Thank you for your analysis of how Jewish activists, like all emotionally-driven activists, are hurting their cause. I rolled my eyes at the Nazi problem on Substack and the attempts to control speech by ADC in Melbourne. There's only so many times one can cry wolf before people no longer take you seriously.
Personally speaking I do not much warm (in the context of the rich Western world) to 'activists' and 'protestors' full stop. 'Narcissists', 'busy-bodies' and 'politico-obssessives' are perhaps better terms.
In places like Iran and Afghanistan where protesting is brave and dangerous it's a different thing altogether....and very noble. In the West though, it's high time we de-sanctified the idea of 'protest' and its resultant...'activism' pretty-much whatever the supposed 'cause'.
Once again you manage to weave past the distractions and identify the better language. But we need to remember that just as one man's patriot is another man's counterrevolutionary, titles of "Karen's" or "busy-bodies" can go both ways.
Still, I wonder for those cases requiring real courage protesting in regimes with arbitrary or compromised rule of law, if better results occur when the protest has been organized and coordinated by some underground group, vs. a more general and spontaneous outpouring of the population.
I don't know is the short answer. I just know that it is so heart-clenching to see the women braving the frothing-mouthed reprisals in these places....and then when you see - by contrast - the look-at-ME-protesters on Western city streets with their "look at my banner; look at how much more I CARE than you do" vanities....you just think Uuuugh Yuk!
To me, rule of law is a great protector. This is why erosion of the rule of law has turned out not to be good for Jews, and some other minority groups. Once you start saying things like, “Jews are oppressors, you can apply to different rules to them,” it is very dangerous, in my view.
Certain Jews loudly talked up "Whites are Oppressors" while forgetting that their allies considered them White. And no amount of "I'm not white, I'm Jewish", isn't going to work.
Yes, I think that particular reality has really bitten, in the last few months. I think it is a real danger to start drawing those kinds of distinctions (eg, black/white). Predicating your identity on victimhood also gives rise to real issues. I read some interesting research by Israeli psychologists on this.
Yes, I find it very odd when people start referring to Jews as separate from the white race.
Because some of them (only some) have olive skin and dark hair? That let's a lot of other groups off the hook then, and leaves those of us with pale eyes and palefaces alone and mighty guilty of just about everything. , but also able to stand proudly behind many important innovations such as the modern rule of law, for one, the Industrial revolution for another.
Or the human mindset at any time. The implications of the Neolithic y-chromosome bottleneck are quite frightening. Except, we are already after the Holocaust …
By coincidence, my holiday reading: Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, is prefaced by a quotation from the Yuma Daily Star 1983 regarding a 1982 expedition to the Afar region of southern Ethiopia by Clark and White in which 'a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier shows evidence of having been scalped."
The problem for the Jewish lobby (ADL) in the US is an unrelenting identification with leftist ideology. While this might have been useful when all the intelligent people were marching together toward a glorious, idyllic future in Liberal land, the reality of vaccine mandates, lockdowns, climate change communism, out of control spending, DEI, and anti- capitalism has finally caught up to them. “When you lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas”. Not much sympathy here.
Great post! You manage to do the difficult dance quite well, discussing these controversial issues fairly and insightfully, without falling into the rigid ideological ruts on either side of the discussion -- for which reason, the ideologues will complain that you go too far or don't go far enough or whatever (no good-faith discussion will ever satisfy such ideologues). The importance of maintaining a legitimate, functioning state of some kind cannot be overstated, especially since Bolsheviks have a tendency to foment and exacerbate anarcho-tyranny (and hence, de-legitimize the state and diminish its ability to function) as part of their revolutionary program (something we see happening in America now with out-of-control immigration and Soros DAs engaging in lawfare against political opponents while permitting violent criminals to go free). If people want to avoid genocidal violence in the future, they absolutely must oppose this campaign of anarcho-tyranny today.
To be clear, the analysis of the Holocaust is Timothy Snyder’s, based on his reading of archival material, which apparently he learnt extra languages to read, because he is that sort of terrifying linguist, I am just teasing out further implications.
Perhaps I missed something obvious here but what does “Jewish lobby” in this piece refer to? Seems like it is referring to random people on Substack, some of whom may be Jewish, as opposed to actual lobbying organizations, or am I confused?
I can't speak for Lorenzo, but I -think- he means bureaucracies like the ADL. Most brand-name bureaucracies in the USA (and probably the West) have become shells that serve themselves and whatever is currently fashionable, and not their original purpose. If Harvard is now antagonistic to actual scholars, think of how many other brand name culture cans are shells containing something toxic to the purpose they purport to serve.
FWIW my own sense is that most Jews (myself included) have little or no interest in what the ADL and various other lobbying organizations say, and also that most Jews are under no illusions about the ability to censor views they don't like, but that's just my sense.
Anyway, what you wrote makes sense, if that's what Lorenzo meant, although it wasn't clear to me from the text and so may not be clear to others. Just mentioning it because misunderstandings with topics like this obviously can get heated quickly, and I'm not typically confused by what Lorenzo is saying.
Thanks for that. I just hopped onto Xitter and said my piece to that poster.
Two rules as usual and this guy is not exactly being helpful here. He can allow other people to point that stuff out- we all know they will & they don’t need our help.
His post was defending a group of people that they don’t seem to want (((us))) AT ALL. “From the river to the sea” is not a radio jingle for a holiday destination advertisement.
That prick Gandhi said in 1939 that the Jews there in Europe should only face the Nazis with peaceful resistance and many years afterwards doubled down saying that they should have “offered themselves to the butchers knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from the cliffs.
It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany... as it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions”.
He had adopted an Arab perspective of Zionism.
Should we all be like Gandhi, hey? Wouldn’t that be nicely convenient for everyone?
Do you know anything about what underlies militant pantheistic ideology?
Let’s just say that they’re not exactly in love with the idea of monotheism or the people who after millennia of miraculously surviving the constant threat to our existence are still alive and definite proof that our G-d has a lot of power. That maybe the Jews are onto something here.
The ugly truth is not hard to find. And once you find it you will never stop seeing it everywhere.
Slick. Real slick. Thanks champion. Psalm 55. Cheers 🕊️✡️🕊️
Anyone can write letters of complaint, they are citizens and the ABC is a public entity. Organising to wield employment law because of what someone said is a bit different.
Jews in the Anglosphere are not at risk from folk’s words about Israel and Palestine.
Part of what infuriates me about all this is that if one goes to very Jewish areas of Melbourne, such as Caulfield, on a Saturday one sees security guards outside synagogues. Jewish schools have security guards. This never used to be necessary in Australia, which was one of the most philo-Semitic societies ever.
Jewish intellectuals and lobby organisations—acting on the paranoid nonsense idea that the Holocaust could happen anywhere—agitated for multiculturalism, replacing the previous policy of assimilation. They wanted Jews to not be “the only” minority. So, we ended up importing people from places that have much more recent histories of anti-Jewish pogroms.
The same Jewish activists pioneered the cancel culture techniques that have since metastasised. Their tactics of monstering people for what they said or wrote, often showing a ridiculous hyper-sensitivity, have turned neutrals into bitter enemies.
Hamas are monstrous thugs who need to be obliterated: my concern with Israel’s war against Hamas is whether they have a good strategy for after the catastrophe, hence my following post. But the Jewish community in Australia has not been well served by those who purport to speak on their behalf.
Did Jewish activists actually pioneer cancel culture? Definitely Jews have (unfortunately) been overrepresented among far-left activists. But you know, “cancel culture” has been going on for centuries. It’s been practiced by religious communities against heretics and so on.
I do hear this idea sometimes that Jewish activists pushed for third world immigration because white European did the Holocaust and so there’s some reflexive anti white animus. It doesn’t actually sound true to me. Isn’t this basically the McDonald hypothesis that Cofnas shot down?
Like, one could say Jews were overrepresented in Russian communism because of the pogroms, but Marx himself was a self-hating German Jew and clearly wasn’t motivated by antisemitism. I think the null hypothesis that Jews are just a high iq group with a high general factor of personality and a verbal tilt that’s very interested in politics makes more sense. Jews are also probably higher in neuroticism. So you know, paranoia.
I'd include Hollywood in this. It's a constant rain of Jewish propaganda. Very professional, entertaining, often beautifully done, but a constant repetitive theme, not so much monotonous as tedious, like a thumping bassline in an otherwise interesting tune. One wonders why the likes of Spielberg don't concern themselves ever with eg the Holodomor, or Stalin's purges of the kulaks
Is the claim that the ADL & co. are behind the Substack-Nazi pseudo-controversy? The first paragraph makes it sound like that's what you're saying. That wasn't my understanding of the whole affair, so I must be missing something?
Sometimes organisations such as ADL get explicitly involved, sometimes they coordinate behind the scenes and sometimes it is just networks, which may well involve non-Jews, operating according to patterns well established. The level of coordination may not be clear at the time.
I do spend time thinking about, as a former Christian, how to maintain those two core beliefs (the universalism and the preferential option for the poor and the sick) without the theological justifications for them. I can’t bring myself to believe in God as Christianity defines God anymore, but I do view taking care of the disabled and the poor and the golden rule as necessary for a health society. How do we hold onto these things as society becomes less and less Christian?
My view is that our morality has a genetic inherent psychological element desiring transcendence, and a cultural element that works (well enough) for a given society. We inherently have a sense of fairness vs. harm (infant studies show this), an inherent tendency to assign agency to unknown forces/ situations, a sense of empathy coupled to a theory of mind for ourselves and for others. These provide a basis for believing in the Golden Rule. The increased within-group trust and cooperation derived from a given culture's religious beliefs also contributes to survival and adaptability.
On the culture side I might recommend Larry Siedentop's Inventing the Individual; or Tom Holland's Dominion, plus many of Tom's You Tube segments. They discuss how Christianity developing in the West has led to our current social and political orientations. It still took 1000 to 1700 years.
Ironic that Timothy Snyder is one of the chief feral catastrophizers with regard to Russiagate and predicting a Trumpian fascist takeover of the USA. I've lost a lot of respect for his scholarship as a result of his activism.
Fair point. I just divide the two. Snyder the historian East of the (Trieste to St Petersburg) Hajnal line I take seriously and have learnt much from. Snyder the catastrophising commentator West of the (Trieste to St Petersburg) Hajnal line I ignore.
You have indicated in the past your intent/plans to explore the role and benefits and limits of maintaining "institutional order". I gather this essay is one arrow in that quiver. I look forward to your further thinking in this direction.
I presume when you discuss "destruction of the state" you are saying the previous (order preserving) state institutions and leadership have been taken over by the invader's state and rulers, so the kind of institutional order changes from one previously accepted by the populace to one they wish was not in place. Conversely, an invader could create a state of order that is more benign than the previous case, which might then actually be more welcome (or still not so much, given human perversity and resistance to change!).
From this view, the real issue becomes not so much the role of Jewish or other activists, etc., but the fragility of having a suitable state providing such institutional order (but not too much order, such as might restrain free speech rights). Your remark on the Netherlands suggest that even when the overall governance structure has been compromised (but short of real destruction), then there can still be a residual undercurrent of institutionalized order (retaining some level of morality, law abidance, law enforcement infrastructure - police/courts, money management and banking, etc. ) This influences the degree to which "the other" has to be shipped elsewhere for extermination.
The loss of institutional order presumably has many levels or shades of gray, depending on culture, social structures, history, geography, economic prosperity, relationships to trade and import/export, etc.
I assume that people who are fighting another group would want to know what they are thinking. Free speech enables that. But they don't want to know, or believe they already know who their enemies are and what they think. They really aren't fighting as much performing.
The evil of Hitler and National Socialism was unprecedented. Nothing like it had ever been seen before. The same could be said of Stalin. He was unique in the history of the world. In Asia, someone like Mao had never been seen before. Of course there had been tyrants, oppression, famine, but never in that way and to such a scale.
The spiritual powers of evil are creative and adapt to various situations. Hitler emerged out of a unique historical context, and so did Stalin, so did Lenin, Mao and Pol Pot.
The next new evil that arises, and maybe already is beginning to take shape, will be in new and unexpected forms.
I had never heard of Huang Chao but have read a couple of biographies of Pol Pot, who was of course familiar with Lenin, Mao and Stalin, even Bakunin and some French revolutionaries from his time in Paris. He also had some parallels with Hitler with his racial emphasis. Pol Pot believed that the dark skinned Cambodians were superior and ethnically purer than lighter skinned Cambodians (the result of breeding with Chinese and Vietnamese).
About Mao, I have read a little about the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom rebellion in a general history but did not remember any names. Mao was an avid student of Chinese history and according to one biography often sought to learn and apply lessons from his reading. Mao had also heard of Lenin and Stalin since Soviet emissaries were active in China in the 1920s and 30s and had given a very glowing vision of the destruction of the old empire and the emergence of a new society.
There are also some striking parallels between Hitler and the leaders of some Russian peasant rebellions, such as Stenka Razin in the 17th century and Emilian Pugachev in the 18th. They are both in Wikipedia but from skimming the articles I thought they had historical facts but did not display the ferocity and violence of extremely charismatic adventurers who whipped up hatred and resentment and did huge amounts of damage before being destroyed. A good book on that is "Russian Rebels, 1600-1800" by Paul Avrich.
Well done Lorenzo. This needs to be said - calmly by someone with intellectual gravitas and no axe to grind. The fact is that merely by criticising those (constantly) crying 'anti-semitism', one opens oneself up to the accusation. That is a warning sign in itself, as the accusers lose potential allies and support. Personally I have got to the point where I avoid the subject. This is not cowardice, but conservation of effort - there are so many other deserving fish to fry
There is certainly a huge problem with the ADL and similar organizations and activists. There are multiple huge problems with the awful idea that white Christians are the primary source for antisemitism or the awful idea that Jews should try to become another left-wing victim group
But did you really need to use the term “Jewish lobby”? I mean you could go with something like “ADL activist types”. The ADL and similar organizations. I also think it’s not accurate to say that they invented modern cancel culture. Look at hate speech laws in Ireland, which has basically no Jews. This is a point Nathan Cofnas often makes.
You should talk to Nathan Cofnas about this I think.
Irish hate speech laws are very recent. Jewish activists were engaging in cancel culture decades ago. Jewish activists pioneered the secularised version of shaming and shunning via, castigating “bad beliefs” as threats to a designated victim group and trying to get people sacked or otherwise monstered for the same.
Really? Jewish activists pioneered these tactics? I know the Students for a Democratic Society attacked Jensen and protested his presence. But the SDS, while having many Jews, was not at all an explicitly Jewish organization. The people who disrupted Shockley and didn’t let him speak were also not Jewish activists. This was in the 60’s and 70’s. I can’t imagine there was much cancelling of people for behavior offensive to victim groups before that. Which Jewish activists pioneered this? Again, if you look at the attempted cancellations of Jensen and Shockley for their support of HBD in the 60’s and 70’s, you don’t see Jewish activists.
Using the term “Jewish lobby” is bait and opens you up to accusations of antisemitism for literally no reason, allowing the retarded pro-Hamas left to accuse you of antisemitism and to claim that the right is the real antisemites, and alienating your Jewish fans. Say “ADL and co”. One can call the ADL and similar organizations the Jewish lobby but I don’t see any reason to do so and 10 reasons not to. It’s not really the most accurate name. It’s similarly stupid to call La Raza the “Hispanic lobby”. I’m not going to deny there’s a real phenomenon of ADL activist types like the ones who went after Helen for her book but better to call them ADL activist types and not the Jewish lobby.
There are different organisations in different countries. Makes labelling more difficult. These groups are very ostentatiously Jewish and their donation strategies target the Jewish community. People colloquially know who you mean when you say ‘Jewish lobby’. If I write more on this (not very likely) I will think more on labels.
Thank you for your analysis of how Jewish activists, like all emotionally-driven activists, are hurting their cause. I rolled my eyes at the Nazi problem on Substack and the attempts to control speech by ADC in Melbourne. There's only so many times one can cry wolf before people no longer take you seriously.
Personally speaking I do not much warm (in the context of the rich Western world) to 'activists' and 'protestors' full stop. 'Narcissists', 'busy-bodies' and 'politico-obssessives' are perhaps better terms.
In places like Iran and Afghanistan where protesting is brave and dangerous it's a different thing altogether....and very noble. In the West though, it's high time we de-sanctified the idea of 'protest' and its resultant...'activism' pretty-much whatever the supposed 'cause'.
Once again you manage to weave past the distractions and identify the better language. But we need to remember that just as one man's patriot is another man's counterrevolutionary, titles of "Karen's" or "busy-bodies" can go both ways.
Still, I wonder for those cases requiring real courage protesting in regimes with arbitrary or compromised rule of law, if better results occur when the protest has been organized and coordinated by some underground group, vs. a more general and spontaneous outpouring of the population.
I don't know is the short answer. I just know that it is so heart-clenching to see the women braving the frothing-mouthed reprisals in these places....and then when you see - by contrast - the look-at-ME-protesters on Western city streets with their "look at my banner; look at how much more I CARE than you do" vanities....you just think Uuuugh Yuk!
To me, rule of law is a great protector. This is why erosion of the rule of law has turned out not to be good for Jews, and some other minority groups. Once you start saying things like, “Jews are oppressors, you can apply to different rules to them,” it is very dangerous, in my view.
Certain Jews loudly talked up "Whites are Oppressors" while forgetting that their allies considered them White. And no amount of "I'm not white, I'm Jewish", isn't going to work.
Yes, I think that particular reality has really bitten, in the last few months. I think it is a real danger to start drawing those kinds of distinctions (eg, black/white). Predicating your identity on victimhood also gives rise to real issues. I read some interesting research by Israeli psychologists on this.
Yes, I find it very odd when people start referring to Jews as separate from the white race.
Because some of them (only some) have olive skin and dark hair? That let's a lot of other groups off the hook then, and leaves those of us with pale eyes and palefaces alone and mighty guilty of just about everything. , but also able to stand proudly behind many important innovations such as the modern rule of law, for one, the Industrial revolution for another.
Agreed. Our constitutions both federal and state, need protection.
Laws are the great equalizers but only if applied equally.
Even when they are not applied equally, they still are better than no laws with the current mindset of the human race.
Or the human mindset at any time. The implications of the Neolithic y-chromosome bottleneck are quite frightening. Except, we are already after the Holocaust …
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04375-6
By coincidence, my holiday reading: Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, is prefaced by a quotation from the Yuma Daily Star 1983 regarding a 1982 expedition to the Afar region of southern Ethiopia by Clark and White in which 'a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier shows evidence of having been scalped."
The problem for the Jewish lobby (ADL) in the US is an unrelenting identification with leftist ideology. While this might have been useful when all the intelligent people were marching together toward a glorious, idyllic future in Liberal land, the reality of vaccine mandates, lockdowns, climate change communism, out of control spending, DEI, and anti- capitalism has finally caught up to them. “When you lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas”. Not much sympathy here.
Great post! You manage to do the difficult dance quite well, discussing these controversial issues fairly and insightfully, without falling into the rigid ideological ruts on either side of the discussion -- for which reason, the ideologues will complain that you go too far or don't go far enough or whatever (no good-faith discussion will ever satisfy such ideologues). The importance of maintaining a legitimate, functioning state of some kind cannot be overstated, especially since Bolsheviks have a tendency to foment and exacerbate anarcho-tyranny (and hence, de-legitimize the state and diminish its ability to function) as part of their revolutionary program (something we see happening in America now with out-of-control immigration and Soros DAs engaging in lawfare against political opponents while permitting violent criminals to go free). If people want to avoid genocidal violence in the future, they absolutely must oppose this campaign of anarcho-tyranny today.
OT except to the extent we are discussing the destruction, or not, of states; and that there are Australian, British, and US readers here:
perhaps you will find this short commentary about the AUKUS alliance by George Friedman of Geopolitical Futures to be of interest: https://geopoliticalfutures.com/aukus-in-2024/?tpa=MzUwNDUzZTk4MTU2MmI2MDQwY2E5MTE3MDYxOTc0NzgyYmIzMjQ&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=https%3A%2F%2Fgeopoliticalfutures.com%2Faukus-in-2024%2F%3Ftpa%3DMzUwNDUzZTk4MTU2MmI2MDQwY2E5MTE3MDYxOTc0NzgyYmIzMjQ&utm_content&utm_campaign=PAID%20-%20Everything%20as%20it%27s%20published
Thanks for the link. Interesting and informative.
Workmanlike summary.
I had to stop reading to write a comment.
- This essay is brilliant.
It's also expounding the first original ideas on the topic I've read or heard since I was a teen.
To be clear, the analysis of the Holocaust is Timothy Snyder’s, based on his reading of archival material, which apparently he learnt extra languages to read, because he is that sort of terrifying linguist, I am just teasing out further implications.
Perhaps I missed something obvious here but what does “Jewish lobby” in this piece refer to? Seems like it is referring to random people on Substack, some of whom may be Jewish, as opposed to actual lobbying organizations, or am I confused?
I can't speak for Lorenzo, but I -think- he means bureaucracies like the ADL. Most brand-name bureaucracies in the USA (and probably the West) have become shells that serve themselves and whatever is currently fashionable, and not their original purpose. If Harvard is now antagonistic to actual scholars, think of how many other brand name culture cans are shells containing something toxic to the purpose they purport to serve.
FWIW my own sense is that most Jews (myself included) have little or no interest in what the ADL and various other lobbying organizations say, and also that most Jews are under no illusions about the ability to censor views they don't like, but that's just my sense.
Anyway, what you wrote makes sense, if that's what Lorenzo meant, although it wasn't clear to me from the text and so may not be clear to others. Just mentioning it because misunderstandings with topics like this obviously can get heated quickly, and I'm not typically confused by what Lorenzo is saying.
This sort of thing.
https://twitter.com/joshbbornstein/status/1747023635238539269?s=46
Thanks for that. I just hopped onto Xitter and said my piece to that poster.
Two rules as usual and this guy is not exactly being helpful here. He can allow other people to point that stuff out- we all know they will & they don’t need our help.
His post was defending a group of people that they don’t seem to want (((us))) AT ALL. “From the river to the sea” is not a radio jingle for a holiday destination advertisement.
That prick Gandhi said in 1939 that the Jews there in Europe should only face the Nazis with peaceful resistance and many years afterwards doubled down saying that they should have “offered themselves to the butchers knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from the cliffs.
It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany... as it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions”.
He had adopted an Arab perspective of Zionism.
Should we all be like Gandhi, hey? Wouldn’t that be nicely convenient for everyone?
Do you know anything about what underlies militant pantheistic ideology?
Let’s just say that they’re not exactly in love with the idea of monotheism or the people who after millennia of miraculously surviving the constant threat to our existence are still alive and definite proof that our G-d has a lot of power. That maybe the Jews are onto something here.
The ugly truth is not hard to find. And once you find it you will never stop seeing it everywhere.
Slick. Real slick. Thanks champion. Psalm 55. Cheers 🕊️✡️🕊️
Anyone can write letters of complaint, they are citizens and the ABC is a public entity. Organising to wield employment law because of what someone said is a bit different.
Jews in the Anglosphere are not at risk from folk’s words about Israel and Palestine.
Part of what infuriates me about all this is that if one goes to very Jewish areas of Melbourne, such as Caulfield, on a Saturday one sees security guards outside synagogues. Jewish schools have security guards. This never used to be necessary in Australia, which was one of the most philo-Semitic societies ever.
Jewish intellectuals and lobby organisations—acting on the paranoid nonsense idea that the Holocaust could happen anywhere—agitated for multiculturalism, replacing the previous policy of assimilation. They wanted Jews to not be “the only” minority. So, we ended up importing people from places that have much more recent histories of anti-Jewish pogroms.
The same Jewish activists pioneered the cancel culture techniques that have since metastasised. Their tactics of monstering people for what they said or wrote, often showing a ridiculous hyper-sensitivity, have turned neutrals into bitter enemies.
Hamas are monstrous thugs who need to be obliterated: my concern with Israel’s war against Hamas is whether they have a good strategy for after the catastrophe, hence my following post. But the Jewish community in Australia has not been well served by those who purport to speak on their behalf.
Did Jewish activists actually pioneer cancel culture? Definitely Jews have (unfortunately) been overrepresented among far-left activists. But you know, “cancel culture” has been going on for centuries. It’s been practiced by religious communities against heretics and so on.
I do hear this idea sometimes that Jewish activists pushed for third world immigration because white European did the Holocaust and so there’s some reflexive anti white animus. It doesn’t actually sound true to me. Isn’t this basically the McDonald hypothesis that Cofnas shot down?
Like, one could say Jews were overrepresented in Russian communism because of the pogroms, but Marx himself was a self-hating German Jew and clearly wasn’t motivated by antisemitism. I think the null hypothesis that Jews are just a high iq group with a high general factor of personality and a verbal tilt that’s very interested in politics makes more sense. Jews are also probably higher in neuroticism. So you know, paranoia.
Weird
I second this.
I'd include Hollywood in this. It's a constant rain of Jewish propaganda. Very professional, entertaining, often beautifully done, but a constant repetitive theme, not so much monotonous as tedious, like a thumping bassline in an otherwise interesting tune. One wonders why the likes of Spielberg don't concern themselves ever with eg the Holodomor, or Stalin's purges of the kulaks
Yes, I mean the non-profits such as the ADL and the networks they coordinate.
Is the claim that the ADL & co. are behind the Substack-Nazi pseudo-controversy? The first paragraph makes it sound like that's what you're saying. That wasn't my understanding of the whole affair, so I must be missing something?
Sometimes organisations such as ADL get explicitly involved, sometimes they coordinate behind the scenes and sometimes it is just networks, which may well involve non-Jews, operating according to patterns well established. The level of coordination may not be clear at the time.
I do spend time thinking about, as a former Christian, how to maintain those two core beliefs (the universalism and the preferential option for the poor and the sick) without the theological justifications for them. I can’t bring myself to believe in God as Christianity defines God anymore, but I do view taking care of the disabled and the poor and the golden rule as necessary for a health society. How do we hold onto these things as society becomes less and less Christian?
My view is that our morality has a genetic inherent psychological element desiring transcendence, and a cultural element that works (well enough) for a given society. We inherently have a sense of fairness vs. harm (infant studies show this), an inherent tendency to assign agency to unknown forces/ situations, a sense of empathy coupled to a theory of mind for ourselves and for others. These provide a basis for believing in the Golden Rule. The increased within-group trust and cooperation derived from a given culture's religious beliefs also contributes to survival and adaptability.
On the culture side I might recommend Larry Siedentop's Inventing the Individual; or Tom Holland's Dominion, plus many of Tom's You Tube segments. They discuss how Christianity developing in the West has led to our current social and political orientations. It still took 1000 to 1700 years.
Yes, it’s the intention of compassion. An attribute of the civilized.
I recognize this was not the main point of the essay
No, but it is absolutely a fair question.
Ironic that Timothy Snyder is one of the chief feral catastrophizers with regard to Russiagate and predicting a Trumpian fascist takeover of the USA. I've lost a lot of respect for his scholarship as a result of his activism.
Fair point. I just divide the two. Snyder the historian East of the (Trieste to St Petersburg) Hajnal line I take seriously and have learnt much from. Snyder the catastrophising commentator West of the (Trieste to St Petersburg) Hajnal line I ignore.
The curse of a domain expert assuming expertise outside of his domain.
You have indicated in the past your intent/plans to explore the role and benefits and limits of maintaining "institutional order". I gather this essay is one arrow in that quiver. I look forward to your further thinking in this direction.
I presume when you discuss "destruction of the state" you are saying the previous (order preserving) state institutions and leadership have been taken over by the invader's state and rulers, so the kind of institutional order changes from one previously accepted by the populace to one they wish was not in place. Conversely, an invader could create a state of order that is more benign than the previous case, which might then actually be more welcome (or still not so much, given human perversity and resistance to change!).
From this view, the real issue becomes not so much the role of Jewish or other activists, etc., but the fragility of having a suitable state providing such institutional order (but not too much order, such as might restrain free speech rights). Your remark on the Netherlands suggest that even when the overall governance structure has been compromised (but short of real destruction), then there can still be a residual undercurrent of institutionalized order (retaining some level of morality, law abidance, law enforcement infrastructure - police/courts, money management and banking, etc. ) This influences the degree to which "the other" has to be shipped elsewhere for extermination.
The loss of institutional order presumably has many levels or shades of gray, depending on culture, social structures, history, geography, economic prosperity, relationships to trade and import/export, etc.
Yes, nicely put.
I was expecting this one, to raise my hackles but found it really well thought out and written. interesting read!
I assume that people who are fighting another group would want to know what they are thinking. Free speech enables that. But they don't want to know, or believe they already know who their enemies are and what they think. They really aren't fighting as much performing.
The evil of Hitler and National Socialism was unprecedented. Nothing like it had ever been seen before. The same could be said of Stalin. He was unique in the history of the world. In Asia, someone like Mao had never been seen before. Of course there had been tyrants, oppression, famine, but never in that way and to such a scale.
The spiritual powers of evil are creative and adapt to various situations. Hitler emerged out of a unique historical context, and so did Stalin, so did Lenin, Mao and Pol Pot.
The next new evil that arises, and maybe already is beginning to take shape, will be in new and unexpected forms.
It is particularly grim to realise that Pol Pot was actually less unprecedented than the others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huang_Chao
Or that Mao admired Hong Xiuquan, a trouble-making Hakka.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Xiuquan
I had never heard of Huang Chao but have read a couple of biographies of Pol Pot, who was of course familiar with Lenin, Mao and Stalin, even Bakunin and some French revolutionaries from his time in Paris. He also had some parallels with Hitler with his racial emphasis. Pol Pot believed that the dark skinned Cambodians were superior and ethnically purer than lighter skinned Cambodians (the result of breeding with Chinese and Vietnamese).
About Mao, I have read a little about the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom rebellion in a general history but did not remember any names. Mao was an avid student of Chinese history and according to one biography often sought to learn and apply lessons from his reading. Mao had also heard of Lenin and Stalin since Soviet emissaries were active in China in the 1920s and 30s and had given a very glowing vision of the destruction of the old empire and the emergence of a new society.
There are also some striking parallels between Hitler and the leaders of some Russian peasant rebellions, such as Stenka Razin in the 17th century and Emilian Pugachev in the 18th. They are both in Wikipedia but from skimming the articles I thought they had historical facts but did not display the ferocity and violence of extremely charismatic adventurers who whipped up hatred and resentment and did huge amounts of damage before being destroyed. A good book on that is "Russian Rebels, 1600-1800" by Paul Avrich.
Well done Lorenzo. This needs to be said - calmly by someone with intellectual gravitas and no axe to grind. The fact is that merely by criticising those (constantly) crying 'anti-semitism', one opens oneself up to the accusation. That is a warning sign in itself, as the accusers lose potential allies and support. Personally I have got to the point where I avoid the subject. This is not cowardice, but conservation of effort - there are so many other deserving fish to fry
There is certainly a huge problem with the ADL and similar organizations and activists. There are multiple huge problems with the awful idea that white Christians are the primary source for antisemitism or the awful idea that Jews should try to become another left-wing victim group
But did you really need to use the term “Jewish lobby”? I mean you could go with something like “ADL activist types”. The ADL and similar organizations. I also think it’s not accurate to say that they invented modern cancel culture. Look at hate speech laws in Ireland, which has basically no Jews. This is a point Nathan Cofnas often makes.
You should talk to Nathan Cofnas about this I think.
Irish hate speech laws are very recent. Jewish activists were engaging in cancel culture decades ago. Jewish activists pioneered the secularised version of shaming and shunning via, castigating “bad beliefs” as threats to a designated victim group and trying to get people sacked or otherwise monstered for the same.
Really? Jewish activists pioneered these tactics? I know the Students for a Democratic Society attacked Jensen and protested his presence. But the SDS, while having many Jews, was not at all an explicitly Jewish organization. The people who disrupted Shockley and didn’t let him speak were also not Jewish activists. This was in the 60’s and 70’s. I can’t imagine there was much cancelling of people for behavior offensive to victim groups before that. Which Jewish activists pioneered this? Again, if you look at the attempted cancellations of Jensen and Shockley for their support of HBD in the 60’s and 70’s, you don’t see Jewish activists.
Using the term “Jewish lobby” is bait and opens you up to accusations of antisemitism for literally no reason, allowing the retarded pro-Hamas left to accuse you of antisemitism and to claim that the right is the real antisemites, and alienating your Jewish fans. Say “ADL and co”. One can call the ADL and similar organizations the Jewish lobby but I don’t see any reason to do so and 10 reasons not to. It’s not really the most accurate name. It’s similarly stupid to call La Raza the “Hispanic lobby”. I’m not going to deny there’s a real phenomenon of ADL activist types like the ones who went after Helen for her book but better to call them ADL activist types and not the Jewish lobby.
There are different organisations in different countries. Makes labelling more difficult. These groups are very ostentatiously Jewish and their donation strategies target the Jewish community. People colloquially know who you mean when you say ‘Jewish lobby’. If I write more on this (not very likely) I will think more on labels.