A cat has only nine lives. And this blog has died for the 9th time. It died the first time after just four months. Now it's saved for eternity in read-only mode. Welcome to my miaowsoleum!
Other ways in which people came here was by searching for certain people. During the years these have been the main entry points; in descending order:
jim kalb
takuan seiyo
traian ungureanu
caroline flint cleavage
tina hallgren bengtsson
lars vilks
A bubbler name is Ferdinand Bardamu, which renders a #7 Google ranking to my blog. And furthermore, many people came here by searching for catholic birth rates.
I'd like to nuance a generalization made by Ferdinand Bardamu, quoted in my previous post. Because not all antisemites are nutty conspiracy mongers. Bardamu mentions Dennis Mangan as a sensible guy, who's not at all a moron such as e.g. Richard Hoste. And I agree with this. He also brings up how balanced people, such as Mangan, gets unfairly accused of being anitsemites, and provides a link to how Mangan complains about that.. Mangan has complained fairly often about this at his blog. He thinks it is a wretched thing to falsely accuse someone of being an antisemite (at least when it concerns himself).
To nuance it even more: not all antisemites are vicious. Let's say for example that Dennis Mangan (who's got good credentials from e.g. Bardamu) says that Kevin MacDonald is not of the vicious kind, but that e.g. Conservative Swede is a vicious antisemite -- well, then that's probably true. Just as an example! I'm just trying to show here how we can actually use this more nuanced language in practice. So it's possible to be either a nutty antisemite or a vicious one; or just an ordinary gray mouse antisemite. And even one that is both nutty and vicious (oof!).
Anyway, two beautiful Romanian girls are currently criticizing the proposition-nation concept of citizenship in another thread of this blog. I have often myself argued for that the traditional pre-French-Revolution concept of citizenship is the only viable one. I.e. no special rights at group level for any ethnic minority group, i.e. no mass citizenship granting at group level, giving them access to influencing the political affairs. Anyone who wants to struggle his way into the political rights of a new country will have to do it as an individual, the old-fashioned long and winding way. The point here is that all ethnic minority groups should be treated equally, fairly and squarely. Still, for some reason, I always have to point out that the Jews should NOT be an exception to the rule here (and this for a whole number of reasons: among them mercy for the future plight of the Jews; it's a way of taking them out of the heat. Ferdinand Bardamu has described well the background reasons for this).
Well it's funny how life is full of coincidences, because exactly in that thread at Mangan's (linked by Bardamu) the same two girls and me were discussing the traditional concept of citizenship. The discussion spilled over into the next thread, and there I also took the opportunity to criticize Kevin MacDonald. Dennis Mangan answered me as follows:
Con Swede, after criticizing MacDonald for supposedly saying that "the Jews did it", wants to strip Jews of their citizenship. That's arguably far more anti-Semitic than anything MacDonald has *ever* written.
Oops, I must really be a very bad person then. If Dennis Mangan says it, it's probably so. Bardamu lifts up Dennis Mangan (together with for example Pat Hannagan!!) as one of the sane and balanced ones in the Alt-Right/WN crowd.
And I like the logic of Mangan's reasoning: If no ethnic minority group is going to have special political rights attributed to them at group level, then the Jews won't have it either, therefore it is antisemitic!
What makes Mangan's rating of my degree of antisemitism especially credible, is how strongly he dislikes false accusations of antisemitism (at least there is evidence that he does so, when it's directed at himself). So I must be a vicious antisemite then (I'm still desperately clinging to the word "arguably" here...)
Anyway, I found this funny fellow who is video-blogging, and who also seems balanced and reasoned. He's called Ramzpaul, and one of his vlogs relates to what I'm discussing here. It's called Is Ron Paul a Vicious Anti-Semite?:
This case is parallel to my own. Ron Paul suggested that the USA should withdraw foreign aid from all countries. But that would imply that the aid is withdrawn from Israel, therefore the suggestion is antisemitic! (this time this razor sharp kind of argument was used by David Horowitz).
Furthermore, Ron Paul is a vicious antisemite (once again credit to Horowitz). As Ramzpaul points out: "coz some antisemites can be not vicious". So that's just like me again. Given that Kevin MacDonald is of the "not vicious" kind, and I'm "far more anti-Semitic" than KMac (as Mangan suggests), then I must be at least as vicious an antisemite as Ron Paul.
Pay attention to the phone call made by Ramzpaul by the end of the clip, where he -- by using Horowitz/Mangan style reasoning -- uncovers covert antisemitism in his own life. Such as at this store, that does not allow Jews entering after 10 p.m.
Here is some more from Ferdinand Bardamu . Over at In Mala Fide he wrote last year both about the moronic nature of anti-Semitism as well as the intolerant, inquisition-like nature of anti-anti-Semitism. I find Bardamu's remarks of interest since he's clearly on the outside of both these camps. The words and opinions are his -- I think he takes some of his generalizations too far -- but I'm providing them here to give us all perspective. Because he writes well, does not shy away from saying what many will hate him for saying, and since he's made several pertinent observations regarding this whole soap opera (pertinent = observations I have also made myself).
Regarding anti-Semitism Bardamu starts with saying:
Alone among prejudices, anti-Semitism makes total and complete morons out of its adherents. With the notable exceptions of Hunter Wallace and the crew at Occidental Dissent, just about every anti-Semite I’ve read on the Internet is two whips short of a BDSM kit. I think the hysterical, fact-free nature of anti-Semitism is part of the problem. People who hate or distrust blacks/NAMs at least have the facts on their side – Jew-haters have to make stuff up about conspiracies to take control of the world and deracinate white people in order to justify their paranoia. When someone comes along to debunk their idiocy with cold, hard facts, they attack them in the most insane ways possible. This is why I don’t bother arguing about the Jews with anti-Semites – it’s as productive as arguing with Truthers about 9/11.
He then continues to go on at length about Richard Hoste. And there is indeed plenty to be said about the spectacular stupidity of this man. I have probably never encountered anyone as unbelievably moronic as Richard Hoste. There's enough material for a whole seminar about him.
Bardamu continues:
- - - - - - - - -
This allows me to segue into another thing that blasts anti-Semites’ credibility into pieces – their inability to be intellectually consistent when it comes to the Jews. Let’s take the question of Israel as an example. Just about every paleocon Jew-baiter loves to kvetch about how those evil Israelis are war criminals and how they’re violating the human rights of the Palestinians. It’s quite amusing to see the likes of Pat Buchanan and Taki Theodoracopulos, who couldn’t give a shit about the human rights of any other group of darkies on the earth, turn into weepy, bleeding heart liberals when it comes to the Palestinians. I could understand it if the Palestinians were of European extraction, but so far as I can tell, they basically look like garden variety Arabs. From the perspective of a racist, the Palestinians are just another group of sand-niggers, so why do they get so much love from the Jew-haters? Answer: these sand-niggers are a stick with which the anti-Semites can beat the Jews. The Undiscovered Jew brought this issue up at Half Sigma’s recently.
Here is an example he provides of the kind of moronic conspiracy theories that could come out of the Jew obsessed mind:
I don’t want to beat up on [Occidental Dissent] too much, because the bloggers there are smart, rational people (save for that insufferable mangina Matt Parrott/Wikitopian), but their commentariat is batshit insane. Those idiots think that Roissy Chateau is a Jew, Mystery is a Jew, and game is a Jewish strategy to destroy the white race, among other things.
He concludes by saying:
I could go on and on, but you get the point. I find it increasingly difficult to take anti-Semites seriously. While I acknowledge that some Jews have had a deleterious influence on Western culture and society (most notably when it comes to feminism), the idea that the whole of Judaism is united to get whitey is just fucking ludicrous. If the race realists, white nationalists, and other related groups want to gain any political traction, they need to read the crazier Jew-haters out of their ranks. Affiliate yourself with dummies and people will think you’re one too.
Well of course, to Bardamu feminism is what is considered the problem of the highest concern :-)
After this lambasting of anti-Semtism some people expected Bardamu to join the anti-anti-Semitism camp. But nope, not Ferdinand Bardamu. Instead he wrote an article lambasting anti-anti-Semitism:
... I think anti-anti-Semitic hysteria is a growing melanoma on the American body politic. While I’m not fond of the conspiracy-mongering on the anti-Semitic right, I’m not stupid – a group of basement-dwelling losers having a circle jerk on a blog aren’t a threat to anyone but themselves. Jim Giles will not be spearheading the rise of the Fourth Reich from his trailer out in the ass-end of Mississippi. Those lunatics are marginalized and have no influence beyond their social circles, which are only populated with people as crazy as they are. The biggest problem with anti-Semitism of that variety right now is that it threatens to clip the wings of the alternative right.
Anti-anti-Semites on both the left and right, on the other hand, are very powerful and very committed to shouting and shutting down anyone who has a less-than-hagiographic view of the Jews. Anti-anti-Semitism is bolstered beyond the usual minority-loving anti-racist whinging by the semi-unique instance of the Holocaust. Liberals and neocons have spent the past sixty plus years constantly picking at that Holocaust wound in one of the biggest and most ignored examples of scar worship in Western society. The Holocaust cult is so powerful that an entire European nation is forced to self-flagellate constantly for a crime that the majority of its inhabitants had no role in. And anyone who questions the influence Jews have on modern society gets a roundhouse kick in the face from the Foxman-Schlussel-Victimologist crowd: “OMIGOD YOU FILTHY NEO-NAZI SCUM YOU WANT TO STUFF JEWS IN OVENS YOU AWFUL PERSON YOU!”
[...]
... so long as the Jews remain visible minorities in gentile societies, anti-Semitism will persist. It will fluctuate in intensity, but it will never go away. If the anti-anti-Semites really wanted to accomplish their goal, they’d launch a campaign to get every Jew outside of the Holy Land to make aliyah, combined with a political push to get the U.S. government out of Israeli affairs.
The biggest sin of the anti-anti-Semitic crusaders is their insistence on painting all gentiles with the same broad brush. Their worldview is as Manichean as it gets, and doesn’t account for the differing treatments of Jews in various countries and regions of the world. On one end of the spectrum you have Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. [...] On the extreme other end is the U.S., the most philo-Semitic nation that doesn’t have a Star of David in its flag. [...] The anti-anti-Semites don’t care about any of this historical nuance, though – to them, Americans, like all other goyim, are two steps away from arbeit macht frei.
This intolerant, inquisition-like treatment of anyone who criticizes the Jews is problematic because it turns ordinary people into frothing-at-the-mouth Jew-haters over time.
At this point Bardamu mentions the example of Kevin MacDonald, and how Robert Lindsay wrote: "My theory is that the increasingly vicious and malign Jewish attacks on MacDonald (almost completely specious on intellectual grounds) gradually drove him to anti-Semitism. This is how it works so many times. People start criticizing the Jews. The Jews will brook no criticism not of their own, and since the Holocaust, anyone who says boo about them obviously wants to kill em all, right?"
Bardamu concludes by saying:
As of right now, the anti-anti-Semites are in the seat of power. The marriage of left-wing multiculturalism and Holocaust worship ensure that anyone with an opinion of the Jews that isn’t Abe Foxman-approved will spend the rest of their lives in the shadows. [...] If Kristallnacht comes to America, the Jewish elite will have only themselves to blame for behaving like inquisitors burning heretics at the stake. As I have said before, I write this not to threaten but to warn. (And I bet that despite writing all that, I’ll get some assclown accusing me of being a Nazi within the first hundred comments on this post. Bring on the hate, bitches. I’m ready.)
In a final note he says that he will review Kevin MacDonald's The Culture of Critique. But I have never seen him do that. Was this potato too hot even for Ferdinand Bardamu to deal with? Read further...
Quick recapitulation: 1) Fjordman wrote a highly interesting article about the Proposition Nation, and how this made treason against ourselves the norm among white people. Putting his blow torch under the asses of USA, France and the Enlightenment. 2) Señor NaziUniform enters the room claiming that we should instead put blame on the goblins. (The thing is that Señor NaziUniform will always bring up the goblins in every discussion even if the topic had been Medieval Celtic beer production. And he will always blame any problems on the goblins. He is constitutionally unable to talk about anything else.) 3) The minds of the other people there went into red alert mode (as it always does whenever goblins are brought up) and they were unable to focus on the discussion that Fjordman had intended. The room becomes a pandemonium of heated arguments about how many problems that are due to goblins, while others claim that goblins do not exist (at least not as a group, at least not if you say something negative about them as a group). Next someone calls out that there are actually goblins present in the room, and the goblin says that this is a goblin room, and someone else says that we should always stand by World of Warcraft, etc. No one manages to focus on Fjordman's article, or on America, France or the Enlightenment.
This is what happened so far... except that it wasn't about goblins. It was about... this other ethnic group... the Finns?
It is an objective fact that the Idea Nation or Proposition Nation as a concept is a child of the Western Enlightenment and has been disproportionately spread by the USA and France in particular. That was the subject of my original essay. I have gradually come to realize that some of the crucial problems the West suffers from today can probably be traced back to the Enlightenment era. It is an objective fact that the direct intellectual input of Jews when it comes to shaping Enlightenment thought, with the possible exception of Spinoza, was tiny.
The Enlightenment was a creation of Europeans, and if we suffer from its effects today this is largely our own fault. We shouldn’t blame others for it, be that the Chinese, the Muslims or the Jews.
Well, no surprises there for anyone who knows history. No goblins behind the birth of the Proposition Nation. And this is all in line with what Ferdinand Bardamu wrote a year ago in his article "What's wrong with white nationalism?"
- - - - - - - - - Quoting from the article:
And there we run into our first problem with white nationalism – it doesn’t confront the core of what is wrong with the West. White nationalists are right that multiculturalism and ethnic infighting are serious issues, but they don’t recognize that the tribal soup that America, Britain and other white nations are drowning in is not the cause of those nations’ decline, but a symptom. To demonstrate this, I will use the time-honored method of the Socratic dialogue:
White Nationalist: We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children!
Ferdinand Bardamu: Tally ho, chap. I say, what are you agitating about?
WN: I want my white brothers and sisters to throw off their shackles and fight the enemies who are trying to wipe them out.
FB: I see. And just who are the enemies of the white race?
WN: The Jews! They control the government, the media, and Wall Street, and they’re trying to ethnically cleanse us from our own nation by robbing us, importing foreigners to replace us, and encouraging miscegenation with lesser races. And the Negroes! They’re slaughtering us in the streets and raping our women!
FB: Okay, Jews and Negroes are bad. But weren’t white people responsible for letting the Jews in this country and allowing them to participate in public life to begin with?
WN: Uhhhh…
FB: And the Negroes – weren’t they brought here from Africa as slaves and later emancipated by white people?
WN: Errrrr…
FB: Wouldn’t this mean that these problems that white people suffer from are basically self-inflicted?
WN: Ummmm…WHITE POWER!
White nationalism doesn’t address why all of these alien tribes have popped up in our midst. WNs like to blame these and other problems on the Jews, and while I acknowledge that they’ve had a disproportionate, malign influence, the fact of the matter is that the ideology that wrecked the West, liberalism, originates from whites. (Note: for the purposes of this essay only, I will regard Jews as a separate entity from whites.) The intellectual forbears of modern liberalism and its offshoot ideologies like multiculturalism and feminism were all gentiles – 17th and 18th century thinkers like John Locke, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Adam Smith. The Jewish establishment in the modern West is merely a vector for a white-created disease of the mind.
And even if we accept the premise that Jews and Jewish influence are primarily responsible for the mess we’re in, that doesn’t absolve whites from blame. The Jews didn’t invade America, Britain or any other country en masse and forcibly take over their institutions – they were invited by the natives. Prior to their emanicipation in the 19th century, Jews were despised and persecuted everywhere they went, and had little to no influence on the societies they settled in. That’s why the neoconservative description of the West as “Judeo-Christian” should make educated people laugh – Jews had about as much influence on pre-Enlightenment Europe as the Gypsies. Jewish emancipation was a product of liberalism, as the first European state to grant them full legal rights was revolutionary France in 1791. If Jews have fired the bullet into the head of white civilization, whites themselves are culpable for letting them touch the gun to begin with.
The fact of the matter, that white nationalists are either unwilling or unable to address, is that white people are their own worst enemy.
The whole article is worth reading. Read it here. There is much more to why White Nationalism is problematic.
So how can we have a proper discussion about how white people are the ones destroying ourselves, and the memes driving it? Well, clearly we'll have to send anyone in Nazi uniform or anyone obsessing about goblins out of the room. Even someone obsessing about Muslims or Hispanics will be useless and disruptive in this discussion. Quite as those obsessing about the Jews. But the last one is worse since it will take the whole room into red alert mode (as described above).
The only thing that the energetic writing and commenting by Chechar and Tanstaafl have lead to is to make open blog discussions about Jews a dead end. I didn't think in this way before, but they have changed the landscape now. Some people who would otherwise say something about the issue will be repelled from it by them. And in this polarized situation, some people who would otherwise have kept a more balanced stance will be sucked into their warp. This since, at least to newcomers, Chechar and Tanstaafl will appear as the brave ones who dare bringing up the "truths".
It's really a pity it has gone this way. A few years ago there were several very informative discussions about the Jewish question over at Gates of Vienna. Plenty of people from Eastern Europe made great contributions there back then.
I'm a Hellenist in the sense that I hold thinking, reasoning and discussing in the highest regard. My view is clear: everything is open for exploration. But nevertheless there is the right time, place, context and participants for any meaningful discussion. To start with, certain rules of civilized society apply, e.g. we do not come naked with a hard-on to a debate. If certain fundamental conditions are not met, it's not a debate at all. Then there are the debates that are not good debates, due to lack of intelligence or intellectual honesty of the debaters. Or the inability to listen to what one's opponent actually said. Typical for the most interesting topics is that the majority of the participants cannot control their deepest emotions of fear and hate, which get triggered by touching upon taboos which set their core myths in berserk mode.
Certain topics are so infected by wackos that an open public debate is effectively impossible. Try discussing with 911 Truthers. Or with Hindutvas about how Christianity is not at all exactly like Islam. Or try pointing out to Sikhs that they have a proselytizing religion. The Jewish question might not even be as bad as some of the other examples I gave here. But bad enough to -- as a rule of thumb -- generally avoid open public debates about it. And that's what I referred to with the title of my previous post.
In any debate, arriving at the debate in Nazi uniform and greeting the participants with a Hitler salute, is always a bad idea. Regardless of what you intended to say. And for the rest, this debate is not worth having -- leave the room.
- - - - - - - - - During the years I have had much use of Internet debates. Partly by learning from people, and partly for studying them; studying them more or less like an anthropologist. By finding what taboos set them off in emotional berserk mode it is possible to identify and describe their core myths. It's been a dirty job, but now it's mostly done. Even for a devoted zoologist, after studying a few hundred times how hyenas eat, shit and copulate, it does not make sense any more to be there out in the field to see it again.
For many reasons I have reached a point where my personal view is that Internet discussions are mostly meaningless. My participation in blog comments sections is minimal. And if I would start writing seriously again, then I'm not particularly interested in having people commenting on what I say. And the duty of moderation is like keeping a hyena farm, and takes too much time and energy. And apart from the moderation, most people who comment will have grossly misunderstood what had been said, and will go on and on about some pet hang-up of theirs. One reason why Internet discussions mostly get stuck in meaningless tirades is that people with serious emotional or psychiatric problems are overrepresented -- not in numbers, but in volume! It's like fighting a multi-headed hydra, and mostly a waste of time.
So how can we go forward without debates? Well, we need to qualify that. First of all, people that recently awoke and started exploring taboos etc. will have a great net gain by Internet discussions (such as I had a decade ago). And myself I keep on thinking, reasoning and discussing. But I'm much more exacting about the context of a debate today. I generally avoid open Internet debates altogether.
But there is a more important point to be made here. The problems that face the West will not be solved by public debates or discussions. We will not be saved by 1) the people finally being enlightened through insightful public debates, and then 2) them voting the right political party in power, that will 3) fix all the problems and set everything straight again. We are far far beyond that possibility. What will happen is a convergence of catastrophes (which will happen in this century). And then we will have to rebuild our societies from the ashes of that.
So, debates are completely pointless with regards to solving our political problems (within the system). But they can help a lot for how mentally prepared we will be after the convergence of catastrophes have happened, and for what we do during and after that.
Open discussions on the Jewish question (JQ) are particularly useless. There is always someone who will enter the room with the metaphorical Nazi uniform. And then the discussion is already dead. And even if that doesn't happen, there will be someone with the reverse emotional hang-up imagining someone in the room having a Nazi uniform on. Either way the end result is just the same. An hysterical quarrel with people going emotionally berserk. We witness a human behaviour here which makes a herd of chattering chimpanzees look good in comparison. And even if the topic of the discussion is not the Jews, there are enough people with such an obsessive hang-up on the JQ, that they will shoehorn it into many other discussions. With the very same devastating result as above.
Once the two sides of the JQ get started it is like listening to a quarrel of a married couple. There are certain wounds in each of them, that will be triggered as soon as there is an argument. And infallibly the whole thing escalates into a hysterical quarrel, and at this point it has nothing at all to do with how the argument started. But all to do with the structure of the wounds on each side, and how they get triggered (like a wildfire). So it's the very same quarrel every time. It's a constant. Precisely the opposite of intelligent debate. I'm not interested in listening to the quarrel of a married couple, or anything resembling it (to the advantage of the married couple is that they can have make-up sex afterward).
I've previously used the analogy of two black holes, with gravity so strong that virtually everyone will be sucked into any one of these extremes. I'll now present another analogy for these discussions about the JQ. It's a trench war with each party deeply entrenched on each side of the battlefield. It's a situation of complete deadlock. No one is really trying to come to a common view of things, just fervently dismissing each other and dig deeper into the trenches. And here comes another analogy from the First World War: anyone who crosses the battlefield between the two lines will be met by crossfire. I have been placing myself at that field a number of times. Being a man of moderation, I've been wanting to present a balanced view. But generally I have been dismissed from both sides as an extremist. Of course there's no logic to that. But then there's no logic to the two trenches where these combatants have put themselves -- no more than a quarrel between a married couple. It's all deeply emotional.
And when strong emotions of fear and hate enters, the possibility of an intelligent debate walks out of the door. When people start acting like a bunch of chattering chimpanzees -- or worse -- there's no point in participating in that.
PS. The issue of Jews as a minority group can be addressed without explicitly calling them by name. E.g. by discussing how to deal with ethnic minority groups in general. I've done so before, and I'll get back to this. This is a way of keeping the berserk emotions of the chimpanzee crowd in check. Of course, sooner or later someone will bring up the Jews (be it the husband or the wife) if it's an open Internet debate. The brains of all the participants subsequently switches into red alert mode and nobody's able to think clearly anymore.
My first impulse was to call this post something relating to "Lösung der Judenfrage" as a tribute to my house god Theodor Herzl, but in the end I fell for a different title. But it's still in an evil language :-)
The title translated into English says: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
My point being: To the degree that we cannot speak intelligently about the Jewish question (der Judenfrage as Herzl would have said in his evil language), we had better leave it aside.
During recent eruptions over at Gates of Vienna I stated "The Jewish question is a dead end". Rebellious Vanilla protested against this in an email, so I'll need to explain. I'm not at all saying that it's not an interesting topic, highly pertinent to explore and with many important insights with regards to what makes the West fall apart. I'm simply saying that people are evidently unable to discuss it. (And if they can't, they had better not.)
I'm trying to find a proper analogy. It's like saying that we should have lessons in school with everyone being naked. In theory that should work fine (at least in the Germanic north). But in practice everyone will be so distracted by the nakedness, that they cannot really focus on the teaching. Some students will be so obsessed about it that they will promptly act in a way making no teaching possible at all. And quite as with the JQ there will be two opposite kinds of obsessions: i) the ones whose sex drive reach an uncontrollable peak and go crazy for that, and ii) the ones who disintegrates into moral fits over the indiscretion of the first group (or anyone they choose to see as belonging to it).
It's our eternal soap opera of The Nazis and The Jews continuing untiring, with the same old dramaturgy. People of today have an insatiable craving for the simplistic and superficial patterns of this drama. It is the most defining mythological narrative for Westerners of today -- the mythological narrative which leaves the deepest imprint in their minds and soul -- no matter what positions they take in the drama (and there is a strong gravity towards extremes here).
- - - - - - - - - My position has always been that it's pointless to take positions in this drama, since the drama is phony; that this whole soap opera and its excesses should just be thrown away. That we instead should focus on real issues, instead of having our minds getting lost in this mythological maze, fed into our minds through the shadow theater in the Platonic cave.
This mythological drama controls the minds of modern Westerners, by invoking the most primitive emotions: fear and hate -- it plays their emotions like a violin. And where the reptile brain turns on -- coupled with religious style zeal -- sound reason is all gone. And this is equally true regardless of which side of the drama that people identify with. I.e. it's equally true for both Abe Foxman and David Duke. And for virtually everyone in-between. Because the gravity of the two extreme points is so strong that virtually no one is able to resist it. It's like a dual system of two black holes where eventually people will be sucked into any of them, and everything becomes darkness.
I've seen such a long line of people in the blogosphere (both blog owners and commenters) who imagine themselves -- and create the expectation among others (who are after all heavily worn out by this frantic drama, and would like to find a way out of it) -- as dealing with the "issue" reasonably, detached and evenhandedly. But sooner or later the mask falls off, and their gravity towards one of the black holes become obvious.
Victimization-mythology about the Jews and fixation about Jews as "the cause of all our problems" are, after all, just two sides of the very same coin. And the coin could be named "obsession about Jews", a fixation about the soap opera of "The Nazis and The Jews".
The solution is not to choose a side of the coin, the solution is to throw the coin away. I have always suggested to move away orthogonally from the issue. Philosemitism and antisemitism are just two sides of the very same coin, and closely related; quite as love and hate are. Philosemitism will easily flip into antisemitism. Making 180 degree turns just makes you go back and forth along the same line, in the same vicinity and according to the same narrative. "The opposite" is too similar to what you are trying to oppose. Move away from it orthogonally (I assume the readers know basic geometry), scrap the narrative and the mythology that drives it (Christianity is a main factor in driving both antisemitism and philosemitism). Get over it and make the Jews irrelevant -- that's the most merciful solution both for us and them.
Fjordman wrote a great article, published at Gates of Vienna, discussing how the Proposition Nation might be our most fundamental enemy. Someone brought up the Joooos immediately and the whole thread turned into a mixed sauna of presumptive rapist and priestly moralists wreaking havoc. The content of the article was never properly discussed. The JQ and intelligent discussion are like oil and water. And the JQ enters discussions where it is not the topic, thanks to certain fanatics who are unable to discuss anything else but the JQ, and will make it the topic whatever else was argued. And once that point is reached it's like if a dog had come into the living room shitting on the carpet. The stench will dominate the existence of the whole room and the discourse for clear thinking and reasoned arguments will be all gone.
This has to be stopped. Incurable sex addicts need to be restrained. Same thing here. In civilized societies we keep our clothes on. Whenever a naked man with a hard-on runs into the room, throw him out. Not because we are ashamed of what is under our clothes. But because his behaviour shows that he's unable to control himself.
Anyway, back to Wittgenstein and the title of my post. Why am I talking about something that I suggest we should be silent about? "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen". Well, Wittgenstein wrote a whole book about it to come to this conclusion. And this is what he wrote in his penultimate paragraph:
"My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly."
What I write here is of the same kind. However, I have no intention of throwing away the ladder for quite some time. Instead I will make this into a series of posts. (Yes, I'm back blogging. At least for a while.)
Finally, my moderation policy will be as follows: your comment will be deleted! If it hasn't been, consider it as providence. (NB: This is entirely consistent with the ideas I express in this post.)
