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Did the Jews Do It?By The Realist • 7/13/07The first two features on this website, “The Inverted World” and “The Reality of Racial Differences,” established that two illusions are central to the age we live in: the “whites as cancer myth” and race denial. Ever since I finished these articles, I have been trying to understand why these myths became so entrenched. I still do not know, and my quest continues. My perplexity on these points is, however, not shared by most on the racial right. Ask them why the current racial orthodoxy exists, and they will return a confident answer: The Jews did it!The strongest arguments for this view can be found in the work of California State University psychologist Kevin MacDonald, particularly in The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (CoC). MacDonald is the idol of a whole subculture and has even been published on the high-brow immigration-reform website VDARE.Summarizing CoC is difficult, as it has two theses, one overt and one covert. The overt thesis is that a number of major 20th century intellectual and political movements—racial egalitarianism, Freudianism, Marxism, and advocacy of open borders—have been vehicles of Jewish ethnic interests. This thesis is supported by copious and convincing evidence. The covert thesis, which is never fully avowed or openly argued for, is much more ambitious. MacDonald would have us believe that Jewish activism is the major cause of the forces that he believes is bringing down the West: multiculturalism, mass non-white immigration, and the taboo against white racial identity. This thesis is manifestly implausible. MacDonald’s book is, in fact, an emotional, extravagant, and unsubstantiated indictment of Jews covered by a veneer of scholarship.CoC is worth reading for its careful explication and substantiation of its overt thesis, which is that Jewish intellectual and political movements “are attempts to alter Western societies in a manner that would neutralize or end anti-Semitism and enhance the prospects for Jewish group continuity.”1 MacDonald argues convincingly that Sigmund Freud, for example, possessed a deep sense of Jewish identity (racial rather than religious) and was quite hostile towards Gentiles. He described himself as “a fanatical Jew” and spoke of the “many dark emotional powers” that bonded Jews together. Furthermore, he conceived of his life’s work in terms of an ethnic struggle: “I have often thought that I inherited all the obstinacy and all the passions of our ancestors when they defended their temple,” he wrote.2 This ethnic identity plainly had some effect on Freud’s work, and that of his mostly Jewish acolytes, which argued that Christian Western culture was a sort of mental illness brought on by sexual repression. By undermining Gentiles’ pride in themselves, psychoanalysts believed they would weaken anti-Semitism. Freud, in fact, once wrote of his hope to achieve “the integration of Jews and anti-Semites on the soil of [psychoanalysis].”3 MacDonald finds similar motivations in the work of Franz Boas, the father of racial egalitarianism, and in that of the Frankfurt school, whose demonization of white America I have described here.MacDonald also leaves no question that Jews were central in the battle to allow non-Westerners to immigrate to the United States. Throughout the 20th century, Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Committee, and the American Jewish Congress took a leading role in combating laws that restricted immigration to Westerners; they eventually triumphed with the passage of the 1965 immigration act. As Nathan C. Belth says proudly in a history of the ADL published by the organization:In Congress, through all the years when immigration battles were being fought, the names of Jewish legislators were in the forefront of the liberal forces: from Adolph Sabath to Samuel Dickstein and Emmanuel Celler in the House and from Herbert H. Lehman to Jacob Javits in the Senate. Each in his time was a leader of the Anti-Defamation League.4This advocacy was straightforwardly motivated by ethnic interests. As Jewish social scientist Earl Raab wrote, “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.”5If MacDonald had confined himself to exploring the ethnic dimension of these movements, no reasonable person could object to his book. However, MacDonald’s real ambition is to convince us that the movements he discusses bear the majority of the blame for multiculturalism and all its attendant phenomena.MacDonald introduces this agenda into the book through hints and implications, rather than overt argument. The sneaky, two-faced character of CoC is evident in his response to Paul Gottfried, who criticized MacDonald for laying excessive blame on Jews for the cultural changes in the West since 1950. MacDonald at first denies the charge: “In general, my position is that Jewish intellectual and political movements were a necessary condition for these changes, not a sufficient condition.” This plausible, if highly indefinite, assessment of the issue is immediately followed by a passage that lays the blame for non-white immigration and multiculturalism entirely on Jews.In the case of the reversal in U.S. immigration policy, there simply were no other pressure groups that were pushing for liberalized, multi-racial immigration during the period under consideration (up to the enactment of the watershed immigration bill of 1965). Nor were there any other groups or intellectual movements besides the ones mentioned in CofC that were developing images of the U.S. as a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic society rather than a European civilization. Gottfried attributes the sea change in immigration to “a general cultural change that beset Western societies and was pushed by a managerial state.” I agree that multi-ethnic immigration resulted from a general cultural shift, but we still must develop theories for the origin of the shift.6Only one such theory is discussed in CofC. Moreover, MacDonald will later refer to the 20th century as “a Jewish century” and speak of “the present Judaized cultural imperium in the West.”7 For all his hemming and hawing about necessary and sufficient conditions then, it is clear that MacDonald’s fans have correctly interpreted his real message: The Jews did it! MacDonald never substantiates his theory by discussing other factors in the origin of multiculturalism and weighing their strength against that of Jewish influence.A small minority of three percent cannot possibly effect major cultural changes through strength of numbers alone, so it is crucial to MacDonald’s argument that he explain how Jews convinced Gentiles to act against their own interests. He spells this out at length in the article “What Makes Western Culture Unique?” Here he casts Jewish and Gentile populations as biological archetypes locked in millennial struggle. Gentiles are inherently individualistic and possess little sense of group allegiance; at the same time, they are highly prone to feel outrage at people they consider morally blameworthy. Through the movements MacDonald discusses in CofC, Jews have managed to convince Europeans that their own ancestors were morally blameworthy, and it is this “white guilt” that has made Gentiles support the Jewish agenda.8There is a simple, but I devastating, counter-argument to MacDonald’s theory. If the Jewish/Gentile dynamic that MacDonald outlines is rooted in these groups’ biological natures, and Jews have extensive powers to convert Gentiles to multiculturalism, why didn’t anything like multiculturalism emerge before the 20th century? Jews have been present in the West since Roman times, but Gentiles in medieval European societies did not believe in white guilt, nor did they think diversity was a strength, despite the presence of Jewish minorities—indeed, multiculturalism was not only non-existent in medieval Europe, it was unthinkable. That almost all Gentile societies containing Jewish minorities have remained strongly ethnocentric is evidence that Jews have little power to weaken Gentiles’ confidence in themselves.Since multiculturalism began the 20th century, we should seek its source in the forces of modernity. The real causes of multiculturalism will likely be found in the major changes in the economy and society of the West that characterize this period: the transition from industrial societies of scarcity to post-industrial societies of abundance, the decline of religious belief, universal suffrage, increasing levels of education, and so forth.To refine this line of thought, the major cause of multiculturalism was not Jewish activism itself but the shifts in Gentile attitudes that made Jewish activism possible. Why was Franz Boas’ empirically unfounded theory of racial egalitarianism taken seriously? How was it possible for Frankfurt school intellectuals, with all their hatred of American society, to teach at American universities? Why did whites decide to undergo psychoanalysis and read Freud? Jewish intellectuals and activists could never have spread their harmful ideas without Gentile approval and consent. MacDonald thinks Jews are “behind” multiculturalism, but really he’s got it backward: behind every Jew that he criticizes is a crowd of approving and enabling Gentiles.MacDonald’s desire to blame Jews for multiculturalism causes him to underestimate Gentile participation in creating and building this worldview. His claim that before 1965 only Jewish movements espoused the idea that America was a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic society is actually quite untrue. In fact, an incipient form of multiculturalism was dominant in America among Gentiles as well as Jews as early as the World War II years.Henry Luce, editor of Life magazine, wrote there in 1942, “Because America alone among the nations of the earth was founded on ideas which transcend class and caste and racial and occupational differences, America alone can provide the pattern for the future.”9Wendell Willkie, a former Republican candidate for president, wrote in 1943:Our nation is composed of no one race, faith, or cultural heritage. It is a grouping of some thirty peoples possessing varying religious concepts, philosophies, and historical backgrounds. They are linked together by their confidence in our democratic institutions as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed by the Constitution… Our success thus far as a nation is not because we have built great cities, but because we have … learned to use our diversities.10Thus, even in 1943, mainstream Gentile writers were stating that the American national identity was based not on race but on distinctive political and philosophical beliefs. Furthermore, they believed that diversity was the essence of America and the source of its strength. Editors of popular magazines and presidential candidates are not known for radical ideas; rather, they cater to the broad mass of the public. It is clear then that a large share of the public was inclined to agree with Willkie’s and Luce’s multicultural view of America. That MacDonald would make such a basic mistake in his account of the origins of multiculturalism is enough to cast doubt on his whole book.Such an exaggeration suggests that MacDonald is motivated by animus against Jews. This impression is confirmed by the crudely emotional language that he sometimes uses to describe Jewish activism. For example, he says at one point, “The best strategy for a collectivist group like the Jews for destroying Europeans is therefore to convince the Europeans of their own moral bankruptcy.”11 The phrase “destroy Europeans” implies a Jewish/Gentile dynamic that is very different from the one MacDonald explicitly argues for: Jews are suddenly transformed from reasonable people trying to make a place for themselves in a hostile world into murderous fanatics, even Morlocks preying on Eloi. Nowhere in his book does MacDonald argue that Jews ever wanted to “destroy Europeans”; the phrase is a sort of slip of the tongue. Yet slips of the tongue, as one of MacDonald’s bugbears knew well, often reveal our true feelings.CofC is thus not of great help to those of us who seek to understand the causes of the illusions that afflict our age. Indeed, the book is more likely to do harm than good by seducing us from the hard labor of circumspect inquiry with a theory that is at once easy to understand, superficially plausible, and flattering to Gentile vanity. In the end though, we racially conscious Gentiles must accept that we are not innocent victims cruelly deceived and exploited by alien masters. Rather, the transformations that we so bitterly resent took place in our own country, controlled by our own people, and we must accept responsibility for them.
Topic: Antisemitism Demolished (Read 1461 times)