The following article by Diana West was originally published yesterday on her website.
American Betrayal Redux
by Diana West
Not one but several of the lowpoints of what Vladimir Bukovsky & Pavel Stroilov have called a “Soviet-style propaganda campaign” against American Betrayal, what Jed Babbin tagged a “disinformation campaign,” and what M. Stanton Evans has described as my “mugging” were logged by The American Thinker website edited by Thomas Lifson.
There was the (1) unsubstantiated parroting of the lies, distortions and fabrications (all debunked here) in an otherwise positive review (which, not incidentally, included the reviewer’s declaration that he was now persuaded that Harry Hopkins was an agent of Soviet influence inside the Roosevelt White House); there was the (2) rapid enforcement action by Rado publicly whacking the positive reviewer (and, of course, my book again in one of a blizzard of Rado-Horo attack pieces); there was (3,4) not one but two other attacks posted at American Thinker by writers who actually admitted in print not to have read my book at all; and (5) lowest of all, there was Thomas Lifson himself, who actually refused to run the rebuttal I wrote in response to false and unsubstantiated attacks on my scholarship contained in (1).
An ugly chapter of an ugly saga, to be sure. It would be compounded when several other writers subsequently and separately told me that their defenses of American Betrayal — or simply arguing for fair and honest dialogue about American Betrayal — were turned down at American Thinker, The party line was and is clear and inviolate. Congratulations to all concerned.
Today on Twitter someone responded to a brief blog Lifson wrote about the Sovietsky posters hanging in the home of Jay Carney and Claire Shipman by urging people to read American Betrayal to understand the phenomenon. (Thank you, @southsalem.)
I don’t know or care whether Lifson ever read or ever reads American Betrayal, but it is certainly the case that Western elites’ zest for Communist iconography is discussed in American Betrayal as a manifestation of the callous indifference to genocidal Communist crime that marks our society, a subject deeply analyzed and weighed throughout the book. There is some measure of irony to AT’s glib treatment of the topic, after everything, that somehow bears noting.
So noted. Here, then, for weekend reading, is a short excerpt from the book where the concept is introduced. The excerpt picks up after a discussion of the wrath of the Truman administration toward Whittaker Chambers for revealing the truth about Alger Hiss when, of course, Chambers deserved a medal. If an act of national-security-saving patriotism can be sundered from plaudits, it follows that multiple acts of mass murder can be sundered from condemnation. It’s all connected….
From American Betrayal, p. 63:
Important to note is that with a twist of the timeline, Chambers could just as easily have been subjected to the “wrath” of the Roosevelt administration or the “wrath” of the Eisenhower administration. Both of these administrations shared with Truman’s the same propensity for suppression when it came to the touchy subject of domestic Communist conspiracy. In the end, this had the effect of protecting the Communist conspiracy itself. In FDR’s case, for example, the president personally tried to shut down Rep. Martin Dies’s investigations into Communist conspiracy—and later his political career.8 In Eisenhower’s case, as president he was personally involved in efforts to shut down Senator Joseph McCarthy’s quite similar investigations.9 In all such cases, as with the Hiss case, this meant that both the extent and the impact of the conspiracies were officially downplayed, denied, suppressed, and/or ignored by those elected leaders directly responsible for defending the Constitution. In each and every instance, it was the anti-Communists, the ex-Communists, and the Cassandras who were punished and castigated by the Washington Establishment, and then ostracized for their “crimes” of exposing treason.
Why?
This question drove me further past the pat narratives that have sufficed for too long. It is particularly pertinent today as we watch the same Establishment forces coalescing anew to suppress logical and, indeed, patriotic questions about hostile Islamic penetration of the U.S. government particularly since 9/11.10 When did this ugly stuff really get going? A related question: When did anti-Communism itself—the philosophical and political drive against state domination of the individual—become a radioactive inheritance of perceived bigotry and mass hysteria to be passed down, gingerly, generation to generation? It must be here where the origins of our indifference to the plight of the anti-Communist witnesses and to Cold War victory and Communist crime lie. What I was looking for, then, was the beginnings of the greatest propaganda coup and flimflam operation in history: the hocus-pocus transformation of liberty-loving anti-Communism into a force of repression to be reviled—not always by the people, who were reflexively anti-Communist, but certainly by the elite expression of public conscience. There was a flip side to the phenomenon, too: the hocus-pocus transformation of totalitarian Communism into a force of liberalism, later liberation, to be shielded or even fully embraced by that same public conscience. It was almost as if a giant syringe of novocaine had been injected into the body politic at some unknown point and with permanent effect: the numbed sensibility that reflexively reviles the evil of Hitler but calmly accepts that of Stalin, Mao, and other Red thugs and killers. Among the many manifestations of this weirdly insensate state, my symbolic favorite is the eye-catching frequency with which Warhol’s silkscreen of Chairman Mao pops up as an aspect of chic in lavishly decorated homes, glorious fruits of the freeish market as celebrated in four-color, glossy shelter magazines. And no, irony is not a fig leaf for the mass murderer over the mantelpiece. His pride of place is more evidence of internal rot and betrayal…
It is also, as the book explains, more evidence of the disconnect between cause and effect, facts and conclusions, which is so much an aspect of the intertwining relationship of lies and double standards and departures from reality that held the US in thrall to the USSR. Increasingly, we rely on cant — much like something to be found in Mao’s Little Red Book, as a matter of fact.
Below, from p. 239, one of my distillations, which I’d wager suits the Carney-Shipman household — and other media-elite households — to a T. In fact, I just looked up a column I wrote back in 2003 noting the Warhol portrait of Mao over the fireplace of a home belonging to a Newsweek/Wall Street Journal couple, at that time recently returned home from Beijing and featured in Vogue. The couple was having problems Americanizing their son, it seemed, whom they had enrolled in St Ann’s School in Brooklyn, a school so Left-wing, I noted at the time, it featured third graders’ portraits of Lenin on the website. I just checked the school site, and eleven years later, it still does.
From American Betrayal:
…Sterling’s comment is testament to the awesome powers of “the belief” in the Big G-Goodness of the “Left,” the political, cultural catchall term we use to encompass all abstractions and ideologies of the revolutionaries and “reformers” who were, and are, naïve or egotistical or zealous or power-mad enough to force utopian transformation on the rest of us by government fiat, by mandatory “inclusiveness,” by police-backed diktat. The Left is all and only about social harmony by command performance. We can chalk up at least one hundred million murders to its most successful alumni, as tallied by The Black Book of Communism, but the animating spirit of “the Left” still retains its glow, its catechisms archaic but basically unchanged, the faith long having become a hardwired reflex:
Left, Good; Right, Bad.
“The people,” good; We, the People, “imperialist.”
Individuals (especially businessmen), greedy.
Hollywood Blacklist, bad.
Hollywood Ten, martyrs (except “squealer” Dmytryk).
Elia Kazan, Judas.
Communists: persecuted freethinkers. Have you left no sense of decency?
“McCarthyism”: repression.
Mao, expensive decorative art.
Che Guevara, fashion statement.
Ho Chi Minh, agrarian.
Mommy, who’s Ho Chi Minh, and what’s an agrarian?
Scratch Ho. The signposts recede from view, but the direction is fixed, which is why the phrase “evil empire” still triggers that patronizing chortle to make Pavlov proud and earn his dog a cookie. How Neanderthal can you get? says the roll of the eyes. No answer is necessary because our minds have been battened down against logic and morality both. Seventeen a year, ten a month, a thousand a month, forty thousand a month… Solzhenitsyn’s moral calculus, like Conquest’s compendia of Communist slaughter, or Bentley’s eyewitness evidence of Communist treason, or Bukovsky’s “détente” nightmare in psychiatric hospitals and prisons, remains beyond our ken and comprehension, much like Solzhenitsyn himself, who was virtually locked out of the White House in the summer of 1975. Twenty-four years later, Elia Kazan had to be sneaked into a side door to receive his special Oscar to avoid pro-Communist (pro-hundred-million- killed?) protesters in front of a Los Angeles theater. In the meantime, Solzhenitsyn never really got inside with his story, the one he always wanted to tell us Americans…
Some people still don’t want that message to be heard — and certainly don’t want to weigh its implications.
Tough luck.
For links to previous articles about the controversy over American Betrayal, see the Diana West Archives.
American Betrayal really holds the key to understanding the chaos of the 21st century where we have to peel back multiple layers of lies to get anywhere near truth. Somewhere out there are “the great and the good” who are cynically weaving these webs of leftist larceny, either to justify a tainted past, or to further evangelise by deceit, or maybe just in a fit of narcisistic love of power.
The end result is to put us all back into tyranny and barbarism. It is a sad truth.
I have a stupid theory. Most of the criticism of the book comes from right wing Jews: Horowitz, Simon, Lifson who were all from left wing families and then saw the light. West’s book calls into question the character of these people’s parents who were left wing and loved FDR. So when West goes after FDR and his Commie cronies, she is also accusing the parents of being Commie sympathizers or Communits and at least useful idiots and fellow travelers. That creates animosity and resentment so they trash her book. Maybe a farfetched theory but maybe not.
I have wondered whether Horowitz, et al. are motivated by an extraordinary sensitivity on the question of the extent of Jewish representation in the ranks of the Bolsheviks and a subset thereof, the Cheka. Their now hostility to communism per se is sincere but could that Jewish role in its victory in Russia be something that must be downplayed at all costs?
No one questions the extent on the attack on Jews by the National Socialists, yet it seems clear to me that Jews will never speak of the Soviet, Chinese, or Cambodian Holocaust, let alone include exhibits in Holocaust museums that chronicle the complete story of totalitarian stupidity, waste, and savagery.
More to the point, is their a raw nerve for some Jews on the matter of Jewish representation in the ranks of U.S. communism, esp. if communists were as influential in so many areas of U.S. policymaking as West makes clear?
In short, I agree with the thrust of your idea and suggest that attention is due to a larger family.
This is as close as I can come to explaining the bizarre, disgraceful and disproportionate attacks on Ms. West. I am open to any other satisfactory explanation but all I’ve heard are not persuasive.
… is there a raw ….
McCarthy used to be a minuture Goebbels to those of an American Jewish background. Many Jewish intellectuals claimed McCarthy personified the European authoritarian antisemite. The massive propaganda of those days, has settled into mainstream American thinking, ensuring the last name of a great patriot is still being used as a pejorative on both sides of the political aisle. These thoughts may still linger in the fantasies of Jewish thinkers who are obviously obsessed with a resurgence of antisemitism.This is true in some cases, and misguided in others.From a more practical point of view, the rehabilitation of McCarthy would be a serious blow to open border advocates, cultural relativists and those who deny the importance of racial identity in politics.
Galt: “Most of the criticism of the book comes from right wing Jews: Horowitz, Simon, Lifson who were all from left wing families and then saw the light.”
Egghead: Can we be sure that these right wing Jews ‘saw the light’ – or are they Communist gatekeepers – under deep cover – to control and misdirect current criticism and historical review? It pays for the enemy to run the political representation and media on BOTH sides of the aisle which is WHY we currently have one political party in Washington D.C.
Galt: “So when West goes after FDR and his Commie cronies, she is also accusing the parents of being Commie sympathizers or Communists and at least useful idiots and fellow travelers.”
Egghead: If it were to be discovered that the overwhelming majority of the tiny number of Jews in the world actively support(ed) Communism – and Communists have overthrown many countries – and Communists have violently tortured and murdered hundreds of millions of people – discussing that idea is spiritually disruptive for the culturally Marxist Christians who have been actively propagandized to believe that Western Christian culture is Judeo-Christian culture instead of Western Christian culture. As Easter approaches, Western Christians should note that – until this ‘progressive’ Communist-influenced century – Western Christians believed in the ascendancy of Jesus Christ and Christian culture.
P.S. With a hat tip to non-Communist Jews who support the counter jihad and take fire from Muslims.
Easter and Passover approach, this year intertwined, as they often are.
Despite your yearning to have it otherwise, the West’s culture is indeed Judeo-Christian. And Greek. And Roman. Our moral law has a Jewish foundation. Our legal code, Roman. Our philosophy and science, Greek.
Find another venue to voice your suspicions about Jews. YOU MAY NOT DO IT HERE ANY LONGER. It is beyond sad that you’re doing this on a post about a writer who is Jewish, Diana West.
Communists did all those things you talk about but Stalin was an erstwhile Christian seminarian. And many, many Russian Orthodox Christians took part in those on-going massacres.
Communism spread world-wide because it offered false hope, not because the JOOOs were in charge.
Last I heard Pol Pot wasn’t in a secret cabal of Zionists.
And we’re worried that Iran is going to blow us up, not Iranian Jews but Iranian messianic Muslims.
Mao wasn’t a secret Zionist either.
Nor was Castro.
Basta. This has gone far enough. For whatever reason, you have chosen to focus on Jews as your tiny minority. If it makes you feel safer to be that hypervigilant about Jews, that’s your burden. But it is not ours. Have you not seen the Israeli flag on our sidebar? Are you not aware that we espouse support for the Jews? Can we make it any plainer??
If your name appears on our blog attached to the word Jew, Jewish, Zionist – whatever – your comment will be deleted.
Happy Passover. Happy Easter. Obviously, if there hadn’t been a Passover, there wouldn’t be an Easter.
There is enough hatred and suspicion in the world without adding to it.
Dymphna,
You raise good points, and your desire for universal harmony, especially during this season, is very much appreciated.
However, Col. Bunny raises valid points, of which I thought long and hard myself.
I am a political refugee from Eastern Europe, and know this subject first hand, believe me.
You blog was, I still hope I can use IS, a breath of fresh air, but blacklisting ideas, makes me intellectually uncomfortable.
These questions seem to be taboo, in our version of the PC we skewer the left so much.
What I write has nothing to do with Mrs. West, but history.
Cobra…we are two limited human beings with finite energy so for our own survival there are indeed some subjects we “blacklist” – as in we don’t go there. They generate more heat than light and the ensuing comment thread is not an exchange of ideas so much as it is a feud by people with different world views.
So we pick the places the blog will go. The ones we don’t want to entertain, I assure you, are well-covered by hundreds of other blogs. And they do it better, too.
I don’t particularly skewer the Left, I simply quote it and show what happened when people followed those ideas. I think the USSR and China have proved the failures of Communism as a viable economic system.
The Chinese played it conservatively: the kept the top-down authoritarian bureaucracy whilst allowing limited free enterprise. They keep running aground internally because the idea that people can be trusted in economic exchanges is foreign to their system. So for a good while yet, the bureaucratic and endemic corruption will continue, with occasional executions for executive mistakes.
Russia is harder. There has never been a middle class or a rule of law, despite the fact that Russia shares some cultural similarity to the West. So it’s corrupt AND lawless, with the oligarchs “in charge”. It’s freewheeling if you have nerves of steel.
—————————-
Here’s one, just in the very beginning of its “proof”: the Western welfare state is a failure. A nice utopian idea that should have worked, but it rewarded the wrong things so as the citizens’ monies dry up, so do the benefits to the jobless, feckless underclass., but it hurt as many as it helped and wasted human potential past imagining. Imagine an adult living his or her whole life never working. I say “imagine” but it’s hard to get my mind around. The idea that any able-minded or able-bodied person should live off others is amazing to me.
Socialism is/was a Ponzi scheme. It depended on an ever-expanding productive population to provide for “the others”. But socialism doesn’t seem to encourage the large families its own system needs to keep the grease machine going. The US is crippled by its own form of socialism, though the word isn’t permitted much.
In order for the West to have continued to function well, it needed several things that it once had in abundance but which is disappearing: (1) a robust rule of law applied across the board; (2) inviolate property laws, clear and unambiguous; (3) fair and just elections; (4) an expanding middle class whose income came not from government but from private enterprise; (5) a manageable tax rate; (6) a small, limited and accountable governing ‘class’. Free speech and an armed citizenry (think Switzerland) are the foundations of those hallmarks. As each of them falls away, people are less safe and more anxious.
If you are from Eastern Europe you know well what it is to be deprived of those things. You have surely witnessed their erosion here. That erosion – sclerotic institutions that no one respects – means eventual death. And from the death of our common weal, new structures will emerge. But first it will be chaotic with long periods of uncertainty.
You will find my “blacklist” on another comment; I believe it’s on this thread. Those are the subjects the Baron and I find wasteful of our energy and time. No one learns anything and people walk away bruised.
I think I very well remember the original source of this tendency (I try to avoid using policy).
It was in Baron’s visit to Europe and comments made in support of certain parties in Western Europe, that lead to the Pajama Media blacklisting this blog. It didn’t also help certain anti-jihadist people, who did not support GOV, to say the least, if not jumping completely in PM’s boat.
How did it feel then, being blacklisted for expressing IDEAS?
Well, you may setup the tone and subject of your blog, for sure, but I thought we are talking history, and, to many, marxism is at least as pernicious and murderous as islam.
My old country experienced both, at different historical times, and the wounds left are many and are deep.
Only by talking to one another, and finding common ground, the deep wounds can heal.
My visits to the GOV site were becoming rarer and rarer, and I just couldn’t put my finger on the cause, until now.
Oh well…
Cobra —
You’re not the only person who has informed us that they won’t be hanging around here anymore unless we let them say whatever they want about Jews, whenever they want to say it.
So be it! Good-bye, then; it was nice knowing you.
If the only way to have a popular blog is to let commenters talk about Jews all day, every day, then thank God we don’t have a popular blog!
There are numerous sites that dedicate themselves solely to this topic (well, to be fair, sometimes they talk about blacks and Mexicans, too). I’m sure they’ll be glad to have you.
I think I very well remember the original source of this tendency (I try to avoid using policy).
You can avoid the term “policy” but that’s what it is: a policy. And it’s obvious that no matter how often we refer to it, someone or other is bound to be taken by surprise at our policies and begin complaining about our lack of free speech. It has gone way past tedious to extremely annoying.
Given that, I have asked the Baron to write up a whole page of policies to which would-be commenters can refer and read at their leisure.
It was in Baron’s visit to Europe and comments made in support of certain parties in Western Europe, that lead to the Pajama Media blacklisting this blog.
This is a conflation of events that I’d not put together before; I don’t think it’s accurate. Pajamas Media, in the form of Roger Simon, phoned us the day after we posted an essay by El Ingles that I presume scared the 9/11 former leftist converts who funded the start-up for the Pajamas Media enterprise. Their reactive fear was an interesting example of Peter Drucker’s maxim that communication is always the act of the recipient. In this case, El Ingles described what he was concerned could possibly happen if the massive inflow of unassimilated migrants continued to flood the UK. He never once prescribed any of the outcomes possible if this inflow continued. In fact, he didn’t have a remedy, merely some educated guesses as to the possibilities for England, et al, in the future.
No matter. Pajamas Media decided that it was really a racist prescription of what should happen and they wanted their skyscraper ads off our blog right then and there.
Their fear turned out to be our good fortune: my first reaction was to feel blind-sided. My second was a strong sense of relief. Removing those skyscraper ads was liberating and I knew our readers would be delighted. They’d expressed their impatience with the additional time it required to load our page with those ads; nor was I satisfied with PJ’s low rate of remuneration. It wasn’t sufficient recompense for the aggravation.
So when you ask, “how did it feel then, being blacklisted for expressing IDEAS?”, I’ll tell you: first I felt rejected and then I felt free. And then I realized how dhimmed-down Pajamas Media was, how rhetorically limited that they couldn’t discern description from prescription. Their refusal to see was a willful blindness because we stated and restated the difference in the intro to those essays.
When asked, our readers voted emphatically against any further ads and in favor of quarterly fundraisers. And THAT solution was so much better than anyone’s ads, that I hope never to return to such a configuration.
Nowadays, you can read and hear provocative material on Pajamas Media that far surpasses El Ingles’ thought experiment. So perhaps the gazillion ads their site runs permits them to be more forthcoming than their original funders did. [As much as I enjoy reading The Belmont Club there, running the gauntlet of their ads is a chore for my poor XP, the computer I use when confined to bed, so I’m hoping Wretchard will do more in the way of brief ebooks in the future.]
i notice that your nic history says you have left a total of 4 approved comments. So if you’ve been reading and commenting here since Pajamas days, you must have had any number of sock puppets before this current snake incarnation… thus, your demur about “not being able to put your finger on the cause” of your “increasingly rare visits” here is not something I take seriously. No doubt you’ll be back in some other form – just as previously contentious commenters have done before you. Hey, maybe you were one of those we banned? Or several??
You say,
Only by talking to one another, and finding common ground, the deep wounds can heal.
To which I can only reply, search for all the common ground you want. Sounds good to me. But no more Joooos; it’s a spent scene here. Having worked for some years in conflict resolution I can assure you that your recipe for covering the same old ground heals nothing. Zero. Zilch. It resembles nothing so much as it does a barroom brawl or a blood feud. And those deep wounds in the fractures/fissures among the ethnicities of the old countries are just as deep as ever they were. They cannot be healed in this life. We move past them and on to more fruitful lives and conversations.
Life is too short for any further paranoid conversation about the you know whos. If some other subject becomes a third-rail electrified jump site, that one will meet the same fate as this has.
Vaya con Dios, cobra. I’m sure you’ll find another site more than willing to cover your common ground
This is no different from pointing out issues in the Irish-American or Italian-American community. It has been common for Jews to organize around their ethnic/cultural identity promoting issues which are detrimental against Europeans, this is actually what propelled this political movement. This is no way a claim that Jews are somehow “inferior” or otherwise a natural enemy to Europeans, such claims are preposterous and add nothing to an otherwise valid discussion, such individuals should be banned but I see nothing of the kind in the couple of statements above.
Until Europeans can truly discuss all issues, it only shows we are still bound by the rules of “Political Correctness”. Jewish leaders often discuss the existence of “antisemitism” amongst Europeans, but we cannot discuss issues in the Jewish community?
I find this indefensible, and find it difficult to accept.
Well. Oz, first of all, this isn’t a free speech forum. Thus, it’s hardly “indefensible” to announce what will and will not be permitted on one’s own website. That’s a difficult concept for people to understand, that Gates of Vienna is not a public space. But it’s not. It’s a private space where people are invited to have their say within certain boundaries.
Secondly, if I had ten years’ experience with these Irish and Italian Americans you mention, clotting up the comments with negative, charged and suspicious remarks about other ethnicities, then I would have learned by now to cut them off when they reached a certain level of intensity. It’s an intuitive thing, like knowing when a cake is done by looking at it because I’ve baked hundreds and hundreds of cakes.
In my experience, the Jewish conversation is a progressive disorder and the intensity builds over time. I make decisions via experience and out of concern for the reputation of our blog. Sometimes I look at what someone has said about Jews and ask myself how my Jewish friends would feel to see this on Gates of Vienna.
So your Irish and Italian – you forgot Polish – examples is a strawman argument because it never happens. No one goes after those folks or accuses them of being the secret power in the world that is really running things. So I never have to tell the anti-Gaels, “Enough. No more.”
You don’t see the ones we simply ban. The very rational arguments that insist that we’ve failed to understand the Jews are behind the world’s turmoil, and they have links and books to prove this. Oh, and that we’re in the pay of the Mossad because we won’t let them rant here. Some of them do indeed have their own websites and that’s the kind of thing they spend time discussing. I’m glad they have a place to go.
There was a European fellow, someone I liked very much, but he couldn’t let go this obsession so he stopped his subscription here and stopped his and my conversation because he was obsessed with the idea that Jews were going to be the death of us all and found my dissent unbearable.
Here are topics (not in any particular order) that start endless argumentative threads. Sometimes they wind their way through hundreds of comments and gain more heat as they lose the light. I may have forgotten some topics, but these are the ones with a third rail:
1. Jews
2. Russians
3. Roman Catholic Church
4. Jews
5. Women’s rights
6. Men’s ill-treatment by women
7. Abortion
8. Gay marriage
9. Jews
10.Intelligence and Race
I won’t even mention topics we never blog about, though I would like to. But because of the charged feelings they engender, we learned the hard way to keep off those, not even naming them.
After ten years of helping my husband with this blog, I can spot potential problems. Experience can be a sad teacher & it has taught me to err on the side of caution now. Life is simply too short to keep on explaining, over and over. Perhaps I should write a template?
Of course I could have just deleted that comment and let it go at that. But I’m hoping to steer the dialogue into more productive channels. That might have been a mistaken hope.
Oh, I forgot one: denominational differences. Admonitions that if we say something against their theology or dogma, we’re sinners.
Nope, no religious wars here either.
I understand you are selective about which comments you allow through, and I’m generally, if not always, content with the current policy on censorship. If this were CNN of Fox, I would not like it similarly, but GoV is a small place on the internet which is reserved for a certain ”class” of people and in this case censorship does add to the quality of this blog.
I do not consider my previous comment a strawmen argument as we could discuss moral ambiguity in the Italian-American community, broken families in early Irish-American communities, or constant talk within the Jewish community which shows many feel ”antisemitism” is a major problem amongst Europeans. What I do is no different from discussing “anti-europeanism” amongst Jews. It is the exact same discussion, although for both historically legitimate and illegitimate reasons, this discussion is condemned. I understand GoV is not public space and never claimed it is, when I stated ”indefensible”, I meant that both morally and practically its not something I can accept as ”right”.
But, it is an important discussion, as like a growing number of gentile Europeans, I refuse to live in a world where our history books inform us we are simply part of people who for no reason at all continually oppressed the Jews. In reality, Europeans were generally not evil or bigoted, they simply reacted to an ethnic conflict on which both sides should have shown more wisdom and constraint. The current narrative ensures Europeans have no confidence in their history, and therefore remain locked into a politically correct mindset.
Once Europeans understand the actual historical events were more complex, and not something which can be discarded by claiming some sort of natural European tendency towards bigotry, Europeans will finally wake up to reality. On the other hand, we must constrain the few frothing at the mouth buffoons who believe every Jew is somehow an inferior human being. I would gladly help doing so.
In any case, banning anyone who claims GoV is run by the Mossad is a good start, this kind is beyond reason, similarly for those who think Tommy Robinson or Geert Wilders are diabolical acolytes for a Jewish conspiracy, or those who question the sincerity of the many Jewish heroes we have to come to know in the counterjihad,my stomach cannot bare such individuals.
Ah, but Oz, it is a strawman to posit an equivalence between arguments about the Jews and arguments about the Irish or Italians, because the last two simply don’t happen.
I’ve been engaged in this endeavor now for ten years, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the nasty comments about the Irish or the angry responses from Irish readers. As for nastiness about Italians, I can’t remember any at all. It just doesn’t happen.
But if I were to lay end-to-end all the unpleasant Jew-related comments that have ever appeared here, they would form a virtual yellow-brick road from here to Spitzbergen and back, with enough left over to carpet the floor of Kim Jong-un’s presidential palace.
Any topic, any thread can turn to the Jooooos if we but let it. It doesn’t matter what the ostensible subject is. If it’s about the heavy snowfall in Poughkeepsie, it will turn out that the JOOOS were flying cloud-seeding aircraft over the vicinity to change the weather and destroy the economy of New York State. Or something like that.
Once that sort of thing begins, it can continue past two hundred comments before I cut it off, with nothing new ever said, no important information added, just Jews, Jews, Jews, on and on until no one is left to read it but wild-eyed Jew-obsessed people and a few hardy well-intentioned ill-advised souls who stick around and try in vain to inject a measure of sanity into the conversation.
That’s the way it unfolds. I’ve seen it happen over and over again. I’m heartily sick of it, and have been saying as much for seven or eight years.
But still it keeps on happening. There’s never anything new; it’s the same stuff, repeated ad infinitum and ad nauseam, day after day, month after month, year after year. I could type it all up myself in advance and save everyone the trouble.
I can’t tell you the ennui, the despair, the Sygdommen til Døden induced in me by the JEWS JEWS JEWS insanity. I wish it would stop, but alas, I know it never will.
Thank you D. I am so glad that you have eyes that “see.”
@Baron
I have to repeat that I am correct on this matter. Lets compare it to another situation. I talk to a random American about the Moynihan Report. I guarantee when I discuss issues in the Irish community which Moynihan briefly discusses, that the reaction will be quite different from when I discuss issues in the black community. Simply because the Irish are white.
The intensity of the reaction may be different, but the situations are exactly the same. “Bigotry” amongst Europeans is just as a legitimate topic as “Bigotry” amongst Jewish Europeans. Both are documented, but only one side may be discussed. Subsequently, Europeans have a terrible self image, something for which I will never stand, I do not even consider it an option to allow this to continue. My motives are pure, and I try to be aware to the major annoyances that this topic has caused you and Dymphna(and only bring it up when I believe it is truly relevant) and for the benefit of Jewish readers, but I will never claim that this discussion is not worthwhile, I consider it of vital importance.
I don’t offer arguments for European Supremacy, for Jewish inferiority, or any other irrational and repugnant claim. I understand what you have to deal with, an extremely small minority of Europeans which consists of these rabid “antisemites”, surely worthy of such a name, are blind to reason and pollute normal discussion. My discussions with this lot are just as unpleasant as you can imagine.
On the other hand, I have been called many names by Jews who i tried to approach in the most reasonable terms, who clearly did see Europeans as inferior, in fact little different from white students who pass through the propaganda institutes we call universities. Naturally I try to be sensitive and learn from such experiences.
Oz —
You are correct in what you say. I find you a rational and reasonable commenter, and I generally agree with you. It’s true that what one says about Jews is often held to a different standard than what one says about other ethnic groups. I deplore this double standard.
But what I said is also correct.
The way to reconcile our two points of view is to take a wider view of the situation, one that includes the social context. Using the Irish as an equivalent topic is not apposite, because statements about Irish people will never engender a flood of hundreds of comments, many of them nasty and insane, about the Irish. It simply doesn’t happen.
But say something about the Jews, and it’s off to the races! On and on endlessly, in a thread that may continue for weeks or even months.
And yes, it’s true that some Jews will take a commenter to task for criticizing Jews or Israel. There are plenty of people who scream “anti-Semite” at anyone who says something negative about Jewish progressives or questions the policies of the Israeli government. But that sort of reaction is far, far exceeded by the tirades launched by people who are obsessed with the Jews. There is a huge disproportion in the two reactions.
This is unfortunate, because there are legitimate topics about Jews that could be discussed, pro and con, in a reasonable way. Alas, reasoned discussion of those topics is simply impossible. I’ve learned this the hard way over the past ten years.
And I am sick to death of the jew-jew-jew-jew comment threads. It would be wonderful if there were only reasonable people saying reasonable things about these topics, but as soon as someone attempts a reasonable statement, he is submerged in a tsunami of paranoid ranting.
To mix metaphors, Jew-obsessed people act as a cleansing fire, burning away any rational discussion and leaving the field free for the terminally obsessed. After ten or twelve such comments, no one else remains in the conversation.
I’ve had it with that kind of stuff, and I’m not putting up with it anymore. It saddens me to have to cut off discussions in which reasonable people like you are trying to say reasonable things. But it doesn’t make me sad enough to allow threads to be hijacked in such an offensive and pointless way.
@Baron
I appreciate your views on this matter, it verifies for me the value of GoV, and I have little doubt that if these discussions could be handled more reasonably, you and Dymphna would have no issue with such discussions. Which I expect from anyone who genuinely cares about the continued existence of European culture.
On last note, as we do agree the somewhat fanatical behaviour on the part of what we can refer to as ”antisemites” it must be concluded there is a psychological foundation for this behaviour. Naturally some of them are simply, nasty individuals, but others either imitate this behaviour and/or react to the difficulty and the enormous complexities which come with this debate. As Dymphna noted, there is a vast body of legitimate evidence, inflated evidence and outright forgeries, which ensure this debate is a mighty difficult one. I do believe that reasonable debate would alleviate some of this, and perhaps its something I should pick up myself.
The common denominator that runs from Marx and Engels to Bin Laden and Amenijihad is the supremacy of the State. Communism was the State that sought to replace Christianity by demanding worship and unquestioned allegiance. Islam is a religion that demands unquestioned worship that seeks to become the State. Both seek global domination. Both are opposed to Christianity, its mores and its values. The Decalogue prohibits murder, theft, lying, and covetousness. Islam allows the premeditated murder of infidels, the theft or their property, lying and dealing in bad faith with those who are not as virtuous in Allah’s sight, and coveting what your neighbor has if your neighbor is perceived as being unworthy. Communism allows the murder of counter-revolutionaries and the slaughter of any of their perceived sympathizers, (Mao, Ho, Josef), double dealing with the capitalist bourgeoisie, refusal to abide by rules of fair play and self-responsibility in trade and business (again bourgeoisie), and coveting that which is not yet theirs.
One can only wonder whether the same source is the inspiration for both ideologies that have plagued the world for the past 150 years and ever since Darwin posited our evolution (or was that declension). Methinks these enemies of the Gospel of Christ have their same source in Hell as they both directly contradict the rules for successful society and social behavior that God gave us some 3,500 years ago.
Respectfully Submitted having appraised the situation,
Steven Davis ASA
Lets face it, Satan is the murderer of murderers and the father of lies, metaphysically speaking, he is the guy at the top of the NWO pyramid, and all these wannabe tyrants are his acolytes.
By purging bible based living from the world they are taking us into a new age of barbarity. A Coast to coast TV station is worth 10 colliseums and a 100 divisions of brown shirts combined. The “Bread and Circuses” highway that leads to destruction.
Democracy, and a Christianity based constitution are dependant upon men of goodwill and an acceptance of the 10 commandments, without these, it becomes a liability and perhaps, a monarchy would be better?
Democracy is mob rule – and always has been. The founding fathers designed the USA to be a constitutional republic with as many checks and balances as possible to prevent the ‘monarchy’ that our current president practices.
The three branches of government (legislative, executive, and judicial) were supposed to check each other at the federal level.
The states were supposed to check the federal government. The federal government was supposed to ONLY have power in a few constitutionally well-defined areas not a general power to control every person from birth to death.
Government was supposed to rule locally rather than federally.
Centralized federal power enables rulers to impose corrupt laws on others without consequence to themselves.
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” – Lord Acton
MC —
“Democracy” has been so contaminated that it’s no longer of any use to the governed. It’s a shell game played by a carny. No matter how closely you watch it, you never quite see that bean move. And anything that has to be watched so closely isn’t worth our effort now.
Israel is a theocracy with a representative democracy spread atop its base. Because of the small size of the country and the basic belief system of its founders, it still functions. It began in survival mode and if that mode dissolves, so will Israel. But right now it’s our best hope.
The idea of a monarchy fit when the polis believed in the divine right of kings. But that has gone too. We need a new wineskin AND new wine…however, given the little we understand of chaos theory the only thing we can even begin to propose is “who knows?”.
In Israel the purging of Judeo-Christianity has met with fierce resistance and is thus not anywhere near as complete as in countries further west. However, there is also too slow a realization that we are faced with isolation as a result.
Western civilisation ends abruptly about 2 miles outside of Sderot, where there is a fence which has to patrolled day and night to keep the ‘wild animals’ out. Those who approach the fense are shot.
Our borders here in Israel are intact, and whilst visitors are welcome, they are encouraged to go home when their Visas expire. There are few illegals, and they certainly do not get to vote.
It is difficult now for Jews to get citizenship, let alone anybody else, and no, it is not ‘fair’, but being ‘fair’ is not a luxury we can afford….
Sloppy porous borders are a huge part of the demise of the Western Nations, and an important weapon in the arsenal of cultural Marxism. “Its not fair” may well be the epitaph (and the death nell) of western Judeo-Christianity, it is certain the major war cry of their most dire enemies.
So MC… do you have the time to expand that into a post? I’ll be your friend 😉
Seriously, you’ve lived in the UK and now in Israel. Would you like to do a compare and contrast?? You talk about things like fences and strict visas and I’m envious. Oh, and I’ll bet there is no incompetent TSA tying up the airport either.
I have a week off work for pesach, I will be able to get some ‘real’ work done in the next few days, I was discussing the idea (his) of civilisation ending just down the road with my son yesterday whilst we were about 400 yards from the fence, and decided it would be an iteresting topic, I may go out and get some photos…..
A man goes into a bank and murders a teller. The next day police arrive at your house and ask you about the murderer’s whereabouts. You swear to them he could not have robbed the bank because he was having tea with you during the time of the robbery. What is your criminal liability? Could you be considered an accomplice? Time and time again the left has provided alibis for communist atrocities. One of the reasons communist leaders have not been prosecuted is the fact that they threatened to blow the whistle on their Western accomplices. See Last Exit to Utopia by Jean Francois Revel.
In the conflict with Diana West, Ronald Radosh has recruited Harvey Klehr to make the absurd comment: “In our more than twenty years of … research on Soviet espionage in America, we have uncovered … very little indicating successful policy manipulation.” Klehr, a well respected Soviet expert, has damaged his credibility with this statement. The evidence that the Soviets inspired many the the West’s policies is overwhelming. This evidence can be found in American Betrayal and The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy as well as many other well researched sources. Western leaders have not only been complicit in communist atrocities, they have perpetrates some of their own.
West draws attention to the similarities of early communist apologists and Islamic apologists. What could they possibly have in common? The unifying factor is an underlying hostility toward the West.
“…the hocus-pocus transformation of liberty-loving anti-Communism into a force of repression to be reviled—not always by the people, who were reflexively anti-Communist, but certainly by the elite expression of public conscience.”
This is the one nodus of her analysis where I think Diana West falters: her apparently casual “not always by the people” here, for example, seems to gloss over the very crux of the whole catastrophe. This protracted phenomenon whose ultimate diagnostic Question (“How did this happen?”) seems to loom between nearly every line as an undercurrent or leitmotif of her entire thesis. Though West at times seems to flirt with an Answer to that Question, she seems to skirt the edge of what she apparently feels compelled to conclude — otherwise glibly (but not necessarily inappositely) denoted the Conspiracy Theory. There seems to be much pressure amorphously afloat in the various warps and woofs of our sociopolitical culture (acquiring new wrinkles and folds in the still under-appreciated “Blogosphere”) to reach for that conclusion, as though the only other alternative would be to minimize, if not dismiss, any systemic problem at all. Both impulses — the glib alacrity to lurch toward the Conspiracy Theory, or the tendency (as Horowitz seems to have implied now and then) to airbrush the problem nearly out of current existence set up a false dilemma. Each one also presupposes and then by implication establishes equally curious, though diametrically opposed, paradigms. The former (by implying a dastardly evil cabal controlling the West) throws out the Western Baby with the Bathwater; the latter does not sufficiently explain the PC MC myopia to the problem of Islam, and the other myopia Diana West alludes to, to Communist infiltration. Similarly, the former cannot adequately account for why Diana West has been able to pursue her daring thesis as much and as successfully as she has (indeed, all the tactics against her smack more of the behavior of people who lack the power to be officially fascistic and who rather are thus doing what they can in the absence of official organs of fascistic oppression).
There must be some kind of a medium between these two inadequate frameworks, a medium that can do justice to the degree of freedom and sociopolitical health America still enjoys, while at the same time adequately accounting for the opposing relative degree of infiltration in Communist terms, lately dovetailing with a growing Muslim infiltration. (Such a medium also should address the phenomenon of the Communism/Leftism/PCMC complex, providing a more sophisticated way to distinguish these various facets rather than indulging in a rather glib and simple-minded demonization without much discrimination, not to mention providing a way to explain why so many non-Leftists and non-Marxists throughout the West also indulge in the PC MC myopia to the danger and evil of Islam.
Interesting comment, Hesperado.
I don’t have the expertise to judge whether Diana West is correct in all her views, and she may indeed be so, but it seems to me that many people of the far Right and Left, but especially the former, are prone to believing in conspiracies. Trouble is, it’s very difficult to disprove them, even if they’re without foundation, and even if one could, some will be reluctant to give them up.
The rise of a conspiratorial frame of mind – whether of an individual or a group – can be correlated with the rise of totalitarian governance.
For example. Obama rode into power on the promise of transformational, transparent government. He said that before any legislature was signed, it would remain on line for a period of time – ?five days, perhaps. I’ve forgotten the framework of that lie – before he would sign it. And he conveniently omitted his rule by executive order. Turned out he didn’t need no stinkin’ Congress. That was just one of many, many fairy tales. Once ObamaCare was rammed through – we have to sign it so we can find out what’s in it – conservatives knew it was a con game.
The left is paranoid because it is sure the right is so ultra-individualist that it comes nigh to anarchy. Which is no small irony.
Your own country’s governing is no better. But at least the elites admitted that mass immigration was designed to create a permanent voting base. Our left hasn’t quite admitted it yet and the spineless right doesn’t want to be seen as heartless so they’ll sign on to allowing in that 45 million and hope it buys them a little time.
Socialist republic governance has failed, is failing, must of necessity fail all over the West as states run out of money. Citizens’ money.
The arguments on both sides is just feuding family members fighting over a carcass, positive there won’t be enough for them…and they’re right: by the time the corrupt banksters, lobbyists and politicians get finished hacking off the choice pieces there won’t be much left for average folk. Just ask the poor PIIGS.
So if the nation-state is on life-support, what comes next? It might be a good idea to examine what the futurist fiction writers are creating. In a paraphrase of one of the Baron’s favorite quotes, “since the truth is ultimately unknowable, choose the version that has the most meaning for you” (not his quote, just my version of it to make the point here).
I noticed your verbal tic, one that most leftists have. They draw the political divide between the left and the FAR right. Why is that? What is FAR right? Would you recognize the terms of the FAR Left if you heard them and are they any less dangerous than their mirror speech on the other end of the spectrum??
The extreme Left is extremely destructive. It wants to do away with fossil fuels – and doesn’t seem to connect the energy in its electric cars with the fossil fuel burned out of immediate sight to create that electric energy. The extreme Left has killed lumber workers by “spiking” forest trees. The poor sap who’s cutting trees for a living dies when his chain saw hits that spike.
The KKK has been declared to be extreme Right, even though their Nazi beliefs are socialist, just as the other Nazis were. Nazi Germany was socialist; it was never conservative at all. That’s one of the Big Lies of the 20th century. That crazy Nazi who attacked a Jewish community center – a al Argentina – is not right wing. He’s left wing in his beliefs.
When I said “far Right and (far) Left, the “far” was meant to apply to both; sorry I didn’t make myself clear.
The recently deceased British politician, Tony Benn, was a genuinely democratic socialist who campaigned for the supremacy of Parliament over the executive, and a thoroughly decent man admired and held in affection by many of his conservative opponents. He also believed capitalism to be a conspiracy to exploit the workers.
In this I believe he was generally wrong, but not entirely- some capitalists are ruthless and selfish, being human, as are some of all classes of people. This, I think, made him a conspiracy theorist of the Left.
Many who post here have a dim view of President Obama, not without reason, but when blanket condemnations are made of all socialists/liberals as being engaged in a quest to undermine our civilisation, this is as ridiculous as Mr Benn’s view of capitalism. The many sincere grassroots campaigners against fossil fuels genuinely believe in their cause, whatever the agenda of some in authority.
Conspiracy theories have a long history; think of the Masons, or the Templars, or the poor bloody Jews. I wonder if they don’t flourish in times of repression, at least in part, because they’re not subject to sufficiently rigorous scrutiny?
“Many who post here have a dim view of President Obama, not without reason, but when blanket condemnations are made of all socialists/liberals as being engaged in a quest to undermine our civilisation, this is as ridiculous as Mr Benn’s view of capitalism”
Where I differ from the “Gates of Vienna Circle” conspiracy-theorists is not that I disagree that all socialists are enabling a perniciously gnostic political science; but only in that I don’t think socialists are driving the West now through some kind of dastardly crypto-totalitarian quasi-Macchavellianism. While they do present a problem (particularly to the extent that they have money and influence — e.g., Ted Turner, George Soros, George Clooney, Oliver Stone, Bono, Oprah Winfrey, the Clintons, Obama; et al.), I don’t agree that they are actually manipulating and moving the West. Indeed, I think the bigger problem is the millions of non-socialists and non-Leftists in the West who are pleasantly, incoherently, sincerely motivated by PC MC (at this point, some in the “Gates of Vienna Circle” will try to say, “Oh but all those non-Leftist PC MCs have been brainwashed by the Dastardly Cabal, you see…!”; and that’s where I check out).
Whether one then wants to granularize further socialists into those who are wittingly hateful of the West and those who are sincerely starry-eyed do-gooders (in a Hell-paving-with-good-intentions sort of way), is a separate issue.
When you fish, you cut bait. When you want leftists to bite down, you expose them. They are programmed to respond just so. I have complained to certain talk radio hosts that they should stop using Joe McCarthy’s name to prejudice listeners. That opinion is flat out wrong. Furthermore, I now think that the reason we witness so many Obamabots ceaselessly slaving away to dismantle our country is that under the covers of dis-information we were lulled into thinking all was well while these termites were gnawing away at the pillars of our society. Some 90 years later, many second or third generational people were positioned to replace true Americans in powerful places (Military putsch anyone?). That is why they are so complacent as they are revealed and reviled. They simply think they have won. Besides American Betrayal, I would suggest reading “Inside The Criminal Mind” by Stanton Samenow. It is absolutely an illuminating journey into understanding the thinking and techniques of leftists, Communists, Marxists, and all the other abhorrent denizens of darkness.
QiPo- re “exposing leftists”… may I suggest this book:
The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class
Here’s just one review:
Fred Siegel reveals the intellectual underpinnings of today’s ascendant gentry liberalism, which leaves old-fashioned liberals, including, I suspect, Siegel himself, politically homeless. The increasingly anti-democratic character of liberalism also undermines much of the reason we became progressives in the first place, which was to help the middle and working classes. The gentry’s stridency and hypocrisy—what’s OK for them is not for everyone else—is utterly transforming liberalism today. The progressives portrayed in this book are not so much the heirs of Jefferson or Jackson or even Roosevelt, as they are the American heirs of the worst high-toned Tories.”
Siegel’s research is excellent. One small example: who knew Mencken was an admirer of Nietzsche & George Bernard Shaw?
He begins with a neglected period (pre and post WW ONE) that hasn’t gotten enough attention. The full flowering of that noxious evergreen, “Middle Class Death” is spreading like a weed now, covering the political landscape like kudzu. It started before the First World War, before America was even looking at Russia, when the German state was seen as the New World Order. The emphasis was on order, architecture, cleanliness. The fierce hatred of average Americans by the elites was beginning. Not for nothing was Mencken and his dour band of brothers so pro-German, so anti-American, so opposed to our entry into the war on the side of those weakling English.
All God’s dangers ain’t a communist or a Muslim…or a Zionist. Even if they all disappeared tomorrow, or had never come to be, we would be up to our gluteus maximus in class warfare. Read the comment section at Amazon on Siegel’s book to see how the underclass and the elites who saved them joined hands in a Faustian bargain to kill off Boobus Americanus…you ‘n’ me. Be sure to read the one-star comments, too. They will give you an idea of the blow-back such a book engenders.
My deep gratitude to M., who sent me the book. (Rarely am I able to hold a book anymore — fibromyalgia. But this relatively slim volume with a decent font is a rare treat: an actual hardcover book…)
To Cobra-I think tej problem might as well have s.th to do with the fact that one might be declared an antisemite jest for mentioning that. s.o less than pleasant happened to be Jewish. In Poland-this Has been established by the National Rememberance Institute-40% of the murderous stalinist secret police came from the Jewish community-in a situation when only 1% of Polish Jewry was left! BUT- 1.these people were as Jewish as Hitler was Catholic 2. they persecuted the core od Jewishness,the religion 3.they were the outcasts od Jewish society,probably the communist recruited them to redirect popular hatred towards others. They same way leftists today are using blacks,gays,migrants ect.These criminals acted in reality against the best interests of Jewish people! Some of them-Helena Wolińska-even had the audacity to cry “antisemitism” when Poland wanted to try. her for several murders! These are the facts-but there is no “Jewish conspiracy” for the reasons mentioned above. Of course,this would become even clearer if we could hear more Jewish voiced condeming People like Wolińska and pointing out how her behaviour ran afoul od Jewish values.
Interesting little story about that Polish woman, Helena Wolinska. I notice a movie was made about her life, “Ida”. I haven’t seen it yet, but the trailer and description of it smacks of a hagiography that obscures her murderous, fascistic schizophrenia, rather than shining a light on it.
http://www.allocine.fr/article/fichearticle_gen_carticle=18630717.html