Something Unspeakable This Way Comes

Yes, you may be sick of Lawrence Auster. I know I am. I consider here some previous statements which I have only just become aware, and which I find relevant to the critique of his ideas I have already invested quite some effort in. This is also connected to and motivated by the realization I first made and began to explore in September: that it is not possible to forthrightly discuss political correctness, cultural marxism, liberalism, immigration, or White genocide without locking horns with jews. I am still only beginning to absorb the staggering disproportion of their involvement and aggressive and unapologetic pursuit of their own group interests over a very long period of time.

I can see that anyone who comes to such conclusions and speaks out honestly about them is smeared as a lunatic driven to irrational hate by a supposed congenital defect that makes them believe jews are to blame for everything. There is virtually nobody to cite in support who themselves has not already been similarly smeared, even though most do not fit the evil and demented caricature they are slandered with. Thus I continue to focus on and criticize Auster, who has long analyzed and argued against liberalism - an ideology he seems well aware jews helped construct, that most adhere to, and that has empirically served their interests - but when faced with the unpleasant implications of his own arguments would literally rather abandon them than see any responsibility fall on jews.

A few days ago Auster noted a post of his from 14 Nov 2003 where he comments on a quote from Nietzsche's Human, All-Too-Human:

"... [T]he whole problem of the Jews exists only in nation states, for here their energy and higher intelligence, their accumulated capital of spirit and will, gathered from generation to generation through a long schooling in suffering, must become so preponderant as to arouse mass envy and hatred."

Now this is amazing as a very early, remarkably incisive expression of the Jewish problem. Think of it--this was written in the 1870s, 20 years before Theodore Hertzl's blinding revelation that the Jews could never be safe as a minority in Europe and needed their own country. (In the early 1990s I and a friend shared the thought that in whatever society they entered Jews would automatically rise to the top and so create majority-minority tensions. This was a new and disturbing idea to me at the time. Little did I know that Nietzsche had said exactly the same thing 120 years earlier.)

But the passage is also amazing in the context of the Jack Wheeler article I posted yesterday. Wheeler argues that liberal guilt is aimed at neutralizing the envy being directed at the liberal from those at the bottom. Now, according to Nietzsche, which is the most envied and hated of all groups? The Jews. And, as we know, which group is also the most liberal--and famous for its liberal guilt--of all groups? The Jews. The Jews are the most liberal because they are the objects of the most envy.

Auster then links to a post from 12 Nov 2003 where he writes:

Susie is correct about Nietzsche's idea that the slave mentality or _ressentiment_ against the strong originated largely among the Jews, and about his view that this same mentality was expanded through its embodiment in Christianity to the detriment of the world. (However, it's important to point out that Nietzsche's hatred, especially in his almost insane late book The Anti-Christ, was directed against Christianity, not against the Jews; Nietzsche was never an anti-Semite.) She's also correct to point out the connection between the slave mentality and modern liberalism; and also that Jewish neoconservatives differ from liberal Jews in being determinedly pro-American.

However, this doesn't mean that the neoconservatives are free from all forms of that resentment. In my view, the Jewish neoconservatives advance an _ideological_ vision of America, and oppose any notion of a _substantive_ American nation, precisely because they fear that they would not be seen as 100 percent full citizens in it. To this degree, they are still functioning as a self-conscious minority trying to weaken an "oppressive" majority. And the majority, by yielding to the minority's demands, does indeed weaken itself and even puts itself on the path to extinction.

My solution to this dilemma is that the majority must re-discover itself _as_ the majority, and see the minority _as_ the minority. This doesn't mean exclusion, persecution, or loss of rights of the minority. But it does mean that the minority, insofar as it is a minority, should not be able to speak authoritatively for the society as a whole. That indeed is the state we're in now, with advanced liberalism and multiculturalism, in which the minorities express themselves as groups and are given importance as groups, while the members of the majority only express themselves as individuals. An ordered state of society is one in which the majority is the majority, and the minorities are minorities.

Wheeler link and emphasis added.

Let's review. In Nov 2007 Auster summed up his Law of Majority-Minority Relations in Liberal Society like so: "the more difficult or dangerous a minority or non-Western group actually is, the more favorably it is treated". I noted a corollary: that jews are the most favorably treated minority of all, therefore they are the most difficult and dangerous. Auster rejected this because jews are not "perceived as dysfunctional, unassimilable, alien or hostile", except by anti-semites. I then pointed out that even his ad hoc qualifications are arguably satisfied, and that his anti-semitism trump card does nothing but lend credence to my point. Auster responded by making insinuations about my pseudonym, complaining about my blog's color and typeface, and exploring the various ways in which I have sinned against jews - for instance by being indifferent to being labeled an anti-semite.

Far from being indifferent I recognize the hostility and hypocrisy behind that label and the distraction and intimidation it is intended to produce. I condemn and reject it all. I understand and accept Auster's affinity for jews, and thus I understand his anti-anti-semitic bigotry. What I don't understand, and can't abide, is his inconsistency and hypocrisy.

As the blockquotes above show, in 2003 Auster expressed thoughts similar to my own. Consider for example his analysis of the fears motivating jewish neoconservatives. He knows the root of those fears is not their neoconservatism, it is their self-discriminating jewish identity and their self-serving liberal values. The quotes above imply that this "self-conscious minority" helped put "the majority" "on the path to extinction". So as I read it, Auster makes the argument that jews by their own volition have been both unassimilable and hostile to "the majority".

The tact Auster has consistently taken, and the out he would probably take here, is to place all blame and responsibility on "the majority". As he literally phrases it "the majority" weakened "itself", put "itself" on the path to extinction, and the cure is to re-discover "itself". This thinking is of course just as simplistic and one-sided as he imagines everyone he calls an anti-semite is guilty of, except in the opposite direction. His own standard, expressed for instance here, is that it is an error to make judgments about jews as jews. This for some reason does not keep him from asserting "that in whatever society they entered Jews would automatically rise to the top", nor does it keep him from passing judgments on "the majority" as "the majority".

Beside revealing a fallacious double standard, Auster's advice for "the majority" is both dubious and disingenuous. When individuals in "the majority" notice that jews express collective interests, interests which are more cohesive and identifiable and monolithically pursued (eg. civil rights, open borders) than those of "the majority", and point out that such interests harm "the majority", Auster is just as quick as anyone to denounce and call for the offender to be excluded from any further discussion. His proscription of anyone who opposes jews (most of whom are liberal) undermines his prescription that "the majority" should oppose liberals (many of whom are jews). The assertiveness he recommends has already failed, and it was defeated by generations of the kind of divide-and-conquer ostracization he supports.

It's easy to imagine the reverse - a world in which liberal jews or other minorities are denounced and excluded. Liberal jews and their comrades in "the majority" are for all practical purposes driven by just such an imaginative reversal. They constantly breathe life into this fear with their movies, reporting, scholarship, and politics, and insist that everyone else be animated by it too. Their fear of potential repression by "the majority" is used to justify pushing "the majority" toward extinction. If you reject their utopian vision because you can see that it is in fact producing chaos and dystopia, well then you are obviously a neo-nazi who validates all their fears. It is sheer tautological madness.

Smears and inversion are the hallmarks of liberalism. They are the key tools with which liberals have rendered "the majority" powerless and are actively reducing it to a minority. Not one in a hundred people know that this is happening or why. That is not an excuse Lawrence Auster can hide behind. He sees. He knows. And yet he dissimulates.

A quote left on my previous post by Desmond Jones:

‘The Jews,’ he says, ‘will be compelled by anti-Semitism to destroy among all peoples the idea of a fatherland.’ Or, I secretly thought to myself, to create a fatherland of their own."—Theodor Herzl, English translation by H. Zohn, R. Patai, Editor, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, Volume 1, Herzl Press, New York, (1960), p. 196.

Kevin MacDonald quotes Earl Raab:

The Census Bureau has just reported that about half of the American population will soon be non-white or non-European. And they will all be American citizens. We have tipped beyond the point where a Nazi-Aryan party will be able to prevail in this country. We [i.e., Jews] have been nourishing the American climate of opposition to bigotry for about half a century. That climate has not yet been perfected, but the heterogeneous nature of our population tends to make it irreversible— and makes our constitutional constraints against bigotry more practical than ever.

Auster:

Just the other week I was telling a secular, leftist Jew of my acquaintance, a man in his late sixties, about my idea (which I've proposed at FrontPage Magazine) that the only way to make ourselves safe from the specter of domestic Moslem terrorism is to deport all jihad-supporting Moslems from this country. He replied with emotion that if America deported Moslem fundamentalists, it would immediately start doing the same thing to Jews as well. "It's frightening, it's scary," he said heatedly, as if the Jews were already on the verge of being rounded up. In the eyes of this normally phlegmatic and easy-going man, America is just a shout away from the mass persecution, detention, and even physical expulsion of Jews. Given the wildly overwrought suspicions that some Jews harbor about the American Christian majority who are in fact the Jews' best friends in the world, it is not surprising that these Jews look at mass Third-World and Moslem immigration, not as a danger to themselves, but as the ultimate guarantor of their own safety, hoping that in a racially diversified, de-Christianized America, the waning majority culture will lack the power, even if it still has the desire, to persecute Jews.

The deeper I dig the awfuller the truth gets.

UPDATE 24 Jan 2008: Auster replies:

Another person on the warpath against me today is the anti-Semite "Tanstaafl." He has found and quotes at length various statements of mine about the Jews, including my 2004 FrontPage Magazine article, "Why Jews Welcome Moslems," and concludes that I'm an anti-Semite just like him, and therefore I'm a lousy hypocrite for condemning him and refusing to have anything to do with him. It is the case that anti-Semites, whose intellects are pathologically distorted, are unable to see any distinction between rational criticism of Jews and their own dehumanization of Jews. By the way, Tanstaafl, unable to resist for a second showing us where he's really coming from, consistently spells the word "Jews" as "jews," lower case.

My real conclusion is that Auster is the opposite of an anti-semite - he is an anti-anti-semite, i.e. a jewish bigot. He is indeed a hypocrite, which he illustrates here once again. His intellect is "pathologically distorted" and "unable to see any distinction between rational criticism of Jews and their own dehumanization of Jews". My point in this post, and the previous one concerning him, is that he has all the intellectual ability required to engage my arguments, which are after all based on his own words and lines of reasoning. Yet he refuses to do so, apparently because he reserves a higher pedestal for jews, a pedestal from which they can slander and dehumanize and ostracize anyone they choose to label "anti-Semite".

To Auster's credit, and despite his deliberate distortions of my thoughts and desires, he does provide links here. Thus his readers can judge for themselves who is rational. I have no hope or desire to change the anti-anti-semites (like Auster, or my commenter Adam, who corresponds with Auster as Paul T.), my hope is that his non-jewish readers, unaware they are being assimilated, will become more aware of the inversion and inherent bigotry contained in the anti-semite slur. I hope they think of this every time Auster uses it, and every time he quotes his Law of Majority-Minority Relations in Liberal Society. A law from which he exempts the powerful jewish minority based on the circular (and self-nullifying) logic that to argue they have been unassimilable or hostile to "the majority" is forbidden.

UPDATE 6 Mar 2008: Added missing link to Auster's 12 Nov 2003 comment above.