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Notes -
Costin the Jew, Israel and Me
or
Bronze Age Zionism
In the Atlantic last week, a profile of Costin Alamariu, listless MIT graduate, former investment banker, itinerant philosopher, schizoposter, dissident right fixture and, of course, 'Bronze Age Pervert'. And, it seems, Romanian-American Jew, likely one of many whose exit was bought in the final years of Ceaușescu's dictatorship by Israel (in exchange for cash, arms and loans).
I once argued extensively on the previous iteration of this forum that it was extremely unlikely that BAP was Jewish (even though he occasionally said things to this effect, he also sometimes claimed he was joking, and in any case non-gentile-white (especially Jewish) ancestry is a meme in dissident right circles). While BAP's more extreme antisemitism was clearly performative, and his 'racism' often as hostile to sedentary, fat American whites as it was to other groups, it was more viscerally (if not intellectually) radical than that of most Jewish far-right antisemites, like Ron Unz. I referred to various posts and comments, and even his appearance in what was at that time one of the only leaked pictures of him. In this article, the author all but confirms that Alamariu is, in fact, actually Jewish, which means I was wrong. I extend a mea culpa to those who disagreed with me.
It is hard to say for sure that BAP is 'the' central figure in the modern dissident right, although I struggle to think of a more prominent personality among online, English-speaking dissident rightists (MacDonald is much less well-known and comes across in many cases as a dull academic, Fuentes is a clown, and Spencer is a laughing stock within the movement even if he is likely still more famous outside of it), but he is certainly one of them. Jewish far-rightists (whether they are open about their ethnic identity or conceal it) are nothing new; Jews are overrepresented, as Sailer has joked, in every intellectual endeavor except perhaps golf-course architecture. The British-Jewish writer Tamara Berens, writing in Mosaic (a more religious sister magazine to Tablet) briefly describes BAP's Jewishness and his feud with Nick Fuentes in a 'report' on dissident right antisemitism, though she does not really engage with his ideas as regards his Jewishness. Discussion of Alamariu's political identity as distinctly Jewish is largely nonexistent beyond the occasional tweeted insult directed at him by detractors on the far-right since his identity became widely known.
We might distinguish here (in a way BAP could reject) between purely genetic and cultural identity. Raised in a first-generation Jewish immigrant family in the heavily Jewish community of Newton (in 2002, almost 40% of Newton's population was Jewish), with a best friend who - The Atlantic reports - is now in a position of "leadership in his synagogue" and with numerous Holocaust survivor relatives, Alamariu seems in many ways to have grown up in a substantially more Jewish milieu than many secular Jewish-Americans, myself included. At university, he seems to have been profoundly influenced by the work of Strauss, one of the more famous Jewish-American philosophers of the late 20th century (certainly on the right).
So is BAPism, incoherent and unfocused though it is, particularly Jewish in a way that even most theories of political philosophy established or contributed to by Jews are not? I think it might be.
Alamariu's political philosophy fits most neatly into the early Zionist, post-Nietzschean climate of a subset of early 20th century Jewish intellectualism in Central Europe. Early Zionism, particularly in the Germanic world, was extremely heavily influenced by Nietzsche, Herzl himself paraphrases him several times. The Nietzschean new man became the New Jew, the Israeli. Large aspects of BAP's discussion of both gender identity and Jewish identity (when he is being serious) paraphrase the work of the German-Jewish writer Otto Weininger, with the notable exception that Weininger considered Christianity the 'antidote' to the ideas he dislikes, while BAP considers it a descendant of the same philosophy. BAP's extreme misogyny is also largely taken from Weininger. This connection was noted in some cases long before BAP's own Jewish identity was widely confirmed. Both consider Jewishness as a quasi-metaphysical state of being distinct from the ethnic reality of being Jewish; to some extent this is a rejection of the hard HBD group-selection stance of MacDonald or even (arguably) Ron Unz, though the latter's views are somewhat fluid on this question.
Jewish dissident rightists face a unique obstacle compared to their gentile peers, which is that they must square their politics with Israel. Consider that to the modal white nationalist, the mythical Western European or North American overtly ethnat twenty-first century state is a fantasy; like Wakanda, hidden from colonialists in the deepest jungle, it can be imagined without compromise or concession to reality. For the Jewish reactionary, Israel is an impossible obstacle because it actually exists. This separates the modern Jewish dissident rightist even from his late-19th or early-20th century equivalents. BAP's writing on Israel is limited, but his most significant commentary is in this piece from 2019, in which he explicitly links western wignat identity and Israeli 'religious zionism', and condemns them both as essentially vapid, empty ideas. The piece is rambling and contradicts itself multiple times, but in it one can see (perhaps) a uniquely Jewish contempt for modern Israel grounded in the above German-Jewish philosophy.
I will now expand on this second point.
To be a Jewish rightist is for me to look upon Israel as an impossibly profound disappointment. A fetid, desert shithole full of ugly, functional, modernist architecture, a tiny, valuable tech and export sector propping up a vast population of fecund religious peasants who dress like 18th century Polish fur traders and who lack the slightest inclination to high civilization or even to the defense of their homeland (and who indeed consider it religiously illegitimate), assorted barbarians, and Slavs with 1/8th Jewish ancestry. To the left, generic Western globally-homogenized secularists. In the middle, the Mizrachim and Sephardim, dull and largely irrelevant beyond electoral politics and clinging to their religion. And then the 'religious zionists', ironic quasi-descendants of Jabotinsky, not-quite-shtetl dwellers practicing a bizarre form of nationalist socialism in which their mission under God is to build more razor-wire-fenced ugly Arizona-esque suburban architecture on the hills outside East Jerusalem taken from Arabs in the belief that this represents the height of their potential contribution to the world.
Where once early Zionists considered themselves in the Nietzschean mold, establishing an outpost of European civilization in the Middle East that could - with the help of Jewish ingenuity and intelligence - perhaps eventually become a best-case example of Western civilization, a great European state that belonged to the (Ashkenazi) Jews as the other European states did to their respective peoples - by the mid-late 20th century Zionism had become a debased form of nationalist socialism in the German fashion, in which the only thing that mattered was the preservation of Jews as a tribe in the most vulgar way. Or, as BAP writes:
In Israel, high culture is irrelevant in part because when the only important thing is racial identity and racial survival, nothing else matters. Israel represents the ethnostate as it is in practice, the worship of the lowest common denominator provided he is "one of us". Ethnonationalism, for BAP, is an inherently debased ideology because it elevates the worst of a people on an arbitrary basis. As Kevin Williamson argued upon Trump's election, not every poor white Appalachian deserved to succeed in modernity, even if Donald told them every failure wasn't their fault; the same thing should apply to Israel but does not, for there an imbecile or lowlife is still, "at least" Jewish, still belongs and so must be accomodated and even (as Alamariu's family was) intentionally retrieved. Ethonationalism as slave morality, in other words. Survival is not enough, birth rates do not in fact detemine civilizational greatness, or Niger would be the finest nation on earth. @SecureSignals once asked about my view on ethnonationalism, I guess this is it: that you can lose even if you win, and that it can be a path to the worst kind of tolerance of the worst aspects of your own people.
It is here, then, that the Jewish roots of BAP's ideology and identity might lie behind the Greco-Roman LARP, in the yearning for a grand national project that never quite worked the way it was hoped to. There is a deep mourning for a 'European' Ashkenazi Jewish state, one that goes far beyond the right. One sees it everywhere in remaining diasporic fiction and culture, sometimes even in Israel, but its most notable (or famous) example is in Michael Chabon's 2007 book 'The Yiddish Policeman's Union', which imagines a fictional Ashkenazi state carved out of Alaska, in a world in which Israel in its Middle Eastern incarnation collapses into anarchy and war just a few months into its existence. The plot itself is largely a thinly-veiled attack on George Bush's policy in the middle east; Chabon is a leftist anti-zionist who opposes Jewish in-marriage (ie. encourages Jews to marry gentiles for the sake of diversity). Still, on the left as well as the intellectual right, then, the unsatisfactoriness of Israel is a mounting disappointment. A state built to serve the weakest members of a tribe cannot turn around and build a culture that worships strength, success, or achievement. Discussion of the failure of Zionist utopianism is now commonplace, even as those who grasp at it fail to understand why it happened.
So the Jew leaves the shtetl, where in some form (whether in Judea or elsewhere) he has lived for millenia, accomplishing almost nothing of note. He changes the world, and for a brief, glorious period it appears as if he is capable (at least) of true greatness, of something approaching eternity, of a new, maybe even greater, civilization, grander than what has come before. And then he fails to build it as he returns to the desert, so he restores the shtetl (so kindly brought over wholesale by the chareidim) and disappears into mediocrity, into nothingness. Terminal decline. The fear of this desert haunts me as it seems to do Alamariu because Israel, really, is the graveyard of Jewish exceptionalism. Perhaps it is better to gamble on the future of the West than to accept fate and be swept beneath the sands of the Negev where one might disappear from history.
Is it the Atlantic that first published his identity and ethnicity? There seems to be a trend of mainstream legacy media outting public personalities that publish under a pen name. BAP, Libsoftictock, Scott. They clearly have an axe to grind here, even though they hide behind the some notion of journalism and a fig leaf of newsworthiness. What is there to be done? Nothing. Its asymetrical. Add it the list of reasons I find journalists lower than lawyers and slightly higher than pedophiles. I hope to one day be introduced to a journalist so that I can laugh in their face when they tell me their profession.
The name has been public for a while. Pseudonyms and revealing their authors has been a thing for centuries, every side does it. It's only asymmetrical in that the center has moved very far to the left relative to the past, so there are more attacks from the left, but the methods aren't at all different.
Yes, I'd say the primary difference is that in the West, there is pretty much zero need for a radically leftist author to write under a pseudonym. They may still do so for privacy reasons, but it's not to protect them from cancellation.
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I understand that perspective, and I agree that some journalists can be pretty nasty about it, going over the top with it and using it exclusively to destroy an adversary, but that's the game man. You don't start writing under a pseudonym because you are a paranoid schizophrenic who is autistic about privacy, you do it because you want to say things you know will upset the establishment. It's part of the trade off you make when you take on a professional pen name - the price of anonymity is trust, the more anonymous you are the less you can be trusted.
You give up the chance to be a household name, your ability to network is hampered dramatically, and even the outfits that will publish pseudonymous works are cautious about it, as they should be. But in return for forfeiting your legacy, you get held to the public's standards of journalist ethics, which can be gamed much more easily than any media organisation's. You get to write however you like, and cater your material to the audience you want, instead of what the outfit wants. And you get to speak the truth as you see it, any and every truth, no matter what anyone else thinks. It's a good trade off I think, as a former pseudonymous journalist (feel free to laugh in my face, if I met younger me I would too.)
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