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Fred's Fallacies
by Douglas Wright
27 August 2004
Fred Reed's recent column on Jews, disappointing pile of dissemblage that it was, trots out most of the prominent arguments used to deny negative Jewish influence in gentile societies. Or, more diplomatically, squelch impure thoughts that occur to people who are struggling with the Jewish issue for the first time. Of course, all of these thoughts and arguments can be dealt with. I have named and listed them, with responses.
1. The "Jews Control or Want to Destroy the World -- That's Crazy!" Argument
Said Fred, "The premises of letters such as the foregoing are invariant: (1) that Jews want to destroy all that is good and holy, and eat Christian children, and (2) that I know it."
Response: Fred is blowing the observation way out of proportion in order to make it look extreme and unreasonable. Then, of course, he has no difficulty chopping it down. All the way down. So that "Jews control the world" becomes "Jews control nothing." The truth is closer to the former than the latter. Jews have tremendous power and influence. A group need not "control the world" for this to be true.
2. The "Just Because Jews Have Some Power and Prominence Doesn't Mean They Are All-Powerful" Argument
Said Fred, "I don't see the Jews of the email. That Jews are tremendously influential in the media is a fact, easily verified on the Web. However, the leap from 'Jews are powerful in the media' to 'Jews are responsible for all social ills, the collapse of civilization, and everything I don't like' is a bit of a stretch."
Response: Yes, but everyone in the Jewish Defense Industry (a sorry conglomerate Fred has now joined) addresses "the stretch." Let's address the SHRINK, Fred. The shrink says that despite undeniable Jewish power in government, media, law and academia, Jews don't have ANY influence, negative or otherwise, in our society or for gentile people. That is more ludicrous than the stretch. Of course they have considerable power. And they quite naturally use it to advance their own interests at the expense of ours.
3. The "My Personal Experiences with Jews Proves That There is No Negative Group Influence by Them" Argument
Said Fred, "I have known lots of Jews. I have dated them, gotten drunk with them, danced with them, argued with them, gone on junkets to weird Asian countries with them. I liked most of them."
Response: This is the some-of-my-best-friends argument that Fred himself seems to dismiss earlier in his column. His own use of it is subtly layered with condescension: Fred is cosmopolitan and well-traveled. Those who disagree with him about Jews are clearly swamp-dwellers and cave inhabitants. But as elsewhere, it's an improper induction. The fact of a few great personal buds of yours who are Jewish does not foreclose the net negative of Jewish influence. Considered with enough imagination, one can see how it actually enhances it.
4. The "Some Individual Jews are Nice, So How Can They Be Negative Overall?" Argument
Said Fred, "Familiarity -- not fear of invisible radioactive death-needles from Mossad, or of being run out of journalism -- is why I don't devote my life to obsessing about the maleficence of Jews. Are there Jews who do things politically I don't like? Yes. Are there Jews who do things politically I'm not sure whether I like? Yes. Is there an Israeli lobby? Yes. Yet I have never encountered the evil Jews of The Conspiracy. I simply do not see them as bad people."
Response: It is not necessary to see the individual members of a group acting against your interests (and your group's interests) as personally bad in order to understand that they are, in fact, working against your interests. Very rarely in the history of the world has it been the case that one could demonize each and every member of such a group. History is replete with soldiers from warring nations who, upon finding themselves alone somewhere, are able to break bread and have a conversation. But the inability to carry both the positive specific and the negative general in one's mind is a sign of extreme political immaturity and lack of political discipline. Jews have this maturity: they can look upon an individual gentile and say, "Johnson's not such a bad one," but still know in the back of their minds that IN GENERAL, gentiles are to be regarded as dangerous. This, I suppose, is related to Prof. Kevin MacDonald's observations about the individuality of Western (gentile) culture and the group cohesion of Jewish culture.
5. The "Jews Are Smart and Have Done Good Things" argument.
Said Fred, "I spent my high-school years aboard Dahlgren Naval Weapons Lab, living on Mathematicians Row (Caffee Road, just off the Circle). The names along the street were Cohen, Reed, Strauss, Kemper. I don't know how they voted, but they designed armament for the Navy. I'd guess Republican."
Response: Understanding Jews means understanding why they're so keen to develop military hardware for the U.S.
6. The "Jews Are Not a Political Monolith" Argument.
Said Fred, "Jews as I have known them are not monolithic. Politically they have been all over the place, though running to liberal: a professional conservative (Herb Berkowitz, the PR guy at the Heritage Foundation, a raucous Boston Jew and delightful loon), a couple of AIPACers, (Seth Carus and Steve Glick, pro-Israel but, I'm sorry gang, not anti-American), libertarians, Greens, several with little or no interest in politics, some who in varying degrees disapproved of Israel."
Response: The larger point is that Jews accomplish what they need to accomplish, as a group. There may be a "Jews for the Preservation of Firearms," but WE HAVE GUN CONTROL. There may be an "Israelis for Peace," but WE HAVE WAR FOR ISRAEL'S SAKE. An individual Jew may declare that TV is to risqué, but WE HAVE JANET JACKSON'S BREAST, and IT WAS JEWS WHO FACILITATED AND EXCUSED AND DEFENDED THIS, and even berated Americans for being too close-minded about it all. Again, this failure to recognize generalities and the need to make those your guide is simple political immaturity. It is a naïvete born of complacency, luxury, and overextension of Enlightenment individualism.
7. The "Subversive Movements Had Gentiles, Too" Argument
Said Fred, "So many of the Jewish crimes popular on the email circuit don't stand up to examination. For instance, I hear repeatedly that during Vietnam America won in the field but that Jews stabbed Our Boys in the back by means of the anti-war movement, thus seeking to promote godless atheistic communism. Not quite. The leadership of the anti-war movement was heavily Jewish. The movement itself was overwhelmingly Christian."
Response: Fred needs education here about Jewish influence and its gentile covering. Bush is a gentile. Stalin was a gentile. Carl Jung was a gentile. What Fred ignores is the driving engine.
8. The "There Were Other Changes Happening" Argument
Said Fred, "The anti-war movement wasn't a Jewish plot. It was a national revolt."
Response: Does this foreclose ethnocentric reasons for Jewish involvement? Involvement that can be decisive in terms of eventual success for failure? Of course not.
The themes to emerge from Fred's Fallacies are a failure to acknowledge 1) necessary generalities, 2) the possibility of deception, and 3) group competition occurring along racial or ethnic lines.
To declare that not all the world's ills are caused by Jews is to ignore that many of them are. Especially for white gentiles. It is the height of ease in today's world to step forward to defend the Jews as diverse and righteous inventors of medicines and technologies, if some are a little liberal. You could make a highly paid career of it. In fact, many white gentiles have. If you honestly think that your journalism career will be derailed if you criticize Jews, why not say so? It is trickery to make it appear that you are the brave one, the tough one or the rebellious one because you won't go along with the e-mails of some nutty anti-Semites. You aren't being sincere. You are sincerely afraid.
DOUGLAS WRIGHT
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