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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Recently I was asked, as happens periodically in this forum, to clarify my position on that thorniest of thorny questions: The Jewish Question. Specifically, @faceh asked me, after I had criticized his equating White Nationalism with statements about “gassing the Jews”, whether I would support the removal of all Jewish individuals from positions of power in White countries. Work stuff pulled me away for a few days and I’ve been unable to answer his question, but I think it’s a useful opportunity for a larger post.

I’ve spoken before about how my conception of Whiteness can be modeled as a series of concentric circles. The central circle - the cluster of the most archetypally and uncontroversially representative examples of Whiteness - consists, roughly, of the historic populations of what can broadly be called Northwestern Europe (the British Isles, Scandinavia minus Finland, the Low Countries, Northern France) plus the German-speaking peoples of Central Europe and the Tyrol, as well as the diaspora populations of these ethnic groups in the New World. Some ardent Nordicists would stop here and say that only people who fit into this first circle count as properly White, but this is a fringe position and not one to which I subscribe. My ancestry is 100% British Isles on all sides as far back as I can trace it, which is hundreds of years, so I don’t object to the Nordicist position out of any personal conflict of interest, but it seems to me that any conception of Whiteness that leads you to conclude that the Romans weren’t white is just a massive own-goal.

So, then we move on to the second circle, in which we find the populations of Spain, Portugal, most of Italy, Southern France, Finland, Hungary, and arguably the West Slavs and the Balts. All of these ethnicities have certain aspects that make them non-central examples of Whiteness - such as partial admixture from non-White substrates, like the Finns and the Iberians, or speaking a non-Indo-European language, in the case of the Hungarians and the Finns. Still, these are very White-looking people, relatively speaking, and their cultures have all played an important part in European history.

Past that, you get to a third circle, encompassing the South and East Slavs, the Romanians/Moldovars, the Maltese, the Sicilians, and the modern Greeks. The boundaries of this circle are blurry, and there are certainly aspects of these cultures which strike members of the central circle as quite distinctly foreign, which is part of why nativists and White Nationalists of the early 20th century vociferously resisted the mass immigration of these peoples into Anglosphere countries. Many of these ethnic groups contain very significant recent genetic admixture from non-European conqueror groups. An argument can be made (and sometimes is made) to exclude this circle from discussions of Whiteness. For me personally, though, any model of Whiteness that kicks out Tchaikovsky and Nikola Tesla is, again, an avoidable own-goal. The outer edges of this circle is where pretty much any commonly-used understanding of Whiteness would stop, though. There’s one glaring exception, though, and that is Ashkenazi Jews.

If you ask the average American if Jews are White, he’ll probably say yes, although it’s likely he hasn’t really thought much about it. If you show him a picture of, say, the Beastie Boys, he’ll readily and without hesitation identify it as a trio of White guys - he might not even be aware that they’re Jewish; still, if he reflects a bit on Jewish history and the fraught relationship between Jews and gentile Whites, he might concede that the question is complicated. And indeed it is! On the Dissident/White Identitarian Right, the question of whether or not Jews are White is generally considered to have been definitively answered - in the negative - and has been for some years now. However, there are some of us in that sphere who aren’t totally comfortable with nor confident about that answer.

I’ve spoken before about my warm feelings toward Jewish culture and Jewish people. The first girl I ever loved was (and still is!) Jewish, and my most recent long-term relationship was with a Jewish woman. The Jewish approach to comedy forms a foundational piece of my sense of humor: clever, heavily verbally-oriented, sarcastic, self-deprecating, at times neurotic, and suffused with a general sense of unease and alienation. From an early age, I strongly related to the Jewish intellectual tradition: contrarian, relentlessly critical and deconstructive, never taking anything at face value or uncritically accepting a proposition. It’s a culture that venerates intelligence, high verbal IQ, and the ability and willingness to argue. I strongly considered converting to Judaism for years, because I suspected that I would feel at home in that tradition. (And could land a beautiful Jewish woman - I have a type, and the Ashkenazi female phenotype epitomizes it.)

So, when I started getting deeper into the Dissident Right sphere, I found the discussion of the “JQ” to be by far the most difficult part to digest. While there is still a healthy Jew-welcoming (or, at least, Jew-neutral) faction of the White Right (Jared Taylor of American Renaissance has never publicly recanted his statement about Jews - “They look White to me!” and Paul Gottfried and Nathan Cofnas are still important rightist voices), the overwhelming stance of the hard Right is that the JQ has not only been answered in the negative, but is one of the most important questions - if not the single most important question - that one must answer when considering geopolitics today. I tend to keep my head down when the Jew stuff comes up in those spaces, simply because I know I’ll be shouted down and potentially singled out for suspicion as a subversive/infiltrator. But, the doubts and reservations I feel internally have not been resolved to my satisfaction.

Basically, I place Ashkenazi Jews in a nebulous fourth Circle of Whiteness. This peripheral circle’s boundaries are in flux, and ethnic groups in this circle can drop out or drift into this circle based on political and material developments within their own cultures. Groups that orbit in this circle also include the Japanese, the South Koreans, Latin American mestizos, Persians, Ottoman Turks, Indian Brahmins, and Arabs. The history of relations between these groups and the more central circles of Whiteness is incredibly fraught, and filled with periods of violence and persecution, conquest, inter-ethnic competition, and mistrust. Arabs and Turks were the great racial/religious enemy of Europeans for centuries, with enormous bloodshed and iterated conquests on both sides; on the flip side, they were on the forefront of scientific/cultural advances during a time of severe cultural regression and stagnation in Europe, and Arab/Turkish scholars were primarily responsible for preserving the works of the great Greco-Roman thinkers during that same time when White Europeans were busy abdicating their responsibilities as stewards of that tradition. Jews in medieval Europe were heavily represented in a parasitic rentier class, which contributed greatly to the animosity so many Europeans felt toward them; however, they were also massively overrepresented in vitally-important technical fields such as medicine. Something like two-thirds of doctors in medical Germany were Jews, meaning that countless gentile White lives were saved or immeasurably improved by Jews.

The great question, to my mind, when it comes to this fourth circle is: will these groups ever see themselves as White? Obviously these groups are always going to be peripheral to Whiteness; nobody is ever going to see a Japanese person as just as white as a Dutchman. However, with the looming population explosion in sub-Saharan Africa and the Global South more generally, we could be approaching a situation in which it will become necessary for the civilizations of the Global North to begin mounting a coordinated defense against the waves of migration that could soon begin spilling out of the Global South. In the same way that Christian Europeans had to bury their long-standing inter-ethnic enmities in order to present a unified front against Saracen and Turk invaders, it may be necessary for societies above a certain level of material and cultural development to bury the hatchet and form a phalanx against the marauding hordes spilling across the Sahara and the Darien Gap. If such a scenario arises, civilizations such as China, India and Iran may have to make the crucial choice about whether or not they want to stand with Europeans, in a united Eurasian front - a Fortress Eurasia, if you will - to repel the invaders, or whether to actively join or facilitate the invaders as they overwhelm and annihilate the already weakened and degenerated peoples of Europe and the Anglosphere.

If such a scenario arises, I want these civilizations on my side. (“I never thought I would die side-by-side with an Arab.” “What about a friend?”) Under such conditions, a criterion of “White enough” will necessarily be sufficient. Jews are well within the “White enough” category, as far as I’m concerned, and I wish that others on the White Right would not be so cavalier about continuing to ignite the already-burning bridge with an ethnic group that still has the capacity to become a powerful ally, but which also had the possibility to continue its development into an equally powerful and implacable enemy.

So, the Jewish Question is actually a series of questions, and some of those questions need to be answered by Jews themselves. I don’t know how many Jews, or what percentage of Jews, see themselves as my enemy, or are likely to act as my enemies as worldwide racial conflict begins to boil over. I’m open to believing that the answer isn’t as dire as many on my side believe. I don’t know the answer, and I’m still trying to talk it out.

So a question I had originally asked was, slightly paraphrased, "To what extent does being pro-white ALSO require you to be anti-semetic?"

Your answer here seems to be "it doesn't, unless the Jews ever become a threat to the interests of whites."

Is that a fair restatement?

Do you believes that Jews, in aggregate, are a threat to the interests of whites?

I think that Jews are White, but that the organized political and economic wing of international Jewry does not see itself that way, and is acting against the interests of White people. This isn’t true only of Jews, though; they have (inexplicably) found eager allies and collaborators among a certain subset of gentile Whites, who are working hand-in-hand with them in the dispossession of Whites. Part of having White racial consciousness is, as far as I’m concerned, wanting to safeguard the welfare even of White people who don’t want the help. Rescuing wayward, confused Whites is non-negotiably important, in my opinion - saving Whites from themselves and opening their eyes to what has been done to them with their own ostensible (if compromised) consent. Basically I think that a great number of Jews fall into that category of “wayward Whites who can still be brought back into the fold before it’s too late”, although my confidence in that proposition continues to waver.

Part of having White racial consciousness is, as far as I’m concerned, wanting to safeguard the welfare even of White people who don’t want the help. Rescuing wayward, confused Whites is non-negotiably important, in my opinion - saving Whites from themselves and opening their eyes to what has been done to them with their own ostensible (if compromised) consent.

Good luck with this.

The best and brightest of Whites clearly see that "whiteness" is lost cause and are leaving the sinking ship ASAP to join the winning side.

https://www.thejc.com/news/world/joe-biden-s-very-jewish-family-1.508420

https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2014-09-28/ty-article/charlotte-clinton-mezvinsky-jew-or-not-jew/0000017f-dbff-df9c-a17f-ffff53ee0000

https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/celebrity/article/3097352/meet-donald-trumps-grandchildren-arabella-joseph-and

Do you believe that, when searching for a husband, someone like Chelsea Clinton really went "hmm, whiteness is a losing cause; I better find a Jewish husband to ensure that my child is not white"? Especially considering that the recent events have, indeed, demonstrated that antisemitism continues to exist - such as in the way that one of the most major musical artists, if not the most major, of the recent decades is willing to go to major medias to express clearly antisemitic views?

And what, you think this is muh IQ and education?

«Sinking ship» may be too strong a phrase but Jewishness does carry social benefits that Whiteness does not, namely access to resources and authority of an ethnic corporation. Can you imagine the reverse of Kanye's case, with some guy calling on Whites to drop Kanye or Nick Cannon?

People do care about ethnic and caste-based in-groups, even if Hajnal whites are on average a bit defective in this respect – even they can adapt. It is historically normal for upper-class (but not necessarily high income) people to think dynastically and seek to marry off their children into a higher-potential, better-protected, well-networked ethnically distinct demographic at the top of the current social hierarchy; this needn't be explained by random, thoughtless romance-driven breeding mechanics characteristic of plebs. Ambitious Jews did that as well when entering Anglo and German higher society, the result being many newly made Baron families mixing with Lutherans and e.g. Rothschilds all but dissolving among the British aristocracy. Now Clintons and Trumps may prosper in a way Kennedys have not, and Pelosis have a stake in the future too.

In fact I contend that for some families this is can be understood as a reward, a result of proving one's dedication over multiple generations. Trump's father had been desperate to demonstrate his and now Ivanka, after converting to Judaism, has become just about worthy of being accepted into the family of a mediocre convicted felon. Pelosi boasts of her father having been a shabbos goy; now some of Pelosi's grandchildren will have a solid defense if anyone calls them Nazi, Racist or Fascist. The story of Clintons and Bidens is probably similar.

Especially considering that the recent events have, indeed, demonstrated that antisemitism continues to exist - such as in the way that one of the most major musical artists, if not the most major, of the recent decades is willing to go to major medias to express clearly antisemitic views?

That's a breathtaking spin on a man with maximally high social capital getting deplatformed in real time. Everything else aside, do you honestly think Kanye's case reinforces your point? What could even have been evidence in favor of the opposite that you'd accept – antisemitism not existing, all antisemites having been rounded up and shot? Literally insane ultra-rich and confident men knowing better than to speak ill of Jews, or Kanye getting quartered in public?

Or are you also building your credentials with conspicuous gullibility, at Eetan's expense?

In an op-ed for the Financial Times, the Endeavor co-CEO wrote that there should be 'no tolerance anywhere for West's anti-Semitism' and encouraged brands to full-stop cease partnering and working with the designer.

Emanuel, himself a Jew, is widely considered to be one of the most powerful men in the entertainment industry. West has repeatedly blamed the 'Jewish media' and 'Jewish community' in the music industry for toying with him.

'This is a moment in history where the stakes are high and being open about our values, and living them, is essential. Silence and inaction are not an option.'

This is something I’ve certainly thought about. What if instead of absorbing Jews into Whiteness, the only really viable long-term hope is to absorb Whites into Jewishness, through a calculated long-term campaign of intermarriage? It’s not something I currently advocate, nor do I have any hope of it getting off the ground as a widely-accepted cultural program, but it’s not clear to me right now whether or not it would be a bad thing.

Well that actually clears things up even if I find the point of view to be almost unrelatable.