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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33579 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Do you think the agitation today from groups like the ADL to fight "hate" and accept refugees and such is also cover for an underlying profit motive? Why don't you believe their own stated reasoning for encouraging that morality? They don't say we should accept refugees because we get access to more profitable labor. They say that to deny them is hateful and racist, which are sensibilities that enable antisemitism. Do you think their criticisms of White identity are driven by profit motive or ethnic anxieties? Why don't you believe them when they say it's about ethnic anxiety?

I agree that many on the DR overstate the practical impact of Hart-Cellar, but I think OP is actually emphasizing the symbolic impact here by comparing it to the poem etched on the Statue of Liberty after-the-fact, which completely changed the interpretation of that symbol.

In the same way, Hart-Cellar was a symbolically important moment that marked the retcon of American history. The motivations for that retcon, and the motivations for enforcing that interpretation with authoritarian measures, goes beyond profit motive.

I think the question is to what extent it was actually the case that Jewish immigration activists in the 1950s and 1950s advocated for the Kennedy-Hart-Cellar immigration reform because they genuinely feared that if America retained its demographics it would result in (or would result in a higher risk of) another Holocaust? This argument doesn't even necessarily make sense.

Well, that is a much stronger form of the argument I was making. They simply viewed it in their ethnic interests, and they viewed opposition to it and the motivating ideas behind that opposition to be threatening. With that said, they have certainly invoked the Holocaust to blame part of it on America for refusing to accept immigrants before the war. That is a narrative which is continued to this day. So, yes, they do use the Holocaust as a moral lesson for why Gentiles should accept immigrants.

Firstly, the Holocaust wasn't central to American Jewish identity until the 1980s and onward when more started to be written about it, it became a larger subject in schools, the first larger memorials and museums opened in the West and so on. The entire public consciousness about it tends to date back only about 40 years.

I absolutely agree with this. The Holocaust is interesting precisely because, unlike most historical events which are most salient in the public consciousness in the immediate aftermath but fade over time (like September 11th), the Holocaust didn't peak in saliency in the public consciousness until the 1990s, although it could be argued we are still at that peak. How exactly did that happen, if not the same cultural forces driving these other cultural changes at this same time? It was another major shift in the symbols we worship as a nation, and it can't be explained exclusively by profit motive.

"If we import a bunch of Latin American Catholics, antisemitism will go down and we're at less risk of anti-Jewish prejudice rising" doesn't really make sense as a strategy, especially given that some of history's harshest persecutors of Jews were Iberian Catholics and that pretty much all the serious antisemitism in the New World happened in Latin America.

I don't necessarily think that was the conscious strategy of the most influential Jewish groups advocating for these changes. I largely take them at their word when explaining their motivations:

  • Racism leads to antisemitism.

  • White people advocating for their ethnic interests is inherently racist (a premise which they themselves have been influential in establishing and maintaining).

  • Therefore, White people cannot be allowed to advocate for their ethnic interests.

Anti-immigration is the single most important policy expression of White people advocating for their ethnic interests. So Jewish influence in promoting immigration can simply be interpreted as them fighting racism, which is the motivation that they openly own. That doesn't resolve the criticism embedded in OP's argument.

Where I do not take them at their word is that their anti-racist sensibilities are motivated by the fact that they are just morally upstanding citizens of the world. I think a lot of them have deceived themselves into believing that. But looking at Israel and their ethnocentric tendencies in the rest of the world should dispel any notion of that.

They are gravely concerned about controlling immigration to Israel and the demographic composition of their Holy Land.

But again, even if we accept the premise that racism nebulously leads to antisemitism, why does importing a bunch of Latin American Catholics challenge racism?

Nobody is claiming that there was a plan from the beginning to import a bunch of Latin American Catholics. To be fair, I do not think anyone involved in Hart-Celler fathomed the current trajectory of demographic change in the United States when that bill was made into law. And for that matter, the importance of that one bill is overstated. For example, Hart-Celler IIRC was actually the first bill to put any sort of restriction on immigration from Latin America. The immigration rate was very low before that (and Mexican immigrants had been forcibly deported in prior roundups). The idea of Whites being demographically eclipsed by Mexican immigrants would not have registered to have been remotely within the realm of possibility among lawmakers at the time. It was not a salient issue within the broader immigrant question.

One can say that the technical impact of the bill is overstated, but I agree with OP that the bill more importantly marked a symbolic shift in American culture and retcon of American history. This was one component of many other cultural shifts which were also influenced by Jews and directly or indirectly advanced Jewish interests, with Holocaust remembrance being another example as you have mentioned.

The assertion is not that influential Jews planned to import Latin American Catholics in particular. The assertion is that influential intellectual and cultural movements spearheaded by Jews pathologize normal and healthy ethnocentric behavior among Whites. And, they use those same institutions to protect their own ethnocentric tendencies from criticism and to invoke Gentile support for their own ethnic interests. This is the same dynamic that endures to this day:

Under the direction of David Myers, the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Professor of Jewish History at UCLA, the initiative will feature 23 projects in its first year, supported by $600,000 in internal research funds. Additional projects will be funded in years two and three of the pilot.

...

“We’re interested in hate as it takes rise in groups and is transmitted from generation to generation, but we are also exploring how hate takes rise in the individual’s brain. Our ultimate aim is to do all that we can to mitigate or minimize hatred in individuals and groups,” added Myers.

Another team is examining how certain brain mechanisms might create a sense of dehumanization toward others. They’ll study participants with healthy brains as well as those with frontotemporal dementia.

So a White American average Joe who maybe has anxiety about the neighborhood he grew up in becoming Mexican or Haitian cannot be allowed to have any ethnocentric preferences that would be considered "hate" by Jews like David Myers. Something must be wrong with his brain if he wants his neighborhood or his country to remain White, and David Myers is going to do everything he can to fix them. Tikkun olam.

This is not a natural state. It did not happen on accident, either.

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