Racism and Anti-Semitism—Part 7

Anti-Semitism is just one manifestation of the vicious and hateful form of racism that is also manifest today as hatred of Christians, of businessmen, of the West in general, particularly of the United States. The emphasis has been on anti-Semitism for a reason.

Defending Jews?

I am defending the Jews. I’m defending their right as people to believe whatever they choose, to live however they choose, wherever they choose, and to defend themselves in whatever way they deem necessary.

I find the history of the Jews fascinating. In spite of the persecution and the diaspora, one must be impressed by the contributions they have made in so many fields, and their amazing ability to prosper under the most extreme conditions. I know none of this is because they are Jews, but because of the individual efforts of those who identify themselves as Jews. Their culture and beliefs no doubt foster the kinds of lives those individuals live, but the individuals themselves have to embrace that culture and those beliefs and live by them.

I am not defending the Jews as a nationality, however, or a religion, or a race, or a country; I am defending them as individuals and only as individuals. I am defending the Jews because what happens to the Jews is a microcosm of what is happening to Western Civilization and individual liberty. In defending the Jews as individuals, I am defending the concept of individual liberty itself, because it is that one concept that is the unidentified target of all the hatred of racism.

Two Views

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These words from The Declaration of Independence express a view unique in the political history of the world.

Formerly all values and all purpose were embodied in some collective—one’s clan, or community, their society, or the State. It was implicitly assumed one’s purposes and one’s fortunes were intimately tied to the purposes and fortunes of one’s society and that one’s personal worth was determined by their contribution to that society. It was tacitly assumed an individual belonged to society, which means the government, and whatever freedom one enjoyed was viewed as a gift of society or the state. The name for all varieties of this view is collectivism.

For the first time, it was clearly declared that an individual belongs only to himself, which means that a society has no purpose except the accumulated purposes of all the individuals in it, that an individual’s fortunes are not determined by the state but by his own efforts, that an individual’s worth is not determined by his contributions to society but by his own values and the extent he lives by them, that his freedom is not a gift of the state, but his by right and the only way an individual’s freedom can be limited is by the tyranny of a government. It was to protect against that tyranny the founders of the United States wrote the Constitution and included The Bill of Rights.

There is a movement today throughout the world promoting the very collectivist ideas the United States was the ultimate rebellion against. The movement takes many forms, but the most insidious is the one that is being put over as anti-racism. By a subtle inversion, the true danger of racism is being obfuscated, and a new kind of racism is being used to undermine Western Civilization itself.

The Danger of Racism

The horrors of the holocaust, the racist genocide and persecution throughout twentieth century Europe, the persecution of Blacks in America’s south, and the growing violence against Jews in present day Europe are not the result of racism. All racism is irrational and harmful, but racism, all by itself, is never the danger. In fact, almost all people are racist to some extent, identifying others with some group or another with varying degrees of antipathy and prejudice toward them. Racism is simply another of the endless irrationalities non-thinking individuals indulge in. So long as that racism, however strongly it is held, however absurd and irrational it is, if not accompanied by physical attacks against persons or their property, it is harmless to all except the racists themselves.

Racism is only dangerous when it is accompanied by force, that is, when it is used by individuals as an excuse for physically attacking others, or, worse, when it becomes part of the ideology and policies of a state. The individual examples of extreme racism pall compared to the outrages of state sanctioned racism.

As despicable as are the individual acts of racist violence on individuals and their property in Europe and world-wide, the champions of racist horror are governments. Excluding those killed in war, in the last 200 years, governments have murdered over 200 million people, the equivalent of two thirds of the population of the United States. Over 169 million were murdered in the twentieth century alone, the bloodiest century in history.

The extent of government racist genocide is almost too great to fathom. There were 20,946,000 victims in Nazi Germany between 1933 to 1945, and 61,911,000 victims in Soviet Russia between 1917 to 1987 as well as 1,500,000 victims of the Armenian Genocide between 1915-1918 and 2,000,000 victims of the Cambodian (Pol Pot) Genocide between 1975-1979. The genocidal slaughter by governments continued to the very end of the century:

“As of December 1994,” writes Sabrina Ramet in ‘Balkan Babel’ (p. 267), “between 200,000 and 400,000 people had died since June 1991 as a result of the war between Serbs and non-Serbs, and at least 2.7 million people had been reduced to refugees. An estimated 20,000-50,000 Bosnian Muslim women had been raped by Bosnian Serb soldiers in a systematic campaign of humiliation and psychological terror.”

The horrors of government perpetrated genocide is not just in numbers; it is also the most vicious and cruel, often beyond imagination, such as the Nanking Massacre, with over 300,000 deaths in about six weeks:

“Old women over the age of 70 as well as little girls under the age of 8 were dragged off to be sexually abused. More than 20,000 females (with some estimates as high as 80,000) were gang-raped by Japanese soldiers, then stabbed to death with bayonets or shot so they could never bear witness.

“Pregnant women were not spared. In several instances, they were raped, then had their bellies slit open and the fetuses torn out. Sometimes, after storming into a house and encountering a whole family, the Japanese forced Chinese men to rape their own daughters, sons to rape their mothers, and brothers their sisters, while the rest of the family was made to watch.

“Throughout the city of Nanking, random acts of murder occurred as soldiers frequently fired their rifles into panicked crowds of civilians, killing indiscriminately. Other soldiers killed shopkeepers, looted their stores, and then set the buildings on fire after locking people of all ages inside. They took pleasure in the extraordinary suffering that ensued as the people desperately tried to escape the flames by climbing onto rooftops or leaping down onto the street.

“The incredible carnage - citywide burnings, stabbings, drownings, strangulations, rapes, thefts, and massive property destruction - continued unabated for about six weeks, from mid-December 1937 through the beginning of February 1938. Young or old, male or female, anyone could be shot on a whim by any Japanese soldier for any reason. Corpses could be seen everywhere throughout the city. The streets of Nanking were said to literally have run red with blood.”

Racism in the Name of Anti-racism

Holocausts, pogroms, and genocides are not the product of ignorant individuals harboring irrational prejudices, no matter how vocal they are or how hatefully they write. The horrors of racism are the product of racism merged with government power. In an almost unbelievable example of Orwellian, government twisting of language, “War is peace, Freedom is slavery, Ignorance is strength,” racism is being combined with government power under the “newspeak” slogan, “racism is anti-racism,” only it’s not called racism, it’s called, _Multiculturalism_, “ the view that all cultures … are equal in value.

Multiculturalism is racism and it is racism of the very worst and dangerous kind, it is racism backed up by government force. It is part and parcel of a movement meant to undermine all we know as Western Civilization, generally known as Political Correctness, a new collectivist revolution appropriately called cultural Marxism.

Under the collectivist banners of Political Correctness and Multiculturalism the individual liberties thought to be secured by the Bill of Rights are being systematically undermined. “The declared rational of this tyranny is to prevent people being offended; to compel everyone to avoid using words or behaviour that may upset homosexuals, women, non-whites, the crippled, the mentally impaired, the fat or the ugly,” or members of state favored religions.

To protect these favored groups from having their feelings hurt by the spoken or written words of some individual bigoted racists, the only agency with the power to commit, and the record of having committed, the worst horrors of racism in history, government, is given the power to silence, fine, and imprison those who merely exercise freedom of speech.

The End of Free Speech

The fist step in the implementation of government racism, is suppression of free speech. In Sweden, On May 25, … Bjorn Bjorkqvist was convicted and sentenced to two months in prison for writing, “I don’t think I am alone in feeling sick when reading about how Swedish girls are raped by immigrant hordes.” It didn’t matter that the statement was true.

In Sweden, the laws under which this suppression of free speech is implemented are called “hate speech” laws; Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, England, France, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Switzerland all have such laws.

In England, Brad Love was sentenced to 18 months in jail for “promoting hatred against minorities.“In Switzerland, Gaston-Armand Amaudruz, was sentenced to a year in jail for denying the holocaust. Also in Switzerland, Jürgen Graf and Gerhard Förster were sentenced to 15 months in jail and a $38,000 fine for “publishing anti-Jewish books;” and these “hate speech” criminals were also sentenced: Andres Studer, to four months in prison, Arthur Vogt, to a fine (Sf18,000), Max Wahl, to 45 days in prison, and Christoph Blocher, to a fine (Sf7,000). In Germany, the holocaust denier, Ernst Zündel, deported first from the US to Canada, and from Canada to Germany, faces conviction and 5 years in jail. In France, Bruno Gollnisch was fined 5,000 euros for statements about gas chambers.

The things these men write and promote are despicable, but Jeff Jacoby in his article, “Freedom of hate speech,” writing about the recent sentencing in Austria of holocaust denier, David Irving, to three years in prison, points out that free speech is not to protect those who agree with us, but to protect those whose thoughts “we hate.”

The excuse for “hate speech” laws is supposedly to, “crack down on rabble-rousers whose ‘hate speech’ can and has led to violence and pogroms;” yet it is in just those countries that have such laws that anti-Semitic violence is most prevalent; but in the United States, which has no “hate speech” laws, while there is anti-Semitism openly expressed, incidents of anti-Semitic violence are extremely rare and isolated.

Racist Laws in US

There are no specific “hate speech” laws yet in the United States, though they are obviously coming, but speech is being made a crime in other more subtle and dangerous ways, and they not only restrict and criminalize free speech, but infringe on every right protected by the Bill of Rights on the basis of some collective identification of certain protected groups.

They are called “anti-discrimination“laws (though “anti-harassment policies and ‘diversity’ rules“as well as so-called “hate crimes,” are equally insidious). Besides the Federal “Civil Rights Act,” “Americans With Disabilities Act,” and “Equal Pay Act,” every State has their own version of “anti-discrimination” laws.

According to The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition totalitarian means “a form of government in which the political authority exercises absolute and centralized control over all aspects of life.” What would you call laws that govern what people can and cannot (or must and must not) do covering all the following: schools, employers, landlords, realtors, lenders, banks, hotels, restaurants, bars, theatres, stores, rental agencies, laundromats, gas stations, lawyers, accountants, museums, libraries, parks, gyms, beaches, public streets and highways, court rooms and polling places.

One would think such broad laws ought to provide “equal protection” for everyone, based on the quaint notion of, “equal under the law.” But, these laws pertain only to certain special groups determined by such factors as age, race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, disability, handicaps, mental illness, receiving welfare, and pregnancy.

In the broadest sense of the term, these laws are racist and discriminatory. They cannot be “implemented” without reference to someone’s membership in some class or group.

If the significant thing in your self-identification is not your age, race, sex, sexual-orientation, or nationality, if you do not have a religion, disability, handicap, or mental illness, if you are not receiving welfare or are not pregnant, if you are a self-sufficient individual who uses none of these things as an excuse for failure or a lever to gain what you have not earned, these laws are not meant for your protection or benefit.

To benefit from any of these laws you have to be a member of a privileged class—they are called “minorities,” but the smallest minorities, individuals, are not protected at all. Laws that exclude some citizens from the benefit of those laws are called oppressive and discriminatory, and those excluded are the oppressed. The most severely oppressed minorities in the United States today are the minorities of independent individualists.

What is wrong with all these laws and the entire PC multicultural movement is what is wrong with all attempts at social solutions to human problems; the worst horrors in the history of human societies have been the result of government instituted social solutions.

The Solution

Far from solving the “problems” of racism, these discriminatory laws will create endless special classes and “minorities” all vying for government favor and special “rights,” all aligned against the only one’s in society to whom rights pertain, individuals.

Is there a solution to racism and anti-Semitism? If by solution is meant eliminating from society all remnants of irrational bigotry and racism or all hateful speech and writing, there is no solution; but if by solution is meant eliminating from society all racist violence, there is a solution, but not an easy one. Ayn Rand described it this way:

“There is only one antidote to racism: the philosophy of individualism and its politico-economic corollary, laissez-faire capitalism.

“Individualism regards man—every man—as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful coexistence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights—and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members.

“It is not a man’s ancestors or relatives or genes or body chemistry that count in a free market, but only one human attribute: productive ability. It is by his own individual ability and ambition that capitalism judges a man and rewards him accordingly.

No political system can establish universal rationality by law (or by force). But capitalism is the only system that functions in a way which rewards rationality and penalizes all forms of irrationality, including racism.” [The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, “Racism”]

Perhaps the most important words in this “solution” of Rand’s, are, “no political system can establish universal rationality by law (or by force).” That of course is exactly what all so called “hate crime,” “hate speech,” “anti-discrimination,” “anti-harassment,” laws and all other attempts to legislate PC multiculturalism are, an attempt to force people to think rationally.

Like all other attempts to engineer society, the results will be the opposite intended. It will not eliminate anti-Semitism or any other form of racism, it will exacerbate them .To grant government the power to institute every more draconian multicultural racist policies is the sure road to the next holocaust.

There are no government solutions to social problems, and attempts to institute them are ultimately disastrous. The solutions to social problems are always in the hands of the individuals that comprise the society. Nothing you or I can do will change all of society, and the odds that anything you or I can do, will change the government are zero to none. That does not mean there is nothing we can do.

Each of us is a part of society, and we can eliminate all racism from that part—we eliminate it by embracing the principles of individualism on which this country was founded, the principle that we are each sovereign individuals, with the right to live our lives as we choose, which means we alone are responsible for all our choices, and our only obligation to others is to not interfere in their lives. It means never desiring anything in life we have not earned by our own efforts, seeking nothing from others they are not willing to give in exchange for what we have to offer to our mutual benefit. It means, it does not matter what race we are, what religion we embrace or do not embrace, whether we are male or female, young or old, nor what “advantages” or “disadvantages” we are born with or have inherited. It does not matter what others think of us, whether we are despised or honored—all that matters, all that determines who and what we are, what we have to hold as a value in ourselves, the basis of our self-esteem, is what we accomplish by our own individual, choices, and efforts. It means this is the only basis for our judgement of our own self-worth, and the “only basis on which we judge the worth of others.”

—(01/22/06)