Tag Archives: joe sobran

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Joe Sobran on Force

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I stumbled across an intriguing quote while searching for an image of Joe Sobran to attach to my latest podcast, The Nature of Jewish Power – Part 3. The quote comes from the conclusion of Sobran’s essay, Anarchy without Fear, dated 17 Oct 2002:

The measure of the state’s success is that the word anarchy frightens people, while the word state does not.

The body of the essay concerns the interplay of rule, legitimacy, morality and force:

The first great American anarchist was Lysander Spooner, who died more than a century ago. His argument was simple. There is a natural and unchangeable moral law, which forbids slavery. No man has the right to force others to do his will. The state not only claims such a right, but claims a monopoly of force — the right to force its subjects to accept its laws as morally binding, no matter how arbitrary and unjust those laws may be.

. . .

There is no getting away from it: at bottom, the state is nothing but organized force. Its only abiding rule is this: “Obey, or we will hurt you.”

What is force? Simone Weil defined force as that which turns a person into a thing — a corpse or a slave — with no will of its own. Of course even a slave exercises his own will to some degree, but only by sufferance of his master. The state itself has to allow its slaves some latitude, but its permissions aren’t genuine rights.

. . .

Most men today can hardly imagine living without the parasitic force-systems we call states. However bad the state may be, they assume that anarchy would be somehow even worse, even after a century of world war, mass murder, and general waste and destruction claiming hundreds of millions of lives and creating poverty where there might have been plenty.

By now, if men learned from experience, they would talk about the state in the same tones in which Jews talk about Nazis.

“Obey, or we will hurt you” echoes the title jew Joey Kurtzman gave to Derbyshire’s odious acquiescence to jewish power, Be Nice, or We’ll Crush You.

When it comes to jewish power, men have learned from experience. Thus most talk about Nazis in the same tones as jews because they don’t wish to be hurt or crushed.

To paraphrase Sobran, the measure of the jews’ success is that the word Nazi frightens people, while the word jew does not.

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The Most Important Thing To Know About Joe Sobran

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Jews hated him.

Sailer’s “Joe Sobran, RIP” links Coulter’s Not your average joe.

A Sailer commenter links Michael Tomasky’s Rick Sanchez and Joe Sobran, which links Jeet Heer’s Joseph Sobran: Far Worse than a Holocaust Skeptic.

Sobran once wrote that “anti-semite” used to mean a man who hated jews. Now it means a man who is hated by jews.

In Hard-line commentator, at the Washington Post, Matt Schudel writes:

Over the years, Mr. Sobran’s views veered ever more wildly to the right, beyond the ken of National Review and anything resembling the mainstream. He praised an unabashedly racist publications called Instauration, which, in Mr. Sobran’s own words, was “openly and almost unremittingly hostile to blacks, Jews, and Mexican and Oriental immigrants.”

An archive of Wilmot Robertson’s Instauration Magazine is online. Go see what the fuss is about.

How I Was Fired By Bill Buckley is Sobran’s account of his ejection from the mainstream for violating what Buckley called “the structure of prevailing taboos”.

UPDATE 19 Oct 2010: A few links provided by Jim Jones in the comments, from which I’ve extracted samples of Sobran’s thoughts about jews.

Sobran’s — The Jewish Faction, May 2004:

In truth, the charge of “Christ-killing” is hard to find anywhere, outside of schoolyard taunts. Yet the Tribe “remembers” it, just as innumerable baseball fans used to “remember” seeing Babe Ruth’s legendary (and apocryphal) “called shot” in the 1932 World Series, the most famous home run never hit. Such non-happenings are a regular feature of Tribal memory, as witness the many testimonies of “Holocaust survivors” that have turned out to be delusions or outright forgeries. A large proportion of the Tribe is still absolutely convinced that Pius XII was “Hitler’s Pope,” despite mountainous, and mounting, evidence to the contrary. (Hitler’s media called Pius “the Jews’ mouthpiece.”)

Sobran’s — The Jewish Establishment, September 1995:

Not only persecution of Jews but any critical mention of Jewish power in the media and politics is roundly condemned as “anti-Semitism.” But there isn’t even a term of opprobrium for participation in the mass murders of Christians. Liberals still don’t censure the Communist attempt to extirpate Christianity from Soviet Russia and its empire, and for good reason — liberals themselves, particularly Jewish liberals, are still trying to uproot Christianity from America.

It’s permissible to discuss the power of every other group, from the Black Muslims to the Christian Right, but the much greater power of the Jewish Establishment is off-limits. That, in fact, is the chief measure of its power: its ability to impose its own taboos while tearing down the taboos of others — you might almost say its prerogative of offending. You can read articles in Jewish-controlled publications from the Times to Commentary blaming Christianity for the Holocaust or accusing Pope Pius XII of indifference to it, but don’t look for articles in any major publication that wants to stay in business examining the Jewish role in Communism and liberalism, however temperately.

When Joe McCarthy accused people of being Communists, the charge was relatively precise. You knew what he meant. The accusation could be falsified. In fact the burden of proof was on the accuser: when McCarthy couldn’t make his loose charges stick, he was ruined. (Of course, McCarthy was hated less for his “loose” charges than for his accurate ones. His real offense was stigmatizing the Left.)

The opposite applies to charges of “anti-Semitism.” The word has no precise definition. An “anti-Semite” may or may not hate Jews. But he is certainly hated by Jews. There is no penalty for making the charge loosely; the accused has no way of falsifying the charge, since it isn’t defined.

A famous example. When Abe Rosenthal accused Pat Buchanan of “anti-Semitism,” everyone on both sides understood the ground rules. There was a chance that Buchanan would be ruined, even if the charge was baseless. And there was no chance that Rosenthal would be ruined — even if the charge was baseless.

Such are the rules. I violate them, in a way, even by spelling them out.

“Anti- Semitism” is therefore less a charge than a curse, an imprecation that must be uttered formulaically.

Sobran’s — “For Fear of the Jews”, September 2002:

It was once considered “anti-Semitic” to impute “dual loyalty” to Jews — that is, to assert that most American Jews divide their loyalty between the United States and Israel. This is now passé. Today most politicians assume, as a matter of course, that Israel commands the primary loyalty of Jewish voters. Are they accused of “anti-Semitism” for doing so? Does this assumption cost them Jewish votes? Not at all! Dual loyalty nothing! Dual loyalty would be an improvement!

Once again, it’s a practical necessity to know what it would be professional suicide to say. No politician in his right mind would accuse Jews of giving their primary loyalty to Israel; but most politicians act as if this were the case. And they succeed.

You can read Jewish publications like Commentary for years, and you’ll read interminable discussions about what’s good for Israel, but you’ll never encounter the slightest suggestion that what’s good for Israel might not be good for America. The possibility simply never comes up. The only discernible duty of Jews, it seems, is to look out for Israel. They never have to choose between Israel and the United States. So much for the “canard” of dual loyalty.

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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.)

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Who’s on Top?

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John Savage wrote an interesting post titled The Leftist Social Pyramid. It was not my intent but in commenting there I upset him, and he closed the thread to further comment. He may withdraw the post, which is his perogative, but I hope he doesn’t. It begins like so:

This week, commenter Mark P. at VFR predicts a coming factionalization of the Left. This goes back to the question I keep asking: Why is the Left so monolithic, in the sense that we rarely hear of fights over whether one or another thing is a proper leftist principle? Whatever difficulties there have been in making the decisions, they seem to have been out of the public spotlight, and discontent among the losers seems to have done little damage to the overall movement.

I suggested last fall that there is a Hierarchy of Entitlement on the Left. To recap, non-Western immigrant groups seem to be at the top. The toleration of violence and even ethnic cleansing by these groups against native-born blacks demonstrates that these groups stand above blacks. The attempt to prosecute disabled whites for racist “hate speech” demonstrates that nonwhites still stand above the disabled, and the toleration of nonwhite violence against homosexuals demonstrates that nonwhites stand above homosexuals. The toleration of nonwhite rape of white women demonstrates that white women are considerably lower than any nonwhites, while white heterosexual men are at the very bottom.

My emphasis.

At my prompting we exchanged a few comments concerning where jews fit in this hierarchy. I argued they’re on the top. John discussed it, but I think he would really have preferred to leave them unmentioned. It’s a common problem. It supports the point I was trying to make. Of all the elephants in the room the jewish elephant is the one everyone seems most eager to ignore. Thus when someone will not ignore it it’s easy to paint them as abnormal, just as John eventually did to me.

Whether or not jews are on top, they certainly are one of the most prominent, powerful victim groups in the “Leftist Social Pyramid”. Opinion on anti-semitism is more monolithic than any other social or political principle in the West. It transcends left and right.

The principle of anti-semitism is this: no matter the merits of what you say, if it is critical of jews then you are insane. It doesn’t matter whether you are ancient egyptian, contemporary korean, amerindian, leftist former president (Jimmy Carter), or rightist former presidential candidate (Pat Buchanan).

In a presentation titled For Fear of The Jews Joe Sobran said:

What, exactly, is “anti-Semitism”? One standard dictionary definition is “hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious or racial group.” How this applies to me has never been explained. My “hostility” toward Israel is a desire not for war, but for neutrality — out of a sense of betrayal, waste, and shame. Our venal politicians have aligned us with a foreign country that behaves dishonorably. Most alleged “anti-Semites” would wince if Jews anywhere were treated as Israel treats its Arab subjects. Moreover, Israel has repeatedly betrayed its only benefactor, the United States. I have already alluded to the place Dante reserves for those who betray their benefactors.

These are obvious moral facts. Yet it’s not only politicians who are afraid to point them out; so are most journalists — the people who are supposed to be independent enough to say the things politicians can’t afford to say. In my thirty years in journalism, nothing has amazed me more than the prevalent fear in the profession of offending Jews, especially Zionist Jews.

Emphasis mine.

I’m sorry if making this point upsets jews, or John Savage, or anyone else. I raise it because it’s important. Not many people will discuss it calmly. John’s accusation that I’m “unreasonable” and “see jews everywhere” is itself unreasonable – it imagines only two extremes: either jews are not worthy of mention, or they control everything. That’s a false dichotomy. I reject it.