Comment not Approved by American Renaissance

This has nothing to do with the NYT. I posted a comment (LINK) to an article on the American Renaissance website which was approved, but my response to a reply which seemed to blame Zionists for more than I thought reasonable was not approved. I though that I made some good points, so I'm posting it here:

One must remind oneself that not all Jews were Zionists. Certainly, during WW1, most German Jews identified strongly with their German fatherland - to the extent that they were prepared to fight and die for it, against their fellow Jews on the Allied side.

To the extent that Jews were responsible for the defeat and humiliation of Germany in WW1, they paid dearly for it when, as a consequence, the Nazis rose to power.

Certainly, European Jews bear some of the blame for the blight of European civilisation, perhaps more than their numbers would justify, but trying to put most of the blame onto them is madness.

It's no good blaming anyone or any group for our troubles. We are ALL to blame, Jew and gentile.

We need to recognise the root cause of our troubles in the perverted Darwinian nature of the state itself, which has caused ALL past civilisations to decline and fall. The only reason that the Jews have survived so long as a people, is because they didn't have a state of their own to betray them. When one state turned on its Jews, other states took them in.

We are taught to believe that the state exists to SERVE society at large, but nothing could be further from the truth. The primary purpose of the state (including the democratic state) is what it has always been, namely, to facilitate society's SELF-exploitation to the personal advantage of its ruling elites and favoured (especially wealthy and priestly/academic) clients, at the expense and ultimate self-destruction of society at large.

See BLOG in which I elaborate further on these ideas.

Anti-Fascists & Fascists = Goodies & Baddies

Is Donald Trump a Fascist?

By Ross Douthat, Dec. 2 2015 (LINK to article)


Let's face it, calling someone a "fascist" is just a way of dismissing and condemning them as a "baddy", by associating them with all the evils and horrors of Nazism. Those doing the accusing are usually primarily concerned with asserting their own moral superiority as a "goody".

I'm not an expert on fascism, but it seems to me that it can't have been all bad, as it is now portrayed, anymore than communism was. Both movements had 10s of millions of supporters, many of them very passionate in the belief that they were fighting for a good cause.

In the aftermath of WW2, fascism was equated with Nazism and dismissed as evil, while many in academia continued to view communism with sympathy. Clearly, with Stalin, things had gone badly wrong, but the ideas behind communism and socialism were not all bad. Far from it. But no such sympathy is ever shown towards fascism, not least, because there is a strictly enforced taboo against doing so. Anyone who does is immediately accused of being a fascist sympathiser themselves.

I think this was - and continues to be - a huge mistake. We (especially academics from whom others take their lead) massively overreacted to the horrors of Nazism, and as the Editorial Board wrote in a recent editorial, The Price of Fear, "In the reaction and overreaction to terrorism comes the risk that society will lose its way".

This, I believe, is what has happened in respect to fascism, which I elaborate on in this BLOG on The West's Overreaction to Nazism.

P.S. There is a very good biography, it seemed to my lay eye, of the British fascist leader, Oswald Mosley, which is long out of print and whose author, Robert Skidelsky, and publisher seem to have no interest in seeing back in print, presumably because it portrays Mosley in too objective and sympathetic a light. Certainly, he was no British Hitler. According to this biography, the violence which often accompanied his rallies was usually initiated by the Left, which doesn't fit the established narrative of it always being the fascists who were responsible for the violence.

Dominated as it is by the Left, academia  only seems interested in demonising fascism, by equating it with the obvious evils of Nazism, rather than in understanding it in its historical context, as they do with communism and socialism.

Britain's Responsibility for First World War

A Century Ago, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity Changed Everything

By Dennis Overbye, Nov. 24, 2015 (LINK to article)

"Cheered on, to his disgust, by most of his Berlin colleagues, Germany had started a ruinous world war." 

Wrong! Germany got involved in a European war, for which it was no more -  or less - to blame than its main adversaries, Russia and France.

It was Britain, my own country, which decided to turn this European war, which probably would have been over by Christmas 1914, into the First World War, and to stick with it for 4 long bloody years (costing millions of lives), until, with America's help, "victory" was achieved, Germany defeated and humiliated, and the way paved for the rise of Nazism, WW2 and the Holocaust.

I know this isn't the subject of this piece, which commemorates Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, but it is no less important. In human terms it is probably more important, because it is our refusal to recognise our own dire political failings, piling all the blame on the Germans instead, that has got us into the sorry political state we are in, and which we won't succeed in getting out of until we do recognise our own failings.

We need a Copernican or Einsteinian revolution and change of paradigm in the social and political sciences, as we have had a number of in the physical sciences. Otherwise, our civilisation will not survive this century.

America's Catastrophic Military Interventions

Intervention in the Middle East Has Produced Instability, Not Stability

By Prof. Andrew J. Bacevich, Nov. 17, 2015 (LINK to article)

I agree with the author's analysis, which is strongly critical of recent American military interventions in the Middle East, but it is not just recent interventions America has embarked upon which have had catastrophic consequences, the most important of which are not even recognised, because it would be too painful, undermining America's "national" narrative and pride.

I'm thinking, not just, but primarily of WW1, which, until the British government decided to intervene, was a local European war, which more likely than not would have been over by Christmas 1914. It was Britain's (my own country's) intervention that turned it into a world war which dragged on, at Allied insistence, for four long bloody years, until "victory" was finally achieved, Germany defeated and humiliated, and the way paved for the rise of Nazism, WW2 and the Holocaust.

I'm not suggesting that Germany was blameless - far from it; but the Allies, with whom America threw in its lot (for less than purely noble reasons), share far more of the blame for that catastrophic war and the even more catastrophic consequences of "victory", than most historians are prepared to admit - for fear, I suspect, of upsetting "national sensitivities" and their state employer.

We need to be far more self-critical; not in the largely negative way that many so-called "progressives" are, in seeking to demonstrate their own personal moral superiority, but in a positive way, which doesn't point the finger of blame and responsibility at others, but at our collective selves, which requires much better understanding of the nature of the modern state and how it deceitfully poses as our nation, in order to legitimise itself, its ruling elites and the immense power they wield and abuse (see BLOG in which I elaborate further).