Defaming America’s past: Henry Ford and the Eugenics Movement
By Dr. Kevin MacDonald
One result of the triumph of the culture of critique is that Americans must endure constant defamations against the pre-1965 culture of America. A good example is the defamation of Henry Ford — an icon when I was growing up but now known mainly as an anti-Semite from America’s dark past.
A recent rather egregious example of Henry Ford defamation is an article by Edwin Black promoting his book Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connections to Hitler’s Holocaust. Black claims that:
“To purvey this new brand of Jew hatred [i.e., "political anti-Semitism"] to the world, Ford purchased a failed newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, which serialized the Protocols for 91 weeks. His company then published the series as a book, The International Jew. Using the techniques of mass production, Ford was able to escalate the Protocols from a negligible, randomly circulated irritant to a national sensation of 500,000 copies. Devoting the national sales force and the assets of the Ford Motor Company to the task made Henry Ford the first to organize political anti-Semitism in America. Indeed, he was the hero of anti-Semites the world over.”
The problem with this is that The International Jew is far more than a serialization of the Protocols. Indeed, it is not a serialization of the Protocols at all. Rather, it is a series of journalistic articles (of uneven quality) on Jewish issues written by two of Ford’s employees, Ernest Liebold and Billy Cameron. Liebold was a college-educated bank president before he became Ford’s personal secretary and alter-ego. Cameron was a journalist who subscribed to an early version of the Christian identity movement that believed the Anglo-Saxons were descended from one of the lost tribes of Israel.
Black’s zeal to discredit Ford even leads him to claim that TIJ was then distributed in Germany where Hitler read it at least two years before writing Mein Kampf. The proof of this is that Hitler refers to the Protocols in Mein Kampf.
The logic seems to be that Hitler never would have heard of the Protocols except for the nefarious work of Henry Ford who was responsible for distributing it in Germany. No Henry Ford, no Holocaust.
This is ridiculous. The Protocols had been circulating in Germany since around 1918 — before TIJ was written. Hitler certainly didn’t need Henry Ford to be aware of the Protocols — nor were the Protocols the source of Hitler’s anti-Jewish attitudes. And, as I noted, TIJ is much more than the Protocols.
If this is the sort of scholarship that typifies Black’s book, one can only be amazed that it found a publisher at all. Yet the book’s website has blurbs praising the research behind the book. According to Michael Hirsch of Newsweek, Black performed “exhaustive research.” Adrienne Miller of Esquire writes: “Edwin Black is a dangerous man. He tells us things we don’t want to hear, like: ‘The scientific rationales that drove killer doctors at Auschwitz were first concocted on Long Island.’”
But of course people like Hirsch and Miller do want to hear what Black has to say because it conforms entirely to their world view. In that world view, anti-Jewish attitudes of people like Henry Ford are nothing more than outlandish conspiracy theories based on forged documents. (The US Holocaust Memorial Museum describes TIJ as “an Americanized version of the Protocols,” suggesting that Black’s views are entirely mainstream among Jewish intellectual activists.)
How should we characterize TIJ and its relation to the Protocols? The following is based on my review of TIJ, and interested readers should consult the entire review. TIJ at times exaggerates Jewish influence and Jewish unity, and it often expresses its ideas crudely. (Nevertheless, I rather doubt that its standards of journalism could be any worse than Black’s.) The following summarizes points made in TIJ that are supported by mainstream research on the history Jews of that period.
- Jews had achieved a great deal of economic success in the US, even to the point of dominating certain important industries. TIJ particularly emphasizes Jewish domination of the movie industry because it viewed the movie industry as undermining the traditional sexual mores of America. For example, TIJ discusses the Jews behind the major motion picture companies of the era, going over much the same information as Neal Gabler’s (1988) An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood.
- TIJ is careful to note that its concerns with the moral messages in movies are not idiosyncratic but part of a larger cultural conflict between the movie industry and large segments of the American public: “In almost every state there are movie censorship bills pending, with the old ‘wet’ and gambling elements against them, and the awakened part of the decent population in favor of them; always, the Jewish producing firms constituting the silent pressure behind the opposition” (2/12/1921). Indeed, the The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, headed by Will H. Hays, was created in 1922 in response to movements in over thirty state legislatures to enact strict censorship laws. Later the Production Code Administration, headed by Joseph I. Breen, was launched in response to a campaign by the Catholic National Legion of Decency. TIJ’s reservations about the moral content of movies were indeed widely shared among the American public.
- Jewish organizations had launched highly successful campaigns to remove references to Christianity from U.S. public culture and to legitimize Judaism as a religion on a par with Protestantism and Catholicism. Writing in 1978, John Murray Cuddihy made a similar point about the remarkable fact that Judaism had become recognized as an official religion of the US despite the fact that Jews only constituted around 2–3% of the population.
- Jewish organizations had been able to impose their ethnic interests on certain key areas of domestic policy. As TIJ noted, Jews were the main force behind unrestricted immigration. By 1920, unrestricted immigration policy had continued nearly 20 years after U.S. public opinion had turned against it.
- Jews had also been able to impose their ethnic interests in the area of foreign policy despite widespread feelings that the policies advocated by the Jewish community were often not in the best interests of the United States. The main examples highlighted by TIJ were the abrogation of the Russian trade agreement in 1911 and post-World War I policy toward Eastern Europe. In these cases, American Jewish attitudes were more in line with what they saw as the interests of foreign Jews rather than the economic or political interests of the U.S. Jews achieved their goals on these issues despite opposition from some powerful forces. The Taft Administration opposed the Russian Trade Agreement, and a wide range of US military and diplomatic figures thought that the U.S. should support Poland as a bulwark against Bolshevism and that Jewish complaints against Poland were exaggerated.
- TIJ argued that Jews had been a major force behind the success of Bolshevism and its incredibly bloody reign of terror in the Soviet Union, as well as the abortive communist revolutions in Hungary (led by Bela Kun) and in Germany (led by Kurt Eisner). TIJ noted that many American Jews remained sympathetic to communism, and it argued that in Poland Jewish sympathy for communism was a major factor in Polish anti-Semitism.
- Jews were the main component and by far the most energetic component of the radical left in the United States, a movement that advocated a massive political, economic, and cultural transformation of the U.S. TIJ documents close links between radical Jewish organizations, such as the 200,000-person Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, and the wider Jewish community. Such linkages continued at least into the 1950s when McCarthy-era pressure forced mainstream Jewish organizations like the American Jewish Congress to divest itself of connections to organizations deemed subversive by the US Attorney General.
- In general, TIJ sees Jews as suffering from moral particularlsm (Is it good for the Jews?) and as ruthlessly oppressing others when they have power to do so. Besides Bolshevism, TIJ mentions the the violence of the Jabotinskiists in Palestine — an insightful comment given the power of the Jabotinskiists in Israel today. TIJ points out that in pre-modern societies, Jews made alliances with elites, while anti-Jewish actions have had populist overtones.
- Jews had attained a substantial influence over the U.S. media via a virtual monopoly on the movie production business, domination of the theater and music businesses, their influence in journalism, and their ownership of some newspapers. Jews were also able to apply economic pressure on newspapers owned by non-Jews because of the importance of advertizing by Jewish-owned department stores in major cities. Jews used this media influence to advance their domestic and foreign policy agendas. TIJ also argued that Jewish-owned media portrayed Jews and Judaism positively while portraying Christianity negatively — a theme that continues in the present.
- Although tending to exaggerate Jewish unity, there are a great many areas where TIJ was correct in claiming a great deal of consensus within the Jewish community on certain issues: Campaigns to remove public displays of Christianity and language suggesting the United States is a Christian nation; withdrawing literature and other cultural artifacts deemed anti-Jewish (e.g., the campaign to remove The Merchant of Venice from the high school curriculum); open immigration; US foreign policy toward countries perceived as anti-Jewish (e.g., toward Russia prior to the fall of the Czar and toward Poland and Romania after World War I).
TIJ would have been quite sympathetic to the idea that Jewish behavior is what I call a group evolutionary strategy. TIJ sees Jews as an ethnic group, not a religion. For example, as part of its argument TIJ quotes Supreme Court Justice and Zionist Louis Brandeis that “the percentage of foreign blood in the Jews of today is very low. Probably no important European race is as pure.” In other words, Jews saw themselves as a racially pure group. Despite this, TIJ comments on the Jewish campaign to have themselves viewed as a religion, not an ethnic group in the US.
Finally, Jewish traits of intelligence and ethnocentrism were well recognized by TIJ: “The international Jew . . . rules not because he is rich, but because in a most marked degree he possesses the commercial and masterful genius of his race, and avails himself of a racial loyalty and solidarity the like of which exists in no other human group” (TIJ, 6/12/1920).
* * *
While far from perfect even as journalism, many of the points made in TIJ have substantial support given current scholarship. Obviously, despite the claims of Edwin Black and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, TIJ is not at all like the rather strange and unspecific Protocols.
The relation between TIJ and the Protocols requires some comment. The Protocols presents a “theory” in which absolutely every aspect of modernism is explained as the result of a single, centuries-old overarching Jewish conspiracy to subjugate non-Jews.
I certainly do not want to endorse the Protocols. (See my comments on the Protocols) But it’s worth pointing out that even though TIJ supports the truth of the Protocols, the Protocols is not used to bolster facts about Jewish influence, such as Jewish ownership of the movie industry or Jewish influence on abrogating the Russian Trade Agreement. Rather, the facts about Jewish influence are used as support for the truth of the Protocols. TIJ argues repeatedly that the best evidence for the authenticity of the Protocols is that events since the Protocols conform to its predictions. In other words, TIJ acknowledged the need to back up claims about Jews and Jewish influence with actual evidence. This is a long way from how Edwin Black, Neil Baldwin, and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum present it.
Ford eventually responded to Jewish pressure, abandoned TIJ, and signed an apology for his actions. The reasons for this remain mysterious. But he never changed his mind about Jews: In 1938, Ford received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle despite a wave of protest from the Jewish press.
Henry Ford receives the Grand Cross of the German Eagle
Another part of Black’s world view is that eugenic theories based on scientific racism had the inevitable consequence of rationalizing gruesome experiments at Auschwitz and even the Holocaust itself. The “logic” is that eugenics leads to race science which leads to the Holocaust. This calls for a fuller treatment, but in closing I note only the following:
1. The logic behind eugenics is impeccable. In its classical form, it proposes that qualities such as health, intelligence, and moral character are socially valuable. Eugenicists were correct that that these qualities are strongly influenced by genetics, and they argued that society can promote these qualities by policies such as discouraging reproduction of people with negative traits and encouraging reproduction of people with positive traits. Many of those who advocated eugenics were social radicals with utopian visions.
2. Eugenic theories played no role in the Holocaust. Hitler, like the writers of TIJ, certainly did not believe that Jews were genetically inferior. Rather, he viewed them as powerful competitors with other groups, including Germans. And he correctly understood the importance of racial purity to Jews, stating in Mein Kampf “While he seems to overflow with “enlightenment,” “progress,” “freedom,” “humanity,” etc., he himself practices the severest segregation of his race.”
3. Jews have a long history of utilizing and explicitly advocating eugenics beginning in the ancient world. Eugenic practices are enshrined in the Talmud, including the injunction for wealthy men to marry their daughters to scholars and the need to scrutinize the family history of prospective spouses for signs of genetic diseases. With the rise of Darwinism, the eugenic practices of traditional Judaism were much discussed as an important ingredient in Jewish success. Many Jewish race scientists in the pre-World War II era both in Europe and in Palestine believed that Jews were a master race and that they had become a master race by following eugenic marriage practices.
4. Eugenic practices have a respected place within contemporary Israel. Yael Hashioni-Dolev shows that Israeli geneticists and the Israeli public strongly favor eugenic practices. Israeli women are “heavily pressured to engage in selection of their embryos, or, in the ultra-Orthodox community, to marry according to ‘genetic compatibility.’” (Prof. John Glad’s website is an excellent source of information on this topic.) This can be seen as an aspect of racial Zionism that dominates contemporary Israeli political culture.
The strong Jewish opposition to eugenics in the West began with the Boasian school of anthropology — a prime topic of The Culture of Critique. Edwin Black carries on that tradition. But, as with other issues (such as ethnic nationalism), it’s pretty clearly a case of “do as I say, not as I do.”
And as is so often the case with scholarship motivated by a Jewish ethnic agenda, Black’s conclusions have little to do with the truth but everything to do with reinforcing Jewish world views — views in which Jews are moral paragons who are victimized by people like Henry Ford and the eugenicists.
I am interested in who Kevin McDonald is after reading this article and the other article I posted in my Catholic section.
Is he really teaching at Cal State Long Beach? Do we want a man like this teaching American students?
The far right accuses the Left of brainwashing students, but what is this man teaching his students? Are they going to believe his lies?
Anyway, I thought I better start researching him as White Nationalists like to quote and use Kevin McDonald in the stats they give people to prove their message.
Here is another article I found written by Kevin McDonald.
It is long reading, but I think it is important to know what he believes and may be teaching in his classroom.
Comments on “Memories of Madison”: White ethno-nationalism and Zionism
Kevin MacDonald
March 27, 2009
I received many positive responses to my VDARE.com article “Memories of Madison: My life in the New Left” — quite a few from people who went through similar experiences. I hope that some of these people would write up their experiences. They are very valuable as a firsthand account of history. Another column based on others’ experiences would certainly have quite a bit of interest.
A lot of us are still “getting over” those days, and there can be little doubt that the sensibilities of the 1960s are a major ingredient in our current cultural malaise. The big story of the 20th century in the US is a struggle for influence by the Jewish-dominated left. The Jewish Old Left was contained during the 1950s by the influence of McCarthyism. But the breakthrough of the New Left into the mainstream culture in the 1960s has had a very large influence on current cultural norms, especially on elite attitudes toward immigration and multiculturalism. As I mentioned in the article, the implicit agenda of the Jewish left has been the general displacement of non-Jewish whites.
Two comments bear an extended discussion. A correspondent, Mark A. Mendlovitz, asks why I “oppose Zionism. Is not what Israeli Jews are doing analogous to what you and I are seeking to do here in the U.S.?”
It seems to me that Mendlovitz and others like him should first and foremost ask this question of their fellow Jews. That is, the vast majority of American Jews are Zionists but the organized Jewish community and the vast majority of American Jews are opposed to the idea that European-Americans have any legitimate interest in retaining political and cultural dominance. My view is that Jews who are interested in supporting European Americans in these goals should attempt to change the views of other Jews.
I certainly do not oppose the principle that it is legitimate for people to carve out a piece of real estate so that they can develop their own form of ethnic nationalism. Indeed, in a previous VDARE.com article, I emphasized the legitimacy and benefits of universal ethnic nationalism, based on the work of Jerry Z. Muller and Frank Salter.
Mendlovitz writes “Yes, supporting Israel is trouble for the U.S., but as is often the case, doing what is right is troublesome.” As he suggests, the problem is that Jewish ethnic nationalism has resulted in a very large cost to the United States for all the reasons that writers like Mearsheimer and Walt — and I — describe.
Frankly, I do not believe that it is in my ethnic interests nor is in the interests of the United States to antagonize the Arab and Muslim world in the interests of an expansionist, ethno-nationalist Israel. It’s simply not our fight. And now there is a real danger that the Israel Lobby will persuade the US to go to war against Iran. This would be yet another enormously costly effort. There can be no question at all that the hostilities between Iran and the US are centered around US support for Israel.
I completely agree that Arabs and other Muslims should be excluded from Western countries, but I don’t single them out in this regard. As an ethnic nationalist, I would like to see Western countries committed to preserving European peoples and their cultures. Let the Arabs continue to fester in their failed, undemocratic societies, with veiled women, clans, polygamy, and cousin marriage. I certainly do not blame Israel for their failures, any more than I blame the West for Africa’s problems. The neocon dream of converting the Arab nations into democratic, republican states was always nothing more than a bit of utopian propaganda that was aided and abetted by staunchly Zionist academics like Bernard Lewis and his neocon publicists. (Yet the ADL and the SPLC claim that I am the dishonest one who attempts to use his academic position to spread falsities.)
I would be willing to make a quid pro quo with the organized Jewish community: If you support white ethno-nationalism in the US and provide intensive, effective support for ending and reversing the immigration policy of recent decades (i.e., something approaching the support you presently provide Israel), I would be willing to go to the wall to support Jewish ethno-nationalism in Israel, even at substantial cost for the US. The fact that a miniscule number of Jews — none of them part of the main Jewish activist organizations that have been so destructive to white ethno-nationalism — are immigration patriots and see value in America as a European civilization is certainly not a reason for someone like me to support Jewish ethno-nationalism.
As a humorous aside (we can’t always be serious!), Philip Weiss reports that Abe Foxman made the following argument for why just about everyone should support Zionism. It is a reductio ad absurdum of the argument that white ethno-nationalists should support Jewish nationalism:
Can you be anti-Zionist and not be an anti-Semite? Almost never. Unless you can prove to me you’re against nationalism. If you’re one of those unique individuals in this world that’s opposed to American nationalism, French nationalism, Palestinian nationalism, then you can be opposed to Jewish nationalism. Is it racist? You bet it is. Every nationalism is racist. It sets its laws of citizenship, it sets its own capital… It sets its songs, it sets its values. It is, if you will, exclusive, and you can even call it racist. But if the only nationalism in the world that is racist is Jewish nationalism, then you’re an anti-Semite.. I don’t want to make any apologies for it.
Hmmm, racism means excluding anyone from anything? In practice, Jewish nationalism means, among other things, erecting an apartheid society and enacting racialist marriage laws in Israel (see below). On the other hand, mainstream forms of American “proposition-nation” nationalism — led by the ADL — seem resolutely committed to a post-European America. If sing the Star Spangled Banner at a baseball game, I must logically support Jewish nationalism as it exists in Israel? I think not.
As I argued previously, white people must be less principled and more self- interested. This implies that they should support others’ nationalism only when it is in their self-interest.
I must agree with Weiss that Foxman is “a loud man with reality issues.”
I agree with Mendlovitz that “while many Jews still vote largely Democrat and have a soft spot for liberal causes, the number of Jewish ‘radicals’ is vastly less than it once was, partly because of the general affluence of the Jewish population, and partly because of a number of other factors.” The problem is that the Jewish defection from the far left has not really altered the fundamental conflicts of interest between the organized Jewish community and white Americans.
1. A major factor easing the defection of Jews from the radical left (in addition to concerns about anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and Soviet support for the Arabs against Israel in the Cold War) was the leftist critique of Zionism. Mark Rudd’s comments, quoted in my article are typical of the leftist critique: Israel is “militarized, racist, religio-nationalist, corporate, riven with so many internal splits and hatreds that only the existence of a perpetual enemy keeps the nation from exploding.” Whereas Rudd remained a leftist, Jews deserted the left in droves when it became impossible to reconcile their leftism with their commitment to Jewish ethno-nationalism and the state of Israel.
2. Neocons — really the only significant group of “conservative” Jews — are no help on issues like immigration. Their main concerns are to organize US support for Israel and to keep the conservative wing of American politics safe for Jews. Neocons only adopt conservative social policies as positions of convenience in order to appeal to the Republican base. As Peter Brimelow noted, “[William] Kristol will return to immigration enthusiasm once he has helped persuade Bush to attack Iran.” (Kristol failed to persuade Bush, but he is now hard at work trying to persuade Obama.)
3. Even though the organized Jewish community is now best described as liberal rather than radical, it is still deeply committed to a post-European America, and that is really the only important issue. A recent spectacle illustrating this is the “Progress by Pesach” campaign to promote open borders immigration reform. Even Lawrence Auster, whose role as a Jewish activist seems to be to advance the cause of Israel within what he calls the “traditionalist, politically incorrect Right” (see below), sees this as a Jewish problem:
What they are explicitly saying, as a national Jewish coalition, is that as Jews, they are required by their Jewish tradition to seek to undermine American law and sovereignty and allow America to be invaded by a mass immigration of illegal aliens.
I have said before that when Jews declare that as Jews they are required to strive for open borders, when as Jews they demand U.S. national suicide, that allows critics to criticize Jews as Jews, and not just as generic “liberals.” This is the strongest case of that nature I’ve ever seen. [italics in text]
Well, I thought I made a pretty good case for that over a decade ago. Anyway, even the prospect of millions of Muslim immigrants is not enough to diminish the enthusiasm for massive non-white immigration by the organized Jewish community — a sure sign that the decades-old emotional commitment of the organized Jewish community to a post-European America trumps rational considerations altogether.
Mendlovitz’s comments are interesting and reflect fairly widespread Jewish concerns. On the other hand, Lawrence Auster’s comments, posted on his website, are first and foremost an attempt to place me beyond the realm of legitimate discourse. By titling the article “The idiocy of Kevin MacDonald,” Auster is saying, “Don’t go near MacDonald—he is off limits.”
This is the same sort of thing that Jewish activists like Alan Dershowitz and Jonathan Chait have tried to do with Mearsheimer and Walt. Dershowitz called The Israel Lobby a “hate-filled screed against Jewish participation in American politics.” Chait chimed in with “Walt and Mearsheimer wrote a book that, even by the account of fair-minded and even ideologically sympathetic critics, is a shoddy, paranoid screed.”
Certainly no respectable person would want to publicly sympathize with screed writers — or idiots.
Auster is clearly living in an alternate universe — a universe in which Israel is a “post-Zionist” state dominated by “soft-hearted liberals.” Whereas everyone else is pondering the horrific brutality of the Israeli invasion of Gaza under a Kadima government and the specter of a Likud government organized by Benjamin Netanyahu with Avigdor Lieberman as Foreign Minister apparently with a secret agreement for expansion of a critical settlement near Jerusalem, in Auster’s world Israel has already ceased to exist as a Zionist state.
The connections between the racialist Jabotinskiist wing of Zionism and the current politics of Israel are straightforward. The Likud party and its leaders — people like Ariel Sharon (who later formed the Kadima Party), Menachem Begin, and Yitzhak Shamir — have been open in their allegiance to Jabotinskyism. (Here’s a photo of Sharon speaking to a Likud Party convention in 2004 under a looming photo of Jabotinsky.) Jabotinsky believed that Jews were shaped by their long history as a desert people and that the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state would allow the natural genius of the Jewish race to flourish, stating, for example: “These natural and fundamental distinctions embedded in the race are impossible to eradicate, and are continually being nurtured by the differences in soil and climate.” As Geoffrey Wheatcroft recently pointed out, at the present time Israel “is governed by [Jabotinsky’s] conscious heirs.”
One knows that racial Zionism has completely won the day in Israel when Kadima — the party of Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni and the Gaza invasion — was described by Benjamin Netanyahu during the recent election campaign as the party of the left. (The LA Times dutifully calls it “centrist” but, as Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery writes, Livni “cries to high heaven against any dialogue with Hamas. She objects to a mutually agreed ceasefire. She tries to compete with Netanyahu and Liberman (sic) with unbridled nationalist messages.”) Indeed, Netanyahu’s only worry during the election was that the openly racist Lieberman — a disciple of the notorious Meir Kehane — would take away too many votes from Likud. Avnery analogizes the election to a joke where a sergeant tells his men: “I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that you are going to change your dirty socks. The bad news is that you are going to exchange them among yourselves.”
Now, if Israeli politics was dominated by people like Avnery, Auster would be quite correct. But Avnery’s Gush Shalom movement has no power in Israel. Even labeling the Labor Party as “soft-hearted liberals” is a huge stretch given that Labor has supported all of Israel’s wars, including the expansionist 1967 war when it held power and the recent Gaza invasion which was implemented by Defense Minister Ehud Barack — leader of the Labor Party.
Labor is dwindling away to nothingness, its only role to provide cover for the far right. Labor won only 13 out of 120 seats in the Knesset in the February election. Parties to its left (including Arab parties) won another 15 seats. Labor has opted to join Netanyahu’s government, or, as Avnery describes it, “Ehud Barak decided that the Labor Party must join the ultra-right government, which includes outright fascists.” This move is seen by many as providing the government with a fig leaf of respectability (see also here) that will appeal to European governments and others who have been critical of Israel’s behavior while nevertheless allowing the government to pursue its ethno-nationalist agenda.
Even excluding Kadima, the right wing nationalist and religious nationalist parties form a majority of the Israeli electorate — a percentage that is sure to increase because of the high fertility of religious and ethno-nationalist Jews and because intensified troubles with the Palestinians tend to make other Israelis more sympathetic to their cause. And if one makes the reasonable conclusion that Kadima is part of the ethno-religious-nationalist right, this faction holds 92 of the 120 seats in the Knesset.
Another phenomenon illustrating the ethno-religious-nationalist bent of current Israeli politics is that some of the rabbis accompanying the Israeli Defense Force during the Gaza invasion lectured soldiers that the purpose of the invasion was to banish non-Jews from the biblical land of Israel. Nationalist rabbis turned the invasion into a religious, messianic — “war against an entire people, not against specific terrorists.” Particularly noteworthy is that religious nationalists have taken over senior positions in elite combat brigades.
In other words, the army has become much more like what Auster wants it to be.
Although (as usual) there are conflicting accounts of the role of the role of religious fundamentalists in the atrocities committed in Gaza, J. J. Goldberg’s account does not dispute the general finding that religiously Orthodox soldiers form a substantial percentage of soldiers in infantry combat brigades and officers training programs. Moreover, ‘some of them appear to be a sub-rosa part of the unfolding story of the ethical standards upheld by the military, which Israelis praise routinely as ‘the most moral army in the world.’” Avnery’s account detailing the atrocity allegations is a must-read.
Over a decade ago Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky noted that Gush Emunim — a religious group that believes that a greater Israel was allotted to Jews in the Book of Deuteronomy — already constituted a significant percentage of the elite units of the Israeli army. (By “Greater Israel” they mean all the land promised to Abraham in Genesis: From the Nile to the Euphrates. Americans who support Israel should prepare themselves for a very long series of wars indeed.) The Gush Emunim are quite willing to treat the Palestinians in a savage and brutal manner. Their ideology is what one might call “theological racism”: A founder of Gush Emunim, Rabbi Abraham Kook taught that “The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews—all of them in all different levels—is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.”
Just another soft-hearted liberal fuzzball.
Finally, Avnery also discusses the recently enacted law barring Arab citizens of Israel from marrying someone who lives on the West Bank. The law contains the following remarkable sentence: “The State of Israel is at war with the Palestinian people, people against people, collective against collective.” That means that the State of Israel has declared itself to be at war with all Palestinians, including the ones living in Israel. The purpose is to create a homogeneous Jewish state: “The inherent aim of the Zionist enterprise was and is to turn the country — at least up to the Jordan River — into a homogeneous Jewish state. Throughout the course of Zionist-Israeli history, this aim has not been forsaken for a moment. Every cell of the Israeli organism contains this genetic code and therefore acts accordingly, without the need for a specific directive.”
Whatever else one might say, Israel has definitely not entered into a post-Zionist era.
Rather than condemning me for telling the truth, Auster should be happy that things are going his way in Israel. I wish that a similarly powerful (but not similarly brutal) ethno-nationalist European movement was on the horizon in the US and other countries of the European diaspora.
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There is too much idiocy in Kevin MacDonald’s article to criticize in a simple blog comments section, but there are several things to consider.
First, he is either just lying or totally ignorant when he claims that eugenics had nothing to do with the Holocaust. The Nazi belief in eugenics, including eugenics popular during that era, is well-established. They released a whole film about the subject. The Holocaust refers to the planned extermination of groups by the Nazis, so this would include those exterminated due to perceived genetic inferiority, either the mentally ill and disabled, or the Jews, Russians etc. And yes, the Jews WERE considered genetically and culturally inferior to the Nazis, as is evident by Nazi propaganda. So in short, either he is inexcuseably ignorant about history(likely), or flat out lying. I think it’s a combination of both, perhaps a bit of willful ignorance.
Kevin MacDonald lacks a great deal of historical knowledge, and as such, he should think twice about criticizing others on minor historical errors(such as whether Hitler came in contact with the protocols via TIJ). What is undeniable, is that Ford did indeed have a profound influence on Hitler, and vice versa, and thus pointing this out is not unwarranted “Ford bashing”.
I found this statement on the college website:
“Statement on the Controversial Writings of Dr. Kevin MacDonald
A majority of Psychology Department faculty members approved the following statement.
While the Department of Psychology highly values academic freedom, many faculty members are concerned that our Department and University are being seen as supporting the work of our colleague, Dr. Kevin McDonald. This work on ethnic/racial differences, more specifically the conclusions he has drawn on Jewish culture, has been embraced by certain extremist groups, and used by some as a rationale for their ideology.
Concerns about how Dr. MacDonald’s research is being used by extremist groups led to a forum in December 2007 during which Dr. MacDonald was invited to present his work. During this forum and subsequent on-line discussions, faculty raised a number of concerns. Faculty were particularly concerned that Dr. MacDonald’s research on Jewish culture does not adhere to the Department’s explicitly stated values on academic freedom, responsibility in research, and human diversity. Faculty also raised concerns about potential violations of the American Psychological Association’s Ethical Principles and Code of Conduct (http://www.apa.org/ethics/code2002.html) and a variety of conceptual and methodological issues. It was also noted that many of these writings have appeared in other media rather than in psychological journals that require peer review and rigorous scientific and psychological methodology.
As a result of these concerns, the department wishes to dissociate itself from the controversial writings of Dr. Kevin MacDonald. We respect and defend his right to express his views, but we affirm that they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the Department of Psychology at California State University, Long Beach.
Statement approved by ballot 23 April 2008.”
That is great that they do not endorce his views, but I still wonder what he is teaching his students in the classroom?
I should also point out that Kevin MacDonald claims that Jews try to conceal the importance of race, which is strange because several popular “academic racists”, including the authors of the Bell Curve, which MacDonald supposedly believes, are Jewish.
Really the whole thing is a canard to tar his opponents. If someone challenges his views and they happen to be Jewish, he implies that they are merely part of a cover-up.
by Philip Weiss
My work has been embraced by Kevin MacDonald, a UC-Long Beach prof of psychology who has become controversial for his views of Jews. On his blog, MacDonald writes of my recent post on the Jewish presence in the establishment.
Jews won the culture war without a shot being fired and without the losing side seeming to realize that it was a war with real winners and real losers — where the losers have not only given up their cultural preeminence, but have failed to stand up to the ultimate denouement: demographic displacement from lands they had controlled for centuries. The new elite retains its outsider feelings toward their new subjects — a hostile elite in the United States as it was in the Soviet Union.
…Weiss seems to feel a twinge of guilt about the role of Jews as victors in the culture war — guilt stemming from his understanding that the new elite has some very glaring moral failings of its own, including its own brand of ethnocentrism that seems far deeper than anything imagined by the WASPs.
The danger for Jews is that non-Jews will come to realize the deep wellsprings of Jewish ethnocentrism and see Jewish involvement in the displacement of European-descended peoples as resulting from ethnic conflict over the construction of culture. Ultimately, Europeans may come to realize that the conflict is really about the ethnic displacement of themselves as a people.
Speaking for myself, it would be difficult for me not to have developed something of a sense of my peoplehood after delving into the 2000-year history of Jews who were intensely concerned about preserving their people and their culture. As I’ve come to realize, preserving one’s people and culture is a virtual human universal.
I find a lot of what MacDonald has said elsewhere bracing and bold. He is alive to important sociological trends that few people are talking about out loud. When he speaks, feelingly, of the displacement of WASPs, he is giving voice to a declension and hurt that I’ve seen even in gentile friends of mine, and that is rarely expressed…
“In terms of their politics, they were almost all Democrats and then as soon as the Democratic party suggested that it wasn’t going to have a strong military, Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, the grandfathers of this movement, they went Republican. Why? Because they said, back in the 70′s, a strong American military is needed to protect Israel.”