The worst mistake I ever made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of antisemitism.

Ezra Pound

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There are three basic kinds of antisemitism. There is the antisemitism of the left — of Karl Marx and his essay on the Jewish question. There is the “antisemitism” of Muslims who want to drive Israel into the sea. There is the antisemitism of the National Socialists. Each antisemitic approach connects with a form of totalitarianism — a form of government that suppresses freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and economic freedom. But this is not all.

A German reader recently challenged me on antisemitism, suggesting my rejection of anti-Jewish conspiracy theory was due to Christian “brainwashing.” I might have replied that his views were the result of “Nazi brainwashing,” but that would have been to trade one insult for another. There is, of course, a large body of anti-Jewish conspiracy “literature.” I found this “literature” to be animated by hatred — whatever it’s pretenses to objectivity might be. The more you delve into the antisemitic “historians” and “theorists,” the more you see irrational Jew-hatred peaking out from every page. There is an unfairness in the conclusions of antisemitic writers, a one-sidedness of evidence. After awhile, they leave the reader exhausted and irritated by their fanatical obsession with Jewish wickedness. All the outrages, all the crime, all the injustices of the world, lead them to a single group: the Jews.

Antisemitic discourse is a sorry, repetitive, pathological hammering at one people, one ethnic group, again and again and again. For the antisemite, nothing bad happens except the Jews are behind it. No disaster unfolds except the Jews are to blame. One may anticipate the antisemite’s analysis on every subject, at any point in time. It is a monotonous, unvarying, humorless drumbeat — a clock that strikes the same hour continuously, a weather report on a drizzle that never ends, a broken record that repeats the same phrase, the same tone, the same sound. Antisemitism is boring. Yet the antisemite never tires of his obsession.

Antisemites are always burning to tell the world about Jewish bankers, Hollywood moguls, Masonic conspirators and the nine hidden Kabbalist’s at the top. Their belief in The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is unshakeable. They are impervious to evidence. (When Hitler was presented with proof that The Protocols was a forgery, he snarled that it didn’t matter because the book was “true in principle” anyway.)

The cultural antisemite, like Kevin MacDonald, might dress his hobby-horse with the catchphrases of evolutionary science, but his conclusions are not far from Fritz Hippler’s Nazi era film, The Eternal Jew, which claimed that “Jews sit at the junction of the world financial markets.” Thereby the Jews have become “an international power” that “terrorizes the world stock exchanges, world opinion, and world politics.” Such was the paranoia of Hitler and the Nazis. Such was a justification for their murderous rage.

Antisemitism continues to infect public discourse. The antisemite blames economic and social problems on the Jews. Modern decadence, they argue, is Jewish. Everything that has gone wrong within Christendom is attributed to Jewish sabotage. The antisemite forgets that civilizations become senile by way of prosperity. It is something that has happened before — to the Greeks and Romans of antiquity. Pagans of the fourth century lamented the death “Great Pan” just as Nietzsche lamented the death of God in the nineteenth. The Jews are not to blame. History is cyclical.

There are many factors contributing to our distress: materialism, atheism, urbanization, and the collapse of the family. Terrible inventions promise to undo us. The COVID-19 virus, which now threatens mankind, appears to be a Chinese creation — not Jewish. Our spendthrift lifestyle of indebtedness is everywhere supported and encouraged by a hedonistic shopping mall regime — a thing as American as apple pie.

Justifying his own ethnic malevolence, the antisemite is the very model of the degeneracy he pretends to oppose. His mottled insights are the result of an intellectual astigmatism. His sociological arguments and evolutionary “science” (like Kevin MacDonald’s) rings hollow. It is the same old scapegoating formula. And since all groups and peoples share in the blame of latter-day corruption, evidence can always be produced to convict one among the others.

As we watch the cartoon-like characters running for high office in the United States, with the socialist contagion metastasizing in the background, the antisemite wants you to believe that it’s all part of a Jewish plot. No serious student of history accepts this thesis. And for good reason. If Hitler had his way and exterminated every Jew in earth, our situation would be no different; for National Socialism was its own madhouse.

You cannot rely on antisemites. They are not the patriots they pretend to be. They will join with the communists in the end, because the communists will offer them a deal. And like all the other useful idiots, they’ll end as serviceable fodder.