An Ethically-Fraught Minefield
C O N T E N T S
I. An Ethically-Fraught Minefield
II. Letter to the Editor from our colleague Tim K.
An Ethically-Fraught Minefield
The following is from Pastor Douglas Wilson’s published questions and answers of Feb. 3 — my remarks follow. (Mr. Wilson was quoted in our previous column).
Question/Comment to Douglas Wilson from “John”:
“Regarding the accusations of white supremacy in classical Christian education, why not just offer up the same defense you do for the Jews? Are White Europeans not High Performance People? Bleating about how you aren’t a racist doesn’t convince anyone who cares about that, so you might as well at least defend your own ancestors as zealously as you defend the betrayers and murderers of Christ.”
— John
Pastor Wilson:
“John, all of us were betrayers and murderers of Christ. Otherwise, whose sins did He die for? As for your first point, it is funny you should mention that. I am currently writing a book on the Jewish question, and a significant part of my argument has to do with the key role that Deuteronomic blessings have in transforming believing Gentile nations into high performance people. But if you want to join us, you will have to knock off the Jew-hatred. It only gets in the way.”
Michael Hoffman:
Douglas Wilson has called Judaics a “high performance people.” We don’t make a big issue out of it, although it is a generalization about an ethnicity and problematic for that reason, in part because it could evoke typecasting of Judaic people as “high performance” money handlers. However, as someone who grew up in New York with many Judaic friends (and a few foes), and whose guides and mentors included Art Levine, Harvey Rosenbloom and Henry Zappler, I do wince somewhat when folks who don’t have that background call up what are in my opinion naive midwestern stereotypes.
From personal experience, for every ten (or thereabouts) “high performance” ethical Judaic persons there was on average one schnorrer or gonef. A schnorrer is a loafer/beggar; a gonef is a thief. No doubt this could be said about many ethnicities, but what’s to brag about? As for “high performance” people, I would submit as candidates in addition to Judaic people, the work ethic and genius of the Japanese and Germans who, after being mass incinerated by Allied napalm in “The Good War,” and with their cities a smoking pile of ash, within ten or fifteen years had rebuilt their nations and were competing economically in the world’s markets.
One might also add to the high performance category the nation which, commissioned and inspired by the vision of its Irish-Catholic president, put humans on the moon in 1969, something which adherents of Talmudism have ceremonially execrated as the “Kochi ve’otzem yadi” of Edom, and included in the calendar of Tisha B’Av disasters, along with the Destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. and The Expulsion from England in 1290. (The next time Ben Shapiro or Daniel Lapin attempt to convince you that the Torah sheBeal peh [the oral law as prescribed in the Mishnah and Gemara of the Talmud Bavli], is an ally of Western Civilization, you might want to reply with the preceding datum and see what happens).
We could be wrong, but John’s note to Doug Wilson seems to have been written in a fit of pique, in that his point about defending ancestors (which in itself is valid), falls flat as an accusation against Wilson, whose life has been a defense of western Christendom, from the classical academies and college he helped to found, to his books and seminars.
Next John accused Wilson of “defend(ing) the betrayers and murderers of Christ.” I don’t see that. Rev. Wilson’s reply in this instance is wise and one we have employed over the years in similar exchanges: “All of us were betrayers and murderers of Christ. Otherwise, whose sins did He die for?”
This is humbling and irrefutable. It’s the heart of the authentic Christian spirit, and anathema to Might-is-Right paganism and the rodef-hunting “preemptive” violence and vengeance of Talmudism.
The fact that John raised the point about “the betrayers and murderers of Christ” is for Rev. Wilson “Jew hate.” It’s here that we encounter an ethically-fraught minefield.
There is indeed plenty of Jew hate around. It cripples the people who are afflicted with it. For this writer the Zionists who created a state that typifies the apartheid of South Africa and then style that instrument of racist oppression “the Jewish state,” are among the more egregious anti-Semites. Zionism is not synonymous with Judaic people, any more than Stalinism is with Russians or Maoism with the Chinese. Zionism is an ideology, not a genetic marker.
This may seem scarcely credible but some if not many of the Jew haters I encountered as a native New Yorker were themselves “Jews.” I’ll give an example from Miami Beach (New Yorkers call it the sixth borough). When I was in my 20s I took a week’s vacation from winter down there, at a cut-rate hotel a block from the ocean. It was shabby but clean. As far as I could tell almost every guest, plus the front desk clerk, were Judaic New Yorkers or New Jerseyites.
This was 1978. There were no phones in our rooms. The only phone was located on the hotel’s check-in desk. On several occasions after it would begin to ring it seemed like half the guests would flood the lobby in the expectation that it was a call from a son or daughter, or other relative. No matter how many times the desk clerk would shout louder and louder one name alone — “It’s for Sarah Kagan; It’s only for Sarah Kagan I’m telling you!,” a sizable number of the guests would nonetheless insist he was lying and that it was a call from a relation who had, it seems, solemnly pledged to telephone at that very hour. I witnessed this spectacle more than once. I thought it was hilarious.
The desk clerk however, who seemed to be at his post six days a week, harbored some very dark thoughts of the homicidal variety about the hotel’s obstreperous clientele, which he would sometimes voice in a rage-filled stage whisper. Those folks were mostly decent and likable working class people with energetic personalities. They were an endless source of interest due to their humanity, intensity and engagement with life.
As for Jew hate among gentiles, it is promoted inside the Far-Right by agents of the Cryptocracy, and inside the Democrat party by those who seek to destroy the Judaics by issuing a blank check to the Zionist sicarii who are dispossessing and murdering Palestinian civilians. These racist crimes are building an animosity in the Middle East that’s off the charts.
Historically, scapegoating of Judaics has been promoted by the gentile ruling class to distract attention from their own crimes, often financial, as we tried to show in Usury in Christendom and The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome. Even an intellectual titan of the caliber of Ezra Pound was gulled by the Right-wing myth, which has had an endless shelf-life, that usury first gained firm purchase in the West due to the machinations of “The Jews” and English and Dutch Calvinists, circa 1650 onward.
Oh? In 1500 John Calvin wasn’t yet born. The Rothschilds were cobblers and peddlers when the Medici and Fugger bankers were the equivalent of today’s billionaires. Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici, known to history as Pope Leo X, at the behest of his family’s vast moneylending operations and those of the papalist Fuggers in Germany, granted in May 1515, when Calvin was not yet six-years-old, the first of the many incremental permissions which the Church of Rome would issue over the centuries for what had once been been the mortal sin of usury. We won’t debate here the revisionist fact of the papacy’s initiation of allowances for the gradual usurious capitalist revolution. We’ve written hundreds of pages documenting it. You can read those books, or not.
There is indeed despicable Jew hate and scapegoating aplenty, apart from the sui generis version Hitler and his criminal Nazis weaponized, but we should be judicious in how we apply the charge. The allegation can speedily separate a man from his reputation and career and result in his impoverishment.
Moreover, we observe in fidelity to the New Testament record that the leaders of the Jews of the first century A.D. had indeed betrayed their Messiah. There is such a thing as direct responsibility—Jesus told us so in Matthew 18:7—“Woe unto the world because of offenses! For it must happen that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense comes” (also cf. Luke 17:1).
The cosmic offense of the Crucifixion came as a result of the pressure the religious authorities in Jerusalem and a majority of the people brought to bear on the Roman governing hierarchy (Matthew 27:24; a significant minority among the am ha’raretz were probably not part of the lynch mob). According to the Talmud, some members of Rome’s government were friendly toward Jesus: “He had close connections with the non-Jewish authorities and those authorities were interested in his acquittal” (BT Sanhedrin 43a).
Both the Babylonian Talmud (BT Sanhedrin 43a) and Talmudism’s premier lawgiver Moses Maimonides (cf. his Mishneh Torah: Hilchot Melachem 11:4 and Hilchot Avodat Kochavim), convict themselves of the charge—they asseverate that Jesus deserved to die and no defense could be found for him. Perhaps out of an abundance of caution, before he would proceed with final production of his movie “The Passion of the Christ,” Mel Gibson solicited this writer through an intermediary, for documentary proof of that statement in the Talmud, in the original Aramaic text, which we provided.
It does seem like hyperbole for Rev. Wilson to characterize his correspondent John’s remark, which was echoed by no less an authority than St. Paul (I Thessalonians 2:14-15), as “Jew hate.” On the other hand, if we acknowledge John’s bald statement alone, without the context with which Wilson prudently admonished him—that all of us are betrayers of Jesus—then Christians are in danger of engaging in an egotistical belief in our own moral superiority over another people, which is fundamentally tantamount to the Talmudic mentality.
We hope to review Pastor Wilson’s book on Judaism after it is published. We have referred him to our volumes Judaism Discovered and Judaism’s Strange Gods, as source material. We don’t know if he has had the opportunity to do so. Those books were written with the compassionate intention of pidyon shevuyim (redemption of the Judaic captive), and the advancement of knowledge, for the Church, and all mankind.
Nietzsche opined that any German who considered himself superior to a Jew belonged in a comedy show or an insane asylum. His observation remains true for all gentiles.
“Salvation is of the Jews” (John 4:22).
Michael Hoffman ©2023
Letter to the Editor from Tim K.
Derrida’s Attack on the Logos
Editor’s Note: Tim has provided us with valuable research leads and contributed material to Twilight Language (cf. pp. 306-307). He wrote the following in response to our Substack column, “If Nothing is True Then Everything is Permitted.”
Dear Michael,
Your recent substack was an interesting read. The line, "If there is no truth, everything is permitted," sounds like a variation on Ivan Karamazov's line from “The Brothers Karamazov” that, "If God doesn't exist, everything is permitted." While it isn't clear how much Nietzsche actually read of Dostoyevsky, it seems clear that he seems to have read some of Dostoyevsky's shorter works, like "Notes from Underground," maybe even “Crime and Punishment.” It's unlikely that he read Brothers Karamazov but he was at least familiar with his writings and expressed the highest respect for him. Whatever the origin, I wanted to mention a few things I've come across in writing (trying to write) the book I'm in the process of developing.
Influenced in no small way by your own work, I started digging into what I take to be the essence of the drive towards advanced technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the current age. Put simply, I think the current technocratic paradigm — whether consciously or unconsciously — is both Gnostic and alchemical in its orientation.
In academia, there are two main schools of thought that support what I call our current tech-gnostic paradigm: the transhumanists and the posthumanists. Setting aside transhumanism for the time being, the posthumanists have been heavily influenced by Donna Haraway's, "A Cyborg Manifesto," written in 1985. Haraway, a socialist and feminist, celebrates technology as a means for disrupting dualities, essentialist metaphysics, and binary thinking. In creating cyborgs and chimeras that merge man and machine, man and animal, new ways of being are created that violate older norms, that are transgressive and (for Haraway) liberating as a result.
Her theoretical source for this is Jacques Derrida. Without getting into the arcana of deconstructionism, Derrida targets "logos" and seeks to disturb or disrupt its primary assumption that meaning is stable and immediately accessible to thought in a way that captures essences or objective truth. So, what about Derrida?
Derrida…had read parts of the Kabbalah and was apparently familiar with certain strands and works of esoterica, using the word "alchemy" here and there to describe the effects of the polyvalence and semantic richness associated with words. Ironically, he knew Moshe Idel and Emmanuel Levinas, the latter a famous student of Heidegger's. In one of Derrida's meetings with Levinas, Levinas once told Derrida that he (Derrida) reminded him of a heretical 16th century rabbi. The feeling is that Levinas had Isaac Luria in mind.
Idel himself has suggested that Derrida's famous phrase, "There is nothing outside the text," is a reformulation of a Kabbalistic principle that there is nothing outside of the Torah, articulated by the 14th century Kabbalist Recanati.
Sanford Drob has written a book, Kabbalah and Postmodernism, exploring in detail the Kabbalistic nature of Derrida's thought — even though Derrida himself was not (apparently) a student of the Kabbalah or a "believer." Mr. Drob has a few articles that link psychology to these esoteric strands as well. This one touches on Jung, as well as the Kabbalah and Gnosticism, the Kabbalah and alchemy:
http://newkabbalah.com/index3.html
It seems to me the theoretical basis for a great deal of postmodernism and posthumanism is Derrida's deconstruction and his blatant attack on logos (this takes up the first sections of his magnum opus, On Grammatology). His philosophy is, in many respects, antinomian, like posthumanism and, to a certain extent, transhumanism. The alchemical element seems evident in the breaching of dualisms, the overturning of binary oppositions that promote the merging of Man and Machine, Man and Animal, or the research paradigm to transmute the self into code and signal.
Derrida may very well be the "accidental alchemist" that has given the academy a weaponized Kabbalistic view of reality without even knowing it. Your mention of Adam Kadmon called to mind these connections, with Derrida sitting at the center of the ideological battles that have raged in the academy over the past three decades.
By the way, you might already know this, but the moniker “Arch Stanton,” the author of the article on the “Assassin’s Creed” video game which you quoted, is pertinent: it's the name of the grave next to the grave marked "Unknown" where the gold is buried in the movie, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." The last scene, the gun battle, is intriguing to consider as a sort of medieval morality play where the Good (Eastwood — "Blondie," the angel) and the Bad (Van Cleef — "Angel Eyes," the fallen angel, the devil), battle for the soul of the Ugly (Wallach — fallen man). The "gold" — (alchemy?) — is in the grave where death reigns but resurrection is possible. Wallach must "dig" for it only to be forced to stand on a Cross and face death unless he has faith that Blondie (Eastwood) will "save him" so he can "get the gold."
Regards,
Tim
Michael Hoffman, a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press, is the author of Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare (2001), The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome (2017), Twilight Language (2021) and six other books. He hosts the podcast, Michael Hoffman’s Revisionist History® and is at work on a book-length study of unfree labor in Britain and colonial America. Michael is an independent scholar free of corporate ties or university affiliation.
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