The Paradoxes of Anti-Semitism
By Dr. Tom Sunic
Jews happen to enjoy a privileged place in the Western world, with their entire past portrayed as a story of suffering at the hands of their non-Jewish enemy. There are tons of well documented books on the psychology of Judaism, which also examine the genesis of the concept of anti-Semitism and its multiple verbal distortions in daily political discourse. The word “anti-Semitism,” unlike words “anticommunism,” or “antifascism,” does not reflect political beliefs or critical views of the Jews. This term is exclusively used as a lexical label to depict a person’s grave mental illness. As a perceived medical or judicial illness, anti-Semitism must never be debated; an anti-Semitic patient must not be a partner in scholarly duels; his sick views must not be the subject of academic inquiry and counter-inquiry. As an element of medical pathology, anti-Semitism must only by treated by doctors, preferably by Jewish psychoanalysts, or legally, by a prosecutor in court.
The word “anti-Semite” will likely be studied one day as a telling example of distorted political discourse, i.e. as a signifier for somebody who advocates the reign of demonology. “Many world-known Jewish authors, haunted by the either real or surreal specter of anti-Semitism, consider it a sickness, which enables them to avoid any form of introspection.” 1 How does one dare critically talk about the predominance of the Jews in America without running the risk of social opprobrium, or, as in Europe, of landing into jail? While it is a common place for the vast number of white Euro- Americans to crack jokes in private about Arabs, Mexicans, Africans, or for that matter deride their fellow Gentile citizens, without looking over their shoulder, a critical comment about the strong influence of Jews in America, even when that comment is founded on empirical facts, is viewed as a grave insult to Jews.2 If a serious European and American scholar or a politician ventures into this forbidden field, his gesture is interpreted as a sign of an agent provocateur, or worse, as a sign of somebody who decided to write his obituary. Such a schizophrenic climate of self-censorship in the West will sooner or later lead to dramatic consequences for both Jews and Gentiles. The lack of healthy dialogue can last for a century or so, but feigned conviviality between Euro-American Gentiles and Jews cannot last forever and remained based on distorted perceptions of the Other and how this Other should behave. Mendacity carries the germ of a civil war. The entire Western history, particularly since World War II, has abundantly proven that distorted self-perceptions, as well as the romanticized perception of the “Other,” if based on negative wishful thinking, lead to war and chaos. Eventually, both Jews and Euro-American Gentiles will be pitted into an ugly clash from which there will be no escape this time.
While many thinkers in the West unabashedly challenge modern myths and sport staggering erudition and courage in their demolition, the most sensitive point of reference of the twentieth century, i.e., the “Jewish question,” is carefully avoided. If the subject of Jews is mentioned in the European or America public forum, then it is usually in a laudatory fashion, which clearly indicates a morbid desire of white elites to curry favor with the Jews. The same individuals will be the first to declare themselves certified anti-Semites when an opportunistic moment becomes official enough for pogroms of Jews. It is the lack of open discussion about the topic of the Jews that confirms how Jews play a crucial role in the Western notion of the political. This is an additional sign of how past times interact with present times. Twentieth century experience with National Socialism serves as a powerful red flag in a political- semantic field that must be carefully trodden upon.
Christian Neurosis
But contrary to classical anti-Semitic arguments, strong Jewish influence in the West is not the product of Jews only; it is the logical result of Gentiles’ own acceptance of the Jewish founding myths that have seeped over centuries into Europe and America in their diverse Christian modalities. The current cultural and political ambiance coupled with strong self-censorship is just the latest secular version of this Judeo-Christian mindset. Hypothetically speaking, if Jews, by some miracle, were to play a marginal role in Europe or America – as they claim they do – then, logically, they would be the subject of a normal critical discussion or derision, just like other ethnic groups, races, or next door neighbors are. Blaming, however, Jews for extraterrestrial powers and their purported conspiracy to subvert Gentile culture borders on delusion and only reflects the absence of dialogue. This behavioral trait is particularly salient among white Christian Euro-Americans. Such delusions only provide legitimacy to Jews in their search for a real or surreal anti-Semitic boogieman around the corner. Without the specter of anti-Semitism, Jews would likely assimilate quickly and hence disappear. Thus, anti-Semitism provides Jews with alibis to project themselves as victims of Gentile prejudice. Consequently, it assigns them a role of posing as the sole educational super-ego for Euro- Americans and by proxy for the entire world. In his book on the social role of Jews, a prominent Jewish-French politician and author, Jacques Attali, writes: “As Russian Jews invented socialism, and as Austrian Jews invented psychoanalysis, American Jews in the forefront, participated in the birth of American capitalism and in the Americanization of the entire world.”3 For a Jewish author, like Attali, such a remark is easier to write down than for a Gentile thinker, who with the same comment, would be shouted down as an “anti-Semite” – or possibly land in jail in Europe.
Each time Euro-American Gentiles write critically about the prominent Jewish role in Western society, they are likely to find marginal readership and will hardly garner credibility in the mainstream media environment. But when a Jewish author talks critically about the same issue, notably the phenomenal Jewish role in social and political affairs in the postmodern West, then his prose will elicit awe and respect. He may be sometimes met with apprehension and irritation by his fellow Jews, such as was the case with Norman Finkelstein, or to some extent Noam Chomsky, but his words will nevertheless find their place in the ears and eyes of a larger audience.
It remains an open secret that Jews played a disproportionate role in the Bolshevik revolution, and more precisely in the early Soviet secret police. It is also a fact that although being a tiny minority in America, Jews play an influential role in the opinion making industry, i.e. the film industry, the media, and higher education. “Jews are simply indispensable for other nations.” 4 There were literally tons of books published in the early and late thirties of the preceding century in America, Germany and France that provide detailed accounts of the role of the Jews in different important professions in America and Europe, and that specifically discussed Jewish numerical overrepresentation in the early Soviet Union and America respectively. The government in National Socialist Germany harnessed the most erudite anti-Semitic heavy weights in order to document every nook and cranny of Judaism in the Soviet Union and America.5 But at the beginning of the 21st century, these books are either banned or derided as unscientific, or simply shrugged off as an anti-Semitic prose. In mainstream political discussions their authors are ignored. Their prose seems to be only savored by individuals who are a priori hostile to Jews, and who usually explain away the entire human drama by reducing it to the alleged Jewish conspiracy.
Therefore, a comment or a book by a Jewish author, who preferably sports a politically correct liberal pedigree, and who tackles this greatest taboo topic of our times, must be accepted with welcome. Such is the book of a liberal Jewish-Russian-American scholar, Yuri Slezkine, whose research does not reveal to someone already knowledgeable about the Jewish question any new insights regarding the Jewish role in America and the ex-Soviet Union. Slezkine notes how Jews played a prominent role in the early Soviet terror machine and in the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, but they did it “because they fought for the state in order to become free of Jewishness.”6 In other words, they happened to be Jews against their own will. They apparently wanted to leave the image of being first and foremost cosmopolitan citizens who wished to improve by means of Bolshevisms the whole humanity. Slezkine also confirms that America was a promised land for the Jews in view of the fact that it “has no state bearing natives.”7 It was to be expected that with the collapse of communism and the decay of the Marxist mystique, the American dream, at the turn of the 21st century, became the best ersatz for disenchanted Jewish Marxists.
Slezkine notes that America became a Jewish substitute utopia because, unlike Europe and Germany, with their strong tribal adherences, “America knew only “vestigial establishment tribalism.”8 . From its inception, America was therefore an ideal country for Jews; it was designed to be a prime laboratory for diverse multicultural and academic experiments — be they of intra-European or extra-European nature. However, this multiracial social engineering was facilitated by the earlier ecumenical and globalistic framework of the early European Christians, notably American Puritans, who had always considered themselves “spiritual Jews.” What Jewish intellectuals could not attain in Europe, or later in the Soviet Union, was at hand in America where “Jewish power, economic status and cultural influence have increased dramatically since 1960.”9
On a different level of analysis, one can notice the absence in America of what the Germans call Kulturvolk, i.e. a rooted cultural and national community (and not just the adherence to the white race), which is the main prerequisite for a sound state-anchored nationalism. The absence of a common cultural identity among white Americans seems to be the fundamental weakness of either real or would-be American nationalists, racialists and conservatives who, while not hiding their hostility to Jews, are unable to muster up common cultural and national energy and shed the Biblical heritage. Harping only on genetic determinism, as many American eugenicists and racialists do, in order to promote some abstract white man American identity is often self-defeating.
One can naturally concur that Euro-Americans are influenced by Jews, but then the question arises as to how did it happen? After all, was not Christianity the offspring of Jewish monotheism? Was Jesus himself not a Jew? The influence of Jews in powerful media positions and the political apparatus, which many Europeans and Americans in private complain about, did not drop from the moon. Jewish social prominence has been the direct result of the white Gentile’s acceptance of Christianity and its early Jewish promoters – an event which was brought to its perfection in America by early Pilgrim Founding Fathers. Be it in Europe or in the USA, Christian religious denominations are just differentiated versions of Jewish monotheism. Therefore, the whole history of faked philo-Semitism, or anti-Semitism in America and in Europe, must be described as a kind of social neurosis.
European and American pro-Jewish or “Jewified” intellectuals often show signs of being more Jewish than Jews themselves. Their excessive love for Jews stems from their subconscious hatred of Jews, a fact that most Jews are perfectly aware of, and which only gives further legitimacy to Jewish social prominence. Indeed, at the beginning of the 21st century there can be no worse insult than qualifying some white politician or an academic as an “anti-Semite.” And often this derogatory noun or adjective does not originate with persons labeled as anti-Semites, but are hurled by Jews or Gentile intellectuals sympathetic to the Jewish cause. Both white Europeans and white Americans, who are resentful of Jews, often forget that the hypothetical disappearance of Jews or their lesser role in public life would not open up a golden era for the while people. Has not the entire history of all European peoples, be it before Christ or after Christ abundantly proven that when Gentiles run out of Jews, then they start hacking each other to pieces – often for trivial reasons.
As the latest version of Christianized and secularized monotheism, Judeo-Americanism represents the most radical departure from the ancient European pre-Christian genius loci, which Europeans have managed to preserve better than Americans. How then to counter strong Jewish influence without lapsing into anti-Semitism?
It is the ontological proximity of Christianity with Judaism, which explains their mutual resentment. Christian anti-Semites in Europe and America often forget, in their endless lamentation about the changing racial structure of America, that Christianity is by definition a universal religion aiming to achieve a pan-racial system of governance. Therefore, American Christians, regardless whether they are hypermoralistic sons and daughters of early Puritans, or more authority prone Catholics, are in no position to found an ethnically and racially all white Gentile society while adhering at the same time to a Christian-inspired dogma of pan-racial universalism. “Anti-Semitism was born from the Christian desire to fulfill Judaism, to “finish it up,” to attribute to it its “real” meaning.”10 The Pilgrim Fathers had exactly this globalistic and ecumenical approach in mind when they arrived in New England. Their liberal secular successors in Europe and America are obligated to resort to the same gospel. i.e., a democratic and human rights credo, as well as ecumenical democracy designed for different peoples world-wide. In the eyes of Christians “just as the Law, with Christ, had come to its end (in both senses of the word) and has become useless, in the same vein each distinction between Israel and other nations has become redundant: there are no more Jews or Greeks (Gal. 3, 28). It is universal Christianity which is verus Israel.”.11
“This process, which emerged with the Pauline reforms had a double consequence. On the one hand it ended up with the persecution of the Jews, who were depicted as the worst enemies of Christianity, on the ground of their genealogical proximity and their refusal to convert, that is, to recognize Christianity as “true Israel.” On the other hand, as Shmuel Trigano noted, while setting itself up as “new Israel,” the West recognized to Jewishness a factual, if not a juridical jurisdiction over itself. And this boils down to saying that the West has become “Israelite” to the extent that it forbade to Jews to remain Israelites. It follows from this that the name “Judeo- Christianity” is a double incarceration; it imprisons the Christian West, which by its own act subordinates itself to a jurisdiction which is not its own, and in order to regain it, puts it in a position to deny this jurisdiction to its legitimate keepers.”12
One could argue that the Christian West and its zenith America, is subconsciously anti-Semitic to the extent that it has always yearned to become Jewish. Therefore, the Christian West, and particularly America, will cease to be obsessed with Jews and anti-Semitism once it leaves this neurosis, once it returns to its own local European beliefs, and “by stopping to be what it is not and by allowing the “Other” to continue what it is.”13 The Judeo-Christian embrace, resulting in a mutual love-hate relationship, has been going on for centuries, and at the beginning of the 21th century it attained its final schizoid peak. This corroborates our thesis that Christianity is a self-defeating “proposition myth” ready to embrace all races and peoples world-wide.
Many Jewish scholars rightly acknowledge deep theological links between the Western civilization and Judaism.14 By contrast, European and especially American traditionalists, however much they may be correct in denouncing Jewish-inspired modern dogmas, such as Freudism, Marxism, and neo-conservatism, fail to go a step further and examine the Judaic origins of Christianity and mutual proximity of these two monotheist religions that make up the foundations of the modern West. When, for instance, a number of historical revisionists critically examine the historical narrative of World War II, they seem to forget the religious Judeo-Christian bonds which have shaped the historical memory of all European peoples. The words by historical revisionists will have, therefore, little echo. No wonder that the level of Jewish outcry against their critical writings will be strong. How can one, as a good Christian, dismiss the self-evidence of Holocaust yet at the same time embrace a self-evident story of a Jew named Jesus Christ, or the immaculate conception of a Jewish Virgin Mary? “Instead of submitting anti-Semitism to the free play of ideas, instead of making it a topic for debate in which all can join, Jews and their liberal supporters have managed to organize an inquisition in which all acts, writings and even thoughts critical of Jewry are treated as a threat to the moral order of mankind.”15 The highly neurotic subject regarding the Jewish question will sooner or later result in an ugly conflict between Gentiles and Jews.
The frightened attitude of American and European intellectuals, who often extol the concept of “intellectual freedom,” is best seen in their servile attitude toward Jews, to the extent that “(T)he pro-Semite has consequently made himself a mirror image of the anti-Semite.”16 The danger of this fatal embrace lies not with Jews, but with white Christians. After all, an American Christian-inspired anti-Semite must appear in the eyes of Jews as a very bizarre species. On the one hand he hates this alien Jew; yet on the other, he lugs behind himself this Levantine deity that is not of European cultural origin. Many American conservatives, and particularly American Christian Zionists, believe in the future conversion of Jews to Christianity. This monotheistic linage, however contradictory it may look, makes sense. After all, just like Mary immaculately conceived her Jewish son Jesus, she remained an immaculate Jewess by birth.
The feigned fraternity between the postmodern Euro- American “shabbath” goyim and American Jews is veiled in mendacity and mutual make-belief mimicry which can be spotted in the Western political establishment and the media all the time. At the beginning of the third millennium, feigned love for the Jews is mimicked tirelessly by European and American politicians and academics. Admittedly, this will only give rise to a proverbial Jewish hubris which will continue to grow as long as it receives the appropriate Biblical fodder from Christians and self-censored European academics.
In order to get rid of this millenarian anti-Semitic neurosis it may be advisable for all white Europeans and Americans to revive their primordial pre-Christian beliefs and critically reexamine stories of Bedouin saviors and a host of other Levantine rag-tag preachers. How about starting reading Homer again?
Tom Sunic
Dr Tom Sunic is a former US professor in political science, translator and author. His latest book Homo americanus; Child of the Postmodern Age can be ordered at: http://www.amazon.com/Homo-americanus-Child-Postmodern-Age/dp/1419659847
For more about Dr. Sunic:
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Notes:
1 Hervé Ryssen, Les espérances planétaires (Paris: éd. Baskerville, 2005), p. 333.
2 Ibid., p.274.
3 Jacques Attali, Les Juifs, le monde et l’argent (Paris: Fayard; 2002), p.19 and passim.
4 Hervé Ryssen, Les espérances planétaires, p. 415.
5 For the Jewish role in the Soviet Union and America respectively, see detailed accounts published in the series “Judaica,” in National Socialist Germany. Rudolf Kommos, Juden Hinter Stalin (first published by Niebelung Verlag in 1944, reprinted by Buchkreis Faksimile Verlag: Bremen, 1989). On page 70 Kommos writes: “The name of the Cheka, the GPU, and the NKVD is linked to Jewishness for all times.” Regarding the role of Jews in America, see in the same series, Walter Freund, B’nai B’rith- Judentum und Weltpolitik (first published by Essener Verlag 1942, reprinted by Buchkreis Faksimile Verlag: Bremen, 1990). Freund writes on page 226, “Regarding the Jewish influence in the history of the USA, Margulis names in the first place the Bible which set up the temple of democracy.”
6 Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p.152.
7 Ibid., p.369.
8 Ibid., p.209.
9 Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Bloomington: Autorhouse, 2002), Originally published by Praeger Publications, Westport CT, 1998), p.304.
10 Alain de Benoist, Comment peut-on être païen? (Paris: Albin Michel, 1981), p.168.
11 Ibid., p.169.
12 Ibid., p.170.
13 Ibid., p.171.
14 Milton Konvitz, Judaism and the American Idea (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1978), p. 71. Also, Jerol S. Auerbach, “Liberalism and the Hebrew Prophets,” in Commentary 84:2 (1987): 58. Compare this with Ben Zion Bokser in “Democratic Aspirations in Talmudic Judaism,” in Judaism and Human Rights, ed. Milton Konvitz (New York: Norton, 1972): “The Talmud ordained with great emphasis that every person charged with the violation of some law be given a fair trial and before the law all were to be scrupulously equal, whether a king or a pauper” (146). Ernst Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen and Gruppen (1922; Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1965), 768; also the passage “Naturrechtlicher and liberaler Character des freikirchlichen Neucalvinismus,” pp.762-72. Compare this with Georg Jellinek, Die Erklärung der Menschen-und Bürgerrechte (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1904).
15 Wilmot Robertson, The Dispossessed Majority (Cape Canaveral, FL: Howard Allen, 1972), p.180.
16 Ibid., p.180.
