largely devoid of meaningful collective endeavors around which to
build a sense of community. Often the only identity available to a manual laborer is
that of a cog in an impersonal machine. He begins each day by punching in his
number to an assembly line, his work task is not his decision but that of a
management whose face he never sees, die pace of his work is decided by a
machine, and there is no variation in die grinding monotony of petty tasks unless the
machinery breaks down. The same pattern repeats itself day after day with no
prospect of change. He simply sweats a lot and leaves a Me of himself behind at the
factory each day. While he receives a pay cheque, he finds himself short-changed
in meaning. Whether you call it 'alienation' or label it 'anomie' he is deprived of
adequate psychological payoff in the way of life-expanding experiences and
identity-confirming ritual. Isolation from meaningful social participation and the
subsequent psychological experience of inadequate identity fulfillment may result in
a personal search for self-authenticity. If the laborer is a young man in search of
himself, he will find nothing in his self-image at workthat will excite him; he had best
look elsewhere. Men who are chained to these circumstances share a compelling
desire to escape, (p. 31).
Alienated from die traditional sources of resistance which religion can
inspire, totally unaware of die panoply of social engineering arrayed against him,
deracinated and alienated from his ethnic roots, the biker turns to the only thing he knows,
namely, machinery and derives his identity from an expensive machine. "The biker,"
according to Wolf, "is a man who has turned to a machine to find himself. He has learned
how to find both meaning and pleasure in the man-machine relationship, and he uses his
motorcycle to create peak emotional experiences that are worth living for. ... He
controls the machine, and he writes the rules. His bile is his 'two-wheeled freedom."'
The graybeards who assemble each year in Sturgis are part of what Wolf
calls "a lower-working class bohemian subculture" which uses an expensive consumer
item "to create an identity."
The ideological foundation of the subculture accurately reflects die lower-
working-class origins of its participants. A man who enters this subculture in search
of identity looks to the outlaw-biker tradition to provide him with long-standing values,
behaviours and symbols. What he will find are heroes and role models, a personal
legacy that is consistent with what he discovered on the streets about die complete
man. He will adopt attitudes and learn behaviors that gravitate around lower-class
focal concerns with independence, freedom, self-reliance, toughness, impulsiveness,
and masculinity, all of which will be embodied in a highly romanticized image of the
anti-hero (p. 33).
Thompson claims that Hell's Angels descended from die Linkhorns, Nelson
Algren's term for the poor white trash who descended from the indentured servants who
migrated to America from England throughout the 18^ century. The biker gangs, in other
words, are the descendants of die Okies and Arkies that Steinbeck wrote about in The
Grapes of Wrath. If Steinbeck had hung around California, he might have written the
definitive biker novel. But he didn't, and Hunter Thompson, no novelist, wrote his New
Journalism piece instead, full of echoes out of The Grapes of Wrath:
Some stayed behind and their lineal descendants are still there—in the Carolinas,
Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee. There were dropouts all along the way:
hillbillies, Okies, Arkies—They're all the same people. Texas is a living monument to
the breed. So is Southern California. . . . Algren called diem "fierce craving boys"
with "a feeling of having been cheated." Freebooters, armed and drunk—a legion of
gamblers, brawlers and whorehoppers. Bowling into town in a junk Model A with
bald tires, no muffler, and one headlight.. looking for quick work; with no questions
asked and preferably no tax-deductions. Just get the cash, fill up at a cut rate gas
stations and hit the road with a pint on the seat and Eddy Arnold on the radio moaning
good, back-country tunes about home sweet home, that Bluegrass sweet heart still
waiting, and roses on Mama's grave. . . . Algren left the Linkhorns in Texas, but
anyone who drives the Western highway knows they didn't stay there either. They
kept on moving until one day in the late 1930s they stood on the spine of a scrub-oak
Californian hill and looked down on the Pacific Ocean. . . .When the war ended,
California was full of veterans looking for ways to spend their separation bonuses.
Many decided to stay on the Coast, and while their new radios played hillbilly music
they went out and bought big motorcycles—not knowing exactly why, but in the
booming, rootless atmosphere of those times, it seemed like the thing to do.
The Booze Fighters who caused the riot in Hollister in '47 were the rootless
spawn of the Arkies and Okies that Steinbeck found in tire migrant worker camps during
the '30s. Terry the Tramp symbolizes the deracination of the motorcycle gang. He is,
Thompson tells us,
"from" Detroit, Norfolk, Long Island, Los Angeles, Fresno, and Sacramento. As a
child he lived all over die country, not in poverty but in total mobility. Like most of
the others, he has no roots.... His longest bout with stability was a three-year hitch
in die Coast Guard after finishing high school. Since then he has worked half¬
heartedly as a tree-trimmer, mechanic, bit actor, laborer and husder of various
commodities. ... He tried college for a few months but quit to get married. After
two years, two children and numerous quarrels, the marriage ended in divorce. He
had another child, by his second wife, but that union didn't last either. Now, after two
hugely publicized rape arrests, he refers to himself as an "eligible bachelor." (p.
156).
World War II had a lot to do with the Hell's Angels origins. John B. Watson,
at the beginning of his book Behaviorism , said war and social engineering go hand in hand.
Wars have always been followed by periods of isolationism and anomie, like the one
which characterized American life from 1920 to 1940. Biker gangs were die '50s
equivalent of The Lost Generation of the 1920s, a generation that had been deeply
affected by World War I, and then made a bad situation worse by their self-indulgence
during the 1920s.
The big difference between the Booze Fighters and the Lost Generation is
that, unlike 1919, World War II did not end after 1945. Instead, the nation's leaders,
intoxicated by their victory over fascism, worked toward the permanent militarization of
American culture. President Eisenhower noticed it and warned against it in his farewell
address in 1959, but that militarization had already had a head start by 1959 and continued
apace. Sooner or later, a reaction was inevitable, because, as Robert Nisbet put it in 1975,
when the nation was suffering through the reaction to the war in Vietnam,
There is nothing so constrictive of freedom, of creativeness, and of genuine
individuality as the military in its relation to culture. ... As soon as the special
character of the military power begins to envelop a population ... a kind of
suffocation of mind in the cultural sphere begins_Populations... quicldy become
restive unless the strongest and most formidable measures are taken by military
authorities to curb them; unless propaganda, force and even terror become almost
incessant (p. 136).
The biggest fear of the regime after WW II was the backlash which had
occurred after WW I. In order to avoid a repeat of the Bonus Army debacle, the
government created die GI Bill, VHA loans, Levittown, the Qvil Rights Movement, and
intensified social engineering as the antidote against backlash that they expected from 11
million returning GIs.
By destroying the ethnic neighborhoods of America's big cities and the
local high schools of America's small towns, social engineering, of course, destroyed the
only matrix that could have reintegrated the returning soldiers and so as a result pockets of
the unreassimilated began to crop up in places like California, where most of die GIs
landed after returning from the Pacific Theater.
War, which destroys family and tradition and the social order, both
enabled and disabled die protest against social engineering that lay at the root of biker
culture. War accelerated die destruction of kinship and religion that gave people roots.
Once the social matrix was weakened, die state, in Nisbefs words, "slowly takes over
many of die functions previously resident in family, religion, guild and other social
institutions to become, as in our day, an economic, social, moral, and intellectual
Leviathan." The military also "liberated" its members from the moral order. War, as
Nisbet points out, "creates opportunity for what can only be called 'licensed immorality"'
(p. 142) not only on the batdefield but also in the realm of sexual conduct
It was under die steady impact of the Roman Republic's wars, first foreign, then
civil as well as foreign, that the destruction of the roman family system gradually
began. It was not easy for young Romans, after a number of years in the field
where every form of violation of the canons of continence was scarcely more than
routine, to return to the iron morality of the traditional Roman family system, with its
built-in coercions, constraints, and subjections to patriarch and matriarch. The great
wave of immorality that hit roman society in the first century BC so well attested to
by contemporary essayists, and that the Emperor Augustus strove valiantiy to
terminate through laws and decrees, had its origins in war.
Biker culture in this regard was as much a symptom of war as it was a
protest against it and the invisible social engineering which followed in its wake. Biker
culture was, as Wolf points out, a bohemian subculture, which means that the returning GI
s had declared war on the family, marriage, and monogamy after their country had
declared war on Japan. Deracination and the military had been the opening barrage in
this war. In fact without real wars like World War II and Vietnam, we never would have
had the culture wars of the 1960s because, as every thinker from time immemorial has
known, war destroys morals.
Wars also cause revolutions. In fact, as Nisbet points out, 'War is by nature
revolutionary in its impact upon a people. How could it be otherwise? Its values ... are
antithetical in the extreme to tire values of kinship-based society with its consecration of
tradition, conventionality, and age or seniority." It was Lenin who claimed that "national
wars are virtually made to be turned into revolutions."
The cultural revolution of the 1960 was no exception to this rule. The net
result of three major wars within a 20 year span was all too predictable: "moral
guidelines are loosened, and the line between good and bad becomes ever more
indistinct" The Jacobins of tire 1960s became experts "at exploiting war in the name of
revolution and revolution in the name of war." Nisbet notes that it was von Gausewitz who
"laid down the vital principle that modem war demands a large scale reconstruction of the
society that participates in it" The net result of America's involvement in the wars of the
20^ century was social engineering which changed American society into
institutionalized revolution, whose main theoretical framework was the Roman law which
made the Roman empire possible. According to those principles,
A sovereign defined as being not under the law but its very source, contract
rooted in will or volition in place of ascribed or fixed states, and, far from least, a
conception of society composed of atomlike individuals, rather than of impenetrable
social groups and associations, that in fact, has proved to be the framework of
modem warfare, capitalism, and nationalism.
This meant an end to the pluralism, localism and regionalism which
characterized both die Catholic Middle Ages and America during its era as a republic.
Instead of man rooted in a community of relationships in a particular place, the
permanent revolution which flows from war and finds its expression in social engineering,
envisions the state as "an aggregate of individuals bound together only by the ties of
contract and the will of the sovereign" and the social order "as a kind of sand heap of
legally discrete individual particles."
War, as Nisbet points out, creates community. Or to put it more exactly, it
turns Gemeinschaft into Gese Use haft. Normal communities are replaced by societies
organized along quasi-military lines. Hell's Angels corresponded exactly to this pattern. In
a deracinated culture where everyone is an individual fending for himself, the military is
often the only institution that can bring men together for a common purpose. Since all of
"our major values—love, protection, courage, honor, loyalty among them—were all
nourished originally in the small contexts of human association: family, neighborhood,
small community," they begin to become invisible when those intermediary groups
disappear. At moments like this they can only be found in tire military and the
community that war males possible. "For individual who find the search in our large-
scale society today for these contexts and values difficult and frustrating, the experience
of war and its community known at first hand in the squad or platoon can be memorable."
Or they can be found in a quasi-military Gesellschaft like the biker gang.
Once again biker culture was both a symptom and a reaction. War turned
the Gemeinschaft of local communities into the Gesellschaft of the military, and the
deracinated refuse of that system, knowing inchoately that man is a social animal,
created an anti-society which was the mirror image of die military which destroyed his
community in the first place.
Bikers recreated the Gemeinschaft the war destroyed as the Gesellschaft of
the outlaw motorcycle gangs. Hell's Angels is a deviant community, based on the
inchoate rejection of social engineering, the planned community or suburb, and the
corporate ladder, unavailable anyway because of die blue collar status of most bikers.
The biker community is also based on the inversion of the military, which is usually the
only stable community die uprooted have ever known. Hence, die proliferation of Nazi
memorabilia. The biter is going to embrace the symbols he was taught to reject by
creating a paramilitary organization dedicated to deviance.
Biter culture is full of military symbols. But they are all deviant. And it is
for this reason that they have largely disappeared down the memory hole created by the
Harley Davidson Motor Company when they embraced biter culture in the '80s to coopt
it and bring it under corporate control.
In his soft-core porn memoir published by Grove Press, Frank Reynolds
tried to explain the connection between Nazi symbols, belonging, and deviance as
practiced by die Hell's Angels. The Nazi insignia symbolized the racial pride that was
now taboo in post-Brown v. Schoolboard America: "People come up to me and ask me
why I wear a swastika and why all of us have these German medals and items from the
Hider regime ... We feel that we are a superior race. The swastika signifies a superior
race. We feel we are a superior race.... it helps us generate togetherness" (Reynolds, p.
9). Hell's Angels wear Nazi insigniae because they symbolize deviance and togetherness
simultaneously. The Angels are Gesellschaft as an ^-Gemeinschaft, and in this regard, as
in their consumerism, they are faithful followers of die dominant culture. "Angel
mamas," FrankReynolds informs us, "are nymphomaniacs who will do anything related
to sex." Reynolds was articulating in 1965 die feminist vision of femininity three decades
before the feminists articulated it Biter culture was social engineering ahead of its time.
Up until 1969 every one knew that hippies and biters were two distinct
tribes, even if they were co-belligerents in the war on straight society, which at that time
had nothing to do with homosexuality. The hippies were leftists and die bikers were fascist
losers, something which became apparent when the bikers attacked the hippies at a Get
Out of Vietnam rally held on the Oakland-Berkeley border in October 1966. The Left
tried to recruit the Hell's Angels into their side of the culture wars but failed because as
Thompson put it,
The Angels, like all other motorcycle outlaws, are rigidly anti-Communist. Their
political views are limited to the same kind of retrograde patriotism that motivates the
John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan an the American Nazi Party. They are blind to
the irony of their role . . . knight errants of a faith from which they have already
been excommunicated. The Angels will be among the first to be locked up or
croaked if the politicians they thinkthey agree with ever come to power, (p. 249).
Allen Ginsberg tried to linkthe Angels to Walt Whitman:
The great image -which all can buy—is your own ideal image—
Whitman's free so, camarado, also of Open Road.
I asking you to be Camarado, friend, kind, lover because vast maj ority
Of peace marchers
Actually respect & venerate your lonesomeness
& struggle & would rather be peaceful intimates
with you than fearful enraged frightened paranoid enmeies hitting each other.
All separate identities are bankrupt-
Square, beat, Jews, Negroes, Hell's Angels, Communist & American.
But anyone could see this attempt was going nowhere. To begin with,
deracinated veterans were drawn to gangs like the Angels precisely because those gangs
offered "separate identities." Ginsberg's poem, in this regard, has uncanny similarities
with die ADL's concurrent attempt to disrupt any ethnic group's identity but its own. The
final nail in this coffin got hammered home at the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont in
December 1969, when the Hell's Angels who got hired as security guards clubbed hippies
with pool cues and ended up stabbing to death one of the few blacks in attendance. The
real subversion of the Angel's separate identity and its conflation with the hippies they
hated did talc place in 1969 with the premiere of Easy Rider.
Easy Rider is hands-down the dopiest movie ever made, but it did succeed
as an act of co-optation and subversion by conflating hippies and bilcrs in the public mind.
Peter Fonda's helmet is tire most important icon in Easy Rider. If Dennis Hopper and
Hollywood had been interested in cinema verite, both he and Peter Fonda should have
been wearing Nazi Wehrmacht helmets because that was the uniform of the day. Hell's
Angels loved Nazi memorabilia. The only thing more popular than die Nazi helmet was
the Iron Goss. If there were one symbol of die outlaw bilcr gang it was die iron cross.
Easy Rider changed all that; it was an ominous sign because it showed how easily bile
culture could be manipulated and brought under control and how the protest at its heart
would be determined not by the people from whom the protest arose but by the culture
which tookcontrol of its interpretation.
There were violent protests against social engineering in the ethnic
neighborhoods of Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, but the bikers were ipso facto, not
part of that protest. Because they had remained in California, die bilcrs were hors de
combat. In keeping with die essence of biker culture as both symptom of and reaction to
the militarization of American culture, the bohemian protest of bilcrs and beats invariably
manifested itself as aggressive rootiessness, symbolized by the automobile in Jack
Kerouac's Novel On the Road, which took place in 1947, and aggression against the
family, which clueless beatniks saw as the engine of oppression since they were unaware
of social engineering. This error in ascribing proper causality coupled with the divisive
and isolating consequences of sexual immorality set up the dynamic of co-optation which
would eventually triumph over biker culture
Initially, however, the inchoate protest biker culture represented was
prohibited by die dominant culture. Harley Davidson wanted to have nothing to do with
Hell's Angels. The American Motorcycle Association responded to die publicity
surrounding the Hollister riot by saying that 99 percent of all motorcycle riders were law-
abiding citizens, prompting Hell's Angels to wear 1 % patches as part of their uniform.
America, however, never really felt comfortable with the idea of social
engineering, and as it became more repugnant in the average American's eyes, Hell's
Angels began to take on the aura of oudaw heroes. Burdened by increasingly onerous
burdens of social control, the average, which is to say, clueless socially engineered citizen
became increasingly fascinated by deviance, which he incorrecdy saw as the antithesis
of and antidote to social control. Eventually the dominant culture exploited this fascination
as it developed even more sophisticated form of control based on the arousal of sexual
passion.
Rej ected by the community that had used diem as cannon fodder and then
spumed them as low-class losers, the bikers created die equivalent of the loser's table in
the high school lunch room. They deliberately and defiandy espoused all of the traits
which made them unattractive in the eyes of the dominant culture. If the culture was
obsessed with being neat and clean, they would take pride in being slovenly and dirty. If
the culture took pride in defeating fascism, the bikers would proudly wear die iron cross,
the swastika and the Wehrmacht helmet of the Germans they had defeated.
The crucial issue became morals because unwittingly the biters' espousal
of bohemian antimoralism opened the door for the subversion of group identity. If the
dominant culture believed in marriage, the biters believed in rape and misogyny. The
biter gangs were cesspools of misogyny, created by men who had abandoned their
families, or were too morally corrupted or fearful to create them in the first place. Sexual
deviance set up dynamic which would ultimately lead to the subversion of the biter
culture and the reason it was created. Freewheelin' Frank joined the Angels after he
abandoned his wife and children, explaining that "my bite has replaced a woman in the
sense of love for something near" (p. 90).
it was tiie 22 n ^ day of July, the year of 1965.1 had just left Reno, Nevada—and
behind me a wife and child. My mind was very young in youth and tom and mixed
up. I'd been an expensive parasite and had not known it really, and I had come back
to the Hell's Angels. My mind wandered, I had no feeling of security, my road was
suicide. I had attempted it in Reno... (p. 76).
I was going to leave San Francisco and go with them into the land of Reno,
Nevada, in order to stay away from my people, who do not mix with the lines of
society and marriage and wife and children. It was a heartbreaking compromise,
and my choice would not be the same today. For I deeply fear women and in turn
my love is for the mechanical motorcycle that cannot be compared to any other
motorcycle or any other mechanical object As I said, in the end my lover turned
into Delilah. I was ridded from the land of Reno by tire law. Directed off by a
psychiatrist—never to come back again. Force away form the child and woman
forever. I went back to the land of my people in San Francisco and they took me
back(p. 93).
Reynolds refers to marriage "and society's pliers of raising kids" as "the
almost impossible kind of life that is set up for you" without asking who or what had made
it impossible. Sensing that his passion inflamed mind will never get to die bottom of this
issue, Reynolds abandons the family for the Gesellschaft of the biker gang and blames
women for his defection. "We both lost our place as Hell's Angels because of a woman—
but we made it back Most of the men don't ever make it back ... Our biggest downfall is
women... .We're trying to teach our women to be more of a Bohemian contact to get on
trip of taking care of children and keeping their mouths shut—to keep their hair brushed
out an long and straight.... If s our j ob to hold die sword. The woman is there to bear our
children and thafs all." Needless to say, Freewheelin' Frank was going to get no support
from die social engineers or their feminist auxiliary with views like these. The social
engineers wanted labor mobility; they wanted to drive down wages by doubling the work
force by integrating women into it, and the feminists were only to happy to collaborate.
As a result, the biker protest against the things it didn't understand turned on the people
nearest to it and began blaming the victim. It was similar to the Catholic ethnics fighting
the migrants from Mississippi in Chicago; both groups unaware of who had enabled the
migration that was the cause of the fighting. In spite of momentary insights—"We don't fit
into the production lines"—the whole issue was j ust too damned complicated to figure out,
and so die Angels became beasts to escape the burden of acting like men.
The motorcycle would henceforth become die symbol of how you had
ruined your life but didn't care anymore. Hollywood found the sexual degeneracy of the
biker gangs irresistible. In 1965 Hollywood broke the production code. In 1965 the
Supreme Court decriminalized die sale of contraceptives in Griswold vs. Connecticut. It
was the age of ghetto riots, and die sexual revolution. Nineteen sixty-five was also the
year in which theAfew York Times, Time Magazine and Newsweek created the Hell's
Angels as a symbol of sexual deviance. In a section of his book entitled "The Making of
the Menace, 1965," Hunter Thompson describes how die Hell's Angels were
reappropriated by the culture which had spurned them in 1953:
The Angels seemed headed for obscurity once again, but die tide was turned by
a New York Times correspondent in Los Angeles, who filed a lengthy and lurid
commentary on the Lynch Report. . . . Time followed with a left hook titled "the
Wilder Ones." Newsweek crossed with a right, tided "The Wild One." And by the
time the dust had settled die national news media had a guaranteed grabber on their
hands. It was sex, violence, crime, craziness, and filth—all in one package, (p. 25)...
. The Hell's Angles as they exist today were virtually created by Time, Newsweek,
and the New York Times, (p. 36).
The Angels become famous as a rape fantasy, even though the charges
that were the basis of the fantasy were dropped The fact that Time and Newsweek
continued with the story took on a meaning of its own. The Establishment was in the
process of redefining deviance, specifically sexual deviance. Contraception was a big
part of this. It would solve the race problem and the Catholic problem simultaneously. It
would also become the most effective form of social engineering this country would ever
know. One of the great achievements of George W. Bush was trashing this system in
favor of military imperialism, a sin for which Hollywood Jews would hold him forever
responsible. The bikers, most of whom were veterans anyway, were drafted once again
to be deployed as the lumpeproletariat in the opening phase of the culture wars of the
1960s. Their role now was to act, as Thompson put it, as an "instrument of Anarchy, a tool
of defiance, and even a weapon" (p. 91). A weapon in tire culture wars. They became a
standing incitement to sexual deviance at precisely die time that the ruling class wanted to
promote deviance as a form of control. Beginning in 1969, the Angels would not have to
worry about being stopped by the California Highway Patrol.
They were now the saints of a sensate culture, and as MickJagger would
put it at around the same time, in sensate culture "every cop is a criminal" and all of the
criminals are saints. The world had been turned upside down, which is another word for
revolution. The biker had become a culturally accepted form of deviance. Hollywood's
infatuation with biker culture deepened when they realized in Thompson's words, that
bikers were "acting out die daydreams of millions of losers who don't wear any defiant
insignia and who don't know how to be oudaws" (p. 266). In a world of almost total
deracination, visible identification with a group had become a valuable commodity, too
valuable to be left to amateurs who didn't know how to market it properly.
Sexual license would prove to be the undoing not only of American culture
but of all of die vulnerable subcultures within it, including the biker subculture, which
would be co-opted and transformed into a form of social control. The crucial middle term
in this transformation is narcissism, which always substitutes the illusion of power for the
reality of control. Veterans became bikers because they were bewildered by the culture
which rejected them as losers and because they ruined their own lives by rejecting
matrimony. The biker was always on the verge of despair that came from knowing that
he was a total loser in die world's eyes and that he had messed up his life in his own eyes
as well. The motorcycle gave bikers the illusion of power, which is always attractive to
the impotent One of the Rebels Wolf studied explained to him that "When I'm on my
bike, I feel good. I feel free. If s just me and my bike, two against the world. You know
the freedom. You get 700 pounds of hot throbbing iron between your legs... when I twist
open that throtde I know she's going somewhere" (p. 50). Wolf then proffers the following
explanation of the attraction which "700 pounds of throbbing metal between my legs"
holds for the biker:
Wolf then proffers the following explanation of the attraction which "700
pounds of throbbing metal between my legs" holds for the biker: "If the biker feels that he
has been used, manipulated, or twisted by some institution, the motorcycle will return to
him a sense of strength and potency."
Put another way, the motorcycle, by giving the biker the illusion of power,
insures that he will never deal with the real issues that are causing him to feel "used,
manipulated, or twisted by some institution." The motorcycle guarantees that the biker
will never figure out who or what has been pushing his buttons. Wolf remains oblivious to
all this and in toe end remains incapable of reading his own text: "This ability to transcend
one's immediate circumstances," he writes, "is toe essence of hope. The sensation of
controlled power helps silence inner doubts; it works against a self-image of being a
passive functionary whose life is a matter of fate or circumstance." The motorcycle, in
other words, inures its victim against toe kind of passive suffering symbolized by toe cross
which is toe basis for Christianity and any effective antidote to toe culture of libido
dominandi. "Controlling power," Wolf continues, "encourages people to believe that they
are toe key to cause and effect and to take full responsibility for their lives; this is toe Icy
to effective decision making in life. By itself riding is an elixir that toe biker uses to change
toe base metal of life into gold." The motorcycle, in other words, offers a kind of
narcissistic magic to toe culture's losers. It ensures that whatever associations they form
will be ultimately impotent and easy for co-optation by those who know how to
manipulate toe symbols of narcissistic magic. All of this is lost on Wolf: "Simply by
engaging in an activity that he feels is 'toe real me,' toe biker makes a statement about his
being an individual who has toe freedom to choose his own destiny. This is toe
psychological core of those elusive and hard to define sensations that a biker will
sometimes refer to as 'two-wheeled freedom.'"
No one has "toe freedom to chose his own destiny." Two-wheeled
Freedom is another word for narcissism, which always offers toe reality of bondage
under toe illusion of power. Bikers became blinded by their own illusions, and when that
happened their protest became ripe for toe picking of anyone sophisticated enough to
know how to manipulate their passions and control them. The motorcycle became, as a
result, one of many escape valves which toe culture tolerates in order to keep toe masses
under control. When Wolf quotes Wee Albert, who claims, "If it weren't for my hog, I'd
probably go insane," he fails to see that if all of toe Wee Alberts got off of their bikes and
pondered for a moment toe forces that drove them to biking for release, they might be
able to first understand and then circumvent the social structures that have been created to
control them. The narcissism which flows from 700 pounds of throbbing metal between
their legs insures, however, that that will never happen. Wolf goes on to define an outlaw
biter as
a man who feels that he has been cheated, used or denied by society. He comes
to view riding as an act of liberating defiance that removes, or at least temporarily
suspends, the mass-conditioned repressions that patterned his parents and threaten to
curb his impulse toward freedom and pleasure (p. 52).
What Wolf fails to see is that the motorcycle, far from being an instrument
of "liberating defiance," is actually an instrument of control. Even if Wolf couldn't see
that fact, other people could, and it paved die way for the total co-optation of biter culture
when Harley Davidson got into the business of social engineering in the 1980s.
By die time Easy Rider appeared on the silver screen in 1969, die Harley
Davidson Motor Company, as die only American motorcycle manufacturer, had been on
the receiving end of a ten-year-long beating at the hands of Honda, Yamaha, and Suzuki,
the major manufacturers of Japanese motorcycles. The Japanese started out at the low
end of the martet in 1959, producing bites with 50 and 90 cc engines. Then in the late
'70s, the Japanese decided to contest Harley on its own turf when Honda introduced the
Honda Gold Wing, a 1000 cc big bite that was cheaper and ran better than the leafy and
temperamental Harleys with their 74 cubic inch V 2 engines. As if that weren't bad
enough, the challenge came when Harleys were being manufactured by die American
Manufacturing and Foundry, a company known best for the manufacture of pin setting
machines in bowling alleys.
Eventually a group of executives and mechanics who were only interested
in producing motorcycles bought Harley from AMF, and, with help from the Reagan
administration, which slapped a tariff on big Japanese bites, pulled off one of die great
comebacks in the history of American manufacturing. That comeback required the
implementation of new management techniques (all of which were borrowed from the
Japanese, at the same time the company was encouraging Harley riders to drop Japanese
bites from cranes, demolish them with sledgehammers, etc.), the development of a new
engine, the Evolution engine, which leated less oil and broke down less frequentiy than the
Knucldeheads, Panheads, and Shove lheads of years gone by.
But the most important thing that Harley did was to get into the identity
business, when it embraced die biter image which it had previously shunned by creating
HOG (the Harley Owner's Group) in 1983. Honda was die first motorcycle company to
deal with the biker image, and Honda dealt with die image by running in die opposite
direction. 'You meet the nicest people on a Honda," was not the best characteri 2 ation of
the clientele that took part in the Hollister riot of 1947. Nor did it spring to mind as you
watched Sonny Barger and the Oakland branch of die Hell's angels ride their motorcycles
over naked, sqealing hippies on their way to die stage at the Rolling Stones concert at
Altamont But it sold a lot of small engine biles to the baby boomers in the '60s.
Twenty years later, the babyboomers were still around, but the world had
changed. The elites had redefined deviance; suddenly the yearly bacchanals at Sturgis,
Daytona, and Piercy, California seemed as American as, well, Woodstock Dennis
Hopper had put an American flag on Peter Fonda's helmet, instead of the swastika on the
chrome Wehrmacht helmet he should have been wearing.
What was up was now down, and what was down was now up, which is
another word for what happens during a revolution. Deviance had been redefined, and in
terms of biker culture, the major instrument for its redefinition was HOG. HOG was to
biker culture what political correctness and speech codes were to college campuses at
around the same time. HOG was social engineering, privatized to fit into the ethos of the
Reagan administration. By creating HOG, Harley Davidson finally embraced the deviant
biter culture which it had been shunning since the Hollister riot of 1947. Gone were the
Nazi memorabilia which were one of the main hallmarks of the biker culture of the '60s.
The classic biker back then rode a Triumph and wore a chromed Wehrmacht helmet. If
he did not have an Iron Qoss on his jacket, he was considered some kind of imposter.
Tale a look at photos of Sturgis or Bike Week at Daytona at any time after 1990 and you
will look in vain for Nazi helmets, chromed or otherwise, or iron crosses or, God forbid,
the swastikas that Hunter Thompson saw in California in 1965. By creating HOG, Harley
realized that tire only way they could beat the Japanese was by creating an antidote to the
deracination which had driven World War II and Vietnam veterans to embrace biker
culture in the first place.
By creating HOG, Harley Davidson put corporate America's seal of
approval on the deviant community. HOG was a consumer group that gave all of the
benefits of ethnic identification—clothing, patriotism, belonging, etc.— along with the
right to engage in sexual excess. In short, HOG embodied the ideals of American culture
as redefined by the social engineers in the period following World War II. America now
meant sexual degeneracy, no children, impulsive buying habits, disposable income spent
on expensive status-conferring consumer items, narcissism, and, most important of all,
the illusion of freedom spraypainted over the reality of control. It wasn't so much that
bikers had become respectable Americans, as it was that Americans in general and the
baby boomers in particular had all become Hell's Angels.
Harley Culture meant identity and friends in an increasingly opaque and
unfriendly world, something biker publisher Reg Kittrelle considers "an important plus"
because "there has been an ever-increasing disfranchising of the population. Individuals
feel pretty distant from their government and they were looking for things to identify
with. Everyone wants an identity. If s pretty much lost in most people's workplaces. None
of us feel that we have much voice in government. The vote doesn't count So people look
around and say, 'What am I? How do I count as an individual?' (Joans, p. 43).
Motorcycles always conferred an identity on people who considered
themselves losers. What has changed since the Hollister Riot of'47 is the size of the loser
pool. Now since everyone can buy into HOG, everyone must be a potential loser. Even
yuppies, who as yuppies are "upwardly mobile," the criterion for success in America,
now have the identity vacuum that marketers love to fill.
The creation of HOG also heralded the arrival of a new breed of biker, the
RUB, or rich urban biker. Once they get to a place like Sturgis the Yuppie Bikers tend to
blend in because of their assiduous cultivation of biker fashion, but with a little effort you
can still pick them out in a crowd. The absence of gray facial hair is one give away. The
absence of prosthetic limbs is another, as well as the presence of temporary tattoos. But
the yuppie bikers are most easily recognized en route, as we noticed while puttering along
at our Conestoga Wagon pace of 50 miles per hour when three Class AMotorhomes with
Harley trailers and New York license plates roared past us on Interstate 90. This was a
sign that the investment banker bikers from Manhattan were hightailin' it to the Buffalo
Chip campground to get their front row seats for the wet T-shirt contest. It could have
been a scene out of Wild Hogs, the final film in the trilogy of biker movies, the one that
brings down the curtain on the movement that began as protest and ended up as a
marketing strategy.
Most commentators mention Harley's creation of HOG in 1983 in the
hushed terms reserved for high-wire financial deals of the sort that landed Michael
Millilen in jail. Anthropologist Barbara Joans spent years learning how to ride a
motorcycle before she wrote Bike Lust, her study of biker culture. (Let's hope she never
decides to study suttee.) She refers to the creation of HOG as "pure brilliance" because
With the formation of HOG, Harley is now selling more than bikes; they are
selling the H-D experience. HOG, die only official Harley-Davidson group backed
by the corporation, provides social and riding activities all over the country. HOG
has turned motorcycling into a respectable way of life. . . . Buying a Harley has
become more than buying a product. Customers are now offered a ready-made
community to join. The community is laced with patriotism. The nationwide network
gives riders die feeling that they are j oining with other American riders in supporting
die country. They are buying an American product and keeping the economy strong
(Barbara Joans, Bike Lust: Harleys, Women, and American Society [Madison: The
University of Wisconsin Press, 2001])
Professor Barbara Joans is an anthropologist who teaches at Merritt College
in San Francisco. She is also part of the Extraterrestrial Intelligence Project When not
waiting to hear from E.T, she hangs around biker bars and Harley dealerships in San
Francisco, where she has become an expert, in her own words, in destroying the culture
you wish to j oin. This comes naturally to Professor Joans because she is a New York Jew:
The only problem is that I am a New York Jew [problem? Is this a problem?],
reared in the streets of Manhattan and the side streets of Brooklyn, and I had been
born to read books not ride bikes. Being sedentary, sickly, utterly nonmechanically
inclined and a lover of the great indoors, I am more suited to appreciate museums
than motorcycles. I am used to corridors and carpets, not canyons and woodlands,
(pp. 182-3).
The problem Professor Joans refers to here can best be summed up by
saying that she really doesn't like riding motorcycles.
My entire past city life of university teaching, child rearing, poetry writing, piano
playing and radical activism left me utterly unprepared for the glory and
godawfulness of riding die wind. Only my innate fanaticism prepared me for riding.
I had been, in mind-numbing order, a fifties beatnik, a sixties civil rights, radical
politics, antiwar, hippie (urban not rural); and an eighties down and dirty, fast field
professional anthropologist. It was revolution, sex, dope, and rock and roll all the
way. .. .My profile, at the start of this work, would have read urban intellectual and
cultural cynic, as well as loudmouthed troublemaker, (p. 184).
Professor Joans is, in other words, a Jewish revolutionary of die sort that
was common in the '60s, who doesn't really like riding motorcycles or the type of people
who ride them. Instead of just leaving it at that and keeping busy by reading Franz Boas,
Joans the revolutionary feels duty bound to reform the redneck bikers she hates. She
knows that she doesn't really belong but rather than start her own club she decides to
wreck their club by making it more inclusive, i.e., by destroying the reason it came into
existence in the first place by importing women and homosexuals into its ranks.
Confronted by a biker club in rural California where women don't ride, or ruin the men's
ride by insisting that the keep their speed below 35 mph, Professor Joans
realized with envy that I would never belong to a group that had that much
female solidarity. These women rode in a universe far more ordered than mine.
These women knew their place. It was a place of strength, courage, and power, but it
was a gender-specific place. They share the bid and club with their husbands and
both accepted their complementary roles.... Their behaviors were defined by club
rules, by community standards and by church affiliation. It worked. They had a
good thing going and they all knew it. Unfortunately for me, it was their thing, and,
appealing as it was, I was not willing to join a small society with relatively rigid
roles, no matter how emotionally gratifying the payoff.
Rather than confront her own Jewish hatred of logos, Professor Joans
decides to confront the group instead and inform them that they are not allowed to break
up an antiwar rally. The thing that made this chutzpah seem conceivable and anything
less than suicidal was HOG and Harley's involvement in social engineering:
Even though I was a guest at that club, I was a Harley rider. Having ridden in on
my own Sportster, I felt qualified to talk The chairman was polite enough to
acknowledge me before he firmly called me out of order. [But in spite of all that] I
had to prevent the group from going downtown. Luckily for me, one of the few
members I knew grabbed me off my bike. "Are you crazy?'
No, Professor Joans is, as she said, just a New York Jew, an entitlement in
our culture which allows toe possessor to tell other people what to think and how to run
their lives. Professor Joans, as toe culturally entitled Jew, is determined to turn toe
motorcycle into her kind of deviance, which involves riding with toe Dykes on Bikes at
San Francisco's annual Gay Pride Parade. Professor Joans likes Dykes on Bikes because
she sees them as "an incredible mix of strength, sexuality and rule breaking." (p. 200).
As if to show that even professors have pensive moments, Professor Joans
wonders at one point whether "toe new riders are unwittingly destroying toe very culture
they wish to join. By their entrance into toe biker world, they are changing toe rules.
They have not given their souls to riding. It is not their life. They are weekend warriors"
(p. 207).
After admitting that she is a dilettante, Professor Joans still feels that she
has toe right to set toe rules for toe biker clubs she is in effect subverting. Men created this
club so that they could ride fast, but Professor Joans has no compunction in denouncing a
group of bikers who didn't want to travel at toe 35 mph she preferred, as "shits." Professor
Joans also has no compunction in denouncing biker for their racism, even though
"separate identity" is the only reason this (or any other) club was created in the first
place. Women bikers are equally ungrateful because they don't want to emulate "the
early feminists whom so many women biters wish to distance themselves from, helped
pave the way for today's riders" (p. 150). They too get an earful from Professor Joans,
who informs them in no uncertain terms that "If my entire generation of feminists hadn't
been such hard-nosed, hard-assed, hard-working, civil rights pushing, abortion rights
gaining, humorless bitches, there would be damn fewer women in the wind today."
Just why that would be tragic is something Professor Joans never explains.
It's one of many things Professor Joans never explains in her book, like why she would
want to hang around with a bunch of fat losers drinking Jack Daniels sitting on plastic
chairs in a parking lot in, say, Carson City, Nevada when she could be at home savoring
the prose of Ruth Benedict. Just why does Professor Joans enjoy paryting with men who
are
Overweight and underfit, the men of this hard-living culture push their pleasures
to excess. Avoidance of pain and promotion of pleasure is a far more accurate
description of the goals of this group than is die deferred gratification of the golden
mean. The men will eat, drink; and screw as much as possible. When they can. (p.
163).
The short answer to this question is community. Professor Joans is starved
for community because she is just as deracinated as everyone else.
This is a community that crosses economic, class, race and gender lines. The
bite, as symbol, icon, transportation, and greatly loved machine permits us to cross
those lines. The bite provides the solidarity glue that cements us as a community_
the shared language that brings us together. The bite brings us together. Without it
some of us would remain friends. But without it, most of us would fragment into our
separate worlds. The extraordinary strength of the bite lies in its ability to forge a
community out of disparate folkand keep it going.
If Steinbeck should have stayed in California and never gone to New York;
the exact opposite is true of Professor Joans. She should have stayed in New Yorkand left
the California biters alone.
When toe Harley-Davidson company got into social engineering, they also
redefined toe family. Freewheelin' Frank Reynolds joined Hell's Angels as an escape
from toe family he abandoned in 1965. Now when you buy a motorcycle, you "join toe
Harley family." But there are other options for those who don't have $20,000 to spend as
a down payment on future repair and medical bills. You can become toe Harley
equivalent of "poor relations" and j oin the Harley family on the cheap, as Professor Joans
points out:
You don't need to ride a bile (or even own a bike) to j oin the Harley family. The
dealerships sell an impressive line of new Harley products—from functional and
protective road gear to household goods. Go to the shops and check out the baby
clothes, sleeping attire, wine, watches, pocketknives, Tiffany-style lamp shades, and
shaving mugs. From blankets to bibs, the H-D logo is likely to show up everywhere. It
even appears on j ukeboxes and cigarettes.
When you buy a Harley, you buy "tire whole Harley experience," which
means that "At 7:00 PM, far from home, when the bike has broken down and both rider
and wife sore and hungry, it helps to know that die closest dealership will offer
assistance."
Harley redefined the family by turning it into a consumer subculture. This
was especially appealing to a cohort which had annihilated their real families during the
carnage of die sexual revolution and, now faced with the inescapable conclusion that they
had ruined their lives, needed to male a U-turn to get out of Memory Lane:
Belonging to die Harley family is one of Harley's strongest selling points. Once
in the family, if you breakdown, there is someone to help you in every town across
the country. The rider, especially die long distance rider, is no longer riding along.
Dealerships offer services that reinforce customer loyalty. Milwaukee has hit upon
marketing magic. It is somewhat ironic that the image of die independent biker riding
alone down the lonely country lane is, in reality, backed by a national network of
dealerships. Independence may look and feel good, but every Harley rider knows
that breakdowns on isolated roads are no fun (Joans, p. 32).
After redefining the family, Harley redefined America. "Riding can also
be seen as an extension of the frontier. If s an iron horse. And Harleys are as American
as mom and apple pie. Harleys carry on a tradition. There is that streakof independence
in all of us. And a litde bit of recklessness too. Kind of like, if the world gets too close, you
can say, 'Screw it, I'm getting on my bike. Goodbye."
In addition to the America stuff, owning a Harley means control of
destiny:
Riding a Harley provides an outlet Now the rider is in control of his own destiny.
Gone is tire remoteness of modern life. If the rider makes a mistake on tire bike, he's
going to pay for it There is the satisfaction of knowing that the rider has made some
decision concerning what he does with his time and his life.... When a whole bunch
of people are riding on Harleys together, riding the actual bite is secondary. What is
primary is that it gives the rider an identity and a group of friends to ride with. These
are people he might otherwise not have befriended (Joans, p. 45).
Secure in his identity and in control of his destiny, the HOG member can
now tell the world: "'Tate me or leave me.' For better or for worse, this is who I am. It
also represents for me my love of my country. I'm putting my country up there and
supporting it. I can't get satisfaction out of die government, but I can still support and love
my country. It also allows you to choose your own statement It sets you apart" (Joans,
P- 46).
Not everyone is as uncritically enthusiastic as Professor Joans about what
has happened to biter culture after HOG took it over. Some people feel that HOG has
destroyed biter culture by making it inclusive. Even Professor Joans, in one of her few
reflective moments, entertains the notion that people like her may have destroyed the
subculture they wanted so avidly to join. No one, however, claims that biter culture is
what it once was. Roby Page, unlike Professor Joans, mourns its passing and its
transformation.
A generation ago it would have been possible ... to generalize about the biter
subculture as a predominantly white, male-driven, working-class-based,
individualistic group. This was the subculture of individualism, patriotism, and
machismo identified by Schouten and McAlexander. The arrival of the new biters
has altered this characterization, making the biter culture much more heterogeneous.
(Roby Page, Bike Week at Daytona [Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005],
p. 122.)
In their 1995 analysis of biter culture, John W. Schouten and James H.
McAlexander refer to "Harley World" as a "subculture of consumption," by which they
mean "a distinctive subgroup of society that self-selects on the basis of a shared
commitment to a particular product class, brand or consumption activity." (John W.
Schouten and James H. McAlexander, "Subcultures of Consumption: an Ethnography of
the New Biters," Journal of Consumer Research, 22 [ 1995]: 43-61, cited in Page).
Page also cites Juliet B. Schor who claims that "It is now widely believed
that consumer goods provide an opportunity for people to express themselves, display
their identities, or create a public persona.... Who we are not only affects what we buy.
What we buy also affects who we become." But he fails to note that the need to buy an
identity has its source elsewhere in other pathologies. Healthy people in healthy cultures
do not feel the need to buy an identity. Only empty people in empty cultures feel that
need. The unspoken truth here is that the malaise which struck the blue-collar veterans
returning from World War II has now spread to die offspring of the white collar veterans
who made it backvia the GI Bill and FHAhousing loans. Successful yuppie babyboomers
now have the same lack of identity that the poor white trash their parents spumed in the
'50s had.
Just as the babyboomers got herded like sheep into the sexual revolution of
the '60s, buying Beatles records, birth control pills, and Honda 90s, they got herded into
the Harley revival of die 1990s because of the same ego needs. They still don't know
what is going on, or as Schouten and McAlexander put it: "Because die newcomer is
ignorant of many nuances of biker culture, his or her sociali 2 ation may be facilitated
opportunistically by marketing efforts. . . This socialization process has die effect of
molding the malleable perceptions of the new biker toward an acceptance of the
corporate vision of bikerdom and of creating customers for official H-D clothing and
accessories."
The babyboomers, who made the inventors of the hula hoop rich, got
suckered into one more fad, and "the old biker subculture has been co-opted by elements
of mainstream society."
The 1983 organization (and trademarking) of HOG was another step in the
co-optation of biker culture. "It was formed in part to counteract die dissident Harley
Davidson Owners Association and in part to coalesce new customers," according to
Yates. "This involved a radical turnabout in policy in that the heretofore pejorative 'hog'
was embraced as a self-effacing, irreverent corporate nickname." The Invasion of the
Body-Snatcher scenario, in other words, happened in just about every subculture worth
colonizing, from Notre Dame to NASCAR
The task when it came to the co-optation of biker culture, as Schouten and
McAlexander put it, was "to expropriate certain symbols of the outiaw subculture and
employ the product design and advertising components of the fashion system in order to
redefine their meanings just enough to make them palatable to a broader group of
consumers. . . . Harley-Davidson has co-opted important symbols and structural aspects
of the outiaw subculture, sanitized or softened them, and given them more socially
acceptable meanings."
Of course, excessive co-optation risks destroying the very qualities that
initially make the subculture so appealing. "As membership in the subculture becomes
more and more accessible and acceptable to mainstream consumers, and as more
mainstream consumers begin to don the trappings of bikers, lines of marginality become
blurred and some of the distinctiveness of the biker subculture is lost," Schouten and
Me Alexander observe.
Not everyone is happy with HOG or Harley's marketing strategy. The old
time bikers who handed on the trappings of biker culture only to have them co-opted refer
to the Harley Davidson Motor Company as the "MoFoCo," whose "stealerships" favor the
upscale yuppies who appropriated their symbols. This means, according to Schouten and
Me Alexander, that Harley Davidson, "is faced with a veritable tightrope walk between the
conflicting needs of two disparate but equally important groups of consumers: those who
give the product its mystique and those who give die company its profitability."
In America profitability wins out over mystique every time. What began
as a protest against social engineering was absorbed by the very social engineering it
sought to avoid. Harley World triumphed over biker culture, something the old-timers
noticed with dismay:
'Daytona," one biker noted in an on-line chat room, "has become a regular
fuckin' motorcycle Disneyland, which is why I don't go anymore." Page finds this
criticism "prescient," especially "when considering the growth possibilities of a new
Orlando Bike Week in die shadow of Disney World. Indeed, Bike Week often does look
like a fantastic theme park, one where bikers, poseurs, and nonbikers alike come to sample
a commercialized version of biker culture and revel in the carnival-like atmosphere. Call
it Biker World."
The word 'World" attached to something like a motorcycle is the sign that
what started off as a protest ended up as a theme park It is a sign that something got co¬
opted. If Harley World is now a reality, can Notre Dame World be far behind? What
about America World? The nation that became a theme park Is it possible anymore to
tell the difference between America World and America?
Steinbeck loved Montana and as part of his homage to that state he made a
pilgrimage to die Little Big Horn Battlefield, where General George Qister died along
with hundreds of his men.
Steinbeck and his dog Charley wanted to "pay our respects to General
Qister and Sitting Bull on the battlefield of Little Big Horn. I don't suppose there is an
American who doesn't carry Remington's painting of the last defense off the center
column of the 7^* Cavalry in his head. I removed my hat in memory of brave men, and
Charley saluted in his own manner but I thought with great respect"
Peter and I arrived at the Little Big Horn after a whole morning's drive
over 212, the short cut that eliminates 70 miles from Interstate 90 and takes us through an
endless sea of grass and two Indian reservations. You can tell that you've entered Indian
territory because the architecture goes from bad to worse. Instead of 19^* century
wooden balloon frame buildings, you see mobile homes surrounded by j unked cars.
Little Big Horn is where General George Custer held his famous last stand.
Like Steinbeck, I was familiar with Remington's painting of Qister's Last Charge, where
the general is mounted on his horse, brandishing his saber, charging at three demoralized
Indians. Needless to say, if this were an accurate presentation of what happened, Qister
wouldn't be buried in South Dakota, with 600 of his troops.
Instead of mounting a cavalry charge against the Indians, Custer ordered
his men to shoot their own horses and hide behind them as protection against the bullets of
the Indians. The cavalry's dead horses, unfortunately, provided no protection against
Indian arrows, which rained down on the US troops like primitive mortar fire for that
entire day in the early summer of 1875. When the bodies were discovered a few days
later, they looted lite porcupines, so many arrows were sticking out of them.
The audience which listened raptly to the parkranger's account of Qister's
last stand was filled with biters on their way to Sturgis. The parking lot was filled with
Harleys, some of which flew die blackand white POW-MIA flag which indicated that the
owner was a Vietnam veteran.
The park ranger who explained die badle to us tried to put a positive spin on
Qister's death, but die fact remains that what Qister did was militarily indefensible. It was
also morally indefensible. He divided his forces, sending one group into the Indian village
at the river at die bottom of die hill to massacre women and children, but in doing that
Qister also allowed his own forces to be cut off and massacred by die enraged Indians.
Just why a seasoned Civil War general would do something this stupid and wicked is
difficult to explain. Custer was known for his daring during the Civil War. Now faced with
a group of primitive people armed with technologically inferior weapons, Custer allowed
daring to turn into arrogance and arrogance into hubris, and hubris led to defeat
Custer's mission was to persuade the Indians to return to their reservation.
His men did this by firing indiscriminately into the teepees of the Indians they were sent
to persuade, killing women and children in the process. Crazy Horse, like Francis Drake,
refused to rush into battle. He was busy being prayed over by the medicine man whose
charms would make him invisible and invincible. The charms must have worked. Crazy
Horse rode directly in front of Custer's lines three times and escaped unscathed. It was
then that the Indians mounted their counter attack
It is difficult not to conclude that Custer was a victim of the myth of
technological superiority. The myth of racial superiority probably also played a role. If
so, Little Big Horn was a warning that got ignored. It was a prelude to Vietnam, which
was a prelude to Iraq. The rifles Custer's men carried were technologically superior to
the bow and arrow, but in the end that didn't matter because of the circumstances of the
battle. The F-16 is technologically superior to the Iraqi car bomb, but so what? The F-16 is
also helpless against it
The high plains are the ideal place to ride a motorcycle—in the
summertime, at least. The sky over Sturgis was blue when we left the redneck biker
bacchanal, but when we entered Montana the weather changed almost imperceptibly. At
first the sly seemed overcast, as if we are heading into rain, but as the sun sank deeper
and turned redder, it became clear that what seemed at first glance to be clouds were in
fact smolc. All of Montana around 1-90 was on fire and we were heading into the heart of
the fire, or better still, into the heart of darkness.
Steinbeck claimed that "from start to finish" he "found no strangers" on his
quest in search of America. He found only Americans, who in spite of "all of our
enormous geographical range, for all of our sectionalism, for all of or interwoven breeds
drawn from every part of the ethnic world,... are a nation, a new breed... .Americans
from all sections and of all racial extractions are more alike than the Welsh are like the
English" (Charley, p. 160). "The American identity," Steinbeck concludes, "is an exact
and provable thing."
But as Steinbeck drove across Texas toward the Old South, the tone of his
narrative changed. Unlike the rest of the country, the South, he tells us, "is in the pain of
labor and the nature of its future child is still unknown." As a result, Steinbeck "faced the
South with dread.
Steinbeck s narrative in search of America undergoes a change of genre
once he crosses the border from Texas into Louisiana. What began as an American
Picaresque Don Quixote is suddenly transformed into The Heart of Darkness. By die time
he reached the South, Steinbecks KV has become the symbol of deracinated America,
and deracinated America has become the only legitimate America according to the elite
for which Steinbeck had been writing propaganda for die past 20 years. So the KV has
become the synagogue of acceptable opinions, and Steinbeck has become their rabbi, the
man who passes judgment on the legitimacy of Americans, and expels anyone who
comes up with ideas that do not pass muster as "American."
At this point it should be obvious that the prime candidates to get hauled
before Steinbecks rolling Committee on Un-American Activities are die Southerners who
disagree with the form of social engineering that was being inflicted on them at the time,
otherwise known as de-segregation. Steinbeck reports on a group of Louisiana women,
known as "die Cheerleaders," who are unhappy with the desegregation of their schools
and expressed their unhappiness in the following way:
No newspaper had printed the words these women shouted.
But now I heard the words, bestial and fdthy and degenerate. In a long an
unprotected life, I have seen and heard the vomitings of demoniac humans before.
Why then did these screams fill me with a shocked and sickened sorrow?. . . These
blowzy women with their littie hates and their clippings hungered for attention These
were not mothers, not even women. They were crazy actors playing to a crazy
audience (Charley, p. 195).
Then Steinbeck runs into the cab driver who tells him that "them goddamn
New York Jews come in and stir the niggers up." Then Steinbeck picks up a cracker
hitchhiker, who tells him he sounds like a "Commie nigger lover."
At this point, Travels with Charley reaches its climax. Unlike Will Rogers,
Steinbeck has finally found an American whom he does not like, and he loses no time in
expelling him from the KV which has become the symbol of deracinated America. "Get
out," Steinbeck says in his best tough guy manner. When the cracker hesitates, Steinbeck
reaches for a non-existent gun, and the redneck scurries off—"In the mirror I saw his
hating face and his open spit-ringed mouth"—forcing Steinbeck to conclude in his macho
way, '1 guess when they're drafting peacemakers they'd better pass me by" (Charley, p.
206). A short ways down the road, the cracker with the hating face and spit-ringed mouth
is replaced in the KV which has become the rolling synagogue of acceptable American
opinions by "a young Negro student ... a passionate and articulate young man with
anxiety and fierceness just below the surface, who tells Steinbeck, "I want to see it—me
—not dead. Here! Me! I want to see it -soon." At this point the passionate and articulate
Negro wipes the tears from his eyes and "waited quicldy away."
At this point the sensitive reader begins to wonder whether Steinbeck has
crossed die boundary from journalism into fiction. In a sense the question is moot
because propaganda covers both sides of that border. If die nagging sense that Steinbeck
made all of this up continues, die sensitive read can at least tell himself he is not alone in
his suspicions. Steinbecks sons also felt that he made up the conversations in Travels with
Charley. "Thom and I are convinced," wrote John Steinbeck IV, "that he never talted to
any of those people in Travels with Charley. He j ust sat in his camper and wrote all that
shit He was too shy. He was really frightened of people who saw through him. He
couldn't have handled that amount of interaction. So, die book is actually a great novel."
(John Steinbeck IV and Nancy Steinbeck The Other Side of Eden: Life with John
Steinbeck (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Bools, 2001, p. 151)
The redneck who got expelled from Steinbecks KV was right, of course.
New York Jews were coming to die South to stir up the Negroes. They had been coming
ever since a group of New York Jews had created die NAACP, and they were going to
come in even greater numbers. The summer of 1964 would be a high water mark of sorts
in the Black Jewish Alliance, which would collapse in acrimony in 1967-8, when Harold
Ouse wrote his expose of the Black Jewish alliance from the Negro perspective and when
the Negroes expelled Jewish teachers from their schools in the Ocean-Hill Brownsville
section of New York around the same time.
So the cracker got expelled from Steinbecks RV for telling the truth. It is
not surprising that someone who had dedicated his life to promoting the deceptions
favored by those in power would feel this way about the truth. Steinbeck also probably
felt this way because he owed his fame to the Jews, first the Hollywood Jews and then the
New York Jews. "I don't think any writer has ever been luckier," says Gore Vidal.
"Steinbeck was one of those rare novelists who actually had a happy relation to
Hollywood." (Parini, p. 229).
And yet even when promoted by die most powerful people on the face of
the earth, deception and propaganda have their limits. And these limitations become most
apparent in time of war. It is said that die winners of wars write the histories. That is
probably the case. But no amount of propaganda can disguise die realities of losing a war,
especially the fact that it has been lost Steinbeckhad become a war propagandist during
World War II. When he tried die same thing in Vietnam, he was forced to admit 1) that
the war was wrong and 2) that America was losing it and 3) that his own reputation was at
state. Unable to admit any of those things, but at the same time unable to change the tide
of events through deception, Steinbeck whose health was failing anyway, took the easy
way out and killed himself, rather than admit he had been wrong. Steinbecks sons served
as soldiers in Vietnam. According to John Steinbeck IV, Steinbeck "chose the overdose of
morphine" over admitting that he, "the Conscience of America" had been wrong about the
war. "He was broken from the Vietnam thing. He didn't want to be alive in a world where
he wasn't right"
In his analysis of the corrupting effect which war has had on American
culture, Robert Nisbet makes it clear that it was the intellectuals who created the Hell
which America became. High on Nisbet's list of intellectual villains was George Creel,
Woodrow Wilson's propaganda minister, and creator of the progenitor of all agencies of
deception in America, the Committee for Public Information. Creel, whom Nisbet
describes as "one of the most gifted architects of propaganda, of manufacture of public
consciousness that has ever lived," created the "four minute men" whose "job was to
infiltrate every public gathering of any kind with the objective of delivering four-minute
speeches in celebration of the war." It was World War I and the propaganda which that
war necessitated which led America down the road to where it finds itself today. Using
the war as their excuse, Wilson and Qeel prepared America for "the West's first
experience with totalitarianism—political absolutism extended into every possible area of
culture and society, education, religion, industry, the arts, local community and family
included, with a land of terror always waiting in the wings. . . ." Wilson "succeeded in
infusing a whole generation of intellectuals with the sense of cause, of mission, in the
moral sphere, to be accomplished only through the power of the national state he came
close to worshipping." In order to succeed at war, America had to transform itself into the
Leviathan that meant the end of "the spirit of localism, of grass roots and of pluralism that
had characterized so much of American reform thought" until that time. Each succeeding
war president tookAmerica further down die same path. Franklin Delano Roosevelt drew
"upon experiences it had known in World War I in order to combat the Depression."
America got its first taste of home-grown fascism at that time. It was also at that time and
under the aegis of the war economy that "the marriage of university and government took
place." During the Cold War which followed World War II, "the marriage between
intellectuals and government became a firm tie. ... The desire to be close to die seat of
power .. . was as strong in the Rome of Augustus as in the Washington of Kennedy" (p.
172 ).
The descendents of die "public intellectuals" who created the mess that is
America are still hard at work, try ing to make an even greater mess out of die one the last
generation bequeathed to them. Steinbeck ended up a high-classed prostitute; he turned to
propaganda after he ruined his life and his wife's life when he ordered her to have an
abortion. One of tire consequences of his work is that writing and prostitution (or academe
and prostitution) have become practically synonymous terms. This, as Robert Nisbet tried
to tell us in 1975, when America was going through its reaction to Vietnam, was one of
the many lamentable consequences of creating a culture based on war.
August 2007, the time when Peter and I made our hajj to the mythic
American West, marked the lull before the storm. In this instance that meant the
propaganda barrage which was calculated to enthuse Americans, already disgusted with
Iraq, with a new war against Iran.
If John Steinbeck was the equivalent of a high class prostitute when it
comes to war propagandists, we now live in the age of the two dollar whore. I am
referring to epigoni like Neoconservative Norman Podhoretz, whose book urging
Americans into war with Iran was released on September 11, the sixth anniversary of the
World Trade Tower collapse, and David Gelemter, a computer professor at Yale who
aspires to the stained mantle of public intellectual. Both Podhoretz and Gelemter are high
priests of die Jewish cult known as neoconservatism. Like all revolutionary Jews since the
time of Simon bar Kokhbar, they advocate messianic politics, which is based on the claim
that those who take up tire sword can create heaven on earth. Just as Russia became the
vehicle for world revolution when the Jews from the pale of the settlement rose up and
toppled the czar, now America is the vehicle for creating the new Jewish version of
heaven on earth. After years of proclaiming that Bible thumpers were the villains of
American history, Jews like Gelemter have changed their tune. Jews like Leo Pfeffer, of
the AJC, made careers out of driving Christianity out of public life. Secularism was good
according to the Jews in die '60s. After years of driving religion out of the public square
and public schools, the Jews (of die neocon variety at least) now want to reintroduce
religion to shore up America's flagging support of the war in Iraq. Because America is
now a vassal of Israel when it comes to foreign policy, die Jews have become chest¬
thumping patriots. "America" (the quotes are Gelemter's)
is one of the most beautiful religious concepts mankind has ever known. It is
sublimely humane, but based on strong confidence in humanity's ability to make life
better. "America" is an idea that results from focusing the Bible and Judeo-Christian
faith like a spotlight's beam on the problems of this life (not the next) in die modem
world, in a modern nation. (David Gelemter , Americanism: the Fourth Great
Western Religion [New York Doubleday, 2007], p. 2)
Gelemter knows enough about American history to know that the Puritans
were Judaizers, although he never uses that term. Pretending that nothing happened in
America from tire time of the half-way covenant in tire late 17^* century until the
present, Gelernter announces that "We American Puritans are God's new chosen people"
(p. 65). We are not dealing with any pale civic religion here; no, we are dealing with full¬
blown idolatry. Caesar is once again God as he was in the other empire which ruled the
world and then collapsed. America is not just a religious nation; America is a religion,
characterized by "passionate belief in the community's closeness to God and its obligation
to God and die whole world—Americans as a new chosen people, America as a new
promised land—that is American Zionism" (p. 69).
In case you were wondering, Gelernter is quickto add that "the American
Religion is a global religion," which means that we as Americans are every bit as much
bound to spread "Liberty, Equality, and Democracy" from Iraq to Iran by force of arms
—nuclear arms, if necessary—as die Christians were bound by Christ to preach the
Gospel to all nations. "Americans," Gelernter informs us, "have a duty not merely to
preach but to bring them [liberty, equality, democracy] to all mankind." Drawing on a
view of American history that is stunning in its lack of depth and insight, Gelernter
concludes that Puritans were fanatics, but they were good fanatics. Unlike Muslims, who
are bad fanatics. Jews now like religious fanatics if they support wars in support of Israel.
Muslim fanatics murder men, women and children at random [unlike Israeli
fanatics who take careful aim before they shoot children]. But the Puritans who
settied the New World were fanatics of a different order. They came to America
because they chose not to fight it out in England; they did not want to foment
rebellion or cause bloodshed.
Gelernter is a depressingly common phenomenon lately. Gelertner is the
New York(or New Haven) Jew who is the expert on j ust about everything. Unlike die rest
of us, who have to backup their assertions, Jews get by on the ipse dixit alone. What they
say must be true because they as a group are rich and powerful. As if that weren't
enough, they have access to big New York publishing houses, like Doubleday, which
published Gelernter's book In his new-found role as "public intellectual," Gelernter, the
computer geek, talcs it upon himself to explain die real meaning of Christianity to the
dumb goyim, especially the evangelical variety who have been following Rev. Hagee
now that Rev. Falwell has gone on to his reward in die big Kibbutz in the sky. Gelernter's
book is full of patronizing nods in the direction of Christians:
you built America and Americanism. In so doing you gave mankind one of the
greatest gifts it has ever received. Do not allow yourselves to be spiritually
dispossessed in your own homes. This country will never have an established official
religion; it will never abandon religious freedom. But neither should it be allowed to
abandon its history or origins or lie about them.
Just in case die goyim get their hopes up and look for a return to Bible
reading in public schools, Gelemter is there to let them down easy: "Christians are
(rightly) prohibited to preach Christianity in the public schools; secularists should be
prohibited to preach secularism too" (p. 12). But aside from that nod to die ghost of Leo
Pfeffer, everything is going to be ol<ay, as long as the goyim let professors like Gelemter
tell them what their country and their religion really mean: "For all Christians facing the
dauntingly powerful secularist culture of die modem United States," die great American
theologian from the Shalem Institute in Jerusalem tells us, "be strong and of good
courage."
Well, God Bless you too, Professor Gelemter!
We are then treated to the idiot's guide to American history, whose main
principle is that the only good Christian is a war-mongering Judaiser. According to this
algorithm, Woodrow Wilson "took America into the First World War and proclaimed
Americanism a world religion, which implied chivalrous duties abroad and at home. He
read the bible, prayed every day, and was shaped by his Presbyterian faith." It goes
downhill from there:
Ronald Reagan, who announced that America must finally win the cold War,
was a devout Protestant; his Americanism might have been even more devout
Reagan reminded America of John Winthrop's prediction about a shining city on a
hill. George W. Bush is a chivalrous American who believes in liberty, equality and
democracy not just for France and Denmark but for Arab nations where the
residents have brown skin and strange ways. Our duty is to provide them too with
liberty, equality, and democracy, says Bush.
By now it should be clear that Jewish propagandists for war can say
anything no matter how preposterous and get away with it, as when Gelemter tells us that
Puritans "invented a primitive and serviceable type of democracy," or when he calls
Jonathan Edwards a Puritan, or when he claims that "at independence in 1776 roughly
three-quarters of American citizens were Puritan" [Like Thomas Jefferson and Ben
FranMinT] or when he confuses the concepts of original sin and predestination, as in the
following passage: "The doctrine of predestination preached by John Calvin was central to
Puritanism. It may be one aspect of Puritanism that is hardest for modems to sympathize
with. Puritans reasoned that because of Adam's sin and the fall of man, men were born
sinful, able to control their behavior but not their thoughts," Or when he says "Queen
Elizabeth tolerated the Puritans"even though they didn't exist then.
Add to that Gelemter's relentless use of the the ipse dixit —"Jamestown,"
we are told, "had a Puritan flavor" — and comically bad prose, as in Gelernter's view of
World War I: "In six week, said the brisk heel-clicking German generals in their spike -
decorated clown hats, France's goose will be cooled," and you begin to long for the good
old days, when war propaganda was written by high class prostitutes like John Steinbeck
Either way, intellectuals created the Hell that is now known as America.
Professor Joans has nothing but good things to say about the sexual decadence of biker
culture. As a feminist she tries to look the other way, when she is a witness to what the
nonbiking world would refer to as rape, including toe rape of her favorite biker chick "We
pass Miss White Hair ... her hair's still in its neat brad but she has dark smudges around
her eyes and a swollen mouth."
And yet even Professor Joans' taste for deviance has its limits. When she
writes about her descent into toe "The Pit," toe locale of toe bacchanal at toe Redwood
Run in California, she ends up borrowing imagery from Dante: "As we walk I stare down
into toe pit and realize that I could be looking into toe ninth circle."
The same thought occurs to me at dusk on toe third day of our journey,
when Peter and I descended toe mountain of fire and entered Missoula, Montana. There
is a sign on toe highway that announces toe Missoula Testicle Festival, a sure sign that
Missoula is a university town. Steering through toe smoke from toe forest fires while
talking on his cell phone, Peter has a arranged a meeting with his nephew, an
undergraduate history major at toe University of Montana. The young man turns out to
be a typical product of University culture. Both of his parents were professionals (his
father, now deceased, was a professor; his mother a counselor); he dresses like Gap's
vision of toe working class, complete with grease-stained jeans. He has also just
purchased a pick-up truck which runs on vegetable oil. When I ask why he just doesn't get
around town on his bicycle, he says that he needs toe truckfor cross-country trips, since
he refuses to fly.
Peter steers toe RV to toe lowest point in Missoula, a parking lot under a
bridge next to toe river. A number of semis are already there with their engines running;
they belong to toe road crew for a Lyle Lovett concert on toe other side of toe bridge.
The initial arrangement was that we would go for a swim in toe river, but that deal did not
go down, and instead we ended up at a Mexican restaurant when Peter's nephew
wondered aloud what to do for a course of directed readings on toe South.
'How about something on toe Black-Jewish alliance?' I suggested. When it
became clear that Peter's nephew didn't have a clue about toe Black-Jewish alliance, I
launched into a mini-lecture which began with the founding of the NAACP, covered the
Leo Frank trial and the trial of the Scottsboro boys, and ended up with the civil rights
movement and the Black Panthers. I was in the middle of explaining the position of two to
the seminal texts—Murray Friedman's What Went Wrong? The Collapse of the Black-
Jewish Alliance and Harold Ouse's The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual —when a man
leaned over from the next table and said, "Would you mind not talking about this topic?
My friend here is Jewish."
Usually, I am dumbfounded at moments like this, but this time I replied,
"You can tell we're in a university town. The thought police are out in force." I then told
him to mind his own damned business and not eavesdrop on our conversation and
continued with what I was saying. I hadn't read Travels with Charley at that point in my
life, but now I realize that everyone who aspires to the things of die intellect has now
become a cracker-barrel commissar like John Steinbeck, expelling anyone who disagrees
with social engineering out of the synagogue of accepted opinions.
Peter and I entered Missoula in need of a meal, a place to wash up in
preparation for the wedding the next day, and a place to park the KV for the night In the
end Peter's nephew, in spite of what he promised us over die phone, came through with
nothing. Peter's nephew, like all human beings created in the image of God, has an
obligation to treat strangers with kindness. His obligation to flesh and blood is even greater.
In the end, I ended up paying for the meal, and all his uncle got was an airy good-bye
because the nephew had friends to meet
And so Peter and I returned to die parking lot under the bridge. The semis
were still there with their motors running, but it was much darker than when we left. It
was also now full of people streaming out of die Iyle Lovett concert Lyle was on his
way to Sturgis to perform at die Buffalo Chip campground, and the women who had
listened to him sing were all intoxicated now, literally, figuratively, whatever.
"I love your hair," said a woman who was obviously drunk She was
fortunate in not being alone and doubly fortunate because die people she was with were
not as drunk as she was. When the car she was in pulled away, another woman appeared.
This one is also drunk I ask her if she knows when the semis are going to pull out, since
sleeping within three feet of a roaring diesel engine seems out of the question. She doesn't
know, but offers to let me park the KV in her driveway. She is not as drunk as die first
woman. If I asked her, she would probably agree to let me (us?) use her shower, but
somehow it didn't seem like a good way to prepare for die wedding in die morning. And
so with the semis still roaring and the women still intoxicated and wandering around in the
dark, we pull out of die parking lot by the river in Missoula and move on to the climax of
our own little j oumey into the heart of darkness.
We pull into the last circle in the hell which America's social engineers
have planned for all of us; we spend the night in a Wal-Mart parking lot In many ways,
this is only fitting because Wal-Mart is the culmination of the American dream in one
sense, and KV its culmination in another. We are living in a home on wheels, the symbol
of America's deracination. And our home on wheels is now within walking distance of the
greatest emporium of cheap junk the world has ever known. What more could an
American askfor?
As I walk, toothbrush in hand, across the parking lot toward the Wal-Mart
men's room, I notice that we are not alone. There must be at least 20 KVs like our own all
nestled together in the corner of a huge parking lot across an asphalt lake from the
institution dedicated to enslaving us by catering to our disordered desires. It is late when
we arrive, so they are all shut up and dark, but I'm sure had we arrived earlier, we could
have found a ready-made community there on that parking lot. At least we would know
that we were not alone, which is, of course, what occurred to Dante, when he entered
Hell. "I had not thought that death had undone so many."
The men's room at Wal-Mart was clean; it was also we 11-lighted, and unlike
the cafe where Hemingway's old man sat, there was no waiter there waiting impatiently
to go home. The water from their water fountain was cool and refreshing. I could have
drunk as much as I wanted; it didn't cost me anything. I could have also stayed there all
night if I had wished, shuffling up and down aisle after aisle over what were literally
acres of j unkfrom China. What more could an American want?
As one answer to that question, I recommend a recent film, The Shooter,
starring MarkWalberg. Ifs now out on DVD; you can probably buy it at Wal-Mart. In
that film, Wahlberg plays a sniper who has been betrayed by his government. He retires
from the military only to be lured back to prevent an assassination attempt against the
president When that turns out to be a set up for which he is to take the fall, the Wahlberg
character declares war on his own government. We have become used to this sort of film
from Dirty Harry to Rambo, but the rage level in The Shooter is, as they say in
Hollywood, over toe top. At toe end of his own journey into toe Heart of Darkness, toe
Wahlberg character ends up confronting toe politician, played by someone who looks life
Pat Robertson, who embodies all of toe evil of toe system. 'I'm an American Senator," he
says, and toe Wahlberg character responds by say, "I know" as he shoots him down in
cold blood.
The Shooter is full of rage at what America has become. The Shooter is
also a Hollywood film, which means that toe rage is fanned to a white-hot flame and then
directed at a phantom target Eventually, the military is going to discover who led us into
the war in Iraq. It was not phantom Senators; it was AIPAC and Neocon Jews like
Norman Podhoretz and David Gelemter. It is drey who are leading the charge (from the
safe confines of retirement and academe respectively) into Iran. Eventually that story is
going to get out, and when it does, the Jewish supporters of our wars in the middle east,
who take consolation in the fact that drey have shut down public demonstrations of the sort
that plagued the nation during die Vietnam War, might want to ponder die suggestion,
mooted in this film, that the reaction this time may come as mutiny in the military. How
about this as a plot line for Shooter //? MarkWahlberg goes gunning for Paul Wolfowitz
Daniel Smith, as I said, is in Iraq now, trying out die geographical cure for
the wound which abortion and the culture of death inflicted on him. Unlike David
Gelemter and the other neocon chickenhawkwarmongers, Daniel Smith has served in the
military, defending a country which he now realizes has ruined his life. Before he left for
the middle east he left a manuscript behind which can serve as a Catholic counterpoint to
the Jewish warmongering of David Gelemter and Norman Podhoretz Smith lacks their
access to the media, but his conclusions are worth pondering nonetheless, if for no other
reason that there are more Catholics in America than Jews, and certainly more in the
military.
Unlike Gelemter, who concludes that America is a religion. Smith
concludes that the United States lost its legitimacy the moment it legalized abortion and set
up the logic that led to him killing his own child. "There can be found no stronger evidence
as to the morally illegitimate nature of the Government of the United States," this soldier
writes, "than the Supreme Court holdings that establish "rights" of people, especially
women, to contracept and abort. . . . With the Griswold and the Roe decisions, tire Court
established that the purpose, the nature, of the United States is to protect peoples ability to
live isolated, alone, and without God."
The unspoken assumption behind David Gelemter's book is that tire dumb
goy im will believe any tiling as long as some Jewish intellectual, backed by the New York
publishing industry, says it Smith's unpublished manuscript, coming as it does from
someone in the military, indicates that this is not the case. In fact, it indicates that the "The
Roman catholic Faith is fundamentally at odds with the American Economic System, or
with capitalism, as that system has come to be known and accepted. ... An economic
system that allows vast disparities of wealth... is morally illegitimate."
The fact that Smith's manuscript is unpublished makes it even more
significant Far from being ready to convert to Americanism, Gelemter's "fourth great
western religion," this Catholic soldier has concluded that
America ... was flawed from the beginning and those flaws have worsened over
time. America has always been ... a construct for the control of the masses by a
relatively few people at die top of die cultural, social and economic heap." Far from
being a religion that brings freedom to the rest of the world, "America, as an Empire,
is an engine for the destruction of lives and the damnation of souls at home and
around the world.
One wonders what kind of conversations Daniel Smith is having with his
fellow soldiers in Iraq. Are they discussing Americanism, freedom or how to find the
weapons of mass destruction? If it becomes common knowledge over there that it was the
neoconservatives who put American soldiers into that meatgrinder, David Gelemter has
reason for concern. He probably won't want to be standing next to a window when
Shooter II arrives at the multiplex.
Chapter 4: Saturday, August 4
Like Steinbeck, Peter and I drove out of Montana "across the upraised
thumb of Idaho and through real mountains that climbed straight up, tufted with pines and
deep-dusted with snow." Like Steinbeck, 47 years ago, Peter and I arrived in Spokane, but
unlike die Conscience of America, we are not just passing through; we arrive for a
wedding. If the play ends with a wedding, I always tell my children, it has to be a
comedy, no matter how harrowing the story was before that. And so this narrative must
be a comedy, not a divine word.
Terry O'Riordain, the groom, was born in America, but he is not an
American. He and the rest of his family moved back to Ireland when they realized that
the struggle for an economic niche in New Yorkwasn't worth the trouble anymore. In this
he is like virtually every other Irishman in New York They have all gone backto Ireland.
You could shoot a cannon down any street in Queens now and not hit an Irishman.
Terry did come backto America, but not in the way that Irishmen have
come before. He came backto teach Irish to die heathen, die Irish diaspora cut off from
their roots and living in God-forsaken places like Montana and Indiana. Terry taught Irish
at Notre Dame, home of the Fighting Irish. His ultimate goal was to create an Irish studies
program, which he succeeded in doing at die University of Montana at Missoula, a place
even more God-forsaken than Notre Dame. Terry is a good example of the return of the
repressed. At die very moment that David Gelemter and the New York Jews are asking
us all to bow down in front of the Idol they have called America, Terry, like some latter
day St. Brendan, is finding converts to the ancient Irish brand of ethnic Catholicism in the
belly of the beast, die university at Missoula. It's hard to say which alternative David
Gelemter would find more repugnant: the average soldier figuring out that Neocons like
he are responsible for sending him to Iraq or Terry O'Riordain, the return of the ethnic
repressed, gaining a foothold in academe.
Terry has rented die Masonic temple for his reception, primarily because
it across the street from the cathedral. Peter and I have time. We check out die hall. I
launch into a lecture on the pillars, which are hopelessly eclectic but primarily Corinthian.
A woman selling drinks asks me if I am a professor. "Why," I ask, "do I look effeminate?
Should I have taken part in the testicle festival in Missoula?'
We meet three bikers on the street outside the church. One is a handsome
middle-aged Irish woman from Canada with red hair and frecldes and black leather chaps
and heavy motorcycle boots. She is on her way to Sturgis.
When Peter and I cross die street to enter the church, I am struck by the
crowd standing in front of the steps. No one is wearing any kind of uniform, as far as I
can tell. If s not like die biker rally in Sturgis, where everyone is dressed the same. And
yet there is this similarity, this coherence nonetheless, when finally it dawns on me.
They're all Irish. Terry's wedding is a distinctly ethnic affair. His family has come from
Ireland to help him celebrate, and the Irish boyos have come with diem. One of the
boy os has become a priest, and as the celebrant of the Mass he launches into a blistering
attack on the culture of death, from which all of us, including the groom, have narrowly
escaped with our lives. At this point it becomes obvious that there is nothing incompatible
about ethnos and Christ. Christ after all told his disciples to go out and baptize all nations.
You can baptize a nation, but you can't baptize a false religion or an idol, like the "fourth
great Western Religion" Jews like David Gelemter are now promoting. All you can do
with an idol is fall down and worship it or smash it, as St Patrick smashed the altars and
idols of the Druids when he claimed Ireland for the faith.
If there is such a thing as redemption, its not what this culture thinks it is.
The American Jews turned the Messiah into Superman, a comic book hero. American
culture in years gone by set up redemption centers, where you could transform green
stamps magically into things life lamps and vacuum cleaners. No matter what else it is,
redemption is not a time machine. You can't bring the child you killed backto life, but as
long as you're alive, you can linkup with God's plan for your life as long as you are
willing to do it on God's terms and not your own. Which is probably why John Steinbeck
committed suicide and why the people who gave their abortion testimonies in Redeeming
a Father's Heart did not. Like Peter, who stayed up all night on speed at the family cabin,
Clifford and Hepzibah Pyncheon found redemption by calling on tire name of the Lord:
"Oh, God—Our Fattier—" they cried when they realized no railroad (or KV or
motorcycle) could travel fast enough or far enough to allow them to escape from their
sins, "Are we not thy children? Have mercy on us!"
On Sunday morning after Mass, Peter and I wander down to the
magnificent waterfall which lies at the center of Spokane, Washington. Except that on this
morning the falls are far from magnificent In fact, there are no falls this morning.
Someone has inexplicably turned the river off, and so all we can contemplate is a
magnificent rockpool full of calm water, and die fact that die stairs leading down to that
pool have cut us off from any real access to the water. This strikes me as symbolic of
America. Magnificent natural resources spoiled by an overlay of culture that isolates
man from nature and vice versa. This leads me to expound Mike Jones's law of rivers. In
general I would never swim in a river in Africa. In general, I would have no hesitation
about swimming in a river in Europe, and have done so many times. In America,
however, I have no clear ideas one way or the other.
The river inspires other thoughts in Peter's mind. Looking at the bridge
crossing the river below the (now nonexistent) falls, Peter is reminded of his deceased
uncle, die only man who was brave enough to jump off die train tresde into the river in
the Wisconsin Dells. Peter's uncle was a legend in die Dells, and Peter keeps his memory
alive to this day, but his daredevil uncle got caught up America's never-ending cycle of
wars. He died while training as a World War II fighter pilot in die Florida Everglades. If s
one more sad instance of the same old story. America's potential wrecked by war. After
the Civil War, there were 50,000 widows and almost as many masterless farms in New
England, and that was the situation among die victors. The fact that life goes on obliterates
in our minds the cost of America's ongoing folly and any idea of what could have been.
The survivors get to articulate a vision, but one constrained by the exigencies of die raw
materials of history at hand. And so we are left with Peter, the oxymoronic symbol of
America, the roodess deliverer of RVs who in some sense never left the Wisconsin Dells.
Table of Contents
Preface
Cadillac Records
Jewish Jazz
Payola
Biographical Note
Footnotes
Pref ace
Hollywcxxi has a way of turning history upside down. Hollywood directors are often
in a position of not knowing what their own movies mean. The classic instance is horror
movies. Martin Scorcese made the point in a conversation with David Gonenberg, when
he told him that Rabid was a great film, but that Gonenberg didn't understand it
The same is true in general of die Hollywood genre known as die biopic and in
particular of the biopic of the Giess brothers, Cadillac Records. It is difficult to imagine a
topic more likely to generate animosity between Blacks and Jews than die sordid story of
two Polish Jews ripping off die royalties of illiterate blues singers from Mississippi, which
is what Cadillac Records portrays; and yet here we have Hollywood doing a movie on
one of the most sordid chapters of the 60 year revolutionary movement known as the
Black-Jewish Alliance.
Murray Friedman, who used to be head of the American Jewish Gtmmittee in
Philadelphia, once wrote a book about the Black-Jewish Alliance called What Went
Wrong?
Lejzor and Fiszel Sing the Blues answers that question in minute if depressing detail.
June 2012
Cadillac Records
As some indication that the black-Jewish alliance was a hot topic in the wale of Barack
Obama's election in 2008 as president of the United States, Sony released die movie
Cadillac Records, its homage to one of die most fertile periods of collaboration between
blacks and Jews, die '50s and '60s. Cadillac Records celebrates one of the most significant
areas of their cultural collaboration as well, namely, "race music," later renamed rock'n
roll.
Obama mentioned the influence which the black-Jewish alliance had had on his life in
a speech he gave at the AIPAC convention during die summer of the 2008 election
campaign. Obama was, in more ways than he would like to enumerate in public, a
product of that alliance, but in hinting at that fact he was also less than honest about the
particular terms of engagement it stipulated and the causes of its eventual demise. In this
regard, Barack Obama has a lot in common with Cadillac Records, die biopic celebrating
the lives of an unlikely menage of Polish Jews and Mississippi sharecroppers and the
music they produced. It is difficult to imagine something less capable of arousing
fraternal feelings among either blacks or Jews than the saga of Chess records in Chicago
and the tales of cheating, drug abuse, and sexual degeneracy that went along with it, but
the Zeitgeist, both then and now, has a logic all its own, and it is one which Hollywood has
shown itself determined to follow.
At some time during the 1930s, on one of his Library of Congress-sponsored ethnic
music collecting expeditions through die South, Alan Lomax popped open die trunk of his
car and recorded the singing of a Mississippi Delta cotton picker by die name of
McKinley Morganfield. The moment gets captured in Cadillac Records, which
documents in its revisionist and sanitized way one of die most significant chapters in the
volume of American history known as die black-Jewish alliance. By 1943 McKinley
Morganfield had had enough of chopping cotton and decided to join what would become
the greatest internal migration in American history when he got on an Illinois Central train
and moved to Chicago, where he changed his occupation to blues singer and his name to
Middy Waters.
The change in locale necessitated a change in the music. Robert Johnson-style blues
played on an acoustic guitar was no match for die noise of a city like Chicago, so Middy
Waters got himself an electric guitar. Cadillac Records has him busking on the streets of
Chicago with his electric guitar but offers no explanation of who was providing the
electricity.
In an April 1948 session, Middy Waters recorded two electrified songs: "I can't be
satisfied" and "I feel life going home." Both were anthems of black migration, and both
records addressed the mind of theblackmigrants, who were torn between nostalgia for the
simpler life they had left behind in Mssissippi and the largely sexual attractions of
emancipation from both segregation and the moral law which big northern cities like
Chicago provided.
If demography is destiny, Muddy Waters was destined to become a star because by
1948 Chicago was home to 500,000 refugees from the Mssissippi delta who had a set of
musical tastes and longings that had been created in the cotton fields and weren't going to
be satisfied, now that they were in Chicago, by the crooning of people like Bing Gosby.
Middy Waters didn't write his own material. The uncrowned poet laureate of the
black migration to Chicago was a fellow Mssissippian by the name of Willie Dixon, who
articulated the longings of the former sharecroppers by telling them that he was their
"Hoochie Ooochie Man." Since moving to Chicago seemed like dying and going to
heaven, at least on Saturday night, Dixon explained their good fortune by claiming there
was a special juju attached to the train ride up from Mississippi. With Muddy Waters as
his front man, Dixon was telling them that "on the seventh hour, on tire seventh day on the
seventh month die seven doctors say" that all of the Hoochie Coochie men in Chicago had
been "born for good luck... If for no one else, die song proved to be good juju for
Middy Waters. "He was doing that song until the day he died," Dixon said later. Tm
Your Hoochie Coochie Man" was a song that Muddy Waters could sing with conviction,
and when he did, the Negroes on the South Side of Chicago believed every word he said
and bought his records. Middy Waters was what the next generation would call a role
model for the Negro migrant, and they listened to what he said and acted accordingly.
The results were disastrous for the black family, something which gets noted almost as an
aside in Cadillac Records, and less than salubrious for everyone else, something which
does not get noted at all. Muddy Waters dealt with the sequelae of his liberated passions in
a way that suited his new abode and the lifestyle which went with it: he hired a Jewish
lawyer to defend him against the many paternity suits which got filed against him. He
never lost a case, but failed to realize that all of those legal fees were coming off the top
of his royalties. Muddy Waters got his Mojo workin in Chicago, but he never learned how
to read; in terms of writing, he mastered two words "MKinley" and "Morganfield,"
which he signed to a number of recording contracts, whose details remained opaque to
him until the 1970s when other lawyers explained to him how he had been cheated out of
his royalties.
The men who cheated this and other largely illiterate bluesmen from Mississippi were
two Polish Jews by the name of Leonard and Phil Chess. Lejzor Czyz (bom in 1917) and
Iris younger brother Fiszel (born 1921) arrived in Chicago in 1928 along with their sister
Malta and their parents Yasef and Cyrla. The Czyz family had emigrated from Motele,
the Polish shtetl which had produced Chaim Weitzman, Israel's first president After
arriving at Ellis Island, the Czyz family made its way to Chicago, where Yasef tried to
find work as a shoemaker and where his son, who Anglicized his name to Leonard Chess,
struggled to leam English and make a living as a "restless and unhappy "HI j unkdealer.
In 1946 Leonard Chess bought a small restaurant located at 3905 South Cottage Grove,
in what was then the heart of Bronzeville, the Negro Tenderloin district, and renamed it
the Macomba Lounge. Nadine Cohodas tells us that Cottage Grove Street "had become a
magnet for black Chicagoans looking for spirited night-life. Music, prostitution, drugs-all
were easily available. ... It was a world of pimps, hookers, maids, chauffeurs, good-time
whites, factory workers, white collar workers, musicians, entertainers, bartenders,
waiters."
Moral corruption, in other words, was part of the migration experience. Cohodas
claims that "Prostitution was so common that Phil candidly described the neighborhood as
home to 'pimps and whores.'"I=l She then tries to finesse the question of the Chess
brothers' involvement in all this vice. "Prostitution was a financial boon to the club," and
"There was nothin' but dope in the place," according to one of the musicians who played
there, but "Nobody thought that Leonard was involved in drug dealing," even though "it
would be bad for business to crackdown, not to mention futile. "1^1
Were Jews life Leonard Chess responsible for the moral corruption of the Negro
migrants to Chicago? The question seems odd because the blues and sexual immorality
have by now become synonymous. At a time when between 70 and 80 percent of all
black babies are born out of wedlock, sexual immorality has come to be seen as a
constituent element of what it means to be black, and so no one gets around to asking
questions about how this situation came about Racism surely plays a role in all of these
assumptions, but since sexual deviance has become the norm in America, no one gets
upset by such claims anymore, not as upset anyway as by claims that blacks are
genetically inferior to whites when it comes to intelligence. The solution to the problem of
sexual deviance has been to redefine it out of existence. Race music is one of the cultural
devices which have made that redefinition plausible to large numbers of people. The
cliche of the oversexed bluesman, however, obscures the moral corruption that often
overwhelmed the families of black migrants up from the South when they arrived in
Chicago. The fact that so many whites followed their example, largely because of die
widespread effect that die dissemination of "race music" exerted during this period
doesn't change the fact that the moral law is written on the hearts of all men, black and
white, and diat something lias to happen to obscure diat fact
That something is usually passion, but in diis instance it was die deliberate excitation of
passion through a certain kind of music for both financial and political reasons. During die
50-year period following World War II, mass audiences at first came to tolerate sexual
deviance as part of the lifestyle of black musicians and then they came to expect it of die
musicians, bodi blackand white, who played diat kind of music.
In Cadillac Records, Leonard Chess is portrayed as profane but morally upright and
faithful to his wife when faced widi die same temptations to which Middy Waters
succumbed. Nadine Cohodas, in spite of her attempt to make the Chess brotiiers
respectable, tells a slightiy different story when she informs us diat Leonard's "other life
... occasionally ... came to light in one special circumstance or another. "ML When a
blackmotorcycle gang showed up unannounced at Leonard's hospital bed, Leonard's son
Marshall suddenly realized that his father lived something akin to the double life that
Muddy Waters sang about, even if there were no illegitimate children to show for it
Mist Americans would find it difficult to believe diat a Jew could corrupt the morals
of a Negro because most Americans feel diat the Negro never had any sexual morals to
begin with. The situation in Chicago, however, comes into clearer focus when Cohodas
writes about Leonard's dealings with white boys like Bobby Charles Guidry (who later
renamed himself Bobby Charles), the Louisiana teenager who wrote "See You Later,
Alligator." In fact, Chess's dealings with Guidry throw a new and largely unflattering light
on the morally corrupting effect Chess had on all of his proteges. "Leonard," according to
Cohodas, "told Charles in their first meeting that Chess would make him rich and famous
and he could have all the women he wanted, though Leonard had expressed the latter
sentiment in far cruder terms than the 17-year-old was used to. "1^1 Cadillac Records
doesn't dwell on the point, but it seems that Chuck Berry isn't the only one at Chess
Records who should have been arrested for transporting minors across state lines for
immoral purposes. Instead of being the direct beneficiary (sexually, at least), Leonard
Chess was the pimp.
If feminism has done anything, it has taught women to brag about their moral
degradation as the badge of liberation. The situation at Chess Records, feminism
notwithstanding, throws the issue of moral corruption into even starter relief than the story
of Bobby Charles. Linda Ellerbee, who worked for Chess as one of the nation's first
female disc joe leys, concedes that she was financially exploited by Chess, but her
feminism obscures the deeper type of exploitation that was going on when Chess
procured abortions for female employees. After appealing to Leonard Chess, Linda
Ellerbee received $600 to pay for an abortion. EUerbee left Chess's office "feeling
ashamed and in tears, but she reminded herself that he had provided the money without
hesitation and he didn't fire her."I£l
Leonard Chess knew that the music he was promoting was corrupting the morals of
the Blacks whose interests he claimed to be serving. Chess, according to Cohodas,
said he was sure that all blacks listened to R& B "although not all will admit it He
likes j azz with the windows open but blues when the windows are closed. "I'm a Jew,
but I don't like some of the music my father listened to," he went on. "Its the same
with die Negro. ... We want a Top 40 format with Negro music, not the Uncle Tom
... Stepin Fete hit "IZL
Negro music, in other words, was synonymous with sexual degeneracy, and die
Jewish record producer who cheated his talent out of their royalties and die Jewish disc
jockey who got paid off by die Jewish record producer could, like the Jewish pimp, salve
his conscience by claiming tiiat he was only supplying die public widi what it wanted.
In spite of Henry Ford's warnings during the 1920s, Americans were still largely
clueless in understanding Jewish cultural subversion and die moral subversion that was its
necessary companion. The Poles, on the odier hand, had had centuries of experience in
dealing with this sort of thing. In 1936, eight years after die Gzyz family had left Poland
for the New World, Augustine Cardinal Fflond, the Primate of Poland, issued a pastoral
letter on morals in which he claimed diat Polish Jews were responsible for the moral
corruption of the Polish nation. "So long as Jews remain Jews," Hlond wrote, "a Jewish
problem exists and will continue to exist. This question varies in intensity and degree from
country to country. It is especially difficult in our country and ought to be the obj ect of
serious consideration." After promising to "touch briefly here on its moral aspects in
connection witii die situation today," Hlond mentioned specifically Jewish involvement in
pornography and prostitution as a danger to die morals of the Christian majority of
Poland:
It is a fact that Jews are waging war against the Catholic Church, that they are
steeped in free-thinking, and constitute die vanguard of atheism, the Bolshevik
movement, and revolutionary activity. It is a fact tiiat Jews have a corruptive
influence on morals and that their publishing houses are spreading pornography. It is
true that Jews are perpetrating fraud, practicing usury, and dealing in prostitutionl^l
He also mentioned Polish youth as particularly vulnerable. 'It is true that, from a
religious and ethical point of view, Jewish youth are having a negative influence on the
Catholic youth in our schools."
"But," he continued, 'let us be fair. Not all Jews are this way. There are very many
Jews who are believers, honest, just, kind, and philanthropic. There is a healthy, edifying
sense of family in very many Jewish homes. We know Jews who are ethically
outstanding, noble, and upright "121
Hlond endorsed boycotts of Jewish businesses, but he warned Poles against adopting
"that moral stance, imported from abroad," i.e., from Nazi Germany, "that is basically
and ruthlessly anti-Jewish" because
It is contrary to Catholic ethics. One may love one's own nation more, but one
maynot hate anyone. Not even Jews. It is good to prefer your own kind when
shopping, to avoid Jewish stores and Jewish stalls in the marketplace, but it is
forbidden to demolish a Jewish store, damage their merchandise, breakwindows, or
throw tilings at their homes. One should stay away from the harmful moral
influence of Jews, keep away from their anti-Christian culture, and especially
boycott the Jewish press and demoralizing Jewish publications. But it is forbidden to
assault, beat up, maim, or slander Jews. One should honor and love Jews as human
beings and neighbors, even though we do not honor the indescribable tragedy of that
nation, which was the guardian of die idea of die Messiah and from which was bom
the Savior. When divine mercy enlightens a Jew to sincerely accept his and our
Messiah, let us greet him into our Christian ranks with j oy ,'iML
Cardinal Hlond's warning hearkens backnot to the 19th century racial concerns which
fueled Hitier's rise to power in Germany but to die 6th and 7th century theological
concerns of Pope Gregory the Great, who was the first pope to articulate what came to
be known as "Sicut Iudeis wow "the traditional teaching of the Church on the Jews. It also
gives much needed cross-cultural perspective on what was essentially a Polish problem
transported to America, namely, Jewish involvement in prostitution and pornography.
Ever since the release of iconic Blaxploitation films like Superfly and The Mack in the
1970s, the pimp has been a black figure in the public mind in America, one associated
with the outlandish clothing and cars (in particular, the Cadillac El Dorado), as parodied in
satiric films like Undercover Brother. This cultural phenomenon obscures the fact that
during the 1920s and 1930s in both Poland and America, prostitution was a Jewish
business. Jews not black were responsible for "White Slavery."
"Between 1880 and 1939," Edward Bristow writes, "the Jews played a conspicuous
role in 'white slavery,' as the commercial prostitution of that era was dramatically called.
Not only was this Jewish participation conspicuous, it was historically unprecedented,
geographically widespread, and fraught with collective political dangers. "Jewish
trafficking," Bristow continues, "was anchored in brothel keeping," women freelanced or
kept houses while their husbands procured ... Jewish traffickers also supplied Gentile-run
houses. "Ull The Jews learned their trade in Eastern and Central Europe, where they,
again according to Bristow, "dominated tire international traffic out of toe area. "1121
Jewish involvement in prostitution is a situation which continues to toe present day, in
spite of media efforts to obscure it. The high-class prostitution operation which ensnared
Elliott Spitzer when he was governor of New York was run by a Jewish pimp, similar to
toe ones which Bristow described. With toe fall of communism and toe collapse of toe
economies of toe former Soviet bloc countries, many eastern European women ended up
in brothels in Israel run by toe descendants of toe pimps who ran toe white slavery trade
in toe Pale of toe Settlement during toe first half of toe 20to century.
On January 11, 1998, toe New York Times ran an article on Slavic Gentile prostitutes
happed in Israel. With toe collapse of toe Soviet Union and toe resulting economic chaos,
hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian women have been dispersed throughout
toe world, most entrapped in an international prostitution trade run by toe "Russian mafia,"
a significant part of which is Jewish. According to an article by Leonard Fine in a 1998
Jewish Bulletin, 'Israel has become a routine destination for toe global trafficking of
women," and "The turnover of toe prostitution trade in Israel comes to some $450 million
a year. -I131
The sex trade in Israel began in toe Pale of toe Settlement By 1889 Jewish women
ran 203 of 289 (70 percent) of toe licensed brothels in toe Tale of Settlement"
(encompassing over 20 provinces in eastern Poland and western Russia —an area where
Jews were about 12 percent of toe population). Of toe 5127 licensed prostitutes in this area
1122 or (22 percent) were Jewish. Bristow claims that, "The grievous political dangers for
local Jewry in toe context of enduring interethnic hostilities, when 78 percent of toe rest of
toe women were Gentile, many indentured in Jewish houses, is obvious. "HU i n Minsk,
Jews ran all four legitimate houses of ill repute. In toe Russian province of Kherson
(which includes toe city of Odessa) 30 of 36 licensed brothels were Jewish-owned. The
American Consul in Odessa wrote in 1908 that toe "whole 'business' of prostitution is
almost exclusively in the hands of the Jews."HXl
In Vienna, authorities knew of about 50 Jewish prostitution traffickers based in
Gzemowitz, "and they were a very inbred lot extending over two generations." The
most publicized 'white slavery' trial occurred in 1892, in Lemberg (once also called
Lvov, then a Polish provincial capital, today called Lviv in Ukraine), where 27
traffickers—all Jews were prosecuted for ensnaring women to go to Constantinople,
Egypt, and India. Some of the women recruits understood their tasks, but others
"were maids, others fieldworkers, one a butcher's helper, all apparently promised
honest jobs." (Lemberg, "a cradle of Zionism from the 1880s onward," also had anti-
Jewish riots in 1918.)1M1
By the 1930s, Jewish-run prostitution had spread from the Pale of the Settlement to
England. According to Martin Fido,
Jewish dominance of the East End [of London] and its crime was reflected in
their Yiddish name, "spielers" (places for games). In the Brick Lane neighborhood,
Isaac Bogard, a Jewish villain whose swarthy complexion and tightly curled black
hair earned him the nickname "Dark/ the Coon," extended his interests. He began in
the early years of the 20th century by supplying muscle for street traders who
wanted to prevent newcomers from moving in, but he moved on to managing
prostitutes and drinking clubs. "XLZ1
Jewish involvement in white slavery (especially when it involved Jewish pimps
prostituting gentile women) led to a rise in anti-Semitism in the turbulent period following
World War I. Adolf Hitler was infuriated that many non-Jewish women were lured into
what was largely a Jewish-run operation in Vienna. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf.
In no other city of Western Europe could the relationship between Jewry and
prostitution, and even now the white slave traffic, be studied better than in Vienna ...
an icy shudder ran down my spine when seeing for the first time the Jew as an evil,
shameless, and calculating manager of this shocking vice, the outcome of the scum
of die big city XML
During the last half of die 19th century, Jewish pimps from the Pale of the Settlement
expanded their prostitution networkto include die New World.
Thirty-nine Jews were expelled from Brazil in 1879 for soliciting women for
prostitution and running illegal whorehouses. [BRISTOW, p. 114] Of 199 licensed
whorehouses in Buenos Aires in 1909, 102 were run by Jews and more than half the
prostitutes were Jewish. [FRIED, p. 71] 4,248 Jewish women were registered for
licensed brothels in Buenos Aires between 1880-1913, and those represented only the
licensed ones. Edward Bristow estimates that 9,000 Jewish women immigrants came
to Brazil in a 25-year span in that era as prostitutes (many were no doubt highly
transient), when the total Jewish population of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay
combined amounted to less than 60,000 people in 1910. [BRISTOW, p. 119] In 1889,
the Buenos Aires Bulletin Continental reported that 200 German/Austrian women
were held against their will by Jewish pimps from Poland. [GUY, p. 5] "Jewish
procurers," says Donna Guy,"... became an organized ring in major cities all over
the world. They were particularly powerful in the Argentine port cities of Buenos
Aires and Rosario ... [GUY, p. 10] ... Tum-of-the-century reports by the Hamburg
B'nai Kith [a Jewish fraternal organization] concluded that most prostitutes in Buenos
Aires were Jewish and that traffickers 'dress with ostentatious elegance, wear large
diamonds, go to the theatre or opera daily; they have their own clubs and
organizations where wares are sorted, auctioned, and sold. They have their own
secret wireless code, are well organized, and — heavens! — in South America
everything is possible.'" [GUY, p. 19]H^1
After the war, "Jews," according to an account by Marvin Wolf, a Jewish captain in
the US Army serving in Germany, "recruited starving, desperate German girls and
opened brothels." According to Rabbi Dave, the Jewish chaplain in Frankfurt am Main, the
Jewish pimps "Got their revenge [on the German people], and got rich, too," something he
found morally repugnant: "They're in other businesses now, but do you really want to
spend Pesach [Passover] with such people?'I2Ql
The same thing held true for North America. Jewish immigration meant a sharp rise
in prostitution in cities like New York.
In 1909 one Jewish observer, Marcus Braun, estimated there to be 50,000 Jewish
immigrant prostitutes in America and 10,000 pimps. (Edward Bristow considers
these figures grossly inflated, but notes that one of Braun's colleagues, echoing at
least public feelings about die problem, diought there were up to 100,000 American
Jewish women of ill repute.) In any case, the Jewish pimps of New York City (who
owned many of the "so-called French" bordellos in the Tenderloin district and
"sought to fill them with French prostitutes from abroad") [BRISTOL, p. 165] had
their own official organization: 'The New York Independent Benevolent
Association." Frances Kellar, a respected social worker, wrote in 1907 that "the two
nationalities who may be said to be central to the disorderly house business in New
York [are] French and Jewish ... French houses... are not... to be so much feared as
the Jewish ... [which are] thoroughly vicious and bad." [BRISTOL, p. 165] By the
turn of the century, "hundreds and hundreds" of Jewish women waited the Lower
East Side of New York City as prostitutes. [FRIED, p. 8] Benj amin Altman described
the whores he saw on Allen Street: "A hundred women on every ... comer. Tall
women, short women. Fair women. Ugly women." [FRIED, p. 12]I2I1
Before long, the American public was beginning to note the high Jewish representation
in the prostitution trade. In the June 1909 issue of McClure's magazine, for instance,
George Kibbe Turner wrote that "the appearance of the Jewish dealer in women" was "a
product of New York politics." The Jewish pimp "has vitiated more than any other single
agency die moral life of die great cities of America in die past ten vears."I221
"It is an absolute fact," wrote Ernest Bell in his 1911 book about white slavery, "tiiat
corrupt Jews are now the backbone of die loathsome traffic in New York and Chicago.
The good Jews know this and feel teenly the unspeateble shame of it. "1221 "The criminal
instincts diat are so often found naturally in the Russian and Polish Jew," wrote FrankMoss
in a popular volume called American Metropolis (1897), "come to the surface in such
ways as to warrant the opinion that these people are die worst element in the entire mate-
up of New York City ... A large proportion of die people of New Israel are addicted to
vice."I2H
The situation in Chicago was j ust as bad as the situation in New York Prostitution was
an essentially Jewish business in botii cities.
By 1907 Rabbi Emil Hirsch declared that 75 percent of the "white slavery" in his
city was controlled by Jews. [BRISTOW, p. 177] The Jewish periodical, die
Forward, forlornly reported that "die facts diat were uncovered at die trial [for
corruption] of [police] inspector McCann are horrifying. 75 percent of the white
slave trade in Chicago is in Jewish hands. The owners of most of the immoral resorts
on the West Side are Jews. Even in Gentile neighborhoods Jews stand out
prominentiy in the nefarious business." [FRIED, p. 70]I221
Then as now, there was a connection between the music business and prostitution. In
his autobiography, Jewish singer Eddie Fisher wrote that "while performing in England in
the late 1950s I had become friendly with a Jewish song plugger, a man who eventually
left die music business to open a very exclusive whorehouse. "1221
When Marshall Chess went to work for his father, he felt a sense of frustration at the
unspecific nature of his new j ob. At first it seemed that his j ob was j ust to drive around
with his father. Later Marshall learned that his job was to observe his father and then
imitate his behavior. That meant bribing disk jockeys with cash and other peris.
According to Cohodas, it meant being a pimp but not a drug dealer. 'You might even get
somebody a girl, if you have to," Marshall Chess told Nadine Cohodas, who was quickto
add that Chess fils, "never paid anybody cash and never bought them drugs. "1221
In 1948 Muddy Waters began a short but intense set of gigs at the Macomba Lounge.
Cadillac Records portrays them as one long brawl interrupted by a few musical
interludes. Then, in 1950, the Macomba Lounge burned down. Cohodas calls the timing of
tiie fire "fortuitous" but claims that "an insurance investigation turned up nothing
untoward. "1221 The black term for the "fortuitous" combustion of Semitic property in the
blackghettos of large cities like Chicago and Philadelphia is "Jewish Lightning." Whatever
its cause, after the fire, the Chess brothers were "happy with a cash settlement that netted
them as much, if not more, than they could have gotten from a sale. "1221 It was this
insurance settlement that launched them into the record business.
By tiie time the Chess family arrived in Chicago in 1928 as poor immigrants from
Poland, popular music in America was already in Jewish hands. Commenting on a
Federal Sherman anti-trust suit filed against Irving Berlin, Leo Feist and tiie officers of
seven New York music publishing corporations, Henry Ford claimed that "Popular Music
is a Jewish monopoly. Jazz is a Jewish creation. The mush, tiie slush, tiie sly suggestion,
the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes, are of Jewish origin. "1221 The defendants,
Ford claimed, "controlled 80 percent of the available copyrighted songs used by
manufacturers of phonographs, player piano rolls and other musical reproducing
instruments, and fixed prices at which the records or rolls were to be sold to the
public. "1211 The other 20 percent were controlled by other Jewish music houses not
included in that special group.
Jewish control of popular music through what would come to be known as tiie music
industry began with the efforts of "song pluggers," largely vaudeville entertainers at tiie
time, who would popularize by repeated renditions on tiie stage, until the flabby mind of
the "ten-twenf-thirf" audiences began to repeat it on the streets. These "song pluggers"
were "the paid agents of the Yiddish song agencies. Money, and not merit, ... dominates
the spread of the moron music which is styled 'Jewish Jazz"'I^=l
Jewish Jazz
Tin Pan Alley, the section of 28th St. in New York between Broadway and Sixth
Avenue, the heart of the American music industry when Ford published his critique of tlie
'"Abies' and 'Izzies' and 'Maes' who mate up the composing staffs of the various ...
Yiddish song manufacturers" had more than a little in common with the Jewish pimps
who came over with diem during the great wave of Jewish immigration because
Flocks of young girls who thought they could sing, and others, who thought they
could write song poems, came to the neighborhood allured by dishonest
advertisements that promised more than die budding Yiddish exploiters were able to
fulfill. Needless to say, scandal became rampant, as it always does where so-called
"Gentile" girls are reduced to the necessity of seeking favors from the eastern type
of Jewl^l
If Tin Pan Alley was another word for the music business in American, then that
business was a version of the black-Jewish alliance from the moment of its inception. By
the mid-'20s, when die book that would eventually become known as The International
Jew began appearing in the Dearborn Independent, Ford noted "the organized eagerness
of die Jew to mate an alliance with the Negro." He also noted "that it was Jewish 'jazz!
that rode in upon the wave of Negro 'ragtime' popularity, and eventually displaced the
'ragtime,'" which Ford considered a legitimate development of blackmusic.
One of the earliest Jewish promoters of Negro music was Isadore Baline, otherwise
known as Irving Berlin, one of die "Izzies" of Tin Pan Alley who became "wealthy
dirough their success in pandering to a public taste which they first debased. "IML Berlin
was tom in Russia, but after he arrived in New York he became the author of "Vamp"
songs and a master of "unashamed erotic suggestion." Irving Berlin, according to Ford,
was only following in die footsteps of,
The first self-styled "King of Jazz!' ... a Jew named "Frisco." The general
directors of the whole downward trend have been Jews. It needed just their touch of
cleverness to camouflage the moral filth and raise it half a degree above that natural
stage where it begets nothing but disgust. They cannot gild the lily, but they can veil
the skunk-cabbage, and that is exactly what has been done. The modem popular song
is a whited sepulcher, spariding without, but within full of the dead bones of all die old
disgusting indecencies. "1^1
The Jews, according to Ford, used Jazz to corrupt the morals of the maj ority.
It is of little use blaming the people. The people are what they are made. Give
the liquor business full sway and you have a population that drinks and carouses.
After preaching abstinence to the victims for a century, die country turned its
attention to the victimizes and the abuse was greatiy curtailed. The traffic is still
illicidy carried on, but even so, the best way to abolish the illicit traffic is to identify
the groups that carry it on. The entire population of the United States could be turned
into narcotic addicts if the same freedom was given the illicit narcotic ring as is now
given die Yiddish popular song manufacturers. But in such a condition it would be
stupid to attack die addicts; common sense would urge the exposure of the
panderersl^l
The popular song is an especially good vehicle for moral corruption because "by
sheer dint of repetition and suggestion die song catches on — as a burr thisde catches
oa"ia
The principle is expressed in the words of the song, "Everybody's Doin' It" You
go to the theater and hear a song. Next day at lunch the cafe singer is singing die
same song. Blaring phonographs used for advertising purposes blat out the same song
at you as you pass on the street You walk past an afternoon band concert in the park
the band is playing die same song. If you are a normal person you have a feeling
diat perhaps something has been going on in the world while you were engaged with
your own affairs. The song - you say to yourself frankly - is silly and the music
trivial; but you keep your opinion a secret, because, after all, "everybody's singin' it"
Not long after you find yourself humming it You go home, and your daughter is
"practicing up" on the piece. It yells its way through your home and through your
neighborhood and through your city and through your state until in sheer disgust, and
in one day, the people pitch it bodily out-of-doors. But, behold, another song is
waiting to take its place - a song fresh from Yiddish Tin Pan Alley. And the agony is
repeated. This occurs from 30 to 50 times a year 1^0.
The song melody was especially corrupting when it was linked to indecent lyrics of
the sort that got sold under the counter and could be substituted for the over the counter
version when the situation demanded. As anyone who has been unable to drive an
advertising j ingle out of his mind knows, music enters the soul directly and can be used to
carry morally corrupting thoughts with it: "The chances are that the song you are
humming today is being hummed by yousimply because you have perforce heard it so
often that it beats unconsciously within your brain. "1221 The process, as Ford pointed out,
was largely involuntary. Those thoughts can also be attached to musically degenerated
forms, as Plato and the ancients warned. One of the characteristics which both the music
Plato condemned and the Negro Jazz shared was syncopation, an element which race
music would share with the Jazz of the 1920s and the white imitators of rock'n roll in the
1960s. "Seductive syncopation [had already] captured the public ear" by the time Ford
wrote his book
From moral corruption it was a short step to revolution. Ford mentioned Hollywood
films as a rehearsal for revolution, but claimed that popular music was an even more
effective "way of making 'revolution' as common and as familiar a thought as the movies
and popular songs have made 'vamps' and 'harems' and 'hooch' and 'Hula Hula "'M21
The moral decline of the 1920s, according to Ford, can be traced to Jewish influence
over American culture. Popular music was revolutionary. Jews controlled the industry
from top to bottom:
the Jewish control of the popular song field means that all non-Jews are barred
out It would be next to impossible for the song of a non-Jew, however meritorious, to
reach the public by the usual channels. The musical magazines, the musical critics,
the musical managers, the music publishers, the music-hall owners, the majority of
the performers are not only all Jews, but are Jews consciously banded together to
keep out all others.MIl
What was true of Jazz, promoted through vaudeville and sheet music in the 1920s, was
a fortiori true of race music, rhythm and blues and rock'n roll in the 1950s.
The Record Business in the 1950s was a Jewish operation. ’Yiddish," Oohodas notes
citing an industry insider, "was die second language of die record business. "1221
Payola
By the 1950s what Henry Ford had called "song plugging" in the 1920s was referred to
as "payola." Most of the payoffs were informal, via things like the "$100 handshake," but
oftentimes payola was more blatant than that:
WKHM in Detroit offered an "Album of the Week' deal: for $350 the station
would play a record 114 times a week with a commercial before and after each
play for a minimum of six weeks. Another record company executive told Time
magazine that under a formula he figured out, it took $22,000 to make a song popular
in Chicago. "There are so many people to shmeer," he said, creating a synonym for
bribe from a Yiddish word that meant "to spread." "The singer, his manager, the
station, the disc jockey.
Cadillac Records portrays the disc jockeys who took payola as a bunch of venal,
cigarette-smoking rednecks, when in fact the main beneficiaries were Jews like Alan
Freed, the Jewish disc jockey who invented the term "rock'n roll." By the late '50s, the
use of payola had become so widespread and so flagrant, that the government decided to
intervene. On November 21, 1959, Alan Freed was fired from his j ob at WABC in New
York Freed was one of the biggest recipients of payola; he was also one of the biggest
promoters of Chess Records. In a letter he wrote to the board of the American
Broadcasting Company, the owners of WABC, Freed defended himself by claiming that
he had "and shall continue to program records for my show solely and completely on the
basis of my evaluation of the records and their appeal to my listening audience. "1^1
Cohodas gives some indication of how that evaluation process worked. 'You mother
f***er," Leonard Chess said to Freed after he showed up at WABC in New York and
found that Freed wasn't playing Chess records on his show.
"What die hell are you playing that guy's record for when I pay you money
every week You know I pay the mortgage up in god-d***ed Connecticut...." When
Freed replied that he hadn't gotten anything that week, Leonard was furious.
Nonetheless, he walked over to Freed, took a wad of bills out of his pocket, peeled off
a few and handed them to the disc jockey along with a stack of new 45s. "Friends,"
Freed said when he was back on the air, "I've just been visited by my friends from
Chicago, Leonard and Phil Chess, and in honor of their presence, this is Chess
Records night "1^1
Payola eventually destroyed the career of Alan Freed Even though he was fined
only $500 and sentenced to a six-month suspended jail term, he never regained the
audience he had at WABC and died in 1965 "a broken man physically and
financially. "1^1
Payola meant that Jewish disc jockeys got paid for the songs the black musicians
wrote. Freed got 50 percent of the royalties for "Sincerely," but the most famous example
of Jews ripping off of blacktalent was ChuckBerry's hit "Maybelline." "Maybelline" was
a "crossover" hit, which is to say, it was race music, with all of the moral corruption that
genre implied, intended for a white audience. Because it reached a much wider audience,
via payola, at places like Bandstand, Dick Clarks Philadelphia-based show for white
teenagers, Berry stood to earn a lot more money in royalties than Muddy Waters did
from his Chicago-based race music.
But when die sheet music for "Maybelline" rolled off the presses in 1955, Berry
learned that he was sharing his royalties with two other men, neither of whom had
any tiling to do with writing either the song's melody or its lyrics. One of the "co-authors"
of "Maybelline" was Russ Fratto, who turned out to be the landlord of the building where
Chess Records was housed. The other co-author of "Maybelline" was none other than
Alan Freed.
Marshall Chess claimed that payola was part of the cost of doing business. "It wasn't a
matter of right or wrong," he told Cohodas. "It was a matter of survival. "HH Marshall
Chess's essentially Talmudic view of payola was one not shared by the former
sharecroppers. In fact, it "opened the brothers up to severe criticism and later
litigation. "HM
Leonard Chess's way of dealing with the royalty issue was to make Muddy Waters
feel "n***er rich." This usually meant peeling off a C-note from the wad of bills Leonard
carried around in his pocket and handing it to Muddy Waters whenever the blues singer
was broke. But there were other methods. When "Hoochie Coochie Man" made the charts
in 1954, Chess bought Middy Waters a brand new red and white Oldsmobile 98.M21 The
undisputed emblem of being n***er rich, however, was the Cadillac, an icon which found
its way into the title of the film on Chess Records. In spite of bending over backwards to
see some justification for Chess's behavior, Cohodas finds his way of doing business
"uncomfortably close to sharecropping" with Hie label functioning as "the company
store," and the musician as the "employ ee/sharecropper."H21
A close second to the Cadillac, as the Chicago version of the company store, was
"taking care of musicians' other needs," as when "Leonard made available his personal
lawyer, Nate Notkin, to handle Waters's paternity suits." Water's legal fees were
deducted from his royalties according to a schedule that Waters never saw. Bo Diddley,
another black musician from the South who recorded for Chess Records, had similar
complaints. "Bo Diddley ain't got sh*t," he told Rolling Stone magazine in 1987. "My
records are sold all over the world, and I ain't got a f***ing dime. ... When I left Chess
Records ... they said I owed them $125,000. "Ull
By the time the '70s rolled around, the grumbling had morphed into lawsuits. In 1974
Howlin' Wolf filed a lawsuit against Arc Music, the music publishing company the Chess
brothers owned with Benny Goodman and his brother, asking for $2.5 million in damages
for unpaid royalties on his songs. The two sides reached an undisclosed monetary
settlement after Wolfs death in 1976. In 1976 Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon "filed
identical lawsuits against the publishing company, alleging fraud and conspiracy and
asking to be paid money damages and to have their publishing contracts voided. "H21
Cbhodas does her best to view the accounting practices at Chess Records in a positive
light: "The musicians believed they deserved more than they got. Leonard and Phil
believed they treated them fairly. They played by the rules of the time."iHl Her efforts
are undermined by the fact that the accounting practices at Chess Records all took place
in the head of Phil Chess. There are no surviving written accounts because there were
never any written accounts. The accounts, if we can call the evanescent figures in Phil
Chess's mind by that name, disappeared when Phil Chess died. Even in trying to defend
the Chess brothers' accounting procedures, Cohodas is forced to concede that, "The
relationships could be paternalistic, even condescending. At Chess it sometimes looks as
though Leonard and Phil gave their musicians an allowance rather than a salary. "HU
Paternalism filled in where accounting left off. Phil Chess, Leonard's brother, claims that
they treated their Negro singers "like they were your children," because that is how "they
wanted to be" treated, at least in his mind. "They used to come to you whenever they had
a problem," Phil Chess continued, "If one had his wife having a baby in one hospital and
his old lady in another, they come to you to pay the bills so his old lady wouldn't know. ...
As time went by, it was 'You know this wasn't right, that wasn't right,' which I'm not
gonna dispute. I'm not gonna defend. I know in my mind what it was and that's it "1^1
Whether it was paternalism or sexual liberation as a form of control, the charge that
the Chess brothers cheated the Mississippians dogged their business from its inception and
contributed to the animosity which eventually led to the collapse of the black-Jewish
alliance in the late '60s. Cohodas claims that the "stereotype of the crafty, even rapacious
Jew played into the disputes that arose later over royalties and contracts: Jews were about
money, smart but not to be trusted. "1^1
Harold Cruse, the man whose book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, did more to
bring about the demise of that alliance than any other work gives some evidence that the
blackattitude toward Jews as "rapacious" was based on something more than stereotypes.
Cruse, it should be remembered, was struggling to get his musical plays produced on
Broadway during the same period that Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry were being
cheated out of their royalties by the Chess Brothers. Ouse felt that the Negro had been
cheated out of his musical patrimony largely because of his own unfortunate experiences
in dealing with Jewish music producers in New York America has never "produced a
black Gershwin," according to Cruse, because Jewish "publishers have used and exploited
the Negro composer unmercifully. This pattern has continued up to the present. "1^1
Duke Ellington was denied a Pulitzer Prize in 1965, because, according to Cruse, "the
Gershwin-type musicians achieved status and recognition in the 1920s for music that they
literally stole outright from Harlem nightclubs. ... The role of the Negro, as entertainer,
has not changed since the 1920s. In 1967, the Negro entertainer is still being used,
manipulated, and exploited by whites (predominantly Jewish whites). "1^1
The talk about royalties obscures the role Jews played in the moral corruption of the
culture in general and of their musicians in particular. Jews inherited the term "race
music," but they soon stalled fiddling with die terminology and the music as a way of
making it more appealing to white audiences. Jerry Wexler, head of Adantic Records,
changed the term "race music" into "rhythm and blues," and Alan Freed, the Jewish disc
j ockey who was one of die biggest casualties of the payola scandal, did him one better by
changing "rhythm and blues" into "rock'n' roll."
Muddy Waters was never anything but a blues singer with a limited, racially defined
constituency on the South Side of Chicago. His successor at Chess Records, die man who
made race music acceptable to white teenagers, was Chuck Berry. As one indication of
his crossover appeal, ChuckBerry appeared on DickGarks Philadelphia-based TV show
for white teenagers, American Bandstand. As another indication, Jerry Wexler and
Ahmet Ehrtegun, the men who ran Adantic Records, "observed that the rhythm and blues
sound was changing to a more pop feel in response to the growing potential of the white
teenage market "1^21
On October 28, 1961 ChuckBerry lost his last appeal in a conviction for transporting a
minor across state lines for immoral purposes and went to prison. Cohodas claims that
"Leonard and Phil had been very concerned about Berry's troubles,' "IML but she goes on
to add that "Berry had no such memory in his rendition of events in his autobiography."
Cohodas goes out of her way to explain that the 14-year-old girl whom Chuck Berry
brought to St Louis for immoral purposes was an Apache Indian, which is to say, that she
was not white. Cadillac Records, however, dwells on Berry's sexual exploits with white
girls. In case the point of Berry's sexual adventures with white girls in the backseat of his
Cadillac might be lost on an audience that has come to expect this sort of behavior from
its musical idols, Cadillac Records deals with the political implications of Berry's music as
well. At the beginning of one conceit, the black and white teenagers are separated by red
velvet ropes. Once Berry's music kicks in, however, Dionysian frenzy ensues, and the
rope barriers are overwhelmed by one large mass of interracial gyrating teenagers,
some of whom come up on stage, to the consternation of the police, and start gyrating
with ChuckBerry.
The point of the Beny conceit vignette in Cadillac Records is to show how race music
fostered integration and the overturning of an unjust social order, but it also indicates that
the music itself had a morally corrupting influence on the teenagers, both blackand white,
who listened to it Race music began as a chronicle of the moral degradation which
followed the black migration from Mississippi to Chicago. It then morphed into a vehicle
for die moral corruption of white teenagers. If ChuckBerry was known as a purveyor of
"blackhillbilly" music, Elvis Presley was the mirror image of die same thing, a white guy
who sang life a Negro. Elvis became a household word in 1957, and it was in that same
year that Norman Mailer's essay 'The White Negro" appeared in die Partisan Review
Even though Mailer was talking about jazz and Beatniks, no one fit the white Negro bill
better than Elvis. Sam Philips, the man who was to Elvis and Sun Records what Leonard
Chess was to ChuckBerry and Chess Records, got the idea of musical miscegenation that
Beny and Chess were promoting and put it into practice from the perspective of a white
southerner who was as avid to make money off of teenagers as the Jews in Chicago were.
"White Youngsters," he claimed "weren't sure whether they ought to like it [race music]
or not" when black musicians performed the music. As a result, Philips "got thinking how
many records you could sell if you could find white perfonners who could play and sing
in this same exciting, alive way." Cohodas claims that "Disc jockey Alan Freed believed
the same thing, only he was cultivating a white market for die black performers who
made the music he loved as much as Philips did."I£il She also deals with the sexually
subversive nature of Berry's music by ascribing the very idea to southern racists.
Cohodas, however, concedes die point white southerners were trying to male on more
than one occasion. Berry, she tells us,
would have violated every racial-sexual taboo. Berry himself appreciated the
racial-sexual borders, if for no other reason than his occasional scrapes with southern
sheriffs angry and unsettled by his popularity among southern white women only too
happy to share his company. Sam Phillips had also understood, and perhaps in their
own way Leonard and Phil had tooJ-^1
The point of all of this music, in other words, was to violate "racial-sexual borders." At
a Bo Diddley concert in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, one of die sidemen jumped off
die stage only to fmd himself surrounded by white women eager to violate these racial-
sexual taboos. Sensing that "racial decorum had been violated," and diat moral subversion
was a prelude to revolution, the police, "all of them white," shut down the performance.
When Marshall Chess asked what was going on, he was called a "Jew N***er Lover," and
told "We're going to lockyou up and it will take diem weeks to fmd you."
By the time die Revolution arrived in Chicago, Leonard Chess discovered that he was
one of its first victims. By die late 1960s, die Soudi Side of Chicago was a dangerous place
for Polish immigrants. Chess was beaten by black assailants more than once. Cadillac
Records portrays Leonard's beating as politically motivated. Cohodas finds tiiis
inexplicable because Chess supported the NAACP, which she fails to see as a Jewish
organization which had enraged militant blacks by die time the '60s rolled around by its
duplicitous promotion of integration for blacks and ethnic solidarity for Jews.
The revolution always devours its own Jews, and die sexual revolution of die '60s, with
its Negro sound track, was no exception to this rule. The Chess Brothers had fomented a
revolution that was going to swallow them among its first victims. Sensing tiiat their time
had passed, Leonard Chess decided to sell out:
He told Marshall tiiat it was getting more and more difficult for white people to
own a company geared to black consumers. Jesse Jackson was pressuring Chess, j ust
as he was pressuring other companies that did business in the black community, to
hire blacks in senior positions
Corruption was a two-way street. Marshall Chess, Leonard's son, recalled being
shoe led when he learned that Willie Dixon had "two wives and two families. "IM1 "I don't
feel ifs no disgrace for a man because it's forty cows to one bull. "1^1 The record
business may have been good to Leonard and Phil, but it was not good for the next
generation of the Chess family. As a result of his involvement in the record business his
father had founded, Marshall Chess ended up a drug addict. His sister Susie died of a drug
overdose in 1973, and his only other sibling died in 1976 from complications following
surgery.
Leonard Chess died of a fatal heart attack on October 16, 1969. Two months later, as
some indication of how things had changed, Chicago police stormed Black Panther
headquarters and killed Fred Hampton.
Biographical Note
E. Michael Jones, editor of Culture Wars magazine, is the author of more than fifteen
books, several of which are available for Kindle, including:
Jewish Nazis
Requiem for a Whale Rider
L'affaire Williamson: The Catholic Church and Holocaust Denial
Abu Ghraib and The American Empire
Travels with Harley in Search of America: Motorcycles, War, Deracination, Consumer
Identity
Footnotes
Ill Nadine Cohodas, Spinning Blues into Gold: The Chess Brothers and the Legendary
Chess Records (New York St Martin’s Press, 2000).
121 Cohodas, p. 23.
01 Cohodas, p. 29.
01 Cohodas,p. 111.
01 Cohodas, p. 126.
121 Cohodas, p. 260.
Ill Cohodas, p. 277.
1M Ronald Madras, The Catholic Church and Antisemitism, Poland 1933-1939 (Chur:
Harwood, 1994), pp. 343-347.
121 Ibid.
1121 Ibid.
1111 http://www.j ewishtribalreview.org/1 Owhsla.htm, reposted at
http://www.rense.eom/Hencral32/j ewsandwhiteslavery .htm .
1121 Ibid.
1121 Leonard Fein, 1998, p. 21.
1121 http://www. j ewishtribalreview.ora / 1 Owhsla.htm .
lOlBristow, p. 56, cited in http://www.j ewishtribalreview.org/10whsla.htin .
1121 http://www.iewishtribab-evicw.orH/10whsla.htm .
liZllbid.
021 Ibid.
021 Ibid
1201 Ibid
1211 Ibid
1221 Ibid [BELL, p. 187].
1221 Ibid [BELL, p. 188],
1211 Ibid [FRIED, p. 55-56],
1221 Ibid
1201 Ibid [FISHER, E„ 1999, p. 293],
1221 Cohodas, p. 232.
1221 Cohodas, p. 51.
1221 ibid
1201 Henry Ford, The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem , a reprint of
articles appearing in the Dearborn Independent DS145, D5, A32.
1211 Ibid
1221 Ibid
1221 Ibid
1211 Ibid
1221 Ibid
1201 ibid
1221 ibid
1221 Ibid
1221 Ibid
1101 Ibid
1111 Ibid
1121 Cohodas, p. 4.
1121 Cohodas, p. 176.
1H1 Cohodas, p. 177.
1121 Cohodas, p. 174.
1421 Cohodas, p. 182.
14Z1 Cohodas, p. 174.
1421 Cohodas, p. 119.
1421 Cohodas, p. 93.
1421 Cohodas, p. 94.
1411 Cohodas, p. 309.
1521 Ibid.
1421 Cohodas, p. 95.
J4£L Cohodas, p. 4.
1441 Cohodas, p. 96.
1421 Cohodas, p. 110.
J4Z1 Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual , (New York William Morrow &
Company, 1967), pp. 69-70.
1421 Cruse, p. 108.
1421 Cohodas, p. 100.
1221 Cohodas, p. 207.
1211 Cohodas, p. 145.
1221 Cohodas, p. 148.
1241 Cohodas, p. 294.
ML Cohodas, p. 83.
Ml ibid.
Fidelity Press
206 Marquette Avenue
South Bend, Indiana 46617
© all rights reserved
To my children
Preface
Chapter One: Bishop Williamson
The Brunt
An Apology
The Right Questions
Personal Narrative
Thought Experiment
Conspiracy Nut
Administrative Decision
Non datur tertius
Chapter Two: Holocaust Denial and Thought Control and Deborah Lipstadt
Bigger Issue
Hired to Get Money
Chapter Three: Bishop Williamson at the End of His Tether
The Priest Crisis in Ireland
The Church and Her Enemies
Mavnooth f Ireland, June 19 f 2010
The Mavnooth Conference
GIFT and Dignitas Personae #12
New Light
Back and Forth
The Only Thing
Biographical Note
Preface
On Thursday, January 22, 2009, within minutes of the leaking on the internet of the announcement that the
excommunications of the four Society of St. Pius X bishops were to be lifted, reports that Bishop Richard Williamson was a
“Holocaust denier” began circulating on the web as well. These reports referred to an interview conducted months before in
Germany but to be broadcast the following day on Swedish TV.
In spite of the Vatican’s efforts to the contrary, news reports kept confusing the Catholic Church’s focus on the sin of
schism with the media world’s focus on the unforgivable secular sin, i.e., “Holocaust denial” and anti-Semitism.
Holocaust denial is another word for Jewish control of discourse, in particular historical discourse, in particular
historical discourse about World War II. If a historian publishes something that a powerful Jew, which is to say a Jew with
powerful backers, dislikes, that person will be punished. If the person in question lives by writing books, as David Irving once
did, the Lipstadt brigade will get him blacklisted in the publishing industry. If the person in question is a professor, the big
Jews will try to get him fired, as Deborah Lipstadt herself did in the case of Professor David O’Connell. In that instance,
Lipstadt failed, but David O’Connell’s case is not typical in this regard.
More typical is the case of Norman Finkelstein, who was fired from his job at DePaul University in Chicago. The fact
that Finkelstein was a Jew himself doesn’t matter. It’s the big Jews, in this case Alan Dershowitz, who decide who is to live
and who is to die in academe and publishing. Finkelstein wrote a devastating critique of Dershowitz’s book The Case for
Israel, and, as a result, Dershowitz set out to destroy Finkelstein’s career.
January 2012
Chapter One: Bishop Williamson
“Christianity clears up the mystery which hangs over Judaism, accounting fully for the punishment of the people by
specifying their sin, their heinous sin. If, instead of hailing their own Messiah, they crucified Him, then the strange
scourge which has pursued them after the deed, and the energetic wording of the curse before it, are explained by the
very strangeness of their guilt; - or rather, their sin is their punishment; for in rejecting their Divine King, they ipso
facto lost their living principle and their nationality.”
John Henry Cardinal Newman
An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent
“Oh, you’re German. I’m sorry. I thought there was something wrong with you.”
Basil Fawlty
Fawlty Towers
“Well, the police may come for Richard W illi am s on and hand him over for deportation proceedings.
Thomas W. Case, “The Society of Pius X Gets Sick,” Fidelity, October 1992
On Wednesday, January 21, 2009, in the middle of the week which the Church has traditionally used to promote
Christian unity, Pope Benedict XVI signed a letter announcing that he intended to lift the excommunications imposed on the
bishops in charge of the Society of St. Pius X, taking a major step toward ending the almost 21-year old schism that began on
June 30, 1988 when Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, along with Bishop Antonio Castro de Mayer, illicitly consecrated Bernard
Fellay, Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, Alfonso de Galaretta, and Richard Williamson in a ceremony at the SSPX seminary in
Econe, Switzerland. On July 1, 1988, one day after the illicit consecrations, Cardinal Bernardin Gantin, the then head of the
Congregation of Bishops in Rome, announced that all six men had incurred excommunication latae sententiae, the penalty laid
down in the revised Code of Canon Law, Canon 1382, for directly participating in an episcopal consecration in the absence of
a papal mandate.
According to the January 21, 2009 document, Bishop Fellay, the Superior General of the Society had written in
December to Cardinal Dario Castrillon-Hoyos, Prefect of the Ecclesia Dei commission, requesting the removal of the
excommunications. Fellay claimed that, “We are always firmly determined in our will to remain Catholic and to place all our
efforts at the service of the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ, which is the Roman Catholic Church. We accept its teachings with
filial animus. We believe firmly in the Primacy of Peter and its prerogatives, and for this the current situation makes us suffer
so much.”
Pope Benedict decided to lift the excommunications in order to promote unity in the Church: “This gift of peace at the
end of the Christmas celebrations, is also intended to be a sign to promote unity in the charity of the universal Church and to try
to vanquish the scandal of division.” (“With peace like this,” we can imagine the pope muttering to himself a few days later,
“who needs war?”)
Serious efforts to end the Lefebvre schism began in April 2005, when Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger became pope. Cardinal
Ratzinger had always been sympathetic to widespread use of the old Mass, a cause dear to traditionalists. Two years into his
pontificate Benedict lifted all remaining restrictions on the celebration of the Vetus Ordo , when he issued the motu proprio
Summorum Pontificium on July 7, 2007.
Bishop Fellay met with Pope Benedict at Castel Gandolfo on August 29, 2005, only four months after Benedict’s
election, and from that moment discussions started in earnest for the removal of the excommunications. On June 4, 2008,
Cardinal Castrillon-Hoyos set several conditions to be met by the SSPX to facilitate a lifting of the excommunications. All of
them had to do with schism, which is based on lack of charity; none of them had anything remotely to do with the Holocaust.
In November 2008 Bishop Fellay led a pilgrimage to Lourdes, during which he asked the faithful to pray the rosary to
have the excommunications lifted. On January 21, 2009 his prayers were answered when he received the letter from Giovanni
Battista Re remitting the excommunications. Re mentioned in his letter that the gesture was intended “to be a sign to promote
unity in the charity of the universal Church and to try to end the scandal of division.” Re also mentioned the hope that this
gesture would “be followed by the prompt accomplishment of full communion with the Church of the entire Society of St. Pius
X, thus testifying true fidelity and true recognition of the Magisterium and of the authority of the Pope with the proof of visible
unity.”
Bishop Fellay responded by expressing his “filial gratitude to the Holy Father for this gesture,” which he hoped would
help “to remedy the unprecedented crisis which presently shakes the Catholic world, and which Pope John Paul II had
designated as a state of‘silent apostasy.’” The message of the pope’s gesture was clear to Fellay: “Tradition will no longer be
stigmatized.”
“Thanks to this gesture,” Fellay continued, “Catholics attached to Tradition throughout the world will no longer be
unjustly stigmatized and condemned for having kept the Faith of their fathers. Catholic tradition is no longer excommunicated.
Though it never was in itself, it was often excommunicated and cruelly so in day to day events.” In his response, Fellay
stressed his and the SSPX’s loyalty, as well as a willingness to work toward resolving:
the unprecedented crisis which is shaking the Church today: crisis of vocations, crisis of religious
practice, of catechism, of the reception of the sacraments ... Before us Paul VI went so far as to say that
"from some fissure the smoke of Satan had entered the Church," and he spoke of the "self-destruction of
the Church." John Paul II did not hesitate to say that Catholicism in Europe was, as it were, in a state of
"silent apostasy." Shortly before his election to the Throne of Peter, B XVI compared the Church to a "boat
taking water on every side." We are ready to write the Creed with our own blood, to sign the anti¬
modernist oath, the profession of faith of Pius IV, we accept and make our own all the councils up to the
Second Vatican Council about which we express some reservations.
Some pundits, however, felt there was a contradiction between the two assertions, i.e., between professions of loyalty
and recognition that an “unprecedented crisis is shaking the Church today.” Neoconservative George Weigel was one of those
pundits. Weigel took issue with Fellay’s reservations about Vatican II, claiming that “Responsible canon lawyers have raised
questions about whether this arrogance [reservations about Vatican II] on the part of Bishop Fellay does not cast in question his
fulfillment of the canonical requirements for a lawful lifting of his excommunication.” (George Weigel, Newsweek, “Rome’s
Reconciliation: Did the pope heal or deepen the Lefebvre schism? www.newsweek.com/id/181721/).
Weigel puts in words a spectre which would go on to haunt the entire discussion surrounding the lifting of the
excommunications, namely, the fact that in some circles of the Church the profession of faith had been replaced by a profession
of faith in Vatican II. Vatican II was not just one council among many, according to this view. At some point during the past 50
years it had become a shibboleth and the sine qua non of church membership. Once it had been proposed as the substitute for
the Creed, Vatican II then got reduced to the documents which were supposed to support the political agenda of the person
doing the reducing. In the case of American neocons like Weigel, the Catholic Faith, became by way of synecdoche, Vatican II
statements on the Jews and religious liberty. If Bishop Fellay expressed reservations about Vatican II, this was an indication in
Weigel’s mind “that the healing has not taken place... . Moreover, Fellay’s letter raises the stakes for everyone, and to the
highest level. For what is at issue now, is the integrity of the Church’s self-understanding, which must include the authenticity
of the teaching of Vatican II.” Weigel found it difficult “to see how the unity of the Catholic Church will be advanced if the
Lefebvrist faction does not publicly and unambiguously affirm Vatican Council II’s teaching on the nature of the church, on
religious freedom, and on the sin of anti-Semitism”
“How,” Weigel wondered in a comment to The Washington Post, “does this advance the unity of the church if they are
reconciled [without embracing church positions on religious freedom and anti-Semitism?] This really has the possibility of
unraveling a lot of the accomplishments of the John Paul and Benedict periods if not handled well.” All of the themes were
introduced in the overture of this opera, which would revolve around but not resolve the related issues of tradition and anti-
Semitism Was anti-Semitism part of the Catholic DNA? Did Vatican II trump the Gospel of St. John? Or did it have to be read
in the light of the Gospels?
On Thursday, January 22, within minutes of the leaking on the internet of the announcement that the excommunications of
the four bishops were to be lifted, reports that Bishop Williamson was a “Holocaust denier” began circulating on the web as
well. These reports referred to an interview conducted months before in Germany but to be broadcast the following day on
Swedish TV.
In his interview, Williamson did not deny the suffering of the Jewish people at the hands of the Nazi regime, but he did
question the details of the Holocaust narrative, concerning the numbers of people who died at Auschwitz and how they died. In
doing this he broke the law in Germany and earned himself the epithet “Holocaust denier.”
“Pope Rehabilitates Holocaust Denier” is the headline Reuters used to frame the issue. Once the issue got framed that
way, the intent of the story became clear. L ’affaire Williamson was born as a combination of the Danish cartoon story and the
media-orchestrated uproar among Muslims over the pope’s Regensburg speech. The “Pope Rehabilitates Holocaust Denier”
incident was a replay of the media-inspired frenzy, which took place in the wake of the pope’s September 2006 Regensburg
speech, over the pope’s quote from Emperor Manuel Paleologos. Once the term “Holocaust denier” got broached, the story
took on a life of its own, and that life had nothing to do with the pope’s intention, namely, to heal a schism and promote unity.
In fact, before long it became clear that the point of this story was to prevent the schism from being healed by proposing a
counter-morality based on a counter-magisterium based on the dogmas of political correctness.
In spite of the Vatican’s efforts to the contrary, news reports kept confusing the church’s focus on the sin of schism with
the media world’s focus on the unforgivable secular sin, i.e., “Holocaust denial” and anti-Semitism. The media could be
forgiven for their ignorance in light of the fact that theologians were failing to make the appropriate distinctions too. Wolfgang
Beinert, a student of the pope who now occupies the same chair the pope held at the University of Regensburg, faulted his
former mentor for breaking what he termed a 2000-year old tradition in the Church. Up until a week ago, Ratzinger’s successor
at Regensburg opined, “Groups which stood in contradiction to the pope had to recant their positions before they were
readmitted to the church.” Beinert here seems to be referring to the “sin” of Holocaust denial rather than the sin of schism
because, he “doubts that Rome was unaware of Williamson’s views.” Beinert was evidently unaware that the bishops had
signed a statement repudiating schism. Either that, or he considered holocaust denial a greater sin. If Catholics were confused it
was understandable. Evidently even theologians were having a hard time keeping their sins straight.
The Swedish TV interview had been in the can for months but it got released within minutes of the announcement that the
pope intended to lift the excommunications. Sources close to the SSPX in Sweden had been warning them during the fall of
2008 that they were being set up by the TV journalist Ali Fegan and the people associated with the Swedish National TV show
“Uppdrag granskning ” (“Mission Examination”). The SSPX’s Father Morgan, however, continued cooperating evidently
feeling that Swedish National Television was interested in filming the ordination of the Swedish SSPX seminarian Sten
Sandmarks at the SSPX seminary in Zaitskofen, Bavaria, which is where Bishop Williamson was interviewed on November 1,
2008 when he made his comments about how many people died in Auschwitz. Evidence that Williamson trusted the Swedish
film crew is evident on the film itself when Williamson says, naively, “You realize you can get me in prison for that. I hope
that is not your intention.”
Once Fegan and the “ Uppdrag granskining ” crew had Williamson’s interview in the can they traveled around Sweden
showing it to the various groups which rented their facilities to the SSPX claiming that if they continued to rent their facilities
to the SSPX they would be indicted as Holocaust deniers as well. The Anglican Church in Stockholm succumbed to these
pressures and canceled their contract with the SSPX.
Not content to leave it at that, the “Uppdrag grans killing” crew then showed the Williamson film clip to other SSPX
clergymen, putting them in the unenviable situation of either denouncing Bishop Williamson in public or incriminating
themselves in the crime of “Holocaust denial.” According to the same source which tried to warn the SSPX in the fall of 2008,
holocaust denial is “here in Sweden the worst sin and crime you can possibly commit, according to the gramscian-leftist
Jewish-owned Swedish media establishment.” The word of the set up had gone out through the SSPX by late November or
early December. We know this because the same source wrote that “I hope and pray that this TV-program will not be
broadcasted [sic] before Christmas-then we would have some time to prepare ourselfs [sz'c] for this fight.”
Italian journalists writing for II Reformista and II Giornale were claiming that the Williamson affair was the result of a
conspiracy between Ali Fegan and the Swedish national TV network and the French journalist and Fesbian activist Fiametta
Vernier who had written a book, Les Nouveaux Soldats du pape, attacking the SSPX in France and an unnamed official in the
Vatican, with good contacts in Scandinavia, who wanted to thwart the re-union. The bishop of Sweden, Anders Arborelius,
OCD, was no friend of the SSPX in Sweden and clearly upset by the SSPX’s campaign to reconvert Sweden back to the
Catholic faith. Arborelius spoke of inclusivity as the chief characteristic of Catholicism, something clearly at odds with racism
and intolerance, which he seemed to imply was motivating the SSPX in its attempts to convert the Swedes. By the end of the
first week of the controversy, Vatican Spokesman Federico Fombardi was one of the few people who still claimed that the
timing of the reversal of Williamson’s excommunication and the Swedish broadcast were “absolutely unrelated.”
The folks at “ Uppdrag granskning ,” however, had bigger fish to fry than disrupting the SSPX’s Christmas holiday or
defending Swedes from proselytism. The fact that the interview showed up on the internet within minutes of the announcement
lifting the excommunications showed that the timing was intended to disrupt the healing of the Fefebvre schism, something that
became obvious when the Anti-Defamation Feague got involved in the story.
On January 23, one day before the announcement was officially promulgated, the ADF issued a press release whose
intent, to thwart the lifting of the excommunications, was clear from their headline: “ADF to Vatican: Do Not Rehabilitate
Holocaust Denier Bishop.” When the first ADF press release failed to derail the lifting of the excommunications, the ADF
followed up one day later with another press release: “ADF disappointed in Pope’s Decision to Rehabilitate Holocaust Denier
Bishop.” In the second ADF press release on the Williamson incident, Foxman claimed that Benedict’s decision to lift the
excommunications “undermines the strong relationship between Catholics and Jews that flourished under Pope John Paul II and
which Benedict said he would continue when he came into his papacy.” Foxman then mentioned Vatican II and “the centuries-
long history of anti-Semitism in the Church,” which Vatican II was supposed to redress, claiming that Pope Benedict’s action
was “a most troubling setback.”
If anyone had any doubts about the purpose behind the ADF press releases, Charlotte Knoblauch, president of the
German Council of Jews, laid them to rest when she told the Rheinische Post in Germany, “I would like an outcry in the church
against such actions from the pope.”
Der Spiegel, Germany’s socialist weekly, then began orchestrating that outcry, putting the pope on the cover of the next
week’s issue along with the claim that the “German pope had embarrassed the Church.” In the January 26, 2009 issue of
Spiegel Online International, Rabbi David Rosen, head of the American Jewish Committee, was quoted as saying, “In
welcoming an open Holocaust denier into the Catholic Church without any recantation on his part, the Vatican has made a
mockery of John Paul II’s moving and impressive repudiation and condemnation of anti-Semitism” The vice president of the
Central Council of Jews, Dieter Graumann, accused the pope of an “incomprehensible act of provocation. The fact that it is of
all things a German pope who conjured up this new ice age between Jews and the Catholic Church ... that is something
particularly painful, astonishing, and deplorable.”
Germany’s newspapers then followed the lead set by the world’s major Jewish organizations, which is to say, they
condemned the pope’s actions via appeals to Vatican II and invidious comparisons between Benedict and his predecessor, as
when the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote: “it remains a mystery why the pope is now making such concessions to the
fanatical opponents of the Second Vatican Council, that he is making a mockery of his predecessor John Paul II’s insistence on
obedience to the teachings of the church and to the pope.”
Two weeks after the pope signed the letter lifting the excommunications, Der Spiegel was still on his case, this time for
appointing Gerhard Maria Wagner as auxiliary bishop in Linz. Wagner had earned the ire of Spiegel because he has “a knack
for inappropriate comments,” including “claiming in 2005 in a parish newsletter” that “Hurricane Katrina was an act of ‘divine
retribution’ for New Orleans’ permissive ways.” Wagner had similarly inappropriate views about Harry Potter books and the
tsunami in Thailand. Taken altogether these views rendered Wagner unacceptable as a bishop, according to Der Spiegel.
All of this raises the question: why does Spiegel have a dog in this fight? Who gave a socialist magazine in Germany
veto rights over who the pope appoints as auxiliary bishop in Linz? Does this mean the Church has veto rights the next time a
Spiegel sympathizer like Guenther Grass gets nominated for a Nobel Prize?
Before long, anyone who had an agenda and was willing to dump on the pope got a hearing in the German press. On a
normal news day at Der Spiegel, Hans Kueng was treated with dismissive condescension if not contempt. Years ago, Spiegel
reported on a phone call Kueng received after Pope John Paul I died. A Vatican official was on the other end of the line
wondering if Kueng would like to become pope. After considering the proposition for a moment Kueng declined the honor,
explaining “If I were pope, I’d no longer be infallible.”
But that was then. Now Der Spiegel was rehabilitating Kueng Germany’s great prophet, and Kueng responded by
producing what had to be the most moronic piece of journalism generated by the entire Williamson affair, namely, “If Obama
were Pope.” “It is no coincidence that the Pope celebrated his 81st birthday in the White House,” Kueng hinted darkly. “Both
Bush and Ratzinger are unteachable in matters of birth control and abortion, disinclined to implement any serious reforms,
arrogant and without transparency in the way in which they exercise their office, restricting freedoms and human rights.” By
lifting the schism. Pope Benedict “has co nfi rmed all the fears which arose when he was elected pope.” Before long, Kueng’s
agenda came to the fore: “What would a Pope do who acted in the spirit of Obama?” Well, he would do what Hans Kueng has
been complaining about for decades now, namely, “he could authorize contraception over night, permit the marriage of priests,
make possible the ordination of women and allow eucharistic fellowship with Protestant churches.” What all this had to do
with Holocaust denial or schism wasn’t immediately clear. What was clear, though, was Spiegel’s attempt to mobilize Hans
Kueng’s German fifth column as a way of weakening the pope’s authority. The veiled threat was becoming clearer with each
intemperate outburst: admit the SSPX and the German Left will leave the Church.
Reaction from Germany was vehement to the point of hysteria. It was as if the fact that the pope was German somehow
obliged them to be anti-Catholic in the same way that the Holocaust obliged them to be anti-German. Beyond that, there was the
undeniable fact that Germany had criminalized the thought crime of Holocaust denial in 1994. If the pope failed to condemn
“Holocaust denial,” it put German Catholics in legal jeopardy, but did Germany have a jail big enough for 20 million
Catholics? That seemed a bit far-fetched. But the thought of revocation of the “ Kirchensteuer ,” the tax money the German
government paid to the Church, was enough to send shivers down the spines of theologians and bishops. Hence, the uproar.
Walter Cardinal Kasper tried to play the whole thing down, attributing the biggest church-state crisis in Germany since the
Reformation to “management errors.” But the theologians were having none of this.
Hermann Haering, a liberal German Catholic theologian, said that the Pope should resign “for the good of the Church.”
Werner Thissen, bishop of Hamburg, claimed that the lifting of the excommunications had led to “a loss of confidence in the
pope.” Christoph Schoenborn, bishop of Vienna, came close to claiming that Bishop Williamson had committed the
unforgivable sin, when he opined that “he who denies the Holocaust cannot be rehabilitated within the Church.” Gerhard
Ludwig Mueller, the bishop in Pope Benedict’s home city of Regensburg, outdid Schoenborn in fraternal charity by announcing
that Williamson would not be welcome in its churches.
The lack of support that the pope had among his fellow German bishops became even more apparent when their
spokesman Matthias Kopp appeared on German television. Matthias Kopp claimed that because Pope John Paul II signed a
concordat with Israel in 1993 (an agreement, by the way, which Israel has yet to honor) the Church has obligated itself to “fight
every form of anti-Semitism.” Kopp, however, failed to define even one form of anti-Semitism, thereby playing into the hands
of organizations like the ADL. “Every form of anti-Semitism” (jede Form des Antisemitismus) long ago became another word
for Jewish hegemony over the Church because the operative definition of anti-Semitism invariably ends up be the definition
promoted by groups like the ADL and Abe Foxman. This means that the Church must adopt Jewish categories in its internal
governance, which in turn means that schism takes a back seat to “Holocaust denial” when it comes to defining the gravity of
the sin.
Kopp pressed further into the theological equivalent of terra incognita when he asserted that the Church had to censure
Bishop Williamson, because combating “every form of anti-Semitism” now “belongs to the Magisterium of the Church” (“Das
sind Elemente, die zur Lehre der Kirche dazitgehoeren “). The press secretary of the German Bishops’ Conference claimed
that the Holocaust was now part of Catholic dogma. Taking his cue on Church teaching from a law which was passed in
Germany in 1994, Kopp concludes that “the Holocaust cannot be denied.” The reasoning goes as follows: “The Holocaust is
not denied by the Church. Therefore, a bishop who has returned to the Church after 20 years of schism cannot deny the
holocaust.... He must conform to the teaching of the Church” (“Also hat er sich der Lehre der Kirche anzupassen. “)
(Kreuz.net Monday, January 26, 2009). The fact that Kopp lives in a country which has outlawed historical research on certain
topics does not change the fact that the Church can pronounce infallibly on matters of faith and morals but has no mandate
whatsoever to pass judgments on historical matters like how many people died in concentration camps and how they died, the
matters which Bishop Williamson brought up in his interview. In matters where she cannot speak authoritatively, the Church
allows the faithful to form their own opinions, everywhere it seems but in Germany.
Spiegel accused the Vatican of having an “an apparent tin ear” (a phrase which probably lost something in the
translation) on matters dealing with the Jews, homosexuals, women, etc. etc., and as an example of this “tin ear” mentioned
“moves to have the war-time Pope Pius XII, who is accused by some of having turned a blind eye to the mass deportation and
murder of Jews, named a saint.”
The status of Pius XII was especially apropos in this regard. I’m tempted to say that his cause has been in Limbo ever
since the Jews objected, except that Pope Benedict XVI doesn’t believe in Limbo. The status of the causes of Pius XII and
Father Dehon crossed my mind while attending a lecture by Archbishop Angelo Amato, prefect for the Congregation for the
Causes of the Saints, who spoke on Secularism in Europe at Notre Dame, the same week / ’affaire Williamson was raging in
the press. Rather than listen to the archbishop shadow box with secularism, it would have been much more interesting to hear
him explain how organized Jewry (hereafter, the Jews) had gained veto power over whom the Catholics were allowed to name
as saints. The case of Pius XII, whose canonization is on hold, as well as the still unresolved case of Father Dehon, whose
canonization was postponed because the Jews accused him of anti-Semitism, are only two cases in point. What implications
did this stance have for church unity throughout history? Would it be possible, I wondered, for St. John Chrysostom to be
canonized by the Church today? Certainly not, if Adversos Iudeos had to be vetted by the Italian Rabbis or Abe Foxman.
The unspoken but all-pervasive issue at the heart of / ’affaire Williamson came down to a question of who was running
the Catholic Church and whose dogmas had the final say in Church governance. Did Jewish concern over holocaust denial
trump what Canon 1382 had to say about schism? If so why? Or were the Jews simply using this as an excuse to promote more
division in the Church? Williamson himself had said on Dioscopirs.blogspot.com that “the media uproar was surely timed and
orchestrated to block the decree.” The Jews, once again, were promoting division. Since the lifting of the excommunications
was only the first step in repairing the Lefebvrite schism, the media attack was meant to ensure that that complete reconciliation
would not happen.
Undeterred by the ADL’s threat and their orchestration of the world media against the Church, the Vatican released the
letter lifting the excommunications on Saturday, January 24. The Vatican’s initial statements showed calm and resolve by trying
to separate the two issues the Jews and the world press were determined to conflate, namely, schism and holocaust denial.
“This act regards the lifting of the excommunications, period,” Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi told reporters, “It
has nothing to do with the personal opinions of one person, which are open to criticism, but are not pertinent to this decree.”
On January 28 at the end of his general audience on Wednesday, the pope reiterated the reasons that led to the lifting of
the excommunications, none of which had anything to do with the Holocaust or how many people died or how they died:
Precisely in order to fulfill the service of unity, which distinguished in a special way my ministry as
Successor of Peter, I decided a number of days ago to grant the remission of the excommunication that four
bishops had incurred when they were ordained by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1988 without a pontifical
mandate. I carried out this action of paternal tenderness because these bishops had repeatedly expressed
to me their acute suffering over the situation in which they found themselves. I hope that this gesture of
mine will be followed by concerted effort on their part to take the further steps necessary to realize full
communion with the Church, testifying in this way to their true fidelity and true recognition of the
magisterium and authority of the Pope and of Vatican Council II.
He concluded his daily Wednesday audience by saying that he wanted to “express my full and indisputable solidarity
with our Brothers and Sisters who received the First Covenant, I trust that the memory of the Shoah will induce humankind to
reflect upon the unpredictable power of evil when it conquers the heart of man.”
The reports in the press invariably involved a skewing of the pope’s words. Michelle Boorstein, writing for the
Washington Post, wrote that Benedict told “pilgrims in his weekly audience in Vatican City that he feels ‘full and
indisputable’ solidarity with Jews and repudiating the idea of denying the Holocaust.”
“If the pope is in full solidarity with the Jews,” one Catholic wondered after reading the report in the Washington Post,
“where does that leave us [Catholics]? Should we all become Jews?”
Boorstein went on to claim that Williamson “denied that the Holocaust occurred” when in fact (as she herself mentioned)
his statements, however, lamentable, had to do with numbers and technicalities. The pope fared no better in Boorstein’s
account, an account full of misrepresentations like the following:
In his short tenure as pope, Benedict has caused concerns among other faith leaders before. He sparked
deadly riots across the Muslim world in 2006 by citing a 14th century characterization of the prophet
Muhammad as "evil and inhuman." Jewish groups protested in 2007 when he expanded use of traditional
liturgy-a priority among groups such as St. Pius X -that on Good Friday called for Catholics to pray for "the
faithless Jews." After protests, the next year he required all Catholics to remove the word "faithless."
(Washington Post, January 28, 2009 "Pope voices support for Jews, rejects Holocaust denial.")
The Boorstein account in the Washington Post blundered from one error to another. At a certain point it became difficult
to dismiss her ineptitude as simple incompetence. “Catholic officials,” Boorstein continued, “say anti-Semitic comments by
any of the bishops, while possibly abhorrent, are not heretical.” The statement ignored the fact that no one in the Church had
raised the issue of (much less defined the term) anti-Semitism, nor had anyone explained how questioning the details of how
Jews died was anti-Semitic, according to any definition of the term
As the volume of the outcry increased, Vatican resolve began to crumble, and comment began to proliferate, making a
bad situation worse. As if to show that Rome could shoot itself in the foot without the help of the Washington Post,
L’Osservatore Romano published an article by An na Foa, a Jewish professor of history at the University of Rome “Za
Sapienza ,” on the topic of “ Negazionismo ,” the Italian term for Holocaust denial. Foa’s article, “Anti-Semitism is the only
motive of the Deniers,” was so apodictic it made papal bulls look like models of empirical induction by comparison. In
contrast to the measured approach of Raul Hilberg, the Jewish dean of Holocaust studies, Foa, offering no evidence other than
her ability as a mind reader, dismissed David Irving’s credentials as an historian. She went on to claim that “Anti-Jewish
hatred is at the origin of this denial. ... There is only one motive, one intention, behind denial of the Holocaust: antisemtism.
All the rest is lies.”
On January 27, 2009, Bishop Bernard Fellay, the Superior General of the Society of St. Pius X, joined the Vatican’s
efforts at damage control when he announced that Bishop Williamson had been silenced. “Our Society claims no authority over
historical or other secular matters,” Fellay wrote. If so, then it was not clear why the Society was silencing him, since what
Williamson said could not be construed as heretical or contrary to faith or morals. Again it came down to a question of who
had the right to declare an action sinful, the Church or the World.
Writing from a traditionalist perspective, Christopher Ferrara had similar difficulties distinguishing between what the
Church considers important and where she leaves her children the freedom to make up their own minds. Ferrara took issue
with Andrew Rabel, who claimed
The SSPX reverts to the penalties given by Rome prior to the episcopal consecrations and all four
bishops in the Society remain suspended a divinis. The society remains a group of Catholics in an irregular
state. No chapel of the SSPX in the world is in communion with the Universal Church, and its priests sharing
in the suspension are deprived of the clerical state (a separate matter from the validity of their
ordinations). They cannot offer the sacraments of matrimony and penance validly because that requires
faculties from a local bishop... But a significant hurdle in the way of full ecclesial communion for the Society,
appears to have been removed.
Ferrara disputed the claims made by both George Weigel and Andrew Rabel, that the society remained in “an irregular
state” but in so doing involved himself in bizarre self-contradictions. Ferrara claimed that the pope’s action proved that the
SSPX was never in schism in the first place, a claim which causes one to wonder why Ferrara is rejoicing at the lifting of the
excommunications. In trying to explain his position, Ferrara only confuses the issue, as for instance when he writes:
To begin with, it can no longer be said by anyone in good faith that the four surviving bishops of the
Society are "in schism." Further, those who have spent the past twenty years calumniating the priests and
lay adherents of the Society as "schismatics" have finally been deprived of even the pretense of a canonical
basis for this insult.
Well ,which is it? If there was nothing irregular about the state of the SSPX, why are we all rejoicing at the lifting of the
excommunications? Brian Mershon attempted to bring clarity to the situation by writing to Msgr. Camille Perl, vice president
of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, who responded on May 23, 2008. In response to the question of whether the society
is in schism, Perl refers to the Episcopal ordinations as “schismatic” but then adds
While it is true that participation in the Mass at chapels of the Society of St. Pius X does not of itself
constitute "formal adherence to the schism" (cf. Ecclesia Dei 5, c), such adherence can come about over a
period of time as one slowly imbibes a schismatic mentality which separates itself from the teaching of the
Supreme Pontiff and the entire Catholic Church. While we hope and pray for a reconciliation with the
Society of St. Pius X, the Pontifical Commission "Ecclesia Dei" cannot recommend that members of the
faithful frequent their chapels for the reasons which we have outlined above. We deeply regret this
situation and pray that soon a reconciliation of the Society of St. Pius X with the Church may come about,
but until such time the explanations which we have given remain in force.
If the SSPX is not in schism now because of the lifting of the excommunications, then it would logically follow that they
were in schism before the excommunications were lifted. But Ferrara can’t bring himself to state either proposition clearly.
Instead he argues that
in justice the Society and its one million adherents must now be seen by everyone as a bona fide
"ecclesial movement" within the Catholic Church, with any remaining issues being precisions of canonical
regularity to be resolved by further decrees.
Ferrara can’t have it both ways. By claiming that the SSPX was not in an irregular situation before the lifting of the
excommunications, he nullifies the point which the lifting of the excommunications made. But if what he says about schism is
true, why did he add the word “now” to the previous passage? If there were no problems, why were there excommunications?
If there was no lifting of the excommunications, why is Ferrara rejoicing?
The Brunt
Ferrara focuses the brunt of his attack on Bishop Williamson and accuses him of being a holocaust denier. In canonical
terms this is known as straining at the gnat but swallowing the camel. Ferrara can’t seem to distinguish between schism, which
is a grave sin according to the authentic teaching of the Church, and discussions of how many people died in World War II and
how they died, which, no matter how inane or unfounded these views might be, do not rise to the level of excommunicable
offense, not in the Catholic Church at least. In order to have his excommunication lifted, Bishop Fellay had to make “the
commitment to avoid every public intervention which does not respect the person of the Floly Father and which may be
negative to ecclesial charity.” It is a phrase that may have given Ferraro pause, but if so, not for long because Ferrara goes on
to excuse his own attacks on the “conciliar popes” as
in keeping with the due liberty of the members of the Mystical Body, and indeed their duty to speak out
when they believe in conscience that the common good of the Church is being harmed, even should that
harm involve acts or omissions of the Supreme Pontiff himself.
Ferrara then goes on to impose the canons of political correctness on any traditionalist who doubts the conventional
narrative of World War II. In fact, he continues,
It is time, then, for traditionalists to repudiate the inadmissible opinions of Bishop Richard Williamson,
with due respect for his dignity as a descendant of the Apostles. For the good of the Church we must make
it clear that the Bishop's opinions are not those of the worldwide "traditionalist movement" (if we must call
it that). Above all, we must not allow the Society or the movement as a whole to be draped with the
albatross of the Bishop's opinion on how many Jews perished at the hands of the Nazis.
Traditionalism, as espoused by Ferrara, is the Catholic world turned upside down. In this world it’s acceptable to be a
schism denier, but when it comes to thought crimes like “Holocaust denial,” traditionalists of the Ferrara stripe are far less
tolerant. This is precisely the attitude Msgr. Perl warned against when he wrote that “over a period of time ... one slowly
imbibes a schismatic mentality which separates itself from the teaching of the Supreme Pontiff and the entire Catholic Church.”
Traditionalists, in other words, can engage in all of the attacks on the papacy which Bishop Fellay had to abjure in order to
have the excommunications lifted, as long as they tow the line on political correctness:
Therefore, not only this newspaper [The Remnant], but every journal of traditional Catholic opinion, and
above all the Society itself, must clearly and unequivocally declare — as I do here and now — that
Holocaust revisionism, wacky conspiracy theories, and other such nonsense will have no part in the
traditionalist movement.
Ferrara’s formulation of the issue is deeply schismatic in its orientation. Who cares about the so-called “traditionalist
movement” or what its self-appointed leaders teach, or who they want to exclude from their “movement”? By defining
themselves as a “movement,” the traditionalists have separated themselves from the Church. The real issue is what the Catholic
Church teaches, not what needs to be done to police “the movement.”
Now that Ferrara has brought up the term in a theological context, what exactly is holocaust revisionism? Do Catholics
now have to accept the Hitler’s diaries as authentic? What about the stories of lampshades made out of the skin of Jewish
concentration camp inmates? What about the flaming pits which gave the name to the holocaust? What about the electrocution
and head-bashing machines? What about the touching story of the all-Negro 761st tank battalion which liberated the Jewish
inmates of Buchenwald, as depicted on the PBS documentary “Liberators”? Was that part of the Holocaust narrative? If so, it
was exposed as a hoax by Jeffrey Goldberg and others in the New York Times , which had previously given serious, if naive,
coverage to this story. What about the equally touching story of love in the concentration camps that was recounted on Oprah
and exposed as a hoax the week before l’affaire Williamson broke? Professor David O’Connell was accused of going to “the
brink of Holocaust DeniaP’ by none other than thought cop Deborah Lipstadt for writing an article in Culture Wars about the
inconsistencies in Elie Wiesel’s holocaust narrative Night. Who knew that literary criticism could land you in jail?
Ferrara loses sight of the big issue in his rush to turn Bishop Williamson over to the thought police. The big issue at the
heart of the Williamson affair is religious. It has to do with which religion is true: Christianity or what Rabbi Jacob Neusner
referred to as “the Judaism of Holocaust and Redemption.” Elie Wiesel made the situation clear in 1971 when he claimed that
“The sincere Christian knows that what died in Auschwitz was not the Jewish people but Christianity.” L 'affaire Williamson
was an attempt on the part of the world’s Jewish organizations to force the pope to accept their dogmas as normative for
Catholics. It was an attempt to force Christians to accept what St. Paul in Titus 1:14 refers to as “Jewish fables” as superior to
Christian dogmas. This is not to deny the reality of Jewish suffering during World War II. This admission, however, must be
joined to a similar concession, namely, that no one can define the boundaries of the Holocaust narrative. Must Catholics accept
parts of the Holocaust narrative which everyone now admits never happened? St. Paul tells us that there are “a great many
people ... who talk nonsense and try to make others believe it, particularly among those of the Circumcision.” Instead of telling
us to go along with these liars “who ruin whole families by teaching things which they ought not to, and doing it with the vile
motive of making money,” Paul tells Titus to “stop taking notice of Jewish myths.” It’s a message that Christopher Ferrara
would do well to take to heart rather than demand that Bishop Williamson give his assent to a narrative full of “Jewish fables,”
many of which have gone down the memory hole over the past half century. Lest anyone think I am exaggerating we should
remember that the ADL has denounced Norman Finkelstein as a Holocaust Denier (he has never doubted the existence of gas
chambers or that millions of Jews were systematically killed) and that Alan Dershowitz has gone as far as to say that the
leading expert on the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, is to be found on the spectrum of Holocaust Denial because of his support of
Finkelstein!
An Apology
Bishop Williamson issued an apology on January 28, 2009. In it he claimed that he was responsible for a “tremendous
media storm stirred up by imprudent remarks of mine on Swedish television.” Citing Jonas I: 12, Williamson suggested that the
pope “Take me up and throw me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you; for I know it is because of me that this great
tempest has come upon you.”
Although Pope Benedict and Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos would have been happy to grant Bishop Williamson his wish, it
wouldn’t have helped. This storm was not of Bishop Williamson’s making. Williamson’s actions were indisputably
“imprudent,” as he himself admitted, but God was using them to bring about a long-overdue clarification of the Church’s
current position on the Jews, a position which can be traced back to the Vatican II document Nostra Aetate and is now codified
in the The Catechism of the Catholic Church, which claims that “The Church remains faithful to the interpretation of ‘all the
Scriptures’” concerning the crucifixion and death of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The Catechism tells us that “The personal sin of the
participants (Judas, the Sanhedrin, Pilate) is known to God alone... . Hence, we cannot lay responsibility for the trial on the
Jews in Jerusalem as a whole, despite the outcry of a manipulated crowd and the global reproaches contained in the apostles’
calls to conversion after Pentecost.” The Catechism ignores the distinction between the Jewish minority, who were ignorant
and manipulated, and the majority, who hated Jesus and wanted him dead. The Scipture passages which the Catechism
dismisses as “global reproaches” invariably insist on the guilt of the Jews not their ignorance. The difference is largely one of
time. The more that time passed, the more convinced the Apostles became of Jewish guilt for rejecting Christ. Nostra Aetate
tends to rely on Acts 3:17 and ignores I Thess 2: 14-15 as one of those “global reproaches.” In that passage St. Paul addresses
the community in Thessalonika as: “You, my brothers,” who have been “suffering the same treatment from your own
countrymen as they have suffered from the Jews, the people who put the Lord Jesus to death, and the prophets too. And now
they have been persecuting us, and acting in a way that cannot please God and makes them the enemies of the whole human
race... .”
The Catechism then goes on to propose Nostra Aetate (“Neither all Jews indiscriminately at that time, nor Jews today,
can be charged with the crimes committed during his Passion .... The Jews should not be spoken of as rejected or accursed as
if this followed from Holy Scripture.”) as the lens through which we must now interpret I Thess 2: 14-15.
As Bishop Fellay’s comments on the lifting of the excommunications indicated, this move involves a total inversion of
the hermeneutic of the Church. The world has been turned upside down. The same Church which traditionally specified that
every council document should be read in the light of tradition is now saying that tradition should now be viewed in the light of
a project (“the spirit of Vatican II” if you will) which turns the interpretations of one council into a meta-Magisterium,
Before long it becomes clear that the point of the Catechism’s section on the Jews is not only to cast doubt on the literal
meaning of passages like I Thess 2: 14-16 and a host of other passages, but also to exonerate the Jews from any responsibility
for the passion and death of Christ. The main way the Catechism does this is by insisting then that “sinners were the authors and
the ministers of all the sufferings that the divine Redeemer endured” and that “our crime in this case is greater in us than in the
Jews.”
This may be an indictment of sinful Christians, but it is hardly an exoneration of the Jews, even though it is always
portrayed in that light. No matter what Abe Foxman says, it should be obvious that the terms “Jews” and “sinners” are not
mutually exclusive categories. In fact the rejection of Jesus Christ and the collaboration in his murder makes all of the Jews
involved in that conspiracy sinners. This indictment, of course, does not extend to the Jewish race as a whole, i.e., to people
like the Blessed Mother, the beloved disciple, the apostles, St. Paul, etc.: hence, the Church’s ongoing and constant
condemnation of anti-Semitism, which is totally irrational from a Christian perspective because it condemns the race which
produced Jesus Christ.
However, it does mean that every Jew who called for Christ’s death and asked that “his blood be on us and our
children,” as well as every Jew since that time who has rejected Jesus Christ shares responsibility for his death because of
their participation in the sin of rejecting him. Paul addresses this on-going rejection of Logos when he says that the Jews
“never stop trying to finish off the sins they have begun.” As a result, “retribution is overtaking them at last.” So Nostra Aetate
is correct when it claims that Scripture proposes no “curse.” The “retribution” which Paul describes comes about as a result
not of some curse placed on the Jews; no, on the contrary, it flows naturally from their rejection of Logos.
But let’s leave the accusation Paul levels against the Jews as “the people who put the Lord Jesus to death” aside for a
moment. What about his claim that the Jews are “the enemies of the whole human race”? The Catechism, citing Vatican II, tells
us that “The Jews should not be spoken of as rejected or accursed as if this followed from Holy Scripture.” How are we then
to reconcile these two statements? Once again the postconciliar Church is confronted with a hermeneutical issue of its own
making. Do we interpret the Spirit of Vatican II in the light of tradition or do we interpret tradition in light of the Spirit of
Vatican II?
By January 29, it was clear that this issue lay at the heart of the conflict and that it was going to reassert itself willy nilly
even after Bishop Fellay silenced Bishop Williamson, because the repressed, as Sigmund Freud taught, always returns.
Shortly after Fellay and Schmidberger apologized for Williamson’s remarks, an SSPX priest from northern Italy re¬
ignited the controversy by coming to Williamson’s defense. Father Floriano Abrahamowicz, a priest from the northern Italian
branch of the SSPX, came to Williamson’s defense, claiming that he didn’t know if Jews had been gassed either. He did say
that Williamson had been “imprudent” to allow himself to be drawn into the topic. But, even so, Williamson, according to
Abrahamowicz, did not deny that the Holocaust had happened; his doubts had to do with the “technical aspects of the gas
chambers.” No one was obligated to hold particular views about the English-American genocide which took place during the
bombing of Dresden, Abrahamowicz opined. Why then was Auschwitz so special? Would Williamson be in trouble if he
claimed that “only” 3,000 Germans died during the fire bombing of Dresden?
The Abrahamowicz story took a turn toward the heart of the matter when the priest, whose father is Jewish, claimed that
he wanted the Jews to convert to Catholicism. “As a Catholic Christian,” Abrahamowicz told the Tribuna di Treviso, a
newspaper from the southern Tirol, “I wish that the Jews would receive Jesus Christ as their Lord. Amen.” (Martin Zoeller,
Jan 29, 2009, Die Welt “Zweiter Piusbruder zweifelt oeflentlich am Holocaust.”). On February 6, Father Abrahamowicz was
expelled from the SSPX for sedevacantism and statements disrespectful of the pope.
Shortly before Abrahamowicz was expelled, SSPX priest Father Pierpaulo Petrucci, prior of Rimini, defended both
Williamson and Abrahamowicz, and in doing so got still closer to the heart of the matter, which had to do with the disruptive
effect that Nostra Aetate and the Church’s “improved” relations with the Jews had on evangelization: “The Church,” Petrucci
said, “has gotten away from bringing up the truth as a way of bringing about conversion. The Church engages in dialogue, but
no one preaches conversion.”
Much was made of the fact that the Jewish Council in Germany as well as the Israeli Rabbinate broke off relations with
the Vatican after the pope lifted the excommunications. Almost no one noticed that a week before 1’affaire Williamson
happened, the Italian rabbis broke their relations with the pope because of the changes he had made in the Good Friday prayer
a year before. That fact, hardly noted in the ensuing furor, lent credence to both Abrahamowicz and Petrucci’s analysis of what
was really going on. If 50 years of dialogue could end this abruptly, one has to wonder what was achieved. Was there a
relationship there to begin with? Or had dialogue become a pretext for something else? Had it become what David O’Connell
claimed when he wrote in Culture Wars that “In the 40 years since Vatican II, this alleged ‘dialogue’ has actually turned out to
be a one way street in which the Jewish side ritually denounces Catholics and Catholicism while the Catholics nod in
approval.” Reacting to the rabbis’ announcement, Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi hoped that the dialogue would return
to its formerly “serene” state, but there seemed little hope of that now.
Before long, however, Rome began to crumble under the pressure. Instead of just letting the dogs bark as the caravan
passed by, the Vatican began issuing statements which made Professor Foa’s comments seem judicious by comparison. By the
end of the week, Father Lombardi was beginning to sound like Elie Wiesel. “He who negates the Shoah, denies God!” was the
headline Suedtirol. online put over Lombardi’s theological lucubrations (Vatican: “ Wer die Shoah negiert, verleugnet Go It .”
1/30/09 www.stol.it).
According to John Allen, it was the Abrahamowicz interview which “prompted the Vatican Spokesman, Jesuit Fr.
Lombardi to go on Vatican Radio to say that ‘he who denies the fact of the Shoah knows nothing of the mystery of God nor of
the cross of Christ.’” Holocaust denial is “even more serious,” Lombardi said, when it “comes from the mouth of a priest or
bishop, meaning a Christian minister, whether or not he’s in union with the Catholic Church.”
“What recent events make clear,” Allen continued,
is that there are two camps in the small universe that rotates around the Society of St. Pius X. The first,
represented by Fellay, is composed of traditionalists whose concerns are solely liturgical and doctrinal, and
who see the future of their movement as a leaven within the formal structures of the church; the second,
represented by Williamson and Abrahamowicz, includes people for whom theological traditionalism bleeds
off into far-right politics, xenophobia, and conspiracy theories.
Evidently Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos didn’t know about either camp. “We absolutely didn’t know anything about
this Williamson. I really think that no one was aware of it,” Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos was quoted as saying in an
interview published in Corriere della Sera.
It was a statement Allen found implausible: “Claims that the Vatican was caught off-guard don’t cut it; well before
Williamson appeared on Swedish TV he had a public record of Holocaust denial and antagonism toward Jews which a 30-
second Google search would have unearthed” (“The Lefebvrite case: What was the Vatican thinking?” NCRonline, January 30,
2009):
In 1989, for example, police in Canada briefly considered filing charges against Williamson under that
country's hate speech laws after he gave an address in Quebec charging that Jews were responsible for
"changes and corruption" in the Catholic Church, that "not one Jew" perished in Nazi gas chambers, and
that the Holocaust was a myth created so that the West would "approve the state of Israel" (NCR, Jan 26,
2009, John L. Allen, Jr. "Lefebvre movement: long, troubled history with Judaism").
Allen then muddied the theological waters by citing passages from the SSPX website which indicated, in his view, that
“The historical association between some strains of traditionalist Catholicism and anti-Semitism run deep.” Those strains
include the fact that “Traditionalists often uphold a robust missionary theology, insisting that the church cannot renounce its
duty to evangelize any group, including Jews.” Those strains also include the fact that, “The SSPX ... issued a statement
asserting that ‘a Catholic cannot be anti-Semitic without destroying the origin and essence of his own faith.’” An unbiased
observer might conclude that statements like that would exonerate the SSPX from the charge of anti-Semitism, but Allen hints
that the statement is mere window dressing to cover over “a track record in some traditionalist and Lefebvrite circles of open
hostility toward Jews and Judaism that is anything but latent.” For example, “In just the past year, controversy arose in
Germany when a priest of the fraternity asserted that Jews were ‘coresponsible’ for the death of Christ.” Did he cite 1 Thess
2:15, perhaps?
Missing from Allen’s account was a clear distinction between anti-Semitism, which is wrong, and the anti-Jewish
polemic which is part of the fabric of the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles of St. Paul and virtually every Father
of the Church and an inextricable part of the Catholic faith. L 'affaire Williamson presented a golden opportunity to make this
distinction, but no one, not the pope, not the Vatican, not the traditionalists, not the pundits, seemed willing or capable of
making it. Allen to his credit did say that “if it is not arrested, a schism can become self-replicating and produce a parallel
church.” The schism had hurt all of the parties involved. It prevented the purification of the traditionalism which the SSPX was
promoting, but it also put the Church the Lefebvrites had left behind into the unnatural position of denying its own tradition in
the name of Vatican II.
Allen’s report on the murky underside of the SSPX was only the tip of the iceberg. If the Jews were interested in
damaging evidence against the SSPX they should have consulted Fidelity Magazine, in particular Thomas W. Case’s article,
“The Society of St. Pius X Gets Sick,” in the October 1992 issue, p. 28 or In the Line of Fire: John Rizzo, Ex-SSPX by
Michael Mazza, Fidelity, May 1995 or a series of articles on the SSPX and schism by John Beaumont. Of course, if the
Southern Poverty Law Center had done this, it would have undermined their case against me as a Nazi. Nevertheless, in Case’s
article, they would have read that
In 1989 Williamson delivered some speeches in Canada that caused some consternation and got him
investigated for possible "hate crimes" by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In Sherbrooke, Quebec, he
said "there was not one Jew killed in the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies. The Jews created the
Holocaust so we would prostrate ourselves on our knees before them and approve the new State of Israel
... Jews made up the Holocaust. Protestants get their orders from the devil, and the Vatican sold its soul to
liberalism."
The Williamson story, in other words, has been out for 20 years and was reported on 17 years ago in Culture Wars'
predecessor Fidelity. Tom Case’s article makes clear that Bishop Williamson was far from the most extreme member of the
SSPX:
Father Ramon Angles (rector of the Pius X academy and the college in St. Mary's Kansas) has an
apartment full of Nazi paraphernalia, which he shows to favored boys. He shows them the Nazi ceremonial
daggers worn by officers of the Third Reich. He is proud of the vintage Mercedes owned by his family which
was owned by Adolf Hitler. A one-time student at the academy was favored by a special meeting with
Father Angles a couple of years ago. In his private room on campus, Angles treated him and a friend to a
pizza and a showing of the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will.
He played the film back, stopping it in places commenting with fervor and reading back from the stack
of Hitler speech transcripts he had at his side. Leni Riefenstahl, the film's producer and a chief propagandist
for the Third Reich is still alive and resides in South America. Father Angles visits her often (he informs the
students) and boasts of the association.
Case also recounted the case of Father Gregory Post, the first American priest ordained into the SSPX, who
arrived at the San Jose, California airport dressed in the full regalia of an SS army officer, complete with
helmet, boots and swastika arm bands. San Jose Pius X members who picked him up at the airport were
indignant, and the then district superior of the society had to fly out to San Jose to reprimand the priest and
cool off the situation.
This and other anecdotes led Case to conclude that “There is a virulent sickness of hatred and Hitlerism running through
the traditional Catholic movement.”
Lest anyone think that personal animus was the driving force behind the Case article, Fidelity ran a follow up piece three
years later “In the Line of Fire: John Rizzo, Ex-SSPX” {Fidelity, May 1995), in which Michael Mazza recounts a conversation
that former SSPX priest Father Rizzo had with Ramon Angles:
All of a sudden, without any provocation whatsoever, he got up and went over to his bookshelf. He
pulled out this huge book with the title The Life of Adolf Hitler and a big picture of Hitler on the cover giving
his salute. He put it on the bridge of his nose, the same way the sub-deacon holds up the Book of the
Gospels at a solemn High mass. He walked around the coffee table in his apartment, making the noise of a
thurible ("ching ching ching ching"). After he sat down he says, "Well, Rizzo, what do you think of that? Isn't
this great?" He was laughing quite devilishly. He then asked, "What else do you want to talk about?
When told about Ramon’s antics, “Father Peter Scott ... reportedly responded: “What can I do? I’m afraid of Father
Angles.” Father Rizzo had similar experiences when he decided to leave the SSPX. On the advice of the legal authorities,
Rizzo began wearing a bulletproof vest.
A little over a year after Mazza’s article castigating the SSPX appeared in Fidelity, the editor of that magazine got a
phone call from a man with a British accent. It was Bishop Williamson and he was calling me not to tell me to wear a bullet
proof vest but to congratulate me on my book Monsters from the Id . I was dumbfounded. After 30 years of logomachy I can
count calls like this on the fingers of one hand.
That conversation led to Bishop Williamson staying at our house not once but twice. During those stays he got to have
dinner with the Jones family a number of times, and he made a favorable impression on all of us. After his visit, there was a
standing joke in the Jones family: “What’s the difference between a bishop who has been excommunicated and a bishop in
good standing with the Church?”
Answer: “Excommunicated bishops don’t hold grudges.”
Bishop Williamson’s visit then led to an invitation which he extended to me to speak on horror films at the SSPX
seminary in Winona. My visit to Winona and the conversations we had there only co nf irmed my first impression. Williamson
was a man of intelligence-his analysis of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, illustrated by performing excerpts on the piano, is one
of the best pieces of musical criticism I ever heard or read-and wit. During the preparations for the talk, Bishop Williamson
and I had to vet the film clips I assembled to illustrate my point. “No R rated films,” he said, “Fidelity might do an expose on
us if they found out.”
During the question period after my talk, one of the seminarians asked me whether there were similarities between the
monsters and the Novus Ordo Mass. When I answered in the negative, he blurted out, “Well, aren’t you a traditionalist?
“No,” I answered.
“Well, then what are you doing here?”
The answer to that question was Bishop Williamson, a man who possesses both intelligence and magnanimity, a rare
combination in any man these days, and even rarer in a bishop.
There is another answer to that question, and that answer is Christianity. Unlike Jews who are often exhorted never to
forget and never to forgive, Christians are taught to do both. Flate, we all learned by reading First Things, is a Jewish virtue.
The fact that I published what I did about the SSPX and Williamson and that it did not lead to hatred is a tribute to Bishop
Williamson as a man but also to the religion we both share, a religion which demands both fraternal correction and
forgiveness. That is what / ’affaire Williamson is all about. It’s about whether, as Yuri Slezkine claims in The Jewish Century,
we have all become Jews.
Tom Case said that the main reason Lefebvre’s May 1988 agreement with the Church fell through was the question of the
bishops. Lefebvre, Case wrote,
had presented the names of potential bishops and Rome had demurred. The selection of bishops is a
touchy subject. With papal approval, it is perfectly legitimate. Without papal approval, it is a schismatic act
and an excommunicable offense... . The real problem of the bishops, in this instance, was not when, but
who? ... Rome had an extensive dossier on the men favored for consecration. And that is why the pope
reserves to himself the right of approval, and why it is such a grave act to consecrate a bishop without it. It
is not a technical matte, but a measure to protect the Faith. How could Rome ever approve a bishop who
really believed that the pope was a tool of the Freemasons?
Richard Williamson, according to Case, was the candidate who caused the most consternation in Rome. And it was
Williamson, according to Case, who persuaded Lefebvre to renege on his agreement when he returned from Rome after signing
the May 5 accord. “There were too many in the Society (meaning Williamson and company) who simply had not trust in Rome
at all. Under that pressure, the Archbishop changed his mind.” One of the things Rome found most objectionable was
Williamson’s views on the Jews. In a Letter from Winona, dated February 1, 1991, Williamson wrote that “Until [the Jews]
discover their true Messianic vocation [by conversion to Christ], they may be expected to continue fanatical agitation in
accordance with their false messianic vocation of Jewish world-dominion, to prepare the Anti-Christ’s throne in Jerusalem...
the wise Catholic will remember that, again, the ex-Christian nations have only their own Liberalism to blame for allowing the
free circulation within Christendom to the enemies of Christ. ...”
It was hard not to see God’s hand in all of this. Or was it another instance of the return of the repressed? Rome would
have never approved Williamson as a bishop, but the fact that he ended up a bishop anyway may have been God’s way of
saying that some divine intervention was needed to solve the problems Rome had shown itself incapable or unwilling to
resolve, in particular questions involving the Church’s relations with the Jews. The Lefebvrite Schism has hurt both parties.
The harm to the SSPX should be obvious by now. But the Church was harmed as well by becoming a de facto bastion of anti-
Tradition, especially on the question of the Jews. If God was trying to teach the Church a lesson in the Williamson affair, the
Church was showing reluctance to learn even in the expensive school of experience. Rome seemed determined to snatch defeat
from the jaws of victory in the Williamson affair as the agonizing of the first few days soon led to a phase of second guessing
and buck passing. One report had Cardinal Re in a bus full of bishops heading to a liturgical celebration at Santa Maria
Maggiore mocking Cardinal Castrillon-Hoyos as a hopeless buffoon for his mishandling of the excomunications. The New York
Times (ATT, January 26, 2009, Rachel Donadio, “Healing Schism, Pope Risks Another”) portrayed Cardinal Walter Kasper,
the director of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the liaison for Vatican-Jewish relations, as distancing
himself from a debacle that was not of his making. Kasper claimed that he had not been consulted. “It was a decision of the
pope,” the cardinal said in a telephone interview. A few days later, Kasper was quoted as complaining about “management
mistakes” and “lack of communication in the Vatican.”
Less invidious, but along the same lines, was a John Allen article which lectured the Vatican on Public Relations 101.
Allen called the handling of the lifting of the excommunications “a colossal blunder” and “stunningly inept.” Allen claimed that
“The Vatican under Benedict XVI still has not learned the lessons of Regensburg.”
Well, maybe so, but Allen never gets around to telling us just what the lessons of Regensburg were. Was it that the media
can create incidents to embarrass the pope and the church? Was it that the media can stir up lynch mobs in both Germany and
Islamic countries? Or were there deeper lessons involved in the Williamson affair which John Allen still hasn’t learned, as,
for example, the lesson which the Catholic Catechism (para 581) drew from pondering Jesus’s relation to the Jews: “Jesus
could not help but offend the teachers of the Law for he was not content to propose his interpretation along side theirs, but
taught the people ‘as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.’”
The lesson the Catechism proposed applied to both Christ and Christ’s vicar on earth, the pope. Jesus knew intuitively
that public relations was not going to save him from suffering in his dealings with the Jews. His followers had to learn this
lesson the hard way. The real lesson of Regensburg was that the Jewish-controlled media will use any pretext to stir up
animosity against the pope and discord within the Catholic Church? Better public relations techniques, Allen seems to be
claiming, could have avoided this debacle. But is that true?
If so, the pope was no stranger to the theological version of public relations. Cardinal Ratzinger tried to finesse the
Jewish question (i.e., how good relations with the Jews squares with the Gospel admonition to work for their conversion)
years before he became pope. In Reconciling Gospel and Torah: the Catechism, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote that
The history of the relationship between Israel and Christendom is drenched with blood and tears. It is a
history of mistrust and hostility, but also, thank God, a history marked again and again by attempts at
forgiveness, understanding and mutual acceptance. After Auschwitz, the mission of reconciliation and
acceptance permits no deferral. Does this hostility result from something in the very faith of Christians? Is it
something in the "essence of Christianity," such that one would have to prescind from Christianity's core,
deny Christianity its heart, in order to come to real reconciliation? This is an assumption that some
Christian thinkers have in fact made in the last few decades in reaction to the horrors of history. Do
confession of Jesus of Nazareth as the Son of the living God and faith in the cross as the redemption of
mankind contain an implicit condemnation of the Jews as stubborn and blind, as guilty of the death of the
Son of God? Could it be that the core of the faith of Christians themselves compels them to intolerance,
even to hostility toward the Jews, and conversely, that the self-esteem of Jews and the defense of their
historic dignity and deepest convictions oblige them to demand that Christians abandon the heart of their
faith and so require Jews similarly to forsake tolerance? Is the conflict programmed in the heart of religion
and only to be overcome by its repudiation?
To begin with, Cardinal Ratzinger is looking into the wrong end of the telescope. The hostility in question doesn’t result
“from something in the very faith of Christians.” It is the inexorable result of the Jewish rejection of Logos. But, conceding that,
“the question remains: Can Christian faith, left in its inner power and dignity, not only tolerate Judaism but accept it in its
historic mission? Or can it not? Can there be true reconciliation without abandoning the faith, or is reconciliation tied to such
abandonment?”
The Right Questions
Ratzinger is nothing if not acute in his ability to formulate the right questions. But in spite of that ability, he seems equally
determined to avoid the obvious answers which both Scripture and Tradition have always given to these questions. As of the
death of Christ, Judaism had no historical mission because, as of the destruction of the Temple, Judaism, as understood by
Moses, ceased to exist. This is not to say that the Jewish people will play no distinctive role in the end times. Rather than go
directly to Scripture, Ratzinger turns to the Catechism in order to maximize the claims he plans to make because, as he puts it:
“This work has been published by the magisterium of the Catholic Church as an authentic expression of her faith. In recognition
of the significance of Auschwitz and from the mission of the Second Vatican Council, the matter of reconciliation has been
inscribed in the catechism as an object of faith.”
Unfortunately, the passages he cites have to do with the moral law and not the Jews. As a result they can’t answer the
questions he raises and so when Ratzinger says that:
The mission of Jesus consists in leading the histories of the nations into the community of the history of
Abraham, in the history of Israel. His mission is unification, reconciliation, as the Letter to the Ephesians
(2:18-22) will then present it. The history of Israel should become the history of all, Abraham's sonship
become extended to the 'many.'
Conversely, this means that all nations, without the abolishment of the special mission of Israel, become brothers and
receivers of the promises of the chosen people, they become people of God with Israel through adherence to the will of God
and through acceptance of the Davidic Kingdom.
This is true but it does not deal with the fundamental issue, namely the Jewish hostility to Christ and their ongoing
rejection of Logos. Ratzinger’s text is littered with statements that are undeniably true, but something prevents him from uniting
these statements into a coherent thesis:
Old and New Testaments, Jesus and the Sacred Scripture of Israel, appear here as indivisible... .
Reconciliation in the common recognition of the kingdom of God ... One understands nothing about him if
one does not enter with him into the dynamic of reconciliation... . He was "to fulfill the law ... With these
statements we find ourselves at the center of the Christian-Jewish dialogue, we reach the juncture where
we are faced with the decisive choice between reconciliation and alienation... . Beyond all historic and
strictly theological discussions, we find ourselves placed in the middle of the question of the present
responsibility of Jews and Christians before the modern world. This responsibility consists precisely in
representing the truth of the one will of God before the world and thus placing man before this inner truth,
which is at the same time his way. Jews and Christians must bear witness to the one God, to the Creator of
Heaven and Earth and do this in that entirety which Psalm 19 formulates in an exemplary way.
Then, as if to say that he hasn’t convinced himself, Ratzinger comes back to the same nagging question: “Does such a
view of the relationship between the law and the Gospel not come down to an unacceptable attempt at harmonization?”
Ratzinger seems haunted by the fact that the answer to that question, in spite of the project of Vatican II, seems to be ‘yes.’ The
more scriptural evidence he brings us (and he doesn’t bring up much) the more he undermines his own argument:
How does one explain then the conflict which led to Jesus's cross? Does all of this not stand in
contradiction to St. Paul's interpretation of the figure of Jesus? Are we not denying here the entire Pauline
doctrine of grace in favor of a new moralism, thereby abolishing ... the essential innovation of Christianity?
... Reconciliation and separation appear thus to be tied up in a virtually insolvable paradox.
In the catechism's theology of the New Testament, the cross cannot simply be viewed as an accident
which actually could have been avoided nor as the sin of Israel with which Israel becomes eternally stained
in contrast to the pagans for whom the cross signifies redemption. In the New Testament there are not two
effects of the cross: a damning one and a saving one, but only a single effect, which is saving and
reconciling.
Instead of seeing the cross as proof that reconciliation on human terms is impossible and conflict with the Jews is
unavoidable, Ratzinger switches horses in mid-stream and appeals to the Catechism as a kind of deus ex machina that gets him
out of trouble and lends an aura of infallibility by bringing up issues that are beside the point, namely,
Jews are not collectively responsible for Jesus's death" The catechism recalls that esteemed Jewish
personages were followers of Jesus according to the witness of the Gospels, that according to St. John,
shortly before Jesus's death "many even of the authorities believed in him" (Jn 12:42)... . St. James is also
mentioned, who commented, "How many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have
believed; they are all zealous for the law" (Acts 21:20). Thus it is elucidated that the report of Jesus's trial
cannot substantiate a charge of collective Jewish guilt. The Second Vatican Council is expressly cited:
"Neither all Jews indiscriminately at that time, nor Jews today, can be charged with the crimes committed
during his passion ... The Jews should not be spoken of as rejected or accursed as if this followed from Holy
Scripture... . All sinners were the authors of Christ's passion.
Personal Narrative
At this point Ratzinger’s narrative shifts from the infallible to the personal, “Already as a child,” he tells us, “I could not
understand how some people wanted to derive a condemnation of Jews from the death of Jesus because the following thought
had penetrated my soul as something profoundly consoling: Jesus’s blood raises no calls for retaliation but calls all to
reconciliation.”
What Church document calls for retaliation? “ Sicut Iudeis non ...” the official Church teaching on the Jews for the
millennium between the time when Pope St. Gregory the Great first formulated it until Nostra Aetate, stated specifically,
repeatedly and unequivocally, that no one had the right to harm the Jew. Nostra Aetate did not repudiate “ Sicut Iudeis non ...”;
it simply ignored it and proposed in its stead a number of statements which got turned into an experiment, which was not part of
the original text. Ratzinger articulates that the aspiration behind that experiment, which could also be seen as a “hope” or a
fantasy, when he writes:
Jews and Christians should accept each other in profound inner reconciliation, neither in disregard of
their faith nor in its denial, but out of the depth of faith itself. In their mutual reconciliation they should
become a force for peace in and for the world. Through their witness to the one God, who cannot be adored
apart from the unity of love of God and neighbor, they should open the door into the world for this God so
that his will be done and so that it become on earth "as it is in heaven," "so that his kingdom come."
Who can disagree with a statement like this? It is indisputably true to say that Jews “should become a force for peace in
and for the world,” and they probably would do so, if it were not for their tragic rejection of Logos, a rejection which made
them “enemies of the whole human race.” “Should” is the keyword here. Ratzinger can only promote his vision, the experiment
of Vatican II, by ignoring the clear testimony of the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles of St. Paul, the Church
Fathers, and the teaching of the medieval Church based upon “ Sicut Iudeis non ...” about what kind of people the Jews
became when they rejected Christ, the Logos, and how Christians were supposed to deal with them. In the final analysis,
Cardinal Ratzinger is giving expression to a personal vision, which no matter how laudable (or naive) is not a theological
reality. Vatican II was a valid council which gave birth to a hope which became a shared fantasy as time went on. Vatican II
gave birth to an experiment based on the premise that the Church had nothing to fear from the modern world. That experiment
involved accepting certain terms as the world defined them, and one of those terms was “Jew,” and another was “anti-
Semitism” In the aftermath of Vatican II, the Church appeared to accept the Enlightenment’s definition of the Jew, as proposed
by thinkers like Lessing in Nathan der Weise. There was no theological reality at the foundation of this experiment, and so it
was doomed to failure, a failure we are now witnessing as it unfolds in front of us.
The theological reality of the situation can be found in Scripture, which ultimately defines the Jew for us as the rejecter
of Christ and Logos and, therefore, a follower of Satan, as described in John 8. Or as “enemies of the whole human race,” as
Paul puts it, or as “the synagogue of Satan.” “The Jews,” according to St. Paul, are “the people who put the Lord Jesus to
death, and the prophets too. And now they have been persecuting us, and acting in a way that cannot please God and makes
them the enemies of the whole human race, because they are hindering us from preaching to the pagans and trying to save them.
They never stop trying to finish off the sins they have begun, but retribution is overtaking them at last.” The note from the New
American Bible informs us:
Paul is speaking of historical opposition on the part of Palestinian Jews in particular and does so only
some 20 years after Jesus's crucifixion. Even so, he quickly proceeds to depict the persecutors typologically,
in apocalyptic terms. His remarks give no grounds for anti-Semitism to those willing to understand him,
especially in view of St. Paul's pride in his own ethnic and religious background.
We concur. The conclusion derived from St. Paul’s epistle to the Thessalonians is inescapable. A Christian cannot be
anti-Semitic, but a Christian must be anti-Jewish. Christians who attempt to minimalize the anti-Jewish nature of the Catholic
faith invariably end up denying both the Gospel and Tradition. The most basic fact of Jewish-Christian dialogue has to be a
candid admission that the Catholic faith is, as Mischa Brumlich put it in 1989, ‘ judenfeindlich .” If the Jews want to talk to us
after we admit that fact, then maybe Jewish-Catholic dialogue will have some purpose after all, but sooner or later the Church
is going to have to accept this fact because it is part of the DNA of Christianity and not even a mind as great as that of Pope
Benedict XVI can finesse this fundamental co nf lict.
This is also, of course, the fundamental clarification which the Jews by their constant and indiscriminate use of the term
“anti-Semitism” want to obscure. There are over one billion Catholics in the world. And yet as of the third week of the
Williamson crisis not one had stepped forward to say that there was a fundamental difference between Mein Kampf and the
writings of St. Paul, and, more importantly, that the use of the term “anti-Semitism” is not an accurate account of what both
Adolf Hitler and St. Paul believed.
To be fair, Cardinal Ratzinger made precisely this point ten years ago when the Church released the document entitled
“We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah ” in 1998. As Gustav Niehbuhr wrote in the New York Times on March 29, 1998,
“We Remember” “bluntly condemns the Nazi genocide and calls the church to repentance on behalf of Catholics who did
nothing to stop it. But it also carefully distinguishes between centuries of ‘anti-Judaism’ as a religious teaching and the Nazis’
murderous anti-Semitism which, the document says, had its ‘roots outside Christianity.’” A comment like this was crying out to
be made during the Williamson affair, but instead of clarifying the issue, the church relied on “spokesmen” like Matthias Kopp,
as the mouthpiece of the German bishops, and allowed them to muddy the waters by claiming that the Church must fight “every
form of anti-Semitism” without even a remote attempt to define the term. Sooner or later the Church is going to have to make
the distinction between being anti-Semitic which is wrong, sinful, and stupid, and being anti-Jewish, which, correctly
understood, is a virtue for Christians. It looks as if the only way that this is going to happen is for God to drag the Church
kicking and screaming to where it does not want to go, through incidents like the Williamson affair.
Failure to distinguish between anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism continued to drive the crisis by allowing discourse to
revolve around an undefined term. As we have come to expect in circumstances like this, two officious rabbis stepped forward
and offered the pope unbidden advice on “What the Pope should do to Reassure the World,” ( Washington Post, 1/30/09).
Abraham Cooper and Yitzchok Adlerstein, as we have come to expect, insist that the pope inform the SSPX that “that there is
no turning back the clock on the teachings of Vatican II,” which is to say, on their interpretation of Vatican II, as removing “the
effects of hundreds of years of Church-inspired anti-Semitism and persecution.” Vatican II, according to the rabbis, “also
helped bring Catholicism firmly into an age of modernity,” and that “allowed hundreds of millions of Catholics to escape the
tension between modernity and sincere religious belief.” These Catholics, the rabbis tell us, “do not want to see a return to the
medieval abbey.”
It’s touching to hear that Rabbis Cooper and Adlerstein want to promote Church teaching, but by now, 50 years after
Nostra Aetate, Jewish zeal for Catholic teaching raises skepticism about ulterior motives and suspicions that their zeal is more
bound up with the Jews’ insatiable desire to control discourse than any desire to promote the Catholic faith. What the rabbis
really want is control of the Catholic Church, through control of the categories of ecclesial discourse. The healing of the schism
was a threat to this status quo.
Sandro Magister, (“No more excommunication for the Lefebvrists. But Peace is still far off, Chiesa online) supported the
same status quo from inside the Catholic Church. According to Magister, “The fundamental reason behind the uproar is the
anti-Jewish theology that generally distinguishes the Lefebvritsts. According to many Jews, the Catholic Church does too little
to oppose this anti-Judaism and demand that its supporters recant.” Once the argument gets framed in terms of “anti-Judaism,”
the next question becomes, “Is the Church anti-Jewish?” That question can be answered by reading the Scriptures and Vatican
II and interpreting the latter in terms of the former, which seems to be the modus operandi of the pope, who according to
Magister, told the Roman Curia on December 22, 2005, that “Vatican II did not mark any rupture with the tradition of the
Church, but was in continuity with this even where it seemed to mark a clear break with the past... .”
The SSPX is right. There is a crisis. Unfortunately, Bishop Fellay is reluctant to say where the most glaring break with
tradition has occurred, namely, on the question of the Church’s relation to the Jews.
The crisis manifests itself by a debilitating lack of clarity, as when Magister writes:
At the Angelus on Saturday, January 25, Benedict spoke boldly about the "conversion" of Paul, a Jew.
He even said that for Paul, the term "conversion" is improper, "because he was already a believer in fact a
fervent Jew, nor did he have to abandon the Jewish faith in order to adhere to Christ."
The Rabbis from Los Angeles were, if anything, moderate in comparison to other Jewish leaders. Alan Dershowitz
entered the Williamson affair when he accused Cardinal Martino of anti-Semitism for saying that Gaza “resembles a big
concentration camp.” Dershowitz, like the rabbis, is an expert on canon law, an expertise he exhibits in the following train of
syllogisms:
Any comparison between Israel's action in Gaza and those of Nazis during the Holocaust is not only
obscene, it is blatantly anti-Semitic, which is supposed to be a sin under Vatican law. (It is apparently not,
however, a sin for a Catholic bishop to deny that the Holocaust occurred at all, since Bishop Richard
Williamson of Great Britain was welcomed back into the Catholic church after claiming that there were no
gas chambers and that the Jews are lying when they say that 6 million of them were killed, when according
to that bigot in robes, a mere 300,000 Jews died during the entire Holocaust).
Dershowitz then invoked the principle of double effect to justify Israeli actions in Gaza:
An essential aspect of Christian teaching, and especially of Catholic teaching, is the important principle
that distinguishes between intentionally killing an innocent person, and unintentionally killing an innocent
person in the process of legitimately trying to prevent harm to one's self or others. This concept, known as
the principle of double effect, is central to Catholic theology. It traces its roots to Thomas Aquinas and has
had enormous influence on moral thinking not only within the Catholic Church, but throughout Christianity
and indeed in the secular world as well. Understanding and complying with this principle may literally mean
the difference between eternal damnation and eternal salvation. That's how important it is.
Dershowitz’s claim to the principle of double effect is based on an even more dubious claim, namely, that Israeli
Defense Forces may have “inadvertently” killed “some Palestinian civilians” but only because they were “used as human
shields by Hamas.”
Dershowitz then lashes out at the Catholic Church, claiming that the pope is “anti-Catholic” because
The Pope himself has been guilty of invoking such moral equivalence between these very different
actions. Indeed it is fair to say that the Vatican's entire approach to the Israel-Hamas conflict has been to
suggest a false moral equivalence... . Church leaders know better. They understand precisely what they are
doing. They are making utilitarian, pragmatic and very anti-Catholic cynical judgments calculated to bolster
the influence of The Church in the Middle East. It might be understandable for secular nations to act in so
amoral, if not immoral, a manner, but it is entirely unacceptable for the Catholic Church, which eschews
utilitarianism and preaches moral consistency and absolutism to act in so cynical a way.
This is especially troubling, because the church tends to forget its own teachings primarily when it deals
with the Jewish people and the Jewish state. Its long history of discrimination and bigotry against Jews-
slaughtering entire Jewish communities on the way to the Crusades, murdering entire Jewish communities
during the inquisitions, fomenting pogroms, and signing a pact with Hitler during the Holocaust-should
make it even more concerned about applying a double standard of morality to the Jewish state. But that's
exactly what it does. And then it complains when critics point to this obvious double standard.
Dershowitz’s comments are a good indication of the fruits of nearly 50 years of Catholic-Jewish dialogue. Just think how
intemperate Dershowitz might have been without the benign influence of Nostra Aetate guiding him His comments about the
Church “signing a pact with Hitler during the Holocaust,” nonetheless, raises interesting historical parallels. It recalls Matthias
Kopp’s statement about the Vatican’s pact with Israel in 1993, the ongoing genocide the Israelis have been waging against the
Palestinians, and the Church’s very real (if not total) silence in the face of this holocaust. Dershowitz may invoke the principle
of double effect as informing the IDF’s strategy and claim that the 1300 Palestinians who perished there during the last two
weeks of December 2008 died as a result of being used as “human shields” by Hamas, but Noam Chomsky’s account of what
happened in Gaza tells a different story. According to Chomsky the Saturday December 27 attack on Gaza
had been meticulously planned, for over 6 months according to the Israeli press. The planning had two
components: military and propaganda. It was based on the lessons of Israel's 2006 invasion of Lebanon,
which was considered to be poorly planned and badly advertised. We may, therefore, be fairly confident
that most of what has been done and said was pre-planned and intended.
That surely includes the timing of the assault: shortly before noon, when children were returning from
school and crowds were milling in the streets of densely populated Gaza City. It took only a few minutes to
kill over 225 people and wound 700, an auspicious opening to the mass slaughter of defenseless civilians
trapped in a tiny cage with nowhere to flee.
In his retrospective "Parsing Gains of Gaza War," New York Times correspondent Ethan Bronner cited
this achievement as one of the most significant of the gains. Israel calculated that it would be
advantageous to appear to "go crazy," causing vastly disproportionate terror, a doctrine that traces back to
the 1950s. "The Palestinians in Gaza got the message on the first day," Bronner wrote, "when Israeli
warplanes struck numerous targets simultaneously in the middle of a Saturday morning. Some 200 were
killed instantly, shocking Hamas and indeed all of Gaza." The tactic of "going crazy" appears to have been
successful, Bronner concluded: there are "limited indications that the people of Gaza felt such pain from this
war that they will seek to rein in Hamas," the elected government. That is another long-standing doctrine
of state terror. I don't, incidentally, recall the Times retrospective "Parsing Gains of Chechnya War," though
the gains were great.
The meticulous planning also presumably included the termination of the assault, carefully timed to be
just before the inauguration, so as to minimize the (remote) threat that Obama might have to say some
words critical of these vicious US-supported crimes.
Two weeks after the Sabbath opening of the assault, with much of Gaza already pounded to rubble and
the death toll approaching 1000, the UN Agency UNRWA, on which most Gazans depend for survival,
announced that the Israeli military refused to allow aid shipments to Gaza, saying that the crossings were
closed for the Sabbath. To honor the holy day, Palestinians at the edge of survival must be denied food and
medicine, while hundreds can be slaughtered by US jet bombers and helicopters.
The rigorous observance of the Sabbath in this dual fashion attracted little if any notice. That makes
sense. In the annals of US-Israeli criminality, such cruelty and cynicism scarcely merit more than a footnote.
They are too familiar. To cite one relevant parallel, in June 1982 the US-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon
opened with the bombing of the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, later to become famous as
the site of terrible massacres supervised by the IDF (Israeli "Defense" Forces). The bombing hit the local
hospital — the Gaza hospital — and killed over 200 people, according to the eyewitness account of an
American Middle East academic specialist. The massacre was the opening act in an invasion that
slaughtered some 15-20,000 people and destroyed much of southern Lebanon and Beirut, proceeding with
crucial US military and diplomatic support. That included vetoes of Security Council resolutions seeking to
halt the criminal aggression that was undertaken, as was scarcely concealed, to defend Israel from the
threat of peaceful political settlement, contrary to many convenient fabrications about Israelis suffering
under intense rocketing, a fantasy of apologists.
Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert, who unlike Alan Dershowitz, was in Gaza when the Israelis attacked:
described the scene of horror as an "All out war against the civilian population of Gaza." He estimated
that half the casualties are women and children. The men are almost all civilians as well, by civilized
standards. Gilbert reports that he had scarcely seen a military casualty among the 100s of bodies. The IDF
concurs. Hamas "made a point of fighting at a distance — or not at all," Ethan Bronner reports while
"parsing the gains" of the US-Israeli assault. So Hamas's manpower remains intact, and it was mostly
civilians who suffered pain: a positive outcome, according to widely-held doctrine.
These estimates were confirmed by UN humanitarian chief John Holmes, who informed reporters that it
is "a fair presumption" that most of the civilians killed were women and children in a humanitarian crisis
that is "worsening day by day as the violence continues." But we could be comforted by the words of Israeli
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, the leading dove in the current electoral campaign, who assured the world that
there is no "humanitarian crisis" in Gaza, thanks to Israeli benevolence.
Unlike Alan Dershowitz, Israeli officials admit openly that civilians are deliberately targeted. In fact it has always been
part of Israel’s strategy in dealing with the Palestinians:
All of this is normal, and quite openly discussed by high Israeli officials. Thirty years ago Chief of Staff
Mordechai Gur observed that since 1948, "we have been fighting against a population that lives in villages
and cities." As Israel's most prominent military analyst, Zeev Schiff, summarized his remarks, "the Israeli
Army has always struck civilian populations, purposely and consciously ... the Army, he said, has never
distinguished civilian [from military] targets ... [but] purposely attacked civilian targets." The reasons were
explained by the distinguished statesman Abba Eban: "there was a rational prospect, ultimately fulfilled,
that affected populations would exert pressure for the cessation of hostilities." The effect, as Eban well
understood, would be to allow Israel to implement, undisturbed, its programs of illegal expansion and harsh
repression. Eban was commenting on a review of Labor government attacks against civilians by Prime
Minister Begin, presenting a picture, Eban said, "of an Israel wantonly inflicting every possible measure of
death and anguish on civilian populations in a mood reminiscent of regimes which neither Mr.Begin nor I
would dare to mention by name." Eban did not contest the facts that Begin reviewed, but criticized him for
stating them publicly. Nor did it concern Eban, or his admirers, that his advocacy of massive state terror is
also reminiscent of regimes he would not dare to mention by name.
Eban's justification for state terror is regarded as persuasive by respected authorities. As the current US-
Israel assault raged, Times columnist Thomas Friedman explained that Israel's tactics both in the current
attack and in its invasion of Lebanon in 2006 are based on the sound principle of "trying to 'educate'
Hamas, by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population." That
makes sense on pragmatic grounds, as it did in Lebanon, where "the only long-term source of deterrence
was to exact enough pain on the civilians — the families and employers of the militants — to restrain
Hezbollah in the future." And by similar logic, bin Laden's effort to "educate" Americans on 9/11 was highly
praiseworthy, as were the Nazi attacks on Lidice and Oradour, Putin's destruction of Grozny, and other
notable attempts at "education."
Israel has taken pains to make clear its dedication to these guiding principles. NYT correspondent
Stephen Erlanger reports that Israeli human rights groups are "troubled by Israel's strikes on buildings they
believe should be classified as civilian, like the parliament, police stations and the presidential palace" —
and, we may add, villages, homes, densely populated refugee camps, water and sewage systems,
hospitals, schools and universities, mosques, UN relief facilities, ambulances, and indeed anything that
might relieve the pain of the unworthy victims. A senior Israeli intelligence officer explained that the IDF
attacked "both aspects of Hamas — its resistance or military wing and its dawa, or social wing "the latter a
euphemism for the civilian society. "He argued that Hamas was all of a piece," Erlanger continues, "and in
a war, its instruments of political and social control were as legitimate a target as its rocket caches."
Erlanger and his editors add no comment about the open advocacy, and practice, of massive terrorism
targeting civilians, though correspondents and columnists signal their tolerance or even explicit advocacy of
war crimes, as noted. But keeping to the norm, Erlanger does not fail to stress that Hamas rocketing is "an
obvious violation of the principle of discrimination and fits the classic definition of terrorism."
Like others familiar with the region, Middle East specialist Fawwaz Gerges observes that "What Israeli
officials and their American allies do not appreciate is that Hamas is not merely an armed militia but a
social movement with a large popular base that is deeply entrenched in society." Hence when they carry
out their plans to destroy Hamas's "social wing," they are aiming to destroy Palestinian society.
Gerges may be too kind. It is highly unlikely that Israeli and American officials — or the media and other
commentators — do not appreciate these facts. Rather, they implicitly adopt the traditional perspective of
those who monopolize means of violence: our mailed fist can crush any opposition, and if our furious
assault has a heavy civilian toll, that's all to the good: perhaps the remnants will be properly educated.
IDF officers clearly understand that they are crushing the civilian society. Ethan Bronner quotes an
Israeli Colonel who says that he and his men are not much "impressed with the Hamas fighters." "They are
villagers with guns," said a gunner on an armored personnel carrier. They resemble the victims of the
murderous IDF "iron fist" operations in occupied southern Lebanon in 1985, directed by Shimon Peres, one
of the great terrorist commanders of the era of Reagan's "War on Terror." During these operations, Israeli
commanders and strategic analysts explained that the victims were "terrorist villagers," difficult to
eradicate because "these terrorists operate with the support of most of the local population." An Israeli
commander complained that "the terrorist... has many eyes here, because he lives here," while the military
correspondent of the Jerusalem Post described the problems Israeli forces faced in combating the "terrorist
mercenary," "fanatics, all of whom are sufficiently dedicated to their causes to go on running the risk of
being killed while operating against the IDF," which must "maintain order and security" in occupied
southern Lebanon despite "the price the inhabitants will have to pay." The problem has been familiar to
Americans in South Vietnam, Russians in Afghanistan, Germans in occupied Europe, and other aggressors
that find themselves implementing the Gur-Eban-Friedman doctrine.
Norman Finkelstein makes the same point, in a well-documented article:
The operative plan for the Gaza bloodbath can be gleaned from authoritative statements after the war
got underway: "What we have to do is act systematically with the aim of punishing all the organizations
that are firing the rockets and mortars, as well as the civilians who are enabling them to fire and hide"
(reserve Major-General); "After this operation there will not be one Hamas building left standing in Gaza"
(Deputy IDF Chief of Staff); "Anything affiliated with Hamas is a legitimate target" (IDF Spokesperson's
Office).Whereas Israel killed a mere 55 Lebanese during the first two days of the 2006 war, the Israeli
media exulted at Israel's "shock and awe" (Maariv) as it killed more than 300 Palestinians in the first two
days of the attack on Gaza. Several days into the slaughter an informed Israeli strategic analyst observed,
"The IDF, which planned to attack buildings and sites populated by hundreds of people, did not warn them
in advance to leave, but intended to kill a great many of them, and succeeded." Morris could barely contain
his pride at "Israel's highly efficient air assault on Hamas." The Israeli columnist B. Michael was less
impressed by the dispatch of helicopter gunships and jet planes "over a giant prison and firing at its people"
— for example, "70 ... traffic cops at their graduation ceremony, young men in desperate search of a
livelihood who thought they'd found it in the police and instead found death from the skies."
As Israel targeted schools, mosques, hospitals, ambulances, and U.N. sanctuaries, as it slaughtered and
incinerated Gaza's defenseless civilian population (one-third of the 1,200 reported casualties were
children), Israeli commentators gloated that "Gaza is to Lebanon as the second sitting for an exam is to the
first — a second chance to get it right," and that this time around Israel had "hurled [Gaza] back," not 20
years as it promised to do in Lebanon, but "into the 1940s. Electricity is available only for a few hours a
day"; that "Israel regained its deterrence capabilities" because "the war in Gaza has compensated for the
shortcomings of the [2006] Second Lebanon War"; and that "There is no doubt that Hezbollah leader
Hassan Nasrallah is upset these days. ...There will no longer be anyone in the Arab world who can claim
that Israel is weak." ( http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=ll&ar=2542 )
Israel’s “all out war against the civilian population of Gaza” included, Chomsky reminds us, the use of white phosphorus
in the shelling of a hospital and a United Nations food warehouse in Gaza City:
The shelling destroyed "hundreds of tons of emergency food and medicines set for distribution today to
shelters, hospitals and feeding centres," according to UNRWA director John Ging. Military strikes at the
same time destroyed two floors of the al-Quds hospital, setting it ablaze, and also a second warehouse run
by the Palestinian Red Crescent society. The hospital in the densely-populated Tal-Hawa neighbourhood
was destroyed by Israeli tanks "after hundreds of frightened Gazans had taken shelter inside as Israeli
ground forces pushed into the neighbourhood," AP reported.
There was nothing left to salvage inside the smoldering ruins of the hospital. "They shelled the building,
the hospital building. It caught fire. We tried to evacuate the sick people and the injured and the people
who were there. Firefighters arrived and put out the fire, which burst into flames again and they put it out
again and it came back for the third time," paramedic Ahmad Al-Haz told AP. It was suspected that the
blaze might have been set by white phosphorous, also suspected in numerous other fires and serious burn
injuries.
The suspicions were confirmed by Amnesty International after the cessation of the intense
bombardment made inquiry possible. Before, Israel had sensibly barred all journalists, even Israeli, while
its crimes were proceeding in full fury. Israel's use of white phosphorus against Gaza civilians is "clear and
undeniable," AI reported. Its repeated use in densely populated civilian areas "is a war crime," AI
concluded. They found white phosphorus edges scattered around residential buildings, still burning, "further
endangering the residents and their property," particularly children "drawn to the detritus of war and often
unaware of the danger." Primary targets, they report, were the UNRWA compound, where the Israeli "white
phosphorus landed next to some fuel trucks and caused a large fire which destroyed tons of humanitarian
aid" after Israeli authorities "had given assurance that no further strikes would be launched on the
compound." On the same day, "a white phosphorus shell landed in the al-Quds hospital in Gaza City also
causing a fire which forced hospital staff to evacuate the patients. ... White phosphorus landing on skin can
burn deep through muscle and into the bone, continuing to burn unless deprived of oxygen." Purposely
intended or beyond depraved indifference, such crimes are inevitable when this weapon is used in attacks
on civilians.
The fact that Israeli troops used white phosophorus on civilians in Gaza was not mentioned as part of the Williamson
affair (although Alan Dershowitz did drag both Bishop Williamson and Cardinal Martino into his discussion of Gaza) because
what people like Alan Dershowitz engage in is an acceptable form of “holocaust denial.” Catholic bishops are not permitted to
question any aspect of the holocaust narrative, but Jewish law professors and Israeli rabbis are allowed to advocate genocide
with impunity. They are allowed to engage in the worst form of “holocaust denial,” denial of the holocaust as it is actually
happening in places like Gaza. At the risk of having Alan Dershowitz call us anti-Semitic, let’s compare Bishop Williamson’s
comments and the outrage they generated with the silence surrounding the statement of Israeli rabbis who previously urged the
IDF to commit war crimes and genocide in Gaza. From a public relations perspective there is no basis for comparison because
Rabbinic holocaust denial went unmentioned in the press accounts of the Israeli attack on Gaza. As Noam Chomsky points out:
The ravings of the political and military leaders are mild as compared to the preaching of rabbinical
authorities. They are not marginal figures. On the contrary, they are highly influential in the army and in
the settler movement, who Zertal and Eldar reveal to be "lords of the land," with enormous impact on
policy. Soldiers fighting in northern Gaza were afforded an "inspirational" visit from two leading rabbis, who
explained to them that there are no "innocents" in Gaza, so everyone there is a legitimate target, quoting a
famous passage from Psalms calling on the Lord to seize the infants of Israel's oppressors and dash them
against the rocks. The rabbis were breaking no new ground. A year earlier, the former chief Sephardic rabbi
wrote to Prime Minister Olmert, informing him that all civilians in Gaza are collectively guilty for rocket
attacks, so that there is "absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during
a potential massive military offensive on Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket launchings," as the Jerusalem
Post reported his ruling. His son, chief rabbi of Safed, elaborated: "If they don't stop after we kill 100, then
we must kill a thousand, and if they do not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000. If they still don't stop
we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop."
Just as a combination thought experiment and reality check, try to imagine a Catholic bishop making a statement like the
one you just read. If you find this hard to imagine, you need to ask a few questions. Why is there outrage when a Catholic
bishop raises theoretical historical questions about a war 60 years in the past, but not even a peep of reproach when a rabbi
advocates the murder of 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, or even a million Palestinians? Why is the Church silent in the face of this
holocaust? Who is the real holocaust denier? Bishop Williamson or Alan Dershowitz?
Thought Experiment
Let’s continue our thought experiment by considering the following allegory. Suppose a German were elected pope.
Suppose the Papal States still had an army, as they did during the Middle Ages. Suppose that after ascending the throne of
Peter, the German pope began bringing Germans to live with him in the Vatican. After a few months it was becoming clear that
the Germans who had come to live at the Vatican at the pope’s invitation were now running out of room or, to use the German
term, “ Lebensraum .” As a result the Germans began moving into adjacent neighborhoods driving the Romans from their homes,
killing anyone who resisted, and stealing their property. Whole sections of Rome were ethnically cleansed and the Italians
whose property was confiscated by the Germans were rounded up and put in refugee or concentration camps, where they were
slowly starved to death by being deprived of food, electricity and water.
Whenever the displaced Romans complained too loudly, the German pope would send in his fleet of helicopter gunships
and destroy their hospitals, schools, and other public buildings, especially when the terrorized civilian population would
gather there to escape the bombing. The pope’s aircraft, supplied by Germany, would also drop white phosphorus bombs on
UN warehouses containing food for the starving civilian population. Just before the pope launched this campaign of genocide
on the ethnically cleansed Italians, he ordered all of the world’s bishops to denounce anyone who protested as “anti-Catholic.”
The bishops also told the pope’s troops that they should have no qualms about killing innocent women and children because
Italians were racially inferior and because the Italian Liberation Organization used them as human shields anyway.
Can anyone seriously imagine world opinion tolerating such a situation? If not, how is it that world opinion, including the
Catholic Church, tolerates what I have described above when Israelis do it to Palestinians? Doesn’t the silence over what is
happening in Gaza amount to a much more serious form of “holocaust denial” than anything connected even remotely to what
Bishop Williamson said?
“Similar views,” Chomsky continues,
are expressed by prominent American secular figures. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006, Harvard
Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz explained in the liberal online journal Huffington Post that all
Lebanese are legitimate targets of Israeli violence. Lebanon's citizens are "paying the price" for supporting
"terrorism" — that is, for supporting resistance to Israel's invasion. Accordingly, Lebanese civilians are no
more immune to attack than Austrians who supported the Nazis. The fatwa of the Sephardic rabbi applies
to them. In a video on the Jerusalem Post website, Dershowitz went on to ridicule talk of excessive kill
ratios of Palestinians to Israelis: it should be increased to 1000-to-one, he said, or even 1000-to-zero,
meaning the brutes should be completely exterminated. Of course, he is referring to "terrorists," a broad
category that includes the victims of Israeli power, since "Israel never targets civilians," he emphatically
declared. It follows that Palestinians, Lebanese, Tunisians, in fact anyone who gets in the way of the
ruthless armies of the Holy State is a terrorist, or an accidental victim of their just crimes.
The claim that "our side" never targets civilians is familiar doctrine among those who monopolize the
means of violence. And there is some truth to it. We do not generally try to kill particular civilians. Rather,
we carry out murderous actions that we know will slaughter many civilians, but without specific intent to kill
particular ones. In law, the routine practices might fall under the category of depraved indifference, but
that is not an adequate designation for standard imperial practice and doctrine. It is more similar to
walking down a street knowing that we might kill ants, but without intent to do so, because they rank so
low that it just doesn't matter. The same is true when Israel carries out actions that it knows will kill the
"grasshoppers" and "two-legged beasts" who happen to infest the lands it "liberates." There is no good
term for this form of moral depravity, arguably worse than deliberate murder, and all too familiar.
Just as Vaffaire Williamson was dying down, Caesar entered the fray to stir things up again. On January 31, 2009, 50
Catholic politicians wrote to the pope demanding that “you publicly state your unequivocal position on this mater so that it is
clear where the Church stands on one of the most consequential events of the 20th century. To neglect to do so is to allow
others to portray it as they wish and impede the progress made over so many years toward harmony and reconciliation.” The
same officials who had grown accustomed to invoking the separation of church and state every time a bishop asked them to
vote against abortion, now had no qualms about interfering, qua state officials, in the internal workings of the Catholic Church.
By February 2, the Vatican had regained its composure somewhat, and Press Secretary Lombardi had returned to
reiterating the Church’s initial response, namely, that lifting the excommunication and holocaust denial were two separate
issues. But it was only the lull before the next storm, which broke on February 3, when Angela Merkel, Germany’s prime
minister, turned / ’affaire Williamson into a Church-State issue by calling on the pope to “clarify the situation.” Admitting that
she was meddling in the internal affairs of the Church, Merkel plunged forward anyway by claiming that the gravity of the
situation demanded it. “The situation is different because we’re dealing with fundamental issues,” is how she put it.
“This should not be allowed to pass without consequences,” Frau Merkel said at a news conference in Berlin. “This is
not just a matter, in my opinion, for the Christian, Catholic and Jewish communities in Germany but the Pope and the Vatican
should clarify unambiguously that there can be no [holocaust] denial,” she said. “In my opinion, this isn’t just an issue affecting
the Christian, Catholic and Jewish communities in Germany,” Merkel said on Tuesday, February 3. Rather, it is important that
the pope clarify “that Holocaust denial cannot be accepted and that, in general, there must be a positive association with
Judaism as a whole.” She went on to say: “I do not believe that sufficient clarification has been made.”
By February 3, it was clear that the German bishops had turned on the pope. Cardinal Lehmann who battled with Pope
John Paul II over the German church’s approval of abortion counseling at Catholic facilities sided publicly with Merkel.
German Catholics were caught up in the lynch mob mentality being orchestrated by Der Spiegel and Hans Kueng. Many
Catholics were appalled at Merkel’s interference in what even she admitted were the internal affairs of the Church, but any
Catholic voice not caught up in the lynch mob mentality was simply eliminated from the harangue against the pope that all of the
major media outlets were orchestrating.
The German rabbis weren’t helping matters any. Michel Friedman, former vice-president of the Central Council of
German Jews, took the 50-year-old tradition of Catholic-Jewish dialogue to new heights when he went on the “Maintower”
program on Hessian Radio Network and called the pope “a liar and a hypocrite.” Just think what Friedman might have called
the pope without the soothing benefit of Nostra Aetate\ And why was the pope a hypocrite? Because he claimed to take a stand
against “every anti-Semite in the world and every holocaust denier” when in fact, “in the middle of the Vatican he accepts them
with open arms.”
“Only the excommunication of this anti-Semitic bigot can restore the pope’s credibility,” Friedman concluded.
( http://www.stem. de/panorama/:Michel-Friedman-Der-Papst-L%FCgner-Heuchler/653817.html )
With “dialogue” like this, who needed religious wars? Intemperate language like this was beginning to cause a reaction.
As one German commentator put it, “the latest media campaign did nothing but widen the chasm separating published opinion
and the German people. With each new campaign politics and media lost their last shred of credibility. When Die Welt
commissioned an on-line poll asking “How do youjudge the work of Pope Benedict XVI?” the overwhelming majority ( i.e ., 64
percent of the 25,000 people taking part in the poll), answered, “Very good. He draws clear lines and does everything right.”
People commenting in on-line forums were massively censored or deleted or not allowed to answer this question.
Conspiracy Nut
Anyone who hinted that the media were orchestrating this outcry was denounced as a conspiracy nut, as when Spiegel
claimed that “The Vatican is now blaming the incident on a conspiracy to harm the Catholic Church leader.”
German Jews, on the other hand, were predictably effusive in their praise of Angela Merkel. “(We have) deep respect
and appreciation for the chancellor for the fact that she spoke out on this difficult matter,” Stephan Kramer, general secretary of
the Central Council of Jews in Germany, told the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. It shows “the kind of prudence and feeling
of responsibility she has,” he said. “Kramer’s remarks,” Spiegel continued
were echoed by Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors
and their Descendants. "When the German chancellor admonishes a German-born pope, it is an
extraordinary message," Steinberg wrote in an e-mail to the Associated Press. "Together with the
expressions of outrage emanating from German and Austrian bishops, these developments have ironically
strengthened relations between Germany and the world Jewish community."
Comments like this, however, only strengthened the feeling among rank and file German Catholics that the Jews had
bribed Merkel to intervene in what she clearly felt was an intra-Catholic issue with a potentially large political downside for
her if it backfired.
On February 4, in response to Merkel’s call for “ Klarstellung ” the Vatican issued a statement claiming that Bishop
Williamson would have to deny “Holocaust denial” before he could be readmitted to the Church as a bishop in good standing.
Under the heading, “Declarations on the Shoah,” the Vatican Secretary of State announced that
The positions of Mons. Williamson on the Shoah are absolutely unacceptable and firmly rejected by the
Holy Father, as he himself remarked on the past January 28, when, referring to that brutal genocide, he
reaffirmed his full and unquestionable solidarity with our Brethren, receivers of the First Covenant, and
affirmed that the memory of that terrible genocide must lead "mankind to reflect on the unpredictable
power of evil when it conquers the heart of man", adding that the Shoah remains "for all a warning against
forgetfulness, against denial or reductionism, because the violence against a single human being is violence
against all."
Bishop Williamson, for an admission to episcopal functions in the Church, will also have to distance himself, in an
absolutely unequivocal and public manner, from his positions regarding the Shoah, unknown to the Holy Father in the moment
of the remission of the excommunication.
Jewish reaction to the announcement was predictable. “This was the sign the Jewish world has been waiting for,” said
Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress.
In making the announcement, Rome pleaded for prayers and support for the pope as the “Custodian of Unity” in the
Church, and well it might because requiring Bishop Williamson to deny “Holocaust denial” had the potential for being the
biggest public relations disaster of the entire Williamson affair, if for no other reason than the number of people it affected. In
attempting to restore unity to the Church, the pope had enraged the Jews. Now in attempting to placate the Jews, the pope ran
the risk of alienating over one billion rank and file Catholics by giving them the impression that the Holocaust narrative was
now an article of faith. Michael Hoffman II, author of Judaism Discovered, made similar claims in an e-mail he sent to the
pope:
Is the rabbinic "Shoah" mysticism now a dogma of the Roman Catholic Church? ... Do Catholics no longer
have the right to doubt or question aspects of secular history? Does the Magsterium [sic] of the Church now
decree the undoubted veracity of the figure of Six Million deceased Judaic persons, and the undoubted
existence of a mass killing operation in Auschwitz-Birkenau, conducted by means of poison gas chambers?
Are you aware of the extent to which the Crucifixion of Christ has been replaced by Auschwitz as the
central ontological event of western history? Do you wish to be complicit in the disastrous effects that
continue to accrue from this derogation of Jesus and deification of man?
One anonymous commentator on the web made much the same point when he claimed that:
In the past, a dogma referred only to a matter of Christian faith, and Catholics could believe whatever
they wanted about historical events. But today's remarks from the Vatican make it clear that the Jewish
version of the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were killed in gas chambers, must be believed by every
Catholic or they're not in communion with the Church. That makes the Holocaust an official dogma of the
Catholic Faith.
Administrative Decision
The situation, however, was neither that bad nor that simple. Theologian Raymond Kevane claims that it is impossible to
globalize from what is essentially an administrative decision by the pope.
What the Pope did was to make a priestly and administrative decision which related precisely and only
to those four bishops: absolve them from their censures, and then reprimand the one for making an
unfortunate public statement. The Pope was making no theological or doctrinal statement. I believe the
Pope's overall purpose was obscured by the stupidity of one of the bishops the Pope was being kind to: It
appears to me that he wants to reinstate in some fashion the liturgy of an earlier time which has been lost.
As Robert Sungenis, the theologian whose article in Culture Wars got the American bishops to remove their statement
that the Mosaic covenant was “eternally valid” from their catechism, put it:
The pope is not insisting on a recanting of his 'holocaust denial' as a requirement to being readmitted to
the Church, but only as a requirement for having his canonical function as a bishop restored, or what the
Vatican called his being 'reinstated to episcopal service.'
Canonically, the pope does have the authority to bind Williamson in this way, since according to Vatican
I, the pope's disciplinary powers over his clerics are unlimited and no one can question them. So, right or
wrong on insisting Williamson recant his position, the pope has the right to enact disciplinary measures
against Williamson.
Sungenis feels that the Vatican, by placing this requirement on Williamson, “has put itself in a win-win situation,”
because “it knows that Williamson is probably not going to recant, so he can then be used as the scapegoat. All the blame for
whatever is bad about traditionalist extremism will be heaped on Williamson, and then Fellay and the other three bishops will
be eventually re-commissioned under the good grace of both the Catholic Church and the Jews.”
On the other hand, “if Williamson does recant, the pope still wins, only more dramatically, since now the SSPX has fully
submitted to his power (and the Jews are happy that the pope has submitted to their power).”
The only lagging, yet supremely important issue remaining regards the ethical validity of the pope's
insistence that Williamson recant his opinion without a canonical trial to see if his opinion is, indeed, worthy
of its claims. Since Williams is being accused of being 'anti-Semitic' for denying a so-called 'fact of history'
about the Semites, and since 'anti-Semitism' is a mortal sin in the Catholic Church, then a trial is the only
recourse for determining if, indeed, Williamson is guilty of 'anti-Semitism,' for that could be the only
grounds upon which he could be formally disciplined by the pope.
Sungenis went on to say that any “canonical trial to determine whether Williamson is guilty of anti-Semitism” would
“require a legal investigation of whether there were indeed, six million Jews gassed by the Nazis. This puts the burden on the
Vatican to prove their case in open court, and severely curtails the Jewish court of public opinion that is now running the
show.”
So, in terms of actual theological fact, no, the holocaust has not been declared a dogma of the Church. But in terms of
perception, the Catholic faithful once more learn that their concerns take a back seat to the feelings of the Jews. In terms of
perception, it certainly looked as if the pope caved in to the demands of the emperor and the Jews who were egging her on.
The pope’s capitulation to Merkel’s demands raised all sorts of historical parallels. Now it was the pope and not
Barbarossa, the German Emperor, who had to stand barefoot in the snow at Canossa. This time it was a woman and not
Napoleon who slapped the pope in the face. What Marx referred to as “the cunning of history” was far from exhausted by these
two examples.
Sandro Magister, the Italian George Weigel, showed his neocon sympathies when he raised Vatican II to the level of the
creed. But in doing so, Magister, in an equally neocon way, raised an issue with uncanny historical ramifications, namely, the
issue of the pope’s “silence.”
For some, it was easy to throw into the faces of the Vatican authorities their excessive silence on
another, much more dangerous form of denial of the Holocaust, the one publicly supported by the leaders
of Iran. In the almost four years of his pontificate, in effect, only once has an official Vatican document
condemned, in vague words, Iran's intention of wiping Israel from the face of the earth.
Pope Benedict is now doing exactly what the Jews accused Pius XII of doing. The Jews allege that Pius XII capitulated
to the German Chancellor, which is precisely what Benedict did when faced with Merkel’s threat. The Jews claim that Pius
XII was silent when he should have denounced the holocaust, which is precisely what happened during the final two weeks of
December 2008. The near total silence emanating from Rome at the time of the Israeli war crimes against the Palestinians in
Gaza during the last two weeks of 2008 was positively deafening.
By February 10, it looked as if the chain of events was going to prove Sungenis right. Bishop Williamson was being
made the scapegoat. After telling Spiegel that he planned to reconsider his views on the Holocaust — a process that would
“take time,” Williamson claimed — Fellay ordered the Rev. Christian Bouchacourt, director of the Latin American branch of
the SSPX, to fire Williamson from his job as rector of the SSPX seminary in La Reja, Argentina. Bouchacourt claimed that
Williamson’s views “in no way reflect the position of our congregation” and that by expressing them, Williamson had
“discredited” the SSPX.
With Williamson out of the way, Catholic-Jewish dialogue could resume. That meant that the pope could once again talk
to people like Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who weighed with his own contribution to dialogue by writing an article in the
Jerusalem Post entitled: “The Pope Must Condemn the Jew-haters in the Church.” Boteach, who, like every other rabbi, is an
expert in Catholic theology, applauded Angela Merkel, who “is reaching out to a pope to teach him morality.” Unfortunately,
the pope is a slow learner; “he has yet to simply kick the bishop back to where he belongs — a state of excommunication from
the Catholic Church.” So — pace, Dr. Sungenis — Holocaust denial is an excommunicable offense after all. It must be true, if
Rabbi Shmuley says so.
What follows is Boteach’s character assassination of Pius XII, whom the rabbi refers to as “Hitler’s pope.” As an
example of Pius XII’s heinous crimes, Boteach mentions the fact the he actually “granted a secret audience to Supreme SS
Polizeifuhrer Karl Wolff.” As we all know from reading the parable of the Good Samaritan, rabbis like Boteach consider
people like Wolff ritually unclean. Just being in the same room with a “Supreme SS Polizeifuhrer” is enough to bring about
moral contamination, something Rabbi Shmuley alludes to when he says, “That Pius realized he was doing something that
others would regard as immoral is attested to by the fact that the meeting took place in great secrecy and Wolff came dressed in
disguise.” Are we to imagine Pius XII calling Wolff on the phone and telling him to come in disguise? Or are there other more
plausible explanations here? Whatever. Rabbis have the charism of infallibility when it comes to reading other people’s minds,
especially the minds of dead popes. But not content to leave it at that, Rabbi Shmuley feels compelled to come up with the
smoking gun in the Pius XII case. The pope, according to Boteach condemns himself with his own words, or at least the words
of Karl Wolff: “Years later,” Boteach writes, “Wolff had this to say about the meeting: ‘From the pope’s own words I could
sense the sincerity of his sympathy and how much he loved the German people.’” At this point we can imagine Rabbi Boteach
rending his garments and crying out, “You have heard the blasphemy. Pius XII said that he loved the German people! What
need of witnesses have we now!” If Pope Benedict wants to know what God thinks of Catholic-Jewish dialogue, we
recommend a reading of St. Matthew’s account of the Passion and Death of our Savior, in particular 26: 57-68.
As a further indication of what the pope can learn by engaging in dialogue with people like Rabbi Shmuley, we read:
The Catholic Church has come a long, long way from its anti-Semitic past. This was done primarily
though the courage of three of the four most recent popes, great men all, beginning with John XXIII,
continuing with John Paul II and culminating in the warm friendship offered to the Jewish community by
Pope Benedict. So why would the pope undermine the warm and outstretched hand he has offered the
Jewish community by demanding that the sins of his predecessor, the unrighteous Pius XII, be expunged by
his victims?"
Why, indeed?! At this point more important questions arise, namely, why would anyone, much less the pope, want to talk
to an ignorant bigot like Shmuley Boteach? Doesn’t the pope have better things to do with his time? Perhaps as a first step in
re-starting Catholic-Jewish dialogue, the pope can appoint a commission to untangle Rabbi Shmuley’s Talmudic syntax. Then,
they can move on to deciphering his mixed metaphors. Why is the pope undermining the warm and outstretched hand he has
offered the Jewish community? This is Boteach at his irenic best! If this is the way rabbis engage in dialogue with the pope, we
can imagine how they talk in private. And that, of course, raises the real issue, namely, why does the pope want to talk to
people like this? Haven’t we had enough of this already? With dialogue like this, who needs logomachy?
And with these questions still unanswered, we come to the heart of the Williamson affair. The lesson of the last 50 years
of dialogue is now clear: the Church can have unity or she can have good relations with the Jews, but she can’t have both. The
two options are mutually exclusive. The more the pope talks with the Jews, the more he destroys the unity of the Church; the
more the pope attempts to restore unity, as in his lifting of the excommunication of the four bishops, the more he enrages the
Jews.
Non datur tertius
We continue to witness one of the greatest course corrections in the history of the Church. The post-Vatican II era of
covert Jewish warfare under the name of irenic dialogue is over. The warfare is out in the open now. Dragging Vatican II into
this discussion is a red herring. Nostra Aetate was not heretical, but by now it should be obvious that the project of Catholic-
Jewish relations based on NA can’t be construed as anything other than a failed experiment. It failed because Rome took as its
model Jew Nathan der Weise and not God’s verdict as expressed in I Thess 2: 15.
In spite of all of the missteps of the Williamson affair, the Church is slowly regaining its footing and its willingness to
articulate its traditional position against the people that St. Paul referred to as enemies of all mankind. If we need empirical
evidence that the Jews are “the enemies of the whole human race,” footage of the carnage in Gaza should suffice to convince
even the most skeptical Philosemite that rejection of Logos has terrible consequences. St. Paul’s statement is as relevant today
when we were forced to stand by helplessly and watch the slaughter of 1,300 Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis as it was
when St. Paul first wrote those words. The irony of the past 50 years of Catholic-Jewish dialogue is that it has placed the
current pope in precisely the situation the Jews have falsely attributed to Pope Pius XII. When Cardinal Martino referred to
Gaza as a concentration camp, his remarks sparked outrage among the Jews. His comment, however, only points up the silence
of the Church on the ongoing Palestinian genocide in Gaza.
The Lefebvrite schism has hurt the church, but it has hurt the Lefbvrites even more. Like all schisms it was based on lack
of charity, which Catholics consider the worst sin. As St. Paul says (I Cor 13: 1), “If I have all the eloquence of men or of
angels, but speak without love am simply a gong booming or a cymbal clashing... . If I give away all that I possess, piece by
piece, and if I even let them take my body to burn it, but am without love, it will do me no good whatsoever.”
Reunion, as the pope pointed out in the letter that set off / ’affaire Williamson, means the triumph of charity. Reunion, as
Bishop Fellay points out, also means a rehabilitation of tradition. Reunion means that the Church regains her strength. All of
this has consequences for the Jews. When the Church is strong, the Jews are weak. The Middle Ages are evidence of that.
When the Church is weak, the Jews are strong. The last 50 years are certainly evidence of that. The Jews don’t want this
wound to be healed for obvious reasons. But as Henry V said after the French embassy had gone back to their lines to prepare
for an attack, “Our lives are in God’s hands, not theirs.”
Chapter Two: Holocaust Denial and Thought Control and Deborah Lipstadt
On March 25, 2009, Notre Dame was embroiled in the biggest controversy to hit the campus since the performance of
The Vagina Monologues. A few days earlier, Notre Dame president John Jenkins, CSC had announced that the university
planned to give President Barack Obama an honorary doctorate. Within hours of the announcement a storm of protest erupted
which showed no sign of dying down any time soon. Citing the statement of the US Catholic Bishops in 2004 — “The Catholic
community and Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles. They
should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions” — the ordinary of the Diocese
of Fort Wayne-South Bend, John M. D’Arcy announced that, for the first time in 25 years, he would not be attending graduation
ceremonies at Notre Dame, because “President Obama has recently affirmed, and has now placed in public policy, his long
stated unwillingness to hold human life as sacred.”
By March 25, 2009 over 100,000 people had signed a petition condemning Notre Dame’s actions, and Bishop Thomas J.
Olmstead of the Phoenix, Arizona diocese joined with his colleague Bishop D’Arcy in denouncing Jenkins’ decision, calling
the decision to honor President Obama a “public act of disobedience” and a “grave mistake.”
Instead of addressing the running sore that is the Catholic identity issue at Notre Dame, the provost of that institution
along with the Notre Dame Holocaust Project invited a “renowned historian” to address the issue of “holocaust denial,” a
delict which has succeeded patriotism as the last refuge of scoundrels. The “renowned historian” in question was Deborah
Lipstadt, who, according to the press release sent out weeks in advance, is the director of the Rabbi Donald A. Tam Institute
for Jewish Studies and is currently on leave of absence at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the Holocaust Museum
in Washington DC.
The invitation was hastily extended in the wake of what has come to be known as the Williamson Affair. In hosting the
affair, Notre Dame could establish its academic bona fides by inviting a Jew into beat up a Catholic bishop. Needless to say, 1
wanted to get to the lecture early so that 1 could get a seat. Expecting a ropes-up crowd, 1 was disappointed to find a sparsely
attended hall. In fact, if it weren’t for a busload of middle-aged Jewish ladies brought in from the south side of town, the hall
would have been virtually empty. Lipstadt was introduced by a chubby middle-aged man who looked like a professor (he
wasn’t wearing a tie), but it was hard to tell whether he was Catholic or Jewish, a state of affairs that is also applicable to
Notre Dame as an institution. Both Professor Lipstadt and the man who introduced her kept referring to Bishop Williamson as
the “alleged” Bishop Williamson, showing their ignorance of both the English language and Catholic theology. Bishop
Williamson was consecrated a bishop in 1988 by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. His consecration was valid but not licit
because it was done in defiance of Rome. For that act, the six bishops involved were excommunicated latae sententiae. ft was
Pope Benedict’s lifting of the excommunications which set off what has come to be known as the Williamson affair.
As further evidence of her renown, Professor Lipstadt’s introducer told us that Professor Lipstadt “discussed alleged
Bishop Williamson’s holocaust denial on her blog,” and that this blogging “may have helped the Vatican see the light.” After
informing the pope that he “must unequivocally distance himself from [alleged Bishops Williamson’s] views, Professor
Lipstadt concluded, again on her blog, that “1 think [the pope] was willing to tolerate these views in the name of unity.”
Given the nature of Catholic response to the Williamson affair, one would think that Professor Lipstadt would have been
pleased, but this was not the case. In one of the most groveling responses to the Williamson affair, Roger Cardinal Mahony,
archbishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, barred Bishop Williamson from setting foot in any Catholic building in the
archdiocese. Again, one would think that Professor Lipstadt would be pleased by an action like this, but that was not the case.
In a comment which, according to her blog, she posted at 4:42 AM [!] March 2, 2009, Lipstadt dismissed Mahony’s gesture as
“largely symbolic in that Williamson has not given any sign that LA was on his travel itinerary.” If Cardinal Mahony thought an
attack on a fellow Catholic bishop would ingratiate him with the likes of Professor Lipstadt, he obviously had not reckoned
with Professor Lipstadt’s high standards. “What 1 found jarring,” she continued, “was the statement by the spokesman for the
archdiocese. ‘The cardinal wished to send a clear signal to the Jewish community that Williamson is not a member or even
welcome in the Catholic Church until he renounces his views’.”
“This,” Lipstadt sniffed indignantly,
should not be a message to the Jewish Community but to all people who think truth is important-
irrespective of their faith. It would be a message that people who lie about history, distort the truth,
express anti-Semitic and racist views, and pervert facts in order to defend one of the most diabolical
regimes in history are not welcome in the LA archdiocese. Racists, for example, should be shunned not to
send a message to minority communities but because racists spread hatred, instill contempt, and work
against communal tranquility.
I don't mean to quibble over this strong statement on Cardinal Mahony's part. But to do this and define
it as a message to the 'victims' is to miss the point.
That being said, she was nonetheless pleased with her two-day stay at Notre Dame, which she described as “an
institution which takes its Catholic identity seriously.”
Before too long into the introduction, it became clear that Professor Lipstadt established her credentials as a “renowned
historian,” by writing “three books,” two of which bear variations on the title “Denying the Holocaust.” Not content with her
own unearned laurels, Lipstadt is obsessed with denying the qualifications which others have earned honestly. In a letter on her
blog which she sent to the New York Times , Lipstadt takes issue with the Times referring to David Irving, who has written
more than three books, as a “historian.” Instead of referring to Irving as a “historian,” the Times should have called him a
“denier.”
Her three books notwithstanding, Lipstadt’s real claim to fame came from the fact that she was named as a defendant in a
libel suit, something that the Notre Dame press release pointed out. A book on that trial constitutes one-third of all of her book-
length writing over the past 23 years. As some indication of the depth of her overall scholarship, Lipstadt assigned the
“Holocaust memoir” called Fragments in her classes. When the book was revealed as a threadbare hoax written by a non-Jew
who had never been near a concentration camp, Lipstadt opined that, if the allegation turned out to be true (which it did), this
“might complicate matters somewhat,” but insisted that it would still be “powerful as a novel.”
Professor Lipstadt was supposed to have been introduced by Rabbi Michael Signer. This is fitting in a way because
Signer was also the recipient of an endowed chair, he at Notre Dame, for producing even less intellectual material than
Professor Lipstadt. Rabbi Signer could not attend the lecture because he died in January but Professor Lipstadt assured her
audience that he is now “up there watching us.”
Even more than being a defendant in a libel suit, Professor Lipstadt’s renown comes from her efforts to prevent the
spread of the delict known as “holocaust denial.” The point of her talk at Notre Dame was explaining the full ramifications of
this invention. As we have come to expect from speakers like this, Professor Lipstadt feels that another Kristalnacht is right
around the corner. “I see things,” she confided to the yentas from the south side, “as bleaker than I used to see them.” Over the
past year, there has been “an uptick in anti-Semitism,” something that should be “a source of tremendous concern.”
Of course, given her expansive notion of anti-Semitism — “Holocaust denial is a form of anti-Semitism”; it is “the new
anti-Semitism” — “uptick” is hardly the proper term. The Holocaust itself begins to pale in comparison to the threats now on
the horizon — not that I am accusing Professor Lipstadt of Holocaust denial. According to Professor Lipstadt’s definition of
the term, anyone who says the word apartheid and Israel in the same sentence is guilty of the “new anti-Semitism” The term
“Israel Apartheid” was, of course, a veiled reference to former President Jimmy Carter, who is now routinely dismissed as an
anti-Semite. Perhaps “New Anti-Semite” might be a better term, since it corresponds with the “New Anti-Semitism” and
reflects, of course, the fact that no Jew dared to level the term when Carter was president.
At this point, Professor Lipstadt was just warming to her topic. Any claim, she continued, that Zionism is a form of
racism or anything linking Israel and South Africa also constitutes anti-Semitism. The same goes for UN resolutions
condemning Israeli behavior toward Palestinians, something she terms “legalized anti-Semitism” The same goes for people
who refer to Jews as a group, as in what she terms “the so-called Jewish lobby,” which was a veiled reference to Walt and
Mearsheimer’s book on the Israel Lobby. Anti-Semitism has even infected “some parts of Belgium”!
Which brings us to the heart of the “new anti-Semitism,” otherwise known as Holocaust denial. There are two forms of
Holocaust denial: Hard core and soft-core. As examples of hard-core holocaust denial, Lipstadt mentioned David Irving and
“so-called Bishop Williamson.” Lipstadt also objects to historians who claim that “otherwise David Irving is a good
historian,” making it clear that they are guilty of what might be termed second-hand Holocaust denial, a pathogen that is
contracted by intellectual proximity in analogous fashion to how lung cancer is supposedly contracted by second-hand smoke.
Then there is soft-core Holocaust denial. As examples thereof, Lipstadt listed things like “cancellation of Holocaust
remembrance day celebrations,” something that happened in Barcelona recently, “because of Israeli behavior in Gaza.” As
another example of soft-core holocaust denial, Lipstadt mentioned “Eastern European countries governments arguing that Nazis
and Communists were equivalent, and that the communists perpetuated genocide.” The fact that a Jewish resistance fighter was
indicted by the Lithuanian government for war crimes committed while he was a partisan is an instance of soft-core holocaust
denial, according to Professor Lipstadt. Another example of soft-core denial was Mel Gibson’s interview at the time of the
release of The Passion of the Christ — which the Jews, according to Professor Lipstadt, made into a blockbuster by their
protests.
Mel Gibson became a holocaust denier, in Professor Lipstadt’s eyes, when he mentioned in an interview with Diane
Sawyer that “in the Ukraine millions of people were starved to death.” As Norman Finkelstein has pointed out in his book The
Holocaust Industry :
To question a survivor's testimony, to denounce the role of Jewish collaborators, to suggest that
Germans suffered during the bombing of Dresden or that any state except Germany committed crimes in
World War II-this is all evidence, according to Lipstadt of Holocaust denial... . The most "insidious" forms of
Holocaust denial, Lipstadt suggest, are "immoral equivalencies": that is denying the uniqueness of The
Holocaust.
As conclusive and irrefutable proof that Mel Gibson is a Holocaust denier, Lipstadt mentioned that he said in the same
interview that the Jews “died at Auschwitz,” not that they were “murdered,” which is what he should have said if he wanted to
avoid the charge of anti-Semitism. Holocaust denial is also something that can be contracted genetically, like the goyische
equivalent of Tay-Sachs disease. Professor Lipstadt makes it clear that Mel Gibson contracted it from his father, or better,
because he refused to denounce his father, who was a holocaust denier. As further proof of Mel Gibson’s “soft-core holocaust
denial,” Professor Lipstadt claimed that Gibson said, “My father never lied to me in his life.” (Does this mean that genetic
transmission of holocaust denial causes an amelioration from the hard-core variety manifested by Hutton Gibson into the soft¬
core variety manifested by his son? If so, what are the prospects for the third generation? Holocaust doubt?) We are left to
assume that Gibson should have behaved more like little Pavlik Moroslav, the Ukrainian boy who denounced his father to the
Soviet secret police. Little Pavlik was murdered by his outraged relatives, but the Soviets erected statues and schools in his
honor.
Having come up with the taxonomy of holocaust denial, Lipstadt then segued into a discussion of her main claim to fame,
namely, the fact that David Irving named her as a defendant in a libel suit, a fact she characterized at another point as being
taken out of line and shot. It seems that every cloud has a silver lining. So when Professor Lipstadt was sued for libel, it
allowed her and a team of researchers to delve into the work of people like David Irving. Since she had already written a book
mentioning Irving, this wasn’t especially reassuring, but oblivious to that fact, Lipstadt launched into an analysis of two
footnotes. In one instance Irving claimed that Hitler was furious at one of his lieutenants for attacking a Jewish delicatessen at
the time of the 1923 beer hall putsch. What Lipstadt uncovered was that Hitler was really furious because said lieutenant didn’t
wear his uniform during the attack. According to Lipstadt, this discrepancy proves that David Irving made it all up. In
recounting this anecdote, Lipstadt seems oblivious to the fact that she is testifying to Irving’s acumen as a historian and his
ability to get to little known facts. Whether what he said is accurate in detail is precisely the role of historical research, an
activity she prohibits in anyone who disagrees with her point of view.
In a second instance, Irving claimed in one of his books that Hitler was furious that Nazis were attacking Jewish
businesses and ordered them to stop. What Lipstadt and her team of investigators uncovered is that Hitler was only upset by the
arson, but even if that is the case, it is not clear why this should be a legal matter, or worse, reason to ruin a man’s livelihood.
Don’t people write books to have them discussed? Isn’t this why we have universities and professors? Isn’t this how we learn
about the past? Not according to Professor Lipstadt.
Before long it becomes clear that the academy exists, in Lipstadt’s view, not to pursue the truth but to punish malefactors
who are guilty of thought crimes. What becomes equally apparent before long is just how blood-thirsty Professor Lipstadt can
be when it comes to pursuing her enemies. We are talking about something more than personal animus here. We are talking
about racial or ethnic animus of the sort that gets expressed in the later novels of Philip Roth or in the late Richard John
Neuhaus’s magazine First Things, where Meir Soloveichik declared that hate is a Jewish virtue.
Lipstadt expressed this hatred by way of anecdote. During her libel trial, Lipstadt was shocked to hear her lawyer tell a
BBC interviewer that David Irving wasn’t important. When she pressed him on this after the interview, her lawyer assured her
that “David Irving was like the dirt—Lipstadt paused at this point and added parenthetically “he used another word” — “you
step into on the street. The dirt’s not important, what’s important is that you remove it from your shoe.” Lipstadt then referred
to the claim that David Irving was a piece of dog shit as “a wonderful analogy” because it “helped her to understand” how to
deal with people like this.
Just to show that Lipstadt doesn’t apply epithets like that to the goyim alone, she also applied the same description
verbatim to Norman Finkelstein. In responding to a call when Lipstadt was on a program on National Public Radio, Lipstadt
said of Finkelstein: “Think of the dirt you step in on the street and you know what kind of dirt I’m talking about. It has no
importance unless you fail to clean it off your shoe before you go into the house.” Lipstadt’s outburst prompted one listener to
write in, “If Professor Lipstadt disagrees with Professor Finkelstein, I suggest that she debate him on the facts instead of being
allowed to launch vulgar personal attacks on NPR with impunity.”
In an interview which was posted on the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs website (#11, August 1, 2003) Lipstadt
claimed that “as an American,” she was “a staunch believer in free speech,” but went on to say that “the situation in Germany
is different and that there might be room there for a law against Holocaust denial.” What comes across here is a strong belief in
double standards, which comes down to both praising the academy and then using it as a podium for referring to other people
as dog shit. Once again, the academy is instrumentalized into a weapon against holocaust deniers, which is to say, people
whom organized Jewry portrays as enemies of the Jewish race, and a place to settle ancestral scores.
Her goal is clear: to get everyone else to view her opponents as dog shit; her quandary, however, is strategic, namely,
how to “defeat them and not build them up.” As she put it in her talk, “How do you fight these people without building them up
or giving them some merit.” The answer to that question is “dynamic silence,” a theory developed by the AJC in dealing with
Gerald L. K. Smith in the ’50s, and recounted in Benjamin Ginzberg’s book Fatal Embrace. Professor Lipstadt, however, got
her answer from the lawyer in the Irving libel action. Lipstadt may or may not have read Fatal Embrace, but her talk and the
hatred she spewed onto her enemies is some indication that disinterested pursuit of the truth is not Professor Lipstadt’s goal in
life. It’s not enough to disagree, as serious historians can and do, with certain assertions in David Irving’s writings. Professor
Lipstadt insists on total denunciation of everything David Irving ever wrote, followed by a concerted attempt to deprive him of
his ability to earn a livelihood. On her blog, Lipstadt gloats that Irving has been reduced to selling Nazi memorabilia, as if
concerted efforts to blacklist him in the publishing industry had nothing to do with that fact.
Anyone who does not go along with this campaign is suspect and guilty of fraternizing with the enemy, which also calls
for reprisals. In this Lipstadt differs from Norman Finkelstein, who writes:
Not all revisionist literature-however scurrilous the politics or motivations of its practitioners-is totally
useless... . [David] Irving, notorious as an admirer of Hitler and sympathizer with German national
socialism, has nevertheless, as Gordon Craig points out, made an "indispensable" contribution to our
knowledge of World War II. Both Arno Mayer, in his important study of the Nazi holocaust, and Raul Hilberg
cite Holocaust denial publications. "If these people want to speak, let them," Hilberg observes, "It only
leads those of us who do the research to re-examine what we might have considered as obvious" (The
Holocaust Industry, p. 71).
Deborah Lipstadt doesn’t want to disagree with David Irving. She wants to first humiliate and then destroy him. “We
stripped Irving bare,” Lipstadt told her audience at Notre Dame. “We made him look silly.” Not content to leave it at that,
Lipstadt continued that at one point she took out two movies, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Mel Brooks’ The
Producers. What she learned from watching these movies is that it’s not enough to defeat your enemies (no one brought up the
fact that Lipstadt’s enemies were people who had written books with which she disagreed), “The point was to dress him in a
jester’s costume and make him a witness to his own powerlessness.”
In other words, academe is for Lipstadt simply the arena in which she humiliates her foes. This view was expressed
repeatedly during the course of her talk. Persuasion is not her strong suit, and that, of course, means that it has no place in
academic life. “Trying to convince holocaust deniers,” she said at another point, “is a hopeless task.” It is also a circular
argument, to which Professor Lipstadt is as blind as the image of Synagoga on the facade of the cathedral portal in Strassbourg.
Professor Lipstadt credits her researchers with bringing about the victory over David Irving, but in doing so only
reinforces the idea that the academy has been weaponized: “The trial was a great tribute to academia; they tracked down that
information.”
Given all of the resources at her disposal, I began to wonder why Professor Lipstadt hasn’t written the definitive
Holocaust narrative. In spite of the resources at her disposal, and the fact that she is now on leave of absence from Emory
University spending a year immersing herself in “Advanced Holocaust Studies” at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, the
only thing she has produced during the last 16 years is an account of the Irving trial. In fact, in the 16 years which have elapsed
since she invented the term “holocaust denial,” she has produced not one piece of historical scholarship on the period in
question. Instead of laying these issues to rest the way scholars do, i.e., with a piece of competent scholarship, Lipstadt has
decided to resolve the issue by force majeure.
Why is this? Well, maybe it’s because Professor Lipstadt’s day job as thought cop keeps her so busy she can’t do
anything else. In her professional activity Professor Lipstadt resembles less the scholar and more the political commissars
assigned to units of the Soviet Army or the interrogators at the Cheka, the Soviet secret police, positions that were more often
than not staffed by Jews, as Jewish historians have noted. In The Russian Jew under Tsars and Soviets, Salo Baron writes:
Perhaps in subconscious retaliation for many years of suffering at the hands of the Russian police, a
disproportionate number of Jews joined the new Bolshevik secret service. The impression these facts made
upon the ordinary Russian is rightly stressed by Leonard Shapiro: "For the most prominent and colorful
figure after Lenin was Trotsky, in Petrograd the dominant and hated figure was Zinoviev, while anyone who
had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself
confronted with, and possibly shot by, a Jewish investigator" (p. 203).
Professor Lipstadt is the spiritual descendant of these Jewish investigators. Professor Lipstadt’s job is to shoot anybody
in academe or publishing (the current equivalent of the Soviet army) who is not following the party line. Since she can’t very
well go out and shoot David Irving literally, she does the next best thing by assassinating his character by claiming that he is
not really a historian (certainly not a “renowned historian” like Professor Lipstadt) and depriving him of a livelihood.
Professor David O’Connell, who teaches French at Georgia State University, found this out when he published an article
on Elie Wiesel in Culture Wars. O’Connell’s article did what scholarship is supposed to do. It pointed out inconsistencies in
the conventional narrative that academe had been cowed into ignoring. It pointed out patent absurdities like the famous picture
of Wiesel in Buchenwald; it pointed up the discrepancies in the various accounts Wiesel has given of his liberation from
Buchenwald. It brought up the fact that after the release of the PBS documentary The Liberators, which purported to describe
how an all-black tank battalion liberated Buchenwald, Wiesel suddenly became aware of memories he never had before,
memories of being liberated by black soldiers emerging from Sherman tanks. “I will always remember with love,” Wiesel
wrote in 1989, “a big black soldier. He was crying like a child-tears of all the pain in the world and all the rage. Everyone
who was there that day will forever feel a sentiment of gratitude to the American soldiers who liberated us.”
It was a truly touching moment. Unfortunately, it never happened. First of all, Liberators was made up “to increase Black
and Jewish mutual understanding in Brooklyn,” and Elie Wiesel wittingly collaborated in that scam O’Connell’s article not
only damaged Elie Wiesel’s reputation, it also called significant segments of the Holocaust narrative, in particular those
recounted by Wiesel, into question. Did Professor O’Connell’s Culture Wars article then constitute Holocaust denial? This is
where the story gets interesting.
After O’Connell’s article on Wiesel appeared in the October 2004 issue of Culture Wars, Lipstadt wrote to the
administration at GSU in an attempt to get him fired. She claimed in her letter that O’Connell had engaged in “fraud in
research.” What followed was several pages of single spaced writing in which she questioned O’Connell’s spelling of Yiddish
and labored mightily to convict Professor O’Connell of fraud. Unwilling to dismiss Lipstadt’s letter, the administration at GSU
appointed a panel of three full professors to look into the matter. After deliberating for almost a year, from December 2005 to
October 2006, the professors concluded that there was no fraud, or that if there were, it was the doing of Elie Wiesel and not
Professor O’Connell. If Professor O’Connell didn’t get fired, it wasn’t for Professor Lipstadt’s lack of trying. The fault lay not
in Professor Lipstadt’s will but in her intellect. In spite of her endowed chair and years immersed in “advanced holocaust
studies,” she couldn’t mount a coherent argument. Every claim she raised was ultimately dismissed as baseless. It was as if she
felt she could carry the day by sheer force of will, and was upset to learn that academic life still had a remnant of integrity.
There is probably another reason why the attempt to oust Professor O’Connell failed. The administration at GSU knew if
they fired O’Connell on trumped up charges of fraud, that he would then sue them, and the lawsuit would lead to a discovery
process that would have been disastrous for both the university and the system of though control run by the powerful Jews who
were orchestrating the campaign, demanding vengeance. In a way, it’s a shame this case didn’t go to trial. It would have been
interesting to learn how Professor Lipstadt heard about Professor O’Connell’s article in the first place, and it would have
provided a nice counterpoint to the Lipstadt-Irving libel trial in London. It would also have exposed the inner workings of
Jewish thought police like Deborah Lipstadt and the role she plays as an enforcer of the Jewish hegemony over academe today.
The O’Connell case makes an interesting counterpoint to the Williamson case as well. Unlike Professor O’Connell,
Bishop Williamson did no research, published no article or book, and so had no way to fight back when the counterattack
came. This is why he was such a tempting target. This is also why the Jewish organizations have stayed away from David
O’Connell. They tried to get him fired and failed because O’Connell had all the facts on his side, and there was nothing that
organized Jewry could do about it. As a result, Lipstadt et al shifted to the tactic of “dynamic silence,” and there the situation
at GSU has remained ever since. Professor O’Connell has challenged Professor Lipstadt to a debate, but, as we learned when
we attended her talk, Professor Lipstadt doesn’t debate Holocaust deniers. But in this case, that logic isn’t compelling, because
she herself had to certify that Professor O’Connell was not a holocaust denier. Unable to prove that O’Connell engaged in
fraud, Lipstadt was unable to claim that he was a holocaust denier. Since she comments on every conceivable delict under the
sun on her blog, it seems odd that Professor Lipstadt didn’t comment on the challenge to debate the Williamson affair from
Professor O’Connell, a man who teaches not far away from where she holds her chair. The logistics of a debate would hardly
be insurmountable, or are there other considerations at work here?
I tried to get some idea of the limits of the holocaust narrative in the question and answer period after her talk. What I got
instead was more evidence for the circularity of the term. My question concerned the documentary about the 761st Tank
Battalion, an all-Negro unit, which allegedly liberated Buchenwald. Was it Holocaust denial to say that it never happened?
Lipstadt was forced to admit that the Tank Battalion/Buchenwald story was, as she put it in another context, “pure
invention,” but she refused to see any implications in this for the Holocaust narrative as a whole or for Wiesel’s credibility.
Wiesel, she claimed, dealing with the latter instance first, was talking about other black soldiers, but since the army wasn’t
integrated at that point, that would have to mean other Black units, and there were none in the area at the time. As Professor
O’Connell pointed out in the article that Lipstadt and presumably her researchers meticulously vetted, “He [Wiesel] made this
statement despite the fact that there were no blacks present at the liberation of Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, and the black
unit in question was over 50 miles away on that date.”
So the question is: is it holocaust denial to say that the 761st Tank Division didn’t liberate Buchenwald?
“No,” snapped Lipstadt, “because it never happened.” This, of course, brings up bigger issues about the status of the
holocaust narrative itself. Is it riddled, like AIG’s portfolio, with “toxic assets.” If so, which parts of the holocaust narrative
are not true? Would it have been holocaust denial to make this claim when everyone, Elie Wiesel included, was effusively
praising the PBS documentary? What about other parts of the holocaust narrative, which have since gone down the memory
hole? What about the lampshades made out of Jewish skin? What about the soap made from Jewish fat? What about the source
of the term holocaust itself, i.e., the truckloads of Jewish babies who were thrown into burning pits? As soon as one detail
becomes patently absurd, Lipstadt is on the scene to purge it from the collective memory, to ensure that no damage gets done to
the holocaust narrative as a whole.
Bigger Issue
This, of course, brings us to the bigger issue, which is, how do we know what really happened? The answer to that
question is historical research, but that is precisely what the delict “holocaust denial” has been created to prevent. Holocaust
denial is another word for Jewish control of discourse, in particular historical discourse, in particular historical discourse
about World War II. If a historian publishes something that a powerful Jew, which is to say a Jew with powerful backers,
dislikes, that person will be punished. If the person in question lives by writing books, as David Irving once did, the Lipstadt
brigade will get him blacklisted in the publishing industry. If the person in question is a professor, the big Jews will try to get
him fired, as Deborah Lipstadt herself did in the case of Professor David O’Connell. In this instance, Lipstadt failed, but David
O’ConnelTs case is not typical in this regard.
More typical is the case of Norman Finkelstein, who was fired from his job at DePaul University in Chicago. The fact
that Finkelstein was a Jew himself doesn’t matter. It’s the big Jews, in this case Alan Dershowitz, who decide who is to live
and who is to die in academe and publishing. Finkelstein wrote a devastating critique of Dershowitz’s book The Case for
Israel, and, as a result, Dershowitz set out to destroy Finkelstein’s career. It was, in many ways, a typically Jewish response,
the academic version of “You’ll never work in this town again.” What followed was equally Jewish. In fact Finkelstein
characterized the dispute as a contest over “who was the toughest Jew from Borough Park.” The definitive answer to that
question is in: the big Jew from Borough Park is Alan Dershowitz, who got Finkelstein fired with the collaboration of the
supine Catholic priest who is president of DePaul University. Among other things, this also shows that a selection process is at
work among Jews in academe. Any Jew who goes against the interests of organized Jewry will get destroyed by the ruthless
academic enforcer Jews who represent their interests. Most Jews are immune to struggles like this because they fall into the
broad, gray middle category of fellow travelers, Jews who go along with the agenda in order to collect big salaries for a cushy
job.
But there are larger lessons to be learned here. First of all, when if comes to a choice between money and principle,
Catholic universities go for the money. Secondly, the fact that academe has become the site of unseemly brawls like this is
largely the result of Jewish i nf luence in academe. As Professor Lipstadt made abundantly clear in her talk, the university not
the place where the big Jews seek the truth. The university is a place where Jews settle scores. It’s where they punish people
who threaten the Jewish hegemony over discourse.
This should not surprise us. The university is not a Jewish creation. It is a Catholic creation of the Catholic Middle Ages,
and so it should not come as a surprise that Jews have all of the difficulties which come with functioning in an alien
environment when they are admitted to universities. For over 600 years, from roughly the beginning of the 13th to the middle of
the 19th century, Catholics were involved in the creation and preservation of the university as a place where one engaged in the
disinterested pursuit of the truth. This was also the place and period of time during which representational art reached its
culmination as well. The link between these phenomena—art and the university as manifestations of the Logos which finds its
embodiment in Christ and its cultural expression in Catholicism—is no coincidence. Conversely, the Jewish subversion of
academe is similar to the Jewish subversion of the art world, something which occurred during the same period of time and, as
Israel Shamir points out in a brilliant article “A Study of Art,” in his book, Caballa of Power, for the same reasons.
Modern art is controlled by Jews. Shamir is sensitive to the sensibilities this claim offends — ‘“Does it matter that they
are Jewish?’ asks the annoyed reader” — but the facts speak for themselves:
The Jewish influence in modem art is well attested. By 1973, some estimated that 75-80 percent of the
2500 core "art market" personnel of the United States-art dealers, art curators, art critics, and art
collectors-were Jewish. In 2001, according to ARTnews, at least eight of the "Top Ten" US art collectors
were Jewish: Debbie and Leon Black, Edythe and Eli Broad, Doris and Donald Fisher, Ronnie and Samuel
Heyman, Marie-Josee and Henry R. Kravits, Evelyn and Leonard Lauder, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder,
and Stephen Wynn.
"Today," wrote Gerald Krefetz in 1982, "Jews enjoy every phase of the art world: as artists, dealers,
collectors, critics, curators, consultants, and patrons. In fact the contemporary art scene has a strong
Jewish flavour. In some circles, the wheelers and dealers are referred to as the Jewish Mafia since they
command power, prestige, and most of all money."
In 1996 Jewish art historian Eunice Upton explained that she went into a career as an art historian in
order to be in a field dominated by Jews: "I wanted to be where the Jews were, that is, I wanted a
profession that would allow me tacitly to acknowledge my Jewishness through the company that I kept."
The field of art history was filled with Jews. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Arthur Ochs
Sulzberger (former publisher of the New York Times) eventually became its chairman. He oversaw an
institution in which Jews, said George Goodman, "have enriched every area of the Museum's collections .
n
By the 1980s, four of the ten board members that dole out the MacArthur Foundation "genius awards"
were also Jewish; two Jews also sat on the board of the Russell Sage Foundation. The Kaplan Fund also has
had an important impact on the art community in divvying out awards. One of J. M. Kaplan's daughters was
the Chairman of the New York State Arts Council. Joan Kaplan Davidson was appointed as chairman of the
$34 million New York State Arts Council in 1975 despite the fact that she was "not professionally trained in
the arts." The Getty Museum ... has consistently had Jews at the economic helm... . [former chairman]
Harold Williams ... was "raised in a Labor Zionist home in East Los Angeles." The new president of the J.
Paul Getty trust is another Jewish administrator, Barry Munitz,... .
After a summary that covers the whole spectrum of modern art, Shamir concludes nonetheless that, “The fact that Jews
are so dominating in the art world is very rarely publicly acknowledged. It is forbidden-for anyone, anywhere — to discuss the
subject for fear of being branded ‘anti-Semitic.’”
The art world is dominated by Jews, not because they are good at producing art, but rather because during the course of
the 20th century, Jewish ascendancy rose in America and American ascendancy rose in the world and the art world as well. As
a result: “The artist as creator of art disappeared and gave place to the museum curator, the collection owner. It is he who
decides what sort of junk will be displayed, whose name will be written under the photo of tinned soup or a dead rat.”
Shamir is basing his verdict in this instance on a visit to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, a Jewish creation (both the
architect Frank Gehry and the funders, the Guggenheim family, were Jews) which is filled with junk and, inexplicably, an
exhibition of Armani suits. In this world of Jewish art, “Only the Armani brand reigns supreme, impervious to the curator’s
will.” The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao provides “a good place to contemplate the present decay, nay, demise of European
visual art,” which is now made up of “Rotten decomposed pig trunks in formalthehyde,” pornography, and anything else that
“became a piece of art by the decision of two Mammonites, the curator and the collector.”
How did this happen? The crucial middle term in both equations (art and the university) is capitalism. The “economic
freedom” of capitalism is traceable to the distinction between the Jewish prohibition on taking usury from a fellow Jew, and
the permission which allowed it to be taken from “strangers.” This differential first brought about a “complete transformation
of commerce and industry,” and then once capitalist principles became the cultural norm, other institutions (including art and
academe) as well:
The theory of price in the Talmud and the Codes in so far as it affected trade between Jew and Jew, is
exactly parallel to the scholastic doctrine of justum pretium which was prevalent in Europe throughout the
Middle Ages. But as between Jew and non-Jew, there was no just price. Price was formed, as it is today, by
the "higgling of the market." ... The differential treatment of non-Jews in Jewish commercial law resulted in
the complete transformation of the idea of commerce and industry in the direction of more freedom. If we
have called the Jews the Fathers of Free Trade, and therefore the pioneers of capitalism, let us note here
that they were prepared for this role by the free-trading spirit of the commercial and industrial law, which
received an enormous impetus towards a policy of laissez-faire by its attitude toward strangers. Clearly,
intercourse with strangers could not but loosen the bonds of personal duties and replace them by economic
freedom. (Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, pp. 246-7).
The spirit of capitalism brought about a similar transformation of both the art world and academe. Shamir calls this spirit
“Mammon,” something which he considers
the personification of capitalist Class Interest. A capitalist may wish to sell drinking water, but Mammon
wants to poison all water in order to force everybody to buy drinking water. A capitalist may build the mall;
but Mammon wants to destroy the world outside the mall, for the outside world interferes with the only
meaningful occupation, shopping.
Since “Mammon will try to eliminate every distraction to shopping,” the Jewish spirit which created the system of
Mammon known as capitalism will “turn every kind of art into Conceptual art” because “For Mammonites, Art is a distraction
from the most important occupation, adoration of Mammon. Mammonite reviews of Art concentrate on the price of Art.”
Jews are never content to integrate themselves into existing structures, whether those structures are states, universities,
art museums or the military. They feel compelled to infiltrate and subvert the institutions which admit them as members. In the
art world, the name this Jewish infiltration and subversion goes by is “conceptual art.” In an article which appeared in The
New Statesman , Ivan Massow, then chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, “noticed the damage this causes for the
artists who are forced to fit into the Procrustean bed of this anti-art”:
It seems sad that so many talented young artists, clawing to be noticed for their craft, are forced to
ditch their talent and reinvent themselves as creators of video installations, or a machine that produces
foam in the middle of a room, in order to be recognized as contemporary artists. ... We need art lovers to
tell artists that they're not obliged to reinvent themselves into creators of piles of crap, or pass their work
around like samizdat.
As some indication that Deborah Lipstadt’s affliction is shared by other descendants of the Cheka, shortly after those
words appeared in print, Massow got sacked. Massow’s expulsion from the synagogue that the British art establishment had
become was, as Shamir points out,
led by the Jewish cultural tsar Nicholas Serota, and by the Jewish art collector and advertising magnate,
a friend of Pinochet, Thatcher, and Conrad Black, Charles Saatchi. His power is unique, and an art critic,
Norman Rosenthal of the British Royal Academy, suggested that "the Saatchis are probably the most
important collectors of modern art anywhere in the world."
Conceptual art isn’t art, but it is Jewish. It signals the culmination of the Jewish take-over of modern art. Conceptual art
requires no artistic ability, talent or skill. That’s why Jews gravitate toward it and promote it. It’s an example of Jews defining
art as what they do rather than defining art in its relationship to Logos. It’s as if, Shamir says at another point, we all woke up
one day and found that only cripples could compete at the Olympics. Or, to give another example, to find out that the high jump
had been replaced by a chess match. Jewish domination of the art world was not “due to the great achievements of Jewish
artists.” Quite to the contrary, Shamir points out that
The Jews were extremely ill-equipped for their conquest of Olympus. For many generations, Jews never
entered churches and hardly ever saw paintings. They were conditioned to reject image as part of their
rejection of idols. In the course of a two thousand-year-long selection process, the visual gifts of Jews were
not developed, as opposed to the abilities to learn, argue, and convince, honed to perfection in the
Talmudic environment.
Shamir goes on to add that “Rejection of Christ,” the Logos incarnate who is the “main fountain of creativity,” was the
ultimate reason why Jews could not be artists, because
There is no visual art or poetry outside of God; at best the godless person can imitate art. For this
reason, Jews are, as a rule, poor painters and sculptors... .While their mastery of word and ideology is very
high (well above the average of 100 at 130), their average visual ability is only 75, extremely low. One can
consider it a scientific proof of "no art without Christ." Indeed, until recently there were no important Jewish
painters or sculptors. The Jewish temple was supposedly built by Phoenecians and Greeks, and it had very
few images. Even the Illumination of Jewish manuscripts was usually done by non-Jewish artists, who made
very obvious errors trying to copy Jewish letters.
The same thing applies, mutatis mutandis to the university. The people whose defining characteristic is rejection of
Logos cannot excel in the disinterested pursuit of the truth. If they are allowed into the university they will subvert the
principles of the university and redefine academic achievement things that Jews do well. If the university were the Olympics,
chess would replace basketball. If Jews controlled the Olympics as effectively as they controlled the art world, only cripples
could compete.
In order to disguise their total lack of artistic talent, “Visually handicapped Jews created a similar anomaly — that of
non-visual ‘conceptual’ art” because “Preparation of these items places no demand on artistic abilities. They can be done by
anybody. Such art is perfectly within Jewish abilities. Moreover, Jews with their good ability to produce ideas and read
iconography will surely succeed in it. Jews bend art to fit their abilities, in order for them to succeed in this difficult (for them)
occupation.”
The culmination of this trend to conceptualize and thereby redefine art can be found in works of “art,” like “Piss Christ,”
an artifact which kills two birds with one stone, combining Jewish subversion of the art world with Jewish hatred of Christ.
“Piss Christ” is a work of art because, as Marcel Duchamp once said, it is “in a museum” “Piss Christ” is a work of art
because a museum curator said it was. In this instance, the man responsible was Leonard Lauder, the Jew who runs the Whitney
Museum, a man who was, according to Shamir, “a great friend of Ariel Sharon.” Are we talking about a conspiracy? Shamir
lays the blame at the feet of Group Interest:
For Jews, their Group interest lays in undermining visual art, for they can't compete in it. The even
deeper Group Interest of Jews is to undermine Christianity, their main enemy. We see this interest satisfied
... by their relentless attack on Mel Gibson, who dared to produce a film about Christ. ... As sacrality in
Europe is unavoidably Christian, profanation of art is certainly within Jewish Group Interests. It does not
mean the Jews, or even some Jews, understand that they act in their own group interest.
This is not a new phenomenon. Shamir sees the Saatchis of the world, the Jews responsible for the creation of conceptual
art, as the descendants of “The Jews [who] were prominent in the great tragedy of Byzantine art, the iconoclasm The
contemporary writers leave us no doubt: Jews (a powerful community in those days as nowadays) were extremely active in
promoting this concept.”
The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of the university; however, I see the cause of this convergence in the form, which is
to say, formal causality. The student of formal causality who attempts to deal with Jewish influence at the university is
confronted with a curious philosophical phenomenon. People regularly refer to Catholics, Methodists, and Baptists (As for
example, when they say ‘Baylor is a Baptist university’), but the minute one refers to Jews, the term is stricken as
impermissible.
The issue is philosophical. It is based on a philosophical error known as nominalism, which maintained that there was
no such thing as “trees,” only individual birches, pines, oaks, etc. This extreme form of nominalism was noticed by Hilaire
Belloc in the 1920s in his book on The Jews, when he wrote, “If anyone referred to a swindler as a Jew, he was an anti-
Semite,” but exposing the absurdity of the claim did little to stop the tendency.
In order to unravel this error at the bottom of what is in reality a ban on thought, we need to distinguish between essence
and existence. If I say that a dog is a four-legged creature with fur, I am referring to essence not existence, and my claim is not
refuted when someone says, “Yesterday, I saw a hairless, Mexican dog with three legs.”
Similarly, the philosophical validity of the term “Catholic” or “Jew” is not refuted when someone claims “I know a
Catholic who is proabortion.” Or “Are you saying my Jewish mother-in-law is a revolutionary?” Both the Catholic and Jew get
their identity qua Catholic or Jew from the form In the case of Catholics, that form is acceptance of Christ the Logos as
defined or determined by the Catholic faith, i.e., by scripture, tradition and the Magisterium In the case of Jews, that form is
defined by rejection of Christ and Logos, as determined by rabbinic interpretation of the Talmud. Catholics are formed by the
gospels; Jews are formed by the Talmud. The result is two radically different cultures.
If the culmination of Catholic culture was the creation of the university, the culmination of Jewish culture was capitalism,
which, over the course of the latter half of the 20th century in America, gradually devoured the university, by restructuring it
according to capitalist, which is to say, Jewish principles, in particular those articulated by Milton Friedman and the Chicago
Boys, a gang of thugs which rivals Professor Lipstadt in its brutality. The institution of tenure, which was a relic of the Middle
Ages, was subverted and then replaced by a system in which Jewish superstar professors like Stanley Fish could earn six
figure salaries (While at UIC, Stanley Fish earned more per annum than the Governor of Illinois), while the majority of the
teaching was done by wage slave adjuncts.
During the more than half a millennium when Catholics were using the university to develop theology, metaphysics,
physics and eventually the sciences that led to the industrial revolution, scholarship for Jews meant studying the Talmud, which
meant among other things, learning how to cheat the goyim in business transactions and then justify those practices with a
veneer of pious rationalization. This is not my opinion; it is the verdict of Heinrich Graetz, the father of Jewish historiography,
who claimed in his magnum opus that the study of the Talmud led to the moral corruption of the Polish Jews:
To twist a phrase out of its meaning, to use all the tricks of the clever advocate, to play upon words,
and to condemn what they did not know ... such were the characteristics of the Polish Jew... . Honesty and
right-thinking he lost as completely as simplicity and truthfulness. He made himself master of all the
gymnastics of the Schools and applied them to obtain advantage over any one more cunning than himself.
He took delight in cheating and overreaching, which gave him a sort of joy of victory. But his own people he
could not treat that way: they were as knowing as he. It was the non-Jew who, to his loss, felt the
consequences of the Talmudically trained mind of the Polish Jew.
This assertion and what follows are recounted in my book The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and its Impact on World
History . The only thing that saved Graetz himself from the fate of Polish Jews was German culture, the German Enlightenment
in particular, and role models like Moses Mendelssohn and Salomon Maimun, who saw their own separation from Talmudic
culture as a liberation from Jewish bondage.
And yet in spite of that liberation and the rise of the maskilim in the Pale of the Settlement, when the Jews were finally
admitted to the university in significant numbers, as happened in Russia in the mid-19th century, they used the university as a
staging ground for revolutionary activity. The same thing happened in America. In his memoir Commies, Ronald Radosh
describes how he and other Jews in the Young Communist League were sent from New York to Wisconsin to take over the
university there.
The same thing happened in slightly different fashion at Notre Dame. As one has come to expect, the main culprit in this
matter was the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, CSC. In addition to being the president who stole Notre Dame from the Catholic
Church, Father Hesburgh has the distinction of hiring the first Jew at Notre Dame, Samuel Shapiro, who was brought into the
history department. I knew Shapiro for the last 20 some years of his life; he would show up at my house and plunk himself
down on the living room sofa periodically. I visited him in the hospital when he was dying, and I wrote his obituary after his
death. In the Middle Ages Catholics were told to avoid contact with Jews because, they were told, the only time a Jew wants
to talk with a Christian is to subvert his faith or corrupt his morals. For over 20 years Sam Shapiro tried to do just that. Fie
attempted to undermine my faith — largely by trying to convert me to Darwinism — and I tried to get him to convert to
Catholicism In the end, neither project was successful. I have written about this elsewhere; the obituary can be read at
culturewars.com For now I’d like to propose the Jewish corollary to the above statement, namely, all too often the only time a
gov wants to talk to a Jew is when the goy wants big money. This was true of the princes in Medieval Europe, and it led to
misery among the population at large and pogroms against the Jews, who were granted privileges that were invariably
economically ruinous for the population at large in exchange for the low interest loans they provided to princes. Needless to
say, this deal often included princes of the church.
Hired to Get Money
It certainly applied to Father Hesburgh, an unofficially crowned prince of the Church, who hired Sam Shapiro to get
money. Sam told me the story of the hiring more than once. He had just been fired from his job, had been jailed in Cuba, and
was nervously looking forward to giving a speech to the history department in the hopes that they would hire him When he got
to Notre Dame, he realized that no speech was necessary. Father Hesburgh had passed the word to the department that Shapiro
was to be hired no matter what. When he arrived at Notre Dame to begin teaching in the fall, Shapiro hardly had time to get his
suitcases unpacked before he was sent to the Ford Foundation to ask for money. The message Hesburgh wanted to send was
clear: Notre Dame was liberal enough for Ford money because they hired Jews.
Privately, however, Hesburgh knew that there were risks involved here. As an ardent devotee of everything Harvard did
and stood for (the crowning moment in Hesburgh’s career was his being named to the Harvard Board of Overseers), Hesburgh
must have been aware that Harvard had strict quotas that limited the number of Jews who got admitted there. There is some
indication that Hesburgh not only knew this, but that he also agreed with why Harvard imposed quotas on Jews because he told
Ralph Mclnerny “if you let the Jews in, they take over.”
For once Father Hesburgh was prescient, because this is what has happened in both Notre Dame and academe in general,
as the rise of a “renowned historian” like Deborah Lipstadt shows. Over the course of the 40 years after Sam Shapiro was
hired, Jews were hired in increasing numbers at Notre Dame. Like Deborah Lipstadt, the Jews at Notre Dame make up for their
lack of scholarship by their zeal in thought control. A few instances should make this clear.
I was once invited by the Orestes Brownson group, a conservative Catholic organization on campus, to speak on Jan
Zizka and the Hussites. When the date of the talk approached I started getting concerned phone calls from the student who was
the organization’s president informing me that the organization had mysteriously run out of money and couldn’t pay me for my
talk. After assuring him that the Orestes Brownson society could pay me out of next year’s budget (which they never did), I
showed up to give my talk and discovered the real reason for the phone calls, namely, Professor Elliot Barkey, the Jewish
professor who was the faculty moderator for this organization. Why was a Jewish professor the moderator for the conservative
Catholic organization on campus? Well, because you can take the Jew out of the Cheka, but you can’t take the Cheka out of the
Jew. Barkey had put pressure on the student to have me canceled, and when that failed he decided to show up for my talk. His
silence during the talk continued during the question and answer period afterward. Then after everyone had left the room, he
dragged the student moderator back into the room and behind closed doors claimed that I had my facts wrong and was an anti-
Semite. I was reminded of Joseph Pfefferkorn, zealous Jewish convert in Germany who ran afoul of Reuchlin and the
humanists, and his lament, “A fat Jew has sat on my books!” Barkey sat silent during my entire talk and the question and answer
period afterward. If he knew of any factual errors in my talk he could have pointed them out, and we could have discussed them
in the open forum that academe is supposed to be. But instead the inner Jew triumphed and in the end Barkey reverted to type
and attacked me behind closed doors by picking on an undergraduate who knew even less about the Hussites than Barkey
himself.
If this were an isolated incident, we could ascribe it to defective personalities, but the pattern is too big to ignore. The
main problem is that, ultimately, the university, like the fine arts academy, is not a Jewish institution, and Jews can only thrive
there if they redefine what goes on there to suit their Talmudic proclivities. The converse of this would be money-lending,
where Christians, as in the case of the Calvinists in Holland and Geneva, could only succeed by imitating Jews. As a result of
this mismatch, academe became a jungle in which the ruthless Jews drove out professors of principle, including other Jews
who refused to go along with the agenda of organized Jewry. Jews have been formed by centuries of Talmudic influence to see
academe as a place when they can settle ancestral scores. They don’t get mad; they get even. Their attempt to have Professor
Kevin MacDonald ousted from his position at California State University at Long Beach is just one more instance of the same
tendency to turn academe into an institution where the main point is settling scores, not the disinterested pursuit of the truth.
The best example of this at Notre Dame was the late Rabbi Michael Signer, the man who was “looking down on all of
us” during Deborah Lipstadt’s talk. I have already written about Rabbi Signer while he was alive, and so there is no need to go
into his all but complete lack of scholarly activity now that he is dead.
He did, however, come to mind when Deborah Lipstadt mentioned the joy Jews take in humiliating those who disagree
with them. Signer was subtler than Lipstadt in this regard. He would do things like invite Polish bishops to come to Notre
Dame to comment on books like Jan Gross’s book Neighbors, which defamed the Polish nation by fabricating a holocaust
narrative out of the incident at Jedwabne. (Again, see Culture Wars, for Iwo Pogonowski’s version of what really happened.)
Signer hoped that he could get the bishop to denounce Poles as anti-Semites. That is why Signer invited him. I was there in the
room when he expressed his disappointment that that hadn’t happened. It was shortly after that exchange that someone came up
to me and shook his fist in my face and said, “Show more respect” because I had asked the bishop about his views on the
Jewish attempt to extort reparations payments from the Poles.
Signer’s aggression against the Church came out in the courses he taught on the Gospel of St. John. Students came away
from his course convinced that St. John was an anti-Semite, but his main accomplishment always remained his ability to
schmoose Catholics under the guise of dialogue. He was a master of reading crowds, something that came out when he
organized a symposium on Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, keying up Jesuits or fellow Jews from the film department,
depending on how the mood of the crowd was developing.
As a follow-up to my question about the 761st tank battalion, I asked if questioning Elie Wiesel were a form of holocaust
denial. At the back of my mind was the following passage in The Holocaust Industry, “And to suggest that Wiesel has profited
from the Holocaust Industry, or even to question him, amounts to Holocaust denial” (p. 70). I did not have the book in front of
me and remembered the note which followed the passage as referring to Lipstadt’s book. I was wrong. The previous note
referred to her book. Instead of viewing the exchange as a way of getting to the truth, Lipstadt and her handler congratulated
themselves afterward on having scored another victory over another hapless goy holocaust denier. I know this because a
student approached them in the middle of that conversation and relayed the details to me later.
What followed was more interesting. Obviously affected by the Obama invitation and the brouhaha that it was causing on
campus, the student then asked Professor Lipstadt whether she thought abortion was a holocaust. The question elicited nothing
but scorn. Lipstadt dismissed it as absurd, and went on to claim that abortion was a good thing, and went on to cite the UN’s
promotion of it as proof of its goodness. Suddenly UN resolutions weren’t so bad after all.
The student then brought up Professor O’Connell’s article on Elie Wiesel, but before she could get her question out,
Lipstadt dismissed O’Connell as “third rate,” and wanted to how she had come across the article. “My professor assigned in
class,” replied the student. At this point Professor Lipstadt could no longer restrain the inner Cheka interrogator and demanded
to know the professor’s name, which the student was smart enough to withhold. One can imagine Professor Lipstadt poring
over university course lists until 4:42 in the morning trying to find the offending professor. As in the case of Professor Barkey,
you can take the Jew out of the Cheka, but you can’t take the Cheka out of the Jew.
In looking at the pictures of Professor Lipstadt on the web, I couldn’t help but notice that they looked nothing like the
lady who spoke at Notre Dame in March. The photos of Professor Lipstadt on the web show a woman with dark straight hair;
the woman who spoke at Notre Dame had red curly hair. The discrepancy brought to mind an article I had just read, that day,
on Miklos Gruner and his odd relationship with Elie Wiesel (Ralph Forbes, “Shocking Charges are made against Most
Infamous Holocaust ‘Survivor,’” American Free Press, March 23, 2009, p. 16). Gruner was a Hungarian Jew who was
arrested and deported to Auschwitz in May of 1944. When he got to Auschwitz, Gruner met another Jew by the name of Lazar
Wiesel, who had the number A-7713 tattooed on his arm. In 1986, Gruner, who was now living in Australia, was contacted by
a Swedish journalist who invited him to come to Sweden to meet “an old friend” by the name of Elie Wiesel. Thinking he was
going to meet his old friend Lazar, Gruner was shocked when the man who now goes by the name of Elie Wiesel met him at the
airport.
I was stunned to see a man I didn't recognize at all, who didn't even speak Hungarian and who was
speaking English with a strong French accent so our meeting was over in about ten minutes. As a good-bye
gift, the man gave me a book titled Night, of which he claimed to be the author. I told everyone there, that
this man was not the person he pretended to be.
When Gruner asked to see the tattoo on Wiesel’s arm, Wiesel refused, claiming that “he didn’t want to exhibit his body.”
Once the shock wore off, Gruner resolved that “The world must know that Elie Wiesel is an imposter, and I am going to tell
it.” Gruner even “officially reported to the FBI that Elie Wiesel is an imposter but had no answer ... .”
Perhaps it was the after-effect of reading this story, perhaps it was the light in the room, but after much pondering, I was
forced to conclude that the real Professor Lipstadt has been kidnapped by neo-Nazis and is now being held in a basement in
Potsdam near Hitler’s bunker. These same neo-Nazis have obviously put an imposter in the place of “the nice Jewish girl” (her
description of herself) who grew up in New York and attended City College there.
I say this in all seriousness because I can’t imagine why any Jewish organization would fund someone as dull-witted,
mean-spirited, vindictive, and hate-filled as Professor Lipstadt to be their emissary. Why would they promote a woman who
makes Heinrich Himmler seem warm and sympathetic by comparison? There is only one cogent answer to the question of cui
bono here, and that is that the imposter Professor Lipstadt must have been put in place by Neo-Nazis or skinheads or some
other group interested in promoting the spread of anti-Semitism. No one promotes the spread of anti-Semitism better than
Professor Lipstadt. I noticed a significant “uptick” the minute she opened her mouth. Professor Lipstadt combines the chutzpah
of Alan Dershowitz with the scholarly acumen of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, all in one package. Professor Lipstadt gives new
meaning to the term “toxic asset.” Could Goebbels have come up with a better caricature of the obnoxious Jew? No one, not
even Israeli soldiers dropping white phosphorus on Palestinian women and children in Gaza, proves more conclusively that the
main source of anti-Semitism in the world today is Jewish behavior.
There is, of course, one other possibility, and that is that Professor Lipstadt (or the Neo-Nazi-funded imposter who is
now going around using her name) is not a commissar at all. She is, in fact, an agent provocateur. The imposter Professor
Lipstadt’s job is to provoke anti-Semitism. In this Professor Lipstadt is like the arsonist in the fire department. She gets to rush
in and put out the fires which she herself created.
I don’t want to press this issue farther than prudence allows, but there is also evidence linking Deborah Lipstadt and
Notre Dame President John Jenkins in this regard. In fact there is every bit as much evidence that the real Johnny Jenkins has
been kidnapped as well and that an imposter has been installed as president of Notre Dame. The same arguments apply here as
well. Once again, I ask, “cui bonoT ’ Can anyone in his right mind believe that a Holy Cross priest who had a reputation as a
conservative Thomist in the philosophy department would, as one of his first acts, approve performances of an obscene piece
of agitprop like The Vagina Monologues in the name of academic freedom? No, the very idea is so preposterous it makes all
but certain my claim that the real Johnny Jenkins has been kidnapped and some ADL agent put in his place to make the Catholic
Church look both supine and ridiculous. Still not convinced? Well, as an example of the one play that would get banned at
Notre Dame, Jenkins (or, more likely, the Jewish ADL imposter who took his place) listed the Oberammergau Passion Play!
Who but a covert agent of the ADL could come up with something more calculated to make Catholics look like idiots?!
Ultimately, there is no mystery about why Notre Dame should be interested in simultaneously inviting both Deborah
Lipstadt and Barack Obama to speak at Notre Dame. The Lipstadt redaction of the Holocaust lets every other promoter of
murder off the hook. If the Holocaust is sui generis, then Obama’s promotion of the abortion holocaust is no big deal. There is
no abortion Holocaust in fact. Her presence allows Father Jenkins to be the converse of the people who talk about dead babies
in America and Ukrainians who got starved to death by the Jew Lazar Kaganovich and his henchmen. It allows him to become a
holocaust denier in good standing, which is to say in good standing with the Jews, the only people whose opinion matters at
Notre Dame.
Chapter Three: Bishop Williamson at the End of His Tether
When the Eye of Sauron that goes by the name of mass communication first fastened its fiery gaze on Bishop Richard
Williamson in the wake of the pope’s attempt to bring the Society of St Pius X back into communion with the Church by lifting
the excommunications that followed Iatae sententiae from the act that made Williamson a bishop, his excellency was living in
Argentina, where he was rector of one of the society’s seminaries. He now lives in Wimbledon, England, home of the famous
tennis tournament. If home is the place that has to take you in when no one else wants you, it’s clear that the SSPX headquarters
on Arthur Road was his home. The lifting of the excommunications as a prelude to healing the schism gave birth to the hope that
Bishop Williamson might find a home in the Church again, but, as I approached Wimbledon, the signals were mixed. The lifting
of the excommunications signaled the start of negotiations, but the signals emanating from the negotiations were also mixed.
Walter Cardinal Kasper announced a few days before my arrival that the negotiations were going nowhere; indications from
the other side were equally gloomy. Bishop Fellay, another of the four bishops, had been interviewed at the SSPX seminary in
Winona, Minnesota and the interview had been posted on YouTube. Fellay began the interview by throwing Williamson under
the bus, and it went downhill from there. “The Church has cancer,” Bishop Fellay opined, “and if we embrace the Church we’ll
get cancer.” He went on to say that the SSPX reserved the right to consecrate other bishops if the negotiations turned out to be
unsatisfactory. Hope for unity seemed a long way off as I gazed at the preparations for this year’s Wimbledon tennis tournament
from a passing train. The fields surrounding Wimbledon were full of people, many of whom were pitching tents on this
blazingly hot day in late June.
The hubbub surrounding the tennis match seemed particularly distant because at this particular moment a Ugandan by the
name of Jasper was shouting the letter to the Hebrews into my ear above the din of the train. Jasper began the conversation by
informing me that he used to be a Catholic. He was, in fact, a seminarian, until he was captured by the Ugandan revolutionary
movement known as The Ford’s Army and marched off to God knows where. As Ugandan armies go, the Ford’s Army was
probably not as bad as the army of Idi Amin, which murdered hundreds of thousands of Ugandans and dumped them into the
Nile. There were so many corpses in the water that even the crocodiles couldn’t eat them all. As a result, they began clogging
the intake pipes of the local power plant. So being a captive of the Ford’s Army wasn’t as bad as the situation a few years
before, but it was no picnic either. Jasper and his fellow captives were marching somewhere or other when they ran into the
current regime’s army, the successors of Idi Amin, at which point a firefight ensued and Jasper was wounded in the leg.
At this point he paused in his autobiographical narrative to reach down and pull up the left leg of his trousers to reveal a
number of coin size scars on his chocolate-brown leg.
“That’s where the bullets entered my leg,” he says.
At this point everyone in the train stops what they are doing and takes a look at his leg. Then they gaze away and go back
to their newspapers or gaze off into space listening to their I-pods. Jasper in similar fashion goes back to reading the epistle of
Paul to the Hebrews, pausing for emphasis to read “and remember always to welcome strangers, for by doing this some people
have entertained angels without knowing it.” It’s clear that Jasper feels that this passage has some special relevance to our
situation.
The scripture passage gets caught on a branch of my consciousness like a valuable article of clothing being washed
downstream in the torrent of words which has been spouting from Jasper’s mouth ever since I suggested that he rejoin the
Church. Everyone, it seems, is a spiritual Robinson Crusoe these days, willfully marooning himself on a spiritual island of his
own choosing and declaring himself his own pope. I try hard to concentrate on what he is saying, especially when he refers our
present encounter to the angel quote in Hebrews, but at he moment I can’t figure out whether I’m supposed to be the angel to
him or he the angel to me.
“You need faith,” he tells me.
“No,” I reply, half wondering what the Fondon commuters are making of our conversation. “I have faith. You need the
Church.” My reply unleashes another torrent of Bible verses of the sort I have heard more than once from ardent
fundamentalists in America. When I bring up, “You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of Hell
will not prevail against it,” Jasper goes etymological on me, claiming that “ecclesia” means “assembly,” which is true enough,
and that therefore any assembly which proclaims the word of God is the Church.
“You and I are church,” Jasper tells me earnestly, omitting the definite article like someone in the liturgy program at
Notre Dame.
“No, we’re not,” I reply. “I am a member of the Church and you are an ex-member, and that’s the point of this whole
discussion.”
This too elicits another torrent of scripture, which pours forth from his mouth like the flood-swollen river in Brazil
which I saw the night before on the BBC. The theological equivalent of refrigerators, cars, hen houses, etc., sweep past my
ears as I try to assess the theological significance of it all. This must be happening for a reason, I keep telling myself, but all I
can say to Jasper is, “You’re not listening to what I’m saying,” which, of course, releases another torrent of scriptural
passages, which would still be pouring forth as I write this if the train hadn’t arrived at Wimbledon Park station, at which point
I get up and disembark.
At some point during our conversation, I told Jasper that I was going to give a talk on the priest sex abuse crisis in
Ireland. The image this conjures in Jasper’s mind must be fertile because it mutates over the course of our train ride together
into a scene in which he envisions me arriving in a house full of pedophile priests with nothing more in my spiritual arsenal
than the talk I’ve prepared to defend myself. It’s clear he doesn’t think much of giving talks. He urges me instead to cast out
demons in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ. For a moment I consider taking him at his ill-informed word. Pedophilia, schism,
whatever: chuck the talk and drive out the demons with a command. The idea would recur to me throughout the day.
When I got to St. George’s House on Arthur Road, the headquarters of the SSPX in England, Bishop Williamson greeted
me at the door. It’s been roughly ten years since we last met in person, at the SSPX seminary in Winona, Minnesota, where I
gave a talk to the seminarians on horror movies. This time the conversation was more focused on the situation in the Church.
After the initial pleasantries, his excellency informed me that, as a result of the media circus of 2009, he had been stripped of
all assignments in the SSPX. This comes as no surprise because I had seen the Bishop Fellay interview on YouTube. So, after
being expelled from Argentina, Bishop Williamson returned to England, where he now resides, all dressed up with no place to
go. Whatever hopes which the lifting of the excommunications in January 2009 engendered were superceded by the uproar
surrounding the media lynch mob which attempted to derail any reunification of the society and the Church by bringing up the
issue of holocaust denial. By now the waves of that storm have subsided, but it looks as if the chances of reconciliation have
subsided with them.
As I mentioned, shortly before I arrived in England, Walter Cardinal Kasper announced that Rome’s negotiations with
the SSPX were not going well. Writing on the Chiesa.com Website, Sandro Magistro wrote that Kasper’s misgivings were
amplified in an article written by Eberhard Schockenhoff, one of Kasper’s former students, and now professor of moral
theology at the University of Freiburg. The article appeared in the April 2010 issue of the German Jesuit magazine Stimmen
der Zeit, and in it Schockenhoff claimed “that the real disagreement between the Church of Rome and the Lefebvrists does not
concern the Mass in Latin, but the teaching of Vatican II, especially on ecclesiology and on freedom of conscience and
religion.” Both Schockendorf and Kasper fear that the readmission of the SSPX will doom their interpretation of Vatican II and
all of the projects of the past forty-some years which have been based on it. Schockenhoff fears that “exegetical manipulation
of the conciliar texts” will allow both Rome and the SSPX to marginalize the true meaning of the council by misrepresenting
what Schockenhoff and presumably Kasper consider genuine reforms as postconciliar misunderstandings and aborted
experiments. This would allow an “antimodern protest movement based on preconciliar Catholicism” to be smuggled into the
Church. It would also mark the end (although Schockenhoff doesn’t say this) of the hegemony of the German professors, whose
interpretation has been dominant but fading since the end of the council. The influence of the German professors has faded even
more, paradoxically, since the accession of Benedict XVI (the quintessential German professor) to the chair of Peter.
Schockenhoff compares the negotiations with the SSPX to “a hermeneutic tightrope walk, which attempts to square the circle.”
He also compares it to “playing with fire.” The issue is interpretation: Whose interpretation of the council is going to prevail?
Put another way, readmitting the SSPX would mean the end of the hegemony of the German professors’ interpretation of the
Council, which the German professors like to portray as “the will of the majority of the Council fathers”:
By proposing an official interpretation, another meaning gets imposed on central conciliar texts other
than the meaning which the will of the majority of the Council fathers intended... . What's at stake here is
the direction of the future path of the Church, a direction which the Council chose when it decided to open
itself up to the modern world, when it chose ecumenical solidarity with the orthodox and reformation
churches as well as dialogue with the Jews and other world religions.
The main person responsible for wanting to “square the circle,” i.e., make the council documents compatible with both
modernity and tradition is, in Schockenhoffs view, Pope Benedict XVI. Magister claims that “In explaining how to interpret
the Council correctly, Benedict XVI shows how it did in fact introduce new developments with respect to the past, but always
in continuity with ‘the deepest patrimony of the Church.’” And as an example of this interplay between newness and continuity,
the pope illustrates precisely the conciliar ideas on freedom of religion: the main point of division between the Church and the
Lefebvrists.”
On December 22, 2005, Pope Benedict gave a speech to the curia in which he tried to explain the Zeitgeist which was
regnant when the council was in session:
The Council had to find a new definition of the relationship between the Church and the modern age.
This relationship started out difficultly with the Galileo trial. It broke completely, when Kant defined
"religion within pure reason" and when, in the radical phase of the French Revolution, an image of the state
and of man was spread that practically intended to crowd out the Church and faith. The clash of the
Church's faith with a radical liberalism and also with natural sciences that claimed to embrace, with its
knowledge, the totality of reality to its outmost borders, stubbornly setting itself to make the "hypothesis of
God" superfluous, had provoked in the 19th century under Pius IX, on the part of the Church, a harsh and
radical condemnation of this spirit of the modern age. Thus, there were apparently no grounds for any
positive and fruitful agreement, and drastic were also the refusals on the part of those who felt they were
the representatives of the modern age.
However, in the meantime, the modern age also had its development. It was becoming clear that the
American Revolution had offered a model of the modern state that was different from that theorized by the
radical tendencies that had emerged from the second phase of the French Revolution. Natural sciences
began, in a more and more clear way, to reflect their own limits, imposed by their own method which,
though achieving great things, was nevertheless not able to comprehend the totality of reality. Thus, both
sides began to progressively open up to each other. In the period between the two world wars and even
more after the second world war, Catholic statesmen had shown that a modern lay state can exist, which
nevertheless is not neutral with respect to values, but lives tapping into the great ethical fonts of
Christianity. Catholic social doctrine, as it developed, had become an important model between radical
liberalism and the Marxist theory of the state.
As a result of this opening to the modern world, discontinuities began to emerge. Catholics began condemning things that
the Saints of previous eras considered praiseworthy. Similarly, things that the Council considered praiseworthy — things like
Schockenhoff’s “dialogue with the Jews” — would have been condemned as pernicious by Church fathers like St. John
Chrysosotm Before long the discontinuities became too big and too important to ignore, or as Pope Benedict put it:
It is clear that in all these sectors, which together are one problem, some discontinuities would emerge.
Although this may not have been fully appreciated at first, the discontinuities that did emerge —
notwithstanding distinct concrete historical situations and their needs — did prevent continuity at the level
of principles.
The Church now finds herself in the process of reconciling those discontinuities, and it is this process of re-establishing
continuity with tradition which Schockenhofif sees as a betrayal of the meaning of the Council. The SSPX, on the other hand,
sees the process of reconciliation as a betrayal of Church doctrine, and it is at precisely this impasse that the negotiations with
the SSPX stand at the moment.
The pope feels that the Council succeeded at being both new and connected with the past:
By defining in a new way the relationship between the faith of the Church and some essential elements
of modern thinking, the Second Vatican Council revised and even corrected some past decisions. But in an
apparent discontinuity it has instead preserved and reinforced its intimate nature and true identity. The
Church is One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic both before and after the Council, throughout time. It "presses
forward amid the persecutions of the world and the consolations of God," announcing the cross and death
of the Lord until he comes (cf Lumen gentium, 8).
Yet those who expected that with this fundamental "Yes" to the modern age, all tensions would melt
away, and that this "opening up to the world" would render everything harmonious, underestimated the
inner tensions and contradictions of the modern age; they underestimated the internal tensions and the
dangerous fragility of human nature, which have threatened man's journey throughout all historical periods
and configurations. Given man's new power over himself and over matter, these dangers have not
disappeared; instead, they have acquired a new dimension. We can clearly illustrate this by looking at
current history.
At this point an uncanny similarity emerges between the SSPX and the liberals who want to keep them out of the Church.
Both the SSPX and Professor Schockenhofif are arguing that their interpretation of Vatican II should be taken as normative. Both
the SSPX and Professor Schockenhofif (for obviously different reasons) would claim that the pope was “attempting to square
the circle,” by thinking that modernity and Church tradition were reconcilable. Both the SSPX and Professor Schockenhofif
have made a particular interpretation of a particular council as the litmus test for membership in the Church. Neither the SSPX
nor Professor Schockenhofif seems capable of entertaining the idea that the Church had embarked upon projects in the wake of
the council which were based in some sense or other on council documents but which went way beyond what the council
documents authorized. “Gesprach mit dem Judentum ” or dialogue with the Jews is one example cited by Schockenhofif which
has led to an almost total discontinuity with the past, something the American bishops discovered when they had to revise their
catechism. Should the Church perdure in this particular implementation of the council? Or should she admit that this and other
projects which the council spawned, unlike the documents themselves, are nothing more than failed experiments based on an
inadequate understanding of what was really happening during the revolutionary ’60s? Is the Church committed to repudiating
the Gospel in the name of dialogue? One would hope not, but the question needs to be contextualized before it can be
answered. If we identify the Council with “Gesprach mit dem Judentum ,” as Professor Schockcnhoff does, then the answer is
far from clear. Schockenhoff might go so far as to endorse postconciliar aberrations like the claim that “the Mosaic covenant is
eternally valid,” a claim both made and repudiated by the American bishops, but would the pope go that far? Probably not. But
the pope’s track record on continuity in this regard is far from clear. He seems unaware that dialogue with the Jews, as
currently practiced, entails repudiating the Gospel, and that proclaiming the Gospel is antithetical to dialogue with the Jews.
As things stand now, the issue is far from resolved, and the only thing that unites both the German professors and the SSPX at
this point seems to be their belief that the pope is determined to square the circle.
It was clear that there were people within the Church who didn’t want reunification to happen because it threatened their
interpretation of Vatican II as the normative view. George Weigel was one of the people who felt threatened. “It is not easy,”
he wrote in an editorial in Newsweek in February 2009, “to see how the unity of the Catholic Church will be advanced if the
Lefebrvist faction does not publicly and unambiguously affirm Vatican Council II’s teaching on the nature of the Church, on
religious freedom, and on the sin of anti-Semitism. Absent such an affirmation, pick-and-choose cafeteria Catholicism will be
reborn on the far fringes of the Catholic right, just when it was fading into insignificance on the dwindling Catholic left, its
longtime home.” Having a Neocon like George Weigel accuse the SSPX of “pick-and-choose cafeteria Catholicism” was a
classic instance of the pot calling the kettle black. Weigel had been picking and choosing his peculiar brand of Catholicism
according to Neocon principles for years, beginning with his justification of the war in Iraq all the way up to his reading of
Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical on church social teaching Caritas in Veritatem. When Weigel put on his magic neocon glasses
to read the pope’s encyclical, some passages appeared in gold, which is to say, they were congruent with the neocon agenda,
while some passages appeared in red, which meant that they were not and could safely be ignored by real Catholics, which is
to say, those who followed the neocon agenda as articulated by George Weigel. To people like this, the holocaust denial
brouhaha was the answer to a maiden’s prayer because it provided a way to shut down unwelcome discussion of suppressed
topics. But by June 2010, the time of my meeting with Bishop Williamson, it looked as if the holocaust issue had been
resolved. In the spring of 2010 Williamson was convicted in a German court and fined 180,000 euros, a sum that was later
reduced to 10,000 and is now being appealed. Bishop Williamson had “put that issue behind him,” as the politicians like to
say. He was now “ready to move on with his life.”
Or was he? At the height of the media cycle, Williamson wrote to the pope and suggested that he be thrown, like Jonah,
into the sea to calm the waves. That is a fairly close approximation of what happened, but it wasn’t the pope who threw his
excellency into the sea, it was Bishop Fellay, who threw him under the bus. Richard Williamson is now a bishop without a
portfolio. In addition to removing him from the seminary in Argentina, Bishop Fellay has forbidden Williamson from saying
anything in public, including presumably granting interviews to people like me.
If there was an assumption on my part behind this meeting it was that the lifting of the excommunications and the
subsequent holocaust denial brouhaha had changed the situation. The only evidence I had to go on was Williamson volunteering
to be thrown into the sea, but that seemed indication enough that the situation had changed him. The lifting of the
excommunications had certainly changed my attitude toward the SSPX—from accusations of the sort that we had leveled in the
investigative pieces we had run in the ’90s to a desire to do whatever it took to restore full communion. Actually, that desire
had come into existence long before the excommunications had been lifted. When we had met at the SSPX seminary in Winona
in the ’90s, I had asked his excellency what I could do to help end the schism. His reply was simple enough, “Get Rome to
revoke Vatican II.”
“Is that all?” I said jokingly back then.
The more we talked, however, the more I had the sinking feeling that nothing had changed. “Semper idem ” (always the
same) was the motto of Cardinal Ottaviani and the phrase had always seemed appealing in dealing with the modernists, but
now it began to recur in a different, less positive light, which is to say, not so much as a reaffirmation of tradition, but as the
theological version of Groundhog Day, the movie in which Bill Murray plays a weatherman from Pittsburgh who finds himself
repeating the same day over and over again. The SSPX had been claiming for over 20 years that the issue was doctrine,
specifically doctrinal issues concerning Vatican II, and in the wake of the excommunications, they had persuaded Rome to
engage in dialogue under those auspices, but now it was clear, as Cardinal Kasper had pointed out, that the dialogue was going
nowhere.
This is not surprising because doctrine was never the heart of the matter. In fact, by allowing the dialogue on doctrine to
proceed, Rome had fatally undermined its own position. The real issue is schism, not doctrine. Heresy is a sin against doctrine,
and in the negotiations which followed the lifting of the excommunications, the SSPX was engaged in an attempt to turn the
tables on Rome and convince them that they were guilty of heresy. Before entering into dialogue with the SSPX, Rome would
have done better to watch Bishop Fellay’s interview on YouTube. In it, Fellay gets to the heart of the matter when he says,
“The Church has cancer. We don’t want to embrace the Church because then we’ll get cancer too.”
If anyone had any doubts about the SSPX being in schism, this interview should have laid them to rest. As St. Augustine
pointed out in both his treatises on Baptism and the Donatists, schism has nothing to do with doctrine. Schism is a sin against
charity. It involves breaking communion out of fear of contamination — which is precisely how Bishop Fellay framed the issue
in his YouTube interview. Bishop Williamson has his own YouTube interview, filmed in January 2010, in which he says
essentially the same thing. The only difference is that in his interview Williamson claims that the Church has leprosy. In
medical terms, the analogy is more apt because leprosy is contagious, but the thought is essentially the same. The SSPX broke
communion with the Church when Archbishop Lefebvre consecrated Williamson and Fellay and two other bishops. Refusal of
communion out of fear of contamination is, as anyone who has read St. Augustine knows, the classic expression of schism, but
evidently no one in Rome noticed this when they began their negotiations with the SSPX because instead of dealing with the
issue at hand, Rome embarked upon the theological equivalent of Mission Impossible, which is to say a theological discussion
of the documents of Vatican with a group of people who were using doctrine as a pretext to avoid talking about their own lack
of charity.
What Rome overlooked in this matter was the psychological need on the part of the SSPX to divert the negotiations into a
discussion of doctrine. That need is based more on guilt than anything in the documents of Vatican II. The SSPX committed a
sin against charity when Archbishop Lefebvre, claiming that a state of emergency existed in the Church, broke communion by
consecrating the four bishops. Their justification for breaking communion is ultimately irrelevant because the Church is always
to some extent or other in a state of emergency because the Church is always at the mercy of the venal and wicked men who
rise to positions of power in it because such men always rise to positions of power in human institutions, but no state of
emergency (real or imagined) ever justifies breaking communion. The Irish priest sex abuse crisis is a case in point, and it was
the invitation to discuss that crisis in the light of tradition which brought me to the SSPX headquarters in Wimbledon in the first
place.
The Priest Crisis in Ireland
In a pastoral letter addressed to the Church in Ireland dated March 19, 2010, Pope Benedict XTV claimed that in order to
recover from the wound which a number of Irish priests had inflicted on the young people entrusted to their care
the Church in Ireland must first acknowledge before the Lord and before others the serious sins
committed against defenseless children. Such an acknowledgement, accompanied by sincere sorrow for the
damage caused to these victims and their families, must lead to a concerted effort to ensure the protection
of children from similar crimes in the future.
The pope based his letter largely on the findings of The Murphy Report, which had been published on November 26,
2009 and found that “child abuse by clerics was widespread throughout the period under review.”
More crucial to a correct understanding of the Irish sexual abuse crisis is an understanding of the “period under review.”
Most of the cases of abuse which the Church is now confronting took place in a period whose epicenter was roughly 30 to 40
years ago. In order to understand the crisis then, we need to understand what Germans call the Zeitgeist, or the spirit of the
times, the times being largely the ’70s, when roughly ten years after the Second Vatican Council ended the Church was in the
throes of its implementation.
The pope adverts to this time period in his letter:
Significant too was the tendency during this period, also on the part of priests and religious, to adopt
ways of thinking and assessing secular realities without sufficient reference to the Gospel. The programme
of renewal proposed by the Second Vatican Council was sometimes misinterpreted and indeed, in the light
of the profound social changes that were taking place, it was far from easy to know how best to implement
it.
One of the main characteristics of this period, according to the pope, was
a well-intentioned but misguided tendency to avoid penal approaches to canonically irregular situations.
It is in this overall context that we must try to understand the disturbing problem of child sexual abuse,
which has contributed in no small measure to the weakening of the faith and the loss of respect for the
Church and her teachings.
The Murphy Report makes clear that the Church did not apply the remedies which Canon Law provides in the case of
sexual abuse. Instead, the diocese of Dublin set aside the penal process of canon law in favor of a purely “pastoral” approach
which was, in the Commission’s view, wholly ineffective as a means of controlling clerical child sexual abuse.” During the
course of its investigations, the Commission learned that “In the mid 1970s there was no public, professional or Government
perception either in Ireland or internationally that child sexual abuse constituted a societal problem or was a major risk to
children.” As one commentator put it:
The pages of the Murphy Report are littered with instances of carelessness, incompetence and moral
cowardice. Over the past fifteen to twenty years they have been flailing about, trying to get to grips with a
seemingly intractable problem. Far too often their response has been, at best, inadequate. A line from the
Report which rings particularly true refers to a priest who had the impression of Archbishop Connell that he
"came across as someone who really cared for the victim but had not "got a clue" about how to go about
dealing with the reality of the problem." Many of the other Bishops give a similar impression.
Pope Benedict was unsparing in his criticism of the priests who betrayed the trust of those whom they
were called to serve and the bishops who were derelict in exercising proper oversight, but Paragraph 4 of
his pastoral letter indicates that other forces were at work as well.
In recent decades the Church in your country has had to confront new and serious challenges to the
faith arising from the rapid transformation and secularization of Irish society. Fast-paced social change has
occurred, often adversely affecting people's traditional adherence to Catholic teaching and values. All too
often, the sacramental and devotional practices that sustain faith and enable it to grow, such as frequent
confession, daily prayer and annual retreats were neglected. Only by examining carefully the many
elements that gave rise to the present crisis can a clear-sighted diagnosis of its causes be undertaken and
effective remedies be found.
Commenting on the pope’s letter in a symposium at Chiesa.com, ( http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1342641 ).
Sandro Magistro claimed that “Benedict XVI has given the Catholics of Ireland an order never before given by a pope of the
modern era to an entire national Church.... He told them not only to bring the guilty before the canonical and civil courts, but
to put themselves collectively in a state of penance and purification ... in a public form, before the eyes of all, even the most
implacable and mocking adversaries,” but the point of the article was, once again the Zeitgeist. As the title of the Magister’s
article in La Repubblica indicated, “Genesis of Crime: the Revolution of the 1960s,” the cause of this crime was the sexual
revolution of the ’60s, an event which was a true revolution and which brought about the sexualization of traditional Catholic
cultures, which brought with it the sexualization of the clergy as well.
Taking part in the same symposium, Angelo Cardinal Bagnasco saw “strategies of generalized discredit” behind the
news reports as well as more than a little hypocrisy. The media who were calling for the pope’s resignation were the same
media which had spent decades undermining sexual morality:
In reality, we must all question ourselves, without any more alibis, about a culture that in our time
reigns pampered and uncontested, and tends progressively to fray the connective tissue of society as a
whole, perhaps even mocking those who try to resist and to oppose it: the attitude that is, of those who
cultivate absolute autonomy from the criteria of moral judgment and convey as good and alluring behaviors
that are designed according to individual desires and even unbridled instincts. But the exaggeration of
sexuality disconnected from its anthropological significance, all-encompassing hedonism, and a relativism
that does not admit limits or exceptions, do great harm because they are specious and sometimes so
pervasive as to escape notice.
Cardinal Ruini called the crisis in Ireland “part of a strategy that has been underway for centuries” and went on to claim
that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had “elaborated” this strategy “with his flair for detail.”
According to Nietzsche, the decisive attack on Christianity cannot be brought on the level of truth, but
on that of Christian ethics, which he saw as the enemy of the joy of living. And so I would like to ask those
who decry scandals of pedophilia mostly when they involve the Catholic Church, perhaps bringing into
question priestly celibacy: would it not be more honest and realistic to recognize that certainly these and
other deviations related to sexuality accompany the entire history of the human race, but also that in our
time these deviations are further stimulated by the much ballyhooed 'sexual liberation."
When the exaltation of sexuality pervades every part of life and when autonomy from any moral
criterion is claimed for the sexual instinct, it becomes difficult to explain that certain abuses are absolutely
to be condemned. In reality, human sexuality from the start is not simply instinctual; it is not the same as
that of the other animals. It is, like all of man, a sexuality 'mixed' with reason and morality, which can be
lived humanly, and truly bring happiness, only if it is lived this way.
Once again the key to understanding the Irish abuse crisis is understanding “the period under review,” which is to say the
aftermath of the sexual revolution of the ’60s. Professor of sociology Massimo Introvigne, president of CESNUR, the Center
for the Studies on New Religion, claimed that the attack on the Church began in earnest during “what the English and the
Americans call ‘the ’60s,’ and the Italians, concentrating on the emblematic year of 1968 [call] 7/ Sessantotto .’” This era,
according to Professor Introvigne, “increasingly appears as a time of profound disturbances of customs, with crucial and
lasting effects on religion.”
Benedict XVI in his letter shows that he is aware of the fact that there was in the 1960s an authentic revolution — no less
important than the Protestant Reformation or the French Revolution — that was “fast-paced” and dealt a tremendous blow to
“traditional adherence to Catholic teaching and values.”
In the Catholic Church there was not at once a sufficient awareness of the scope of this revolution. In
this climate, certainly not all priests who were insufficiently formed or infected by the climate following the
'60s and not even a significant percentage of them, became pedophiles. But the study of the revolution of
the 1960s and of 1968 is crucial to understanding what happened afterward, including pedophilia. And to
finding real remedies. If this revolution, unlike those before it, is moral and spiritual and touches the
interiority of man, it is only from the restoration of morality of the spiritual life and of comprehensive truth
about the human person that the remedies can ultimately come.
What this and similar commentary makes clear is that talking about the ’60s and understanding the ’60s are two different
things. What all of the critiques have in common is an inadequate understanding of what happened in the ’60s and, more
importantly, what happened in the aftermath of the sexual revolution, a period which coincided in time with the implementation
of the Second Vatican Council.
Cardinal Ruini mentions Nietzsche, who is certainly a villain, but if his eminence was interested in talking about a
campaign of revolution, of “a strategy that has been underway for centuries,” and sexualization of the culture for political
purposes, he would have done better to begin with the Marquis de Sade.
Similarly, Professor Invigne claims
that a single factor cannot explain a revolution of this magnitude. The economic boom and feminism
play a part, but also more strictly cultural aspects both outside the churches and Christian communities (the
encounter between psychoanalysis and Marxism) and inside them (the 'new theologies').
But he doesn’t mention Wilhelm Reich, the man who created the term Sexual Revolution and who also combined
psychoanalysis and Marxism to create a weapon that was specifically targeted against the Catholic Church, and even more
specifically one which promoted the sexual corruption of the clergy as the best way of reducing the Church’s political power.
Reich was a Jew from Galicia, the easternmost province of the Austro-Hungarian empire, who was both a Freudian and
a Marxist. Nine years after his death, he became the hero of the ‘68 revolution in Paris. Two years later he was featured on the
cover of the New York Times magazine.
By the time Reich had been re-discovered by the New Left in 1969, he had been dead for ten years, but that fact was
irrelevant, because the Reich the cultural revolutionaries were interested in promoting had stopped writing in 1933 anyway.
On January 4, 1971, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote a review of the new Farrar Straus edition of The Mass Psychology of
Fascism, which announced in effect that the Reich revival had begun in earnest. “Wilhelm Reich,” Lehmann-Haupt proclaimed,
“the Austrian sexologist and inventor of the so-called orgone energy accumulator, has made a comeback.” Reich, according to
the review, was the father of youth culture, the sexual revolution, and the feminist movement. Kate Millett’s book Sexual
Politics was written under his influence. Beyond that, Reich was better at reconciling Freud and Marx than Marcuse,
especially by expounding his “credo that sexual man was man liberated from his need for authority, religion, and marriage.”
Reich, in other words, “makes considerable sense,” at least to someone sympathetic to the goal of sexual liberation. Lehmann-
Haupt was, in fact, so enamored of Reich’s vision of sexual liberation he was even willing to take a second look at his theory
of orgone energy. “Perhaps it’s time to reconsider all of Wilhelm Reich,” he concluded.
Four months later, on April 18, 1971, the New York Times returned to Reich, this time devoting a feature length article in
their Sunday magazine to his thought. In “Wilhelm Reich: The Psychiatrist as Revolutionary,” David Elkind described how
student communards in Berlin pelted the police with soft-bound copies of Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism. (Was it
compassion that kept them from using hardbound copies or frugality?) Reich “was being resurrected everywhere in Europe as a
hero/saint to students demanding social reform,” and now “many American young people” were “now discovering that Reich is
very much their kind of Revolutionary too.” This was the case because his message was more appealing to the American Left,
who felt that they could bring down the state by sexual license without the sublimation urged by Freud or the political
revolution urged by Marx.
Reich is relevant to our discussion because he was a proponent of both child sexuality and the sexual subversion of the
clergy. In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich claimed that it was pointless to debate the existence of God with a
seminarian. However, if the seminarian could be induced to engage in sexual activity, the idea of God “evaporated” from his
mind. In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich praised “the genuine sociologist who will reckon psychoanalysis’
comprehension of childhood sexuality as a highly significant revolutionary act” (p. 28). He goes on to say that the Catholic
Church is the main enemy of revolutionary liberation:
With the restriction and suppression of sexuality, the nature of human feeling changes; a sex-negating
religion comes into being and gradually develops its own sex-political organization, the church with all its
predecessors, the aim of which is nothing other than the eradication of man's sexual desires and
consequently of what little happiness there is on earth.
According to Reich: “Sexual inhibition prevents the average adolescent from thinking and feeling in a rational way.”
Religion, according to Reich, is nothing more than inhibited sexuality:
Clinical experience shows incontestably that religious sentiments result from inhibited sexuality, that the
source of mystical excitation is to be sought in inhibited sexual excitation. The inescapable conclusion of all
this is that a clear sexual consciousness and a natural regulation of sexual life must foredoom every form of
mysticism; that, in other words, natural sexuality is the archenemy of mystical religion. By carrying on an
anti-sexual fight wherever it can, making it the core of its dogmas and putting it in the foreground of its
mass propaganda, the church only attests to the correctness of this interpretation.
At another point Reich claims that: “If one succeeds in getting rid of the childhood fear of masturbation and as a result
thereof genitality demands gratification, then intellectual insight and sexual gratification are wont to prevail.”
The first step to revolution is the promotion of child sexuality because “Sexual consciousness and mystical sentiments
cannot coexist.” Any revolutionary who regards sexuality as a “private matter” is guilty of a “grave error” because
political reaction ... always rides on two tracks at the same time: on that of economic policies and that
of "moral renewal." Until now, the freedom movement has traveled on one track only. What is needed,
therefore, is to master the sexual question on a social scale, to transform the shadowy side of personal life
into social mental hygiene, to make the sexual question a part of the total campaign, instead of confining
oneself to the question of population politics.
Sexual revolution is, to use Reich’s term, “social dynamite,” but it cannot work its destructive havoc if the
revolutionaries are afraid of getting involved in child sexuality, or as Reich puts it: “if this work is to be carried out by
revolutionaries who vie with the church in the asseveration and advocacy of moralistic mysticism, who view the answering of
the sexual question as being beneath the ‘dignity of revolutionary ideology,’ who dismiss childhood masturbation as a
‘bourgeois invention,”’ it won’t work.
In other words the true revolutionary must be willing to promote the sexualization of children. The revolutionary,
according to Reich, must “awaken ... a desire in modern youth, a desire for a new philosophy and for scientific knowledge
about the fight for sexual health, sexual consciousness, and freedom... . It is the youth that matters! And they — this much is
certain — are no longer accessible to a sex-negating ideology on a mass scale. This is our strong point.”
Reich’s emphasis on the promotion of sexual activity is too pervasive to be ignored:
In the main, revolutionary work with children can only be sex-economic work. Overcome your
astonishment and listen patiently. Why is it that children in the pre-pubertal stage can be directed by
sexual education in the best and easiest way?
This powerful weapon was never put to use in Germany. And it was those in charge of child
organizations who offered the strongest resistance to the proposal that the usual individual treatment of
sex education be turned into sex education on a mass scale.
If we could once succeed in engaging the sexual interests of children and adolescents on a mass scale,
then reactionary contamination would be faced with a tremendous counterforce — and political reaction
would be powerless.
... the mechanism that makes masses of people incapable of freedom is the social suppression of genital
sexuality in small children, adolescents, and adults.
In order to bring about revolution, the true revolutionary, according to Reich, must promote sex with children. He must
also promote the sexualization of the Catholic clergy because the Catholic Church is the main obstacle to the revolutionary
take-over of Austrian society:
The case of clerics is especially difficult, for a convincing continuation of their profession, whose physical
consequences they have felt on their own body, has become impossible. The only course open to many of
them is to replace their priesthood with religious research or teaching.
Taken together Reich’s promotion of child sexuality and the sexualization of the Catholic clergy became the blueprint for
the subversion of the Catholic Church. This campaign began in the wake of the Second Vatican Council but it reached its
culmination in the priest abuse crisis of the first decade of the 21 st century. Reich’s theories were put into practice during the
sexual revolution of the ’60s, but it would take decades before their full effect would be felt.
The Left put Reich’s theories into practice during the ’60s. In an article which appeared in the Austrian magazine Die
Aula in February 2001, a translation of which was reprinted in English in Culture Wars in May of that year, Hans Fingeller
explained how the sexual revolutionaries “used children as experimental guinea pigs in the sensitive area of sexual
development”:
Wilhelm Reich, a wacko follower of Sigmund Freud, proposed certain theses on how one might "liberate"
the sexuality of children, which the "Spontis"and APO [Ausserparliamentarische Opposition] revolutionaries
used as an excuse to carry out certain experiments with children.As a result of absorbing Reich's
theories, the '68 generation began experimenting on their own children, who were now being raised not in
pubic or religious schools, but rather in "alternative day care centers" in which zealous comrades attempted
to create out of this 'human material" the "New Man" not by any biological process but by the deliberate
application of Marxist ideology to the classroom.
In his book Linke Lebensluegen: eine Ueberfaellige Rechnung [Left-wing Lies about Life: a long-overdue Reckoning]
Klaus Rainer Roehl, who was then husband of RAF terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, goes into some detail about the child-rearing
practices in Kommune 2, which specialized in raising children according to the Gospel of Wilhelm Reich.
The first goal of this “education” was to replace the attachment of the child to his parents with a relationship to a
“relationship person” and as a result inhibit the formation of “the authoritarian family fixation.” These activities included
pedophilic contact between adults and five year old girls, the details of which I will spare you. You can read the full account
in the May 2001 issue of Culture Wars.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit is now a member of the European Parliament and the head of the Green Party in France, but during
the ’60s he was a teacher in one of these day-care centers. After his Comrade-in-Arms Joschka Fischer was named foreign
minister of Germany, Cohn-Bendit granted an interview with ZDF, the second German TV channel in which he was asked
whether he was ever employed in one of the red day care centers.
“Yes, of course, of course,” he replied.
The ZDF reporter then asked him if he published the following text about his experiences there: “it often happened to me
that the children would unzip my fly and begin to fondle me.”
At that point the eloquent European Parliamentarian had the look of a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car.
After lots of hemming and hawing, Cohn-Bendit said that he wouldn’t recommend now what he recommended then
because “we know a lot more about child abuse.”
Then, contradicting what he had written, Cohn-Bendit swore: “I never had anything to do with children.”
The ZDF reporter remained unconvinced: “It sounds so autobiographical. The descriptions are so personal, as if you had
had sex with children.”
Cohn-Bendit replied, “Yeah, but that is not true. That is not true. The same thing goes for the parents ... I’m not mad if
people accuse me of that because it was no secret. I was only thinking that you have to look at it in the context of this time and
this period. We’re talking about ‘68. That was then... .”
Unlike the Catholic Church, which has apologized for the priests who have engaged in sexual activity with children, the
Feft in general and the Green Party as its current heir has never “sought ways to repair the damage that they have done to the
children of than generation, who were treated like guinea pigs by being subjected to the abstruse ideas of the madman Wilhelm
Reich.”
Klaus Rainer Poehl writes: “It’s in this particular area [the sexualization of children] that his movement has the most to
answer for. These evil or stupid deeds have created the biggest aftershock for the movement. It was here that it did its most
damage.”
Writing around the same time as Hans Fingeller, Herbert Rauter claims that Cohn-Bendit’s experiences were “No
Isolated Incident.” In fact in 1985 the Green Party, the political home of both Cohn-Bendit and Joschka Fischer, advocated the
elimination of laws criminalizing sexual relations with children, claiming “they prevent the free development of the
personality.”
At the beginning of 1985, the Greens proposed legislation which would decriminalize the seduction of girls under 16
years of age as well as homosexual contact with children and teenagers. Their reason? “The threat of punishment inhibits
children from discovering their true sexual orientation.”
At their state convention in Fuedenscheid in March of 1985, the Greens of Nordrhein-Westfalen demanded that
“nonviolent sexual activity” between children and adults never be considered as a reason for criminal prosecution. This sort of
activity, to the contrary, “must be liberated from all restrictions which this society has placed on it.” The fact that this
resolution was approved by a majority of those in attendance attests to the fact that they considered sexual relations between
children and adults as a form of “social oppression, which places those who are interested in engaging in nonviolent sex with
children in the danger of having their entire lives destroyed from one day to the next if it were to become known that they had
relations which all of us consider pleasant, productive, development-enhancing, in short, positive for both parties involved... .
Therefore, we demand that all criminal sanctions against such sexual activity be removed.”
In 1985 the Greens in Baden-Wuerttemberg ... attempted to weaken the criminal sanctions against this form of sexual
activity. Consensual sex between adults and children should not be punished. Also in 1985, in their political platform
(Auszuege aus dem Wahlprogram der Alternative Liste Berlin), the Greens claimed that “It is inhuman to approve sexual
activity only for a certain age group and under certain conditions. If young people express the wish to have sex with people of
the same age or with older people outside of the family, either because their homosexuality is not accepted by their parents or
because they have pedophilic tendencies or for whatever reason, they must be afforded the possibility of acting on these
desires.”
Fet’s sum up here. Christopher Hitchens, who has written a book extolling the virtues of atheism and another attacking
Mother Teresa, is planning to arrest the pope when he arrives in England in September, but no one is planning to arrest Daniel
Cohn-Bendit any time soon. The Church has never condoned this sort of activity in any way, shape or form, much less in the
way that the Green Party has, but no one is suing the Green Party for the sexual molestation that took place in the day-care
centers of the ’60s.
It turns out that Gaudium et Spes was off the mark when it claimed that the Church had nothing to fear from the modern
world. Modernity has always been the enemy of the Church and it remains so today.
But worse than the machinations of her enemies, the Church has adopted the categories of its oppressors in the name of
dialogue and as a result blinded itself to what was really going on during this crucial period of Church history. As a result, the
Church is still trying to figure out what happened during the ’60s. Professor Invigne claims that
There was ... a Sessantotto in society and also a Sessantotto in the Church: 1968 is itself the year of
public dissent against the encyclical "Humanae Vitae" of Paul VI, a dispute that according to a valuable and
influential study by the recently deceased American philosopher Ralph Mclnerny, What Went Wrong with
Vatican II, represents a point of no return in the crisis of the principle of authority in the Church.
That book was in many ways the result of 15 years of lunches which Ralph and I had together at the Great Wall Chinese
restaurant in South Bend, Indiana. Ralph and I also attended the synod on the Laity in Rome together in the late ’80s. Ralph,
who died in January, was intimately involved in the Revolution of ‘68. His novel The Priest views it from a ringside seat. For
15 years Ralph and I discussed the state of the Church over Chinese food at the Great Wall. What Professor Invigne didn’t
know is that we also discussed Notre Dame University’s involvement in the sexual revolution. Professor Invigne couldn’t have
known that because Ralph suppressed all of the information on Notre Dame in his book. The result was an account of this
crucial period of Church history which was so truncated that it was seriously misleading. The Chiesa.com symposium is one
more proof that the Church is ignorant of its own history. The Church can’t win because she is not playing with a full deck.
Missing from Ralph’s book was any mention of the role Notre Dame played in the sexualization of the culture, the
sexualization of the Catholic Church, or the sexualization of the clergy. This story didn’t begin in March 2010. The sexual
revolution of 1968 was part of a war against that Church that had been going on in America for over 30 years.
Less than a week after my return to America, it seemed clear that the sex abuse crisis was far from over. In fact, it had by
then spread to Belgium, where local police broke into church buildings, barred bishops meeting there from leaving the
premises, seized computers and church files, and even bored holes into the tombs of two deceased bishops. The Vatican was
outraged by the actions of the Belgian police, claiming that “there are no precedents, not even under the old communist
regimes” for such actions, but the Vatican’s apologies for sexual abuse combined with their lack of understanding about how
the political instrumentalization of sexual deviance worked made political retaliation like this inevitable. The era of dialogue
with the modern world which began with the council ended with the sound of boots on the stairs and the police banging at the
door of the Church and a campaign which made Kulturkampf and communist oppression seem mild by comparison. The police
raids in Belgium certainly provided the possibility of a new interpretation of Gaudium et Spes, but no one in Rome was rising
to the challenge of the new hermeneutic.
The Church and Her Enemies
In talking with Bishop Williamson, it becomes clear that the doctrinal issue is uppermost in his mind, but that’s only
because he refuses to admit the real cause of the problem, namely, that the SSPX broke communion. Schism is a word that
never gets mentioned in traditional circles. It is only with difficulty that I can broach the topic in our conversation. Bishop
Williamson wants to talk about the pope instead, who, according to his view, sometimes says 2 plus 2 equals four and
sometimes says 2 plus 2 equals five.
The pope’s views of the Council are certainly tied to a view particular Zeitgeist, the Zeitgeist of the ’60s. When he
claims that “It was becoming clear that the American Revolution had offered a model of the modern state that was different
from that theorized by the radical tendencies that had emerged from the second phase of the French Revolution... . Thus, both
sides began to progressively open up to each other” what he is really telling us is that he had fallen under the i nf luence of John
Courtney Murray and therefore under the influence of Time Magazine, which was responsible for Murray’s celebrity status, as
well as C.D. Jackson, who was the CIA controller/liaison with Time/Life. We are talking about the widespread promotion of
the self-induced illusion that the Church no long had enemies.
During the 1930s, the Church had enemies. When the Church was strong, which is to say when it was united, the Church
won the battles against her enemies. In 1933, the Church in America took on the Jews in Hollywood when Cardinal Dougherty
of Philadelphia called for a boycott of all Warner Brothers theaters in his diocese. The success of that boycott led to the
institution of the Hollywood production code. In 1935 the Catholic Church led by Msgr. John A. Ryan, head of the National
Catholic Welfare Conference, defeated the WASP ruling class’s attempt to get the federal government involved in the funding
of contraception. If you ask yourself what had changed in the 30 years between 1933 and 1963, it wasn’t Church teaching.
Because of Vatican II, the Church believed that she no longer had enemies. In fact, because of a magical process known as
dialogue, our former enemies had been transformed into our friends.
Needless to say, this was not the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church. The traditional teaching of the Church had
been articulated some 1500 years earlier, when St. Augustine wrote that “Heretics, Jews and Pagans have made a unity against
Unity.” The loss of its enemies turned the Church against itself. In the absence of external enemies, the presence of evil in the
Church had to be attributed to the Church itself. The Church, to cite Bishop Fellay, developed “cancer.”
Benjamin Franklin once wrote that “Experience keeps an expensive school, but fools will learn in no other.” What the
Church had to learn in the expensive school which experience has conducted for the past 45 years is that nothing has changed.
Our enemies were still our enemies. The only thing that had changed was the sophistication of their tactics.
What the pope’s 2005 speech to the Curia shows is that Joseph Ratzinger was influenced by a sophisticated
disinformation campaign orchestrated by Henry Luce, the publisher of Time/Life, and his Catholic agent, John Courtney
Murray. What it does not show is that there are flaws in the conciliar documents. The same is true of Nostra Aetate and the
Jews, who were paying Malachi Martin to act as a double agent at the council. Now as in the past, the Church continues
digesting the documents, which is to say it continues to interpret them in light of tradition, which is what the Church has always
done. Archbishop Lefebvre accepted the idea; but, as I was to learn in the course of our conversation, evidently Bishop
Williamson cannot.
What we’re talking about is the background of council documents like Dignitatis Humanae and Nostra Aetate, but not
the documents themselves, which were vetted by the world’s bishops. Having attended more than one synod in Rome, I can see
how an individual bishop (or a bishops’ conference) might introduce a political agenda into the Church’s deliberations, but it
is not easy to see how this agenda could prevail. In my experience the only thing that the world’s bishops could possibly agree
upon is Catholicism. Bishop Williamson claims that there are ambiguous statements in the documents of Vatican II, and that this
fact justifies his separation. The former statement is undeniably true; the latter undeniably false.
Maynooth, Ireland, June 19, 2010
Four days before our meeting, I attended a conference on “Fertility, Infertility, Gender,” sponsored by the Linacre Centre
for Healthcare Ethics at Maynooth, the home of the seminary for Ireland’s Catholic priests. The participants at the conference
are congenial enough, but looming behind the conference is a pall of both sexual and economic crisis in Ireland and the Irish
Church. A bishop freshly deposed by the pope for his negligent handling of the crisis is in attendance. The seminary itself was
criticized in recent articles in the Irish press for its tolerance of homosexuality. The sex abuse crisis was the topic of talks I
would give in both Dublin and London.
In May 1992 just as the neoconservative counter-counter revolution in America had declared war on Pat Buchanan, the
scandal of Bishop Casey of Galway broke over Ireland. According to Mary Kenny’s account in Goodbye to Catholic Ireland :
Bishop Eamonn Casey had had a love-affair in 1974 with an American divorcee, Annie Murphy, had
fathered a child by her, deserted her and suggested the child should be placed for adoption; and then in a
desperate attempt to hide the truth had used diocesan funds to pay off the mother's claims.
Is fathering a child out of wedlock wrong? Yes, it is. But once again the press seemed determined to punish the only
institution which was willing to uphold moral standards. If illegitimacy were wrong, why weren’t the newspapers urging
children born out of wedlock to sue the National Basketball Association? Has any institution produced a higher number, per
capita, of illegitimate children?
Kenny initially dismissed the story, but before long it became clear that the forces that wanted to destroy Catholic Ireland
were not going to let the issue drop.
During these events of the mid-1990s, I would hear people in Ireland say, "it can't get any worse." And
then it did. On any Monday in November 1994, the three leading stories on RTE, the national television
network, were the political repercussions following the Brendan Smyth case, the collapse and death of the
Dublin priest in a homosexual club sauna, and the conviction of the Galway priest for a sexual assault on a
young man: all in one news bulletin. I made no more jokes about Renaissance Popes.
Kenny found that
The wave upon wave of charges and convictions—nearly all were convicted as charged — was
relentless, squalid and depressing... . The Brendan Smyth case was not only squalid and depressing: it
brought down the government of Albert Reynolds. It was also particularly shocking not just because the
offender was an apparently incorrigible paedophile, but because there was evidence that the religious
authorities had covered up for him over a number of years. In 1968 he had been given psychiatric
counseling for his compulsion, but without apparent amelioration... . In its efforts not to "give scandal," it
appeared that the Church authorities had enabled a paedophile to continue in his weakness... . Some
observers predicted that the Peace Process would now falter without the stewardship of Albert Reynolds —
all because of the paedophile priest... . it was claimed in Dublin that the breakdown would never have
occurred if Albert Reynolds had still been Taoiseach.
The sex crisis, in other words, was used to uproot the last elements of Catholic culture in Ireland. The late Tom Herron
recounted how the notoriously anti-Catholic Irish Times broke the story, and that in turn
led to the collapse of the government of Albert Reynolds in the Republic of Ireland and the weakening of
the Church's influence on Irish society. In this same period the feminist law professor, Mary Robinson, was
elected the first female president of the republic and helped to erase traditional sex roles in that country.
Her services to the secularization of her native land were appreciated by the international elites when they
made her United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees when her term as president was over.
Unfortunately Mrs. Robinson's career on the international stage appears to be over as she criticized Israel's
treatment of the Palestinian refugees; learning late that no matter how progressive you are there are
statements that will end your usefulness to the elites rather quickly.
The Brendan Smyth episode was, in Mary Kenny’s words, “yet another onslaught in the ongoing decline and fall of the
Irish Catholic Church.” But before long, it was becoming clear that the same playbook was being used on both sides of the
Atlantic. In both Ireland and America, the arsonists were on the fire department payroll. This is true not only of the Fourth
Estate, which promoted the sexualization of Ireland during the years following the council, and therefore, Ireland’s clergy in
the first place, but also of the psychological/counseling establishment. After creating the crisis by undermining the morals of
the clergy, the psychology/counseling establishment got to cash in on the settlements by offering therapy to the victims. It is an
irony not lost on Mary Kenny:
A million pounds was immediately spent on a help-line and counseling after abuse victims of the
industrial schools mentioned in Suffer the Little Children were opened. It was ironic that the Catholic Church
was using the very psychotherapeutic techniques which, 50 years previously, it had so condemned in the
works of Freud.
In 1995 Ireland was rocked with revelations about the life of Father Michael Cleary, who had died of cancer in 1993.
According to Kenny, Cleary “had been one of Dublin’s best-known and most popular priests. Back in the 1960s, he had been
hailed as the best type of modernizing young priest, hip and cool, accessible to the young, quick to play a guitar and sing a pop
song; and yet at the same time, with strong moral convictions and a strong social conscience.”
Unlike the homosexual clergy, who could be counted on to be one-issue, useful idiots, Cleary made the mistake of being
both a heterosexual and against abortion. When the woman by whom he had fathered two children published a lurid memoir
after his death — “My Secret Life as Priest’s Wife for 27 Years” was a splash front-page headline for the Dublin tabloid, the
Sunday World — the Church was again left holding the bag. Once again, celibacy was to blame, and the moral order which the
Church defended was henceforth to be considered suspect by the very fact that the Church defended it. “To hell with prayers,”
wrote Mary Ellen Synon in the Sunday Independent.
The feminists then volunteered to be the willing executioners for the therapeutic state. Nell McCafferty, a Derry radical
and nationally-known feminist, was both more vehement and more explicit than her colleague at the Sunday Independent.
McCafferty wrote that Catholic priests had lost all entitlement to discourse upon sexual morality.
Next time they open their mouths on love, sex, contraception, abortion, homosexuality, pleasure — on
anything that goes on between consenting healthy adults — their words should be publicly quoted back to
them... . Now let them shut up while people put themselves and their families back together again, and
knock some delicious, loving sexual pleasure out of life. In the meantime, beware the local priest. He is a
danger to your mental, physical and sexual health. Never leave one alone with a child. Not ever.
In Ireland as in America, the feminists functioned as the shock troops of the new world order by claiming that the Church
had no authority to speak on sexual matters. That was soon extended to include all instances of morality, which of course
included any condemnations of avarice, theft, and looting, behaviors which characterize capitalism, which was waiting in the
wings to fill the moral vacuum which the feminists had just created by undermining the authority of the Catholic Church.
The Common denominator which both the Neoconservative take-over of Catholic institutions in America and the Irish
priest pedophile crisis share is Capitalism. As Mary Kenny put it:
Market capitalism, which is essential to the Celtic tiger boom, depends on individual lifestyle choices,
initiative, tolerance of diversity. It also depends on people valuing, not rebuffing, material gain. The
"authoritarianism" of the Catholic Church, with its strong directional tradition and concept of orthodoxy, is
anathema to the market. Individualism is essential. Those who have studied their Max Weber (The
Protestant Work Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism) would say that it was not coincidental that Catholicism
receded as capitalism triumphed: they would say it was necessary for Catholicism to recede in order for
capitalism to triumph. The Protestant mindset, that you make your own choices for salvation, bypassing
any form of "priest-craft," is a cultural pre-condition for free market capitalism. Were there any conspiracy-
theory Trotskyites left under the age of 60, they might almost suspect a capitalist plot to discredit the
priests, to free Ireland for market capitalism.
Ten years later, as abuse reports continued to roll in Pravda agreed with Kenny. The by now world-wide sex abuse
crisis in the Church
has ideological connotations and follows a political agenda that seeks to deconstruct traditional society
and all its secular institutions and to impose a New World Order after the manner of the sinister interests of
the international oligarchy, the same ones that handle the financial markets and through them, largely
control the global economy. We refer to cases of pedophilia within the ranks of the Catholic Church recently
publicized by international news agencies.
Indeed recent reports of pedophilia involving priests have the outlines of information that journalistic
ethics require, regardless of their moral gravity. Such stories raise suspicion about their "goodness" even
among non-Catholics like us. Although disagreeing with the doctrine of the Catholic Church, in some
respects, but we recognize the importance of their role in our history to defend the ethical values that
shape our Judeo-Christian culture and their social merit on behalf of those who have been victims of the
usury and greed of the international oligarchy, which is after all more interested in destroying Catholicism
and religion in general, as they constitute a serious obstacle to achieving its goal, which is to reduce
mankind to the status of robotic slaves.
Pravda mentioned the case of Father Lawrence Murphy as a particularly egregious case of media-inspired witch-hunt:
The fury of the anti-clerical secular lobby goes so far as to revive old cases like that of Father Lawrence
Murphy, back in 1975, to address the current Pope insidiously and in this way, the very Roman Catholic
Church. On 25 March of this year, the prestigious New York Times published an article that allegedly
accused Benedict XVI of covering up for the priest from Milwaukee in 1995 when the Pope was still Cardinal
and responsible for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith It must be motivated by a very strong
hatred of Catholicism to raise this issue 35 years afterwards ...
Pravda accuses the New York Times of engaging in “a defamatory smear campaign ... against the world Catholic
hierarchy” which is being conducted for the benefit of “philanthropic foundations like the Rockefeller family” whose “financial
interests of those are linked to a wide range of economic sectors ranging from banking, oil, pharmaceuticals, military industry,
etc., to audio visual media, including the “media”, which clearly meets an agenda dictated by the Global Elite to which they
belong.
Kenny claims that the rise of Capitalism meant the decline of the Church. In fact she claimed that capitalism could only
flourish in Ireland if the Church were discredited. The publicity campaigns for Capitalist Ireland and against Catholic Ireland
were in reality two different sides of the same coin. By 2000, mammon had replaced the Catholic Church as the organizing
principle for Irish society:
By 2000, a special Sunday Times survey of Irish 30-year-olds was claiming that for the young Irish
"Money is the new religion and they're queuing up to pay homage to the folding stuff. God plays second
fiddle to Bill Gates ... while sin is forgetting to nail down decent equity options. This generation is more
likely to worship at a stock exchange than at a cathedral, to seek a pension advisor than a confessor."
The debut in 2000 of the film version of Frank McCort’s book Angela’s Ashes was part of this campaign to discredit the
Catholic Church in Ireland and pave the way for unrestrained Capitalism. Kenny feels that “Alan Parker might as well have
made a film called How All Irish People are Absolutely Horrible. For there is scarcely anyone in the whole story of
provincial Ireland in the 1930s and ’40s with an ounce of humanity.” Everyone in the Limerick of Angela’s Ashes is especially
beastly to children: “It goes without saying that the Catholic Church is sneering, cruel, rejecting and exploitative, and the
charity, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, is represented by most particularly odious characters who taunt poor women before
they patronize them”
The Catholic Church is even blamed for being involved in money-lending.
There is a repellant moneylender who exploits the poor of Limerick, and although for historical reasons
which are entirely understandable, moneylenders in Ireland were traditionally Jewish, it is understood now
in Ireland by the media that your are only allowed to be nasty about Catholics; so the moneylender in the
story has to be made into a spiteful Catholic vixen, complete with statues of the Blessed Virgin scattered
about her extortionate book-keeping.
The Jews were left out of the McCourt/Parker story of money-lending in Ireland because the goal of Angela’s Ashes was
to discredit “Catholic Ireland.” According to Kenny, the sex abuse crisis was proof that “the Angela s Ashes movie was
correct after all: Catholic Ireland had been a horrible society, in which horrible people had prevailed. It had been a society in
which harshness made for inhumanity.”
Mary Kenny wrote her book in 2000 at the height of the economic boom in Ireland known as the Celtic Tiger. By the time
I arrived in Ireland ten years later, the Celtic Tiger was dead of its own wretched excess. At the time of my arrival the Irish
debt stood at 1,275 percent of Gross Domestic Product, roughly ten times as high as Greece’s debt, and yet no one was talking
about Ireland.
The people who attended my talk in Dublin were hardly a representative sample of the Irish people, but it was hard not
to generalize from their plight. Most of the men were unemployed and living off a combination of welfare and subsistence
farming. Ireland has a population of 4 million souls. Of that 4 million, 1.8 million are gainfully employed and 500,000 are on
welfare. Saying Good-bye to Catholic Ireland meant saying hello again to the same wretched Capitalism that had driven my
grandfather from his farm near Cork to Philadelphia over a century before.
The Maynooth Conference
The Maynooth conference sponsored by the Linacre Centre was more upscale than my talk. The Linacre Centre
conference on bioethics at Maynooth had the air of Human Life International conferences of the kind I had attended 20 to 25
years ago. It was long on the arcane particulars of genetic engineering of various sorts but short on the cultural ligaments which
held these techniques together in one explainable fabric of pathology. The Linacre Centre has fought a valiant rearguard action
against the Culture of Death in England, which has one of the most advanced genetic engineering establishments in the world.
England was heavily involved in in vitro fertilization when the rest of the world, including America, hardly knew what it was.
The Linacre Centre brought out a brilliant little book on the consequences of this violation of nature, entitled Who Am I? The
book tracked the plight of children who were fathered by donor insemination and grew up with the uncanny sense that things
weren’t as they seemed. This sense of biological insecurity is something that isn’t supposed to exist in the brave new world of
genetic technology (The only reaction the children got when they objected to growing up without a biological father was being
told that they should be grateful to be alive.)
And yet here as elsewhere the Church is handicapped by its allegiance to a culture which despises everything the Church
stands for. Missing from the talks, I thought, was any understanding of the deliberate instrumentalization of deviance which
united all of the individual pathologies under discussion. In order to make my point during the question and answer period
following talks on sexual ethics (by Alexander Pruss, Luke Gormally, and Dr. Philip Sutton), I described the collapse of the
Black-Jewish alliance and the rise of the homosexual as the avant garde of revolution beginning with the Stonewall Riot of
1969. No one objected to my comments at the time, but a number of people complained privately about them afterwards.
It was a scenario depressingly similar to the handling of the priest abuse crisis. As soon as you get specific about the
historical circumstances and dramatis personae involved in a particular crisis, someone attempts to shut down the discussion. I
was reminded of the reaction of Bernard Cardinal Law to my article on Niels Rasmussen’s death, which appeared in Fidelity
in January 1988 (cf. E. Michael Jones, Is Notre Dame Still Catholic? . Fidelity Press, 2009). Rasmussen, a Danish Dominican
who was head of the liturgy program at Notre Dame, was found shot to death in the basement of his house surrounded by whips
and chains, homosexual pornography, and automatic weapons, one of which had killed him After I presented him with a copy
of the article, Cardinal Law asked, “What good does this serve?” Perhaps his eminence now knows what good the article
served. Within a few short years, Cardinal Law would be driven from office as a result of not wanting to know the bad news
about sexual corruption among the clergy.
The most famous example of the sexual engineering of the Catholic clergy is Carl Rogers’ use of Sensitivity Training to
destroy the Los Angeles branch of the Immaculate Heart Nuns. We broke that story 25 years ago when we published an article
by William Coulson, Rogers’ assistant, detailing what Rogers had done to the Nuns. If you’re interested in the full story, it’s
told in my book Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control .
Four years before Carl Rogers began introducing sensitivity training to the Immaculate Heart nuns in Los Angeles,
Abraham Maslow was doing similar work on another group of nuns at the other end of the country. On April 17, 1962 Maslow
gave a lecture to a group of nuns at Sacred Heart College in Massachusetts. Afterward he noted in his diary, that his talk had
been very “successful,” but he found this fact troubling “They shouldn’t applaud me,” he continued, “they should attack. If they
were fully aware of what I was doing, they would [attack].” And why should they have attacked him?
Maslow was aware that encounter groups were toxic for Catholics in general and especially toxic for Catholic religious.
Anyone who promoted encounter groups among Catholics was promoting ipso facto their demise as Catholics, even if he did
so in the name of liberation and with that as his intent. For the liberal Jew or Protestant, the nun was the textbook case of
someone in need of “liberation” and in the context of Catholic religious life and the vows upon which it was based, liberation
could only mean annihilation. On February 25, 1967, Maslow wrote in his diary, “Maybe morons need rules, dogmas,
ceremonies, etc.” He then made a note to order a book entitled Life among the Lowbrows for the Brandeis library. He may
have ordered it because the author of that book noted in it that “feebleminded clients behaved much better and felt better being
Catholic and following all the rules.” Since the nuns weren’t feebleminded, this meant that bringing “self-actualization” to the
nuns meant destroying their commitment to their vows and the Catholic Church. Perhaps this is why Maslow felt they shouldn’t
have applauded his talk in 1962. Maslow, who had spent time at the National Training Laboratories’ headquarters in Bethel,
Maine, where encounter groups, with the help of subsidies from the Office of Naval Research, had been created; he knew that
they were funded as a form psychological warfare, and he had an inkling of the effect they would have on nuns, but it was up to
his colleague Carl Rogers to do the actual experiment.
“I guess what I’m trying to say here,” Maslow wrote in his journal in 1965, the same year that Carl Rogers began
circulating his paper on the psychology of small group encounter among the IHM nuns and around the same time that the nuns
started to leave the convent, “is that these interpersonal therapeutic growth-fostering relationships of all kinds which rest on
intimacy, on honesty, on self-disclosure, on becoming sensitively aware of one’s self — and thereby of responsibility for
feeding back one’s impression of others, etc. — that these are profoundly revolutionary devices, in the strict sense of the word
— that is, of shifting the whole direction of a society in a more preferred direction. As a matter of fact, it might be
revolutionary in another sense if something like this were done very widely. I think the whole culture would change within a
decade and everything in it.
In an article which appeared in Culture Wars in 2004, Patrick Guinan, M.D. described the devastating effects that the
systematic implementation of these revolutionary techniques would have on religious life in the United States. What we’re
talking about here is the wholesale abandonment of ascetical practice among the clergy, or as Guinan put it:
What changed between the first and second halves of the twentieth century were not the management
policies on sex abuse and secrecy at all costs — these remained a constant throughout — nor do we have
evidence to show that the personality features of seminarians or priests changed in any fundamental way
that would account for the nature and the magnitude of the crisis — in its early stages at least... . the core
change over the course of the 20th century was one of purpose or allegiance — leaving behind ascetical
discipline, having disdain for religious tradition, and adopting the therapeutic mentality, a popular belief
that fulfillment of the human person springs from emotional desire in a quest for self-definition, or self-
actualization, without regard to an objective philosophical, religious or moral truth. Further, the therapeutic
mentality views sin as a social concern and discourages loyalty to religious authority; it is profoundly anti-
ascetical.
Allegiance to the therapeutic mentality has dislodged ascetical habits and manners, and it now holds
sway over the attitudes of clergy, just as it strengthened its materialist grip on western societies for nearly
a century. Mental health experts and educators, as the main purveyors of the therapeutic mentality, know
little of the spiritual life and are ignorant of ascetical discipline. Nevertheless, in the name of science, and
as the prime representatives of the educated elite, they advocated a liberalization of sexual standards
before the sexual scandal in the Church, and then attempted to advise the bishops and to treat problem
priests as the crisis took form. Bishops, who have oversight of the parish priests and seminaries, and who
have been at the center of the crisis management, do not speak much, if at all, about ascetical discipline.
Priests give few indications that they know or care about ascetical discipline. But most clergy seemed well
versed in language of the therapeutic mentality. Predictably, when the storm surge in pagan sexuality
began to overwhelm the natural defenses of the clergy in the 1950s and 1960s, those without the spiritual
anchor of ascetical discipline were set adrift — perpetrators as well as their managers. As the initial storm
surge receded, a spawn of the therapeutic mentality remained in the tidal pools.
The man who introduced these ideas into the Church and therefore the man most responsible for the sexual corruption of
the American clergy was the psychologist and former Maryknoll priest Eugene Kennedy. In 1972 Father Kennedy was
commissioned by the United States Catholic bishops do a survey of American priests. Kennedy was a disciple of ErikErikson,
aka, Erik Salomonsen, Erik Homburger, a Jewish psychiatrist who, like Wilhelm Reich, was deeply influenced by the writings
of Sigmund Freud. Central to the thinking of both men was the idea that sexual repression was psychologically damaging, a
theory totally at odds with the Catholic tradition of a celibate clergy.
In addition to Freud’s theory of sexual repression, Kennedy also imported Erikson’s theory of ego development,
according to which each person went through eight developmental stages:
1) the first year of life, 2) through the second year, 3) from age three to six, 4) from age of six to
puberty, 5) adolescence, 6) early adulthood, 7) young and middle adulthood, and 8) later adulthood. Each
stage had to be successfully worked through for normal development. Stage six required sexual intimacy
and expression.
According to the teaching of the Catholic Church, “Chastity is an aspect of temperance which inclines a person to
deliberately forego sexual relations for ascetical purposes.” According to Freud and Erickson, any such renunciation in the
name of religion, which both men considered a dangerous illusion, “would be abnormal and possibly pathologic.”
When Kennedy’s survey came out in book form as The Catholic Priest in the United States: Psychological
Investigations, the results were a foregone conclusion, given the premises with which he began his study. Of the 271 priests
surveyed, Kennedy found that only 19 (or 7 percent) could be termed psychologically “developed.” The overwhelming
majority of American priests were “not developed,” because they had not engaged in sexual activity.
The standard against which the priests were judged was Erickson's development scale. Because the
majority of priests were underdeveloped, they remained in Stage Six or the early adult stage, because in
order to get beyond Stage Six, the priests would have to engage in "sexual intimacy."
Guinan claims that Kennedy’s study contributed to the sexual abuse crisis by giving the impression that celibacy was
nothing more than repression, and that repression was unhealthy:
If repression is portrayed as psychologically unhealthy, it can be argued that Kennedy's Psychological
Investigations and its flawed psychology gave support and justification to beliefs that resulted in the sex
abuse of minors. Erickson's insistence that sexual intimacy was essential to successfully traverse
developmental stage six, justified sexual acting out in general, but it also justified sexual activity with
predominantly male minors, who because of their proximity were the targets of abusive priests.
Guinan goes on to blame Kennedy for the current priest scandals:
When Psychological Investigations was published in 1972, it relied on Erickson's and Freud's materialist
psychology, which posited unrestrained sexual behavior as inevitable and healthy. Seminary formation
programs as well as individual priests accepted Kennedy uncritically and in an effort to move beyond Stage
Six and become normal through sexual intimacy began acting out sexually. Since priests, many of whom
were homosexually inclined, had ready access to adolescent males, this vulnerable group of victims was
disproportionately targeted. While some abusers were implicated in serial rapes many involved only
isolated cases. Nonetheless most involved coercion and all were breaches of both the sixth and ninth
commandments as well as the vow of chastity. The scandal, now involving hundreds of cases, has resulted
in significant damage to efforts at evangelization in the United States, to say nothing of the staggering
financial losses.
In 1976 the revolution that Reich had predicted as resulting from the sexualization of the clergy came out into the open.
The inaugural event was a celebration of the bicentennial of America known as the Call to Action Conference. The revolution
was led by the sexualized clergy. Call to Action was the Catholic equivalent of the tennis court oaths. The Revolution was now
out in the open. The vector of revolutionary transmission was the Church’s educational system.
Two of the participants at the Call to Action conference were Dr. & Mrs. John Krejci. In 1996 both Dr. & Mrs. Krejci
were excommunicated by Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz, ordinary of the diocese for Lincoln, Nebraska, for belonging to an anti-
Catholic organization, namely Call to Action. During the 1960s, Professor Krejci was Father Krejci, a priest who was working
on his doctorate in theology and Mrs. Krejci was a nun by the name of Jean Gettelfinger. Mr. & Mrs. Krejci met at Notre
Dame. Like many who attended that university, Father Krejci and Sister Gettelfinger got married, and when they did they left
their respective religious orders.
The real problem lay with the clergy who felt no reason to leave because they were homosexual. Once the heterosexuals
ran off and got married, the Church was left with a serious homosexual problem. Germain Grisez says most “abuse” consists in
seduction by homosexual priests:
The bishops and those who speak for them should acknowledge honestly that most clerical sex crimes
that have come to light have been seductions of adolescents and young men by homosexual priests.
Because Jesus entrusts bishops to oversee the pastoral care of souls, those bishops who failed to do all that
they could and should have done to prevent or limit a priest's crimes ought to ponder very carefully the
moral and spiritual nature and gravity of their own omissions and actions. Having done that, those bishops
should reexamine their consciences, repent any sins they previously overlooked, and begin to do what they
can and should do by way of restitution.
The Church was then denied the ability to solve its homosexual problem because the dominant culture that was leveling
the accusations refused to admit that homosexuality was a problem at all, much less the problem that was tearing the Church
apart. The issue is complicated by the hypocrisy and double standards of the institutions that were acting as judge, jury and
executioner in the sex abuse scandals. Throughout the period in question, the media continued making contradictory demands
on the Church. On the one hand, the media, especially during the ’70s, were claiming that we should all act on our sexual
impulses whether they are congruent with the moral law or not. Thirty years later, the same institutions were claiming that
certain people should be punished for doing what they were told to do.
On the one hand, the media are claiming that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality, ignoring the fact that 80 percent
of the offenses which have been actually proven involve homosexual behavior between clergy and victims over the age of
puberty. Because the campaign against the Church coincided in time with a campaign by the same group of people to legitimize
homosexuality, the Church was denied any effective way of defending itself against the sexual fifth column which had
established itself in the Church in the wake of the implementation of Vatican II. Professor Schockenhoff claims that “Dialogue
with the Jews” is a non-negotiable part of Church teaching now, but during the sex abuse crisis, the Church’s “elder brothers”
sided with the homosexual fifth column which was the source of the Church’s woes. During the debate leading to the passage of
the federal health care bill, all of the major Jewish organizations signed a friend of the court brief demanding that the Obama
administration allow the Catholic Church no exemptions of conscience when it comes to hiring homosexuals. Actions speak
louder than words. In spite of all the dialogue which had been promoted in the wake of Vatican II, there was no collaboration
in the area of religious freedom and freedom of conscience when it came to the health bill and the concerns it raised for
Catholics. While many may have had no thought beyond promoting the liberal agenda, the net result of their intervention was to
create a homosexual fifth column within the Catholic Church, one which, because of the nature of its sexual activities, can be
used to create a whole new series of lawsuits. With Elder Brothers like this, who needs enemies?
When it came to media concern about sex scandals in the Church, it was becoming increasingly difficult to separate the
arsonists from the fire department. As the late Tom Herron wrote in Culture Wars:
Father Shanley of Boston used to be the toast of the award winning Boston Globe back in the early 70s
when he was a long-haired street priest who worked with young people, spoke against Catholic moral
teachings and was a known early founder of NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association.) Thirty
years later, the same newspaper, The Boston Globe, "was instrumental in bringing him back from
retirement in California to face trial and imprisonment in Massachusetts."
GIFT and Dignitas Personae #12
One of the most powerful presentations at the Linacre Conference was given by a Jesuit by the name of Kevin Flannery.
Twenty-five years ago, he and Paul Mankowski, another Jesuit speaker at the conference, showed up at my house as newly
ordained priests. At the time I took it as a sign of hope for a bright future in the Church that the Jesuits would ordain dedicated
men like this. What I should have told these bright young men back then is “if you wish to serve the Lord, prepare for
suffering.” Paul Mankowski, who would go on to receive a degree in Semitic philology at Harvard while serving as boxing
coach there, would spend the next 25 years circling the ring with his Jesuit superiors, fending them off with theological jabs
like “I accept the authority of my Jesuit superiors insofar as it is congruent with the teaching of the Catholic Church.” Father
Mankowski spent years teaching at the Biblicum, but as part of the ongoing battle over his allegiance to the Jesuits and his final
vows he was summarily dismissed and sent to teach freshman Latin at a ghetto high school in Chicago.
Father Flannery fared better at the Gregorian University in Rome, where he is now a dean, but that only enabled him to
become involved in abstruse bioethical doctrinal battles at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. His talk was about
one of those battles. Paragraph #12 of Dignitas Personae, the most recent document on fertility technology issued by the
Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, has been taken to imply that procedures like GIFT (or Gamete Intrafallopian
Transfer) are morally acceptable. Father Flannery feels that they are not because they “involve a third active factor” which
violates the integrity of the sexual act. Father Flannery used the rest of his talk to explain how this contradiction arose and how
he as a faithful Catholic had to deal with it:
How has the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith gotten into this tangle of setting out conditions for morally
acceptable procedures and then saying that procedures that cannot meet those conditions are acceptable? In my opinion, what
has happened is that, when the Church first began to consider these issues and her thinking was more clear than it is now, she
set out sound principles for their analysis. She has also always been aware of couples — both within the Church and without
— who experience difficulties in conceiving and who desperately want children: a very natural and, therefore, good desire in
itself. So, while continuing to propound the sound principles at the core of the Church’s teaching, the Congregation has seized
upon whatever opportunity the language with which those principles are formulated affords — or appears to afford —in order
to approve procedures that might allow couples to have children.
Father Flannery bolstered his case by citing one document after another which showed that “In this regard, the teaching ol
the magisterium is already explicit” [ li Ad rem quod attinet, magisterii doctrina iam explicata est li ]. He then attempts to
explain how a doctrine that is “already explicit” could undergo corruption by giving a close analysis of Pius XII’s 1949
address to midwives:
He first says that artificial fertilization outside of marriage is to be condemned as immoral and that the
child resulting from such a procedure would be illegitimate. (Repeatedly in his addresses regarding this
issue Pius XII expresses concern for the upbringing of progeny and so also for their legitimacy.) He then
says that artificial fertilization "within marriage, but effected by the active factor of a third party, is equally
immoral and, as such, to be condemned out of hand." The problem with such a procedure, he says, is that,
"between the legitimate husband and the child, fruit of the active factor of a third party (even were the
husband consenting), there exists no connection of origin: no moral and juridical connection of conjugal
procreation." In effect, the problem is that the husband in this marriage has not generated the child who
results from the procedure, for generation has been effected by the third party. It is clear that the problem
here for Pius XII is not illegitimacy, for he speaks of the husband as legitimate; the problem is rather, who
has generated the child: who is the initiator, the agent, whose action results in the generation of a child?
How then did the corruption of doctrine come about?
The small word iam inserted into the paraphrase makes all the difference. Where Pius XII speaks simply
of "the natural act performed in a normal manner" ["I'acte naturel normalement accompli"], the
paraphrase, imposing a meaning upon the participle "accompli" it can hardly bear, speaks of an act that has
been normally performed in the past. The Supreme Pontiff is suddenly not condemning all types of
fertilization but approving one type — a type in which clearly the act of generation is not the conjugal act
but an act performed by technicians in a lab.
Father Flannery, as a result, finds himself in a dilemma.
This all places individuals (such as myself) who believe that they owe to the teachings of the
magisterium religiosum voluntatis et intellects obsequium in something of a dilemma. One welcome way
out of the dilemma would be to discover that we (I) am simply wrong: there is something wrong with the
present analysis and there is nothing contradictory about the teaching of DP§12 (and the related teaching
in Donum vitae).
But let us say that I am not wrong. It is logically impossible to give obsequium (of any sort) to a set of
ideas that are contradictory and recognized as such: obsequium involves at the very least
acknowledgement that a set of ideas could be true, but a contradiction cannot be true.
The way out of this dilemma is not to be found by leaving the Church because:
... finding such a contradiction does not leave obedient sons and daughters of the Church completely in
the lurch, for the teaching office of the Church is exercised within a tradition of moral reflection inspired by
the Holy Spirit. An incoherent paragraph or two in a magisterial document — such as are inevitable when
human beings are writing the documents — do not cancel out the tradition, but quite the converse: the
offending paragraphs (if they truly are such) ought to be judged from the perspective of the tradition. This
is the proper attitude to adopt toward Dignitas personae §12, derived as it is from Donum vitae, which
states that "in this regard" — that is, in regard to homologous artificial fertilization — "the teaching of the
magisterium is already explicit."
New Light
Father Flannery’s struggle throws a new light on the complaints of Bishop Williamson. To begin with, unlike Bishop
Williamson, who complains about ambiguous statements in council documents, Father Flannery believes he has come across an
actual contradiction of Church teaching. The only way the contradiction in Dignitatis Humanae 12 is going to be resolved is
the way the Church has resolved issues in the past, which is to say, by going over the issue again and reconstruing it in the light
of tradition. Non datur tertius. There is no other way. To pretend there is is to be radically anti-traditional.
This is precisely what the SSPX is refusing to do by refusing to affirm their acceptance of the documents of Vatican II as
interpreted in the light of tradition. All that Bishop Williamson and the SSPX have to do to be readmitted to the Church is
affirm the statement, “I accept the documents of Vatican II in the light of tradition.” He does not have to affirm that x number of
Jews died in the holocaust. He does not have to affirm Professor Schockenhoffs interpretation of Vatican II or his endorsement
of “Gespraech mit dem Judentum.”
When Bishop Williamson tells me this affirmation of Vatican II in the light of tradition is the condition which Rome has
set for readmission to the Church, I blurt out, “It’s that simple?”
“It’s not that simple,” Williams replies.
“Yes, it is.” I feel like saying, but do not.
“If we sign this document, we are affirming the validity of Vatican II which means that we are affirming the very thing
which is destroying the Church.”
The statement is patently preposterous, but I bite my tongue and attempt to steer the conversation in another direction.
“Has the Church failed in its mission?” I ask.
“No,” Bishop Williamson replies.
“Then there’s no reason to separate from the Church.”
“We haven’t separated from the Church..”
“Then what are the negotiations about then?”
Before long it becomes apparent that they are about bringing Rome around to the point of view of the SSPX. As another
sign that the discussions are doomed to go nowhere, Bishop Williamson told me that an SSPX priest is planning to use their
meeting with the Ecclesia Dei commission in the Spring of 2011 as an opportunity to the explain to Rome the errors in
Dignitatis Humanae. By now it is clear that this dialogue became Mission Impossible for a number of reasons. First of all, by
concentrating on doctrinal issues in general and Vatican II in particular, it avoided the main issue that needed to be resolved,
namely, schism, which has nothing to do with doctrine. Secondly, there are large segments of the hierarchy which confuse the
documents of Vatican II with the spirit of Vatican II and as a result want to make readmission to the Church contingent on a
particular theological interpretation of council documents rather than an affirmation of the documents themselves “in the light of
tradition.” Bishop Williamson seems determined to conflate Rome with that group of people, thereby granting an unearned
victory to the George Weigels and Professor Schockenhoffs, and allowing them by default to impose a neocon litmus test on the
rest of the Church.
As if to answer my question about the purpose of the negotiations, Bishop Williamson gets up to look for a large piece of
paper. I volunteer a page from my notebook, but it’s not large enough to convey the sweep of his idea, which is that throughout
history movements have broken off from the Church, as did the Arians, the Protestants, the revolutionaries in France, but
through it all the Church has maintained its commitment to tradition and the scriptures. This sounds like an argument against the
SSPX position to me, but that’s only because I see the Church and the SSPX as two separate entities. For Bishop Williamson,
they are one and the same thing. The frustrating thing about conversation with him lies in his inability to acknowledge the
premises upon which his argument is based. So when I ask if the SSPX is the Church, he immediately says no.
Back and Forth
Our conversation goes back and forth over church history. His excellency brings up the Inquisition, intimating that if it
were re-established, he would rejoin the Church. I point out that there was a time when there was no Inquisition, but there has
never been a time since when Christ walked the earth that there has been no Church. He brings up doctrine, but the same
applies here. There was a time when no Christian could say for certain that Christ was true God and true man, because the
formula hadn’t been articulated, but there was never a time when there was no Church. I then bring up the Church’s position on
usury, which is still awaiting its definitive explication.
By now it’s time for lunch and the theological discussion lurches to an unresolved end. After lunch, his excellency takes
a nap and I prepare my talk by walking around the gravel track in their lower garden, making mental notes about the talk which
gradually get supplanted with thoughts about what I would do if it were my garden. When Father Morgan, the English SSPX
superior, appears to give the timetable for the rest of the afternoon, I tell him that the middle of the garden would be the ideal
place for a fountain.
“My mother said the same thing,” he replied.
In the end the talk went well, there was a lively question and answer period afterward, but no one in attendance address
the talk’s conclusion, which I reproduce here in its entirety:
Yes, the Church was derelict in not preaching the gospel, especially on sexual matters. Yes, the Church
chose therapy over the penal sanctions required by canon law. Yes, the Church is being punished for
following the advice of the psychologists. Yes, the current scandals are being orchestrated by the Church's
traditional enemies, Protestants and Jews in order to destroy traditional cultures and make the world safe
for Capitalism and the universal rule of Mammon. But what is the proper response?
Let’s answer that question by explaining what is not the proper response. In a recent interview, Bishop Fellay talked
about the current state of the Society of St. Pius X. After throwing Bishop Williamson under the bus, Bishop Fellay went on to
say that “the Church has cancer” and that “we do not want to embrace the Church because we might contract cancer.”
There are a number of things one might say about such a statement. First of all, cancer is not contagious. Secondly, this
image — the Church has cancer — can be found nowhere in the tradition of the Church, not in the Gospels, not in the Acts of
the Apostles, not in the Epistles and not in the writing of the Church Fathers. The reason is simple enough: it does not and
cannot correspond to reality.
If the cancer image is faulty, anti-traditional and unscriptural, what image does correspond to the situation of the Church
in our time? The answer is the story in Mark 4:35-41, the story of Jesus calming the storm. We are told that:
It began to blow a gale, and the waves were breaking into the boat so that it was almost swamped. But
[Jesus] was in the stern, his head on the cushion, asleep. They woke him and said to him, "Master, do you
not care? We are going down!" And he woke up and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, "Quiet now! Be
calm!" And the wind dropped and all was calm again. Then he said to them, "Why are you so frightened?
How is it that you have no faith?" They were filled with awe and said to one another, "Who can this be?
Even the wind and the sea obey him."
All of the Church Fathers are unanimous in saying that the boat is the Church and that the boat is going to be tossed about
by storms, which is to say, campaigns orchestrated to destroy the Church.
St. Hilary of Poitiers writes that Christ “bids us to be within the Church, and to be in peril until such time as returning in
His splendor He shall give salvation to all the people ... Meanwhile the disciples are tossed by the wind and the waves;
struggling against all the storms of this world, raised by the opposition of the unclean spirit.”
St. Augustine tells us to “Think of the boat as the Church, and the stormy sea as this world... . For when any of a wicked
will and of great power, proclaims a persecution against the Church, then it is that a mighty wave rises against the boat of
Christ.” We are to remain in that storm-tossed boat until, “when the night is nearly ended, He shall come, in the end of the
world, when the night of iniquity is past, to judge the quick and the dead.”
When Christ finally does come, according to St. Hilary, he will
find His Church wearied, and tossed by the spirit of the Anti-Christ, and by the troubles of this world.
And because by long experience of Anti-Christ they will be troubled at every novelty of trial, they shall have
fear even at the approach of the Lord, suspecting deceitful appearances. But the good Lord banishes their
fear saying, It is I; and by proof of His presence takes away their dread of impending shipwreck.
From the perspective of the faithful who have to endure these storms, it always seems as if Jesus is asleep, which is to
say, unconcerned with their plight. This is, of course, not the case. God is always with his Church, even when it appears that he
is not. Jumping ship means instant death. Because God can calm any storm, the real issue is not the magnitude of the storm, but
rather as Jesus points out, the magnitude of our faith.
The Only Thing
As things stand now, the only thing holding back the reconciliation of the SSPX and the Church is Bishop Williamson’s
(and three other SSPX bishops’) signature on a document that he himself admits Archbishop Lefebvre would have signed. Four
days after I gave my talk at SSPX headquarters in Wimbledon, it was clear that my overture to Bishop Williamson had failed.
On June 28, 2010, his excellency wrote on his blog that:
Archbishop Lefebvre chose a third way, in between the two extremes of either Truth or Authority. His
way, in which he has been followed by that SSPX, was to cling to Catholic Truth, but with no disrespect
towards Church Authority, nor any blanket disbelief in the status of its officials. It is a balance certainly not
always easy to keep, but it has borne Catholic fruit all over the world, and it has sustained a faithful
remnant of Catholics with true doctrine and the true sacraments for the 40 years we have so far spent in
the Conciliar desert (1970-2010). In that desert we Catholic sheep may have to be scattered for a while
yet, as long as the Shepherd in Rome is struck (Zech. XIII, 7, quoted by Our Lord in the Garden of
Gethsemane - Mt. XXVI, 31). In this Gethsemane of the Church, we do need compassion on our fellow
sheep... . But that no way means that the third way as traced out by Archbishop Lefebvre has ceased to be
the right way.
Non datur tertius. When it comes to the Church there is no third way. Bishop Williamson affirms here all of the
propositions — the Church has failed in its mission, the SSPX is the Church — that he denied in our conversation. The only
thing that remains the same is his adamant refusal to restore communion, not even on terms that Archbishop Lefebvre would
have accepted. In his history of the Hussite rebellion in Bohemia, Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini, who took the name Pius II when
he became pope, referred to Jan Zizka, the one-eyed military genius who lost both eyes leading the invincible Hussite armies,
as “the blind leader of a blind people.” The phrase kept popping into my mind during the course of our interview, but
especially when Bishop Williamson said that the society was going to break apart, for it seems as if he is determined to stick
by an organization that is doomed to self-destruct anyway.
As a gesture of friendship, I gave Bishop Williamson a copy of The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and its Impact on World
History . On the first page of the book, I wrote a dedication “To Bishop Williamson,” and then added “ Ut unum sint.” He
laughed when he read it, and everyone else at the table laughed when I said that an artifact like this was destined to end up in
the holocaust museum in Washington. What occurred to me later is that the SSPX is more like the Jews than either of us were
willing to admit at the time. Like the Jews, the time of their visitation has arrived and the SSPX is too blind to see it. They
were unable to sign a document that Archbishop Lefebvre could have signed without hesitation, and in failing to sign it they
were unable to see that they were doing more to enhance the modernist agenda they ostensibly oppose than would have been
the case if they had accepted their rightful position as docile members of the Church.
Ultimately, the inscription was no laughing matter. Unity in the Church is not some optional feature, like white wall tires
on a car. It goes to the very heart of Christ’s conception of the church and it goes to the very heart as well of the woes that have
been inflicted on the world since the cataclysmic violation of that unity which followed from the events of 1517. That situation
was not improved by the events of 1988.
Bishop Williamson is 69 years old. That is one year short of the Biblical allotment of years granted to men. If the society
is going to break up anyway, I argued, then let it be through his unilateral signing of the agreement with Rome. At this
suggestion, he simply throws up his hands, as if to say the suggestion is too preposterous for words. The suggestion is far from
preposterous. In fact, as live options go, it’s the only option he has left.
Biographical Note
E. Michael Jones, editor of Culture Wars magazine, is the author of more than fifteen books, several of which are available
e-editions, including:
Travels with Harley in Search of America: Motorcycles. War. Deracination. Consumer Identity
Jewish Nazis
Requiem for a Whale Rider
The Updated
25th anniversary
Edition of the Book
that Started it All
NOT
GS
On March 25, 2009, Notre Dame was embroiled in the biggest
controversy to hit the campus since the performance of The Va¬
gina Monologues. A few days earlier, Notre Dame president John
Jenkins, CSC had announced that the university planned to give
President Barack Obama an honorary doctorate. Within hours of
the announcement a storm of protest erupted which showed no
sign of dying down any time soon. Citing the statement of the US
Catholic Bishops in 2004, “The Catholic community and Catho¬
lic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our
fundamental moral principles. They should not be given awards,
honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions
the ordinary of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, John M.
D’Arcy announced that, for the first time in 25 years, he would not be attending graduation ceremonies at Notre
Dame, because “President Obama has recently affirmed, and has now placed in public policy, his long stated unwilling¬
ness to hold human life as sacred.”
cation has
ovcrished
students.
By April, 2009 over 250,000people had signed a petition condemning Notre Dames actions, and Bishop
Thomas J. Olmstead of the Phoenix, Arizona diocese joined with his colleague Bishop DArcy in denouncing Jenkins deci¬
sion, calling the decision to honor President Obama a “public act of disobedience’ and a ‘grave mistake.
Beginning in June 1984 and continuing for the next 25 years, Fidelity Magazine and then Culture Wars published a
series of articles on Notre Dame that rocked the Catholic World. Beginning with a survay of the theolgy department,
Those articles described a sordid web of intrigue which included blackmail and murder and which amounts to the best
description of the trajectory that began when Father Hesburgh stole Notre Dame from the Catholic Church in 1967.
Written by one of the most acute observers of the contemporary Catholic scene and compiled over a quarter of a Cen¬
tury, these articles tell the compelling story of the demise of Catholic education in America.
□ 1 have enclosed $27 plus $5 S & H for the revised 25th anniversary edition of Is Notre Dame Still Catholic?
Name:
Address:
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Total: $
MAIL YOUR ORDER TO: Fidelity Press • 206 Marquette Ave. •
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Table of Contents
Letters
Culture of Death Watch
Moral Sqeamishness:
A Magazine is Born
by Anthony S. McCarthy
Bullets
by James G. Bruen
Features
© Copyright Ultramontane Associates, February
2010 (Volume 29 No. 3) Culture Wars Magazine
(ISSN 1080-9058) is published monthly, except
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The Weber Thesis:
Capitalism and its Myths of Origin
by E. Michael Jones
Reviews
The Transparent Cabal
reviewed by Tim Wilkinson
2
6
48
18
40
LETTERS
BUND TO THE TRUTH
This letter is in response to the
letter by Lawrence J. Dickson pub¬
lished in your magazine for the De¬
cember, 2009 issue. Lawrence
Dickson’s desire to make a point, as
erroneous as it is, should not blind
him to the truth.
The justification for destroying
the “pursuer” is not one based on
truth, but is based on the principle
of being able to do whatever one
wants. Judaism of today rejects
truth because it rejects Christ. Per¬
haps one of the best places that we
can observe this situation is in
Mark 12:28-33. As you may recall,
the Jewish elders, chief priests, and
scribes asked Jesus “By what au¬
thority are you doing these things?”
(that is, the miracles He worked).
Jesus responded with a question: “I
shall ask you one question. Answer
me, and I will tell you by what au¬
thority I do these things. Was
John’s baptism of heavenly or of
human origin?” Now here’s the re¬
ally interesting part: the Jews “dis¬
cussed this among themselves and
said If we say of heavenly origin, he
will say, Why did you not believe
him? But shall we say of human
origin?—They feared the crowd.”
In other words, instead of seeking
and speaking truth, the Jewish lead¬
ers thought foremost of what others
would think of them; they engaged
in empty discussions or debate, and
they ultimately gave a political an¬
swer to the Incarnate Truth. They
rejected Truth when they refused to
answer Him correctly even though
they knew the truth.
The idea of the pursuer means
whatever anyone wants it to mean
to justify one’s actions. If Mr.
Dickson accepts the pursuer prin¬
ciple in his life, then he will un¬
doubtedly engage in whatever he
wants and feel good about it just
like the Jews. However, in the ex¬
amples that Mr. Dickson provides,
it appears that he is trying to ar¬
ticulate a Roman Catholic posi¬
tion.
Roman Catholicism is founded
on and dedicated to the Truth.
That means that there are prin¬
ciples of order that are to guide our
conduct and thoughts because
these principles properly orient us
to doing the will of God and hence
to achieving our nature, our sup¬
posed final end, which is union
with Him.
One of the principles that Ca¬
tholicism espouses is what is called
the Principle of Double Effect.
While I believe that Catholics
United for the Faith has largely lost
its way and its energy, it did pro¬
vide a good definition of the Prin¬
ciple in its “Faith Facts.” Here it is:
“The basic moral principle that
we follow is to pursue and do
good, and avoid that which is evil
or bad (Catechism of the Catholic
Church, no. 1732, 1955). The
principle of double effect is an
ethical formula that enables some¬
one to evaluate the moral dimen¬
sions of complicated moral issues
that may involve consequences or
side effects which are both positive
and negative, good and bad. This
principle may be employed when
one is considering an action that is
morally good, yet the action in¬
volves one or more unintended bad
consequences. Because these con¬
sequences are side effects, and not
directly willed, the choice that
brings them about is morally ac¬
ceptable.” For the principle of
double effect to apply to an action
thereby rendering it morally ac¬
ceptable, the following guidelines
must be met: “[1] the intended act
must be good in itself. The in¬
tended act may not be morally evil.
[2] The good effect of the act must
be that which is directly intended
by the one who carries out the act.
The bad effect that results from the
act may be foreseen by the agent
but must be unintended. [3] The
good effect must not be brought
about by using morally evil means.
[4] The good effect must be of
equal or greater proportion to any
evil effect which would result. [5]
Acts that have morally negative ef¬
fects are permissible only when
truly necessary, i.e., where there are
no other means by which the good
may be obtained.”
This reasoning applies whether
one is faced with an attacker or a
pending accident or a tubal preg¬
nancy.
Fr. Tad Pacholczyk, an icon of
sorts these days for the pro-life
movement due to his work in ex¬
plaining the Church’s position on
embryonic stem-cell research, pre¬
sents in an article entitled “When
pregnancy goes awry” an example
of the operation of the principle of
double effect with the situation in¬
volving an “ectopic” (“out of
place”) pregnancy. He writes that
there are three procedures that are
available to deal with such a situa¬
tion where a growing embryo is
lodged in the fallopian tubes and
poses a serious threat to the life of
the mother. Two of these proce¬
dures are morally impermissible
and the third is acceptable.
The first morally impermissible
procedure involves the use of the
drug methotrexate which targets
the embryo, particularly the pla¬
centa cells, and causes these cells to
stop growing thereby killing the
2 / CULTURE WARS
embryo. The methotrexate is a di¬
rect attack on the embryo, just like
abortion, and is morally impermis¬
sible.
The second morally impermis¬
sible procedure involves “cutting
along the length of the fallopian
tube where the child is embedded”
and then “scooping out” the living
child who then dies. This proce¬
dure, while keeping the tube in¬
tact, directly causes the death of
the child, and is morally unaccept¬
able.
The third, and only morally ac¬
ceptable procedure, involves re¬
moval of the entire section of the
fallopian tube where the unborn
child is stuck. Fr. Pacholczyk ex¬
plains “Although this results in re¬
duced fertility for the woman, the
section of tube around the growing
child has clearly become pathologi¬
cal, and constitutes a mounting
threat with time. The threat is ad¬
dressed by removal of the tube,
with the secondary, and unin¬
tended, effect that the child within
will then die.” The intention here
is to the good effect (removing the
damaged tissue) while tolerating
the bad effect (loss of the child)
and the child is not directly tar¬
geted nor is the death of the child
the reason for the cure.
I hope that this helps Mr.
Dickson to properly think about
and correctly decide on the moral
course of action when he is faced
with an insane man attacking his
wife or daughter, or someone fall¬
ing towards his family from a great
height, or a tubal pregnancy by his
daughter or wife.
Abortion is from the Jews for the
reasons contained in my article in
the October, 2009 issue. The Jews
have neither a concept of natural
law, nor have they Logos or Christ,
so error such as abortion can be
justified as some good. This,
coupled with the fact that the Jews
are the most powerful ethnic group
in the United States, if not most of
the world, makes it likely, and logi¬
cal, that their value system or reli¬
gion will be imposed on the rest of
us, or at least it will come to be the
basis of social norms and mores.
So, yes, abortion is from the
Jews—this is a statement of fact
even if a lot of non-Jews cooper¬
ated in bringing it about. I submit
that if pro-lifers really wanted to
end abortion, they would first seek
the conversion of Jews to Roman
Catholicism.
And, my article was not meant
to “score points against the Jews.”
It is meant to speak truth and Mr.
Dickson’s letter provides for yet
another opportunity to preach the
Gospel: Jesus Christ is the Son of
God, the Promised Messiah. No
one can go to the Father except
through Him. I call on all Jews,
Protestants, and Muslims, but es¬
pecially Jews, to see Him for Who
He Is and to accept Him. Convert
to the Roman Catholic Faith, find
that for which you have been seek¬
ing, and save your souls.
David A. Wemhoff
South Bend, Indiana
Culture Wars welcomes letters to the editor.
Preference will be given to letters which deal
with topics discussed in the magazine. Letters
should ideally be limited to one single-spaced
page, but we know how difficult it is to follow
ideals in this world. Letters can be sent by mail
to Culture Wars, 206 Marquette Ave., South
Bend, IN 46617; by fax to 219-289-1461; or by
electronic mail to Jones@Culture Wars.com.
February 2010 / 3
HEART- RENDING PICTURE
In your new December issue of
Culture Wars there is a picture in
James Bruen’s article “Killer
Moms” of a mother in uniform
parting from her child. It is one of
the most heart- rending pictures
I’ve ever seen. How well it empha¬
sizes the madness, stupidity and fu¬
tility of war and misguided values!
Gordon Badgerow
Sparta, Michigan
BAD MONEY
Recent discussion of Gresham’s
Law of currency in the December
2009 issue of the Culture Wars, in¬
cludes comments on Gresham’s
Law which tells us that “bad
money drives out good” should
also be interpreted as saying that
“cheap money drives out expensive
money” according to the author W.
Patrick Cunningham in his article
on “Devouring Our Young: Teen
Ministry and the Politics of Dis¬
continuity.” I would like to call at¬
tention to the historic background
of Gresham’s Law.
The protracted monetary crisis
in early 16th century Poland was
caused by flooding the country
with debased Polish coins minted
fraudulently by the Hohenzollerns
of Berlin, who thereby destabilized
the economy of Poland and dam¬
aged the Vistula wheat trade. Act¬
ing as Poland’s finance minister
Nicolaus Copernicus described the
necessary monetary reform in his
book and while working with the
Polish Seym, he established in
1526 a new currency unit named
the “zloty.” Thus, the zloty became
a basic unit of the monetary system
in Poland.
Copernicus published in Latin
his book on monetary reform early
in 1526 under the title, Monetae
Cudende Ratio, in which, for the
first time in history, he stated the
law of currency that “bad money
drives the good money out of cir¬
culation.” At that time Thomas
Gresham (1519-1579) was seven
years old.
The Seym immediately passed
into law The Act of Monetary Re¬
form of 1526. The currency reform
was adopted by Prussia in 1528 be¬
cause Prussia was then a fief of Po¬
land after Albreht von
Hohenzollern paid on his knees
the first act of homage in the mar¬
ket of Krakow in 1525 and recog¬
nized the control of the Polish king
over Prussia. It was the first pact in
Europe torn by religious conflicts,
between a Catholic king and a
Protestant vassal duke.
Economics were Copernicus’
family tradition. His father
Nicolaus Copernicus Sr. registered
in Cracov as a copper wholesaler
for trade with Gdansk. In 1454
Nicolaus Copernicus Sr. served the
acting chancellor of Poland,
Zbigniew Cardinal Olesnicki, as an
envoy to the Prussian Estates to ne¬
gotiate the unification of Prussia
with Poland. In order to perform
his duties, Nicolaus Copernicus Sr
moved in 1458 from Cracov to
Torun closer to Prussia and there
in 1473 was born Nicolaus
Copernicus Jr who became the fa¬
ther of modern astronomy after he
discovered (about 1504) that the
earth rotates daily on its axis and
with other planets it is in orbit
around the Sun.
The copern ican Calendar was as¬
tronomically correct and was accu¬
rate within two minutes per year. It
solved the problem of celebrating
Easter at the correct time, and it
was used despite attacks by John
Calvin and Martin Luther, who
hanged and burned Copernicus in
effigy in Magdeburg and called
him that “Damned Polack As¬
tronomer.”
The Hohenzollerns paid homage
to the kings of Poland for over a
century. King of Poland founded
the University of Koenigsberg in
1544. The Hohenzollerns of Berlin
were able to take advantage of the
panic of Jewish bankers in Poland,
after the Cossack’s rebellion and
horrible pogroms of 1648 in the
Ukraine. These bankers feared the
repercussions that would lead to
eviction from Poland of all Jews,
especially the money lenders, the
way it happen previously in Spain.
The Hohenzollerns profited
from the transfer of commercial
capital to Berlin from Poland by
Jewish bankers. In 1701 they were
able to proclaim the Kingdom of
Prussia, with its capital in Berlin.
When the Austro-Prussian (1740-
1749) war was fought for posses¬
sion of Silesia and bankrupted the
Berlin government, it started again
to flood Poland with bogus money
to salvage its finances. At that time
the Prussians stole from Leipzig the
dies to mint Polish zlotys and used
Jewish minters to produce the bo¬
gus money. Berlin continued to act
as an international parasite and on
three occasions proposed schemes
for dismembering the Polish
Nobles Republic, starting in 1656
then in 1720 and in 1733.
After Berlin was burned down by
the Russians in 1760, Russian min¬
ister Alexis Bestuzhev-Riumin tried
to destroy the new Kingdom of
Prussia in order to prevent it from
4 / CULTURE WARS
acquiring the means to dominate
the 350 independent German
principalities and form a new Ger¬
man Reich with its capital in Ber¬
lin, which would have meant the
modern unification of Germany
for the first time in history
Bestuzhev proposed an exchange in
which Russia would acquire parts
of Podolia or Belorus, while Poland
would acquire Silesia and East
Prussia, which would be popu¬
lated, especially in the region of
Mazurian Lakes by Mazurs, by
colonists from Mazovia in Poland.
The proposal failed because Polish
citizens of the Noble Republic did
not want to became subjects of the
Tsar of Russia.
The miracle of Prussian history
occurred, when a German woman
born in Stettin became Catherine
II of Russia and successfully con¬
spired in bringing about the assas¬
sination of her husband Peter III
(1728-1762). On July 9, 1762 she
conducted a coup d’etat which put
her in power in St. Petersburg. The
same year Berlin initiated parti¬
tions of Poland, after 65 years of
“Saxon Night” (1699-1764) as the
union of Poland with Saxony is
known. It was the most dismal pe¬
riod in the history of Poland. The
Kingdom of Prussia was saved
from destruction and Berlin was
able to provoke a series of Polish-
Russian wars; each war gave Berlin
a chance for robbery of Polish land
by annexation. Thus, one could
add that the Poles saved the King¬
dom of Prussia from final liquida¬
tion, after 244 years of its creation
in 1701.
The partitions of Poland in
1762-1795 allowed the Kingdom
of Prussia to acquire as much land
as was the combined area of the
350 other German independent
principalities at the time. Thus, the
annexation of Polish provinces was
the key to Berlin’s domination over
all of Germany.
Similarly, as it happened with the
Copernican law of currency, which
the British call “Gresham’s Law,” so
today one reads in British books
fraudulent statements about World
War II in which it is falsely stated
that the British broke the German
military code Enigma. The history
of Enigma and of perennial bad
money problems now called the
Gresham Law relate to the usurpa¬
tion by the English of the work of
Copernicus and Polish cryptologists.
Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski
WWW.pogonowski.com
TESTIMONY OF SCRIPTURE
The controversy between Simon
Goldhill and Israel Shamir in the
December 2009 issue of Culture
Wars over whether there were any
prostitutes in ancient Greek, Latin,
and Biblical cultures before capital¬
ism, ignores the testimony of
Scripture: “the love of money is the
root of evil. ” Before what is known
as capitalism there was the love of
money. And before that there were
prostitutes or harlots, as can be
seen in Genesis 38, where Tamar
plays the harlot with Judah. There
was no money as a substitute for
goods and services, but for the ser¬
vice of the harlot, Judah promised
the good of the kid taken from the
flock.
As near as I can recall, the first to
identify Mary Magdalene with the
woman who washed Jesus’ feet
with her tears (Luke 7:36-50, 8:2)
was Pope Gregory I. Despite the
statement that the Risen Christ ap¬
peared first to Mary Magdalen
(Mark 16:9), St. Gregory Palamas
attempted to reconcile the four
evangelists and said that the “other
Mary” (Matthew 28: 1-10) was the
virgin mother of our Lord, and she
was the first. Mary Magdalen sup¬
poses the risen Jesus to be a gar¬
dener, and Jesus said to her,
“Touch me not” (John 20:1-18),
but the “other Mary” met the risen
Jesus and fell down at this feet and
worshiped him (Matthew 28:9).
Charles Caldwell
Naples, Florida
HATRED OF MAMMON
In Culture Wars 2009 you gave
Ken Freeland, the Christian Social¬
ist, the opportunity to develop his
economic hypothesis. In the No¬
vember issue there was a very inter¬
esting exchange between Michael
McClain and Israel Shamir about
the fact that Shamir “could not
find a line of thought behind”
McClain’s letter, and that’s why he
simply allowed his gifted pen to
run freely on the page. But I think
Mr. McClain had some sensible
thoughts, although expressed
rather emotionally. Israel Shamir
has written numberless articles,
and in some of them he also gives
into his weaknesses.
But actually Michael McClain
challenged Shamir to develop his
claim, “if the Soviet Union had
been left alone the Russian Ortho¬
dox Church and Russian Commu¬
nism would have united ... in
mutual hatred of Mammon.”
Israel Shamir had expressed this
publicly and this opinion had sur¬
prised many people, not only
(continued on p. 17)
February 2010 / 5
1
z.
A Magazine is Born
I AMORAL STANDPOINT
England is ill served by her me¬
dia. She is not unique in this, nor
in the fact that her magazines, with
few exceptions, are overwhelm¬
ingly trivial, dull and incurious. I
do not refer to the mass market
magazines, that glut of pornogra¬
phy, celebrity, and prurience, or
the newspapers, which, when not
imitating the mags, give space to
political correspondents who don’t
appear to have any meaningful be¬
liefs, and who are practically indis¬
tinguishable from one another.
It is the serious magazine market
that is almost empty in England.
The US, for all its faults, does have
some serious magazines. Even First
Things, for all its unfortunate poli¬
tics, publishes important and
thought-provoking articles. And
there are others out there: The
American Conservative, Culture
Wars and Chronicles for starters.
There are no equivalents in En¬
gland. Of the few supposedly seri¬
ous magazines The Spectator has
become increasingly trivial, and
the newer magazine Prospect is a
pretentious atheist rag which en¬
gages more in sneering than in ar¬
gument (AC Grayling is a regular
contributor).
Into this barren landscape a new
magazine has come. Edited by a
well-educated Catholic (Daniel
Johnson) and promising to cut
through all of the above (and de¬
fend Western values), Standpoint is,
one might have hoped, a much
needed counterblast against the in¬
creasingly decadent and anti-intel¬
lectual culture of this troubled isle.
England is not short of good
minds and good writers. Many do
not get a chance to address a main¬
stream audience, so the emergence
of a new magazine is not a minor
event. The magazine was given a
lavish launch party at London’s
Wallace Collection gallery. Huge
quantities of champagne were
quaffed by many prominent fig¬
ures of the media and literary
worlds. Paul Johnson, Daniel’s fa¬
mous father, was conspicuous and
a good time was had by all. But
who was paying for all this, and in¬
deed for the magazine itself? And
why?
The major financial backer of
the magazine is one Alan Bekhor, a
prominent Zionist and former
London metal-trader who is now
6 / CULTURE WARS
building a shipping empire. The
staff of the magazine is largely Jew¬
ish and, one supposes, not of the
anti-Zionist or paleo-conservative
persuasion (if they are they have
my sympathy).
Paul Johnson, who appears to be
something of a godfather for the
magazine, will be known to most
readers as a prolific author and
bestselling historian. So well-
known is he in certain circles that
in 2006 he received the Medal of
Freedom in the US. Jewish
paeloconservative Paul Gottfried
used the occasion to reflect:
Paul Johnson should be
known as a British journalist
who writes long historical sur¬
veys aimed at pleasing the
usual suspects. Johnson, of
course, has many unpleasant
things to say about the Ger¬
man people in any time pe¬
riod, and he assails those Ar¬
abs who challenge the right of
Israelis to occupy territory
they had once held. His his¬
tory of the Jews, which could
have been written by John
Podhoretz—provided that
John could put together
enough sentences sequen¬
tially—brought Johnson the
favor of “our crowd” and their
pampered progeny. Since
then the obliging Brit has
made a new career writing for
neocon publications, and he
does so more often than I
would care to notice.
Gottfried is right. Johnsons His¬
tory of the Jews is a travesty. The
book’s inherent anti-Christian bias
and persistent, though not total,
refusal to mention Jewish as op¬
posed to Christian wrongdoing is
there for all to see. Small wonder
that the Catholic writer Piers Paul
Read was to state, in reviewing the
History of the Jews together with
Johnson’s slipshod History of Chris¬
tianity, “Indeed, reading the two
histories together, one gets the im¬
pression that he would rather have
been born a Jew than a Christian
because the Jews were the ‘first to
rationalize the unknown’ and are
the ‘pilot project of the human
race.’” Read goes on to enumerate
a few of Johnson’s oversimplifica¬
tions and outright falsehoods. Two
eminent Jewish historians, Elliott
Horowitz and Israel Yuval, have re¬
cently decried the damage done to
Jewish historiography by historians
like Johnson. It would seem that
they think philosemites, of whom
Johnson is a conspicuous example,
are not true friends either of the
Jews or of scholarship.
As if that weren’t bad enough
from this Christian historian,
when it comes to Israel Johnson
takes misrepresentation to new
heights. Just one example: he de¬
scribes the massacre at Sabra and
Chatila in Lebanon as “a slaughter
of Moslem refugees, by Christian
Falangist Arabs. . .This episode was
skillfully exploited by Arab and So¬
viet propagandists and presented in
the Western media as an Israeli re¬
sponsibility. . . The Israelis wisely
ordered an independent judicial
inquiry which established the facts
and placed some blame on the Is¬
raeli Minister of Defense, Ariel
Sharon, for not having foreseen
and prevented the killings.” All this
in the context of Johnson’s mea¬
sured comments about the 1982
invasion of Lebanon by Israel
(“Such Israeli exercises in the right
to self-defense were sometimes mis¬
judged or ill executed,” Johnson
tells us).
Contrast Johnson’s account with
the words of the unimpeachable
Zeev Maoz, Professor of Political
Science at the University of Cali¬
fornia, Davis and former director
of the M.A. Program at the Israeli
Defense Force’s National Defense
College. Maoz tells us that “Sharon
explained the need to enter the
refugee camps in order to pull out
the suspected PLO guerrillas but
also the need to get the Phalanges
involved in the fighting.. . .The
Phalange militias entered the refu¬
gee camps and spent nearly three
days there. When they left the
camps some eight hundred men,
women and children were left dead
in the streets. The massacre took
place under the eyes of the IDF
commanders who had been sta¬
tioned on the roofs overlooking the
camps. . .”
Paul Johnson is not, of course,
Standpoint , although he is a hugely
influential “conservative” figure in
the States. He is, however, the fa¬
ther of the editor and a supporter
of the magazine. That said, it is
surely wrong to judge the son and
his magazine by the father’s writ¬
ings. Gottfried, in discussing Paul,
turns his focus to Daniel, writing:
Into this barren landscape a new
magazine has come.
February 2010 / 7
z.
V
Daniel Johnson
The mention of Paul
Johnson. . .made me think of
his son Daniel, another kept
journalist, who is about to
launch, with Miriam Gross, a
former assistant to Melvin
Lasky at Encounter, a British
equivalent of the Weekly Stan¬
dard. . . I wish his enterprise
every possible success, on the
grounds that the British de¬
serve this American import,
for having pushed us into
World War One. We are now
returning the favor belatedly
by dumping our latest ex¬
ample of toxic waste onto
their newsstands. Besides, the
neocons claim to adore the
Brits, as they dislike the
French and detest the Ger¬
mans. Why shouldn’t they be
allowed and even encouraged
to put part of their propa¬
ganda machine in the British
Isles? Perhaps some of our pre-
m t e r
neocons can
be urged to
move across
the Atlantic
and to de¬
vote them¬
selves to Mr.
B e k h o r ’ s
venture full¬
time.
When I first
read this I
thought it un¬
duly harsh. I
had reason to
believe that
Daniel was a
rather more
cautious and
careful person
than his father.
I also had rea¬
son to believe
that he was,
unlike his father (who has a fixa¬
tion about the need for the Catho¬
lic Church to ordain women), an
orthodox Catholic. These things
matter. To have an orthodox
Catholic at the helm of such an
important venture struck me as a
cause for celebration. And 1 had no
reason to share Paul Gottfried’s
cynicism, admire him as I do.
Then I read Standpoint.
It is written, though not exclu¬
sively, by a motley bunch of anti-
Christian neoconservatives who,
like Paul Johnson, seem to prize Is¬
rael, demonize Muslims and boast
of their ‘hawkish’ approach to the
“War on Terror”. A quick survey of
the magazine finds us in rhe com¬
pany of, among others, Melanie
Phillips, Julie Burchill, and
Emanuele Ottolenghi. There are
many more, but let’s just look at
these to begin with, as an example
of the kind of people Standpoint is
employing or commissioning. All
three of these people are very con¬
cerned about both anti-Semitism
and anti-Zionism. Ottolenghi has
been given a regular column. Just
as Paul Johnson defends Ariel
Sharon from his critics, so too does
Mr. Ottolenghi. In a jointly writ¬
ten article with Suzanne
Gershowitz for the Middle East
Quarterly in 2005 Ottolenghi
warns:
The growing legitimacy of anti-
Zionism has contributed to a re¬
surgence of European anti-
Semitism, again often wrapped
with and, in many European eyes,
legitimized by the caricature of
Sharon. Violent anti-Semitic inci¬
dents in Europe have risen in pro¬
portion to the violence between Is¬
rael and the Palestinians, which
suggest a relationship between
anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.
The article by Ottolenghi and
Gershowitz was, unsurprisingly,
praised by UK Zionist Melanie
Phillips. The article forthrightly as¬
serts a link between anti-Zionism
and anti-Semitism, a theme that
Phillips constantly brings up in her
own writings. And both
Ottolenghi and Phillips draw at¬
tention to the prospect of a “new”
anti-Semitism and to surveys
showing a rise in this “new” anti-
Semitism (in Europe). The
Ottolenghi article refers to the
Manifestations of anti-Semitism in
the European Union report to back
up its claim of a “new” anti-
Semitism (linked with a rising
anti-Zionism). Ottolenghi dishon¬
estly whitewashes Sharon’s record
and then refers (along with his co¬
author from the American Enter¬
prise Institute) to a report so ludi¬
crous and propagandistic in its as-
8 / CULTURE WARS
sumptions that, as Norman
Finkelstein notes: “If virtually any
criticism of Israel signals anti-
Semitism, the sweep of the new
anti-Semites, unsurprisingly, beg¬
gars the imagination.”
1 have yet to see any of
Finkelstein’s analysis in his book
Beyond Chutzpah refuted by any¬
one. What is one to do with such a
man? Ottolenghi knows. Here is
what he wrote of this awkward cus¬
tomer, one who actually bothers to
dig up the background for
Ottolenghi’s ludicrous claims:
“Norman Finkelstein provides a
blanket cover to Holocaust de-
niers.”
Got that? The son of Holocaust
survivors who has campaigned
more than anyone to ensure that
Holocaust payments to victims ac¬
tually get to victims (rather than to
Jewish institutions supportive of
the “work” of the likes of
Ottolenghi) is basically an enabler
of Holocaust deniers. One can
only assume he has got the dean of
Holocaust studies, the late Raul
Hilberg, to endorse his work fully,
and has also made sure that his ac¬
ceptance of Hilberg’s findings with
regard to the systematic mass exter¬
mination of Jews during the Sec¬
ond World War is well-known, as
part of his enabling project.
Finkelstein’s condemnation of
those who would deny this tragedy
is, of course, well-known too. But,
for Ottolenghi, it would seem that
any critic of Israel can be smeared
in this way. Thus does Ottolenghi
honour the Jewish dead of World
War II. Perhaps he should meditate
on the title of Finkelstein’s book on
the subject: The Holocaust Industry:
Reflections on the Exploitation of
Jewish Suffering.
It comes as no surprise that the
ubiquitous Melanie Phillips is a fan
of Ottolenghi. Not only that, but
both were witnesses for the Report
of the All Parliamentary Inquiry Into
Anti-Semitism (September 2006).
This Inquiry, led by the Zionist
MP (and member of the Henry
Jackson Society) Denis MacShane,
took evidence from a list of ideo¬
logical witnesses that produced ex¬
actly what one would expect from
such a list. According to
Finkelstein: “The report defines an
anti-Semitic incident as any occa¬
sion ‘perceived’ to be anti-Semitic
by the ‘Jewish community.” So
“anti-Semitic” is the media in Brit¬
ain that, as far as I could see, the
entire mainstream press
uncritically covered the report, ac¬
cepting all of its dire warnings re¬
garding a “new anti-Semitism.”
Given that such reports form the
backbone for opinion pieces in
Standpoint and other
neoconservative/Zionist opera¬
tions, it’s important that Bekhor’s
project doesn’t let the truth out.
After all, neoconservatives and Zi¬
onists badly need these kinds of re¬
ports. Plus, critics of such reports
can be denounced as anti-Semites,
not least because there is now no
objective test that need be satisfied
to qualify for the label.
The whole association of anti-Zi¬
onism with anti-Semitism is, of
course, a political manoeuvre used
by Zionists and neoconservatives as
a way of deflecting attention from
serious moral questions and ruin¬
ing opponents where possible. This
should come as no surprise, for, as
we shall see, when it comes to seri¬
ous moral questions our Standpoint
contributors are all at sea. The phi¬
losopher Michael Neumann, being
rather more concerned with moral
philosophy than most, easily sees
through this tactic. He tells us:
Anti-Semitism. . .means ha¬
tred of Jews. But here, imme¬
diately, we come up against
the venerable shell-game of
Jewish identity: “Look! We’re
a religion! No! a race! No! a
cultural entity! Sorry—a reli¬
gion!” When we tire of this
game, we get suckered into
another: “Anti-Zionism is
anti-Semitism!” quickly alter¬
nates with “Don’t confuse Zi¬
onism with Judaism! How
dare you, you anti-
Semite!”. . .Let’s try defining
“anti-Semitism” as broadly as
any supporter of Israel would
ever want: anti-Semitism can
be hatred of the Jewish race,
or culture, or religion, or ha¬
tred of Zionism. Hatred, or
dislike, or opposition, or
slight unfriendliness. But sup-
“The mention of Paul Johnson.. .made me
think of his son Daniel, another kept jour¬
nalist, who is about to launch... a British
equivalent of the Weekly Standard.”
February 2010 / 9
'IN
porters of Israel won’t find this
game as much fun as they ex¬
pect. Inflating the meaning of
“anti-Semitism” to include
anything politically damaging
to Israel is a double-edged
sword. It may be handy for
smiting your enemies, but the
problem is that definitional
inflation, like any inflation,
cheapens the currency. The
more things get to count as
anti-Semitic, the less awful
anti-Semitism is going to
sound. This happens because,
while no one can stop you
from inflating definitions, you
still don’t control the facts. . . .
Through definitional infla¬
tion, some form of anti-
Semitism becomes morally
obligatory. It gets worse if
anti-Zionism is labeled anti-
Semitic, because the settle¬
ments, even if they do not
represent fundamental aspira¬
tions of the Jewish people, are
an entirely plausible extension
of Zionism. To oppose them is
indeed to be anti-Zionist, and
therefore, by the stretched
definition, anti-Semitic. The
more anti-Semitism expands
to include opposition to Is¬
raeli policies, the better it
looks. Given the crimes to be
laid at the feet of Zionism,
there is another simple syllo¬
gism: anti-Zionism is a moral
obligation, so, if anti-Zionism
is anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism
is a moral obligation.
Neumann is a secular Jew. What
is not mentioned by him is that the
vast majority of Jews were either
anti-Zionists or non-Zionists when
Theodore Herzl was promoting
the idea. Are/were they, too, anti-
Semites? Presumably the following
group of native-born inhabitants of
Jerusalem qualify as anti-Semites
for proclaiming the following in
1948 :
We will not allow ourselves,
our wives and our children, to
be led to our deaths, God
forfend, in the name of Zion¬
ist idolatry. It is inconceivable
that the impious, the unbe¬
lievers, the ignorant, and the
irresponsible heretics lead an
entire population of hundreds
of thousands of Jews, like
lambs to the slaughter, God
save us, because of their false
demented ideas, and that an
entire population like an in¬
nocent dove, allow them to
lead it to be killed.
That a present-day Orthodox
Jew like Yakov M. Rabkin can re¬
veal Zionism to be utterly anti¬
thetical to his religion must be
painful for the Standpoint crowd:
all the more so because his vision is
actually closer to a Christian one
than a neoconservative or Zionist
view. Rabkin tells us of pious Jews,
accused by Zionists of passivity:
Many of them must con¬
stantly call upon all their spiri¬
tual resources to ward off the
temptation to nationalism. To
reaffirm their trust in divine
mercy, they strive to live Torah
life, for Jewish tradition con¬
siders that each good deed has
an effect on the entire
world. . . . Each deed, no mat¬
ter how minor, will be
weighed on the balance of di¬
vine justice, for ultimate re¬
demption. “It should not be
thought that the inferiority of
the nation of Israel among the
nations, and its prostration in
exile, can be attributed to ill
fortune.” Rather than seeing
the history of the Jews as part
of the fatalistic turnings of the
wheel of history, tradition af¬
firms that the “fate” of the
Jews depends only upon
heaven’s assessment of their
deeds. . . . The Jews were ex¬
iled from their homeland in
an historical accident; Zion¬
ism thus proposes to redress
what it perceives as an histori¬
cal injustice in historical,
rather than religious
terms. . . . For many pious
Jews, Zionism appears as an
obstacle to redemption of Is¬
rael. Rather than relying on
“prayer and the plea for
mercy,” the Zionist pioneers
resorted to physical labor and
armed struggle.
The Jewish convert Israel Shamir
reminds us:
Zionism became poison with¬
out the Messiah: not in vain
did the Jewish religious scrip¬
tures (“the instructions to the
soldiers”) forbid the gathering
of Jews in the Holy Land be¬
fore the days of the Messiah.
The “instructors” knew what
we have forgotten: such a
gathering, unless by means of
accepting the Messiah, would
be used by the Antichrist and
would poison the world.
So it would seem that those who
oppose Zionism and accept the
idea of expiatory patient suffering
and divine mercy are seen to be in
opposition to the messianic way of
Zionism and/or neoconserva¬
tism — neither of which is too
concerned with “moral issues” be¬
cause, well, we need to get re¬
sults — and through force if neces¬
sary.
Lest the reader think I am as¬
suming too much, I offer you
Melanie Phillips, who is sometimes
portrayed, not without some justi-
10 / CULTURE WARS
fication, as a morally upright
thinker. Here is Ms Phillips on the
question of torture: “Torture is al¬
ways wrong, and corrupts those
who employ it. But the moral
squeamishness of the west is also
the hole in its defences.” It is worth
noting that Melanie Phillips only
recently castigated a fellow panelist
on the BBC’s show The Moral
Maze for saying that torture was
inherently wrong. She called such a
position immoral and endorsed the
use of torture in certain circum¬
stances (her endorsement is not
new). So it seems that the state¬
ment used in the first sentence is
not made in good faith. And we
know that anyway, because in the
next sentence Phillips uses the term
“moral squeamishness.” What on
earth is the term supposed to
mean? If it means anything at all it
seems to mean a dismissal of the
idea of moral absolutes—at least as
they apply to “always wrong”
choices such as torture.
Phillips supports torture, cluster¬
bombing, and nuclear strikes and,
in practice, rejects traditional just
war theory. Apparently, such posi¬
tions are in line with what she sees
as neoconservatism. Truly her
messianism has, as with all false
messiahs, led her into
antinomianism. I would suggest to
this confused woman that there is a
way out of all this, but fear that I
might be accused of “religious”
anti-Semitism.
With this background in mind, I
looked at the second issue of
Standpoint. Not content with pub¬
lishing a series of nakedly
neoconservative articles, the maga¬
zine took it upon itself to publish a
person who not only excuses tor¬
ture but was reportedly himself
closely involved in the practice (see
below). Since that individual is
known as a neoconservative we will
turn now to examine this ideology
and its oft-ignored theological
roots.
NEOCONSERVATISM
What’s a neoconservative? As
with many political terms, neither
its sense nor reference is crystal
clear. Let’s hear what various
knowledgeable people have said
from geopolitical and
eschatological perspectives. Here is
a conversation between George H.
Bush Senior and his incurious
president son:
George W. Bush: “What’s a
neocon?” George H. W. Bush:
“Do you want names or a de¬
scription?” “Description.”
“Well,” said the former presi¬
dent of the United States, “I’ll
give it to you in one word: Is¬
rael.”
American academics John J.
Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt
describe neo-conservatism less
tersely as
a political ideology with dis¬
tinct views on both domestic
and foreign policy. . . . Most
neo-conservatives extol the
virtues of American hege¬
mony—and sometimes even
the idea of American em¬
pire—and they believe US
power should be used to en¬
courage the spread of democ¬
racy and discourage potential
rivals from even trying to
compete with the United
States. . . . They tend to be
skeptical of international in¬
stitutions (especially the UN,
which they regard as both
anti-Israel and as a constraint
on America’s freedom of ac¬
tion) and wary of many allies
(especially the Europeans
whom they see as idealistic
pacifists free-riding on the Pax
Americana ). .. .neoconservatives
believe that military force is
an extremely useful tool for
shaping the world in ways that
will benefit America. . .
Neoconservatism, in short, is
an especially hawkish ideol¬
ogy. . . . Virtually all
neoconservatives are strongly
committed to Israel, a point
they emphasize openly and
unapologetically. According to
Max Boot, a leading
neoconservative pundit, sup¬
porting Israel is “a key tenet of
neoconservatism,” a position
he attributes to “shared liberal
democratic values.”. . . In par¬
ticular, writes [Benjamin]
Ginsberg, they embraced
Ronald Reagan’s “hard-line
anti-communism” because
they saw it as a “political
movement that would guaran¬
tee Israel’s security.”. . .Given
their hawkish orientation, it is
not surprising that the neo¬
conservatives tend to ally with
the right-wing elements in Is¬
rael itself.
According to Professor Claes
Ryn of the Catholic University of
America, evident in this “ideology”
or ideological pattern is a large ele¬
ment of neo-jacobinism. As well as
openly endorsing the need for big
government (for example, William
Kristol and David Brooks),
neoconservatives talk of the need
for a “a neo-Reaganite foreign
policy of national strength and
moral assertiveness abroad.”
Neoconservative Robert Kagan’s
words about his fellow Americans
are also noted by Ryn: “As good
February 2010 / 11
"7
Melanie Phillips
children of the Enlightenment,
Americans believe in human per¬
fectibility. But Americans. . .also
believe. . .that global security and
the liberal order depend on the
United States—that ‘indispensable
nation’—wielding its power.”
Ryn says of this ideology, “The
neo-Jacobin vision for how to re¬
deem humanity may be less obvi¬
ously utopian than that of commu¬
nism. It may strike some as admi¬
rably idealistic, as did communism.
But the spirit of the two move¬
ments is similar, and utopian
thinking is utopian thinking, fairly
innocuous perhaps if restricted to
isolated dreamers and theoreticians
but dangerous to the extent that it
inspires action in the real world.”
Ryn, a man who knows his his¬
tory as well as his faith, notes, by
way of contrast, that,
Christianity has always
stressed the imperfect, sinful
nature of man and warned
against placing too much faith
in man-made politi¬
cal institutions and
measures. St. August¬
ine (354-430) is only
one of the earliest
and least sanguine of
many Christian
thinkers over the
centuries who would
have rejected out of
hand the idea that
mankind is destined
for great progress and
political perfection,
to say nothing about
the possibility of sal¬
vation through poli¬
tics. Although Chris¬
tianity has stressed
that rulers must serve
the common good
and behave in a hu¬
mane manner, it has
been reluctant to en¬
dorse any particular form of
government as suited to all
peoples and all historical cir¬
cumstances.
In trying to piece together the
different strands of
neoconservative ideology it is use¬
ful to listen to what the proudly
Jewish thinker Benjamin Ginsberg
has written. In discussing
neoconservatives and their relation
to “paleoconservatives” (traditional
conservatives like Claes Ryn, Pat
Buchanan, Paul Gottfried and
Thomas Fleming). Ginsberg ob¬
serves:
Few neoconservatives attach
much moral significance to
the issues of abortion or
school prayer and pragmati¬
cally advocate doing little to
concretely advance these
causes in order to avoid alien¬
ating middle-class suburban
voters. Indeed, many neocons
are fond ofsaying privately that
social issues are merely useful
bait with which to attract the
votes of the riffraff [my empha¬
sis], By helpfully reminding
conservative Protestants and
Catholics of the true character
and aims of the Jews (as re¬
vealed by the portions of their
liturgy they have chosen to
overlook in recent years),
paleoconservatives can disrupt
the improbable alliance be¬
tween conservative Christians
and Jews and bring the former
over to their camp. . . . Many
neocons were at one time lib¬
eral Democrats or, in some
cases, even Socialists or Marx¬
ists. One major factor that
drew them to the right was
their attachment to Israel. . .
In the Reaganite right’s hard¬
line anticommunism, com¬
mitment to American military
strength, and willingness to
intervene politically and mili¬
tarily in the affairs of other na¬
tions to promote democratic
values (and American inter¬
ests), neocons found a politi¬
cal movement that would
guarantee Israel’s security.
Ginsberg, however, seems to
think that for paleoconservatives to
point out what he has done is
somehow anti-Semitic, telling us
that “This is why, after a long hia¬
tus, anti-Semitism has once again
become a significant phenomenon
on the political right. The most
noteworthy expression was, of
course, Pat Buchanan’s charge that
the Persian Gulf War was pro¬
moted by the Israeli Defense min¬
istry and its ‘amen corner’ in the
United States. ...”
If Ginsberg is right, then it
would seem that social issues such
as abortion, which many people
have regarded as extremely impor¬
tant, take a back seat for the
neocons to foreign policy consider-
12 / CULTURE WARS
ations, especially US support for
Israel. And, of course, this ideo¬
logical pattern is in many ways the
antithesis of the notion of the So¬
cial Kingship of Christ that those
who profess to be followers of
Christ are duty-bound to promote.
In fact, despite the many Chris¬
tians who see themselves as
neocons or fellow-travelers with
neocons, this ideology seems some¬
thing very far from Christian.
Melanie Phillips certainly thinks
so, telling an audience of her fel-
low-Jews at the Limmud confer¬
ence:
If the neocons aren’t really
conservative, they differ even
more strikingly from their
Christian co-counter revolu¬
tionaries. For the neocon view
of the world is a demonstrably
Jewish view. Christians see
man as a fallen being, inher¬
ently sinful. The neocons have
the Jewish view that mankind
has a capacity for good or ill.
Christians believe humanity is
redeemed through Christ on
the cross; the neo-con ap¬
proach is founded on the be¬
lief that individuals have to re¬
deem themselves. Christians
believe in transforming fallen
humanity through a series of
mystical beliefs and events.
Neocons believe in taking the
world as it is, but encouraging
the good and discouraging the
bad. It is this impulse to
tikkun olam or repair of the
world, this belief that the
world must not be allowed to
fester but can be persuaded to
change for the better, that
gives the neocons the opti¬
mism that so distresses old-
style paleoconservatives when
the principles are applied to
world affairs. For it was the
neocon belief that good can
prevail over evil, that pre¬
emptive strikes against rogue
states are justified and that re¬
gime change into democracy
can transform a terrorist state
into a model world citizen,
that lay behind the wars
against Afghanistan and Iraq.
Phillips makes quite explicit the
idea that neocons have a “Jewish
view of mankind.” She is to be
commended for bringing into dis¬
cussion the theological dimension
of political movements. It would
be nice, however, if she allowed
others to bring in that dimension
too. 7 he BBC filmmaker Adam
Curtis made a series of films en¬
titled The Power of Nightmares
about neoconservatives and radical
Islam. Not only was Israel not
mentioned, but nor (if I remember
rightly) were the words Jew, Jewish
or Judaism. I regarded this as a
striking omission. Still, at least no
one could accuse Mr Curtis of
anti-Semitism and perhaps he too
thought this. Melanie Phillips,
however, thought differently, writ¬
ing of Curtis in her blog: “You ob¬
viously can’t overestimate the cre¬
ative imagination of a pukka con¬
spiracy theorist. It’s not enough
willfully to invent a conspiracy by
sinister neocons, aka Jews, in
Washington to subvert American
foreign policy.”
Apparently, only the likes of
Melanie are allowed to delve into
these esoteric areas. The rest of us
will have to make do with whatever
exoteric message is given us, and
stop imagining things that just
aren’t true. Perhaps it’s easier to live
with double standards if one
adopts the neoconservative view
which, according to Phillips, effec¬
tively denies the reality of Original
Sin, or at best admits its existence
but de-emphasizes it in the name
of the belief that “the world. . .can
be persuaded to change for the bet¬
ter,” a belief to be contrasted with a
robust belief in Original Sin. We
can all share Phillips’ unexception¬
able wish to “encourage the good
and discourage the bad” without
being quite so sanguine about the
results.
Phillips does not, of course, be¬
lieve in the redemptive power of
the crucified and resurrected
Christ. Human suffering as it re¬
lates to Christ’s sacrifice is, for her,
meaningless. But Phillips the
neoconservative goes further than
most. Not only does she reject out¬
right the New Covenant which
forms the New Israel that is (so
Catholics believe) the Catholic
Church, but she thinks that any¬
one who believes that the New
Covenant has superseded the Sinai
Covenant is necessarily anti-
Semitic (her article on the matter is
Phillips supports torture, cluster-bombing
and nuclear strikes and, in practice, rejects
traditional just war theory.
February 2010 / 13
/_
X"
entitled “Christians who hate the
Jews”). Assuming that Ms. Phillips
knows the history of this view (an
incautious assumption) she is con¬
demning as anti-Semitic Christ
Himself, St Peter, St Paul, all of the
Church Fathers, all of the Popes,
all Saints, and all orthodox Catho¬
lics. Not only that but, as Jewish
convert Israel Shamir points out,
Her insufficient grasp of ideas
calls it “replacement theology
invented by a revisionist Pales¬
tinian theologian.”. . . A
genuine article is “replaced”
with a substitute, while an
outdated idea is “superseded”
by a newer one. It was indeed
invented by a “revisionist Pal¬
estinian theologian,” but his
name was not Canon Ateek,
as she claims, but Prophet
Isaiah. He spoke of the New
Covenant that will supersede
the Old one. Afterwards, this
idea became the cornerstone
of Christianity, as the New
Covenant between God and
the Church (Israel of spirit)
superseded the Old Covenant
between God and Israel of
flesh. Ignorant Jews present it
as an act of “hatred of Jews.”
But it was just the opposite:
the act of eradicating hatred
between Jews and non-Jews.
Had Phillips listened to the man
who is now pope she would have
learned that “The Torah of the
Messiah is the Messiah, Jesus,
himself. . .To imitate him, to fol¬
low him in discipleship, is there¬
fore to keep the Torah, which has
been fulfilled once and for all. Thus
the Sinai covenant is superseded .”
Rejection of the New Covenant
is rejection of Christ. If to follow
Christ and His Church is necessar¬
ily anti-Semitic and if neocon¬
servatism is a Jewish movement
(even if rejected by most Jews) then
it should come as no surprise that
critics of neoconservatism, espe¬
cially if they are Christian, are ac¬
cused of anti-Semitism. In being
thus slandered, they are in good
company.
Thus far I have quoted various
people’s views on what the word
neoconservatism denotes. In so do¬
ing I have aimed to give an impres¬
sion of some common themes
which roughly identify the aims of
any movement that might be called
neoconservative. I started with
geopolitical concerns and moved
on to theological assumptions.
With regard to the latter, we have
those like Melanie Phillips openly
identifying neoconservatism as a
Jewish (or Jewish-inspired) move¬
ment. Promoting the central goals
of such a movement/ideology, as
she describes it, is surely incompat¬
ible with living a good Christian
life. For a start, the doctrine of
Original Sin can never be
downplayed—it is absolutely cen¬
tral to the Christian life and to any
understanding of the Gospels, Sac¬
raments etc. To minimize or ignore
this doctrine is to invite upon one¬
self some of the greatest disasters of
history.
Standard Christian teaching
holds that the Incarnation came
about because of Original Sin. And
through the Incarnation the God-
Man Christ, the Second Adam,
chose through love to embrace suf¬
fering on the Cross in order to
bring about an atoning sacrifice of¬
fered to all mankind. If a Christian
believes in the doctrine of Original
Sin, he also believes in the need for
Redemption through a Second
Adam, the perfect Son of God.
Can’t one deny or downplay
Original Sin, brush it away, talk of
some vague need for ‘healing’? The
tiqqun olam to which Phillips refers
was popularized through the
Lurianic Caballah. The Jewish his¬
torian Gerschom Scholem ex¬
plains:
The realm of qelippah , where
the sparks are held in bond¬
age, is a distinctly political
realm “represented on the ter¬
restrial and historical plane by
tyranny and oppression”. The
purpose of man’s existence on
earth became tiqqun or heal¬
ing, restoring the lights in
their original place in the uni¬
verse before the breaking of
the vessels had released the
forces of sin and evil. “The
messianic king, far from
bringing about the tiqqun , is
himself brought about by it:
he appears after the tiqqmi has
been achieved. The cosmic re¬
demption of the raising of the
sparks merges with the na¬
tional redemption of Israel,
and the symbol of the “in¬
gathering of the exiles” com¬
prises both.
This form of Gnosticism has
little to do with Original Sin but
everything to do with a worldly
messianism, the very kind of
messianism that caused the earth-
shattering ruptures at the time of
Christ. And it is this toxic
messianism that many neocons
seem to be obsessed by. If the
neoconservative movement—or
loose group of convergent inter¬
ests—cannot excommunicate
someone like Michael Ledeen (in
fact he is cherished) then I think
we can safely say that the move¬
ment is a form of revolutionary
messianism. Ledeen tells us:
Creative destruction is our
middle name, both within our
14 / CULTURE WARS
own society and abroad. We
tear down the old order every
day, from business to science,
literature, art, architecture,
and cinema to politics and the
law. Our enemies have always
hated this whirlwind of energy
and creativity, which menaces
their traditions (whatever they
may be) and shames them for
their inability to keep pace.
Seeing America undo tradi¬
tional societies, they fear us,
for they do not wish to be un¬
done. They cannot feel secure
so long as we are there, for our
very existence—our existence,
not our politics—threatens
their legitimacy. They must
attack us in order to survive,
just as we must destroy them
to advance our historic mis¬
sion.
The program of those who
would choose Barabbas over Christ
has seldom been put so succinctly.
No surprise, then, that this same
man, a leading neoconservative
thinker, tells us, in writing, approv¬
ingly, of Machiavelli, that: “There
are several circumstances in which
good leaders are likely to have to
enter into evil: whenever the very
existence of the nation is threat¬
ened; when the state is first created
or revolutionary change is to be ac¬
complished. ...” To such a man,
and his fellow-travellers as de¬
scribed below, these words of Eliza¬
beth Anscombe were addressed:
But if someone really thinks,
in advance, that it is open to
question whether such an ac¬
tion as procuring the judicial
execution of the innocent
should be quite excluded from
consideration—I do not want
to argue with him; he shows a
corrupt mind.
SQUARING THE CIRCLE
So apparently neoconservatism is
a Jewish-inspired movement advo¬
cating messianism, revolution, and
a downgrading of the importance
of “social” moral issues and, of
course, war, war, war. While there
is more to neoconservatism than
support for Likudnik Israeli poli¬
cies, a general adherence to these
seems to be a necessary condition
for being regarded as a “conserva¬
tive” by this group. It should come
as no surprise then that an aversion
to Christ is present among a good
number of adherents of this ideol¬
ogy, even if it isn’t politic to admit
to it. How, then, do people square
the circle between Christ and anti-
Christ.
In the light of these reflections,
having read the July issue of Stand¬
point on the neo-conservative
mindset, I fired off a letter to
Daniel Johnson, the Catholic edi¬
tor of the magazine. I asked him
why the magazine welcomed the
thoughts of certain influential US
figures such as Paul Wolfowitz, a
man who has not only advocated
torture, but micro-managed it, as
Major Michael Thomspon in¬
formed a US court in stipulated
testimony. In 1978 Wolfowitz was
investigated for providing a classi¬
fied document to the Israeli gov¬
ernment through an intermediary,
and in 1992, as Undersecretary of
Defense, promoted the export to
Israel of advanced AIM-9M air-to-
air missiles, despite knowledge that
a previous version had been
handed on to the Chinese by Israel.
What kind of ideas will flow
from a character formed by such
actions? No surprise that
Wolfowitz promotes Robert
Kagan, a co-signatory of the fa¬
mous letter to the President on
September 20, 2001 urging to re¬
move Saddam Hussein from
power, “even if evidence does not
link Iraq directly to the attack. . . .”
No surprise that in typically
neoconservative fashion Kagan’s
book essentially argues that due to
remote and or/fabricated (and eas¬
ily resolved) dangerous geopolitical
possibilities, the US must follow
costly and dangerous policies in
the present.
Having noted two of the more
openly extreme neoconservatives in
the review pages (as reviewer and
book author) I turned to Melanie
Phillips’ feature article which,
while rightly drawing attention to
a possible fraud [the al-Dura case
involving the alleged faking of TV
footage regarding the killing of Pal¬
estinian youth by Israeli forces] ne¬
glects to mention the numerous
and well-documented cases of
child-killing carried out by IDF
soldiers over the years. Whether
such killings are directly inten¬
tional or barely considered side-ef¬
fects of rash and needless actions,
they are absolutely wrong. That so
many have been documented, in¬
cluding by Israeli human rights
groups, surely deserved a mention.
Back to the review pages, I noted
David Pryce-Jones talking about
Nazis, whose crimes he takes so se¬
riously he has equated them with
Hezbollah’s but not with IDF’s
“proportionate” dropping of 1.2
million cluster bomblets in south
Lebanon, an issue that has both¬
ered neither Pryce-Jones nor col¬
umnist Douglas Murray. Douglas
Murray is a young neoconservative
who takes all of the usual morally
degenerate positions. While calling
February 2010 / 15
himself a “conservative” he tells us
that he is “pro-abortion, pro-gay
rights” and spends much time
criticising Islamic groups (some¬
times fairly) while utterly ignoring
anything Israel might do.
With the exception of Aidan
Nichols’ fine piece, extolling a
truly Christian solution to social
problems, Standpoint has shown us
that it stands, in many ways, in op¬
position to what Nichols is envis¬
aging.
Only in passing did 1 note Nick
Cohen, a follower of Christopher
Hitchens who has has travelled the
same very short journey that
Hitchens has. Cohen hates religion
and is a keen abortion advocate.
He is also capable of such brilliant
arguments in favour of military in¬
tervention in sovereign nations in
contravention of international law
as: “If you say it is illegal to over¬
throw a genocidal tyrant. . .then
you have to say genocide is legal”.
Enough said.
Finally, I did not mention an ex¬
traordinary article in the July issue
of Standpoint entitled “Barack
Obama, Isolationist” by James
Kirchik of The New Republic. Aside
from the absurd premise (Obama
is affiliated with The Council of
Foreign Relations) the author
clearly thinks that “isolationism” is
a terrible, terrible thing, especially
when there are messianic wars to
be fought. That it is this (and not,
say, his support for infanticide,
prostration before AIPAC etc.)
which is the one thing Kirchik
(and Standpoint ) choose to criticise
him on (not, say, his support for
infanticide, prostration before
AIPAC etc.) again tells us all we
need to know about the worldview
and priorities of Standpoint.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
My letter to the editor provoked
no reply nor was it published (in
common, no doubt, with many
others). After a little pestering I
eventually received an e-mail from
the editor Daniel Johnson. He in¬
formed me that the letter was not
published because it was too long
(doesn’t Standpoint employ
copyeditors?) and reassured me
that he saw our disagreement was
political rather than moral.
Along with “moral
squeamishness,” the idea that tor¬
ture is somehow a merely “politi¬
cal” issue suggests a moral confu¬
sion that is depressing coming
from a Catholic. Johnson did try to
point to future “Christian” articles
but then proceeded to name a se¬
ries of largely Christian-lite writers
who undermine rather than bolster
Christianity. This was in response
to my praise of the one excellent
article by Aidan Nichols in the July
issue, extolling a truly Christian so¬
lution to social problems.
The following issue of Stand¬
point published another column by
Julie Burchill, a woman who hates
the Catholic Church and Islam
and boasts of having had five abor¬
tions. Other than that, she is fa¬
mous for washing, at tedious
length, her (very dirty) linen in
public and producing lesbian
“chick lit.” What qualifies her to
write for Standpoint ? Well, she is
utterly in love with Israel and in
her column she literally wraps her¬
self in the Israeli flag. Such are the
moral standards of this “conserva¬
tive” magazine.
Still, at least no Wolfowitz in this
issue. No Wolfowitz; instead John
Bolton, the neoconservative who
ludicrously denies he is a
neoconservative (despite not differ¬
ing in policy views one iota from
self-described neo-conservatives).
He uses his column to object to the
fact that some people think he is a
war criminal. Bolton, who has be¬
come something of a regular on
UK TV, is a notorious Israel-firster
and hard-line hawk who did every¬
thing he could to facilitate the Iraq
war and block any possible cease¬
fire in the Israel-Lebanon conflict.
Furthermore, as Tom Barry in¬
forms us, “According to news re¬
ports, including the highly re¬
spected Jewish magazine Forward ,
Bolton took part in unauthorized
meetings with Israeli officials, in¬
cluding Israeli intelligence agents.
He met with officials of the
Mossad intelligence agency with¬
out first seeking ‘country clearance’
from the State Department’s Bu¬
reau of Near Eastern Affairs.” In its
May 6, 2005 article on Bolton’s
practice of manipulating intelli¬
gence and violating government
protocol, Forward also noted that
Bolton is “known as a strong sup¬
porter of Israel’s position that
Tehran is coming alarmingly close
to being able to weaponize its
nuclear material.” Not surpris¬
ingly, when he was the US ambas¬
sador to the UN he was called
“Israel’s secret weapon” by his Is¬
raeli counterpart.
To top it all, this issue contained
a prominent piece by Rabbi Sidney
Brichto on—you guessed it—anti-
Semitism and that insidious form
of it, anti-Zionism (he refers to the
absurd Parliamentary Report on
Anti-Semitism noted above). As
well as inflicting on unwary readers
a completely false impression of Is¬
raeli history (see Maoz) and the
16 / CULTURE WARS
1967 war, this Rabbi has the chutz¬
pah to tell us that nowadays “His¬
tory is dismissed as irrelevant.”
Certainly irrelevant is Rabbi
Brichto’s statement that: “Zion¬
ism—and its creation, Israel—gave
that prejudice the excuse to breathe
again. Deep down in the European
consciousness, there lingers a con¬
viction that the world would be
better without the Jews. But as
anti-Semitism is now an unfash¬
ionable tool for achieving this goal,
the way to do it is by destroying
the ‘Zionist entity.’”
Such extraordinary statements
contrast with the statement of the
pre-eminent Zionist Walter Lac¬
quer who informs us, rightly or
wrongly, that “anti-Semitism in
Europe is predominantly Muslim
in character.” Brichto’s statement
regarding the conviction held
“deep-down” in European con¬
sciousness, together with his use of
the now capacious term anti-
Semitism is an appalling and irre¬
sponsible piece of armchair socio¬
cultural psychology that manages
to be both tragic and deranged.
This kind of paranoid mindset (his
statement has yet to be condemned
by Melanie Phillips or Douglas
Murray, both of whom accuse
Muslims of paranoia and scare-
mongering) is reminiscent of the
distinguished Jewish playwright
David Mamet’s comment upon
seeing a bumper sticker reading
Israel Out of the Settlements” (S’s
transformed to dollar signs). The
playwright said that such a slogan
could best be translated as “Hook¬
nosed Jews Die.”
This paranoia is not merely a
propaganda tactic, but is in at least
some cases, a genuinely distorted
view of the world and, as such, a
kind of sickness. One does not
help the sick by encouraging them
to indulge in pathological behav¬
ior. It isn’t moral, and it certainly
isn’t Christian.
THE CURE
The cure to these problems, in
the Christian understanding, is, of
course, to replace messianism with
a recognition of the true Messiah.
At the very least, the beginning of
the cure is to reject the antinomian
idolatry that the contributors to
Standpoint indulge in. I do not
know how much influence the edi¬
tor has over the magazine. To co¬
operate formally or materially (in a
way that cannot be morally justi¬
fied) with the morally bankrupt
pronouncements of the neocons
can never be acceptable. Mr
Johnson must either stand up to
his funders and remove such ob¬
stacles to his faith or leave this sor¬
did venture. As things stand,
Johnson is allowing Zionists to
keep Jews from the Way, the Truth,
and the Light, and the neocons to
continue in their overturning of
people’s appreciation of the natural
moral law. The one thing that both
groups cannot bear is the Cross.
Daniel Johnson, along with all of
us, need to embrace it again, and
in doing so lead others to do the
same.
ANTHONY S. MCCARTHY
Notes available upon request.
Contact author at
asdmccarthy@hotmail.com
LETTERS, CONT’D FROM P. 5
Michael McClain. That’s why Is¬
rael owes his readers an explana¬
tion, and preferably a thorough
one (like Ken Freeland’s explana¬
tion) as had been requested by the
editor for a future edition.
In is account of the 2008
Trialogos Conference in Tallinn,
Estonia, the editor quotes Israel
Shamir as saying or giving the im¬
pression that he thinks that Esto¬
nian Russians are in the same situa¬
tion today as Palestinians are in
present-day Israel. That is his opin¬
ion. The situation is actually the
reverse. The situation which
Shamir is working to bring about
in the Holy Land now is compa¬
rable to the situation in Estonia.
The Estonians were not occupiers
of a state belonging to the Rus¬
sians. Shamir should be happy
about the present state of justice by
the very fact that he works for a
free state of Palestine which he
considers occupied.
The Russians in Estonia are only
required to know the Estonian lan¬
guage, as Estonians were required
to know Russian under the Russian
occupation. I know for a fact that
the Estonian government is not
strictly requiring this knowledge
before giving citizenship and pass¬
ports to Russian Estonians, as
many of our friends and acquain¬
tances (Russian and Estonia) have
received full justice in this situa¬
tion.
Monk Serafim
Telemark, Norway
February 2010 / 17
The Weber Thesis:
Capitalism and
its Myths of Origin
by E. Michael Jones
“a thing of immortal make, not human, lion-fronted and snake behind, a
goat in the middle and snorting out the breath of the terrible flame of
bright fire.”
Homer on the Chimera, The Iliad
The origin is what really needs explanation.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
No area of contemporary life, with the possible ex¬
ception of sexuality, is as surrounded by myth as eco¬
nomics. When it comes to Capitalism, the great
mythmaker of our day is Michael Novak. After begin¬
ning his career as a Christian socialist and promoter of
sexual liberation, Novak joined the staff of the Ameri¬
can Enterprise Institute in 1978, just as the
neoconservative movement was gaining steam and
moving from Trotskyite to Reaganite politics.
In 1982 Novak wrote The Spirit of Democratic Capi¬
talism, which attempted to come up with a theological
justification for Catholics wishing to abandon the
Democratic Party and support the Reagan
Administration’s crusade against Communism. Sup¬
porting the Reagan agenda had other sequelae less con¬
genial to the Catholic mind, like the assault on unions
that began with the firing of the air traffic controllers,
but those and other negative consequences of the
Reagan era, like opening up the American auto mar¬
ket to the Japanese in exchange for the purchase of
Treasury bills, did not seem apparent at the time.
One of the main reasons they did not seem apparent
at the time was Michael Novak. Professor Stephen M.
Bainbridge referred to Novak as “the foremost Chris-
E. Michael Jones is the editor of Culture Wars magazine. Ballet Parking
is his most recent book. It can be ordered from Fidelity Press. See ad on
back cover.
tian thinker on the economy,” and to The Spirit of
Democratic Capitalism as “undoubtedly his magnum
opus.” The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism , Bainbridge
continues, “appeared in a samizdat. . . edition in Po¬
land during the 1980s and had an obvious impact on
the Solidarity movement. Its reasoned defense of
democratic capitalism as being grounded in the hu¬
mane values of the Judeo-Christian tradition also
helped give a moral center to the neoconservative
movement”—or at least the appearance of a moral
center.
Less sanguine in their evaluation of the effect that
Novak’s magnum opus had on discourse about eco¬
nomics, especially among Catholics, are the editors of
the I H S Press edition of Amintore Fanfani’s classic
Catholicism, Protestantism and Capitalism. If Fanfani’s
contention that “there is an unbridgeable gulf between
the Catholic and the capitalistic conception of life”
falls on deaf ears these days, especially among Catho¬
lics, the main reason for that deafness is Michael
Novak, “the man,” according to the editors, “who has
come to represent all that Catholic thought has to say
on economic subjects.” If there is one man respon¬
sible for ignorance of and hostility toward Catholic so¬
cial teaching, especially among Catholics, it is Michael
Novak. If most Catholics think that Quadragesimo
Anno is a hunchback who lives in the bell tower of
Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, the main reason for
that misunderstanding is Michael Novak.
How is it then that Catholic thinkers can come to
such contradictory conclusions about Novak’s mag¬
num opus, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism ? Well,
it may be because the book itself is based on a contra-
18 / CULTURE WARS
Max Weber
diction.
At the heart of Novak’s book we find a mythologi¬
cal creature, not unlike Homer’s chimera, known as
“democratic capitalism.” This creature is an incoher¬
ent composite which purportedly has the powers at¬
tributable to the animals out of which it was made,
powers hitherto unknown in the realm of economic
thought. According to Novak’s economic theory:
“political democracy is compatible in practice only
with a market economy”
(In reality democracy and capi- _
talism, like liberty and equality of
French Revolution fame, are anti¬
thetical. Capitalism always con¬
centrates wealth—and, therefore,
power—into fewer and fewer
hands. Has Michael Novak ever
heard of China?)
“Modern democracy and mod¬
ern capitalism proceed from identical historical im¬
pulses”
(As in Elizabethan England? Revolutionary France?
Florence under Savonarola? Each of these instances
had either capitalism or democracy but not both.
Plato reminds us that democracy follows plutocracy as
its antithesis when the younger generation realizes that
their elders had sold their birthright. The thesis of
Kevin Phillips book Wealth and Democracy is that
American history is a contest between wealth and de¬
mocracy. In other words, the two are antithetical not
complementary.)
“the natural logic of capitalism leads to democracy”
(This statement is true in a certain sense. As Plato
pointed out in The Republic, aristocracy leads to plu¬
tocracy, which leads to revolutionary democracy,
which leads to tyranny.)
“Except in Adam Smith’s book, the concept of de¬
velopment did not exist. In 1800, a judgment like that
of Ecclesiastes, ‘There is nothing new under the sun,’
blanketed a mostly torpid world. In most regions, eco¬
nomic enterprises stagnated.”
(All of the economic advances upon which modern
Capitalism is based—including double entry book¬
keeping, bills of exchange, and fractional reserve bank¬
ing—were all in place in the city-states of northern
Italy by the beginning of the 15 th century, which is to
say 400 years before Novak says they appeared in En¬
gland.)
“The invention of the market economy in Great
Britain and the United States more profoundly revolu¬
tionized the world between 1800 and the present than
any other single force. After five millennia of blunder¬
ing human beings finally found out how wealth may
be produced in a sustained systematic way.”
(The market economy was not invented in either
Great Britain or the United States. During the last two
decades of the 20 th century and the first decade of the
21 s ' century, Capitalism was responsible for the de-
“Capitalism was the social counterpart
of Calvinist theology.”
struction ol billions of dollars of wealth in American
through thinly veiled looting schemes like leveraged
buy-outs. During the last decade of the 20 th century,
Russia was looted in an even more rapacious fashion
under the oversight of Jeffrey Sachs and Lawrence
Summers, then president of Harvard University. The
February 2010 / 19
z.
V
Michael Novak
looting of Russia was so obscene that Harvard ended
up being sued by the United States government and
paying the biggest fine in its history, which led to the
resignation of Summers as Harvard’s president. Sum¬
mers is now director of the National Economic Coun¬
cil for the Obama administration.)
“The churches did not understand the new econom¬
ics. . . . Latin Culture did not understand Economics.”
(Does Mr. Novak consider Italy as part of “Latin
Culture”? Is the Roman Catholic Church part of
“Latin Culture.” Is the headquarters of the Roman
Catholic Church in Rome? Is Rome in Italy? In order
to maintain his thesis—England created modern eco¬
nomics, the Church is ignorant of economic prin¬
ciple—Novak has to claim that Italy was an economic
backwater, when in fact the exact opposite was true.
Italy was the financial center of Europe for centuries.
During the high middle ages, when Italy was establish¬
ing banking houses in Bruges, dominating commerce
in Europe, and coming up with the financial advances
that would revolutionize commerce, England’s main
export was raw wool.)
“The Catholic Church . . . has tended, particularly
because of the Vatican’s location within Italy ... to
rest uncomfortably in the past with only a tenuous
connection to liberal societies. In a word, it has stood
outside of and has, I think, misread the liberal demo¬
cratic capitalist revolution.”
(Novak’s framing of the issue is so tendentious that
it needs to be unpacked a bit before it can be refuted.
Does Novak consider Florence under
Savonarola a “liberal society.” Savonarola
certainly promoted democracy, but he
opposed plutocracy, which is another
word for Capitalism, as manifested at the
time by the Medici banking interests.
Faced with an unprecedented expansion
of commerce in Italy during the 13 th ,
14 th , and 15 th centuries, the Church was
deeply and intimately involved in sorting
out which economic developments were
beneficial to society and which were
not.)
“North and South America were
founded upon two radically different
ideas of political economy. The one at¬
tempted to recreate the political-eco¬
nomic structure of feudal and mercantil¬
ist Spain. The other attempted to establish a novus
ordo secidoritm, a new order, around ideas never before
realized in human history.”
(North and South America were founded under ex¬
actly the same system. It was known as Mercantilism.
Novak ignores the fact that that system found accep¬
tance by all of the colonial powers in North
America—England, France, Spain, and Holland.
Novak attempts to draw deep theological conclusions
from the fact that the United States has a larger
economy than individual South American countries,
even though for much of the 20 th century Argentina
was not far behind. The outcome of colonial conquest
in North America was not decided by the triumph of a
superior idea. In terms of economics, all of the colo¬
nial powers had the same idea. The conquest was
brought about by force of arms. Mercantilism was an¬
other name for economic warfare. All of the mercan¬
tilist powers fought wars over the exclusive economic
privileges which went with the right to colonize North
America. In these wars, England defeated both France
and Holland. What theological/economic lesson does
Mr. Novak derive from England’s defeat of Holland, a
country more Calvinistic than England?)
“Latin Americans do not value the same moral
qualities North Americans do.”
(Statements like this may make sense to the
Neoconservatives who were Novak’s employers at the
American Enterprise Institute at the time he wrote The
Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, but they are incom-
20 / CULTURE WARS
prehensible to Catholics, including those who live in
North and South America. Catholicism is the target of
Novak’s book precisely because the Catholic Church is
the main institution which claims that economic
policy should be subordinated to the moral law.)
“Now that the secrets of sustained material progress
have been decoded, the responsibility for reducing
hunger and misery is no longer God’s but ours.”
(Have these secrets reached Detroit?)
No region of the United States is poorer than it was
in 1900.”
(See above.)
Locke on Strawberries
“John Locke once wrote that the inventors of new
economic processes and products—quinine, for ex¬
ample—were greater benefactors of mankind than ear¬
lier givers of charity.. . . It may have been John Locke
(1632-1704) who first articulated a new possibility for
economic organization. Locke observed that a field of,
say, strawberries, highly favored by nature, left to itself
might produce what seemed to be an abundance of
strawberries. Subject to cultivation and care by practi¬
cal intelligence, however, such a field might be made
to produce not simply twice but tenfold as much
strawberries. In short, Locke concluded, nature is far
wealthier in possibility than human beings had drawn
attention to before.”
(Novak’s invocation of the name of John Locke is
the infallible sign that the chimera of “democratic
capitalism” resides in a mythical realm known as Whig
History. One of the heroic figures of Whig history is
John Locke. Since Novak is writing Whig history, he
needs to drag statements about Locke, no matter how
preposterous, into his narrative, and give them a im¬
portance which their banality does not deserve.
Whig history is based on the ability to draw grand
theological conclusions from dubious historical pre¬
mises. We’re talking about things like Locke’s discov¬
ery of the theological significance of strawberries. Or
Novak attributing to Locke statements that were ei¬
ther commonplaces of Catholic thought for centuries,
e.g. Lockes vision of a novel and invigorating sense of
the human vocation.” Or statements that were flat out
wrong, as when he claims that “History was no longer
to be regarded as cyclical.” What man living in Europe
at any time after the birth and crucifixion of Our Lord
and Savior Jesus Christ and familiar with a Bible
which begins with the creation of the world and con¬
cludes with a description of the end of the world be¬
lieved that history was cyclical? Determined to pile
Pelion on Ossa, Novak goes on to claim Locke’s influ¬
ence was so great that it affected our perception of the
way God works on history:
After Locke, reflection on God’s ways with the
world—theodicy—was altered. The way God
works in history was now thought of as progressive,
open, subject to human liberty and diligence. The
vocation of the human being came to seem en¬
nobled. No longer were humans to imagine their lot
as passive, long-suffering,
submissive. They were
called upon to inventive,
prudent, farseeing,
hardworking—in order to
realize by their obedience to
God’s call the building up
and perfecting of Gods
kingdom on earth.
Michael Novak’s sense of
timing was uncanny. In the
realm of popular thought he
both anticipated and facili¬
tated the neoconservative
takeover of American for¬
eign policy. In the realm of serious ideas, however, his
book was uncannily wrong. It was based on an intel¬
lectual foundation which had just collapsed. The Spirit
of Democratic Capitalism attempted to revive the Black
Legend for the benefit of the Reagan administration at
the very moment when the final nail was being ham¬
mered into the coffin of Whig History with the publi¬
cation of Eamonn Duffy’s Stripping of the Altars.
Novak based his appropriation of Whig History on
the writings of H.R. Trevor-Roper, a notorious
If most Catholics think that Quadragesimo
Anno is a hunchback who lives in the bell tower
of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, the main
reason for that misunderstanding is Michael
Novak.
February 2010 / 21
John Locke
Catholic basher whose credentials as a historian took a
significant hit when he staked his reputation as a his¬
torian on the authenticity of Hitler’s diaries. Trevor-
Roper, known among his students as Professor Clever-
Groper claims that the “secret techniques of capitalism
were carried away to other cities,’’ and then wonders
“Why?” [H.R. Trevor-Roper, “Religion, the Reforma¬
tion and Social Change,” in The European Witch-
Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and
Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 21].
Whig history is notorious for taking an historical
fact, in this instance the decline of commerce in the
Mediterranean when compared with the rise of com¬
merce in the Atlantic which followed from the discov¬
ery of the New World, and then loading it down with
theological significance, all of which is to show the su¬
periority of English Protestant culture in the wake of
the Glorious Revolution. Novak further loads the dice
by referring to those nations engaged in the Mediter¬
ranean trade as “strongholds of the Counter-Reforma¬
tion,” making it all but certain that the reader will as¬
cribe any change in economic fortune to their Ca¬
tholicism. Sure enough, Novak uses Trevor-Roper’s
tendentious resurrection of the Black Legend as a stick
with which he proceeds to beat the Church, as when
he writes.
For Trevor-Roper, the decisive fact [in the develop¬
ment of Capitalism] was a new alliance of church
and state, more intolerable with each passing year,
which drove the new class of Catholic businessmen
in some cases out of their church but in many more
cases out of their native cities and homelands. 1 hey
sought out cities no longer under the control of
princes and bishops; they sought self-governing cit¬
ies of a republican character.”
This is because:
The Counter-Reformation state impugned the reli¬
gious value of commerce. It banned or restricted en¬
terprise in the private sector. It licensed certain
entrepeneurs to develop state monopolies; it favored
state mercantilism over private mercantilism.
To begin with, there is no such thing as private mer¬
cantilism. Mercantilism is, by definition, government-
sponsored economic activity. Secondly, when it comes
to an intolerable alliance of Church and State was any
government more repressive than Elizabethan En¬
gland? Is Novak claiming that there was no alliance of
Church and State in England during the 16 th century?
Is he claiming that Elizabeth did not grant state mo¬
nopolies? Is he claiming that Elizabeth did not favor
the pleonasm known as “state mercantilism”? Finally,
where were the “self-governing cities of a republican
character” which Novak praises? Were they in En¬
gland? Was London one of them? No, “self governing
cities of a republican character,” places like Venice,
Milan, Florence, Siena were to be found in Italy,
where they had been in the forefront of economic ad¬
vance for centuries.
In Novak’s attempt to resurrect the Black Legend,
all of history becomes a morality play in which En¬
glish forces triumph over their Catholic opponents be¬
cause of the innate superiority of their ideas, all of
which revolve around the emancipation of economic
life from moral supervision. According to Novak, the
failure is all on the Catholic side, i.e. in “the failure of
Catholic thinking to grasp the creative potential of
democratic capitalism.”
Amintore Fanfani, who was familiar with the claim
that the development of capitalism was more intense
in Protestant than in Catholic countries, was reluctant
to conclude that the rise of England as an economic
22 / CULTURE WARS
v
»
power came about because of the superiority of En¬
glish ideas, specifically the English idea later espoused
as Capitalism. More important from Fanfani’s point of
view was “the displacement of trade from the Mediter¬
ranean to the Atlantic” as well as the disadvantages
which arose from the fact that Italy was “economically
divided into innumerable markets,” while “the na¬
tional state of England is already making giant strides
toward unification, of which it enjoys full benefit at a
time when in Italy there are but a few individuals who
dimly realize the advantages to be derived from agree¬
ments between the various Italian states with a view to
definite economic and political results. The capitalis¬
tic importance of a vast and unified market—which is
far greater than the form of religion—can be seen by
summary of the economic history of France and Ger¬
many.” There is, Fanfani concluded, “no need to seek
for mysterious influences.”
Novak’s thesis rests on a particular explanation of
the origins of Capitalism known as the Weber Thesis.
In 1904 and 1905 the German Sociologist Max We¬
ber wrote t 
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