Crisis du mois

I’m at a loss for words. No, not really, only as a figure of speech.

What’s this all about? It’s about:

• The emasculation of LGF:

Comments that advocate violence will be cause for immediate banning with no appeal.

From the commenting rules, retrieved on October 21, 2007.

Charles Johnson has had to contend with visits from the FBI in the past. And it does not do his reputation any good that every comment on his site is automatically ascribed to his thoughts. That said, banning all calls for violence effectively means LGF is nothing but a news aggregator and “online get-together” (oxymoron, I know…) forum.

LGF is one of the best at what it does, if not the best, and Charles deserves all praise and support for his Herculean efforts. But as there is no operative solution to this world war that does not involve some measure of violence, this means I just lost one of the major venues for my ideas and suggestions. I got a comment deleted only once. It was a comment calling for expulsion of all the Muslims, typically. I thought, “If it doesn’t call for genocide then it’s OK”. Charles thought it could damage his reputation. He did as he saw fit, and I lost all the feeling of security I’d previously had posting on LGF. And now this new rule stamps the seal on the affair. I can’t use LGF as anything more than a dump for the Leftreasonous links I find.

• The coming of the Stormfronters:

I used to loudly shush defeatists who said, “Europe is doomed”. Now I think Europe is doomed myself—not because I think the Muslim colonialist invaders can’t be repulsed (which is what the defeatists think), but because it seems clearer and clearer to me every day that the only ones with the guts to stand up to them are the racialists, people for whom the fight against Islam is only part of the general battlefield over the “racial purity” of Europe. People who get their kicks out of bringing “scientific studies” showing how “blacks have a lower average IQ than whites”, which is just an intellectual-sounding, sophisticated way of saying, “N*****s are stoopid”.

You can see all the gory details on a Gates of Vienna thread I participated in. I got called “Politically Correct” and “part of the Left” for voicing my idea that race is a chimera, a red herring, a maintained illusion, and that culture has everything to do with it.

And very much related:

• Arguing for “innateness” by Jews as well:

See comment #353 on an LGF open thread for October 21, 2007. A succinct excerpt:

[…] In next week's portion in Genesis, Abraham sends his servant Eliezer to find a wife for Isaac. The rabbis ask why he did not take a wife for his son from the surrounding Cananite tribes. After all, the Cananites were idol worshipers and Abraham's cousins back in Haran were also idol worshipers. The rabbis answer that while both were idol worshipers, Abraham's family had an innate goodness that was not present in the Cananites and could not be taught.

I expressed my disgust in a later comment (#390), and Carl replied (#396). Thanks, Carl, though I find the reply unsatisfying. It’s nothing personal against Carl, who was just quoting others. It all has to do with the same problem I have with the Stormfronters: I consider policies derived from unchangeable, inborn traits to be anathema. As I said in my comment: If you didn’t exert an effort in it, then it’s worth nothing.

Let’s take it to science fiction for a slightly more neutral ground. Star Wars: the force-sensitives are so by genetics. If you weren’t born to the right parents, all the efforts at training in the use of the Force won’t be of any good. Let me put it bluntly: I detest, despite, loathe, abhor, revile (etc.) this idea.

“Looks like there’s still some of the old 1990’s hippie you were left in you.” “God didn’t make a politically correct world. Lodge your complaints with Him if you don’t like the way things are.” Yada yada, blah blah and so on ad nauseum. My soul is not for sale, folks. If this belief of mine, that unmerited traits should be disregarded as much as possible while merited achievements should be rewarded as richly as possible, has stayed a constant after all those years, then the verdict is final: it’s an inseparable part of me. I view everything through a cultural lens as much as is feasible, and nurture as the major player in all affairs. I hate the Muslims intensely, and call for the mass expulsion of them from within and near every non-Muslim state they reside, not because I think they’re inherently, unchangeably evil, but because they are nurtured by their religion to institute their rule over the whole world, blowing stuff and people (God forbid) up in the process.

I will not cave in to either extreme of multiculturalist Political Correctness or racialist misoxeny. As for Judaism, I already wrote that, far from the misconceived image of it as being a “racist ideology” (advanced so often by the “reverse”-racist Leftscum with their Khazaria Hypothesis, no less), Judaism was the first supraracial ideology in a world that, back then, was racialist to the core. So where is the crisis here? It is in the realization that, between the rock of multiculturalism and the hard place of racialism, my niche has been narrowed. I can expect more and more accusations of heterodoxy now.

Let Europe (Western Europe, anyway) be mired in the bifurcation fallacy of anti-white, “reverse”-racist multiculturalists vs. xenophobic, “scientific-study”-quoting racialists. Let Western Europe choose which of two putrid swamps—life under Islamic fascism, or life under the sway of decisions made around genetics, bodily fluids and kindred things—it wants to drown in. Maybe that’s God’s delicious way of bringing payback for the Holocaust. I don’t want any part in this. My wish and vision is that the Jewish nation (and HaShem willing, the American as well, for they are a malchut shel chesed, a kingdom of grace) will carry the torch of the good fight, the fight for culture, for the good lifestyle, for the elevation of man above both the stunting mindset of “Nothing can be said to be better than the other, not even by merit” and the unjust one of “My father was better than your father, therefore I’m better than you, and there’s no changing that”.

Above all, I call for honesty. When you want to say, “Jews control all world affairs”, say that, don’t write an intellectually-sounding book called The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. When you want to say, “N*****s are stoopid”, say so, don’t go citing “scientific studies showing how blacks have a lower IQ on average than whites”. We are all biased, therefore state your biases. State forthrightly your position, clearly what you believe in. Life is too short to treat it all like a poem to be analyzed, with hidden meanings to be figured out.

May HaShem be with all the righteous of the world until the end of days. Amen.

Wikipedia: Golding Digitized

From time to time a new scandal arises, such as the Siegenthaler affair and now the launch of a tool for listing anonymous Wikipedia edits by organizations, raising to the fore the problematic nature of an “encyclopedia anyone can edit”. This post, however, is not an addition to the already saturated opinion-market of essays telling the world how Wikipedia sucks; Wikipedia is here used only as an illustration, an exemplar of a general problem. In the world of computing, Wikipedia is just a vivid and expanded demonstration of the truth that “permit all” is usually followed by “delete all” (or, as Unix buffs say: chmod 777 usually comes before rm -r -f). In the world of culture and human anthropology, which I have an inordinate interest in, Wikipedia is an illustration of the tabula rasa (blank slate) fallacy.

Wikipedia is just another in a slew of anarchist ideas—the idea of “a smoothly-functioning anarchy” (the words of Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Project), the idea of “a self-policing system”, the idea of “a consensus-driven community”, the idea of “the dictatorship of the proletariat”, and you get the drift. It doesn’t matter if Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is an anarchist or not; the idea can be traced to that pedigree, even if Wales developed it independently. Whether intentionally or not, Wikipedia has its place in the long list of enterprises in which the creator or founder really plays God, making an experiment whose pillar is creation from scratch—the aforementioned tabula rasa. A very interesting fact, for the Bible describes how God Himself, because of the free will and the passions He has given humans, voices His total rejection of the concept of tabula rasa.

Successful art is usually deemed as such because it stands the test of time. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is relatively recent (1954), but its ideas are timeless, and its core idea (as far as I gather) is that Biblical idea that tabula rasa utopianism is a grave error. A bunch of little kids is stranded on an island paradise: they have a goal (returning to civilization), they have their needs provided (the fruits of the trees on that island), and they have minimal sources of friction (no girls to fight over, for example). It is really a clean slate, and by rights it ought to function smoothly. Yet little time passes before they partake of the same afflictions of all other societies: factionalism (the Merrydew schism), murder and—finally—the burning of the trees, the source of their sustenance. The beast is indeed within those kids, no matter how favorable the external conditions have been from the start.

Wikipedia’s lack of professionalism is the hot topic, the popular point of discussion; under the radar, however, slips the issue of what Wikipedia was conceived to be as opposed to what it has become. Bureaucrats, administrators, piles upon piles of rules, vital actions bogged down by procedure, pages put under protection or semi-protection—a complex, elaborate, monstrous, labyrinthine system that belies the entire initial concept. Yes, you don’t need to tell me: those changes were necessitated by the circumstances. No argument here. But this is proof of the fallacious nature of tabula rasa utopianism. This is the same, exact same idea as in Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and in its (conscious or unconscious) source, the Bible, the Word of HaShem.

How many times have we seen that happen? “Such if we do, heaven will be created on earth”, only to prove dismal at best, forcing the founders to take a turn diametrically opposed to their original vision. The “smoothly-functioning anarchy” envisioned by Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond is most popularly demonstrated by the Linux kernel, but the Linux kernel is free of the schisms and bureaucratic creep that have plagued other open-source projects because it is under the rule of a dictator (Linus Torvalds), even if that dictator is semi-jokingly called a benevolent one. The Marxist experiment, spawning one of the cruelest dictatorships in history (Stalin’s, long may he roast in hell, amen) and 100,000,000 deaths in its wake, was another attempt to solve humanity’s problem by creating from scratch, as if human beings were program source code to be cleaned by doing a complete rewrite.

Or religious reforms. Many an attempt at religious reform aims to clean up the religion from what are considered sinful accretions, such as commercialism, ritualism, legalism and getting entwined with the state, only to become a religion in its own right, moreover usually succumbing to the same accretions that the reformer-founders aimed to dispose of. For example, the Jewish reformer who is described to have railed against the commercialism near the Temple, turning the stalls, spawned a religion in which, a few centuries afterward, many of the men of cloth engaged in their own forms of crass commercialism (such as the sale of relics). Similarly, Protestantism had the goal of “ridding the religion of all the priestcraft, of the priests and popes telling people how to read the Bible”, but ministers and reverends fill the niche quite nicely. The Muslims pride themselves of belonging to a religion without priests, to contrast with the “Jewish and Christian corruptions”; true, Islam has no priests, but, once again, it has a class that fills that hole well. Buddhism may have started as a rebellion against the excesses and empty piety of the Hindu Brahmins; Buddhist functionaries can compete with the best (worst) of those. Sikhism was meant to purify religion of empty ritual, focusing instead on “God’s True Name”; there is no shortage of ritual that has accumulated there over time. And finally, scientific rationalism aimed to purge humanity of all the “primitive superstitions born of unreason”, all the religions, all beliefs in the supernatural; secular religions quickly took to fill the void, and, on the way, drenched the world in blood in the course of the 20th century.

All this consistent track record, of the failure of tabula rasa experiments, could have been avoided, had mankind listened to what God has to say on the matter. The Bible lists these occurrences from start to finish, and even if some parts of it are not taken literally, the lesson is a stupefying one. Adam and Eve; the post-Flood generation that built the Tower of Babel; and then the periodical fall into transgression by the one nation that HaShem had consecrated for His purposes, the Israelites. A clean slate, followed by a fall into weak human lapses. Golding set out the idea in another form, but it’s God’s lesson unto us anyway you put it.

These falls into transgression from an initial pure state—are they oversights on God’s part, as the unbelievers say? Perish the thought. It is not but our Creator drumming the truths of our nature—and He knows best, for He is the manufacturer—into our thick skulls. God says (Genesis 6:5):

And the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

And he also says (Genesis 8:21):

For the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth. (&c)

Now the Jewish view differs from the Christian one, in that the latter says humans are incapable of standing up to their evil inclination while the former says they are (based on HaShem’s words to Cain, in Genesis 4:7: “[…] But thou mayest rule over it”). But the view that humans are inclined toward evil is shared by the two religions, because the Bible (in the above two passages, for example) is absolutely clear about this. God’s word brings the rational explanation to the phenomenon that every eye—every eye not letting the predetermined opposite doctrine get in its way, that is—can see. Every eye can observe the scrapping of tots with each other at kindergarten: the selfishness, the vindictiveness, the cruelty. And all of this, unlearned. Did the parents teach them to be that way? No, most chances are that the parents, when they see it, react in shock and try to do something to counter it. Untaught to be evil. Unimparted propensity for bad behavior. Goodness has to be taught to the child, and fought for throughout all his life; badness comes naturally.

Do you now realize the secret behind the tabula rasa fallacy? God tells us: there is no such thing. There is no clean slate. There is no escape, not even an island paradise setting as in Golding’s book! Those kids had the benefit of an external clean slate, yes, but internally they started with the same fully-occupied slate as every human being—the basic fact of human nature, the inclination of human beings toward wrongdoing. Judaism says it can be overcome, through effort—but Judaism rejects the idea that good and thoughtful planning by human beings can guarantee the neutralization of that basic evil. It’s not ours to create humans anew; God has the first, last and only say in that matter.

So many times, before I got religion, I looked at passages in the Torah and said, “This is open to abuse!” I was reading it with the critical eye of a hippified anarchist, regarding it as a book authored by humans for furthering their tyranny over the masses. “This is for giving an unlimited supply of food to the priests! How convenient”, I said. “This passage means the rabbis have unlimited power over the common man”, I said. But now I see, that even if the spirit of those thoughts still has a grain of truth in it—there is free will for everyone to abuse his power, after all—I know that such attempts at correction as humans (particularly leftists like I was then) have undertaken have never led to the desired effect, to the utopia hoped for.

The fact is there is no human guarantee in anything. From the 18th century, scientific rationalists envisioned a world in which science and reason provided the solution to most (if not all) of humanity’s problems. Quite apart from the world wars caused by non-religious ideologies, the fact is technological advances have brought a mixture of blessings and curses, which add up to the same situation as humanity has always been. Courses on “success in business”, rationally-sounding though they are tailored to be, are a mass of superstitious nonsense that would make any Middle Ager proud. Just as you can take all the steps detailed in a book by Bill Gates or Donald Trump telling you how they got rich, but to no avail, there is no reason why scientific rationalism should improve the human condition. And the various medical suggestions given for evading the mortal diseases of our time (HaShem guard us and save us) can only improve statistical probability, which is no help if genetics or some other unexpected thing gets in the way (example: a young, healthy sportsman dying of a heart attack in the middle of a game, HaShem guard us).

Therefore there is no good word except HaShem’s mitzvah from last week’s Torah portion (Deuteronomy 18:13):

Thou shalt be whole-hearted with the LORD thy God.

Tamim: whole-hearted, complete, childlike in trust. Working with what He created, not trying to get around it through sophisticated attempts at improvement. Recognizing that His creation, because of the very fact of being His creation, is not a blank slate. Not attempting to play God by creating a micro-world or micro-humanity, but building on what He created. Asher bara E-lohim la’asot (Genesis 2:3): literally “Which God created to do”, and our sages of blessed memory say of it: He created it for humans to build on it. Not for humans to dispute it and try their own hand at creation. If you have any doubts about the error of that, just look at the track record.

Shabbat Shalom!

Desert, but no Manna

It is one of the countless examples of the hypocrisy of Cultural Marxism, that it can lump Judaism, Christianity and Islam together in “primitive backwardness, Abrahamic morality and divinely-ordered atrocity”, but then turn an admiring eye to the one religion that has not been tempered by any form of Enlightenment, the one religion whose adherents are overwhelmingly in the mindset of an age which in the Western world is now deemed to be all but a historical curiosity. I find no more interesting an endeavor than unraveling the system that makes such seeming doublethink possible.

I have seen the phrase, “Desert Monotheism” used in the conflation of Biblical and Koranic religion. The Cultural Marxists say it refers to the origins of both: the giving of Torah at the foot of the mountain in the middle of the Sinai Desert, and, l’havdil (“to distinguish”), the alleged revelation of the Koran to Mohammed in a cave in the middle of the Arabian Desert. To frame both religious traditions as desert monotheisms because of a single event is already something to be suspected of superficiality; in truth, the Marxists do not believe in it themselves, but use it as their tu quoque (“You too”) club, whenever someone points the violence of Islam from the Koran. If they believed in it, they wouldn’t accord Islam a special status. Is it a cynical ploy? Is it born of fear, fear of the one religion whose followers are not reluctant to wreak revenge for any perceived slight to their feelings? Or is there something real, inner and spiritual about this exception-making? My attempted answer cannot cover all of them, and I am sure there are a few of them who parrot words without inner conviction, but my experience with the modern Left tells me there must be some inward convergence, otherwise there would not be such zeal and fervor in the Left/Islam alliance as we see today. And I believe the phrase, “Desert Monotheism” is where it begins and ends.

As with many foundations underlying the Left/Islam alliance, the “Desert Monotheism” grouping of Biblical and Koranic traditions is a lie. The role and perception of the desert in the Biblical tradition is far different from that in the Koran. If cultural truth were allowed to have a say in naming names, then only Islam would be called a desert monotheism. Only Islam was born in the desert, is culturally bound to it and brings it along to every place it comes. Judaism was not born in the desert, despite the location of its founding event, and is not culturally tied to it. Christianity, having the Greco-Roman world as its background, is even less so. In the Biblical tradition, the desert occupies a place in the sidelines and is a tool in HaShem’s hands; in the Koranic tradition, the desert is the whole setting, the stage on which the entire drama takes place, and without which the religion cannot be fully understood.

The founding narrative of the Jewish nation is based on three points in a line:

• Egypt: the gilded cage to be escaped.
• The Sinai Desert: the necessary route to take in order to reach the goal.
• The Land of Israel: the goal, the hard-won but spiritually unique destination.

Egypt, the rich land, whose generosity is guaranteed by the regular flooding of the Nile, is a gilded cage, both spiritually and (later, and also symbolized by that) physically. Because of the confidence in the Nile, the Egyptians’ eyes had no need of being raised upward in beseeching of the divine, with the result that they created their deities in such images that even the Greeks and the Romans, masters of creating the divine in human image, were shocked. Our sages of blessed memory tell us how defiled Egypt was, how filthy with dark spiritual practices, like sorcery, divination, necromancy and sexual immorality. After generations of living on the fat of the land, the time came for the Israelites to pay up, with the currency of physical slavery—real, but also a symbol for the high price paid by those who are lost in their estrangement from HaShem, slavery of the worst kind.

The reality behind the most famous tourism site in the world is necromancy.

To an outside observer, the Land of Israel would not look as rich as Egypt; in our day, the joke about Moses meaning to bring the Israelites to Canada, but saying, “Canaan” instead because of his stutter, comes to mind. But they err that compare Egypt and the Land of Israel through physical eyes alone. The Land of Israel has the vast, incomparable bounty and advantage over Egypt—over any other land in the world—in that it is under the direct rule of HaShem. It can produce ample physical bounty—a land flowing with milk and honey—but it does so in direct proportion to the spiritual rectitude of its inhabitants. The Torah warns us of this so many times: walk with HaShem and you will prosper in the Land of Israel; disobey (God guard us), and the Land of Israel will spew you out. The bounty of the Land of Israel cannot be measured, because it is a spiritual one.

The focus of Jewish hopes for generations, and why they desire no other land than the Land of Israel.

Between Egypt and the Land of Israel is the Sinai Desert. No other way to get from Egypt to the Land of Israel by land. The desert is an ambivalent place, a place full of doubt: physical hardship that, on the one hand, prepares one for an existence of trusting in HaShem, but, on the other, is the opposite of both Egypt and the Land of Israel as regards permanence. Nowhere is this more illustrated than by the Tabernacle, which was dismantled and rebuilt each day, while the Temple in Jerusalem was a permanent building.

We received the Torah there, but it was not the destination.

The Biblical story of the Israelites’ passing through the desert cannot be told without reference to the manna, the bread given from above. Our forefathers did not desire to adopt Bedouin ways; when they sensed the hardship of desert life, all the more so after Egypt, they cried out to HaShem. He answered them, and sustained them all the years with food from above. It was another symbol of the impermanence of the desert: since one cannot live on miracles forever, it is clear that the manna was only a temporary measure, until the arrival at the Land of Israel. The desert was where we received the Torah, but the Torah given at Sinai contains such mitzvot as the Sabbatical Year (one in seven years of ceasing to work the fields), which cannot apply to the desert. And the desert was also a punishment: for believing the lies that the Ten Spies uttered about the Land of Israel, the entire generation was condemned to roam the desert until dying out. All in all, the desert was a necessary evil, the place of Israel’s birth-pangs. The Biblical narrative is conclusive: it is not HaShem’s requirement for mankind to be desert-dwellers in order to be spiritually fulfilled. The desert was preparation for a life of trusting in Him, but the life itself, a life of completeness through carrying all His 613 mitzvot, was to take place in inhabited land, in the Land of Israel.

Islam sprang out from a totally different setting.

Islam emerged in the Arabian Desert, in the area of two oases surrounded by uninhabited desert. The desert was not merely a transition between Mecca and Medina; those two cities were enveloped by it, and served as a life-belt from it. The contrast was not between a rich but defiled land and a rich and sacred land, with a desert separating them, but between desert and non-desert: between the sanctuary and life hanging upon a thread. The Arabian desert-dwellers would come to those fertile points to set their livestock to graze—another important point. Whereas Egypt was marked by lethargy, born of the consistent flooding of the Nile, Arab Bedouin existence was marked by a life dependent on taking what one had not toiled for.

Bedouin existence was, spiritually, a little better than that of Egypt, in that the circumstances forced the desert nomads to raise their eyes upward; but they did not raise their eyes in expectation of manna, they raised them for a reprieve from the fate of next day or month or year. For the Israelites, desert life was a transition, and continuous roaming of the desert was a punishment; for the Bedouins, desert life was their main existence, punctuated only by forays into fertile fields worked by others. The Bible is centered on the arrival at the Promised Land; but for the Arab Bedouin, in contrast, there is no Promised Land, there is only an oasis for refueling, a race to reach there before dying of thirst.

The tenuous existence in the desert shaped the whole worldview of the Bedouins, and consequently of the religion of Islam.

The Koran advertises itself repeatedly as a “clear guidance”. The term for that, huda, according to Malise Ruthven’s Islam and the World, means “desert guide, the tribesman on whose navigation skills the tribe depends in order to reach the oasis”. The word “shariah” itself means, “the way to water”. Islam views mankind’s entire existence as a roaming in the desert, with Allah being the only reliable guide to the oasis. Desert life being such a stark struggle between life and death, it is no wonder that Islam’s afterlife paradise is described in the most lurid of physical terms. Jewish commentators on Islam have long faulted the religion for promising its adherents a reward that can be had in this life. It is only natural for adherents of a Biblical worldview to look down upon that, just as it is natural for a religion born in the harsh world of the desert to promise rewards of this kind. The Biblical worldview promises the follower that God will take care of his physical needs if he does His will, leaving him with the leisure and desire to seek out God Himself, His spiritual splendor; in contrast, the Koranic worldview, desert born, has the physical promises running over, splashing out from the cup of this life onto the afterlife. “A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity”, said Winston Churchill on Islam, more than a century ago.

The desert nomad sustains himself by punctuated forays into fertile lands; he sets his livestock upon fields tilled by others. This modus vivendi has been carried over to Islam and its adherents to this day: appropriation of the accomplishments of others, both physical and cultural, has been the hallmark of the Islamic colonialists from the 7th century to our times, each appropriation often followed by a fraudulent claim to original ownership. The golden cow-udder standing on top of the ruins of the Temple in Jerusalem is the most prominent example of this, along with the usurpation of the Jewish ownership of the Land of Israel by means of the Fakestinian Nation narrative.

And it is an object of admiration for many Cultural Marxists worldwide.

Oh, the desert! Pristine land, unsullied by the hands of capitalism, industrialism, commercialism and other forms of man-made modifications of the original state! Oh, the Bedouins! Free as the air, authentic, sprung from the soil, untouched by the artificial mannerisms of townspeople! Oh, all that we had but have lost! All the things we once were (according to the Primitivist narrative, conceived by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Father of All Hippies) and would wish to have once again! Can we have them? Can we turn the clock back? Maybe, maybe not, but if not, at least we can support the Bedouins in their moves against that hated Western, Bible-based civilization, use them as proxy avengers of our wrath.

Those Cultural Marxists understand what eludes many scholars: the primitivist affinity between Marxism and Islam. Marxism longs for return to a mythical world “Before Capitalism”; the Bedouin nomad looks like an authentic remnant of that long-lost paradisical age; therefore the alliance between the Marxist primitivists and the active representatives of Bedouin life, the Muslims, is a natural and spiritual one.

It is also natural because Marxism is built upon legalizing theft. Communist regimes had their upper class and their vast stratum of poor, downtrodden people, just as—usually far worse than—did the hated capitalist countries of the world, but the upper class justified it as “taking from the rich in order to give to the poor”, and with the mindset, both internalized and externally voiced, that the wealth never belonged to the original owners in the first place (“Property is theft”). As today both Venezuela and Zimbabwe, once rich countries reduced to financial ruin under their Marxist dictators, show, the micromanaged economies espoused by the Far Left are total failures at production; therefore, the only recourse for those countries, or for their rulers, is to live off the work of others. Marxist robber, meet the Bedouin setting his livestock to graze on another’s field—or the Bedouin’s representative on the modern geopolitical stage, the Muslim.

This World War is between those who wish to desertify the whole world and those who believe in the Promised Land, in eating the fruit of one’s labors (Psalms 128:2); between those who believe mankind’s pristine existence is a canonized goal, and those who believe the world was meant to be worked, those who believe the Garden of Eden is not the initial state but the result of mankind’s toil (Genesis 2:15); and between those who are trapped in viewing prosperity as either a brief respite from the harsh day-to-day reality (an oasis in the desert) or a fantastic, patently unrealistic cornucopia (a lustful carnal paradise), and those who set their eyes onto bountiful, yet moderate and spiritually conducive, prosperity.

This war begins with the idea of how the world should be, and there it also ends.

The Poor of Your City

Long before the NY Times, the BBC and Haaretz, there were the geographic magazines.

Starting from an issue I got as a birthday present, I’ve been a consistent reader of geographic magazines, such as the local Masa Acher and international ones like National Geographic. When I started reading them, Al Gore had not yet invented the Internet (just kidding—I meant to say this was before the popularization of the ’Net in the early 1990’s), so these were truly my first window onto the large world. Fascinating reads, all of them: chock-full of descriptions, narrations, background stories and, best of all, photos. Intriguing cultural customs from all over the world. Many instances of shattering misconceptions as to what was universal throughout humanity and what was not.

Formation of political opinions was far off—this little kid was still at the stage of believing everything his parents said. And yet, the more I read those magazines, the more I found something disturbing.

One thing adults tend to overlook in little children is the fact that, because of their innocence, they are the most rigorous comparers of the ideal with the reality. I was sold on the idea that geographic magazines were unvarnished descriptions of other places and all that is in them. I thought, in simplicity: the writer would go to the destination, take notes and photographs, return to his offices, prepare the article, and that would be what every reader would see. Only a child could think like that, of course. How educating, then, howbeit in a shocking way, to find otherwise.

More and more as I read, as I became aware of it, I found out a proliferation of statements which, I realized, were not descriptions but opinions. They were usually integrated seamlessly into the descriptive whole, but the more I thought about it, the less I could mistake it: those were opinions. Not merely reports of the locals’ sentiments, which were OK, but interjections by the writers themselves. I did not yet have a good eye for the themes, which I do now, but I did not have to recognize themes in order to know that the subtle hints of pre-colonial bliss, of Western blame and of the curse of mechanization were opinions and not descriptions. I did not yet know the exact system behind an article describing life in traditional villages in Ladakh as a good model contrasting with the “soullessness, cheapness and despair” of modern life in the West, but I did not have to know that—even for a little kid, it was crystal-clear that the message here was educational, not informational. It was all clothed in the semblance of telling of exotic things, as if in the tradition of Marco Polo, yet it had an agenda.

Long, long before our Mainstream Media started giving us our daily dose of self-skepticism, nay, self-flagellation, in the mantle of reporting, reporters of the Other had been doing that for thousands of years. Already in Herodotus one finds criticism of his own society inserted into his descriptions of other peoples. Tacitus’ Germania contains a wealth of information on the Germanic tribes that is true and has been verified, yet the opportunities which he took to use his work as criticism of contemporary Roman society necessitate caution. And I need hardly mention Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, Diderot’s descriptions of exotic tribes and the rest of the offerings of Enlightenment writers—all social criticisms presented as descriptions of the Other. Bias and agenda in the form of unbiased description.

Those were in the days when the media was open about its biases. The media has never been unbiased, but the difference is that in our times it takes after the geographic magazines, impressing the readers with the cloven hoofs of neutral-sounding language, while the inside, the spirit, the facts that a trained eye could see, was deep and unrepentant bias. Today, the more neutral-sounding the name of an organization is, the better its chances of being an organization with a single-minded agenda. Take the website Information Clearing House. Such an innocuous name, is it not? Judging by the name, it sounds like a repository of plain facts, much like a telephone book. But in truth, that site is a conspiracy theory website, one of the wackiest and most uninhibited on the ’Net.

Why did it begin that way? How did covert bias, and self-flagellating bias at that, creep through what was supposed to be mere reports of faraway places? What is it about the Other that attracts people, in such a way that it dominates today’s political discourse? How have we reached this state in which it is possible to reduce all the problems in the world to “racism” and “xenophobia”? How have we come to a world where the cycles of victimization, guilt and reparations now trap all discussions of policy, even to the detriment of national security?

I said geographic magazines were my first window to the world. For those who have not found answers to the problems besetting their societies, whether out of ignorance or by rejection of traditional answers, the window to the world is their beacon of hope. They crave the global view of humanity because it might provide them with answers. The parochial view, they think, cannot provide answers, because of the very fact that it is parochial, while a larger view of humanity could inform us of human universals, the key to answering the human problem. Utopianism and cosmopolitanism often go hand in hand, and in the past century have done so spectacularly, with more to come for sure.

The window to the world has grown ever wider. When I started reading geographic magazines, the old method of word-of-mouth was still the best way to rally people; a few years afterward, the entire globe was connected by computer-to-computer interaction. With the popularization of the Internet in the early 1990’s, the famed (and worn-out phrase) Global Village was born. There could no longer be a situation in which humans no longer cared for the plight of other humans elsewhere—or so it was believed, even when events like the Rwanda Genocide of 1994 showed otherwise.

A big mistake. A mistake identical in cause, even if not equal in victims, to the mistake of Communism. The mistake of assuming the malleability of human nature.

Olam chesed yibaneh—the world is built by charity (Psalms 89:3)

The sages of Judaism say: “Aniyei irkha kodmim”, meaning, “The poor of your city precede”. It is in the framework of discussing the duty of giving to charity, but it touches human nature deeply. It is both descriptive and prescriptive. And it is more relevant than it ever was.

Geographic magazines, then media outlets, and now the Internet have supposedly brought humans closer, thus increasing the awareness of human commonalities and shared troubles, thus leading to greater empathy in the world. Or have they? No. Not by a long shot.

Contributions to Live Aid or Live Earth concerts are a good way to assuage one’s guilt over enjoying life while others are struggling with the necessities, but the things a particular human involves himself—really involves himself—with are the same as they have always been: the causes that are close to his heart. To his heart, not to his sight on the computer monitor. Of those who say, “All humans are my brothers and sisters”, how many act it? To which the reply will inevitably be a list of good deeds and philanthropic activities, but that misses the point: people who claim empathy for all humans don’t have that. Oh, they do have empathy—I didn’t say they didn’t—but their empathy is limited to a set of concentric circles. Greatest empathy to friends and family, then to people they are familiar with, then to those of the neighborhood, then the town, and so on. And whenever you find they have empathy to those faraway, then on further investigation you always discover that this is because those people faraway have some affinity, some emotional similarity, with the empathizer.

Or take activism for animals as another example. How much of it is for the welfare of dogs, cats, mice, horses and monkeys, and how much for flies, mosquitoes, fish and worms? Is it a coincidence that human empathy for animals is nearly always reserved to those animals that share important features with humans, foremostly the ability to show pain and other emotions? No, there is none of the fabled “Empathy toward all creatures, born of the feeling of Being One With The Universe” here; it is all “Like attracts like”, the tendency of humans to open their hearts to what those hearts regard as kindred, while—by necessity—closing their hearts to what is remote. Remote, in a sense that all the geographic magazines, media outlets and websites cannot counter.

How many of the “Free Palestine!” crowd have exhibited even a quarter of their zeal for the cause of Tibet, or for righting the (true) wrong of the setting up of an Islamic state on historically Hindu lands (Pakistan)? They will all say, of Darfur, “Yes, I agree, we must do something”, but where is the zeal? Giving to charity can easily be perfunctory; zeal, in contrast, bespeaks something inward. The anti-Zionists do not care much for the “Palestinians”, for they did not make the tiniest squeak when “Palestinian” refugees were forcefully expelled by the Kuwaitis after their liberation from Saddam, or more recently the Naher al Bared massacre in Lebanon. The causes of Iraq and “Palestine” resonate only because of some affinity with the activists’ own purposes. Just as my empathy with the victims of Islamic terrorism in Southern Thailand (and elsewhere) can only be explained by the affinity of the situation in Israel. Like attracts like.

The mythical Global Village is nothing but conceptual smoke and mirrors; in reality, we are as parochial as ever, choosing even our worldwide interests according to our very, very local leanings. More: the towering Marxist catchphrase, “We are all Citizens of the World”, has proved to be bankrupt by none less than the sons and daughters of pluralistic education themselves.

You are Citizens of the World? Really? Then why do you try to find your identity? Why do you play Indian? Why do you seek out a shaman from the Wannabi Tribe, in order that he may initiate you into the mysteries of the Smelihipi Tribe? Why does Abe Cohen, a Jew brought up on the idea that Jewish tribalism is an outdated, even dangerous, concept, seek out the tribal knowledge of a Hawaiian Kahuna, after having been indoctrinated against his own tribal heritage of the crown of kehunah (priesthood)? Why do Citizens of the World so often exchange the “elitist, Eurocentric” (et cetera) philosophy of Greece and Rome with the philosophy of India and China? (Not that that’s bad, but I’m pointing out the inconsistency here.) Why is there such a tendency for activists against white racism to excuse, even condone, anti-white racism? Why are those that issue the strongest condemnations of “dualistic divisions”, calling for the end of all distinctions as the only way of bringing world peace, so keen on propping up divisions themselves (support for the “Palestinian” and “Iraqi” nations, to name just one example)? Because, when you think about it, being a “Citizen of the World” is a state that is contrary to human nature. Humans cannot feel all-embracing empathy toward the whole world; their empathy, as I said, is a set of concentric circles.

Some rootless kids embrace Trustafarianism, others wear a keffiyeh.

Geographic magazines pioneered the demonstration of human diversity. Diversity has become such a potent watchword today, to the effect that it can be invoked to shut down sane initiatives against threats of terrorism. But diversity, like empathy, is not absolute. It could be absolute only if every human were his own group—his own ethnicity, his own religion, his own culture, and so on. There is no diversity in humanity except the diversity of groups, and that cannot exist without—oh, the horror—sameness within each group. Sameness, or more accurately a sufficient amount of affinity between the members. “Affinity” again. That dreaded, reviled parochiality once more.

There is no “near” for humans except “near and dear”—that is human nature, and no window to the world can change that. It is not possible for the state to replace the family, hence the need for repression whenever an attempt to do that has been made. A bureaucrat can never be a true helper, even if he does do his job of giving the applicant the desired government handout, for in most cases he does not know the applicant. The wider the circle becomes, the farther it is from having your interests in mind. If the state is uncaring to the individual due to its distance from his life, then the superstate is sevenfold so. The European Union and the Islamic Caliphate cannot be anything other than monsters of bureaucracy or repression or both.

“The poor of your city precede” is not a call for apathetic withdrawal into one’s tiny shell—far from it, it is the only way you can realize those human traits you have been raised to cherish so much. Charity begins at home because that is where charity really flows from an inward source—love, empathy and the “up close and personal” angle that no geographic magazine can give you. The farther causes are built on top of that, and not the other way round. In our day and age more than ever, redemption is brought to the world by local efforts, made enthusiastically therefore thoroughly, widening and widening, until the feeling of “all in the same boat” forms the needed cohesion. In this period of government betrayal, this is the only way. It is the only way because it is authentic, while all-embracing cosmopolitanism is fake.

If there is just one thing for which I am grateful to the geographic magazines for, it is this: the realization that happiness in our age lies in turning away from being a global tourist and reporter, to finding one’s particular heritage and local existence—turning into one of the groups which a rootless, world-citizen geographic magazine reporter would describe in one of the issues of his magazine.

“Be strong, be strong, and we will be strengthened”.

Seder Olam

“Out with the family!”, said the revolutionaries.
“We don’t need need that old-fashioned establishment
That unenlightened men did create.”
So in the revolutionaries’ new utopia
Was born a new, very extended family—the state.

“Out with patriarchy!”, said the radical feminists.
“Women must do away with this tool of male rule,
Forged for the control of men over each woman’s life.”
So in the rad-feminists’ new utopia
Women were liberated, doing the work of both husband and wife.

“Out with class distinctions!”, said the Marxists.
“Exploitation by the rich is the source of all woe.”
So in the Leninspired new utopia
A thin stratum of fat cats took post, and were called the Politbüro.

“Out with religion!”, said the hardcore atheists.
“Religion is the source of all bloodshed and wars,
Undebatable, the desire of despots all.”
So in the fanatical secularists’ new utopia,
Secular religions, such as earth-worship, held people in thrall.

“Out with nationalism!”, said the internationalists.
“Mankind’s division into nations should be finished,
For it does all enmity between humans hatch.”
So in the internationalists’ new utopia,
Support was pledged for new “indigenous peoples”
Created by colonials of old from scratch.

“Out with fascism!”, said the Liberals.
“Creeping authoritarianism is the plague of our time,
Demanding constant vigilance for every hole in the dam.”
So in the Liberal-Leftists’ new utopia,
All aid and comfort was given to fascistic Islam.

“Out with the old, in the new!”, said the Progressives.
“Change is inevitable, you cannot that path abort.”
So in the Progressives’ new utopia,
Life returned to be what it once was:
Solitary, nasty, brutish and short.

“A book of myths, irrelevant in our age”, so we were told.
But to HaShem is the last word:
Truth eternal ceases not being so by being old.
To believe in a literal Adam and Eve there is no need;
But of the changeless verities of human nature one should ever take heed.
There is no escape! Every attempt to rebel has only led to different forms of the same.
So come and let us reason together, and hear the word of His Holy Name.

(“Seder Olam” is Hebrew for “Order of the World”.)

Racist Inheritance vs. Written Inheritance

No, I have not retreated to living under a rock for the past weeks. I’ve been reading LGF, Gates of Vienna, Jihad Watch and the rest on the one hand, and Daily Kos, CounterPunch and Common Dreams on the other, just as before; but whereas previously the reading of the enemy’s writings would provoke some anger in me and then a lengthy refutation, nowadays I find they provoke only rage. The Daily Kos diaries, the CounterPunch screeds, all make my blood boil, boil at the injustice of obsessively criticizing the one state that is not deserving of such criticisms, and when I try to write something (as I did twice the last period), I am consumed by rage, and the result is a cursefest which is a far cry from the intellectually argued posts thus far.

I decided to wait until some opportunity knocked, until there emerged a new (or more accurately “relatively unexplored”) argument to address or to make. Such a one has finally come now. The rage is still there, and I don’t think I’ll be able to completely exclude it from the post, but the new material is a good starting point for a post that less reflects the fury I feel.

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The Dune series of science fiction books by Frank Herbert has again provided me with food for thought. It is not the particular events but the mere concept of the series that has fascinated me from the start, and filled me with great admiration from the writer. I like to contrast Dune with its contemporary 2001: A Space Odissey, by Arthur Clarke (novel) and Stanley Kubrick (film version, with which most are familiar). To my mind, 2001 strikes me as a cheap, common exercise in extrapolation much like Back To The Future II, while the setting of Dune is derived from the sane, rational view that human nature isn’t, barring miraculous intervention, likely to change, not soon, and not in 10,000 years either.

I wish to engage in literary analysis and comparison first.

2001 tries to depict life, politics and technology in that year, and flunks on all three counts: it assumes off-world colonization; it assumes the existence of the Soviet Union; and it assumes the success of Artificial Intelligence. In all three fields, the error is that of extrapolation, born of the belief in inevitable progress.

“One small step for me, and a giant leap for mankind”, said Neil Armstrong when he set foot on the moon. But was it really a giant leap for mankind? I think not. That event in 1969 may be a memorable one for those who lived to experience it, but it soon enough entered the domain of trivia. “1st century CE: Roman Emperor Caligula makes his horse a senator”, “11th century: King Canute stands before the tide in an attempt to end the flattery of his courtiers”, “1969: Neil Armstrong is the first human to set foot on the moon”. Nice to know, but in the real world, nothing changed: humans are still humans, despite all the vain (not to mention bloody) endeavors of the Progressives to engineer them into something new. The drive toward space exploration today is at an all-time low, there being much more pressing concerns here on earth, and no Soviet Union to spur the United States of America into a Space Race.

The Soviet Union. Before 1991, we were all sure it had a long, long time to stay. Sure, in the 1980’s we could see the Eastern Bloc collapse state after state, but the assumption still was that this was only a respite on the part of the USSR to gain momentum, and then the repeats of 1956 Hungary and 1968 Czechoslovakia would follow. The demise of Soviet Russia was a shock to all in 1991 (although, it is often said today that Russia under Putin is the successor of what was before, just not Communist in name).

Clarke and Kubrick assumed the existence of the Soviet Union in 2001 and were wrong. As a perfect match to that failed prediction, they failed to foresee 2001 as the year in which the opening shot for the continuation of the 1,400 year long war between Islam and the non-Muslim world would be fired. A year in which man is supposed to have already colonized the moon, and you suggest it would be remembered as the year in which religious believers would fly passenger planes into office buildings?! How medieval of you! But that’s what happened in fact, and the fallacy of historical scorn (or, in the words of C S Lewis, “chronological snobbery”) is the pitfall where 2001 fell while Dune masterfully circled around it.

Lastly, the error of extrapolation is to be found in technology: the famed HAL, the computer programmed to have human-like intelligence. Artificial Intelligence is a dream dating from the early days of computing, from the 1950’s, when computers were still vacuum-tubed monsters filling whole rooms. It has inspired a load of movies on the theme of the slave that rebels against his master and ousts him, such as The Matrix and Terminator series, to name a few. The best and brightest minds devoted themselves to the pursuit of AI, of making computers exhibit human-like intelligence. Even dedicated programming languages (such as LISP) were invented for that purpose.

Until John Searle’s seminal article of 1980, the assumption had always been the inadequacy of hardware; AI is not succeeding, said its proponents, because our sights are still much too high for the hardware we have in possession. They trusted, then, in Moore’s law (processor power doubling every 18 months, with slight modifications to the rule for other types of hardware) to provide them with the hardware needed to surmount the challenges of AI. As we can see, we now have, on each of our desktops, hardware that makes the original Cray I comparable to the Apple II, and the hardware in possession of research faculties is staggering in computing power. Yet we are no closer to the realization of AI than we were in the 1960’s. How can that be?

Searle’s article, the Chinese Room article, suggests rethinking the problem: it is not hardware but a systemic limitation that prevents HAL from becoming a reality. He framed it as a parable: a man in a room, with the most explicit and detailed instructions for translating Chinese into English; he receives Chinese text from one opening, translates it according to the rules, and then hands out the translation from the other opening. As far as the result seems, the customers of Chinese–English translations think he knows Chinese, English and the art of translation perfectly; in reality, the man does nothing but follow rules, and he knowns no more Chinese than a donkey can evaluate the cholesterol quotient of fruit soup. Computers execute instructions, and nothing more; even the most elaborate “neural networks” have no intelligence, no self-awareness, none of that which separates man from machine, no matter how much the hardware is improved. One could be satisfied with inserting a few coins into a vending machine and getting the desired drink, but if said vending machine neglects to give him the change (at best), then he could not do what he would do with a human vendor—discuss the matter.

Deep insights though 2001: A Space Odissey may contain (personally, I think it’s the most boring movie I ever saw), its predictions were consistent flops, of the type of the early technological “visionaries” who predicted that, in the year 2000, computers would no longer weigh hundreds of tonnes and occupy twenty rooms, but instead would weigh just one tonne and occupy just two rooms. Extrapolation is the visionary’s prime pitfall, and 2001 is one of the best examples of that. In contrast, Dune is amazing in its sanity—in its carefulness not to extrapolate, in its assumption that human nature is not easily changed, if at all, and in its view of history as tilts of the pendulum.

The late Frank Herbert assumed space colonization (but that’s OK when you project 10,000 years forward), yet his view of humanity is something “retrograde”: the Imperium is nothing but the medieval Holy Roman Empire updated to a Space Age setting, with feudal lords owning planets as fiefs, a Spacing Guild monopolizing space travel (Venice and Genoa), an all-valuable spice growing on one planet only (comparable to the nutmeg and cloves of Indonesia), troubadours, pervasive religion, and so many more of that which springs to mind when we think about the Middle Ages, the Age of Feudalism, the Age of Faith.

The “Progressives”, from the 18th century freethinkers to the Dawkinses and Harrises of this day, have constantly predicted the demise of religion. Herbert gives their view some room in his series, as “the agnostic Guild members”, who view all religion as a plot to keep the public docile (the Royal Lie Theory of religion, itself an example of unwarranted extrapolation; for it is one thing to point out clergymen fleecing their flock, which no one would deny, but quite another to assume religion was invented for that very purpose), but he places them in the framework of a universe that is mostly religious. Not for Herbert was this “Progressive” idea that religion would die out; he was far too perceptive of human nature to assume that the advances of science and technology could be humanity’s promised Messiah. His view, I hold, is the most rational: I see nothing reasonable in the thought that stone-cold, dry-fact science and technology could address timeless human concerns. Far from disrespecting science and technology, I think this view is the most respectful, for it does not (as does the “Progressive” view) make an idol out of them.

And now, finally, after this literary excursus, I come to the point, to what is more directly related to this blog: the narrator’s religious worldview in Dune.

The various religious worldviews in Dune, including the agnostic (“Royal Lie”) one, are all narrated. But there is, of course, the storyline itself, not attributed to the mind of a character, but belonging to the narrator, at least in that particular story. What religious worldview encloses all the others in the Dune series?

It may be tempting to answer, “None”. Seeing the admirable impartiality of Frank Herbert, his descriptiveness in telling us of the multitude of religious beliefs and unbeliefs throughout the Dune series, it would be tempting to regard him as having been totally detached, empty of thoughts of his own, absolutely neutral. But such a thing is an impossibility.

We are alive and we have minds of our own, therefore we have opinions of our own, however much we try to deny it. I do not believe in such a thing as being “unbiased”; there is always some bias (and therefore my complaint with the Leftstream Media isn’t that they’re biased, but that they have the wrong bias). Far too many times have I seen an “analysis of the Bible from the unbiased, detached, scientific point of view” that is actually biased toward explaining away all the supernatural events in any way possible. To call such an “unbiased opinion” is fraud! Be honest and say your analysis is from an anti-supernaturalist, atheistic point of view, for that is the truth; analyzing the Bible from the atheistic point of view is no more unbiased than doing so from the Islamic point of view. I give Frank Herbert full credit for objectivity in depicting all the religious worldviews of Dune; for neutrality, however, nothing, because it is an impossibility. He definitely did write the narrative of Dune from a religious worldview in its own right. What was that view, in my opinion?

The short version: I think Dune is written from the worldview of paganism. The longer version: I deduce this not from occasional expressions like “gods below”, which are narrated expressions (i.e. uttered by the characters), and anyhow are beset by monotheistic expressions (you can find “Allahu Akbar” in Children of Dune). I deduce this from the narrator’s overarching emphasis on genetic memory.

In truth, I tell you I have found next to nothing that is purely spiritual in the narrative of Dune. That which we can call spiritual experiences, such as visions and prophecies, are strongly anchored to the matter-based, blood-based narrative, a narrative that puts genetic memory at the center. Though the author contrasts between the common, ignorant people, who know nothing beyond the timebound dream following “birth-shock”, and the special, enlightened few who can recall the memories of their ancestors from within their blood, tracing their past to ancestry in Terra 10,000 years back, the difference is not a qualitative one. The former just aren’t “developed” enough; if they were, their “spiritual experiences” would still be derived from the material basis of genetics. That is paganism.

People think paganism is about polytheism, idolatry, nature worship and material sacrifices. That is true, but those are surface manifestations, while there are other, less-known, characteristics lying below the seen and familiar layers. The belief in genetic memory is one of the most pervasive of these: pagan peoples from all over the world have held that a storehouse of memories, from the present to the beginning of the nation, is available in one’s blood. Much of pagan ritual and mysticism is devoted to finding ways to extract those secrets from one’s blood: vision quests, blood-letting, dream catching and necromancy.

I have often wondered about the Torah’s prohibition of talking with the spirits of the dead (King Saul’s last sin). In most cases the explanation has been, “It was a pagan-like practice”. But the animal sacrifices of the Temple could also be said to resemble (repeat: resemble; far be it from me to compare G-d’s holy ordinances to pagan filth) the practices of the idolators, therefore that explanation can at best be a partial one. I think the prohibition of necromancy is not (merely) out of guarding G-d’s people from imitating the ways of the pagans, but is one of the most potent laws given unto them in order to break any spirit of paganism in them. All methods of gaining spiritual knowledge by tapping into the genetic storehouse are a direct affront to G-d’s concept of memory and inheritance.

It is written, “Moses has bequeathed us Law, an inheritance to the community of Jacob”. Gone, gone away is the pagan idea of maintaining the heritage of the nation by shamanically consulting the deceased ancestors; to Israel, the guarantor of the future is the copying of the text and passing it to the children. The importance of writing has been given its highest boost under Judaism—wherever there is the danger of forgetting, things must be written down. Thus, the Oral Law, given to Moses at Sinai as the key to the correct interpretation of the Written Law, was passed down from person to person until the decline of education in Judea under the Romans prompted its writing down (as the Mishnah). Nikkud (points indicating the vowel-sounds) and cantillation marks were added to guard against reading errors (though the Torah Scrolls do not have them, for they are but reading aids). The development of Jewish Law, from the Talmud to the modern-day responsa, has been codified in its entirety. With few exceptions (mostly concerning the services at the Temple; HaShem will fill those gaps when He builds the Temple again, speedily in our days, amen), there are no missing pieces in Jewish religion. Thus, it is not an excuse for a Jew to say, “I wasn’t brought up on the religion, so I can’t practice it”—zil g’mor, said Rabbi Hillel, “Go and study”, for it is all written down, waiting for you as an inheritance.

In contrast, the pagans seldom wrote down their religions, and then only in fragments, certainly not enough for their recovery. Why should they have written their religions down, when they believed that, even if something were lost, it could be regained through connecting to the blood-based library of the Volk? Yet it is not so—it is not factually so. Irish-Americans have had little success in gleaning the religion of their ancestors through necromantic methods, instead having to rely mainly on the writings of that indisputably biased enemy of the Celts, Julius Caesar. Those of Teutonic heritage are more fortunate: they have the Eddas and Sagas to read, recorded by Christian Norseman Snorri Sturlusson in the 13th century. But aside from the fact that even those corpuses are not sufficient in order to restore the religion dumped by Harald Bluetooth, have you noticed that this preservation is by a mode that is not pagan but Biblical? Whatever happened to the usefulness of tapping into the secrets within the coiled coil, Teutonic, Celtic or otherwise? What’s with this… this Biblical reliance on the written word to secure memory? G-d always wins.

Paganism has always been racist to the core. That is evident, because the exclusion of person X from the secrets of nation Y on the grounds of ancestry cannot be called anything other than racism. The mere concept of blood-based or genetic memory is racist without any possibility of dispute. It is therefore the height of irony to see those “anti-racist” Leftists (oh, another example of Leftist hypocrisy! So what else is new?) express such an admiration for paganism, for “pre-Biblical religion”, many of them even being members in the movement to revive those religions (again: in the Sturlusson way rather than in the Witch of En-Dor’s way). They wholeheartedly buy into the racist narrative of Dune that people have not just a material (lands, water etc.) heritage but also a spiritual one by virtue of their blood.

And those same “anti-racists” embrace the Khazaria Hypothesis. I have never ceased to wonder at that: why is it that, the more a person veers to anti-Zionism, the greater his likelihood to give credence to the Khazaria Hypothesis? What does this hypothesis serve? After all, more than 50% of the Jews of Israel are admitted, even by the Muslim enemy, to be of “original Semitic stock”, meaning that more than half of Israeli Jews have a racially legitimate claim on the Land of Israel. But apart from that, as you can see from the previous emphasized phrase, the Khazaria Hypothesis is a racist argument, racist to the core, with no redeeming feature, with no way to excuse it.

I leave the refutation of the Khazaria Hypothesis to others, more competent than me at that field. But I wish to engage in a thought-experiment, assuming that the Khazaria Hypothesis is true. Let us say that the majority of Zionist settlers from 1880 to 1950 were descendants of Khazars. That was 70 years of settling on an almost desolate land and setting up a state against all odds. So many points at which the whole endeavor could have died out: from the catastrophe of malaria in the late 19th and early 20th century, to the attack of five Arab armies in 1948. So many points at which G-d could have pulled the plug on those Khazars’ grandiose project. Yet He did not.

Again assuming the truth of the Khazaria Hypothesis, the meaning of this is that, contrary to those hell-deserving hypocrites who condemn Jewish nationalism (Zionism) as racism, HaShem decided to accept the descendants of the Khazars as an integral part of His Chosen People. This is an anti-racist as you could possibly get! The Khazaria Hypothesis, then, if true, swings back to bite the anti-Zionist racists in their gluteus maximus. As Steven Plaut (HaShem bless him) said: the whole argument falls on the fact that Judaism is not based on race, blood, genetics and any such thing. Contrary, I add, to the paganism that many of those anarcho-primitivists on the Left so idolize.

Now the “Palestinians” have emerged as a nation from scratch, and the fiction has been maintained in order to usurp the Jews’ claim to the Land of Israel, a claim that is not based on the Holocaust, nor on having made the desert bloom, nor even on its being the land of our ancestors (for, as I said, that’s a pagan sort of justification), but on G-d’s decree, in His Torah. The “Palestinians” have no real way to stake that claim, for they lack any essential difference between their brothers in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon or Syria. If they take the Arab narrative, then they can trace themselves to 638 CE, after which their land was designated as only a part of the Province of Syria. If they try to claim themselves the descendants of pre-Israelite inhabitants, supposedly predating Joshua (that great destroyer of pagan idolatry, the man who wrote the Aleinu sealing every Jewish prayer), then they slide into paganism, with all the racism that it entails.

The “Palestinians”, when marshaling their claims to a secular (read: Western Leftist) audience, cite ancestral continuity as the linchpin of their claim to the land. They wind that time machine in ever-growing circles: the idea that each “Palestinian” child is a living embodiment of his grandfather expelled from the land 60 years ago, such that this is the only case in the world of the status of “refugee” transmitted across generations, is just the appetizer. The list of ancestral “Palestinian” grievances has only widened, diving deeper into history: they are the Arabs wronged by Western colonialism from Napoleon’s time; they are the common folk of Roman and Byzantine times demanding national recognition after all these years (how convenient for them to have remembered it just when the Jews had arrived); and finally, they are the Canaanites and other people of the seven “First Nations” that Joshua drove away more than 3,000 years ago. What a feat of historical revisionism and ancestral grievance-mongering we have here!

And for that purpose, everything is kosher. Their embrace of the Khazaria Hypothesis is one of the blatant examples, but their narrative that “Zionism is a European, White Settler Colonialist enterprise” is the overarching one. Comparisons to Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa naturally follow, but they all stem from that racist root, however much that root may masquerade as “anti-racism”: the idea that Whitey has no right to live in either the Orient or the New World. The mirror image of Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden”. Racism cannot be anything other than white, they hold, and colonialism cannot be call such when perpetrated by Muslims in Europe or Mexican illegals on the US border. It could be called “reverse racism”, but that would be part of the problem, because it assumes white anti-black (or anti-brown) racism is the norm; no, it’s racism, just racism, even if it’s the brown or black anti-white kind.

The United Nations has spared no efforts in declaring the rights of indigenous peoples, their rights to both material resources and spiritual ones (language, culture, religion). This is not necessarily a bad thing per se, but this is now, more often than not, used as a club by the “reverse”-racist grievance-mongers. Indigenism may at this stage be nothing but an excuse for “reparations” from the “rich white states”, but it has the potential to be the platform for a vengeful return of the dark world of blood-based preferences, all couched in the Orwellian language of “diversity” and “multiculturalism”, of course.

The future of mankind is in G-d’s Law, His Word that will go forth from Zion—from Jerusalem. The alternative, that of human-authored revenge for past genetic wrongs, cried out from the human-built structures in both New York (the UN building) and Mecca (the Kaaba), can spell nothing but a bloodbath that will make the last Volk War (a.k.a. World War II) look like a prick of the pin in comparison.

“And in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed”, said G-d to Abraham (Genesis 12:3): neither a One World melting-pot, nor a ranking of the nations of the world into higher classes and lower classes. Written inheritance, the one and only antidote to racism.

Ana HaShem Hoshi’ah Na

It is the year 500 CE. Uther Pendragon is not long in the grave, and the state of Celtic Britain could not be worse: under attack from the outside, with no leader worthy of the name in the inside. Uther’s knights are squabbling among themselves, struggling for pieces of the pie.

Barak Braces for Ayalon-Peretz Onslaught

by Hillel Fendel

(IsraelNN.com) Outgoing Labor Chairman Peretz is set to join forces with Ami Ayalon when the latter faces off against Ehud Barak in the party’s primaries next week.

Britain is reaping the fruit of Vortigern’s misguided plan, of inviting Anglo-Saxons as mercenaries serving him; his was short-term thinking, not considering the possibility that the latter might use it as an opportunity to stay. Now the Anglo-Saxons are claiming the land as their own, aided by knights as venal as was Vortigern.

As of Saturday night, Ayalon stands to be bolstered by the support of third-place finisher and incumbent party leader Amir Peretz. Peretz is scheduled to make a speech calling on his supporters to vote for Ayalon.

Merlin looks at those selfish knights, sighing, thinking: they would sell their own mothers to the Saxons if it meant great wealth to them. The daily incursions of the Saxons upon British towns mean nothing to them as long as they are safely tucked in their castles.

Peretz, who has announced that he will step down from the job of Defense Minister, met with Ayalon on Saturday night to discuss the details of their agreement. In return for his support, Peretz will receive this series of demands: He will receive an economic ministerial post to be carved out for him in future coalition negotiations with Kadima; his ministerial allies—Yuli Tamir and Raleb Mejadle—will remain in their positions; and the party’s Central Committee will decide in the near future if and when to quit the Olmert government.

“He who pulls the sword out of this stone is the true-born King of Britain”, says the inscription. All the knights set out to the task, craving the throne with their greedy hearts. “Surely I am fit for this role, am I not?”, each thinks. Surely a knight like myself, and not any other, let alone a commoner, and far be it an illegitimate child.

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What is taken generously is given back generously: Arthurian Legend took from the Biblical history and prophecy of King David, and now it has given back by being a reflecting mirror of the current situation in the land of source.

In a world of clueless, self-interested, naïve, dhimmi “leaders”, fervently awaited is the unlikely person who will lift the sword from the stone. Come, Mashiach Ben David, and lead us to victory against the past foolishly invited, now brazenly attacking, invader! Speedily in our days, amen!

Lips For The Indigenous, Hearts Against Them

I have already addressed the external inconsistency of the Leftists’ focus on the “Palestinians” to the exclusion of other, similar, usually much more serious, issues (e.g. Darfur), explaining it with the very self-interested reason of the erroneous belief that the Israel/“Palestinian” conflict is the key to peace between the West and the Muslim world. But even though this inconsistency means that the Leftists’ battle-cry of, “Stand up to the right of indigenous peoples!” is hollow, it is further made hollow by the internal inconsistency of cultural, political and spiritual indigenism, otherwise known as the New Age.

I have explained indigenism as a modern, urban, Western yearning, and shown how it can be harnessed as a potent conservative rallying point. I now wish to detail the disparity between the words, even the feelings, of those who claim to stand up to the rights of indigenous peoples, and their actions and even their thoughts. This issue is important because the conception of the West, the Bible and Israel as colonialism personified, as against the conception of the Muslim world, the Koran and the “Palestinians” as indigenous, native culture personified, is what drives the great majority of today’s Western Leftists to support the latter against the former.

From the Toronto Sun, via Common Dreams, in the article Negotiate with the Taliban, dating from March 4, 2007, by Eric Margolis, come the following interesting excerpts:

Anti-Western forces are quickly gaining ground in Afghanistan. What Washington and Ottawa keep claiming is an “anti-terrorist operation” against a handful of al-Qaida fighters and Taliban has, in fact, turned into fast-growing Afghan national resistance to foreign occupation. Were it not for the U.S. Air Force’s might and ubiquitous presence, U.S., Canadian, and British troops would soon be driven from southern Afghanistan.

[…]

In the 1980’s and 90’s, I explored and became fascinated by the wild, lawless, then little-known frontier tribal agencies of north and south Waziristan, Khyber, Mohmand, Orakzai and Malakand. Their warlike, fiercely independent tribes joined Pakistan in 1947 under constitutional guarantee of total autonomy that excluded government soldiers from the tribal agencies.

[…]

Negotiating a deal with Taliban and other Afghan resistance forces is the only way out of this morass, not expanding a war that is already lost. [All emphases mine. —ZY]

Let it be very clear that these are the same people who featured a video showing a 12 year old boy of theirs beheading a captured enemy. “Wild”, “lawless” and “fiercely independent” are still within the bounds of the romantic (“One village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the invaders…”), but “warlike” is, needless to remind you, something that the present US administration is constantly berated for by people such as this writer, people who swear by the slogan, “War is not the answer”. A good encapsulation of the inconsistency.

“Palestinians” dressed as Native Americans, for Western Leftist eyes. Hat tip: Solomonia. I cannot stress this enough: our enemies know which strings to play to turn the world against us, therefore we must adapt as swiftly as possible.

What is it that those indigenists, those incurable romanticists, those New Agers, find in such cultures such as the Pashtuns of Afghanistan, the Native Americans and the Celts? Here is a brief list:

1. Connection to the land, to Nature (thus capitalized).
2. A healthy social life (“Wife, Children and Friends”, as the title of one Celtic song goes), undisturbed by modern pollutants (cell phones, the Internet and the like).
3. Frugality, both personal and political. By the latter, being satisfied with one’s land and not going on colonial expeditions or imperial adventures is meant.
4. Localized spirituality, in tune with the land, not imported from elsewhere as a universal message for all people.
5. An oral, living culture, without the petrifying effect of the written word.

There are surely more, but these are the most salient points. When I compare those points with the Pashtun tribesmen for whom Eric Margulis has expressed such admiration, I am dumbfounded. It is an example of not letting the facts get in the way, but not just in the way of one’s view of reality but in the way of one’s very ideals and yearnings of the heart. It is the ultimate betrayal.

The contradiction runs in both directions: on the one hand, the objects of admiration in the real world are, more than often not, counterexamples to the indigenists’ ideals, sharing many points in common with the hated West, Bible and Israel; on the other hand, the ideals run counter to that which the admired ancients ever were.

Let me begin with the Pashtun tribesmen. Their connection to the land exists, but is the functional one of birth and acquaintance; as believing Muslims, they are taught to regard the whole world as their land. They are taught this from the Koran, which is scripture; an individual Pashtun may be illiterate, but the imam who teaches him is not, and he gets his ideas from the written word, a message which is universal, for all people, and an import from the desert of Arabia, not a native Pashtun growth.

As for their social life… Mr. Margulis can admire their fierce tribalism all day long, but in the end, this tribalism is made possible by the same concepts which, when expounded by people in America, are decried as “the darkness of the Religious Reich”. Or to put it another way: this healthy social life with a loving wife, dear children and beloved friends is not possible with the social innovations that the Leftists uphold. Polyamory and “open marriage” have to be thrown out for there to be a real soul-relationship between a man and a woman; the creation, and healthy rearing, of children requires a father and mother, no matter what the spirit of the time says; and a company of friends can gather only if there is a shared interest in real life, not the “everyone blazes his own trail” mentality of Progressivism.

Also, regarding the much-admired “resistance” of the Pashtun tribesmen and the “Palestinians”, it should be noted that they no longer rely on romantic indigenous artifacts such as swords, horses and bows and arrows; their AK-47’s and suicide vests are made from the finest products of the Western industrial assembly-line. But the indigenists are so obsessed with shaking their fists at the ugly sight on their mirrors (Western culture) that they fail to ask themselves whether their objects of admiration think the same.

This brings me to the next point: the ideas of the indigenists about indigenous cultures, especially ancient ones, are so out of sync with what scholarship tells us about them that it is astounding. Apparently only White Man is capable of mass murder and environmental destruction, yet the truth is all humans, throughout all history, have known bouts, and even continuous periods, of atrocity, whether given or received, and taken some measure of shaping the environment to their needs. (We’d still be swinging from tree to tree if that weren’t so.)

Ancient indigenous cultures were as varied as modern ones are, and the romanticists’ lumping them together with broad brush strokes is at the very least a mental form of cultural imperialism. From Lisa Aldred’s Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun Dances (American Indian Quarterly, Summer 2004, vol 24, no. 3) is the following passage:

Many Native Americans have been offended by the mockery these bastardized versions make of their sacred ceremonies. Some of the incidents denounced as most offensive include Sun Dances held on Astroturf, sweats held on cruise ships with wine and cheese served, and sex orgies advertised as part of “traditional Cherokee ceremonies.”

What most struck me in that passage is the idea that the Native Americans were offended by the hedonistic practices. In the romantic image, non-Biblical cultures are rife with sexual freedom, yet here we see that those played no part in traditional Cherokee ceremonies. The idea that “Puritan notions of sexuality” could be found in pagan cultures is shocking to the romanticist, but that is the reality. The Bible describes scathingly the child-sacrifice of the Canaanites; from that, one might gather human sacrifice was a universal pagan practice, but we find as matter of historical record that the Romans (pagans) banned the Celts (also pagans) from sacrificing humans. (As an aside, from my Jewish point of view: I think it is for that reason that G-d let the Romans have a vast and durable empire, as a reward.) And today, the only ones who are known to engage in human sacrifice, and child-sacrifice no less, are monotheists—the Muslims.

This is whom our enemies serve in their hearts. See this, O HaShem, One and Only True G-d!

This lumping, this wide brush, this stereotyping underlies the New Age, which is indigenism and romanticism writ large, universalized and reworked into an all-eating global movement. It takes from the nations and religions it admires only those features that its romanticist adherents like, melts them into a hodgepodge and discards that stuff which the New Agers consider nasty. Many indigenous cultures had quite definite, and Biblical-sounding at that, roles for the sexes, and condemned homosexuality? To hell with that. Many ancient peoples had gods of war and praised warfare and bloodshed, and some even sacrificed their war-captives to those gods? That’s very nice, but that makes us queasy—you know what, we’ll pay tribute to those ancient customs by supporting those who still have the stomach to follow them, such as the mujahideen of Afghanistan. And how about leaving the comfort of your armchair in front of the computer monitor reading about primitivism and actually living those ideals? That’s rad, man, but it’s just, you see, I ain’t got that thing for mosquito bites, y’know.

The New Age is the theological error of paganism without the real-life circumstances under which pagans lived: crystals and necromancy and vision quests and “free love”, without the concepts that are far too reminiscent of true, Biblical belief for comfort, such as the idea of divine judgment and punishment, even if those are believed to be meted by deities which are permissible and hypocritical, unlike the One True G-d.

Thus much for the disparity between the indigenous reality and the romantic idea. But I must bring this post back to the purpose of my blog, namely defense of Zionism in particular and the Torah-based view in general, before it drifts too far away. When I consider this very old, yet for me newfound, faith of Judaism, and what it means to me, a rootless cosmopolitan seeking his roots and his connection to this land, I realize there is in Orthodox Judaism, in Religious Zionism, so much of what the indigenists yearn for. To compare the points I raised near the top of the post:

1. Judaism and the Land of Israel are inseparable. Many of the 613 commandments can be performed only on the Land of Israel. Most of the festivities (including the coming Shavuot, or Festival of Weeks) are tied to the characteristics of the Land of Israel.
2. Marriage is enjoined on all, for the purpose of procreation, as well as love. Once a week, by G-d’s command, all the modern disturbances are switched off (my cell-phone gives me a rest for about 25 hours).
3. No other land than the Land of Israel belongs to the Jews; any other land is a temporary stay, even if that stay takes centuries, while the Land of Israel is the only one which we desire to possess and which we can call home.

The Jewish connection to the Land of Israel is of divine ordination; ordained when we were still in the desert. G-d says (Leviticus 25:1–4):

And the LORD spoke unto Moses in mount Sinai, saying: Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them: When ye come into the land which I give you, then shall the land keep a sabbath unto the LORD. Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the produce thereof. But in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a sabbath unto the LORD; thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard.

Of this, Rashi asks, “What has the Sabbatical Year to do with Mount Sinai?” For these words of HaShem were spoken to the Jews when they were still in the desert, where such a commandment is totally out of place. But the Land of Israel was given to us in HaShem’s will, and not by our having been its “First Nation”. This link to the land is the strongest possible, and throughout more than 2,000 years of being outside the Land of Israel, the Jewish nation never relinquished its spiritual connection to it.

Contrast this with those self-professing indigenists and make-believe indigenous peoples such as the Fakestinians: they scramble to find out any ancestral scrap, to fabricate any ancient tie, to their desired lands. White American indigenists try searching the family tree for the tiniest hint of Cherokee blood, some—like Ward “Little Eichmanns” Churchill—making it up when they can find none, and the Muslim usurpers of the Land of Israel have engaged in the impressive feat of creating a whole new nation from scratch, yet though they have taken much of the world on their ride, they have no ancient connections to speak of.

What they, both the Muslims and their Marxist sympathizers, covet in us and causes much of their hatred toward us—no matter how much they deny it—is this great favor that HaShem has conferred upon us: our sure heritage.