Auster on the Jewish Problem

When I was a liberal Larry Auster was one of the few authors who helped me in changing my worldview… at fifty! Although Auster and I have had strong disagreements in the past regarding the Jewish Problem, the recent article by Kevin MacDonald, “Lawrence Auster on the Role of Jews in Disestablishing White, Christian America” merits reposting here. Keep always in mind that, although Auster converted to Christianity, he is ethnically Jewish.

At The Occidental Observer webzine MacDonald wrote:



Lawrence Auster is one of those rare Jews (Paul Gottfried is another) who seems to have an appreciation for the traditional people and culture of America and an understanding of the role of Jews in White dispossession—not that Auster and I haven’t had our disagreements (“Lawrence Auster gets unhinged”).

Auster recently posted a chapter originally written in 1998 on the role of Jews in the multicultural transformation of the U.S. and the decline of White America (“Jews: The Archetypal Multiculturalists”). He hits pretty much all the right notes. Auster often has a way of phrasing things and choosing quotations from prominent Jews that cut to the heart of the matter—almost like painting pictures that are worth a thousand words.

His dissection of Alan Dershowitz is classic—the supreme arrogance and hypocrisy of Dershowitz’s fanatic ethnocentrism that is entirely mainstream in the Jewish community. Dershowitz unabashedly gives Jews the right to alter America in the direction of multiculturalism to suit their interests, as well as to disregard the Constitution and the attitudes and interests of White America; Dershowitz simultaneously condemns the ethnocentrism and group feelings of non-Jewish Whites while supporting Jewish ethnocentrism, endogamy, and sense of group interests in America as well as the racialist, apartheid state of Israel. To say that Jews like Dershowitz have no respect for the traditional people and culture of America is a gross understatement; they see the world from a completely Jewish perspective in which the rights, culture, and traditions of non-Jews at best count for nothing. At worst, they are the appropriate target of hatred, scorn, and ultimately, one fears, far worse; indeed, Auster describes Dershowitz as “openly hostile to America’s historic civilization.”

Dershowitz is an example of extreme ethnocentrism where it is impossible to see the world except in terms of Jewish interests. Here’s Auster on Dershowitz excoriating WASP law firms for not hiring ethnically obsessed Jews like Desrhowitz:

He lived a life apart as a Jew, yet at the same time he expected high-society lawyers to staff their firms with people who couldn’t socialize with them. And he calls them bigots for not wanting to do this! [Auster’s emphasis]

Jews like Dershowitz are completely unable to see the situation from the perspective of those he condemns. Unfortunately, Dershowitz is entirely within the mainstream of Jewish opinion and activism among American Jews and certainly within the organized Jewish community in America. And because of the elite status of American Jews, this is very important indeed. Jews matter.

One thing that struck me is that nothing much has changed for the better since 1998. Despite the rather old references, Auster’s article is up to date because the processes he describes are ongoing. If anything, they have become more extreme. For any given example that he lists, there could be dozens more gleaned from the intervening 15 years. Nothing fundamental has changed.


“Jews re-made America”

Because of the Jews’ tragic history as a persecuted people, and because of their own ability, through their leading role in American intellectual life, to set the terms of permissible discourse, it is impossible in today’s society to have an honest discussion on the subject of Jewish cultural impact. While every other ethnic group can be spoken of in a critical light, if only to a very limited extent, nothing that is even implicitly critical is allowed to be said or inferred about Jews

One may wonder exactly what the Jews’ “tragic history as a persecuted people” has to do with this—one should at least phrase it as perceptions of persecution because Jewish historical memory is profoundly tinged by Jewish ethnocentrism (see, e.g., the work of Andrew Joyce on the Russian pogroms, the Limerick affair in Ireland, and Jewish writing on historical anti-Semitism). But it’s certainly true that 15 years later it’s still impossible to have an honest discussion of Jewish influence on culture (Joe Sobran’s classic statement on the subject dates from 1996). And, given the intellectual shoddiness of the Jewish intellectual movements that have dominated intellectual circles throughout the West (psychoanalysis, Boasian anthropology, critical theory, and Marxism) much more than talent is involved here. In fact, the limits on permissible discourse on Jews are maintained by exclusion from the mainstream media because of Jewish influence and by the threat of job loss and other negative repercussions for those who publicly criticize Jews.

In particular, Jews have used their power to disestablish the traditional idea of America as having a European ethnic and a cultural core based on Christianity.

The Jews also (as few people recognize, because the subject is forbidden) changed America in some profound and not always positive ways. In terms of national identity, Jews were instrumental in the reformulation of America as a universalist society based strictly on ideology rather than on peoplehood, a change that set the stage for mass Third-World immigration and the much more profound redefinition of America as a multicultural society. In terms of morality, many Jewish intellectuals, writers, and entertainers deliberately undermined the older Anglo-American Victorian ethos, a program of moral/cultural subversion that climaxed in the Sixties counterculture and the dominant nihilist culture of the 1980s and 1990s. In terms of politics, Jews were instrumental in replacing the old American order of Constitutional self-restraint with the statist politics of unrestrained compassion.

Auster highlights the chutzpah underlying Jewish activism in overturning public expressions of Christianity, beginning in the late 19th century—the topic of a recent academic book confirming Auster’s comments. He also cites David Hollinger’s important work showing the role of Jews in altering the attitudes of American intellectuals in the direction of secularism, universalism, and ethnic pluralism. The result of the ascent of the Jews was that

the elite universities had changed from guardian of the old Western order to its subverter. [See also here.] This transformation in the universities then reverberated through the rest of the culture, stripping America’s public institutions, entertainments, symbols, and manners of the Christian and bourgeois values they had once embodied. America’s transition from a Protestant culture whose public institutions, celebrations, and symbols reflected Christian belief, to a pluralist, secular society with no identity at all, was complete.

Auster cites Jews who unabashedly celebrate the Jewish role in the displacement of White America with no fear of anti-Semitism—yet further examples of the overt expressions by Jews of Jewish power tabulated in Andrew Joyce’s recent article. Auster mentions sociologist Earl Raab’s pride in the Jewish role in changing the bias toward Northwestern Europe in U.S. immigration laws, and he notes Rabbi Abram Goodman’s comments that “Now I witness a Harvard that has been thoroughly cleansed and Judaized.” Auster comments that “thus an American Jew in 1997 unselfconsciously boasts of eliminating America’s former Christian culture, describing this elimination in terms (“thoroughly cleansed and Judaized”) not unlike those once used by the Nazis about the Jews.” Indeed, as Ron Unz has shown, Jews are now vastly overrepresented at Harvard controlled for their academic achievement, while non-Jewish Whites are underrepresented by a factor of at least 15 compared to Jews, again based on academic achievement. I rather doubt that Goodman (or Dershowitz, for that matter) is shedding any tears for Harvard’s egregious discrimination against non-Jewish Whites—discrimination that is far greater than historical discrimination against Jews who, even before the end of WWII, were admitted to Harvard at levels far above their percentage of the population. Our new hostile elite is far more corrupt than the old elite—and far less representative of the population as a whole.

The Judaization trumpeted by Rabbi Goodman means the destruction of the European cultural heritage of America:

Now that their enemies have been scattered and silenced, the left and the minorities can admit that their real agenda all along was not simply inclusion, equality, justice, or tolerance toward Jews and other minorities, but the destruction of the Christian culture.

And, of course, it goes beyond the destruction of culture to the destruction of the political power of White America—a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly apparent in U.S. elections. The entire process has never been about the pursuit of moral ideals; it has always been about ethnic hard ball, and the end result is the displacement of White America, its culture and its people.

The Jewish Role in Unleashing Displacement-Level Immigration to the U.S.

Auster is quite aware of the role of Jews in the demographic displacement of White America (see also here), noting particularly that Jewish immigration reformers not only wanted to end the bias in favor of Northwestern Europe but to ease the immigration of as many non-Whites as possible (see also here, p. 291). He focuses (as do I; see previous link, p. 285ff) on an extraordinary article from 1952 in Commentary by Harvard historian Oscar Handlin in which Handlin essentially deplores the fact that non-Jewish immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe do not have the same hatred against the traditional people and culture of America that Jews have. Auster takes Handlin’s argument to its logical conclusion:

If an immigration law that is designed to preserve the nation’s ethnic majority is racist (because it implicitly puts down other groups), then the same must be true of any manifestation of the ethnic majority, including its very existence. After all, if a nation still has an ethnic majority, and a culture that reflects that majority, doesn’t that impute inferiority to all people not related by blood to that majority? Therefore the only way to procure real democracy is to turn the ethnic majority into a minority, which is to be accomplished (and since 1965 has largely been accomplished) by immigration…

The 1965 Immigration Act, the culmination of a forty-year, largely Jewish-led campaign, was not simply a piece of “liberal” legislation (i.e., an act aimed at formal equality) which later turned out to have unforeseen, radical consequences. As early as 1952, the liberal idea of equality before the law was already linked in the minds of Jewish immigrationists with the radical project of dispossessing America’s white, Anglo-Saxon, Christian majority.

The hatred of Jews extends also to other White cultures. Auster notes literary critic Leon Wieseltier’s rejoicing at the displacement of traditional English culture by the Muslim onslaught:

Wieseltier is not exactly shy in his hatred. He mocks an Englishmen’s fears about the survival of English culture. He rejoices at the thought of Englishmen being discomforted, disoriented, and displaced in their own country by Muslims. If anyone is driven by an ethnic animus, surely it is Wieseltier and the many Jews who think and feel as he does.

Hypocrisy and Double Standards

Of course there is a massive hypocrisy about all this: “The Jews feel that they have a right to homogeneity and collective survival. But, as we have seen, the Jews deny this same right to white gentiles” [Auster’s emphasis]. This desire to destroy and vilify the ethnic ties among non-Jewish Whites while maintaining their own is deeply rooted in Jewish tribalism. “It is a blind, unreasonable, unappeasable force.” Exactly. TOO has an archive of 39 articles related to Jewish double standards related to ethnocentrism and we repeatedly discuss the legitimacy of White identity and interests. But the organized Jewish community and the vast majority of American Jews are completely tone-deaf when it comes to a hypocrisy that is so obvious that a child could see through it.

Auster seems to adopt a cultural explanation of Jewish ethnocentrism, attributing the pervasive double standards to deep immersion over the centuries in a tribalistic culture represented by the Talmud and its very different ethical treatment of Jews and non-Jews. (My view is that Jewish culture reflects biological influences—the deep ethnocentrism and collectivism at the heart of Middle Eastern culture [see here, p. 24ff], abetted by selection within the Jewish community that effectively excluded less ethnocentric Jews [see here, passim].)

As a result, Jewish patriotism toward America is always contingent on whether America meets specifically Jewish interests. The interests of the nation as a whole, much less the interests of the descendants of the White Europeans who founded the country, are completely irrelevant. “Over and over, Jewish-American patriotism seems to be based on some factor extrinsic to America itself” such as America’s role in defeating Hitler or supporting Israel.

Jewish Subversion of Traditional American Culture Via Media Influence

Auster also highlights another theme of TOO—the Jewish role in the subversion of the traditional culture of America resulting from their control of Hollywood. In a comment on the movie Outbreak reminiscent of Edmund Connelly’s work on the “Jews to the rescue” theme of Hollywood movies like Independence Day, “the Jew now cast as action hero—and his brilliant black sidekick heroically foil the plot.” There is also the denigration of WASPs as stereotypically evil also documented by Connelly (see above link): “the anti-WASP animus in film and TV had evolved into a formalized demonology. The cold-hearted, inhuman WASP—the WASP as super-Nazi—has been a regular fixture in one suspense/action movie after another.” The bottom line is that

Eastern European Jews, with their discontented, irrepressible temperament, were admitted as equals into a culture that had been formed by Anglo-Saxons and other northern European-origin people, with their pacific, self-controlled temperament. The former outsiders then proceeded to make their own sensibility the center of the culture, while diminishing and demonizing the Anglo-Saxon.

Provoking Anti-Semitism

Auster acknowledges that the Jewish role in the dispossession of Whites and their culture will likely lead to anti-Semitism:

[Another prospect] will be an upsurge of anti-Semitism among marginalized whites, many of whom will blame the Jews (not without cause) for the ruin of white civilization. Having acted all along on the ludicrous and hostile assumption that the white American majority is a potential neo-Nazi force that must be dispossessed, Jews will hardly be in a position to complain about real anti-Semitism when it appears among whites who have actually been dispossessed.

Despite his awareness of the forces that have dispossessed White America, Auster is very concerned to deflect anti-Semitism, even though he understands that anti-Jewish attitudes are completely expectable.

To seek to transform America into a Messianic project, to identify with the Other (whoever the Other may be) at the expense of the native majority, to deny to the native majority its ethnic identity while indulging in one’s own ethnic identity—this is not just a bad agenda, it is a Jewish agenda, and it is entirely moral for citizens of a free country to criticize it as such.

Auster’s basic argument is that not all Jews have been involved in or support these transformations, and a certain percentage of Whites (such as David Hollinger, about whom Auster says “he barely conceals his pleasure at Christianity’s being pushed aside”) have welcomed or at least acquiesced in these transformations. (It remains to be seen how much pleasure White Americans will have in majority non-White America where a very large percentage of non-Whites, including Jews as described here, have historical grudges against them. I rather doubt that pleasure will be a majority opinion among Whites.)

Nevertheless, we should be clear. These transformations could not have occurred unless there was overwhelming support for them among the vast majority of Jews and within the organized Jewish community. Indeed, there is far higher consensus among Jews on issues related to White dispossession than even on Israel, where there are beginning to be cracks in the unified support among American Jews for whatever Israel does. While there is a certain analogy between Auster and Gottfried on one hand and Philip Weiss and Peter Beinart on the other as opponents of the mainstream Jewish community on issues related to White dispossession and Israel respectively, the letter have been far more active in trying to convert other Jews and they speak for far greater numbers of Jews on Israel-related issues than Auster or Gottfried do on issues related to White dispossession. And in any case, the mainstream Jewish community remains as staunchly anti-White and pro-whatever-the-government-of-Israel-wants as ever.

Auster cannot point to any significant Jewish organization that has dissented from the dispossession of White America. (To be sure, groups like ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews have played no role in the dispossession of White America, either in favor or in opposition, since they live in a hermetically sealed world completely cut off from the rest of the society.) Nor can he point to any other identifiable group that promoted these cultural changes. While it is true that Europeans are more prone to individualism and moral universalism than other groups and this made them more susceptible to dispossession (see here, p. 14ff), there can be little doubt that Jewish activism is ultimately responsible for the displacement of White Americans (see, e.g., here).

The fact that some Whites have greeted these changes is expected (although it is certainly short sighted and selfish), given the fact that in contemporary American society the media environment (the constant propaganda of Whites as evil noted by Auster; see also here) and the rewards (e.g., career opportunities for White university administrators or corporation CEO’s who promote multiculturalism) and punishments (e.g., job loss and ostracism resulting from opposing multiculturalism) overwhelmingly favor the changes wrought by the Jewish hostile elite. The power of the hostile elite is now institutionalized and strongly defended from attack, particularly against attacks by disaffected Whites. As noted above, a key marker of Jewish power is that Jewish power, unlike the power of any other group, has been successfully relegated to outside the boundaries of acceptable discussion.

Moreover, Jewish influence extends far beyond the organized Jewish community. The very large influence of Jews in the media, resulting in the invidious portraits of Whites and Christianity and positive portrayals of everything Jewish (see here, p. 53ff), has been the work of individual Jews and informal Jewish networks, not Jewish organizations.

The same can be said of the Jewish networks involved in the Jewish intellectual and political movements discussed in The Culture of Critique—movements that collectively undermined the concept of America as a White, Christian nation. Indeed, the crux of the issue, displacement-level non-White immigration, is a consensus issue among all Jewish organizations and among all Jews from the far left to the neoconservative right. As Auster says about neocon Norman Podhoretz, he “does not regard non-Jewish Americans as his people. In effect, he sees America as ‘one nation, many peoples’—which is, of course, the multiculturalist view of America.” And remember, Podhoretz, is what passes as a conservative among Jews. The hatred for the White establishment among neocons as they were climbing the ropes of power is legendary (see here, p. 4).

Righteous Anger

So what is the appropriate reaction to all this among White Americans? Recently Bill O’Reilly has been harping on “righteous anger” as an entirely appropriate response to the rather mundane issue of President Obama’s failure to propose specific budget-cutting measures. Given the cataclysmic consequences to White America, righteous anger at the Jewish community is an entirely appropriate response for Whites whose cultural and demographic displacement is well-advanced as a result of Jewish activism. This is, after all, the mirror image of the hatred that is such a prominent characteristic of the mainstream Jewish community, as noted here in the discussion of Dershowitz, Wieseltier, Handlin, and Rabbi Goodman and reflected in the theme of Jews as a hostile elite. (Whites expressing righteous anger at what Jews have done to America are likely to experience far more negative consequences than did these Jews for openly expressing their hatred toward White America—a telling indication of Jewish power.)

No one would think it unjustifiable if a people becomes angry when they are physically invaded, reduced to a minority, and their culture taken away from them. Although not the result of physical invasion, the end result of this Jewish onslaught is exactly the same.

There is no more grievous crime against a people than the crime being committed against White America. Righteous anger is an appropriate response indeed.