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The strange place of Jewishness in the culture war
I find that Jewishness has a very strange place in the culture war, and I think it merits examination. I welcome people trying to help me make sense of it and figure out exactly where the battle lines lay. Both left and right fancy themselves champions of Jewishness, and paint the other side as antisemitic. It's very strange how it breaks down, and I don't fully understand why and along which lines.
On the left, they're very eager to portray the other side as fascists, holocaust deniers, and old-fashioned anti semites. We can see this in cases like Kyrie Irving mentioned below, and Kanye West, where if anyone says anything bordering on Jew-illuminati conspiracy theory, they are pounced on and labeled as fascist and far right. I particularly disliked the handling of Marjorie Taylor Greene last year, where she said something (which admittedly did sound stupid and crazy to me) about Rothschild, and immediately, I was hearing about "jewish space lasers" from every jewish acquaintance I know. While I do agree that Greene sounded crazy, I think there was a few steps and a lot of filling in the blanks between what she said and something that's legit antisemitic.
On the right, everyone I know is very eager to say that the left hates Jews. These people are fans of people like Bari Weiss. I'm less clear right now on exactly what delineates the claim that the left hates Jews, maybe because we've had a run over the past month of a number of cases of the left supposedly championing Jews (like in the Kanye situation). I know that one such thing that people on the right take issue with is the left being very anti-Israel. Though really, I think it does make sense that being anti-Israel isn't the same as being antisemitic.
This state of affairs makes it difficult for me to predict how my Jewish acquaintances will react to any culture warring. I've found that sometimes, the very same people are eager to claim that liberal American institutions hate Jews due to their stances on Israel, but then will also turnaround and claim that Trump was about to start shipping Jews out to the camps for the 2nd holocaust. It sort of seems to me that most of them are so eager to see oppression everywhere, they're like a leaf blowing in the wind, following whatever the current is, claiming that anyone and everyone is out to get them. Instead, to me, it seems more like (almost) no one is out to get them, and instead everyone wants to claim that their tribe is the only REAL supporters of the Jews.
So much has been said on this topic over the centuries, it's tedious.
The long and short of it is that Jews truly have «systemic power» that the left accuses White-cishet-male-etc. outgroup of having; perhaps this accusation is better understood as a deflection. They are overrepresented in positions of power, they are substantially coordinated specifically as Jews, including in those positions of power, via a rich and dense network of Jewish organizations focusing on outreach to/bargaining with/pressuring people in power – well, this «they» necessarily excluding those who neglect their ethnic identity or its illegible political terms (e.g. Greenwald), and the fruit of in-group preference that those factors provide, but in terms of total influence this isn't a noteworthy caveat – and their coordinating structures are dedicated to maintaining and furthering this power, first of all by means of promoting the doctrine of Jewish victimhood (to the point of it having become a kneejerk quasi-religious dogma, with Hitler impersonation being about as taboo as Devil worshipping was in the Middle Ages – at least the medievals could have their Festivals!), and secondly by eroding the capacity of other peoples to coordinate, except to again erode the bigger and stronger group's capacity. So we have Civil Rights support and assorted pro-Black activism including BLM, but the moment Blacks begin to build their identity on the Black Hebrew Israelite/Nation of Islam ideology (admittedly a complete schizo clown show), Jews pull the plug and we see those performative lustrations.
This isn't new. I think the difference this time is that Western elites are progressively becoming, well, less Western, and more tolerant of explicit ethnic casteism, especially when powered by genuine differences in capability: for a good illustration, see @BurdensomeCount here. Due to all people nominally having the same rights and obligations, there is no notion of noblesse oblige either, the useful bits of Western egalitarianism being combined with useful bits of Eastern might-makes-right logic.
I think in my lifetime, even with moderately pessimistic estimates (i.e. the next 15 years) I'll see the flip-flop on this topic, a sharp transition to normalization of the belief that Jews, as a politically represented ethnic fraction, are just inherently better and have more rights than Gentiles. Those demands of admitting the advantage, with the promise of recognizing it as valid, are not as clever as people like Roko may imagine.
I very strongly believe in noblesse oblige and perform it when in the midst of my own people. Back home people can basically tell at a glance that I am better than them simply based on my dress (even when I'm wearing local dress my clothes have higher quality fabric are crisper and fit me better due to having been specifically tailored for me) and in such a case I even go out of my way to e.g. at the airport lift my own baggage rather than getting a porter as that is demonstrating the virtue of self sufficiency to others around me. Also when praying I have no qualms to standing next to janitors and ditch diggers, reflecting the fact that while in Earthly matters people have different ranks, in the eyes of God we have all been created equal (and infinitely beneath Him) and that we will be judged for our sins in the same way on the Day of Resurrection regardless of whether one was a prince or a pauper.
When talking to people in my language no matter how low they may be I always use the formal, polite way of referring to them and in conversation always treat them like an equal (because it is possible to tell from my dress, manner of walking, height etc. that I am their superior, I don't need to articulate it). They know they are beneath me, I know I am above them but treating them like dirt beneath my feet isn't going to get us anywhere in relation to the reason I'm talking to them, instead I have a duty of care towards them similar to a parent's duty of care towards their children and I try and make sure that what I'm asking of these people doesn't cross the line over into exploitation (equally I would never ask someone to do something I wouldn't be willing to do myself, I've cleaned plenty of toilets and even once dug a ditch to find out what it was like).
In the west though I don't do any of it, because the proles here believe themselves to be equal in worldly matters to me (lol, lmao even) and so I treat them like equals; much like how my job is focused on figuring out ways to make money off of other market participants in the west these people get to deal with a version of me that only looks after my own self interest, and naturally since they are beneath me they lose out more often.
Once I made close to £500 off a student acquaintance of mine who was making wildly overconfident claims about the probabilities of certain events, I challenged him to trade on it and he accepted, despite knowing I work in quant finance and him being a history & politics student who stopped studying maths at 16. I even pushed to do a big sized trade given how confident he seemed by dangling the carrot of potentially winning £2000 in front of him. Naturally he was wrong, I was right and suddenly he had lost a month's worth of discretionary expenses for him. Had this been back home I would never have proposed the bet in the first place, seeing it as exploitation of those below me in this domain, and even after I had won would probably have returned the money along with a life lesson in being less confident in your assertions but here in the West I was perfectly happy to take the cash as I had rightfully won it from an equal, never mind that it was supposed to be his food money for the rest of the term while it was something I wouldn't even notice (you can probably tell I didn't really like him).
This wasn't an attack on your attitude, which if anything is refreshing in its boldness and consistency. Even an explicit Varna system where our neo-Brahmin Judeo-Hapa CEOs are recognized as spiritually (and racially) superior but are also expected to fulfill certain paternalistic prosocial obligations befitting their greater capability would be preferable to the current having-the-cake-and-eating-it-too arrangement, where Whites both underperform and carry the inexhaustible moral burden of transgressions, real and imagined.
Note, however, that in the West you feel noblesse oblige towards, and intend to save, «the West» as an abstraction and a communal cultural legacy. As you have indicated many times in the past, ignorant, wretched lower-to-middle-class Anglos can only inspire an almost-genocidal contempt on your side. You justify this by pointing out their unmerited pretension of equality. Fine. But if we compare values, they are, on average, superior to the median member of your nation (if not your lineage) in all respects one could care about – work ethic, intellect, honesty, fucking cleanliness – except maybe knowing their place; they provide the substrate for your flourishing; and they are not afforded the opportunity to lord over those lesser people in their countries, nor do they seek it – as opposed to their, or rather their upper classes', forefathers of the Colonial era. And indeed both in the US and the UK they calmly accept even the political leadership of your kin; a situation unthinkable in any South Asian nation, no matter the respective merit.
In my eyes this largely redeems their superficial arrogance, and brings the ball back into your court.
Nobility, as far as I understand it, is about owning land, developing it and those who dwell on it and protecting it and them from harm. (Whatever "bloodline" and "good stock" are, they only contribute to nobility as much as they contribute to what nobles do). Perhaps Burdensome has neglected to mention everything he does that makes him, as he puts it, "better", but from what I gathered from his post he moves money around the Western market and earns a premium based on how much of it ends up in his employers' hands. Hardly evokes an image of a noble patriarch, that.
Right, the devil is very much in the details as far as @BurdensomeCount’s account of his noblesse oblige. The nobility of medieval Europe were expected to actually materially improve the lives of the people living under them, and to provide military protection for them. They were warlords - warlords with culture and at least the trappings of a genteel bearing, to be sure, but we’re talking about a network of guys who were expected to raise and lead armies in brutal combat.
I’m sure that @BurdensomeCount would say that he’d be happy to be a benevolent patriarch to the Western proles, and to provide for and protect them, if only they hadn’t pre-emptively spurned his noblesse with their gross insubordination. But could it be that he has gotten the causation backwards? Maybe the Western proles hate him and revolt against him because they are fully aware that he is in their country specifically to do something parasitic which produces zero actual value for anyone who isn’t a mega-wealthy vulture capitalist, and they don’t believe that he has anything remotely useful or beneficial to offer them.
A shake-up a few years ago in the executive suite of the multi-billion-dollar corporation with which I’m employed led to the ascension of an Indian Brahmin CEO, who then hired a few of his co-ethnics to major positions in the company. I’m sure that this guy probably sees himself precisely the way that Burdensome sees himself; as a paragon of superior breeding, here to rescue a flagging company with his immense and visually-obvious inborn talents. What most of us proles see, though, is a painfully awkward empty suit with not one iota of integrity or love for the common man in his bones. A parasite, here to bleed the company dry, dither about wage increases, and give a leg-up to other immigrants from his caste. A massively well-compensated parasite, and almost certainly a profoundly intelligent and numerate man, but someone I wouldn’t let into my home.
I would actually be fine with an immigrant overclass who displayed a genuine noblesse oblige. I agree with Burdensome that Anglosphere proles - I can’t speak to the state of Western proles more broadly - are degenerated and unworthy of the mantle of self-rule. They are crying out for someone to be their champion, but their shitty tastes and miscalibrated instincts keep leading them to elevate what, to the rest of us, are obvious grifters and charlatans. A ruling class with a combination of genuine erudition, hyper-competence, and noblesse oblige is exactly what these people need, and while I’m far from convinced that we’re past the point that we could construct such a class entirely from native-born talent, it’s at least plausible. The problem is that we can sense, with zero difficulty, that the overclass we’re actually importing are soulless sycophants and parasitic quants, saying whatever they need to say to get ahead while privately undermining and bleeding dry the people they’re ostensibly supposed to be protecting. Until the proles see concrete changes, of course they’re going to be insubordinate. You can play chicken-and-egg games all day, but from my perspective the ball is in your court to earn their deference.
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