WAR OF PERCEPTION

Saul D. Alinsky: A role model for left-wing satanists

The 1972 Vintage Books paperback edition of Rules for Radicals by Saul D. Alinksy has a page of quotes just before the table of contents. In the last of the three quotes, Alinsky himself said the following:

"Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins -- or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom -- Lucifer."

On page 71, speaking of his training program for political organizers, Alinsky remarked:

"The qualities we were trying to develop in organizers in the years of attempting to train them included some qualities that in all probability cannot be taught. They either had them, or could get them only through a miracle from above or below."

And, on the last page of a 1972 Playboy Interview with Saul D. Alinsky, he said:

ALINSKY: Sometimes it seems to me that the question people should ask is not "Is there life after death?" but "Is there life after birth?" I don't know whether there's anything after this or not. I haven't seen the evidence one way or the other and I don't think anybody else has either. But I do know that man's obsession with the question comes out of his stubborn refusal to face up to his own mortality. Let's say that if there is an afterlife, and I have anything to say about it, I will unreservedly choose to go to hell.

PLAYBOY: Why?

ALINSKY: Hell would be heaven for me. All my life I've been with the have-nots. Over here, if you're a have-not, you're short of dough. If you're a have-not in hell, you're short of virtue. Once I get into hell, I'll start organizing the have-nots over there.

PLAYBOY: Why them?

ALINSKY: They're my kind of people.

I'm not sure whether Alinsky really was a Satanist/Luciferian of some sort or whether he was just joking. He may well have been just joking. The man certainly did have a sense of humor.

When asked his religion, he would always say that he was Jewish. But, on many levels, he seemed to have distanced himself from his Orthodox Jewish background. For example, in Rules for Radicals, when praising Moses as a "good organizer," Alinsky did so in a manner rather irreverent toward the egotism of the Biblical God (pp. 89 to 91).

Be that as it may, he's an excellent role model for politically left-leaning Satanists, whether theistic or symbolic. (When I say "role model" I mean only in a very general sense, not one to be followed slavishly.) Certainly he can be said to have manifested his true will. And he espoused a lot of values that are familiar to today's Satanists, such as his emphasis on power, self-interest, creativity, and practicality.

Rules for Radicals is full of pragmatic realism. For example, on page 88:

"In mass organization, you can't go outside people's actual experience. I've been asked, for example, why I never talk to a Catholic priest or a Protestant minister in terms of the Judaeo-Christian ethic or the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount. I never talk in those terms. Instead I approach them on the basis of their own self-interest, the welfare of their Church, even its physical property."

Alinsky accomplished a lot. He built many organzations that gave lot of people the power to improve their lives.

In Part 7 of the 1972 Playboy interview, Alinsky said:

"The biggest obstacles we faced were the apathy and despair and hopelessness of most of the slum dwellers. You've got to remember that when injustice is complete and crushing, people very seldom rebel; they just give up. A small percentage crack and blow their brains out, but the other, 99 percent say, "Sure, it's bad, but what can we do? You can't fight city hall. It's a rotten world for everybody, and anyway, who knows, maybe I'll win at numbers or my lottery ticket will come through. And the guy down the block is probably worse off than me.

The first thing we have to do when we come into a community is to break down those justifications for inertia. We tell people, "Look, you don't have to put up with all this shit. There's something concrete you can do about it. But to accomplish anything you've got to have power, and you'll only get it through organization. Now, power comes in two forms -- money and people. You haven't got any money, but you do have people, and here's what you can do with them." And we showed the workers in the packing houses how they could organize a union and get higher wages and benefits, and we showed the local merchants how their profits would go up with higher wages in the community, and we showed the exploited tenants how they could fight back against their landlords. Pretty soon we'd established a community-wide coalition of workers, local businessmen, labor leaders and housewives -- our power base -- and we were ready to do battle."

Unlike many leftists, Alinsky avoided dogma. In Part 10 of the 1972 Playboy interview, he said:

"I've never joined any organization -- not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism. One of the most important things in life is what judge Learned Hand described as "that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you're right." If you don't have that, if you think you've got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide. The great atomic physicist Niels Bohr summed it up pretty well when he said, "Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question." Nobody owns the truth, and dogma, whatever form it takes, is the ultimate enemy of human freedom.

Now, this doesn't mean that I'm rudderless; I think I have a much keener sense of direction and purpose than the true believer with his rigid ideology, because I'm free to be loose, resilient and independent, able to respond to any situation as it arises without getting trapped by articles of faith. My only fixed truth is a belief in people, a conviction that if people have the opportunity to act freely and the power to control their own destinies, they'll generally reach the right decisions. The only alternative to that belief is rule by an elite, whether it's a Communist bureaucracy or our own present-day corporate establishment. You should never have an ideology more specific than that of the founding fathers: "For the general welfare." That's where I parted company with the Communists in the Thirties, and that's where I stay parted from them today."

But his "belief in people" certainly did not translate into utopian idealism. Also in Part 10 of the 1972 Playboy interview, Alinsky said:

"People don't get opportunity or freedom or equality or dignity as an act of charity; they have to fight for it, force it out of the establishment. [...] Reconciliation means just one thing: When one side gets enough power, then the other side gets reconciled to it. That's where you need organization -- first to compel concessions and then to make sure the other side delivers. If you're too delicate to exert the necessary pressures on the power structure, then you might as well get out of the ball park. This was the fatal mistake the white liberals made, relying on altruism as an instrument of social change. That's just self-delusion. No issue can be negotiated unless you first have the clout to compel negotiation.[...]

In fact, of course, conflict is the vital core of an open society; if you were going to express democracy in a musical score, your major theme would be the harmony of dissonance. All change means movement, movement means friction and friction means heat. You'll find consensus only in a totalitarian state, Communist or fascist.

My opposition to consensus politics, however, doesn't mean I'm opposed to compromise; just the opposite. In the world as it is, no victory is ever absolute; but in the world as it is, the right things also invariably get done for the wrong reasons. We didn't win in Woodlawn because the establishment suddenly experienced a moral revelation and threw open its arms to blacks; we won because we backed them into a corner and kept them there until they decided it would be less expensive and less dangerous to surrender to our demands than to continue the fight. I remember that during the height of our Woodlawn effort, I attended a luncheon with a number of presidents of major corporations who wanted to "know their enemy." One of them said to me, "Saul, you seem like a nice guy personally, but why do you see everything only in terms of power and conflict rather than from the point of view of good will and reason and cooperation?" I told him, "Look, when you and your corporation approach competing corporations in terms of good will, reason and cooperation instead of going for the jugular, then I'll follow your lead." There was a long silence at the table, and the subject was dropped."

Given Alinksi's overall approach to organizing, he has been called a "Machiavelli for the common man." In Rules for Radicals, Alinksy's response to those who ask "Does the end justify the means?" was "The means-and-end moralists, or non-doers, always wind up on their ends without any means" (p. 25).

Some relevant web pages: 1972 Playboy Interview with Saul D. Alinsky, on the Progress Report website, which also has an article Saul Alinsky and the Industrial Areas Foundation by Sanford D. Horwitt

Brief excerpts from Rules for Radicals on the websites of Latter Rain (a left-wing Christian site), Thinking Peace and Maurice Institute Library.

As even the Latter Rain site acknowledges, in an introduction to its excerpt from Rules for Radicals:

"Alinsky's field of action was the field of change and a constant stream of conflict. Alinsky knew that in today's world, people are not motivated by altruism, you need to somehow appeal to their self-interest. The right thing usually done for the wrong reasons. When he came into a community in order to organize it, he had to get the local churches involved. He said that he never appealed to the ministers or priests in terms of Christian principles because they did not really believe in Christianity. Therefore, Alinsky appealed to what really motivated them, their self-interests and talked more about membership and more money. It worked every time."

Some may ask: Is left-wing politics of any kind consistent with Satanism? LaVeyans have often equated Satanism with pure capitalism.

I do not see Satan as championing any particular social, economic, or political order. I see Satan as encouraging us to think for ourselves and to be in touch with our own personal nature. It is up to us to figure out what kind of social, economic, or political order would work best for us, given our own circumstances.

I personally feel that it's in my best interests to live in the kind of society that, on the whole, works best.

My opinion of pure capitalism and economic libertarianism is that they work fine in a society that is largely rural and where there are a lot of small farm owners, as was the case in much of the U.S.A. until the early 20th century or so. However, in a more urbanized society, neither pure socialism nor pure capitalism works well; some sort of mixed economy is needed and can indeed work well, as per the example of most (though admittedly not all) continental Western European countries.

In small towns, "big government" may seem utterly unnecessary. A lot of small towns even have volunteer fire departments. This would never work in a big city like New York. In a small town where everyone knows everyone, there are strong social incentives to do various kinds of volunteer work. The social rewards for volunteer work are much less in a large city.

In a highly urbanized society, the alternative to having at least a moderately limited "welfare state" is to have very high crime rates every time there's an economic downturn. This sort of thing happened quite a bit in the early 20th century, if I'm not mistaken.

Anyhow, as the financial troubles of the Church of Satan itself should more than adequately demonstrate, we Satanists need to drop the fantasy that we're a bunch of supermen. Yes, we should aim to empower ourselves through our own individual efforts, but it also helps to have organizations that empower entire communities.

By Diane Vera

 

 

 

What is Judaism?

(IsraelNN.com) How should Judaism be defined? Is it a race, religion or nationality?

Despite the secularists, religion is the crucial and historically validated quality of Jewishness. 1,000 years ago, Saadia Gaon declared, "We are a people by virtue of the Torah." That is, when the people of Israel accepted the Torah as their guide-book, they gained mission, purpose and identity.

But Judaism is more than religion. That too is clear. To be a Jew is not only to be heir to a religious tradition. It is also to belong to a group, however one defines the nature of that group. Some may think it incongruous, but even an atheistic Jew remains a Jew, a member of the group.

Some people speak loosely of a "Jewish race". There is no such thing. Race is presented as a scientific concept and it simply does not apply to the Jews.

Are Jews, then, a nation? Not in any political sense, at least outside Israel. Yet, there is a wider definition of nationality or nationhood which has relevance. Some editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica apply the term "in a more extended sense... to denote an aggregation of persons claiming to represent a racial, territorial or some other bond of unity, though not necessarily recognised as an independent political entity.... A nationality in this connexion represents a common feeling and an organised claim rather than distinct attributes."

Phrases such as "an aggregation of persons... bond of unity... common feeling..." do have their application to the Jewish people. Of this there is no doubt.

But the problem as I see it is not a straight-out one of saying: Are the Jews a religion or an ethnic group? This kind of choice hardly ever presents itself. On the whole, Jews know that both elements are part of their make-up and that they have, as Eugene B. Borowitz puts it, an "intimate fusion of peoplehood and religion."

Thus, within Jewish communal life there are times and places where the religious is stressed, notably, of course, in the synagogue; and there are places and occasions when it is the group aspect which unites us. Look for instance at the Jewish newspapers and you see that they report what Jews are doing just as much as what is doing in Judaism.

The real problem is that of deciding what image to give to the wider community. We are generally regarded as a religious denomination. Religion does not by itself cover all of Jewishness, but historically it was the religious pattern which made the Jew distinctive. Even today, whatever one's private angle on Jewish life, the vast majority of Jews maintain some religious associations and observances; and they would agree that it is Judaism which is the most Jewish of Jewish ideologies.

 

By Rabbi Dr Raymond Apple

Ira Einhorn, Earth Day's Dirty Secret

On this, the 39th anniversary of Earth Day, it is only fitting to speak of one of its founders, Ira Einhorn.

You won't find Ira Einhorn's name listed in any of the Earth Day promotional literature, as the organizers have taken great pains to distance themselves from this man, at least since he became better known for composting his girlfriend in a trunk in his closet for a couple of years in the late 1970s.

Earth Day organizers and publicists don't want to have anything to do with Ira these days. Since he was convicted of murder, he hasn't been very useful to them. But that wasn't always the case. In 1970, during the first Earth Day event, which was televized throughout the globe, Ira Einhorn was on stage as master of ceremonies.

Or so he claims, and it seems likely that he was.

A friend and contemporary of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and acquaintance of authors Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, Timothy Leary, Alvin Toffler, and Isaac Asimov, Einhorn held the floor for a half hour, during the first Earth Day celebration, in Philadelphia, kissing Edmund Muskie on the lips before surrendering the microphone to the Senator from Maine. There is no evidence that Muskie rejected his advances, or that anyone associated with the event had ever voiced any disagreement with Einhorn's place as a key organizer until after his arrest for the murder of Holly Maddux.

Ira Einhorn knew all of the right people. Executives from Sun Oil and AT&T showered him with support, financial and otherwise. Ira Einhorn was the man who could make Earth Day happen as, it seems, he did, denials notwithstanding.

Due in large part to his influence, Einhorn escaped punishment for his crime for a quarter of a century.

After bludgeoning his girlfriend of five years to death, fracturing her skull in a dozen places, Ira stuffed her body into a trunk, which he packed into a closet where it remained until discovered by the police nearly two years later.

When Holly Maddux disappeared in the fall of 1977, Einhorn was named as a suspect by the girl's parents, who knew that Einhorn had threatened their daughter with violence. Yet, after briefly questioning him, while the body of his murdered girlfriend lie decomposing in a trunk stored in a closet of his apartment, police accepted his denial of any knowledge of her whereabouts.

When she failed to reappear, the murdered girl's parents hired an investigator who very quickly came up with sufficient evidence for a warrant to search Einhorn's apartment. A downstairs neighbor told of a liquid leaking from Einhorn's apartment into the kitchen below, describing it as being dark in color and smelling of putrefaction. He also testified to hearing a scream, as well as "several sharp thuds", at the time of Holly's disappearance.

When the private investigator presented this evidence to the police, they finally obtained a search warrant, which was served on March 29, 1978.

The battered and partly mummified body of Holly Maddux was found in a trunk in a bedroom closet, packed in styrofoam, newspaper, and air fresheners.

Arrested, Einhorn's attorney was considering a run for the Senate. His name was Arlen Spector, of Pennsylvania. The darling of New Age society, politicians, Ivy League professors, and corporate executives alike, Einhorn had no shortage of friends during his bail hearing. With his great love for the earth, surely Ira would not have murdered anyone. Released on a mere $40,000 bail, of which he had to pay only ten percent, Einhorn fled to Sweden, remaining as a fugitive in Europe until 1997, when he was found living in France under another name.

While a fugitive, Einhorn was convicted in absentia in 1993, and sentenced to life in prison. The government of France, however, refused to extradite Einhorn unless the death penalty was taken off the table and he was promised a new trial. Eventually, this was agreed upon. Ira Einhorn, the founder of Earth Day, was once again convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Today, we celebrate Earth Day, sacrosanct, proclaimed by none other than our Republican President George Bush, and every president since 1975, when President Ford first proclaimed and urged observance of Earth Day on the March equinox.

We're living in a time where wacky is in, and life doesn't mean very much.

While it is likely that Einhorn's violent history is not shared by other Earth Day founders, the observance is nevertheless bizarre.

Underlying the themes of Earth Day is a call for mankind to align itself with nature, and against itself, enlisting human beings to take part in a battle that seeks to place humanity under the control of an enlightened elite, one that values the interests of nature above that of people.

The process of our destruction is termed sustainable development, a destructive scheme that is in direct opposition to Christianity, which holds that man is to have dominion over nature, which is given to us for our use.

Ira Einhorn took the life of one woman, while the movement that he had a hand in founding seeks to steal the life from all of us.

Hitler and the Secret Societies

National Socialism & The Occult: A Level-Headed Analysis (Mookie will hate this!)

It is remarkable that some authors in France have researched the relationship of German National Socialism to secret societies and initiatic organizations. The motivation for this was the supposed occult background of the Hitler movement. This thesis was first proposed in the well-known and very far-fetched book by Pauwels and Bergier, "Le Matin des Magiciens" (English ed., "The Dawn of Magic"), in which National Socialism was defined as the union of "magical thinking" with technology. The expression used for this was "Tank divisions plus René Guénon": a phrase that might well have caused that eminent representative of traditional thought and esoteric disciplines to turn indignantly in his grave.

The first misunderstanding here is the confusion of the magical element with the mythical, whereas the two have nothing to do with one another. The role of myths in National Socialism is undeniable, for example in the idea of the Reich, the charismatic Führer, Race, Blood, etc. But rather than calling these "myths," one should apply to them Sorel's concept of "motivating energy-ideas" (which is what all the suggestive ideas used by demagogues commonly are), and not attribute to them any magical ingredient. Similarly, no rational person thinks of magic in connection with the myths of Fascism, such as the myth of Rome or that of the Duce, any more than with those of the French Revolution or Communism.

The investigation would proceed differently if one went on the assumption that certain movements, without knowing it, were subject to influences that were not merely human. But this is not the case with the French authors. They are not thinking of influences of that kind, but of a concrete nature, exercised by organizations that really existed, among which were some that to various degrees were "secret." Likewise, some have spoken of "unknown superiors" who are supposed to have called forth the National Socialist movement and to have used Hitler as a medium, though it is unclear what goals they could have had in mind in so doing.

If one considers the results, the catastrophic consequences to which National Socialism led, even indirectly, those goals must have been obscure and destructive. One would have to identify the "occult side" of this movement with what Guénon called the "Counter-Initiation." But the French authors have also proposed the thesis that Hitler the "medium" emancipated himself at a certain point from the "unknown superiors," almost like a Golem, and that the movement then pursued its fatal direction. But in that case one must admit that these "unknown superiors" can have had no prescience and very limited power, to have been incapable of putting a stop to their supposed medium, Hitler.
A lot of fantasy has been woven on the concrete level about the origin of National Socialism's themes and symbols. Reference has been made to certain organizations as forerunners, but ones to which it is very difficult to attribute any genuine and factual initiatic character.

There is no doubt that Hitler did not invent German racial doctrine, the symbol of the swastika, or Aryan antisemitism: all of these had long existed in Germany. A book entitled "Der Mann, der Hitler die Ideen gab" [The man who gave Hitler his ideas] reports on Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (the title of nobility was self-bestowed), who had formerly been a Cistercian monk and had founded an Order that already used the swastika; Lanz edited the periodical "Ostara" from 1905 onwards, which Hitler certainly knew, in which the Aryan and antisemitic racial theories were already clearly worked out.
But much more important for the "occult background" of National Socialism is the role of the Thule Society.

Things are more complex here. This society grew out of the Germanenorden, founded in 1912, and was led by Rudolf von Sebottendorf, who had been in the East and had published a strange booklet on "Die Praxis der alten türkischen Freimaurerei" [The practice of ancient Turkish Freemasonry]. Practices were described therein that involved the repetition of syllables, gestures, and steps, whose goal was the initiatic transformation of man, such as alchemy had also aimed at. It is unclear what Turkish masonic organization Sebottendorf was in contact with, and also whether he himself practiced the things in question, or merely described them.

Moreover, it cannot be established whether these practices were employed in the Thule Society that Sebottendorf headed. It would be very important to know that, because many top-ranking National Socialist personalities, from Hitler to Rudolf Hess, frequented this society. In a way, Hitler was already introduced to the world of ideas of the Thule Society by Hess during their imprisonment together after the failed Munich Putsch.

At all events, it must be emphasized that the Thule Society was less an initiatic organization than it was a secret society, which already bore the swastika and was marked by a decided antisemitism and by Germanic racial thinking. One should be cautious about the thesis that the name Thule is a serious and conscious reference to a Nordic, Polar connection, in the effort to make a connection with the Hyperborean origins of the Indo-Germans--since Thule appears in ancient tradition as the sacred center or sacred island in the uttermost North.

Thule may just be a play on the name "Thale," a location in the Harz where the Germanenorden held a conference in 1914, at which it was decided to create a secret "völkisch" band to combat the supposed Jewish International. Above all, these ideas were emphasized by Sebottendorf in his book "Bevor Hitler kam" [Before Hitler came], published in Munich in 1933, in which he indicated the myths and the "völkisch" world-view that existed before Hitler.

Thus a serious investigation into Hitler's initiatic connections with secret societies does not lead far. A few explanations are necessary in regard to Hitler as a "medium" and his attractive power. It seems to us pure fantasy that he owed this power to initiatic practices. Otherwise one would have to assume the same about the psychic power of other leaders, like Mussolini and Napoleon, which is absurd. It is much better to go on the assumption that there is a psychic vortex that arises from mass movements, and that this concentrates on the man in the center and lends him a certain radiation that is felt especially by suggestible people.

The quality of medium (which, to put it bluntly, is the antithesis of an initiatic qualification) can be attributed to Hitler with a few reservations, because in a certain respect he did appear as one possessed (which differentiates him from Mussolini, for example). When he whipped up the masses to fanaticism, one had the impression that another force was directing him as a medium, even though he was a man of a very extraordinary kind, and extremely gifted. Anyone who has heard Hitler's addresses to the enraptured masses can have no other impression. Since we have already expressed our reservations about the assumption that "unknown superiors" were involved, it is not easy to define the nature of this supra-personal force.

In respect to National Socialist theosophy [Gotteserkenntnis], i.e. to its supposed mystical and metaphysical dimension, one must realize the unique juxtaposition in this movement and in the Third Reich of mythical, Enlightenment, and even scientific aspects. In Hitler, one can find many symptoms of a typically "modern" world-view that was fundamentally profane, naturalistic, and materialistic; while on the other hand he believed in Providence, whose tool he believed himself to be, especially in regard to the destiny of the German nation. (For example, he saw a sign of Providence in his survival of the assassination attempt in his East-Prussian headquarters.) Alfred Rosenberg, the ideologist of the movement, proclaimed the myth of Blood, in which he spoke of the "mystery" of Nordic blood and attributed to it a sacramental value; yet he simultaneously attacked all the rites and sacraments of Catholicism as delusions, just like a man of the Enlightenment. He railed against the "Dark men of our time," while attributing to Aryan man the merit of having created modern science.

National Socialism's concern with runes, the ancient Nordic-Germanic letter-signs, must be regarded as purely symbolic, rather like the Fascist use of certain Roman symbols, and without any esoteric significance. The program of National Socialism to create a higher man has something of "biological mysticism" about it, but this again was a scientific project. At best, it might have been a question of the "superman" in Nietzsche's sense, but never of a higher man in the initiatic sense.

The plan to "create a new racial, religious, and military Order of initiates, assembled around a divinized Führer," cannot be regarded as the official policy of National Socialism, as René Alleau writes, when he presents such a relationship and even compares it, among others, to the Ishmaelites of Islam. A few elements of a higher level were visible only in the ranks of the SS.

In the first place, one can see clearly the intention of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler to create an Order in which elements of Prussian ethics were to be combined with those of the old Orders of knighthood, especially the Teutonic Order. He was looking for legitimation of such an organization, but could not obtain it, since these old Orders of Catholicism were openly opposed by the radical wing of National Socialism. Himmler was also seeking, without the possibility of any traditional connection, a relationship to the Nordic-Hyperborean heritage and its symbolism (Thule), albeit without those "secret societies" discussed above having any influence over it. He took notice, as did Rosenberg, of the researches of the Netherlander Herman Wirth into the Nordic-Atlantic tradition. Later Himmler founded, with Wirth, the research and teaching organization called the "Ahnenerbe." This is not without interest, but there was no "occult background" to it.

So the net result is negative. The French authors' fantasy reaches its high point in the book "Hitler et la tradition cathare" by Jean-Michel Angebert (Paris, 1971). This deals with the Cathars, also called Albigensians, who were a heretical sect that spread especially in Southern France between the 11th and 12th centuries, and had their center in the fortress of Montségur. According to Otto Rahn, this was destroyed in a "crusade against the Grail," which is the title of one of his books. Whatever the Grail and its Grail-Knights had to do with this sect remains completely in the dark. The sect was marked by a kind of fanatical Manicheism: sometimes its own believers would die of hunger or some other cause as a demonstration of their detachment from the world and their hostility to earthly existence in flesh and matter. Now it is assumed that Rahn, with whom we corresponded during his lifetime and tried to persuade of the baselessness of his thesis, was an SS man, and that an expedition was sent on its way to retrieve the legendary Grail which was supposedly brought to safety at the moment when the Cathars' fortress in Montségur was destroyed. After the fall of Berlin, a unit is said to have reached the Zillertal and hidden this object at the foot of a glacier, to await a new age.

The truth is that there was talk of a commando unit, which however had a less mystical commission, namely the rescue and concealment of the Reich's treasures. Two further examples show what such fantasies can lead to when they are given free rein. The SS (which included not only battle units but also researchers and scholarly experts) mounted an expedition to Tibet in order to make discoveries in the fields of alpinism and ethnology, and another one to the Arctic, ostensibly for scientific research but also with a view to the possible situation of a German military base. According to these fantastic interpretations, the first expedition was seeking a link to a secret center of the Tradition, while the other was seeking contact with the lost Hyperborean Thule...

By Julius Evola (from Il Conciliatore, no. 10, 1971; translated from the German edition in Deutsche Stimme, no. 8, 1998)

 

The Real Enemy

FRANCIS'S LEGACY

By E. Michael Jones

I first met Sam Francis at a meeting of the John Randolph club in Chicago. He was sitting at a table with Tom Fleming. Both men are two years older than me. Both gave me the impression that I was a freshman trying to sit at the Junior Lunch Table in the School Cafeteria.

The last time I saw Sam Francis, it was at a meeting in Washington. Sam was the moderator at a talk given by John Tyndall, a leader of the National Front in England. Mr. Tyndall was trying to get us enthused about being white guys, and so he launched into a peroration about the glories of Elizabethan England. Since Elizabethan England was the place where Catholic priests, like Edmund Campion, SJ, could be hanged until not quite dead, drawn and quartered and have their entrails thrown into boiling oil for the crime of saying the Mass, I was less than enthralled by the picture Mr. Tyndall had painted for us. In fact, if his intention was to bring us all together, his talk had the exact opposite effect. Since both Father Campion and Lord Burghley and his henchman Walsingham were all white, just what meaning did this fact possess?

My friend Gerry Bruen must have been entertaining the same thoughts because after Mr. Tyndall finished his speech, Gerry asked him whether “the Irish are white.” The question annoyed Mr. Tyndall, who got a disgusted look on his face and said, “Of course, the Irish are white. My mother is Irish.”

At this point, Sam Francis broke into the discussion, and turning to Mr. Tyndall, he asked, “Are Jews white?” Mr. Tyndall was taken aback by the question. After a long pause, he turned to Sam and said, “I’ll have to get back to you on that one.” So today I’d like to honor the memory of Sam Francis by trying to answer his unanswered question: “Are Jews White?”

But before I get to that answer, I need to talk about the Culture Wars.

Sam and I were both casualities of the culture wars of the ‘60s. Both of us started out in professional life as academics, both of us got fired for transgressing the canons of political correctness. In this I claim seniority over Sam. I was fired from a position as assistant professor at a Catholic college in 1980 for being against abortion. Sam was fired from the Washington Times many years later. What we had in common was not some racial identity—our persecutors were as white as we were—but rather the fact that both of our ethnic groups had been declared wicked during the opening battle of the culture wars of our generation, namely, the cultural and sexual revolutions of the ‘60s. Sam was a white southerner, a group which had been under attack since the beginning of the civil rights movement, if not the Civil War. And I was a Catholic ethnic from one of the big cities of the North. Although the war against Catholic ethnics in the North was a post-World War II campaign (that was waged under a number of names ranging from urban renewal in the ‘50s to busing in the ‘70s), it actually antedated the civil rights movement’s assault on the South by a number of years.

As proof that the two campaigns were linked by something more than my mind, I point to Martin Luther King’s arrival in Chicago a little over 40 years ago in the summer of 1966. It would be tempting to portray what happened in Chicago during the summer and early fall of 1966 as a racial struggle, but that’s not really what this battle in the culture wars was really about. Martin Luther King’s people noticed that the minute they set foot in Chicago.

“Down South,” Southern Christian Leadership Conference Worker Dorothy Tillman said, “you were black or white. You wasn't Irish or Polish or all of this.”

What the SCLC attempted to do was transpose the moral mandate they felt they had to end integration in the south, to the cities of the north where segregation existed only by tenuous analogy. Ethnicity, not skin color, determined residence in cities like Chicago. Up North, White was a completely negative designation, deriving from black, which referred to the skin color of the newly arrived migrants from the south.

I know of no northern city which had a neighborhood called “White Town,” but Chicago did have a Jew Town, a Greek Town, and a China Town. Detroit had its own Greek Town as well as a Pole Town. Cincinnati had its “Over the Rhein” and Philadelphia had a Germantown and its own China town as well as neighborhoods which everyone knew were ethnic even if the name of the ethnic group wasn’t included in the name. So, everyone who lived in Philadelphia knew that Bridesburg was Polish, South Philly was Italian, and that Northeast Philadelphia, when I grew up there, was Jewish. If Chicago’s ethnics became “white” during the struggles over the social engineering of housing in the ‘40s and ‘50s, it was only because they defined themselves as the negative of the threat, which they perceived as black hordes streaming into and then taking over their neighborhoods, not because of any racial identity of their own.

The only thing that linked people like me with people like Sam Francis in the culture wars was the psychic space we occupied in the mind of the enemy. One of the most formidable culture warriors of the 1960s was a Jew by the name of Leo Pfeffer. In his book The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy, Murray Friedman refers to Pfeffer as the lawyer who “advised, planned and argued more church-state cases before the U.S. Supreme Court than anyone else in American history.”

In 1947 Pfeffer filed briefs in two historic cases before the US Supreme Court: Everson v. Board of Education, challenging a New Jersey law that allowed state funds to be used for busing school children to religious schools; and McCollum v. Board of Education, which concerned an Illinois released-time program permitting school facilities to be utilized for religion instruction during regular school time.

This is what Pfeffer had to say about his opponents in the Culture Wars. In a memoir which appeared in 1975 in the liberal Catholic journal Commonweal entitled “The ‘Catholic’ Catholic Problem,” Pfeffer wrote that “whenever I felt that my daughter should not have something she wanted, she threatened to marry a Catholic army officer from Alabama.” “The truth of the matter,” Pfeffer continued, “was that I did not like the Catholic Church as I did not like the military and the South and for pretty much the same reasons. In the first place, it stood for what I opposed, and opposed . . .what I stood for.”

Sam and I came under attack during the Culture Wars not because we were “white,” not because we belonged to the same racial group, but because our enemies viewed us as belonging to two different groups, both of which they found repugnant.

This leads me to my first conclusion about the Culture Wars. The culture wars weren’t racial; they were ethnic. Sam and I were both white, but we belonged to two different ethnic groups because ethnicity in America is based on religion. According to the sociological theory known as the triple melting pot, country of origin ceases to be an indication of ethnic identity after three generations in America. At that point, it is replaced by religion, which becomes the source of ethnic identity in America. So the triple melting pot, as of the 1950s when Will Herberg wrote his book Protestant, Catholic, Jew, refers to Protestants, Catholics and Jews. America far from being some unified nation inhabited by generic Americans turns out to be a lot like the former Yugoslavia, a country made up of three ethnic groups based on three religions each engaged in a form of long-standing covert warfare against each other, one which often, as

I attempted to show in my book

The Slaughter of Cities , involves ethnic cleansing.

My second conclusion flows from the first. The culture wars are simply not understandable in racial terms. The different sides in the culture wars may have used race as a pretext, but the identity of the antagonists was ethnic not racial in the sense commonly portrayed in the media. In applying the ethnic calculus to this period of history, we discover that the blacks, even if they were the most visible player in the civil rights phase of the culture wars of the ‘60s, were ultimately the pawn of other groups, which were just as white as the groups they attacked.

In his book Fatal Embrace, Benjamin Ginsburg confirms our suspicion that the racial conflicts of the ‘60s weren’t really racial at all by showing that virtually every major civil rights organization, including or one might say especially, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was in some sense of the word controlled by Jews:

Jews served as major financiers and strategists for the civil rights movement. Jews served as well as the key liaisons between the civil rights movement and the government during both the Kennedy and Johnson eras. Jewish groups, organized through the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council, had long worked closely with blacks in efforts to eliminate housing and employment discrimination from the 1950s and after.

Jewish contributions provided a substantial share of the funding for such civil rights groups as the NAACP and CORE. Jewish attorneys were at the forefront of the legal offensive against the American apartheid system. Stanley Levinson, a longtime official and fund-raiser for the American Jewish Congress, became Martin Luther King’s chief aid and advisor, having previously served as a major fund-raiser for Bayard Rustin. Harry Wachtel was a major legal advisor and fundriaser for the SCLC. Levinson and Wachtel were often called King’s twin Jewish lawyers. Jack Greenberg, head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund was the most important single civil rights lawyer in the United States. Jews comprised a large segment - perhaps one-third of the whites who participated in civil rights marches and protests in the South during the 1960s.

Kevin MacDonald, America’s premier racial theorist, says pretty much the same thing as Ginsberg in the article on the Jewish-Black alliance which appeared in Race and the American Prospect, the book Sam was editing before he died:

“The record,” MacDonald writes, “shows quite clearly that Jewish organizations as well as a great number of individual Jews contributed enormously to the success of the movement to increase the power of blacks and alter the racial hierarchy of the United States. (p. 221).

“Jews,” he continues, “have played a prominent role in organizing blacks beginning with the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. The NAACP was founded by wealthy German Jews, non-Jewish whites and blacks led by W.E. B. Dubois. The Jewish role was predominant:

“By mid-decade, the NAACP had something of the aspect of an adjunct of B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Committee, with the brothers Joel and Arthur Spingarn serving as board chairman and chief legal counsel, respectively; Herbert Lehman on the exectuive commitee; Lillian Wald and Walter Sachs on the board (althought not simultaneously); and Jacob Schiff and Paul Warburg as financial angels. By 1920, Herbert Seligman was director of public relations and Martha Greuning served as his assistant. . . . Small wonder that a bewildered Marcus Garvey stormed out of NAACP headquarters in 1917 muttering that it was a white organization.

The NAACP, in other words, was a Jewish organization that mobilized America’s blacks to fight racial discrimination insofar as this was congruent with Jewish goals. Benjamin Ginsberg is remarkably frank in discussing the terms of the Jewish-Black alliance:

By speaking on behalf of blacks as well as Jews . . . Jewish groups were able to present themselves as fighting for the abstract and quintessential American principles of fair play and equal justice rather than the selfish interests of Jews alone. This would not be the last time that Jewish organizations found that helping blacks could serve their own interests as well. . . . Gains achieved on behalf of one, Jewish organizations reasoned, would serve the interests of both, while allowing Jews to project an image of unselfish pursuit of the public good. . . . For Jews . . . gains achieved on behalf of blacks in terms of equality of opportunity also promised to serve their own interest in eliminating discrimination.

It turns out that there was more to this alliance than simply fighting discrimination, by allying themselves with the blacks, the Jews found that they could covertly attack the people they perceived as their main political enemies and weaken if not destroy their political influence.

I’m talking again about the ethnic groups to which Sam and I belonged. Ginsberg goes on to say that “Jews . . . had been suspicious of conservative Southerners at least since the 1920 Leo Frank case and were only too happy to help reduce their influence in American politics.” Having succeeded in the South, the WASP-Jewish coalition behind the civil rights movement decided to deal with its enemies in the North, namely the Catholic ethnics. “Liberals,” Ginsberg continues, “seized the opportunity to attack and weaken their political rivals in the North as well. Liberals charged the Northern Democratic party’s coalition of machine politicians and labor leaders [i.e., the Catholics] with racism, worked to deny them representation at Democratic national conventions and sought to cut off their access to federal patronage.”

Richard Daley, mayor of Chicago, was the quintessential Catholic machine politician, and as such he became the target of the Jewish-WASP alliance when Martin Luther King arrived in Chicago a little over 40 years ago in the summer of 1966. Why did Martin Luther King go to Chicago, the site of the worst debacle of his public career? He went to Chicago because 1) the Quakers invited him 2) because Nelson Rockefeller gave him $25,000 if he would take his campaign to the North and 3) because, as Ginsberg puts it, “Stanley Levinson, a longtime official and fund-raiser for the American Jewish Congress, became Martin Luther King’s chief aid and advisor.”

The Jews, as the ethnic constellation around Martin Luther King shows, could not have done this damage alone. They were part of an alliance that included the Northeastern WASP establishment and the main-line Protestant denominations, which saw the civil rights movement as their great crusade. That alliance, according to Ginsberg, began in the years before World War II, when the Jews and the Anglophile WASP establishment united against America First and got America into the war on the side of England. It went into a brief period of remission after the War, but Senator Joe McCarthy’s attacks on the WASP establishment got it going again just in time for the civil rights movement and the sexual revolution, when Jews and WASPs united to get the government into the birth control business as a way of controlling the fertility of their unsuspecting Negro allies.

The Negro-Jewish alliance fell apart years ago. The definitive moment was the Ocean Hill-Brownsville School Board battle of 1967 when Negro activists aided by the Ford Foundation took over that school board and promptly fired all of its Jewish teachers and principals.

The Jewish-WASP alliance lasted longer, but it too is now showing signs that it is breaking up in a messy and acrimonious divorce. As evidence for the break-up I would cite the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, the Walt-Mearsheimer report on the Israeli Lobby, and Jimmy Carter’s book calling Israel an Apartheid state. As evidence of the acrimony, I would cite David Horowitz’s critique of Carter’s book which begins with the headline “Jimmy Carter: Jew hater . . .” and then goes on to get really intemperate. The tattered remnant of the WASP ruling class now clearly views Israel and their neoconservative supporters in America as a Frankenstein of their own making. Neoconservatism, like the civil rights movement, was a black operation which got out of control, because as Liddell-Hart points out in his book Strategy, all black operations ultimately get out of control. The WASP ruling class now looks upon the neocons as the latter day version of Osama bin Laden, except that the Israelis have a lot more at their disposal than stinger missiles.

The same thing is true of Sam Francis’s career as a writer. It wasn’t the Negro that destroyed Sam Francis. In fact, if you look at the end of his career from a racial perspective, it becomes completely incomprehensible. The next to last time I saw Sam Francis, he told me the story of how he got fired at the Washington Times. Sam didn’t look good. He was obviously suffering from the heart disease that would kill him. Gone was the swagger, but gone with it was, at least in my mind, the suspicion of me as the Yankee upstart freshman at the junior lunch table. Sam was a man of principle who showed courage in his writings and suffered at the hands of those who hated both his ethnicity and his integrity. When I spoke with him this time, he had been fired from his job as a columnist at the Washington Times. In fact, that was the topic of our conversation.

Sam mentioned a memo he had seen, actually a fatwa, issued by the Anti-Defamation League demanding that someone do something to stop his writing. The man who stepped forward to pull the trigger in that act of targeted character assassination was William F. Buckley, the godfather of modern conservatism, and a Catholic.

Once again the dynamic of this sortie in the culture wars was ethnic/religious. Buckley volunteered to go on a mission of the sort which had characterized his entire tenure as the editor of National Review. He was going to be the goyische front man (or trigger man) for the Jewish interests that had supported him since the inception of that magazine in 1955. In case you’re interested in the details, I recommend again Murray Friedman’s book The Neoconservative Revolution, especially the section on the role people like Martin Liebman, and Frank Meyer and William (Willi) S. Schlamm, and other “forgotten Jewish godfathers” played in the creation of National Review. In return for the favor, Buckley acted as their goyische hit man, rubbing out whomever they found convenient. Buckley, it should be noted, didn’t just treat Southern Protestants this way. By the time he got around to rubbing out Sam Francis, he had already knifed fellow Catholics like Pat Buchanan and Joe Sobran in the back.

Sam was well aware of what Bill Buckley and National Review had done to the conservative movement. In Shots Fired , he argued that the serious right would have to go back beyond Burke and the 18th Century to understand what had happened. Only then could conservatism “work toward its own liberation . . . from the ideological paradigms that have dominated the conservative mind since the 1950s and to formulate a new paradigm that can more correctly identify who is a real enemy and who is a real friend of the core of the American nation and the Civilization of European man that our nation represents” (p. 276).

Sam is right. If what’s left of the WASP establishment or the paleoconservatives or other men of good will want to do something effective in the culture wars, they will have to understand just who the enemy is in this battle. But in order to understand that, they will have to go back well beyond the ‘60s to understand what is going on. In order to answer that question we have to go back well beyond the 18th century, in fact 1800 years beyond it, back to the opening shot in the culture wars. This battle began 2000 years ago, at the foot of the cross, when Annas and Caiphas, the Jewish high priests said to Jesus Christ, “If you come down from the cross, we will accept you as our Messiah.” Needless to say, Jesus did not come down from the cross, and because he didn’t the Jews rejected Him, chose Barabbas, and became revolutionaries, condemned to seek heaven on earth by following one false Messiah after another from Simon bar Kokhbar, to Shabbetai Zevi, to Alex Portnoy, to Paul Wolfowitz.

Sam has also written that “The distinguishing feature of 20th century revolutionary behavior and thought has proved to be . . . precisely its racial character.” But his own demise in the culture wars belies that statement.

So, as Sam would say, who is the real enemy? To answer that question, let’s return again to Professor MacDonald’s analysis of the NAACP, the premier organization in both chronology and size of “the Jewish-black alliance.” That alliance “essentially involved wealthy German Jews aiding black organizations financially and though their organizations abilities.” That meant Jewish organizers like Joel Spingarn, who “was chairman of the NAACP from 1914 to 1934,” but the NAACP could not have survived without the support of wealthy Jews like Jacob Schiff, the man who bankrolled the Bolsheviks.

The real enemy, it turns out, both here and in Russia, was the revolutionary Jew.

He is not our enemy because of some occult racial inheritance. The revolutionary Jew is our enemy because he has rejected Logos. This means that Jews to the extent that they accept, honor and revere Logos, are not our enemies. There are Jews who accept Logos fully by sincerely accepting baptism, and there are Jews who accept it in some lesser capacity by their docility to the truth. We all know Jews like this, and they should not be excluded from our fellowship, especially since many of them have suffered at the hands of “the Jews” themselves.

As the Gospel of St. John makes clear, the Jews became “the Jews” the minute they rejected Christ. As such, their only identity is negative. The minute they rejected Logos, which means reason, order, speech, and word, they became revolutionaries, determined enemies not only of Christ and the Christian social order, but any order in any society not of their own revolutionary making. Thirty years after rejecting Christ, the revolutionary Jew rose in rebellion against Rome. Seventy years later they united under Simon bar Kokhbar, one of their many messiahs, and tried the same thing again. Having failed to destroy Rome they attemtped to destroy the Europe which St. Benedict created out of the ruins of the Roman Empire and to replace it with one of their many deadly Utopias. What do Jerusalem under Simon bar Kokhbar, the Soviet Union under Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamanev, and Radek, the short lived Soviet Republics of Bavaria under Kurt Eisner and Eugene Levine and Hungary under Bela Kun, the racial Apartheid state known as Israel under terrorists like Menachem Begin or Itzhak Shamir, or the neocon never-never land known as a free and democratic Iraq have in common? Death is what they have in common. Lots of people have to die to bring about the revolutionary Jew’s version of heaven on earth.

The West which we seek to preserve is based on docility to Logos, the order of the universe which makes discourse possible. The essence of the Jewish Messianic politics which seeks to create heaven on earth is rejection of Logos, not sacred (or wicked) DNA. The essence of the Jewish rejection of Logos is known as the Talmud, which is anti-Logos in every sense of the word, from hatred of Christ all the way down to rejection of the practical logos that is known as morality. We saw a recent example of Talmudic thought this summer during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon when Charles Krauthammer and the Jewish rabbinic council attacked the Just War theory--in particular its ban on killing noncombatants and the principle of proportionality--as a “Christian” idea and, therefore, one which Jews did not have to follow. The principles of the Just War Theory are another word for civilized behavior. Those who refuse to be bound by them are barbarians and deserved to be treated as such. No country can implement Talmudic thought--as our country has—and not suffer the consequences that rejection of Logos necessarily brings with it.

In France in 1890, in wake of the one hundredth anniversary celebration of the French Revolution, the Jesuits who wrote for Civilta Cattolica explained how widespread rejection of Logos, in the form of the French Revolution, led to bondage, in particular bondage to Jews. The same thing is true of our country in the wake of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. We swallowed the bait of sexual liberation and ended up enslaved by our enemies. Lest anyone misunderstand me, I am saying that the Jews are our enemy insofar as we are partisans of Logos. They are the enemy of Logos, because their religion is based on hatred of Logos.

Lytton Strachey and his friends once referred to the subversive movement we call Bloomsbury as the “higher sodomy.” Taking a page from his book, I will refer to Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular as the “higher Logos.” Those of us who follow the higher Logos know, however, that the only proper response we can make to our enemies is to love them, and the clearest manifestation of that love is our desire to bring them to the Truth, otherwise known as the Logos. We should work for their conversion to the Higher Logos.

At this point, it should be obvious that I am not just talking about Jews as the enemies of Logos. I am also talking about Christians who want to live and act like Jews. The Puritans spring immediately to mind along with the poisonous Judaizing influence they have had on America from the moment of its birth. But I am also thinking of the character assassins and apologists for usury, pornography and other Jewish forms of social control, those who feed at the trough of institutions like the Bradley Foundation - their name is Legion - and earn their money by poisoning the public mind.

The same forces which used the NAACP to turn the Negro into the revolutionary vanguard in the United States, the same forces which subverted the idea of conservatism, are still at work today. As Nelson Algren once said, every movement begins as a cause, becomes a business, and ends up being a racket. This is nowhere more true than in the civil rights movement, where the NAACP made the transition from cause to business, and the name of the racket is the Southern Poverty Law Center. In case you haven’t noticed, the SPLC has declared war on Catholics. Traditional Catholicism is now featured as harboring 100,000 anti-Semites. I have been listed as one of the most prominent of those 100,000, even though I am not now nor have I ever been a traditionalist. Another man on the list is Lt. Commander John Sharpe, who has just been suspended from his job as public relations officer on the USS Carl Vinson pending an investigation into his involvement in “supremacist” organizations.

Why has John Sharpe, an Annapolis graduate and career officer in the Navy, incurred the wrath of the SPLC? Was it because he plotted to blow up a Church in the South? Was it because he was lowering in the bushes in Mississippi with a rifle waiting to shoot civil rights marchers? Was it because he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan? Was it because he believes in racial supremacy? Was it because he urged people to harm Jews? No, John Sharpe was singled out for persecution because he was a Catholic and because he decided that he didn’t want to go along with all of the Catholic prostitutes—Father Sirico of the Acton Institute springs immediately to mind-- who were claiming that free market laissez faire capitalism was completely compatible with what the popes had to say in encyclicals like Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno. John Sharpe made the mistake of re-publishing distributist classics by writers like G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, and for that his patriotism has been called into question by the United States Navy, which has accepted as worthy of something other than contempt the smears and slanders of the SPLC.

But it wasn’t just distributism that got John in trouble with the SPLC. It was also his two-volume attack on the war in Iraq,  Neoconned and Neoconned Again , to which I contributed. The slanderers at the SPLC referred to the Neoconned volumes as containing “several articles by racists and anti-Semites.” If the idiots at the Navy who collaborated in the SPLC smear of John Sharpe’s name had taken the time to look at the book the SPLC cited they might have found notorious anti-Semites like Noam Chomsky, Paul Gottfried, and Jeff Steinberg among its contributors. Why would a Jew hater include Jews among the contributors to his book? Probably because he is not what the SPLC says he is. The article in the Navy Times attacking John Sharpe was based on the legwork of the SPLC’s paid troupe of character assassins, and it gives new credence to the old oxymoron joke about military intelligence.

In the end, when Father Scalia entered his hospital room and asked him if he wanted the sacraments of the Church, Sam Francis chose the Higher Logos, and we can honor him by choosing the cause of Logos as we enter the next phase of the culture wars. Both Sam Francis’s deathbed conversion to Catholicism and the persecution of John Sharpe are symbolic of a shift in the culture wars. The offensive launched by the Southern Poverty Law Center is the best indication I can offer that the main front in the culture wars is now the confrontation between Jews and Catholics. The Enlightenment is finally dead.

There are no more quasi-Masonic movements, where each of us can rise above whatever sect he belongs to and join the Lodge known as “conservatism” or liberalism, or whatever. I think we, no matter what our religious or ethnic background, should rejoice at this development because in this confrontation 1) the Church has both a history and a set of beliefs that will lay to rest forever the charge of anti-Semitism and destroy it as a tool of political oppression and 2) because no matter how much they want to finesse the attack by focusing on what they consider fringe groups, the Jews have taken on a considerable group of people, who will react eventually to the attack. The situation in Hungary now is a case in point.

And finally, we should be happy because the attack clearly defines the terms of engagement, all of which are all spiritual. The revolutionary Jew is our enemy because he is a rejecter of Logos, not because of his DNA. We are not anti-Semites because we oppose the machinations of the revolutionary Jew. No, we are true Christians because of that, as the Church from the time of St. Peter onward has proclaimed. Like St. Peter and St. Paul, we are suffering at the hands of the Jews, “the people who put the Lord Jesus to death, and the prophets too. And now they have been persecuting us, and acting in a way that cannot please God and makes them the enemies of the whole human race” (I Thess 1:15).

We are now engaged in a battle which has ebbed and flowed over the centuries, but the sides in this battle have not changed. What has changed are the odds. The Jews have never been stronger; the Catholics have never been weaker, but the outcome of spiritual battles--and the battle for the soul of the West, as Tolkien knew, is a spiritual battle--no matter what the odds, is rarely predictable. If St. Paul, representing the Christian position, has to say, “When I am weak, I am strong.” Then the revolutionary Jew, representing the opposite position has to say, “When I am strong, I am weak.” We are outgunned on every front in the culture wars, but that is no reason for despair, if we follow the Logos that St. Paul followed, because he was outgunned by the Jews too, outgunned but not undone, saying, “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down but not destroyed."

And so, as Theoden said, “we come to it in the end, the great battle of our time, in which many things will pass away. But at least there is no longer need for hiding.” Nor, might we add, any place to hide. Many if not most of us are here today because our careers have already been destroyed by the revolutionary Jew and his goyische front men. The Jews spy on us through our computers. They suborn fellow Catholics to betray us, get us fired, prevent us from speaking. Our backs are to the wall. But in attacking John Sharpe, the SPLC has created the American Catholic version of the Dreyfus affair.

They have clarified the issue. By going along with their slanders, the Navy has put itself on trial. It is our duty to play the cards which providence has dealt us. We have never been weaker, and our enemies have never been stronger, but that is no reason for despair, because as Elrond says, “this quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong.” And why is that? Because “such is the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them as because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.” (I, p. 283).

At this point, if we were all French or Austrian or English or Russian, I would utter a stirring call for the return of the Bourbons or the Habsburgs or the Stuarts or the Romanovs to the throne. But since we’re all Americans, I can’t do that. We have no common past. We have no royal family waiting in the wings. We have no established religion which can act as a source of order and identity. We have no racial identity. We have no common DNA. I am almost tempted to say that we have no we. We are a nation of nations, and that is all we have ever been.

All we have is various ethnic traditions and communities—Sam Francis’s South, my ethnic neighborhoods—united by the frail bonds of Logos as perceived by a human soul so beset by human passion. Even if our souls are weak, however, Logos is not. Logos is the glue that holds the universe together, and so it is strong enough to unite us as Americans whether it be the higher Logos which acknowledges Christ as Lord of the universe or the lower Logos which honors him by seeing this order in the works creation or in the moral law. We are the party of Logos, and it is only as such that we can think of surviving much less prevailing over our enemies.

Thank You.

E. Michael Jones

is editor of Culture Wars.