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Jewish Revolutionaries: Good for Anyone Other Than the Jews?

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From the Bastille to the boulevard: The long history of Jewish revolt, by Shuki Sadeh, Ido Efrati, Haaretz Daily Newspaper, 2 Sept 2011:

One hot day in the summer of 1967, a young, frizzy-haired guy named Abbie Hoffman tried to go into the visitors’ entrance of the building in which the New York Stock Exchange is located. When the guard stopped him, Hoffman said: “We are Jews and you are an anti-Semite who is not letting us in.” The disconcerted guard let Hoffman and his hippie-friends go up to the visitors’ gallery.

Jews have traditionally taken a particular interest in the successes of their people in every generation and in every field of endeavor. This Jewish “bookkeeping” is mostly tendentious and usually ignores the circumstantial and environmental conditions that made these success stories possible. Indeed, for the most part, it prefers to attribute these achievements to the genetic makeup of the Chosen People.

“The list of Jews who have been involved in leading revolutions [since the middle of the 19th century] is very long,” explains Prof. Moshe Zimmermann of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s history department. “When a social group is not satisfied with its situation and feels it cannot change it – it will support a revolution. The Jews were not satisfied because they did not have privileges granted to other sectors and therefore the idea of revolution – whether communist or liberal – was attractive to them.

According to Prof. Moshe Zuckermann, a historian at Tel Aviv University, revolution was not the only option for Jews. They had least two other options.

“One was assimilation,” he explains, “as happened in Germany in the 19th century, and the other was going in the Zionist direction, a possibility that arose at the end of that century. If a Jew did not choose one of those two directions, his remaining alternative was to change the society at large – and therefore became a revolutionary.”

Trotsky was surrounded by quite a number of Jews, among whom his brother-in-law, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev stood out. “It is said jokingly,” comments Miron, “that when Lenin would leave the room, Trotsky was able to organize a minyan [prayer quorum].”

In Hungary, in another example, Bela Kun, a young man in his 30s, was among the founders of the Soviet Republic in Hungary in 1919. When it collapsed after 133 days, Kun went into exile in Russia, and was killed in one of Stalin’s purges at the end of the ’30s.

“Kun operated within a reality in ferment: Nearly half of the Hungarian journalists were Jewish, as well as the lawyers and doctors – even though they constituted only 5 percent of the population,” Silber explains. “At the end of World War I, Kun seized power in Hungary. He headed a government of 35 commissars, nearly all of them Jewish, and the impression was that a Jewish government really had been created. This led to a wave of anti-Semitism and terror against Jews.”

“In Germany there were various revolutionary ‘focal points’ dominated by Jews,” says Miron. “Kurt Eisner led the ‘Bavarian Soviet Republic,’ which briefly ruled in Bavaria. In Munich, there were three attempts at a revolution, all of them were led by Jews and all of them failed.”

Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish-born Jewess, was one of the founders of the Communist Party in Germany.

“Jewish revolutionaries for the most part live on the margins of Jewish society and sometimes cut off ties with the community,” notes Prof. Avi Saguy, head of the program for hermeneutics and a lecturer in philosophy at Bar-Ilan University. According to him, tikkun olam (repairing the world ) is a profound Jewish ethos – but a conservative rather than a revolutionary one.

“To say that in the Jewish genes there is a revolutionary element is utter nonsense,” says Prof. Zimmermann. “The Jews, by virtue of being a minority and because they were a religious group, adopted various types of behavior – which also explains the support for revolutions. The origin of the demand for social justice is indeed rooted in Jewish tradition, but in modern conditions, it can be said that it lies in revolutionary tendencies.”

Zuckermann, too, says there is no connection between the revolutionaries’ Jewishness and their political choices: “The discourse did not revolve around ultra-Orthodox religious Judaism, but rather around the Judaism that emerged in the period of the Enlightenment. From the moment the Jews integrated into the civil society of the 19th century – which, although it declared that they were emancipated, in fact did not accept them – they had a collective interest in changing society. Bourgeois civil society perceived the Jews in a new light: not only in a religious context, but also in socioeconomic one.”

Emanicipation of society

The most significant expression of the separation between the Jew’s social status and his tradition is found in the writings of Karl Marx, whose philosophy had a crucial influence on the revolutionaries of the 19th and 20th centuries. Born in Germany in 1818, Marx came from a family of rabbis but his father converted and became a Lutheran.

In his 1844 essay “On the Jewish Question,” one of his early writings, Marx related to the secular status of the Jews in society and characterized them as a people identified with commerce and the accumulation of wealth.

“Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion,” he wrote, “but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time. An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society …

“We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time, an element which through historical development – to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed – has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate. In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.” There are those who saw in Marx’s sharp words an expression of anti-Semitism and a denial of his Jewish past. However, in general he is perceived as a serious social theoretician, who called for the elimination of religious separatism of any kind and for abolishing economic commerce, on the way to creating an egalitarian, classless civil society.

“Most of the great revolutionaries,” says Zuckermann, “did not relate to their Judaism. People like Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg did not talk about emancipating the Jews from their Judaism, but rather about human emancipation, whereby people need to liberate themselves from social structures that create the oppression of various groups in the society, among them the Jews.”

Jews, jews, jews. Jews are so obsessed with themselves that they write stories bragging even about the mass murder and mayhem their tribemates have caused, turning European society upside down, spinning it as good and righteous. Then, perhaps realizing that this story may not fly, they hedge somewhat by lamely claiming it wasn’t really jews as jews.

But of course the story is about jews as jews. That’s what 9/10ths of it is about and that’s why it was published by Haaretz.

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Napoleon, the House of Rothschild, and Jewish Emancipation

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The Rothschild story: A golden era ends for a secretive dynasty, by Paul Vallely, The Independent, 16 April 2004 (my emphasis):

More significant, however, was that in the process the Rothschilds created the world of banking as we know it today. Nathan operated principally as an underwriter and speculator in the early 19th-century bond market. He and his brothers invented, or at any rate popularised, the government bond, which allowed investors, big and small, to buy bits of the debts of sovereign states by purchasing fixed-interest bearer bonds.

Governments liked this because they could use them to raise colossal sums of money. Investors liked them because they could be traded – at prices that fluctuated in relation to the performance of the issuing government – and shrewd investors could make big sums. It brought investment in railways, the industrial revolution and ventures like the Suez Canal. The Rothschilds got a cut of everything.

It was a new kind of power. “I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man who controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply,” Nathan said. The family developed a lack of awe for the powerful and important. A pompous aristocrat one day called on Nathan who was head down at his desk. Without looking up, the banker said: “Take a chair.” His caller, affronted, said: “You are speaking to the Prince of Thurn and Taxis.” To which Rothschild replied: “Take two chairs.” At one point he even rescued the Bank of England after a run on gold caused the collapse of 145 banks. In 1885 he was given the hereditary title of Baron Rothschild.

Many of the distinct characteristics of the family can be traced back to the will of the founder Mayer Rothschild. It stipulated that no public inventory should be made of his estate; that key positions in the House of Rothschild were to be held by family members; that the eldest son should inherit unless the rest agreed otherwise; that the family was to intermarry with first and second cousins to keep the fortune together; that anyone disputing these terms would be struck from the will. And that all this should apply in perpetuity.

In part this was about preserving not just their Jewish identity but a self-conscious position as role models for their poorer co-religionists. The Rothschilds expended much effort and money pressing for Jewish emancipation and equality across the continent.

Their Jewish solidarity was not heterogeneous. In 1938 Nathan’s great-great-grandson, Victor, shocked an audience by saying that in spite of “the slow murder of 600,000 people” on the continent “we probably all agree that there is something unsatisfactory in refugees encroaching on the privacy of our country, even for relatively short periods of time.” And the family split over the question of the dream of a Jewish homeland, with some members supporting the first Zionist settlement in Palestine and the Balfour declaration and others opposing it on the grounds that it would encourage anti-Semites to question the existing national identities of assimilated Jews around the rest of the world. None of which has allayed the wild fears of anti-Semites who throughout the 20th century branded the Rothschilds as part of a Jewish plot to take over the world.

The world has changed around the Rothschilds. At one point Nathan Rothschild was the richest man in Britain and probably in the world. In today’s terms he was wealthier than Bill Gates. But they never gained the foothold in America they needed. The world became corporate. Private banking got left behind.

Napoleon and the Jews, Wikipedia:

Napoleon’s indirect influence on the fate of the Jews was even more powerful than any of the decrees recorded in his name. By breaking up the feudal trammels of mid-Europe and introducing the equality of the French Revolution he effected more for Jewish emancipation than had been accomplished during the three preceding centuries. The consistory of Westphalia became a model for other German provinces until after the fall of Napoleon, and the condition of the Jews in the Rhine provinces was permanently improved as a consequence of their subjection to Napoleon or his representatives. Heine and Börne both record their sense of obligation to the liberality of Napoleon’s principles of action, and the German Jews in particular have always regarded Napoleon as one of the chief forerunners of emancipation in Germany.

(Image from Jews and French Grand Opera.)

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Andrew Johnson, White Nationalist

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Jamie Kelso’s March 1st podcast brought to my attention the article “Andrew Johnson Reconsidered”, which was published in the March 1998 issue of Wilmot Robertson’s Instauration.

Though Johnson’s oratory was noted for its style, the substance was equally impressive. An outspoken man, to put it mildly, today he would be consigned to the ranks of the insensitive at best or the bigoted at worst. Some of his most amusing outbursts were downright racist. In terms of bombast, he could have given any black preacher a run for his money. Of a pro-black voting rights bill, he said:

It would place every splay-footed, bandy-shanked, hump-backed, thick-lipped, flat-nosed, woolly headed, ebon-colored Negro in the country upon an equality with the poor white man.

His racial philosophy left little room for interpretation:

This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men …. This whole vast continent is destined to fall under the control of the Anglo-Saxon race-the governing and self-governing race.

His reasons for feeling as he did are well-documented:

[The] black race of Africa were inferior to the white man in point of intellect-better calculated in physical structure to undergo drudgery and hardship-standing, as they do, many degrees lower in the scale of gradation that expressed, the relative relation between God and all that he had created than the white man.

The following statement, made in 1866, cannot be easily dismissed today, 135 years after Negro emancipation:

The peculiar qualities which should characterize any people who are fit to decide upon the management of public affairs for a great state have seldom been combined. It is the glory of white men to know that they have had these qualities in sufficient measure to build upon this continent a great political fabric and to preserve its stability for more than ninety years, while in every other part of the world all similar experiments have failed. But if any­ thing can be proved by known facts, if all reasoning upon evidence is not abandoned, it must be acknowledged that in the progress of nations Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race or people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.

Johnson didn’t mince words about the Negro problem. Even though there wasn’t much of a Jewish problem in the U.S. in those days, he was not loath to speak up whenever a Hebrew was in need of a dressing-down. Florida’s David Levy Yulee, the first Jew to serve in the U.S. Senate, was berated as a “contemptible little Jew.” Of Louisiana Senator Judah Benjamin (later to become Attorney General, Secretary of War and ultimately Secretary of State in the Confederacy), Johnson said, “There’s another Jew –­that miserable Benjamin! He looks on a country and a government as he would on a suit of old clothes. He sold out the old one; and he would sell out the new if he could in so doing make two or three million.” Benjamin was further lambasted as being of “that tribe that parted the garments of our Savior and for his vesture cast lots.” In pre-ADL days, however, such bold comments were not career killers. Of course, if we had speeches like that in Congress today, C-Span would be a real ratings puller.

As a baseborn white, Johnson instinctively distrusted the Southern planter class, which wielded so much power in western and central Tennessee. Johnson represented the mountainous, eastern part of the state, where the residents tended towards yeomanry. He found that no matter how high he rose in politics, no matter how prosperous he was in his private life, he was never accepted by his “betters.” His particular brand of populism may have been inspired as much by his own experience as by his reverence for the Constitution:

The aristocracy in this district know that I am for the people….They know that I love and desire the approbation of the freemen of this State….The fact of a farmer or mechanic stepping out of the field or shop into an office of distinction and profit, is particularly offensive to an up­ start, swelled headed, iron heeled, bobtailed aristocracy, who infest all of our little towns and villages, who are too lazy and proud to work for a livlihood [sic], and are afraid to steal.

Though easier said than done, his recommendations for a robust republic still resonate:

I want no rabble here on one hand, and I want no aristocracy on the other. Lop off the aristocracy at one end, and the rabble at the other, and all will be well with the republic.

His antipathy to the plantation aristocracy was not just class envy. Johnson blamed it for fanning the flames of secession for its own benefit-certainly not for the benefit of the poor whites who formed the core of his constituency and had to bear the brunt of battle after secession.

I am for a government based on and ruled by industrious, free white citizens, and conducted in conformity with their wants, and not a slave aristocracy. I am for this government above all earthly possessions, and if it perish I do not want to survive it. I am for it though slavery be struck from existence and Africa be swept from the balance of the world … .If you persist in forcing this issue of slavery against the government, I say, in the face of heaven, give me my government and let the Negro go!

In other words, the welfare of the country is more important than the status of the Negro, be he slave or free man. In Johnson’s time, as in our own, too many people of influence and power have these priorities reversed.

It isn’t clear from the article which of Johnson’s quotes came before, during, or after his term as president in the wake of America’s most fratricidal, uncivil war. At the very least readers today can see that 90-odd years after Thomas Jefferson asserted the “self-evident truth” that “all men are created equal” there were still White leaders at the very top who believed Whites could and should govern Whites “to ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity”. You know, the kind of thing recent US presidents believe about jews.

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Sailer on Sherman

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In “Depression v. Nervous Breakdown”, Sailer writes:

I noticed this when I was reading up on the Civil War and got to the formidable Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s psychological collapse in late 1861, in-between his strong performances at the battles of First Bull Run in 1861 and Shiloh in 1862. While organizing behind the lines for the next year’s campaigns, he had to be relieved of command so he could recuperate at home. Sherman later joked, “Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other.”

The Wikipedia page on Sherman uses the old-fashioned term “nervous breakdown” and blames “the concerns of command.” In contrast, James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom sometimes uses the more modern term “depression,” and at one point suggests that Sherman was depressed by his vision of the logic of Total War.

Or was he suffering Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder over Bull Run?

Maybe Sherman was depressed because he realized Total War would someday result in the rise to power of pushy, hostile jews and the subsequent colonization of the entire White world by unarmed Amerindian, African, and Asian peasants. Then again, it isn’t likely Sherman would have ever recovered and continued to kill his cousins if he realized that.

General Grant’s Infamy:

The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the department [the “Department of the Tennessee,” an administrative district of the Union Army of occupation composed of Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi] within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.

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Hate, Then and Now

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Consider the position of the American Indians at the present day. They live side by side with a people which always wishes to increase in numbers, to strengthen its power. They see thousands of ships passing up and down their waterways. They know that the strength of their masters is irresistable. They have no hope whatever of seeing their native land one day delivered from their conqueror; their whole continent is henceforth, as they all know, the inheritance of the European. A glance is enough to convince them of the tenacity of those foreign institutions under which human life ceases to depend, for its continuance, on the abundance of game or fish. From their purchases of brandy, guns, and blankets, they know that even their own coarse tastes would be more easily satisfied in the midst of such a society, which is always inviting them to come in, and which seeks, by bribes and flattery, to obtain their consent. It is always refused. They prefer to flee from one lonely spot to another; the bury themselves more and more in the heart of the country, abandoning all, even the bones of their fathers. They will die out, as they know well; but they are kept, by a mysterious feeling of horror, under the yoke of their unconquerable repulsion from the white race, and although they admire its strength and general superiority, their conscience and their whole nature, in a word, their blood, revolts from the mere thought of having anything in common with it.

Arther Gobineau, circa 1854, p121 of The Inequality of Human Races, copyright 2009 by General Books LLC.

ENVY

The concept of envy — the hatred of the superior — has dropped out of our moral vocabulary …

The idea that white Christian civilization is hated more for its virtues than its sins doesn’t occur to us, because it’s not a nice idea. …

Western man towers over the rest of the world in ways so large as to be almost inexpressible.

It’s Western exploration, science, and conquest that have revealed the world to itself.

Other races feel like subjects of Western power long after colonialism, imperialism, and slavery have disappeared.

The charge of racism puzzles whites who feel not hostility, but only baffled good will, because they don’t grasp what it really means: humiliation.

The white man presents an image of superiority even when he isn’t conscious of it. And, superiority excites envy.

Destroying white civilization is the inmost desire of the league of designated victims we call minorities. …

~ Joseph Sobran (Sobran’s — April 1997)

(As quoted by Landser at OD.)