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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27059 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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Clark Kent Did Not Assimilate

The Dissident Right Inquisition on Twitter/X is ongoing, whereby certain factions of the DR, mostly surrounding the orbit of Bronze Age Pervert, are accused of being crypto-Jewish, owing to their willingness to be super edgy on every aspect of cultural consensus under the sun except that one question. They will criticize everything except Jewish power and Zionist influence. The fact that a growing number of them have actually turned out to be secretly Jewish puts wind in the sails because that sort of behavior is predicted by DR critique of Jewish behavior: the Clark Kent metaphor of deceptively presenting one identity to the outside world while secretly maintaining a different one under the surface.

Steve Sailer got caught in the crossfire here. In our recent discussion on this Twitter spat, I would have put Steve Sailer as an "execption" to the rule that an edgy DR figure who counter-signals the JQ is probably secretly Jewish himself, but now I increasingly believe Sailer is another instance of this model generalizing after all. Last week, after some token Holocaust worship and virtue signaling against anti-semitism on Twitter, Sailer abandoned his typical methodological thoroughness in an article placing the blame for Wokeness solely at the feet of white Protestants and Quakers (!). This position is not new, it is identical to what (Jewish) DR figures like BAP and Curtis Yarvin have been saying for a long time, and @2rafa has advocated for this position as well:

Peng writes:

…wokeness appears to be a syncretic blend of Puritanism and Quakerism. Woke adherents value elite education and moralizing, seem obsessed with rooting out heretics, adhere to orthodoxy, and display a sense of personal salvation, traits that were all characteristic of Puritans, while also displaying the radical openness and commitment to egalitarianism that characterized the Quakers.

Puritans tended to be intense and Quakers nice. Put them together and you get an intolerant religion of tolerance...

...Peng sees Jewish liberalism as, historically, a triumph of assimilation:

Whereas anti-Semites today like to blame Jews in academia for “cultural Marxism,” the correlation actually runs the other way: Jews gave up their faith and assimilated into liberal Christian values, including sometimes literally converting to Christianity. The Jews that resisted assimilation, Orthodox Jews, are a solidly Republican bloc. A similar assimilation is occurring among Asian Americans, who have swelled the ranks of the same colleges over the past few decades.

The key piece of evidence relied on by Sailer is an analysis of The 100 Most Influential Americans by The Atlantic. Finding only 7 Jews among that list, Sailer concludes that Peng is correct and Jewish association with wokeness is merely an effect of their assimilation with Protestant values.

Keith Woods wrote an excellent response to this article, pointing out the the biggest problem with Sailer's methodology: the question at hand is the cause for the radical change in trajectory of American progressivism in the 20th century. "Progressivism" in America at the turn of the century denoted not just immigration restriction, but demographic reversal, as well as HBD and eugenics. This all changed with the growth of Jewish influence in the 20th century. If you tried to create a "top 100 most influential list" related to this sharp diversion in American progressivism you would walk away from vastly different conclusions than those drawn by Sailer and Peng.

What's the motive?

Jewish participation in these cultural upheavals is not challenged by Sailer, or 2rafa, etc. Rather the most import question surrounds the motive for Jewish support, and even creation, of these counter-cultural movements. Sailer cites Peng briefly, but there's no actual evidence presented that Jewish participation in these cultural movements was motivated by a desire to assimilate to Protestant culture and values. On the other hand, Keith presents very strong evidence that the academic and cultural movements most closely associated with these upheavals throughout the 20th century were motivated by a retention of a Jewish identity and a hostility towards Protestant culture and values.

Keith presents strong evidence that the anthropological movements in the 20th century which enforced HBD denial as dogma, deriving from the Boasian school of anthropology, were motivated by his Jewish identification and opposition to antisemitism:

Boas was committed to the fight for racial equality throughout his life. Together with close friends he formed the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom in 1939, an antifascist organisation designed to “discredit the theories of race being forwarded by the Nazis in Germany”.

One of Boas’s most successful students was Ashley Montagu – born Israel Ehrenberg to a Jewish family in London’s East End – who completed a dissertation under Boas in 1937. Montagu arrived in the United States in 1931, and immediately focused his intellectual work on dismantling what he considered the dangerous idea of biological race, as well as attacking his new home of America for its racist past. His 1942 work Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: the Fallacy of Race, which was based on his dissertation, deconstructed the concept of race as one which developed in the 18th century as a response to slavery and colonialism.

Montagu’s book received mixed reviews from other academics, and he misled other academics on his credentials. In her book The Evolution of Racism, Pat Shipman records that Montagu responded to his academic critics by branding them as “racists” who opposed him because of his Jewish heritage. In an interview later in his life, he explained this early opposition with the sensational declaration that “all non-Jews are anti-Semitic”[9], a statement Shipman used as the title of one of the chapters of her book. Montagu also described childhood experiences of antisemitism in London as formative. It does not seem Montagu ever embraced or assimilated to the American Christian culture after his arrival in 1931, rather, he critiqued the norms of White Christian society as masking oppressive dynamics which brutalised other races and women.

Associating the radical departure from HBD to race denial in the early 20th century to Protestantism also does not make sense given the fact HBD was invented within White protestant culture, and the eugenics movement was also invented there and more advanced than anywhere else in the world. The United States, Germany, Scandanavia all had comparable eugenics programs and the Nazis were not even an outlier in that regard. It's impossible not to Notice that the battlelines between HBD and race denial in the 20th century largely broke between Protestant Darwinists (Madison Grant, E.O Wilson, Charles Murray, Samuel Morton, James Watson, etc.) and Immigrant Jews (Franz Boas, Stephen Jay Gould, Jared Diamond, Eric Turkeimer, etc.). Madison Grant also remarked that Jewish influenced was mobilized against HBD as early as 1921:

It is well-nigh impossible to publish in the American newspapers any reflection upon certain religions or races which are hysterically sensitive even when mentioned by name. . . . Abroad, conditions are fully as bad, and we have the authority of one of the most eminent anthropologists in France that the collection of anthropological measurements and data among French recruits at the outbreak of the Great War was prevented by Jewish influence, which aimed to suppress any suggestion of racial differentiation in France.

Keith does a good job establishing that the motivations of the Boasian School of Anthropology and the Frankfurt school of academics were not motivated by a desire to assimilate to white Protestant culture, but rather by their Jewish identification and deep-seated desire to wage culture war on White Protestant culture.

But I want to talk about two more:

Was Sigmund Freud motivated by a desire to assimilate to White Protestant Culture? This is from Kevin MacDonald's Culture of Critique:

[Freud] was proud of his enemies—the persecuting Roman Catholic Church, the hypocritical bourgeoisie, the obtuse psychiatric establishment, the materialistic Americans—so proud, indeed, that they grew in his mind into potent specters far more malevolent and far less divided than they were in reality. He likened himself to Hannibal, to Ahasuerus, to Joseph, to Moses, all men with historic missions, potent adversaries, and difficult fates. (Gay 1988, 604)

There is also evidence that Freud conceptualized himself as a leader in a war on gentile culture. We have seen that Freud had a great deal of hostility to Western culture, especially the Catholic Church and its ally, the Austrian Habsburg monarchy (Gay 1988; McGrath 1974; Rothman & Isenberg 1974a).[177] In a remarkable passage from the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud, in attempting to understand why he has been unable to set foot in Rome, proposes that he has been retracing the footsteps of Hannibal, the Semitic leader of Carthage against Rome during the Punic wars.

Hannibal . . . had been the favourite hero of my later school days. . . . And when in the higher classes I began to understand for the first time what it meant to belong to an alien race . . . the figure of the semitic general rose still higher in my esteem. To my youthful mind Hannibal and Rome symbolized the conflict between the tenacity of Jewry and the organisation of the Catholic Church. (Freud, Interpretation of Dreams; in Rothman & Isenberg 1974a, 64)

The passage clearly indicates that Freud was self-identified as a member of “an alien race” at war with Rome and its daughter institution, the Catholic Church, a central institution of Western culture. Gay (1988, 132) states, “A charged and ambivalent symbol, Rome stood for Freud’s most potent concealed erotic, and only slightly less concealed aggressive wishes.” [178] Rome was “a supreme prize and incomprehensible menace” (Gay 1988, 132). Freud himself described this “Hannibal fantasy” as “one of the driving forces of [my] mental life” (in McGrath 1974, 35).

A strong connection exists between anti-Semitism and Freud’s hostility to Rome. Freud’s conscious identification with Hannibal occurred following an antiSemitic incident involving his father in which his father behaved passively. Freud’s response to the incident was to visualize “the scene in which Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar Barca, made his boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since that time Hannibal had . . . a place in my phantasies” (in McGrath 1974, 35). “Rome was the center of Christian civilization. To conquer Rome would certainly be to avenge his father and his people” (Rothman & Isenberg 1974a, 62). Cuddihy (1974, 54) makes the same point: “Like Hamilcar’s son Hannibal, he will storm Rome seeking vengeance. He will control his anger, as his father had done, but he will use it to probe relentlessly beneath the beautiful surface of the diaspora to the murderous rage and lust coiled beneath its so-called civilities.”

Rothman and Isenberg (1974) convincingly argue that Freud actually viewed the Interpretation of Dreams as a victory against the Catholic Church and that he viewed Totem and Taboo as a successful attempt to analyze the Christian religion in terms of defense mechanisms and primitive drives. Regarding Totem and Taboo, Freud told a colleague that it would “serve to make a sharp division between us and all Aryan religiosity” (in Rothman & Isenberg 1974, 63; see also Gay 1988, 326). They also suggest that Freud consciously attempted to conceal his subversive motivation: A central aspect of Freud’s theory of dreams is that rebellion against a powerful authority must often be carried on with deception: “According to the strength . . . of the censorship, [the authority-defying individual] finds himself compelled . . . to speak in allusions . . . or he must conceal his objection beneath some apparently innocent disguise” (Freud, Interpretation of Dreams; in Rothman & Isenberg 1974a, 64).

If we were to create a Top 100 Influential list regarding, specifically, the radical shift in American culture Freud would certainly make this list along with the other examples discussed, and likewise another example for the intellectual motivation being driven by Jewish identity and a bitter hostility to White American culture. Not an attempt to assimilate to Protestant-Quaker cultural values.

Captain America - American as Apple Pie?

One blind spot in MacDonald's work is the comic-book pantheon: hugely influential on American culture, identity, and values. Looking barely beneath the surface reveals the very same psychology: less overtly malicious, but no less salient.

After all, someone ignorant would perceive Captain America as an Ayran hero. But when I watch this scene from Captain America (2011) I perceive something very different from the rest of the laity. I perceive the significance of the Jewish immigrant-inventor, Abraham Erskine, injecting Steve Rogers with the Serum that empowers him to fight the Nazis. The meaning of the myth does not point to a Jewish attempt to assimilate to Protestant values, it portrays a Jewish self-conceived role of transformation of American values. In the case of Captain America, the Jewish Immigrant lectures the audience before literally injecting the Aryan with a serum to transform him into the "Superior Man" so he goes to fight other White people. The Jewish writers are metaphorically depicting Culture War with Gentiles through these symbols.

Superman is one of many others which clearly fits in with this category, with heroic symbols and combat being a metaphor for Jewish Culture War being waged on white Gentiles.

Clark Kent is not a Jewish assimilation fantasy, he's a Jewish supremacist fantasy.

Clark Kent adopts an alter-ego in his daily interactions with humans by changing his name from Kal-El, meaning "Voice of God" in Hebrew, to the Gentile name Clark Kent. He changes his appearance, puts on a suit, goes to work as a media reporter (!) with everyone else none the wiser to his true identity.

But when Clark Kent tears open the shirt, he affirms that underneath the disguise he was always Superman. He holds sentimental feelings towards humanity as his adopted family, but in his heart of hearts he is a diasporan son of Krypton and he will never be them- he is a superior being and he must protect them and guide them.

This is extremely sophisticated storytelling. It provides perceptive Jewish audiences with a sense of identity, and yes superiority, it is a myth that tells them they cannot assimilate even if they change their name and appearance such that nobody around them knows who they truly are, they will always be Kryptonian underneath the surface. At the same time, there is compelling content for Gentile audiences that internalize the Ethos espoused by the ass-kicking superhero.

The dynamic described above was consciously created and self-aware. This is from a former principal writer of the Superman series from 1971 through 1986:

The unwarranted assumption in the explanations above is that Kryptonians are not Jews. I dissent from that notion. While they are not direct descendents of the Judeans of the Middle East from whom the term "Jewish" comes, I always ascribed effectively Jewish doctrine and ritual to the Kryptonian tradition. In fact, the Kryptonian tradition is congruent with and certainly predates the Judean, so they have at least as much claim to the tradition as any of us.

I give all my characters religions, so I've thought this through - really. The kents are Methodist (as is Clark), Lois is Catholic, Perry is Baptist, Jimmy is Lutheran (no surprise there) and Bruce Wayne and Batman are both Episcopalian (even less of a surprise there). And Superman (like the Siegels, the Shusters, the Weisingers, the Schwartzes, the Maggins and the Luthors) is Jewish.

This is so self-evident that it may as well be canon.

What's interesting here is that Clark Kent is Methodist but Superman is Jewish. This points to a very different dynamic of non-assimilation, and there's an interesting parallel to be made with certain DR edgelords who are Nietzschean on the surface and then crypto-Jewish underneath. These characters are metaphors for things that are real.

The psychology embedded metaphorically in the comic book canon points towards the exact same dynamic which motivated other intellectual movements: Jews retain their identity, if only in cryptic form, and self-conceive as saviors directing the values of humanity.

Conclusion

I'm not one to let Christianity off the hook, I also believe it is necessary but not sufficient to describe the cultural trajectory of 20th century America. But to say that Jews only contributed to it by force of their desire to assimilate is just so preposterous and contradicted by an enormous body of evidence of all forms that I find it hard to believe someone of Sailer's caliber falls victim to it. When Sailer sees someone say something like "IQ is just a measure of how good you are at taking tests, nothing important" that's how I feel seeing Sailer, BAP, Yarvin, 2rafa all say something so implausible like Jewish contributions to 20th century intellectual movements were motivated by their intense desire to assimilate to White American Protestant values.

These people are obviously motivated by their own Jewish identities, and it's correct for the Gentile DR to be inherently suspicious of the crypto-Jewish DR. It is a real problem that these people are unable and unwilling to see an incredibly obvious pattern, psychology, and symbolic coherency underlying these 20th century intellectual movements, it's not simply a prejudice.

Boasian Anthropology, the Frankfurt School, Freud and psychoanalysis, comic book myth creation, in none of those cases is the cultural influence of those movements motivated by an attempt to assimilate to a Protestant/Quaker ethos. In all cases, the individuals involved directly perceived themselves as Jews outside- even above and superior than, White Gentile culture and they all perceived their role as engaging in Culture War against White American values to direct them towards a way they perceived to beneficial for Jews.

I mean, I’m a half-Cajun half-Dutch tradcath and I think the JQ is a waste of time.

Right. Why drive away Jewish talent? What's the worst case of having Ben Shapiro around? We're a bit more willing to spend on Israel? That hardly seems worth complaining about compared to his value as a pundit in convincing people. Repeat for Sailer, etc. etc.

What's the worst case of having Ben Shapiro around?

Ben Shapiro is an awkward, uncharismatic nerd and I've never been convinced by his arguments. He's actively off-putting to me and every single person I've ever spoken to about him has shared those feelings. I'd support keeping him around as long as he stays on the side of people I disagree with, but other than that...

Fair enough. Then substitute in the argument for people who are persuasive or helpful.

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