GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

The only real fight against the victimary entails dismantling the entire “non-discrimination” regime put in place after World War 2—it means giving up on, and accepting the reversal of, the abolition of what Eric Gans refers to as “ascriptive differences”—which may not be restored in de jure form by the state, but will be restored in in sufficiently explicit de facto form so as to acquire state sanction (the state won’t discriminate, but it won’t stop anyone else from doing it). In the end, you can never really stop ascribing differences—every attempt just leaves more residue of those differences, and reassembles the resentments in new forms. We will have to learn to live in a world where people judge each other based on race, nationality, sexuality, religion and so on—that is, if we want a human world at all. There is nothing new in any of that to any one who reads my posts on this blog. Nor is there anything new in my claim, logically derived from the preceding, but also evident in those who actually challenge the SJWs and PC in sustained ways, that these developments will make expressions of resentment towards Jews respectable and common. Anti-antisemitism is the original PC, and cannot survive the overthrow of the victimocracy.

Against that background, I’d like to explore a bit further something I’ve mentioned a few times—the form this resentment towards Jews will most likely (is already starting to) take. The charge is as follows: Western, which is really to say, by now, American, Jews have established their identity through a constitutive hypocrisy: while defending ethnic homogeneity for Israel, they promote mass immigration and all manner of “diversity” initiatives at home. Pushed even further, we get the following formulation: the Jews are the only nationality whose national integrity and solidarity is dialectically tied up with their contribution to the dissolution of the national identities of others. But, as indictment unfolds, it turns out, given that the Jews have been pursuing this national interest (really, more of a kind of cultural, even biological, imperative) so successfully for so long that it is now their white, Western victims who live a marginalized, diasporic existence. And, as we follow the call to resistance against the spirit of Judaism to its logical conclusion, we find the marginalized whites resorting to the same disintegrative, “critical” strategies that worked so well for the Jews (dissecting texts for hidden motives, depth psychology, etc.). The logical conclusion doesn’t always come, but we can see parts of this argument all throughout the “alternative” or “dissident” right (while many writers of the alt-right do not pursue this logic at all). Perhaps the best (in the sense of most exemplary and most sophisticated) representative of this antisemitic resentment is Kevin MacDonald, whose writing is widely available on the internet, and persistently pursues this logic of the Jews are the opposite of what they say they are which is what we really are even though we let the Jews convince us that we really are what they really are.

The mimetic structure of this resentment is very obvious—the Jews are both model and rival, admired and hated. Equal energy is put into debunking Jewish claims to a higher morality and more universal ethics as to asserting a right to precisely the kind of particularist ethic that would enable us to see the Jews for who they are and act accordingly. Western civilization, in fact, has achieved the kind of objectivity and sympathy for others that Jews claim but have in fact always rejected; while unfortunately, this Western generosity has made whites easy prey for the Jews (which must mean that the only salvation for whites is to practice the same kind of hypocrisy of which the Jew stands accused: universalism in theory, unwavering ethnic solidarity in practice—with the false universalism serving the ethnic particularism). The symmetry is striking.

Now, part of the problem here is that some of this resentment is well-founded. The antisemitic analysis overlaps considerably with Yuri Slezkine’s distinction between the “Apollonian” European nations and the “Mercurian” Jews (of course, Slezkine himself has been accused of antisemitism—indeed, how far is Apollonian/Mercurian from Aryan/Jew?). Israel is, indeed, an ethnically based nation (even if the reality is more complex, insofar as Israeli Jews in fact are comprised of many ethnicities), which will not be letting in Muslim refugees, or allowing for mass (or pretty much any) immigration of non-Jews. And American Jews, in both their corporate forms (the major Jewish organizations) and public opinion has been vociferously pro-immigration, including immigration from the non-Western world, for many decades—and, much of the impulse for this agitation has, in fact, been resentment towards the white, European homogeneity of the American population, and the assumption that Jews would be safer (and more powerful?) in a more ethnically diverse society. This is true to this day, as I am reliably informed by the Jewish media that I consume that, of course, as a Jew, I must be enthusiastically in favor of a continual flow of Syrian refugees and find Donald Trump’s proposals to the contrary utterly reprehensible. Even conservative Jews barely dissent, while bleating about “vetting.” The days when one could silence discussion of this issue through accusations of antisemitism are rapidly coming to a close—the more slowing down (at the very least) immigration, and ending illegal immigration, comes to be seen as an existential issue by the American “core,” or the “historic American nation,” the more likely a reckoning, as the aware and enraged will want to know where everyone has stood on the question of the demographic warfare carried out by the globalist elite.

But American Jewish support for increased Muslim immigration is a sign of a Jewish genius for collective suicide, rather than domination or destruction—predictions are usually off, but what can be more certain than that a critical mass of Muslims in America will make life untenable for the Jews, just as has been the case in Europe? This interferes with the antisemitic narrative. Meanwhile, Israel is heading in a diametrically opposed direction to that of Europe and the US—towards greater ethnic solidarity, and lesser willingness to make concessions that put their citizens’ lives at risk. This allows us to respond to charges of Jewish hypocrisy with the following query: do you genuinely want to adopt Israel as a model to emulate (with the consequence that you’d be ready to endorse their approach to the Palestinians), or do you prefer to hold onto your (culture of) critique? In other words, let’s cut the Gordian Knot—what Israel is doing is right (and those, in fact increasingly few, American Jews supporting them unequivocally are also right), while American Jewish support for immigration is terribly wrong—the most generous reading is that it’s a kind of PTSD from presumed American indifference to Holocaust refugees, but in that case it is still pathological. If you are first and foremost an antisemite—if antisemitism is your passion, your addiction—then you want to keep the Gordian Knot tied up, and you will end up with ridiculous pseudo-alliances with the Iranians, the Palestinians, and a host of other anti-Western forces (and with the left, which is already in an odd alliance with the Islamists), and forced to ignore or explain away pretty much everything they say about you as well. If, on the other hand, it is really preserving the American nation that concerns you, and your resentment of the Jews derives from that concern, then you will prefer to split off the Zionists from the immigrationists—and, in that case, you might find some Jews willing to add their voices to that critique of “hypocrisy,” and support Israel precisely by encouraging the US to take it as a model. (This raises a whole new kind of question for American nationalism—can Jewish Americans care more about Israel than other countries—would that not give them an interest in encouraging an “entangling alliance”? Of course, it doesn’t end there—can Irish Americans care about Ireland, Ukrainian Americans about the Ukraine, etc.? The anomalies of American nationalism will have to be reckoned with—but are not the Jews the most anomalous ones of all?)

For Jews, meanwhile, this means engaging what seems to be the permanent (if usually non-violent) Jewish civil war (something else the antisemitic narrative misses). This civil war now takes the form of Zionism vs. secular universalism—the Israelis are culling their secular universalists (and, not coincidentally, realigning Israel’s national “core” around religious Zionism,), just as American Jewry is (more slowly and hesitantly) culling its Zionists. What will the goyim think? It’s a real question, and there is a long history of the denunciation and expulsion of Jewish “traitors” who betrayed, whether under duress, due to venality, or out of conviction the secrets of the “tribe” to a hostile world—with Spinoza being the most famous example. In the connected contemporary world, this is a regular phenomenon, with the latest example being the Israeli leftist group “Breaking the Silence” slandering the IDF, and the Israeli government now putting in place a law to expose the foreign funding of such groups (and undercover Israeli amateur journalists exposing these groups’ dirty secrets and American leftist Jewish publications complaining about all this…) It’s all a kind of hostage taking, but rendered non-violent and symbolic by being played out in front of the world. The tendency, as seems to be the case everywhere these days, is towards exposure and revelation, towards speaking your mind when others urge you to mind your speech. Towards apocalypse, in other words. Let’s create a mode of rivalry whereby we treat our opponents and enemies as models for how to expose them, and through them, us as well, for what we all really are. Eventually, we’ll have to settle things and arrive at a new dispensation, but for now there’s too much that’s volcanically active but still hidden by our anti-discrimination prohibitionist regime. We need to see what’s there. Whoever can find a way to shed light on the resentments while minimizing action on them will save the day.

The Jews are always the most anomalous of the many anomalies of the nation; as the poststructuralists have taught us, though, the anomalous is the other that is constitutive of the same. The anomalous is normal—or, to put it in simpler terms, any identity involves an exchange (with debts and unrequited gifts), which makes it at least a duodentity. If the Jews didn’t exist, they would invent themselves. The most important kind of civilizational discipline is resisting the urge to eliminate anomalies. It’s often necessary to bracket them, though, or distill them into oppositions—in order to reconstitute and embody them again. One reason to support a return to nationalism is that nationalism embodies an acceptance of plurality, imperfection and uncertainty, and a rejection of utopian efforts to unite the world and end conflict forever, whether through some universal free trade regime or a global human rights regime. But nationalism itself doesn’t necessarily know this, caught up as it is with managing the boundary between its internal rivalries and its own rivalries with other nations—indeed, the nationalist is likely to view any disruption of this boundary with suspicion, as if an internal rivalry has been skewed unfairly by the infiltration by someone beyond the border. The Jews have obviously always been best suited for this role, while anyone could be the Jew in this sense. The most important role for Jews today in sustaining and elevating civilizational discipline is not to harp on each and every offense (descrying and decrying antisemitism everywhere). Rather, by taking literally the alt-right’s half sarcastic insistence that the West take Israel as a model, Jews should use that model, dispassionately, to delineate and itemize in increasingly detailed ways all the fault and boundary lines separating and associating civilization and barbarism/savagery today. Everything the Israelis are coming to learn they must do to preserve their island of civilization in a sea of barbarism becoming savagery is what the rest of the West that is determined to remain the West will eventually learn they have to do. Then, whoever overly resents that Jewish firstness will be writing their own suicide note.