Dear monotheists: We will attack your semitic god. By what method? By all methods.

Posted by Kumiko Oumae on Thursday, 10 September 2015 01:33.

There was a trading dhow on this flag for a good reason.

Summary

Christians and liberals neither understand the threat environment nor do they have the inner motive energies that can be harnessed for the war against Islamism. A new type of European consciousness that completely rejects and opposes the semitic god, will have to manifest if Europeans are going to be able to continue to contribute meaningfully to the defence of global trade routes on which they and their partners depend in order that their societies can flourish, and for the defence of the European peoples in their homelands. Wealth is not an end in itself, wealth is a means to an end, in the same sense that a person driving a car needs to fill up at the service station before attempting their journey.

“Pure philanthropy is very well in its way, but philanthropy plus five percent is a good deal better.”
— Cecil John Rhodes.

That sounds about right to me.

Once upon a Time in Eurasia

It is said among traders and among contractors that we won’t laugh unless we’re profiting, and that we won’t cry until we’re completely bankrupt. It’s a good saying. Of course, this is only a rationalisation of a feeling that is completely natural in every way, one which in earlier times in human history would not have needed to be enunciated by anyone. These kinds of sentiments are taking people back to the past, even though they are very modern-sounding expressions. If you think about it you’ll realise that this is a motivational logic that applies in almost every honest expression of the relations of production.

There are some modern phrases that lack the appropriate level of nuance, though. For example, when speaking of time scales growing longer or shorter, people will say that time is money. Money of course being an indication of a promise to do productive work.

In agrarian times long past, the phrase ‘time is money’, would have had a slightly different meaning. Rather than speaking of how fast a task is completed, it instead would have been a reference to the appropriateness of the timing of the actions. It wasn’t about ‘punctuality’. It was about instinctively knowing when to act, being able to skip some of the rationalisation process through an intuition that is hardwired into one’s alleles. The people sensed when it would be most appropriate to take an action, and they did it. If it required leadership, then the leader sensed when to harness the motive energies of the people and then did so. The sense of ‘time’ was entirely different from the sense of ‘time’ that presently exists. Time was seen as a cycle that spiralled upwards on each of its turns. When a person would participate in seasonal festivals, re-enacting the same stages over and over as the wheel of the seasons turned, re-enacting the deeds of the past, that person would no longer be in ‘profane time’, but would instead be immediately and—literally—magically taken back to the ‘sacred time’, the foundational and primordial story around which that society ontologically is founded.

And then came the Abrahamic monotheists to disrupt everything. They set human beings against their own senses and against their own intuition by emphasising a false distinction between mind and body. They created a separation between the people and the land that they evolved on. They were not the only ones to attempt this, but particularly in Europe and the Near East, it is impossible to talk about this issue without actually pointing out that Abrahamic religion is a central factor to the process of the alienation of people from themselves and their dispossession from their own land.

The Christian church twisted the minds of the European peoples, turning the mechanisms of their own survival instincts against themselves. Islam also did the same from without, it attacked people for the sake of accomplishing the same purposes, and these are essentially the same phenomenon, all branching from Judaism. All the expressions of Middle Eastern monotheism spring up in the physical world from the after-effects of a desertification event that occurred in the Middle East and North Africa about 4000 years ago, an event which a priestly class seized upon so as to cement their control. Those population groups then tried by every means possible, to impose their warped social institutions and practices onto the neighbouring populations.

Europeans struggled, for centuries, to succeed at living fulfilling lives not because of Christianity, but rather, despite Christianity. But at long last, the European continent has begun to shed the vestiges of Christianity. Since about the early 1970s, Christianity has been on a steady decline in Europe, less and less people are finding it to be convincing than ever. And for a moment, perhaps it appeared that this would be the end of the story. But it is not the end. It could not be allowed to end so easily, it seems. Instead, what has happened is that Islam has inflicted itself onto the continent as yet another wave of semitic religious assault. It is as though there is a malicious force out there which does not want you to be free, it’s as if there is something out there which wants to enslave you all.

That is only intended to be a very loose description of what has been happening, consider it like a loose narrative which will be expanded on at a different time. It should however be enough—for now—to give a general idea of what viewpoint I’m taking here.

Shaking the Kaleidoscope

Being able to conceive of this as a fight that has been going on for thousands of years is something that is crucial to being able to understand the most recent assault wave that is taking place.

The European Union is presently in a situation where the breakdown of law and order in Libya and the failure to re-establish the rule of law in that territory has led to a 70% increase in the number of Islamic fundamentalist groups operating in that area. Furthermore, the inability of the European Union to impose border controls from the Libyan side of the border, and the complete disintegration of the system of border controls that Libya used to use to stem the flow of migrants from East and Central Africa across trafficking routes into Southern Europe, has led to a massive increase in migration heading toward the European Union. At the same time, various governments have enacted laws that act as financial incentives for economic migrants to try to risk their lives to enter the European Union illegally, and has in turn facilitated the expansion of already-existing trafficking networks who are able to make exorbitant profits from the trade in human beings. This has in turn enabled the traffickers to expand their operations and become more sophisticated.

Migrants are also flowing from Syria and Iraq, along multiple routes that lead into Europe. Some of those people are fleeing persecution at the hands of ISIL because the leaders of the North Atlantic have not yet shown the political courage to commit themselves to ground war in Mesopotamia to undo the damage that has been done by the rise of ISIL.

At the centre of all of this, is now ISIL, which intends to graduate into being able to carry out strikes inside Europe by sending its operatives to form terrorist cells, which would be included among the economic migrants and asylum seekers, and who would be able to acquire their weapons through weapons smuggling networks which have existed in Central Asia and the Balkans since at least the late 1980s and are still intact.

As is clearly obvious, the threat involved for Europe is extremely severe. This is warfare against a foreign enemy that fights in new and inventive ways to harm the interests of peoples of around the world by attacking targets both foreign and domestic. As the line between foreign and domestic targets is blurred—after all, what is the functional difference between a trading house being attacked domestically, and a shipping port or an oil services office being attacked overseas—so too the line between foreign policy and domestic policy is blurred as a result of this, and as a consequence the line between policing and warfare becomes very thin. And furthermore, in a highly integrated set of national economies, intelligence collected by one country might be more useful to a partner country than it is to the country that actually collected it, meaning that policing and intelligence have increasingly become just as supranational as warfare has become under the NATO framework.

Unfortunately, the domestic appearance of the conflict has led to many misunderstandings about what the fundamental nature of this conflict really is. Many people who are skeptical of the severity of the threat, like to argue that terrorism is ‘a tactic and not an enemy’, and that somehow this means that all of these could be handled as a police matter within individual member states of the European Union. They do this because they took the term ‘War on Terror’ literally, rather than as a piece of political rhetoric, and didn’t remember that what it actually is called is ‘Overseas Contingency Operations’. We are not actually ‘fighting terror’ in the sense that it is commonly understood. We’re protecting lines of supply and hard assets from interference by hostile Islamic state or Islamic non-state actors which happen to frequently employ terrorism as a tactic. The ‘War on Terror’ is an umbrella, it’s a toolbox which is tailored for dealing with the challenges of the post-Cold War environment and for tying off loose ends that were left untied. It’s a toolbox full of tools that can be used to manage disorder and keep it at bay.

We are not at war with every single group in the world that happens to use terrorism as a tactic. We’re at war with those which threaten the interests of the North Atlantic and those of its global defence and trade partners.

There are three things that make the war against Al-Qaeda and Al-Qaeda-inspired groups, as well as ISIL in particular, different from criminal investigations into organised crime or measures taken by police to tackle domestic social problems. Firstly, the Islamists are not seeking purely to accrue gains for a syndicate. They have explicitly geopolitical objectives, namely, that they would like the states of the North Atlantic and their partners to abandon all of their enterprises in the Middle East. Their purpose is not solely to make money for a narrow clique of individuals, but rather, to in fact stymie the development of productive forces by accruing the power to deny us access to natural resources or to otherwise interfere with shipping. Secondly, these people have shown that they are willing and able to create events that are both violent and spectacular, and cause massive property damage to hard assets to such an extent that it cannot be categorised as crime but in fact is plainly visible to all as an act of war. This is something that they themselves are willing to acknowledge and even boast of. Thirdly, the Islamists are a completely foreign ideology which finds its safe havens outside the North Atlantic, and is a culturally foreign threat in the sense that Islam is not European, and Islamists consider themselves to be at war against European society on the most fundamental level.

Still others have made criticisms talking about how it is ‘un-European’ to detain people for effectively indefinite periods in clandestine detention facilities, and even that having intelligence services being patched into the processing of asylum seekers, is ‘un-European’. We’ve also seen recently that many politicians seem happy to hang up signs marked “All Refugees Welcome”, as though anyone seeking to cross borders in the middle of a 14-year long war is supposed to be regarded as completely non-suspicious.

What is the usual rationale that is taken toward detention of wartime combatants? The obvious purpose of wartime detention, has historically been to prevent the detained individual from returning to the battlefield to take up arms against us again. Normally, detainees are released after the formal cessation of hostilities. Therefore, given that this is a war, those who were detained at some point over the past 14 years, should be able to be detained for the entire duration of the ‘War on Terror’, which is to say, so long as Overseas Contingency Operations are being carried out against Islamic groups. Since it is difficult to determine when that time might actually come, it makes sense to me that an enemy combatant picked up on the battlefield in the ‘War on Terror’ can indeed rationally be held for what is effectively ‘indefinitely’, but that would only be because the enemy refuses to surrender, not because anyone in the North Atlantic necessarily has any explicit desire to detain someone without trial ‘forever’. The so-called ‘indefinite detention’ was just inherent to the logic of events which unfolded.

One of the most unfortunate things is how people have not processed or understood the idea that making all of these things illegal would also reduce flexibility and make the North Atlantic entirely too predictable in its behaviour. Having some ambiguity can actually be a good thing sometimes.

Failure to Understand the Threat Environment

Now we see liberals doing this:

Financial Times, ‘Germany braced to receive 800,000 asylum seekers’, 19 Aug 2015:
Berlin has said it expects to receive a record 800,000 asylum seekers this year, more than the entire EU combined in 2014, laying bare the scale of the biggest refugee crisis to face the continent since the second world war.

If the latest official projection released on Wednesday is borne out, it would be nearly twice as high as Germany’s previous record for asylum claims, set during the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1992.

Interior minister Thomas de Maizière warned that the Schengen zone, which allows passport-free travel across much of mainland Europe, could not be maintained unless EU states agreed to share asylum seekers.

The 800,000 figure — which represents about 1 per cent of Germany’s population and is a sharp increase on an earlier estimate of 450,000 — is one of the starkest signs yet of the extent of the migrant crisis facing Europe, as thousands of refugees fleeing war in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan and poverty in Africa stream into the continent.

[...]

And:

SKY News, ‘Germany: ‘No Limit’ To Refugees We’ll Take In’, 05 Sep 2015:
Chancellor Angela Merkel has said there is no legal limit to the number of asylum seekers Germany will take in, with at least 800,000 expected this year alone.

Mrs Merkel was speaking as thousands of exhausted refugees were bussed from Hungary into Austria, with most thought to be en route to Germany.

German police said at least 2,000 people had arrived at Munich railway station so far, with up to 7,000 expected by nightfall.

The German Chancellor told the Funke consortium of newspapers: “The right to political asylum has no limits on the number of asylum seekers.”

[...]

Many are attracted by its economic prosperity, comparatively liberal asylum laws and generous benefits system.

Mrs Merkel has insisted Berlin can cope with the record-breaking influx without raising taxes, or risking its goal of a balanced budget.

She said Germany’s strong economic position meant it was able to cope with such “unexpected tasks” as presented by Europe’s worst migration crisis since the Second World War.

Nevertheless, a number of German cities have been struggling to process newly arrived asylum seekers and to meet the demand for additional housing.

Mrs Merkel’s governing coalition is due to meet on Sunday to agree a series of measures to ease the crisis, including cutting red tape to allow the construction of new asylum shelters, speeding up asylum procedures and increasing funds for federal states and towns.

[...]

It’s clear that liberals are not capable of selecting policy preferences that are suitable to the threat environment that Europe faces, nor are they able to understand that this is fourth generation warfare and that security needs to be everywhere because the fighting is asymmetrical and the force composition of the enemy includes ‘civilians’. The enemy organises in Mesopotamia and seeks to control cells within Europe’s borders, and they also seek to radicalise 2nd and 3rd generation Muslim immigrants inside Europe through the internet. In the present social media environment, it is extremely difficult to monitor, much less control, the sheer volume of material that is out there for them to interact with or consume.

There are three emergent phenomena among young jihadists in Europe that are becoming more prevalent since the start of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’.

The first phenomenon is that there is an increase in training and sophistication. Jihadists have been able to organise explosives training for European Muslims, they’ve been able to gain combat experience in the wars in Syria and Libya and Iraq, and have absorbed some of the best practices for urban combat as a result of having operated in that kind of environment. Many of them would by now have more hours of experience fighting gun battles than the police in many states in the North Atlantic tend to have.

The second phenomenon is that there is shift to recruitment from the deprived areas of Europe which would usually be characterised by ghettoes and inner city gangs. For many of the recruits, their movement into the ranks of ISIL is just like graduating from one form of ‘gang activity’ to another, but of course only in the limited sense that they are already used to breaking the law and already have a disrespect for the societies that they are living in, and so can be quite amenable to carrying out violent acts toward police officers and civilians in European countries. The pre-Arab Spring pattern was one characterised by Islamists who had become radicalised. This recent phenomenon now adds to that criminals who have become Islamised and graduate into becoming enemy combatants. Their initial revolt against society would have been characterised as anti-social behaviour, but they have now become Islamised and seek to direct that behaviour toward a ‘larger purpose’.

The third phenomenon is the broadening of prison gang recruitment outreach by Islamist groups. Given that many of the demographics that are emblematic of Islamic migration into Europe have a higher rate of criminal offending than the native population, it is only natural that prisons would become jihadist recruitment grounds. The narrative that they are being given is a combination of a guilt narrative and a victim narrative paired together. The recruiters would sympathise with the plight of the prisoner by telling them that they are members of a downtrodden group and that in order to survive they had been ‘forced’ to the margins of society to become criminals. At the same time, the recruiters would also impress on the prisoner that being a criminal is still ‘a sin’ because the Qu’ran and the Hadiths admonish Muslims to obey the law of the land that they are living in unless they happen to be engaged in jihad against that land. They are then offered ‘redemption’ on the condition that they would leverage the skillsets and contacts that they made in the criminal world to serve the ‘larger purpose’ of waging jihad.

With all of those things in mind, the fact that someone would want to massively increase migration into Europe from the very same zones in the south where all of this is based, is truly breathtaking to consider. Angela Merkel and the rest of the liberal political class in continental Europe seem to have no problems whatsoever with taking over 800,000 new people all at once over an extremely short period of time, and they probably don’t intend to stop there.

See for example:

Spiegel Online, ‘Top German Immigration Official on Influx of Syrian Refugees’, 31 Aug 2015:
Around 800,000 refugees are expected to arrive in Germany this year, with the number of Syrians growing rapidly. Manfred Schmidt, Germany’s top migration official, discusses how the country is coping with the massive influx.

[...]

SPIEGEL ONLINE: There are currently around 250,000 asylum applications that have not yet been processed in Germany—and hundreds of thousands more will soon be added to the stack. How do you intend to process them all?

Schmidt: New decision-making centers will be created in several cities and thousands of new employees will be hired this year. And in 2016, we will hire up to 1,000 more. The effect has already become noticeable. By July, we had processed more applications than during all of 2014. We assume that we will be able to make up to 200,000 more decisions during the next six months.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: How many refugees can Germany still take in?

Schmidt: When it comes to the absorption of people who are fleeing persecution and require protection, there can be no upper ceiling.

And:

Daily Mail, ‘Pope calls on every European parish to host one migrant family each’, 06 Sep 2015:
Pope Francis called on Sunday on every European parish and religious community to take in one migrant family each in a gesture of solidarity he said would start in the tiny Vatican state where he lives.

“I appeal to the parishes, the religious communities, the monasteries and sanctuaries of all Europe to ... take in one family of refugees,” he said after his customary Sunday address in the Vatican.

[...]

Counter-terrorism is a very tricky thing. It’s not really possible to always be able to find and break up terrorist cells just because you know that they are out there. Even being able to watch all of the signals all of the time, does not mean that the state can address all possible threats simultaneously. Being able to keep track of the relationships between people, and to decide who should be placed under total surveillance and when, is partly based on patterns, partly based on the experience of the case officers, partly based on luck, and the rest is fate. Think of this: To place someone under a wiretap requires a court order and that takes time to get. If you know who the attackers might be, you then have to prioritise who you’d want to place under 24/7 surveillance. Just to watch about five suspects, would require assigning several officers in several cars to that job. To make sure that everyone is properly alert and lively, a person might run these in four shifts over a 24 hour period. And then for all of those people, they would need support back in the operations centre to coordinate their actions, review intelligence and manage the wiretaps. And so you realise that you’ve actually got about a hundred people tasked to five suspects who you think might be planning an imminent attack.

Money is going out the door to finance that effort. And you’ve chosen to watch those particular people rather than dedicating those resources to any other cluster of people who might be the cell that you are looking for. Or perhaps even the cell you didn’t know you were looking for until something began to look suspicious. Other intelligence collection requests are being postponed or missed while that is occurring. Now imagine how much more difficult that becomes in a scenario with mass migration from a place where ISIL is operating. The threat would be extremely severe, more severe than it ever has been. Yet liberal politicians are making this scenario play out before everyone’s eyes.

Putting the Car into Gear

Europe is—whether it likes it or not—in the midst of military operations against an enemy that is determined to strike anywhere and at any time. Conduct of military operations must be guided by a set of established guidelines, referred to as doctrine. Often, doctrine is shaped significantly by factors other than the lessons learned during operations because the doctrine is also partly shaped by the political environment in which it manifested. Doctrine has increasingly been more a reflection of the influence of individuals with ideological biases and guilt complexes, budget constraints, and flagrant electioneering, rather than critical analysis, exercises, training, study or experience in the application of force.

I would say that at least four things need to be established and/or strengthened in order to begin addressing the problem:

An independent operations centre for counter-terrorism police and immigration officials, which should conduct operations outside of the constraints of the political class. This would dampen the impact of any further liberal-minded populist meddling.

Centralised control of the counter-terrorism police and immigration officials, along with the airforce and military ground forces. Immigration officials should be right inside the joint command structure. Not just in word, but in action.

A commitment to review the demands that are placed on European militaries and intelligence services, and ensure that the funding meets their needs. Now is not the time to be cutting defence spending.

‘Letters of Marque’ need to be given to PMCs, so that they can legally leverage the power of the private sector toward fighting against Islamists directly. This time around, PMCs should also be patched right into the decision-making processes so that everyone is reading from the same script. This probably should be numbered among one of the lessons that was learned seven years ago in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Regarding the refugees that are fleeing from Iraq and Syria in the face of ISIL aggression, it is obvious that having the whole of Mesopotamia fleeing into Europe to get away from ISIL is simply an international absurdity. If ISIL were to be defeated in Iraq and Syria within a reasonable time frame, that would do a lot to stem the flow of migrants into Europe, because that would be effectively tackling it from the demand side. There would be less of a demand for entry into Europe, if stable governance were restored in Mesopotamia.

Strategic bombing against ISIL, while useful, does not actually restore stable governance and thus does not give people the confidence to remain in their homes and stop migrating out. Also, the compromise measure of embedding special forces into Iraq is not sufficient either, because you cannot just throw special forces into a country without any of the support and services that usually would accompany doing such a thing. And if someone is going to do that, then they might as well just resign themselves to the fact that they will end up with combat brigades in there eventually. So why not just plan for putting combat brigades back into Iraq from the start?

The purpose in such a case, should not be to try to ‘put Iraq back together again’ in the way that it was arranged before ISIL arose. Iraq will never be the same again, but re-establishing some new kind of borders would probably help to stabilise the situation. Continuing to support the existence of Iraqi Kurdistan would also be helpful. Also meriting attention would be people like the Assyrians who would like to have their own homeland be recognised in the Nineveh plains. There are also energy interests involved, as Exxon-Mobil has been in negotiations with individuals in the area. Furthermore, should these groups be given faithful support by NATO countries, they would be very grateful. Additionally, the governments of those hypothetically independent states or autonomous provinces might be able to act as satraps that are far more reliable and amenable to European interests than the consistently duplicitous satrap called Israel ever will be.

There are a lot of interests and angles of approach that can be summed together for a support of more North Atlantic involvement in ground combat against ISIL, and it would be nice if European people could impress upon the politicians that it is okay for them to show some political courage and support such measures. And that if they do not support such measures, they should be questioned as to why they refuse to support tough action against ISIL.

There has also been a dearth of enthusiasm for intervention among European ethno-nationalists, when in fact intervention is quite clearly something that European ethno-nationalists ought to be championing. It’s not enough to just be against mass migration, to be completely parsimonious and coherent, you have to support the measures necessary to disintegrate and destroy the problem at its source.

Motive Energy

All of what I’ve said above would be completely useless if a person doesn’t have the historical understanding and most importantly the motive energy to carry through the war to its objective. After all, it’s one thing to show a person their material interests, and to exhort them to support war, but it’s another thing entirely to have a person who has that will to fight and act on those interests. After all, a person could always say “I’ll accept a loss here and withdraw, it’s not worth it to me”.

Christians lack the motive energy for this war, and these examples are typical of that lack of motive energy:

Reuters, ‘Pope criticizes nations that close doors to migrants’, 17 Jun 2015:
Pope Francis on Wednesday called for respect for migrants and suggested that “people and institutions” who close doors to them should seek forgiveness from God.

The pope’s appeal, made at the end of his weekly general audience, came amid growing debate in Europe on how to deal with an immigrant crisis that has included clashes at the French-Italian borer between police and migrants.

“I invite you all to ask forgiveness for the persons and the institutions who close the door to these people who are seeking a family, who are seeking to be protected,” he said in unscripted remarks delivered in a somber voice.

France and Austria have stepped up border controls on migrants coming from Italy, turning back hundreds and leaving growing numbers camped out in train stations in Rome and Milan.

[...]

And:

Reuters, ‘Pope says weapons manufacturers can’t call themselves Christian’, 21 Jun 2015:
[...]

Francis issued his toughest condemnation to date of the weapons industry at a rally of thousands of young people at the end of the first day of his trip to the Italian city of Turin.

“If you trust only men you have lost,” he told the young people in a long, rambling talk about war, trust and politics after putting aside his prepared address.

“It makes me think of ... people, managers, businessmen who call themselves Christian and they manufacture weapons. That leads to a bit of distrust, doesn’t it?” he said to applause.

He also criticized those who invest in weapons industries, saying “duplicity is the currency of today ... they say one thing and do another.”

Francis also built on comments he has made in the past about events during the first and second world wars.

He spoke of the “tragedy of the Shoah,” using the Hebrew term for the Holocaust.

[...]

That weak and pathetic behaviour from Christians should not be surprising. Christianity is less motivated to fight, because for them, the disagreement with Islam is not fundamental. They don’t fundamentally disagree with the premise of Islam because for them it merely is an argument about the specifics of the tyrannical Abrahamic god’s requirements. Christians are never going to have any lasting and enduring will to fight against Islam, because they are actually servants of the same god in the first place.

They complain of how ‘destructive’ the war is and how they ‘distrust’ people who sell weapons, but the whole world is constantly changing. Creation and destruction are both forms of change. Destruction is behind us and in front of us, so why shouldn’t we welcome death in the same way that we welcome life? The war against Islamism is not just killing without a goal, it is killing that has a goal of preserving those lives that we value.

The development of productive forces—which requires that energy supplies be maintained and goods to flow unimpeded by adversaries—leads to societies in which more people are able to ascend Maslow’s hierarchy. When people move up the hierarchy they have more time and inclination to examine the life that they are living critically, to plan for the future, and to engage in more in-depth personal development. We’re in a pivotal era in human history right now, where, since 2001, the forces of retrogression have found themselves locked in combat against the forces of progress, and it is a fight that will have lasting global implications for human evolution.

If some Arabs want to be regressive and stand in the way of human development, and if some Arabs want to act as a spearhead to break down ethnic genetic communities so that these blocks of political experience—political experience of the ages being one of the great intellectual treasures of nation-states—are eroded and destroyed, then it is absolutely right that people should kill any Arabs who behave in that way. Any group that feels that its destiny is to stand with ISIL, should be targeted, hunted down, and killed in the spacial battlefield. That would be progress.

Fundamentally, one of the most important things that people must be encouraged to do is reject the god of the monotheists. Its fraudulent claims that it ‘created everything’, must be rejected. The opinion that it is ‘a belief worthy of respect and toleration’ also must be rejected. Once you can make those in Europe who are trapped in delusion aware that the god of the monotheists is a liar and a fraud, and that nature is not something that could have been consciously made by anyone, then you will be laying the groundwork through which people can support war coherently.

Why is that so important? The reason is this: If people can be brought to understand the war in the realm of ideas, to understand that we are actually fighting against the power of the monotheistic god, to understand that this should be done deliberately and consciously, it has a real effect. It can cause transformations in people’s thinking that would lead to the complete inversion and thus destruction of Judeo-Christian society and morals, a destruction which needs to happen, along with the destruction of Islamic society and its prestige at the same time.

Those who were ‘losers’ in the past 2000 years will be ‘winners’ in the new and inverted world that is to come. Human beings will cast off the chains that are interwoven with dead flowers so that they can seek the true flower, because they’d be casting off the conditions and the ideas which had made the monotheistic lying possible in the first place, through participating in actions—as a society—that are understood to be antagonistic against the semitic god.

People should also be encouraged to show the viability and vitality of a new Europe, through their support for parallel civic organisations that strengthen national bonds of blood and proximity. These social organisations would be like a great constellation of stars shining like a thousand points of light over the continent, engaged in world service. By doing so, it would show that it is possible to run Europe without Christianity, without Islam, and without Judaism.

Through that kind of approach, we would be fighting the war domestically, fighting the war overseas, and also fighting the war in the world we cannot see. If we are successful at creating that environment—and we will be—I think there will be a definite chance for a new Europe to emerge.

Kumiko Oumae works in the defence and security sector in the UK. Her opinions here are entirely her own.

Tags: British Politics, Business & Industry, Demographics, European culture, European Nationalism, European Union, Free Speech, Immigration, Immigration and Politics, Islam & Islamification, Military Matters, New Right, Political Philosophy, September 11th, That Question Again, War on Terror

Comments:

Posted by DanielS on Thu, 10 Sep 2015 10:57 | #

Wonderful piece, Kumiko. There is much to ponder, so I do not want to comment at length as yet until I digest this a bit more, particularly as you confront the standard WN with what is to us the unusually hawkish and suspiciously tantalizing position that military and security could be on our side as opposed to having us be pawns for Jews (and objectivists).

Posted by neil vodavzny on Thu, 10 Sep 2015 12:55 | #

Is it true to say that Daniels is subjectivist, as I got a bit confused way back when? So, for example, you would be the polar opposite of Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy of individual achievement and reason over loyalty etc? So therefore, some right-wingers are mistakenly objectivist?

Posted by DanielS on Thu, 10 Sep 2015 15:02 | #

Yes, I am saying that right wingers are (overly) objectivist in placing objective facts over social loyalty.

No, I do not propose subjectivism as the antidote to objectivism, I am far more of a relativist. Relativism of social, especially a racially social perspective is what is needed (in the case of Whites in particular) as correction to pejorative philsophical-historical trends: anti-social patterns of individualism and objectivism that go beyond social classification, outstripping its concerns; trends which are perverted, extrapolated by the Jewish notion of anti-“racism”, viz. anti-social classification for Whites.

Social relativism is necessary even as grounds of individual achievement.

Subjective interests are somewhat relative, and connected to the social, of course. However, subjectivism is too individualistic a position to be most useful at this point in history in compensation for the individulalism (saliently, of Lockeatine rights and Jewish inversion thereof) that has worked against our racial interests; and to be most useful against objectivism’s even more egregious oblivion, which plagues the relative interests of the social group.

Being critical of objectivism in the sense that I mean it is much more broad than being against Ayn Rand’s philosophy.

Even racial advocates make the mistake of getting mixed up in objectivism broadly speaking - they do most often, in fact: “race based on naturalism” etc.

Well, nature does not care about your race. “Please shut up”, I’d like to say to these objectivists, might (of itself) makes righters, etc. I was discussing this with Kumiko and she fed back to me perfectly: “nature is objective, but you should not be.”

We should care about our relative social paradigms if we are interested in preserving them - especially if we are racial advocates.

Posted by neil vodavzny on Thu, 10 Sep 2015 15:47 | #

“nature is objective, but you should not be.”

This is interesting, as I got into a discussion with Vincent Fee-Woo of UVS website, which posits “cognitive paradoxes”. These are things like the sun setting in the east, when objectively earth orbits the sun; the constellations, when the night-sky we observe is millions or billions of years old.

There are connections to astrology and other alternate sciences.

I have a post http://www.uvs-model.com/UVS on paradoxical effect.htm
which relates cognitive paradoxes to overwhelming subjectivity. (Scroll right down page to end, there’s an icon on right of The Wizard of Oz with link to “Somehow I don’t think we’re in Kansa, Toto”)

There is an objective view of nature, but IMO there is also a subjective view of nature. This is contrary to orthodoxy, and Vincent’s site is completely unorthodox. Nevertheless, orthodoxy is taking the world into a den of iniquity, and us along with it. A subjective view of nature is bound to be more Right and less modern and IMO more realistic. Dynasty, or just breeding, gives you a subjective viewpoint (of the outside).

Posted by neil vodavzny on Thu, 10 Sep 2015 15:49 | #

Actually, rising in the east

Posted by Captainchaos on Thu, 10 Sep 2015 17:59 | #

I guess I’ve imbibed enough liberalism in my life to take a pretty heterodox view of people’s spiritual beliefs. It is instinct which will compel support of the 14 words. Something entirely more powerful than the thin layer of other-worldly imaginings which give succor to many.

belief in Santa Claus and his magic Elves + support for the 14 words = fine by me

Posted by DanielS on Fri, 11 Sep 2015 01:18 | #

Neil, interesting remarks (p.s., I’ve edited my own response to you to make it more clear)

CC, very glad to hear it!

(note: “except”... was a typo for accept.. sheesh)

.....................................

Kumiko, coming back directly to the topic of your post, a thought emerges at this point:

While we (Whites/ European peoples) should be able to take for granted that state military and security apparati are functioning in our interests, tragically, we have been riddled by the fact that we cannot trust them to be operated by and for our interests at all - they have been largely in the service of “anti-racism” (which is anti-European), particularly since World War II.

It would be ideal to have these state apparati in our service - that is what makes your posts so exciting - but it will take a monumental effort to wrest them squarely thus. This post could represent a giant step in that regard.

Posted by Kumiko Oumae on Sat, 12 Sep 2015 05:09 | #

Captainchaos on Thu, 10 Sep 2015 17:59 wrote:
belief in Santa Claus and his magic Elves + support for the 14 words = fine by me

Even if ‘Santa Claus and his magic elves’ happen to be literally part of a Middle Eastern comedy skit? Does this have any kind of limitation to it? Do you just automatically accept anyone who mouths the ‘14 words’ like some kind of mantra?

Posted by More on optimal Social Relativism as antidote on Sat, 12 Sep 2015 08:26 | #

In further elaboration on Neil Vodavzny’s question and in warding off the “alternative right”‘s shenanigans:

No, subjectivism is not the antidote to objectivism. Subjectivism is simply the other side of The Cartesian divide which ails Western peoples, sends liberalism into runaway and leaves us susceptible to Jews and other collectively organized antagonists.

It is the acknowledgment of the engaged interaction of one’s Relative Social Group Perspective - our social paradigms and their interactive rules - that is the antidote to the Cartesian divide (of subjectivism and objectivism) and facilitates instead the management of a human ecology (such as a race) with social accountability, keeping it from runaway and being taken advantage of by antagonistic peoples who embrace the relative interests of their collective interests and who are not hoodwinked to participate in Western style objectivism or liberal subjectivism.

Posted by Crazy over you on Sat, 12 Sep 2015 09:40 | #

Crazy over you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gpNqB4dnT4

Barracuda

]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0OX_8YvFxA

Even it up
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLhxF-Un39k

Posted by Captainchoas on Sun, 13 Sep 2015 17:18 | #

Even if ‘Santa Claus and his magic elves’ happen to be literally part of a Middle Eastern comedy skit?

Well, I was speaking rhetorically…

Does this have any kind of limitation to it?

Sure. Taken much further and we would have arrived in the land of mental illness. That is where any serious political debate ends and the men in the white coats take over.

Do you just automatically accept anyone who mouths the ‘14 words’ like some kind of mantra?

That depends on the quality of the person’s mind in question. If they are just another common dumbass (one of “the rabble”, as Nietzsche referred to the mass of the people) then their reciting simple slogans will have to do.

Posted by jawake on Mon, 14 Sep 2015 22:13 | #

There’s not a lot you can do, even on the national level, when the EU regulates migration/asylum policy. If any national politician actually rejected the EU Directive, they would find themselves in hot water. You can blame monotheism all you want, but it is EU Council Directive 2003/9/ec or Dublin 3 that is immediately responsible.

Hungary will have to defend itself, and the EU has already challenged them.

http://europeanmigrationlaw.eu/en/about_navigation#asile_119_0_0

Posted by Kumiko Oumae on Mon, 14 Sep 2015 23:57 | #

You shouldn’t reject the directive, you should have national leaders that are willing to interpret it in a way that does not lead to having to actually accept hundreds of thousands of refugees from a region of the world that the North Atlantic is engaged in various conflicts with.

Consider Directive 2013/33/EU, and Directive 2001/55/EC. The thing you will notice is that there are circumstances under which detention and removal is allowed, and one of the allowed reasons is ‘national security’, if anyone should choose to invoke it. Also, the asylum application procedures are determined by the members states and are reviewed by the legal apparatus of the member state. Just because someone arrives on the soil and files an application, does not mean that you have to give it to them.

Another thing worth remembering is that in order for a person to apply for asylum in the first place, they must be standing inside the territory that your country controls. If they never make it to a position inside your borders, you don’t have to hear their application at all. It is not allowed for a person to seek asylum by making an application at a location outside of a member state.

Furthermore, if an asylum seeker is inside one European country and crosses illegally into another, it voids the process unless the two member states concerned happen to agree that this kind of behaviour should be allowed.

So I would conclude that these people are not having their hands tied by the language in the directives, so much as they choose to implement the directives in the member states in such a way that allows for mass migration, because the mentality and psychology of the national leaders and their constituents causes them to do so. Because they actually just want to implement the directives in a very permissive way. The language in the directives does not prevent them from stopping the wave of migration. They could stop it if they wanted to, and still be within the law.

Posted by jawake on Tue, 15 Sep 2015 01:01 | #

This is a typical pro-EU argument. The EU has already required that member states institute a quota and it will eventually decide how many people will be taken in. Germany is setting an example because it considers itself the leader of the EU project; not because they are weak Christians who don’t have the stomache to fight.

So what if the member states implement the directives in a way not to allow for mass immigration? If you make the pledge of a quota and it is shoved down your throat, the end result is that the migrants stay.

Juncker: Migrant quotas must be ‘compulsory’

The European Commission wants all 22 EU member states to sign up to a quota policy - but several nations oppose such a move, including Poland, Slovakia and Hungary.Ministers will meet again next month to work out how many refugees each nation will take in, as Luxembourg foreign minister Jean Asselborn cautioned “it is premature for the Council to take a decision today”.

They don’t want to make a decision because they know to shove it down Europe’s throat right now would be dangerous. But that doesn’t stop them wasting any time bringing proceedings against the countries that are “not allowing mass migration:”

August 2015
The European commission has opened a total of 32 infringement proceedings against 18 member states on how they apply EU-level asylum rules. Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden are all under commission scrutiny for various violations.

And of course:

He (Junkcer) said the Commission plans to set up a Trust Fund of €1.8 billion to help Africa tackle the root causes of migration, and called on all EU members to pitch in.

Posted by Kumiko Oumae on Tue, 15 Sep 2015 05:36 | #

Of course my argument is ‘a typical pro-EU argument’, but only in the sense that it’s also common sense.

The idea that all problems are caused by the existence of the European Union makes no sense. The EU is simply a supranational body that exemplifies the broad talking-shop and broad policy preferences of all the European governments, who pool their sovereignties for the purpose of dealing with issues that are continental in scope.

The reason that Germany is ‘setting an example’ in their attempt to import 800,000 migrants, is not because of the EU’s existence. The reason that they are ‘setting an example’ in their attempt to import 800,000 migrants is because Germany has been terminally ill since the year 1945, moreso than any other European nation barring Sweden.

Does Germany strike you as a being a country that would be perfectly fine and healthy if not for the existence of the EU project? Or does Germany strike you as a country that has been very sick for a long time now? Whether they are inside the EU structure or outside of it, they would need to deal with the same core problems.

This applies when talking about fighting in general as well. If you anti-Europeans had your way, perhaps the European Union might be abolished or something. That action would solve basically no problems whatsoever, because you’d still have the problem of the existence of liberalism and Christianity, just now you’d have the additional problem of lacking a customs union, lacking a banking union, lacking an energy union, lacking FRONTEX, and lacking the ability to leverage the economy of scale for industry and defence, and lacking the ability to coherently coordinate defence of the southern and eastern borders of the continent against hostile Russian manoeuvring.

Abolishing the EU would not make anything easier for you. It would just make things even more difficult than they already are.

Posted by jawake on Tue, 15 Sep 2015 17:02 | #

You are arguing with a straw man and trying to overload the question.

This is dishonest discourse and typical of Nationalism’s enemies.

You want to force me into defending opinions I never expressed and thereby force me to point out all the problems with the “unions” you listed, hoping that you discredit me on this forum by:

1) Exposing my ignorance of all these systems and possibly my lack of a rationally developed critique of them; and which you have merely asserted are beneficial:

2) And asking me to defend the abolishment of the EU, a position I did not take, and then forcing me into a position where I have to provide some kind of detailed alternative which cannot possibly be conceived.

You are arguing from the position of what is and therefore trying to make legitimate criticism of one policy-a policy which actually condemns the EU (or should) in Nationalist circles- seem nonsensical. This technique is typical of establishment funded apparatchiks or people who conceive of themselves as rational because they side with the perceived rationality of argumentation made from power.

(I made a viable point and see that the article I linked to about the EU’s suggestion to make asylum quotas compulsory was included on the front page today.)

My point is: The EU was NOT conceived as a regional entity to help Europeans enjoy peace and prosperity, but it was conceived under the auspices of globalization after much of Europe was destroyed and exhausted, in order to persistently demoralize Europe and subsequently extract a debt that the rest of the world feels it owes them. Because of its origins, the process by which the EU would be transformed into a regional entity that would be democratic- thereby exclusively beholden to Europe instead of whipping it- would be just as revolutionary and “destructive” as the abolition of the EU would be.

Posted by British wife's ragheadedness on Fri, 18 Sep 2015 15:47 | #

British wife of ISIS jihadi killed in drone strike says ‘I will never love anyone but him’

A SICK widow of an ISIS jihadi who was killed in a drone strike in Syria has spoken gushingly of her love for the slain terrorist.

Sally Jones is said to have married Junaid Hussain in Syria

Former punk rock guitarist Sally Jones, 45, married toyboy Junaid Hussain, 21, after meeting him online and converting to Islam.

Hussain, a computer hacker and recruiter for ISIS, was killed by an American drone in the terrorists’ stronghold of Raqqa last month.

Now he has been praised by the middle-aged mum in a sickening twitter post in which she said she was “proud my husband was killed by the biggest enemy of Allah”.

She continued: “May Allah be pleased with him, and I will beaver every love anyone but him.”

Posted by Croatia shows: it can be done on Sun, 20 Sep 2015 08:16 | #

It can be done.

Croatia started transporting migrants to Hungary by bus on Friday (18 September) after the country’s prime minister said Croatia cannot cope with the influx and will redirect people towards Hungary and Slovenia instead.

Croatian police put refugees on to more than 10 buses in Beli Manastir, a small town 6 km from the Hungarian border, and some 30 km from the Serbian border.

Posted by Kumiko Oumae on Sun, 20 Sep 2015 08:37 | #

What? All of the Croats were arrested along with the migrants, and rightly so. They were drawn in and then sent back to whence they came.

Independent.ie, ‘Hungary seizes migrant train from Croatia, disarms 40 Croatian police and arrests train driver’, 18 Sep 2015:

Hungarian authorities seized a train bringing migrants into the country from Croatia, disarmed 40 police on board and detained the driver after over 4,000 migrants arrived across their border, the head of the Hungarian disaster unit said.

Gyorgy Bakondi told reporters the Croatian train that shipped the refugees and migrants to Magyarboly came without any prior notice, like the rest of the new arrivals coming on other trains and on buses.

Hungary registered and disarmed the 40 police who escorted the train, he said according to a video posted on M1 state television’s website.

[...]

The row between the two countries and their respective handling of the migration crisis has deepened as Hungary’s foreign minister on Friday accused Croatia of pushing migrants to break the law by “illegally” breaching Hungarian borders.

“Rather than respecting the laws in place in the EU, they (Croatia), are encouraging the masses to break the law, because illegally crossing a border is breaking the law,” said Peter Szijjarto, speaking in Belgrade following talks with his Serbian counterpart. [...]

“Asz nagz durbatuluk, asz nagz gimbatul, asz nagz trakatuluk agh burzumiszi krimpatul.”

Posted by DanielS on Sun, 20 Sep 2015 08:40 | #

I’m still glad that the Croatians were concerned enough and took initiative to get rid of them, but it is indeed, even better that the Hungarians handled the situation more properly still on a meta- read international level - by compelling the Croats to negotiate these matters correctly on an inter-European basis.

However, my point was that the Croatians were showing that putting would-be migrants on transport and removing them from one’s country can be done.

It also showed that European nations can still act with a degree of independence - one of my key points in connection to what you’ve said above in response to jawake’s suggestion that EU members had no autonomous say in accepting or rejecting immigrants.

It is true, however, that merely and only shipping them so far as another European country is a bit like wiping one’s dirty hands upon someone else’s clean clothes.

Posted by Les Brigandes: Le rat jèze on Tue, 22 Sep 2015 08:29 | #

Les Brigandes - Le rat jèze

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtfmN9gGg4Y

Posted by M. Koehler III on Tue, 29 Sep 2015 01:15 | #

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Ali Agca took care of this shitpope.

Posted by Pope of Cucks on Tue, 29 Sep 2015 08:23 | #

He is truly the Pope of cucks

Pope cuckbird

Praying before the black Madonna and child

Posted by A Moderate Muslim on Wed, 21 Oct 2015 16:28 | #

Free Speech is Sacred

Posted by No Abrahamic Religion on Thu, 19 Nov 2015 10:21 | #

Posted by Kumiko Oumae on Thu, 10 Mar 2016 16:09 | #

jawake wrote:

My point is: The EU was NOT conceived as a regional entity to help Europeans enjoy peace and prosperity, but it was conceived under the auspices of globalization after much of Europe was destroyed and exhausted, in order to persistently demoralize Europe and subsequently extract a debt that the rest of the world feels it owes them.

Well, this is a late response, but while I maintain that it was not conceived for the purpose of destroying Europe, it is now doing precisely that because its leaders want it to, so it would seem that the entire edifice is going to have to be torn down and reconstructed for sake of Europe’s survival.

Posted by The Holocaust is Aging on Tue, 29 Mar 2016 00:26 | #

My approach to clarity is to go to the ambiguous side, or to put it more high-mindedly, to turn to Wittgenstein’s concept of “family resemblances.” “The Jews,” in other words, exemplify the sort of social entity Wittgenstein spoke of as “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing.” There are, in the case of the Jews, as Wittgenstein said, “overall similarities,” and he went on: “I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblances’; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.” All manner of qualities and boundaries are stirred together in that “Etc. etc.”—doctrinal, institutional, legal, textual, ritual, national, and whatnot. Seen from within or without, there are resemblances but not identity. Curious, then, and interesting, that concepts like “Jewish identity” should be hazy at the boundaries. It is not irrelevant that Wittgenstein was himself baffled about being a Jew—three of his four grandparents were Jewish, but one of them, his paternal grandfather, born Moses Meier, became a Protestant and changed his middle name to Christian. This might well be a biographical root for his interest in family resemblances.

***

The genealogy of Jewish identity as a problem is ancient.

It can’t be denied that, for centuries, the “complicated network” of the Jewish condition was, and continues to be, channeled through an overlapping obsession with a story contained in a book; by identification with it (as in “The People of the Book”), and by contestation within it; with the effort to know, cherish, and preserve that book, and to honor those who take it seriously, to recite, decipher, and dispute it, to try to manage its contradictions, to honor the chain of commitments and sacrifices described there, to use chapters and verses of that book against other chapters and verses, aspiring always to make sense of a world full of absence in which the one certainty about life is that it ends. The most important activity of an honorable Jew was to study the book which told the story of a tribe that was anointed as God’s deputies on earth, along with the sanctioned commentaries on it.

The people of Abraham, “father of many,” found it beneficial, or at least comforting, to confront, or evade, radical mysteries of their existence in the company of a tribe equipped with, if nothing else, a common vocabulary. The Jews had a story that featured them. There was convergence on that story concerning a unique and immensely powerful deity Who created the world and flooded it to punish a failed species, saving only the line of Noah, a uniquely just man, and Who later came to an otherwise undistinguished descendant of Noah called Abram, and spoke to him, and set him toward a destination in Canaan, otherwise undistinguished as well, and set him on his journeys and his tasks, and arranged for an endpoint in a land whose meaning to them derived strictly from the fact that it had been designated by God.

As you know, a great deal ensued, including rituals, miracles, enemies, exiles, escapes, the delivery of commandments and the setting of laws, and eventually, defeat and centuries of Diaspora (vastly longer than the time of the Jewish State), and further on, throughout all the failures and defeats, the punishments meted out for their failures to do well by their assignments, millennial yearnings for a return to the Holy Land. Even Jews who disdained any foothold in the varieties of doctrinal Judaism felt the calling to locate themselves on a map whose once and enduring center was in Jerusalem. Jerusalem was what you had a relationship to, even if that relationship was mysterious, abstract, and hypothetical. The language of Jewish longing for a surpassing, redeeming deliverance was saturated with a hunger for Zion even in the breasts of Jews who were not Zionists.

The Jews were the beneficiaries of a particular kind of story: It was not just a narrative of characters and events of the form, A did X to B, upon which C happened. It was not a story prescribed for a self-contained tribe. It was a morality tale that traced variations on an overpowering theme: A single God chose a single man to engender a singular people. Here’s what happened when they tried to live up to their mission; tried and failed; tried, failed, and tried again.

In the Jews’ story, the age of gods in the plural was now to be overshadowed, and the age of God had arrived. This designated people told a story about themselves in which their story was central because the single God whom they recognized, different from all the gods who were of surpassing value to all other peoples, determined that they should matter, because He had chosen them—and not to worship a local god but to be the people of the single God. The single God was not only their God, the local God of their tribe, but the God, God in the singular, everyone’s God, whether they knew it or not. So, a universalist claim is built into the history of the Jews. God hammers it home when He addresses all the Jews in the world from Mt. Sinai (after finally delivering them from bondage). The Jews are a particular people charged with universal significance—if you like that paradox, you like the Jews. The Covenant declares a mission that exists not only for God and for the Jews but for the others. As it is written in Genesis 12:3, “by you shall all families of the earth be blessed.” “ … all families of the earth.” There were others, goyim, Auslander, to contend with.

In a word, the Jews were designated a people among peoples, with a particular mission and task: Jewish exceptionalism. To be for themselves in the name of being for others, and for others in the name of being themselves. Not to be “a people” but “the people on behalf of the people.” The logic was circular but weirdly compelling, as was it also perplexing to the people whom God singled out. The story mattered because the single God must have known that there were other peoples holding to other gods. The Talmudic story of the young Abraham makes the destruction of idols a proof of virtue, in fact.

The idea of chosenness was not unique to the Israelites. But, unlike other people’s parallel claims, it persisted even as the meaning of chosenness proved elusive and even obscure. It was the inescapable magnet for Jewish identity. And perhaps for this reason it had the probably unintended effect of provoking a zero-sum challenge to all the peoples left unchosen. As Liel Leibovitz and I wrote in The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election, “The promised land’s native inhabitants struggled against a theology that declared them to be, in effect, the children of a lesser god. When they resisted becoming history’s beautiful losers, they construed their defeats as martyrdom, built identities around humiliation, set out to regenerate themselves through acts of magic and will, and began to rationalize the next war.” The later Abrahamic religions developed their own forms of either-or chosenness. They too recognized the power of the idea: the universal in the particular. Even toward the end of the 20th century, 50 percent of a national sample of American Jews conducted by the sociologist Steven M. Cohen said they agreed with the statement, “Jews are a ‘chosen people.’”

***

Breaking out of the ghetto, the Jewish Enlightenment altered—widened and complicated—the scope of Jewish ideals. Some Jews who entered the outside world, in Cohen’s words, “universaliz[ed] what had been a particularist civilization,” but it was a particularist civilization with a difference. They would take up the Hebrew language but they would also sign up with ways to belong to distinct nations. For these Jews, there was not only an opportunity but an imperative to return to one or another version of the divine election that stemmed from their origin—to open the Jews up to broader Enlightenment currents of thought, to enlarge and in part secularize Jewish education; to make the Jew a citizen of the world, equipped, or saddled, with ethical obligations, even to point the way. A universalist tendency had long been latent in the cloistered Judaism of Europe; now, let free, it could flourish. What was good for the Jews would be to complete Hillel’s triad: to be for ourselves; to be for others; and to be all that now. In other words, the Jews in the Diaspora were a people of ethics.

Exiles did not cease, and new homelands were founded. Under pressure, many European Jews flocked to varieties of the secular left and then, eventually, under the pressure of oppression, to Zionism, which, although ostensibly secular, carried in its bones a millennial spirit of return to the biblical homeland. In America, Jews went to work founding—in the words of a recent New York Times Magazine ad for an Upper East Side condominium complex—“a new tradition.” New traditions, actually, and quarrels among these traditions, both religious and secular, perched uneasily on the foundations of older traditions.

In the historical land of Israel, as Leibovitz and I wrote, “undercurrents of chosenness rattled the ground. … Even as [Zionists] fiercely disputed all manner of things, including the nature of a Jewish state, and what policies to pursue, a spirit—one might even say a dybbuk—of chosenness inhabited them, and continues to do so.” But in America, the old question came to the surface again: chosen for what? A good part of the answer would become: chosen for success. Jews were acculturated into a pot for partial melting. But also chosen to stand for justice, to complete Hillel’s triad.

It was another turn of the screw of ironic history that the Holocaust—as it came to be called—should have opened up American society for Jews. Barriers fell. Anti-Semitism withered—both the genteel type and the murderous type. Restricted covenants were banned by the Supreme Court in 1948. University quotas were phased out. Turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe could join in the American celebration and give over their hearts to the newly founded Israel even as their children were retreating from Yiddishkeit. Even as the Holocaust left us reeling, Jews overwhelmingly joined in a combination of redemptive spirit, old-country nostalgia, and successful assimilation. Rituals of religious observance, holidays, and food, cleared for acceptance by dietary laws that were held to be inscribed with the imprimatur of God. The grandchildren, like myself, found ourselves freed for secular lives infused with what we thought of as Jewish values. This is a story for another day. Even as religious connections thinned out—Jews attend religious services at much lower rates than other religious denominations—the Jews, at least in America, became a people of ethics. In Cohen’s words, “Jews are ethnically hyperactive and religiously indolent.” I would say also: ethically hyperactive.

But here was yet another turn of the screw: The Holocaust now became a badge of Jewish identity. Whatever you thought about the Jews being chosen by God, our people had been singled out for the worst assaults ever delivered upon a whole people in modern history. A Christian might say that the Jews were crucified. And to have suffered this crucifixion, vicariously, to feel forever scarred by it, became a badge of identity. As Steven Cohen wrote about his 1989 survey: “The Holocaust is more important to more respondents than any other symbol [of Jewishness]. As many as 85 percent say it is at least very important, and 56 percent call it extremely important. Both figures exceed comparable rates for all other concepts in the series”—the High Holidays; an attachment to Israel; God; the Torah, all of them.

The Holocaust was the ultimate denial of equality, of dignity, of justice. And if anything, it only elevated the significance of the affirmative values that had been so atrociously annihilated by Nazi Germany. As the Holocaust became more central to the Jewish imagination, so did the ethical core of being Jewish—a commitment to equality, dignity, justice. So it is that the liberalism of American Jews has withstood decades of disillusion. It should not be surprising that, as Judge Richard Posner noted recently in the Washington Post, “the three liberal justices besides Sotomayor are Jewish”—though as he quickly added, they are “not, it seems, influenced by Judaism in their judicial work.” Not by Judaic doctrine, but by the penumbra of egalitarian ethics that, to most American Jews, feels like their birthright.

So, what does Jewishness mean today, in America? Is there a core, an essential overlap, in the thick of all the family resemblances? Let’s look at other social surveys, a quarter-century after Steven Cohen’s. In 2012, the Public Religion Research Institute found that 87 percent of Jews said that the Holocaust was “somewhat or very important for informing their political beliefs and activity.” Nearly half (46 percent) of American Jews cited a commitment to social equality as “most important to their Jewish identity,” twice as many as cited “support for Israel (20 percent) or religious observance (17 percent).” In 2013, a Pew poll found that:

U.S. Jews see being Jewish as more a matter of ancestry, culture and values than of religious observance. Six-in-ten say, for example, that being Jewish is mainly a matter of culture or ancestry, compared with 15 percent who say it is mainly a matter of religion. Roughly seven-in-ten say remembering the Holocaust and leading an ethical life are essential to what it means to them to be Jewish, while far fewer say observing Jewish law is a central component of their Jewish identity. And two-thirds of Jews say that a person can be Jewish even if he or she does not believe in God….The view that remembering the Holocaust is essential to what it means to be Jewish is shared by majorities in all of the large Jewish denominational groupings.

As Hitler’s movement had chosen the Jews for annihilation, the Jews could now choose themselves: not only as survivors but as redeemers. But what if there is no consensus on what it means to “live an ethical life”? What if a chasm divides the values of American Jews, Diaspora Jews, from the Jews of the Jewish state?

***

Between 1948 and 1967, American Jews could cherish the state of Israel on both particularist and universalist grounds. Israel was the state of the Jews, for sure. It had a part to play in the great universalism of nationhood. But it also leaned socialist. It could be exhibited as a case study of national liberation. Palestinians had no reality to the great majority of American Jews, but the Israeli victory in 1947-48 served both particularist and universalist needs. The Jews of the liberal-left were doubly blessed. Be it Old Jerusalem or New, Holy Land or God-fearing America as a “city on a hill,” the exalted state located elsewhere had long been, for the Diaspora, a badge of identity, a palpable sign that history has a vector and of renewal. Pride in the survival—indeed, the triumph—of the Jewish state evoked pride.

The Israeli victory in the Six Day War for a while re-cemented the salience of the Holocaust. David had crushed Goliath. But in the conquest of the Territories lay demon seeds. The statehood of Israel had the sanction of international law. It still does. But when Israel became an illegal occupier of the territories it conquered in 1967, it forfeited its universalist mantle. It made Israel look like a less compelling answer to the immense question of what might be left of chosenness, which dovetailed with the problem of what meaning might be found in the Holocaust. First under center-left Labor governments and more radically under the Likud, Israel interpreted chosenness as a title to land and a warrant for defying world opinion and international law. It justified its aggressions as defenses. But this was an almost fatal mistake. Israeli exceptionalism abandoned the high moral ground. Gripped by messianism and a volatile brew of desperation and truculence, Israel defies the hard-fought achievements of the Diaspora as it becomes steadily more illiberal, and thus more offensive to Jews who remain among America’s most liberal populations. In a world of sinful nations, Israel now, simultaneously, claims the privilege of victimhood and the right to be honored as democratic even as it abandons liberality. This is a hell of a climb-down from tikkun olam, the injunction to repair the world and welcome the stranger. It offers little solace or cohesion for American Jews. For the built-in ambiguities that face all minorities in America, Israel is no spiritual refuge.

By now, a growing minority of younger American Jews are so intensely angry at the actually existing, increasingly illiberal Israel, which is no longer the Israel of Martin Buber and Paul Newman, as to reject “Zionism” as a dirty word and endorse the whole bundle of BDS politics, including the academic boycott—a direction made easier as American-Jewish oligarchs fund land-grabs and implant enclave fortresses in East Jerusalem and on the West Bank. Some are naïve; some are thoughtless; some can think of no other way to get the Israeli government’s attention. Not many liberal American Jews go so far, but the gulf that has opened up between Israeli and American Jews will be a fundamental feature of the Jewish landscape for a long time.

Obviously Israeli politics is in an inflammable state, in no small part because Palestinian politics are dead-ended. The polarization in Israel-Palestine generates aftershocks in America. And we are in the throes of a nasty feedback loop. When the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations lays claim to speak for American Jews (the Israeli philosopher Menachem Brinker has asked whether there are any minor Jewish organizations), it reveals itself helpless to resist the soft messianism and aggressive desperation of the West Bank Occupation. The more the American Jewish establishment colludes with Netanyahu, the more damage the Israeli right does to the prospects for peace, and the more polarized are American Jews. As Israel becomes steadily more illiberal, it becomes more vexatious—more divisive—for Jews who, all in all, remain among America’s most liberal populations—and the younger the Jews, the more so. Minor Jewish Organizations will likely proliferate.

As a cement for American Jewish identity, the Holocaust is aging. The cracks will grow—and not only over Israel but whether the Jews are really a people of values, and if so, which they are. Schmaltz, however marketed, will not hold together a fractious population whose two world centers, Israel and America, are increasingly irreconcilable. The people of values are once again tested to decide what their values are. Which is where we came in.

***

This text is adapted from a speech delivered at the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, March 15, 2016.

Summary

Once upon a Time in Eurasia

Shaking the Kaleidoscope

Failure to Understand the Threat Environment

Putting the Car into Gear

Motive Energy

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