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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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I agree that the dissident right is overdosing on hopium regarding antisemitism.

With the exception of some of the Muslims (and not even all of them, since many at elite universities are largely secularized DEI libs who do not or barely follow any tenets of Islam) these protestors are not racially or religiously hostile to Jews in and of themselves. At most they consider Jews to be ‘white people’, whom they may dislike, but that is hardly the basis for a coalition with white rightists.If this is how young progressives protest against what they perceive as ‘white ethnonationalism’ on the far side of the world, it does not take a great intellect to imagine how they feel about white ethnonationalism in the United States, which is the central policy position on the dissident right.

It is cathartic for far rightists to see Jewish people finally getting their supposed ‘comeuppance’ for supporting progressive policies in the diaspora while defending an ethnic homeland in Israel (allegations of hypocrisy were not unfounded, although many did ‘pick a side’ and advocate liberalism in both, like Soros, or in neither, like many Jewish conservatives).

In practice, though, the most strategic thing for the dissident right to do would be to shut up. Each major Jewish donor or lobbyist who leaves the left because of its anti-Israel activism, even if they merely become politically neutral rather than center-right (let alone hard right, let alone far right) is a win for conservatives. Richard Hanania made this point more eloquently.

The coming together of leftist and rightist antisemitism is not particularly likely. Blue haired DEI activists who think Israel is a white nationalist fascist police state oppressing innocent people of color (much like Amerikkka amirite) are unlikely to agree that the progressive ideology, media, art and culture they love, which in fact is the impetus behind their antizionism itself (!) is in fact degenerate art and subversion created by the very Jews they are protesting against. The protestors like everything the rightists dislike about Jews except their zionism, while the antisemitic far right sympathize on some level with ethnonationalism but dislike everything else.

However, I disagree that antisemitism will not rise. It is clearly rising, as is visible in everything from comments on mainstream YouTube and TikTok content, in Zoomers memes and in real life among younger people, both white and non-white in the West. That does not mean that things will necessarily get very bad for Jews, at least in the Anglosphere (it was still much worse a century ago), but it is undeniable.

Have these anti muslim zionists ever done anything for white people? The whole Bush era was full of white people siding with AIPAC to fight Islam. It achieved absolutely nothing and Europe got swamped with migrants. While the mainstream right got blown up fighting peasants in the middle east their home countries were taking in millions of Muslims. There is no reason to side with people who have been consistently hostile to White people for decades because they now want you to fight for Israel again.

Will these jewish lobbyists actually do something for White people or will they just try to convince us that we are owning the libs when we waste tax money bombing peasants fighting the same billionaires that donate to ADL?

Antisemitism has less to do with people not liking jews and more to do with people being annoyed with things jews do. Pogroms weren't caused by abstract hate of jews, it was caused by people being fed up with how the jews were behaving. The best thing jews could do would be to stop provoking people around them and stirring up conflicts. Unfortunately, it seems like jews use conflicts with the host population in order to increase cohesion within the jewish community. An outside enemy is a great way to unite a people and jews therefore need to be in a continuous state of conflict.

Antisemitism has less to do with people not liking jews and more to do with people being annoyed with things jews do. Pogroms weren't caused by abstract hate of jews, it was caused by people being fed up with how the jews were behaving. The best thing jews could do would be to stop provoking people around them and stirring up conflicts.

So I take it that in your view, the Holocaust was because all these evil Polish Jews were meddling in German politics.

I hate to break it to you, but Jews do not act as a coherent group. If you find Jews on two sides of an issue, that is not because they decided to infiltrate both sides, but because they genuinely believe in different things. In any somewhat meritocratic system, some Jews will likely come out in the top 1%. Some Jews will be doctors, lawyers and so on. Some will be intellectuals all over the political spectrum, from the fringe left to conservatives (if the Nazis and their ilk were not rabidly antisemitic, I am sure that some Jews would have joined them as well). A lot of them will have perfectly normal middle class jobs. Of course, some of the rich ones will throw their money around trying to influence politics. Or commit sex crimes. Good thing gentile industrialists never do that!

For Germany 1933, antisemitism was the placebo therapy. Plenty of poor people found capitalism wanting and were disillusioned with democracy. Rather than waiting for a communist revolution (which would have been terrible for other reasons), gentile industrialists were funding Hitler. There were Jewish bankers and industrialists, and the Nazis managed to convince enough of the population that rather than the Jewish banker and the gentile banker being the problem (as the commies would see it), or unbridled capitalism being the problem, the Jewish banker and the Jewish barber were the problem.

host population

That phrase is Problematic.

Charitably, you want to suggest that the Jews are guests to the host population. This is wrong, Jews are members of their nation states as much as anyone. German and French Jews both did their share of foolish dying at Verdun, same as any other Germans and French did. Some US Jews lived there back before it was independent. The trope of the faithless, nationless Jew is from old European antisemitism. In reality, it was the other way round: whenever a monarch was feeling particularly Christian, they would banish all the Jews from their realm.

Of course, less charitably, you know exactly what phrasing you are using and the word opposite to the host is "parasite", which is also an old antisemitic trope.

So I take it that in your view, the Holocaust was because all these evil Polish Jews were meddling in German politics.

Yes, the major factor in the thrid reich's policy on jews was jewish support of communism, the rampant issues with jews engaged in degeneracy. Jews such as Magnus Hirschfeld were not exactly making their people look good. This was during the same era that the Soviet union was wrecking eastern Europe and killing millions, the Bolshevik party was stuffed with jews.

Jews don't have to act as a coherent group. Jews can still be highly overrepresented in certain movements such as communism. There have continuously been problems with dual loyalty amongst jews throughout history and the jews in Germany were clearly not loyal to the German people. Jews have high in group preference and are nepotistic. Their overrepresentation is largely due to them working as a group to promote their own. When a group's members primarily are loyal to their own group and engage with rampant nepotism that hurts the host society.

gentile industrialists were funding Hitler

The movement largely consisted of working class veterans who saw jewish communists take over Munich and have a predecessor to a BLM rally and decided to shut it down.

Charitably, you want to suggest that the Jews are guests to the host population.

Yes, they are a diaspora population that moves around.

Of course, less charitably, you know exactly what phrasing you are using and the word opposite to the host is "parasite", which is also an old antisemitic trope.

Funny how the same tropes have been used by ancient Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, arabs, and throughout Europe for two millenia.

Congratulations, this comment has finally spurred me into registering an account on this website after lurking since the Reddit days. (I have a few comments on the sub, but nothing major besides one about Ukraine). In my defense, the Motte’s UX on mobile isn’t great.

I’m not interested in commenting on anything re: “jews engaged in degeneracy”, and anyway I wouldn’t say anything 2rafa hasn’t already pointed out, but this stood out to me:

The movement largely consisted of working class veterans who saw jewish communists take over Munich and have a predecessor to a BLM rally and decided to shut it down.

What I believe you are referring to (feel free to correct me!) is the formation of the Volksstaat Bayern, the People’s State of Bavaria, on November 8th 1918. And you’re sort of right, the organizer of the anti-Wittelsbach revolution and the subsequent Minister-President, Kurt Eisner, was, in fact, a middle-class Jew (as well as a socialist from Berlin who left his wife and child for a journalist, very degenerate indeed). Well, he wasn’t actually a communist, and most of his government wasn’t, either (though many were Jewish, also). Eisner was assassinated by the rightist Anton Arco-Valley (an aristocrat who himself had significant Jewish ancestry), and the whole government collapsed.

The Volksstaat was couped by more radical left-wingers and set up the Bavarian Soviet Republic in April 1919 (led by Ernst Toller, who wasn’t a communist either, but was a Jew). Anyway this lasted six days, and then the actual communists took over the government, led by Eugen Levine (finally, a Jewish communist), and then a month later elements of the German Army and the Freikorps overthrew said communists and ended the whole fiasco. And it would be correct to say that there were individuals involved in the latter that would go on to join the NSDAP.

I don’t understand the BLM allusion, and I ended up writing more about a fairly obscure event than I intended, but for my own sake I decided to steelman the context here. It is not irrelevant to the NSDAP’s history as a whole. Biographies of Hitler often spend a good chunk on this period of his life, as he (and a few other later prominent Nazis, like Sepp Dietrich) literally participated in the revolutionary government!

I object to taking this event, however, and using it to characterize the NSDAP entirely! I’m not going to write an essay now on the demographics of the Nazi support base in 1932 (Richard F. Hamilton’s Who Voted For Hitler is probably the best source, although Seymour Martin Lipset has also written extensively on the subject).

But to put it shortly — the idea of the great brown wave, the common man who said enough (!) to Jewish degenerates, communists, sodomites, etc. is an absolute myth. The NSDAP’s voters were primarily middle class and self-employed, and they were Protestant (Catholics voted for Zentrum). The urban working class voted for the communists, or the SPD, before that party’s growing unpopularity caused by the Great Depression and Chancellor Bruening’s austerity policies radicalized the electorate. The economic crisis did drive parts of the working poor to the Nazis, but these were primarily artisans, shopkeepers, lawyers, small farmers, and domestic workers; and their motivation was not particularly anti-semitic, and if it was, I’d agree with quiet_Nan, that this was brought on by the more important economic and political anxiety. Although I would disagree on the finer points, as most of the NSDAP’s voters probably would not have voted for the communists anyway, as most likely some owned private property.

More interesting to me, however, is the support of the upper classes for the NSDAP, which was motivated primarily by anti-communist sentiment, albeit with some anti-semitism and anti-democratic sentiment thrown in. The NSDAP received extensive funding from industrialists, such as the directors of IG Farben and Gustav Krupp, and Alfred Hugenberg’s media empire was critical in setting the scene for Hitler’s electoral program. The Nazis also extensively courted the German aristocracy (famously Wilhelm, Crown Prince of Germany), and several key members, such as Goering, were decidedly not salt-of-the-earth types. These people were not inspired to shut down a BLM rally by degenerate Jewish communists (they were probably personally each much more degenerate than the bohemian Kurt Eisner). Their motives were political and economical, and related far more to gentile Soviets than to Jews.

I probably rambled on for too long, and it’s possible I’m reading too much into a throwaway sentence, but sometimes I read takes on this forum about the Nazis that I find uninformed, and this being one of them, here we are.

Oh also

Funny how the same tropes have been used by ancient Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, arabs, and throughout Europe for two millenia.

This just isn’t true.

The movement largely consisted of working class veterans who saw jewish communists take over Munich and have a predecessor to a BLM rally and decided to shut it down.

Jews were not mostly disloyal to Germany. Most were not involved in politics at all. Jews were well represented in the Freikorps beyond Prussia despite their substantially antisemitic character in the North especially re. certain chants, among them heroic anti-communists like Weissenstein (killed by communists defending Essen in the Ruhr insurrection) and men like Ernst Kantorowicz, who was of course later famous for The King’s Two Bodies and remained a lifelong German patriot even after the Holocaust.

Ernst and Gertrud Kantorowicz were typical of German Jews…They were passionate nationalists, as völkisch as you could get. Like other Germans, they celebrated the outbreak of war as a momentous chance for national renewal. The late historian Fritz Stern remarked that the passionate German response to the war went beyond mere patriotism. Many intellectuals, especially, saw the guns of August as a triumphant release from dead-end bourgeois culture, a call to a new nobility and manliness.

In summer 1914, during the first frenzy of battle, even German Zionists declared that there was “no difference” between Jews and other Germans. Martin Buber wrote enthusiastically in August, “Never has the concept of the Volk been such a reality to me than during these last weeks.”

And yet years later these were the same Jews blamed both for Germany’s defeat and the Treaty of Versailles, and even amid that, many still served in right-wing anticommunist paramilitaries. The great majority of German Jews were apolitical and loyal to their country.


But that isn’t even the question here. The majority of German Jews fled the Nazis well before 1939. If it had been a mere expulsion of German Jews, the few hundred thousand would be removed and the whole chapter would be just another expulsion of many. What happened, however, was the invasion and occupation of other countries and the murder of their Jewish populations. Greek or Dutch Jews were not Germans or (in almost all cases) communists, and had no intention of becoming so.

And the Soviet Union’s role in WW2’s early years was as Nazi ally whose territorial conquest of Poland was accomplished hand-in-hand with the Germans. By the late 1930s many old Bolshevik Jews had already been purged, even Yagoda was dead, and you seem to ignore that the predominant impulse behind Soviet policy in Eastern Europe by this time certainly was gentile. Was alleged (minority) Jewish involvement in German communist movements enough to justify cleansing the entirety of continental Europe of them, as was the plan? I don’t think you’ve made a case for that.

I didn’t tell you to ally with them or that they would serve the ‘interests’ of white people. I said that a large shift in their politics away from the increasingly anti-Israel left in America would be a win for the right regardless because they would separate an important part of the progressive coalition from it. Most Islamic immigration to Western Europe has been from Pakistan, Algeria and Turkey, and to some extent from the Caucasus, not from Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria. They left not because of American policy but because Europe offered a much higher quality of life and welfare. It’s delusional and ridiculous to suggest that the large increase in the Muslim population of Western Europe since the 1960s is the fault of US intervention in the Middle East.

It is true for Sweden specifically, where functor is from.

Sweden also could’ve said “no.”