MacDonald's Spartan Dream

Kevin MacDonald asks: Can the Jewish Model Help the West Survive? Rather than dismiss him off-hand as an anti-Semite, I will take his question and assumptions at face value.

My main objection to MacDonald is that he privileges the dichotomy of Jews and Gentile whites. Some Jews do as well, for understandable psychohistorical reasons. But that dichotomy is wrong and outdated. Jews are a small ethno-religious group. Whites encompass a range of ethnic and religious groups. If we exchange MacDonald's implicit label, Gentile whites, for his explicit one, Westerners, it is obvious that Jews are one of the ethnic and religious groups that together make up "Westerners."

No matter how much the Hutus and Tutsis hated each other, to the outsider they were all Africans. Similarly, despite whatever other Westerners may say, to anyone outside of the West Jews are obviously Westerners. Are Jews different in origin, culture and religion from most other Westerners? Certainly, just as Afro-Semitic Ethiopians are different from the majority of sub-Saharan Africans who are Bantu. But no one would doubt that they are both African peoples. If MacDonald wants to get Darwinian, he should adopt a wider vantage point and realize that despite the mutual distrust between African tribes, they're all niggers to the white man with the whip.

What MacDonald wants is for Westerners to become like the Chinese. There should a billion of us speaking the same language united in the same geo-political space. Yet perhaps there's a reason the West succeeded in global domination instead of China. Perhaps that reason is the flourishing side by side of culturally related but distinct groups like Englishmen, Frenchmen, Italians and yes, Jews. As a Jew, I hope other Western nationalities continue to exist in the future. If imitating "the Jewish model" helps them to survive, I'm all for it. Fair's fair. After all, "the European model" helped the Jews to establish the state of Israel.

I am leery, however, of the concept of white nationalism. Jews base our nationhood in no small part on shared descent, but ultimately anyone may become a Jew and a Jew may renounce his Judaism. Shared descent has its limits, and our spiritual and biological brothers are not always the same. A Jew may live in England and become an English nationalist. An Englishman may convert to Judaism and become a Jewish nationalist. But white nationalism makes every race a slave to pure biology. The spiritual and ethical demands (not always met, I am the first to admit) that balance Jewish ethnocentrism - apparent in the many Jewish critics of the worst aspects of Jewish ethnocentrism - are devoid from MacDonald's racialized view of what it means to be Western.

Traditional tribalism allows outsiders to join the tribe. Consider the tales of white explorers who "went native" in the bush, of Ruth the convert or Disraeli the Brit. MacDonald, however, does not have faith in his tribe's ability to assimilate newcomers. He must put up genetic walls to block entry, like the Germans who cast out their Mendelsohhns and Wittgensteins. The end-result? A diminished and shattered Germany. Similarly, I fear MacDonald's dream can only result in a diminished and shattered West, sacrificed on the altar of purity - just as many Western principles are currently sacrificed on the altar of diversity. For the sake of Western survival, we must not let the city-states of remembered Greece fall to the barbarians at the gate. But adopting MacDonald's Spartan empire of blood is giving in to the barbarians within.

Setting Forth

Do not look back
What would you see!
What was is gone
Like smoke, and free
You ride the dawn.

Be deaf to pasts.
Their call corrodes.
What was has died.
The Word will guide
From foul abodes.

Do not think back.
What was is cleft.
One refuge fair
And ripe is left.
The refuge: There!

No dreams for pasts!
Now grip you staff.
What was is hail
On frozen trail
Where north winds laugh.

No love for pasts!
What was is cracked.
The days when you
Were vision-racked
Grew faint and few.

No grudge for pasts!
What was - forgive;
Fling out your hands
To sunset lands
And stride and live!

Reject return!
Spring stirs the clods.
What was is gauds.
Is death. You wear
The wanderer's garb.
To go - what pain!
To go - what joy!
Do not remain!

- Karl Wolfskehl, German-Jewish exile, 1933

Atheist FAQ

Joseph Leatch asks several questions in Butterflies and Wheels:

All scriptures describe a God or several lesser gods who speak, act, and wield an impact on the material world. All have a will, all interfere with our lives, and all may change things as they see fit. It is possible that Karen Armstrong is correct, and all of this is intended allegorically. But why, we may ask, would religious people write allegories in order to express the opposite of what they say? If they were trying to convince people that God does not exist in an explicit sense, why would they write allegories in which He does? Finally, why would prayer, sacrifice, and the belief that God can fulfill one’s wishes be such a deeply ingrained aspect of all religious traditions if those traditions did not believe that God could wield an impact on the real world?

In order:

1. Because human beings best grasp complex, even paradoxical concepts through allegory. Do most people learn about love through the scientist ("love is a series of chemical reactions...") or the poet ("love is a rose...")? More to the point, who is the better lover?

2. Because the great religious and philosophical texts were written with multiple audiences in mind. The scholar reads differently than the mystic who reads differently than the layman - and not everyone is capable of being a scholar or a mystic.

3. Because even if God cannot wield an impact on the real world, people who believe in God can. "God" may be nothing more than shorthand for the power of belief in God, but "God sustained the Jewish people" is a statement of fact in either case.

Anti-Aryanism

Aryan influence has corrupted all the world - A lot is said today about the Semitic spirit of the New Testament: but what is called Semitic is merely priestly - and in the racially purest Aryan law-book, in Manu, this kind of "Semitism," i.e., the spirit of the priest, is worse than anywhere else.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Methinks Nietzsche is too harsh on the Aryans. But that might just be my Occidental Brahmanism speaking.

Strangers Among Strangers

Galut had numerous meanings for Jacob Joseph of Polonnoe, who at one time (around 1750) thought of settling in Palestine, and he differentiates several sorts of galut: physical galut, in which one is subject to non-Jewish peoples; and spiritual galut, in which the soul is the captive of the evil instinct (yetzer hara). Furthermore, physical galut is not exclusively a state of being held in captivity by the non-Jews. This is only one form of exile, and the easier one. A second, much harder kind is the "exile of the scholar" (talmid hakham) among the ignorant who despise him. A third sort of exile, the hardest of all, is that inflicted upon the pious scholar by the wicked scholars (the "Jewish devil" scholars).
- Bernard Dov Weinryb, The Jews of Poland

Sages saw themselves as special within the context of a general society to be transformed in the image and after the likeness of sages. They were to "Israel" as "Israel" was to the nations.
- Jacob Neusner, "'Israel': Judaism and Its Social Metaphors"

A Jew can be in exile among his own people. A Jew must be in exile among his own people. Judaism is not democratic. The majority of Jews worshipped the golden calf. The majority of Jews ignored the warnings of the prophets. The majority, even the majority of a minority, is always wrong. If the majority of Jews are liberal, that doesn't make Judaism liberalism. If the majority of Jews are atheist, that doesn't make Judaism atheism. Abraham was the minority of one who rejected idol-worship. Abraham is our father, and a son's first loyalty is to his father, not to his brothers. That means a Jew must look to approval from his ancestors, not his contemporaries. The more alienated I feel from my contemporary kin by blood, the more drawn I feel to my ancestral kin by blood and spirit: Moses, exiled before the entrance to the Promised Land; Kafka, exiled before the gate of the law.

That Socrates was fed hemlock by his kinsmen makes him no less a Greek. That Jesus was crucified by his kinsmen makes him no less a Jew. Great religions and nations are vaster than their numbers; even or especially those who number themselves the orthodox. Why should we look to approval from the merely living? The Jewish community is not Judaism, although the two may occasionally overlap. The state of Israel is not spiritual Israel, although the two may occasionally overlap. Israel is not a liberal democracy, but a sacral monarchy; not an extant nation-state, but an existential state of being. Even if our king is dead, even if we killed our king (Nietzsche: "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him"), He is still our king. Fealty to dead ancestors is strange, and fealty to a dead king is even stranger; but to be a stranger in the world is to be at home in the world to come.

King of the Jews

Mark's Jesus is a lonely and restless, mysterious stranger. His mission is dark and obscure. Everything he tries fails. By the end there is no God, no loyal followers, just torture by crucifixion, climaxing in a colossal death-scream. The story closes without a resurrection from the dead. There is just an empty tomb, and three women fleeing in terror.
- John Carroll, The Existential Jesus

As yet had he known only tears, and the melancholy of the Hebrews, together with the hatred of the good and just—the Hebrew Jesus: then was he seized with the longing for death.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair.

Non-Jews Who Should be Eligible for Aliyah

Assyrians:
Fellow Semites who already use the Hebrew alphabet.

Black Hebrew Israelites:
In honour of the Queen of Sheba.

Dönmeh:
Messianic Jews (Sabbatai Zevi, not Yeshua) of Anatolia.

Messianic Jews:
Jews who worship a Jew are still Jews.

Palestinians:
Just kidding.

Syrian Malabar Nasrani:
O.G. Hebrew Christians of India.

Roma:
Fellow recipients of Aryan hospitality.

The Palin Factor

In a mostly uninsightful article on why Jews vote liberal, Norman Podhoretz writes:

Mr. McCain's long history of sympathy with Israel should have given him a distinct advantage over Mr. Obama, whose own history consisted of associating with outright enemies of the Jewish state like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the historian Rashid Khalidi.

Nevertheless, Mr. Obama beat Mr. McCain among Jewish voters by a staggering 57 points. Except for African Americans, who gave him 95% of their vote, Mr. Obama did far better with Jews than with any other ethnic or religious group. Thus the Jewish vote for him was 25 points higher than the 53% he scored with the electorate as a whole; 35 points higher than the 43% he scored with whites; 11 points higher than the 67% he scored with Hispanics; 33 points higher than the 45% he scored with Protestants; and 24 points higher than the 54% he scored with Catholics.

Podhoretz misses a major part of the story. Jews did not vote againt McCain; they voted against Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin, no matter her position on Israel, is anathema to most Jews because of her anti-intellectualism and crass populism. She is a philo-Semitic Cossack, and even her philo-Semitism is based on a Christian theological view no Semite shares. Most North American Jews (lobbyists aside) don't want their politicians to "love Israel." They want their politicians to respect Israel's right to exist and help it achieve a lasting peace. They also want their politicians to be worldly, urbane, well-read and well-spoken. Palin (and Bush) were none of these things. Ergo, few Jewish votes.