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Can the Jewish Model Help the West Survive?
by Kevin MacDonald, Ph.D.
November 2004
[Address upon receiving The 2004 Jack London Literary Prize]
First I want to thank everyone involved in the award. It means a lot to me.
I do think it's important to discuss Jewish issues as openly and honestly as
one can and with as much intellectual rigor as one can muster. As a great
American, Joe Sobran, once wrote:
The full story of [Pat Buchanan's 1996 presidential] campaign is impossible
to tell as long as it's taboo to discuss Jewish interests as freely as we
discuss those of the Christian Right. . . . Not that the Jews are
all-powerful, let alone all bad. But they are successful, and therefore
powerful enough: and their power is unique in being off-limits to normal
criticism even when it's highly visible. They themselves behave as if their
success were a guilty secret, and they panic, and resort to accusations, as
soon as the subject is raised. Jewish control of the major media in the
media age makes the enforced silence both paradoxical and paralyzing.
Survival in public life requires that you know all about it, but never refer
to it. A hypocritical etiquette forces us to pretend that the Jews are
powerless victims; and if you don't respect their victimhood, they'll
destroy you. It's a phenomenal display not of wickedness, really, but of
fierce ethnocentrism, a sort of furtive racial superpatriotism.1
I agree entirely with this. And this last part of Sobran's comments bears
directly on the topic of my talk: Is Judaism an appropriate model for
survival of the West -- by which I mean not only culturally but ethnically as
well. I have at times been accused of being an anti-Semite. But the reality
is that I greatly admire Jews as a group that has pursued its interests over
thousands of years, while retaining its ethnic coherence and intensity of
group commitment. There have been ups and downs in Jewish fortunes, to be
sure; but their persistence, at times in the face of long odds, and their
spectacular success at the present time, are surely worthy of emulation.
Taking seriously the idea of Judaism as a model for ethnic activism is a
tall order indeed. What would we have to do that we are not doing now?
First, we would have to develop a strong sense of ourselves as a people with
interests -- interests that often conflict with the interests of others. The
fact is, of course, that any mention of the ethnic interests of European
Americans or even Europeans in Europe or anywhere else is certain to be
greeted with scorn, accusations of "racism" and moral depravity. These
accusations are effective because if there is one area where the
intellectual left has won a complete and decisive victory, it is in
pathologizing the ethnic interests of the European majority of the United
States. By "pathologizing" I mean not only that people have been taught to
believe with utter certainty that there is no biological reality to race or
ethnicity, but that the slightest assertion of ethnic self-interest by the
European majority of the United States is the sign of a grave moral defect.
Indeed, it is a moral defect so grave that it is really more a matter of
psychiatric concern than anything else.
Of course, this stance requires a great deal of hypocrisy because assertions
of ethnic interests by Europeans are stigmatized at the same time that
assertions of ethnic interest by other groups are utterly commonplace and
respectable. As Virginia Abernethy wrote recently,
The goals of the multicultural game are ethnic separatism, ethnic privilege,
and ethnic power. I began to realize not too long ago that I have to play
the multicultural game, at least defensively, or I and my family and kin
will lose out. It is what every ethnic group except, in the main,
European-Americans, does these days.2
Indeed, Mexican activists loudly advertise their goal of reconquering the
Southwestern United States via immigration from Mexico -- an event that would
be rather obviously in the ethnic interests of Mexicans but undoubtedly
compromise the interests of European-Americans. Jewish organizations, which
were in the forefront leading the intellectual and political battles to
pathologize the ethnic interests of European Americans, have also been
deeply involved in organizing coalitions of minority ethnic groups to assert
their political interests in Congress and in the workplace. The elaborate
Jewish effort on behalf of their ethnic brethren in Israel is legendary and
can only be described as awesome in its effectiveness.
So the very first thing that any ethnic group must do is to assert their
ethnic interests openly and honestly. Until recently, ethnic interests were
understood intuitively by everyone but not formally analysed. And of course
there has been a major effort by the intellectual left to convince everyone
that their commonsense perceptions of race and ethnicity are an illusion. As
Frank Salter, Henry Harpending, and William Hamilton have shown, people have
an interest in their ethnic group in exactly the same way that parents have
a genetic interest in raising their children.3 When world populations are
sampled, genetic differences between groups are significant -- on average, they
are about the same as the kinship between a grandparent and a grandchild. In
other words, on average, people are as closely related to other members of
their ethnic group versus the rest of the world as they are related to their
grandchildren versus the rest of their ethnic group.
What this means is that it is very rational to make extreme sacrifices for
our ethnic group. And I would like to underline that. Because of the large
number of ethnic brethren numbering in the hundreds of millions, we are
actually far better off from an evolutionary point of view if we have a
positive influence on the future of our ethnic group than when we
successfully rear our own children. Extreme self-sacrifice is entirely
warranted and rational if it has a positive effect on our ethnic survival. I
think we should all keep this in mind when planning our future life course.
The best way to defend ethnic interests is to defend a territory against
immigration from other ethnic groups. The big story of immigration since
WWII of course is that wealthy Western societies with economic opportunities
and a high level of public goods such as medical care and education, are
magnets for immigration from around the world. We should never forget and
should be immensely proud of the fact that Western societies act as magnets
precisely because of the spectacular success of the peoples of European
descent in creating the science and technology that is the basis for the
incredible explosion of wealth and the breakthroughs in medicine and public
health. And it goes without saying that we should also be immensely proud of
the extraordinary flowering of European high culture that has repeatedly
produced geniuses like Bach, Beethoven, Wagner and Shakespeare.
Jewish pride
in their own culture is of course a very important part of the Jewish
tradition, and it certainly bears emulation. Sadly, a primary effect of the
culture of critique has been to produce immense guilt among so many
Europeans about their own culture, their own history, and their own people.
However, because Western societies act as very powerful magnets for
immigration and because we have not acted to defend ourselves against this
onslaught, the result will be displacement of the founding populations, not
only in the United States, but also in Australia, Canada, and throughout the
European Union. If present trends continue, in the United States the
founding European-derived population is set to become a minority by the
middle of this century; in the British Isles the submergence date is just
two generations later.
In mobilizing a sense of ethnic interest, Europeans are at a very serious
disadvantage compared to Jews. A very striking feature of Jewish groups is
their intense ethnocentrism -- what I call hyper-ethnocentrism.4 I have
provided a great many examples of this in my writing. Jewish ethnocentrism
is a critical component of their success because it is of fundamental
importance for their ability to construct highly focused ethnic networks in
politics, the arts, the media, and the social sciences -- all the critical
centers of power in the modern world. Perhaps the main focus of my writing
has been simply to describe how these networks operate and the extraordinary
effects that they have achieved, from creating the culture of critique and,
more recently, the culture of the Holocaust to the present effort of the
United States to transform the politics of the Middle East in the interests
of Israel.
We should not forget that the great wellspring of modern Jewish populations
was the religious fundamentalist Jewish populations of Eastern Europe in the
19th century. These fundamentalists passionately rejected all the
assimilatory pressures coming from surrounding governments. Well into the
twentieth century the vast majority of Eastern European Jews could not speak
the languages of the non-Jews living around them.5 Corresponding to this
intense ingroup feeling were attitudes that non-Jews were less than human.
"As one famous rabbi put it, 'A Gentile does not have a heart, although he
has an organ that resembles a heart.'"6
This hotbed of intense ethnocentrism was the origin of all the important
modern Jewish movements, including political radicalism and Zionism. Many of
the early Zionists had clearly articulated racialist views in which Jews
were a unique and superior race. A good example is Vladimir Jabotinsky.
Jabotinsky was an important early Zionist and he is the spiritual leader of
the Likud party in Israel and its leaders -- people like Sharon, Begin, and
Shamir. He is also a hero to many American neoconservatives. I just recently
found out that neocon patriarch Leo Strauss was a follower of Jabotinsky.
Jabotinsky was deeply ethnocentric, believing that Jews were shaped by their
long history as a desert people and that 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."7 What is striking is that virtually
the entire organized Jewish community in the United States is allied to the
Likud party and the settler movement in Israel whose leaders openly idolize
Jabotinsky.
As a European in a society that is rapidly becoming non-European, I can
sympathize with Jabotinsky's envy of the native Slavic peoples he observed
in the early twentieth century. He wrote:
I look at them with envy. I have never known, and probably never will know,
this completely organic feeling: so united and singular [is this] sense of a
homeland, in which everything flows together, the past and the present, the
legend and the hopes, the individual and the historical.8
Every nation civilised or primitive, sees its land as its national home,
where it wants to stay as the sole landlord forever. Such a nation will
never willingly consent to new landlords or even to partnership.9
It is the memory of this rapidly disappearing sense of historical rootedness
combined with a sense of impending dispossession that are at the root of the
malaise experienced by many Europeans, not only in the U.S. but elsewhere.
The triumph of Zionism took a mere fifty years from Herzl's inspiration to
the founding of the state of Israel. There is a tendency to overlook or
ignore the powerful ethnocentrism at the heart of Zionism that motivated
people like Jabotinsky, especially on the part of the American Jewish
community, which has been dedicated throughout the twentieth century to
pathologizing and criminalizing the fragile vestiges of ethnocentrism among
Europeans.
But the bottom line is that the Zionists were successful. Israel would not
have become a state without a great many deeply ethnocentric Jews willing to
engage in any means necessary to bring about their dream: a state that would
be a vehicle for their ethnic interests. It would not have come about
without the most radical among them -- people like Jabotinsky, Begin, Shamir,
Netanyahu, Sharon, and their supporters -- a group which now includes the
entire organized American Jewish community. The impending dispossession of
Europeans will only be avoided if people like them can be found among the
political class of Europeans.
European populations that are allowing themselves to be displaced are
playing a very dangerous game -- dangerous because the long history of ethnic
strife provides them no guarantees about the future. Throughout history
there has been a tendency for majority ethnic groups to oppress minorities.
A glance at Jewish history is sufficient to make one realize the dangers
faced by an ethnic group not having a state and political apparatus to
protect its interests. The organized Jewish community in the U.S. is well
aware of this and has adopted a two-pronged strategy: Territorial defence
and expansion of Israel as an ethnic homeland, and promoting the
displacement and disempowerment of European populations in the Western
world. Both of these projects have had a considerable degree of success.
It does not take an overactive imagination to see that coalitions of
minority groups could compromise the interests of formerly dominant European
groups. We already see numerous examples where coalitions of minority groups
attempt to influence public policy, including immigration policy, against
the interests of the European majority. And we must realize that placing
ourselves in a position of vulnerability would be extremely risky given deep
sense of historical grievance harboured by many ethnic activists have toward
Europeans.
This is especially the case with Jews and of course Jews have shown a
tendency to become part of the elite in Western societies. We have recently
seen reports in the press of religious Jews spitting on Christian symbols in
Israel, thereby resurrecting an age-old Jewish practice.10 Indeed, hatred
toward all things European is normative among a great many strongly
identified Jews.11 I recently came across the following statement by Dov
Fischer, vice-president of the ZOA, in the Forward, a very prestigious
Jewish publication in 2002:
Although we appreciate a half-century of West European democracy more than
we appreciated the prior millennia of European brutality, we recognize who
they are, what they have done -- and what's what. We know, if they don't,
that they need Arab oil more than they need Jewish philosophy and
creativity. We remember that the food they eat is grown from soil fertilized
by 2,000 years of Jewish blood they have sprinkled onto it. Atavistic
Jew-hatred lingers in the air into which the ashes rose from the
crematoria.12
Besides coalitions of ethnic minorities, the main danger facing Europeans is
that wealthy, powerful European elites are often unaware of or do not value
their own ethnic interests. Wealthy and powerful people have much more
potential to advance or hinder ethnic interests. In the Western world since
1965, many elite politicians and business interests have acted to subvert
the ethnic interests of their own people by allowing and even advocating the
mass immigration of non-European peoples. One reason may be that these elite
Westerners would be the last to suffer personally from ethnic replacement
because they are able to live in gated communities insulated from the rest
of the world. Many others have made personal and political alliances with
non-European elites that have advanced their interests at the cost of
completely ignoring their enormous family of ethnic kin. This extreme
individualism of Western elites is a tragic mistake for all ethnic
Europeans, including the elites themselves who are losing untold millions of
ethnic kin by promoting mass immigration of non-Europeans.
Wealthy and influential Jews have a strong record of attempting to further
the interests of their own ethnic group. And Jews are indeed a very elite
group. Although Jews make up less than 3% of the population, they
constitute more than a quarter of the people on the Forbes list of the
richest four hundred Americans. In general, wealthy Jews have a strong
record of donating to Jewish causes.13
Jewish organizations are lavishly funded. In 1996, there were approximately
300 national Jewish organizations in the United States, with a combined
budget estimated in the range of $6 billion -- a sum greater than the gross
national product of half the members of the United Nations.14 The ADL has an
annual budget of over $50,000,000. Irving Moskowitz not only funds the
settler movement and land purchases in Israel, but he also supports the
American Enterprise Institute by funding scholars like David Wurmser who is
a prominent member of the very influential neocon group that has turned
United States foreign policy basically into an arm of the Israeli right
wing. Moscowitz provided the money that enabled the 1996 reopening of a
tunnel under the Temple Mount, which resulted in seventy deaths due to
rioting, started the intifada and eventually led to Ariel Sharon's election
as Prime Minister of Israel. He also funds the Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs, a lobbying organization dedicated to establishing close
relations between Israel and American military and defense contracting
companies. Edgar Bronfman funds the World Jewish Congress, while Charles
Bronfman, Ronald Lauder, and the notorious Marc Rich fund Birthright Israel,
a program that aims to increase ethnic consciousness among Jews by bringing
20,000 young Jews to Israel every year.15
So far as I know, there are no major sources of funding aimed at increasing
ethnic consciousness among Europeans or at promoting European ethnic
interests. Certainly the major sources of conservative funding in the U.S.,
such as the Bradley and Olin Foundations, are not aimed at this sort of
thing. Indeed, these foundations have been a major source of funding for the
largely Jewish neoconservative movement and for pro-Israel think tanks such
as the Center for Security Policy.
An excellent example of an ethnically conscious wealthy Jew is Haim Saban
who was recently profiled in the New York Times. Mr. Saban controls the
largest media company in Germany. Saban has stirred controversy in Britain,
where he publicly expressed interest in buying ITV, the country's biggest
commercial network, while accusing its competitors, including BBC News, of
pro-Arab coverage. He views his acquisition of a dominant position in German
media as benefiting Israel in the long run. Obviously he thinks of media
ownership as far more than simply a way of making money but of influencing
content by promoting Jewish causes. The Times describes him as [quote]
"perhaps the most politically connected mogul in Hollywood [and that's
saying a lot. He is described as], "throwing his weight and money around
Washington and, increasingly, the world, trying to influence all things
Israeli. 'I'm a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel'" To that end, he has
become one of the largest individual donors in the country to the Democratic
Party and its candidates, giving millions over the past decade -- $7 million
in just one donation to the Democratic National Committee in 2002. He
hobnobs with John Kerry and he vacations with Bill Clinton. It is certainly
striking that Bill Clinton is on record expressing very positive attitudes
about massive immigration and the impending minority status of his own
people while having a close relationship with a wealthy Jewish ethnic
activist intent on advancing the interests of Jews. One could say virtually
the same thing about the entire political class in this country. This is, I
think, a parable of our times.
Saban is far from unique. For example, in Canada, Israel Asper, executive
chairman of CanWest Global Communications Corp. used his media empire to
promote pro-Likud policies and has punished journalists for any deviation
from its strong pro-Israel editorial policies.16 In my writing I have tried
to show that Jewish involvement in the media has influenced content -- that the
media in the United States have reflected Jewish attitudes on
multi-culturalism and all things Jewish, especially Israel, and negative
attitudes on Christianity, European ethnocentrism, European culture and
especially the culture of the American South and Midwest.17
The point is that Jewish elites have been hugely influential in advancing
the interests of their people. This is surely a goal to emulate.
The best way to preserve ethnic interests is to defend an ethnostate -- a
nation that is explicitly intended to preserve the ethnic interests of its
citizens. From an ethnic point of view, a major problem with massive
immigration is that there is likely to be an increase in ethnic competition.
Multicultural societies sanction ethnic mobilization because they inevitably
become a cauldron of competing ethnic interests.
In this very dangerous game of ethnic competition, some ethnic groups are
better prepared than others. Ethnic groups differ in intelligence and the
ability to develop and control economic resources. They differ in their
degree of ethnocentrism, in the extent to which they are mobilized to
achieve group interests, and in how aggressively they behave toward other
groups. They differ in their numbers, fertility, and the extent to which
they encourage responsible parenting. And they differ in the amount of land
and other resources held at any point in time and in their political power.
Given these differences, it's difficult at best to ensure peaceful relations
among ethnic groups. Even maintaining a status quo in territory and resource
control is very difficult, as can be seen by the ill-fated attempts of
Americans to achieve an ethnic status quo with the 1924 immigration law.18
And accepting a status quo would not be in the interests of groups that have
recently lost land or numbers; nor is it likely to be acceptable to groups
with relatively low numbers and control of resources; nor would a status quo
be likely to be acceptable to groups prone to high fertility. And yet, the
alternative -- that all humans renounce their ethnic group loyalties -- seems
utopian to say the least.
And given that some ethnic groups -- especially ones with high levels of
ethnocentrism and mobilization -- will undoubtedly continue to function as
groups far into the foreseeable future, unilateral renunciation of ethnic
loyalties by some groups means only their surrender and defeat -- the Darwinian
dead end of extinction. The future, then, like the past, will inevitably be
a Darwinian competition in which ethnicity plays a very large role.
The alternative faced by Europeans throughout the Western world is to place
themselves in a position of enormous vulnerability in which their destinies
will be determined by other peoples, many of whom hold deep historically
conditioned hatreds toward them. Europeans' promotion of their own
displacement is the ultimate foolishness -- an historical mistake of
catastrophic proportions.
KEVIN MACDONALD, PH.D.
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References
1. Sobran, J. (1996). The Buchanan frenzy. Sobran's (March), p. 3
2. Abernethy, Virginia Deane (2004). Arizona Illegals (Letter to the
editor), Washington Times, October 1.
3. Salter, F. K. (2004). On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethny, and Humanity
in an Age of Mass Migration. Frankfurt Am Main, Germany: Peter Lang.
4. MacDonald, K. B. (2003). Understanding Jewish Activism I: Background
Traits for Jewish Activism. The Occidental Quarterly, 3(2),Summer, 5-38.
5.MacDonald, K. B. (2003). Understanding Jewish Activism II: Zionism and the
Internal Dynamics of Judaism. The Occidental Quarterly, 3(3), Fall, 15-44.
6. Mahler, R. (1985). Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment: Their
Confrontation in Galicia and Poland in the First Half of the Nineteenth
Century. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, p. 17.
7. Shavit, Y. (1988). Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Movement, 1925-1948.
London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., p. 112.
8. Ibid., p. 116.
9. Wheatcroft, G. (1996). The Controversy of Zion: Jewish Nationalism, the
Jewish State, and the Unresolved Jewish Dilemma. Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley, p. 207.
10. Armenian archbishop quizzed over spat with yeshiva student. By Amiram
Barkat, Oct. 11, 2004. http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/486934.html
11. MacDonald, K. B. (1998/2002). The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary
Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and
Political Movements. Westport, CT: Praeger; paperback version: Bloomington,
IN: 1stbooks Library, 2002; MacDonald, K. B. (2003). Understanding Jewish
Activism I: Background Traits for Jewish Activism. The Occidental Quarterly,
3(2),Summer, 5-38.
12. D. Fischer (2002). We're right, the whole world's wrong. Forward, April
19.
13. MacDonald, K. B. (2003). Understanding Jewish Activism I: Background
Traits for Jewish Activism. The Occidental Quarterly, 3(2),Summer, 5-38.
14. Goldberg, J. J. (1996). Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish
Establishment. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
15. MacDonald, K. B. (2004). Understanding Jewish Activism III:
Neoconservatism As a Jewish Movement. The Occidental Quarterly 4(2), 7-74.
16. MacDonald, K. B. (2003). Understanding Jewish Activism I: Background
Traits for Jewish Activism. The Occidental Quarterly 3(2):5-38.
17. Sorkin, A. R. (2004). Schlepping to Moguldom. New York Times, Sept. 5.
18.MacDonald, K. B. (2004). Was the 1924 Immigration Cut-off "Racist"?, VDARE
(www.vdare.com), June 19, 2004.
http://www.vdare.com/misc/macdonald_1924_immigration.htm
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