Battle Lines

Essays on Western Culture, Jewish Influence, and Anti-Semitism

Brenton Sanderson

• Publisher: Brenton Sanderson
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780648932406
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Jewish Question is foundational to the demographic transformation of the West, the revolution in its sexual and ethical mores, and to the trajectory of Western politics, art and culture. Battle Lines is a compendium of Brenton Sanderson's best writing on Jewish influence on Western societies and culture. Originally featured on The Occidental Observer, these incisive and intellectually-stimulating essays (all revised and updated) range across the cultural landscape of the West, examining Jewish influence on politics, economics, music, art, literature, sexuality, and popular culture. Battle Lines includes a Foreword by Dr. Kevin MacDonald, the author of The Culture of Critique and editor of The Occidental Observer and The Occidental Quarterly.

1

Free to Lose: Jews, Whites and Libertarianism

In the first two decades of the twenty first century the political philosophy of libertarianism attracted a wave of support in the United States, particularly among the mainly White Tea Party movement, and the supporters of Ron and Rand Paul. One catalyst was the perceived failings of the Obama administration’s response to the Global Financial Crisis and subsequent recession: a response characterized by an expansion of government ownership, spending, and regulation of the U.S. economy, with a corresponding decline in individual liberty. To espouse free-market libertarianism in this context seemed a rational corrective to Obama’s economic agenda, given the libertarian commitment to the maximization of individual liberty and minimization of the state – at a time when a bloated dysfunctional state seemed to lie at the heart of the problems facing White people.

While there is a spectrum of libertarianism that straddles the left-right binary of contemporary politics, in today’s world, libertarianism is primarily associated with the commitment to market liberalism that was the hallmark of the Austrian and Chicago Schools of economics. The 1974 Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded to the libertarian theorist Friedrich von Hayek. For the preceding thirty years the economic theories of the British economist John Maynard Keynes held sway throughout the West. Keynesianism, involving state intervention in the economy through deficit spending to stimulate output and employment, is based on the idea that governments can and should act to eliminate the worst vicissitudes of the business cycle. Through manipulation of the federal budget and monetary policy a government can, theoretically, engineer economic outcomes.

Keynesianism emerged as a midpoint between free-market neo-liberalism and socialist state-planning. The stagflation problem resulting from the OPEC oil crisis of the early 1970s threw the post-war Keynesian consensus into turmoil, and set the scene for the re-emergence of political support for free-market libertarianism and, ultimately, for the election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and, subsequently, their legions of political imitators throughout the world. At the forefront of this renaissance of libertarian thought, alongside Hayek, was a group of Jewish intellectuals whose ideas and advocacy were key to this achievement, and to libertarianism’s subsequent and enduring appeal. The most prominent and influential being Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and Ayn Rand.

It is one of the seeming paradoxes of political history in the past century that Jews have been prominent as theorists and activists for ostensibly opposing ideological forces: socialist collectivism on the one hand, and free-market libertarianism (and neoconservatism) on the other. However, this paradox fades when viewed through the lens of Kevin MacDonald’s theory of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. According to this theory, Judaism emerged historically as a strategy to promote the economic welfare and reproductive success of Jews as a genetically distinct population. In Culture of Critique , MacDonald examines a range of twentieth-century intellectual movements that had decisive Jewish involvement, and concludes that they share a common tacit agenda in promoting the group evolutionary interests of Jews at the expense of non-Jews. ⁵ Accordingly, they can be accurately regarded as Jewish intellectual movements that are post-Enlightenment manifestations of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. A major focus in Culture of Critique is on the role of Jews in the formulation and advocacy of Marxist and Cultural Marxist ideologies, such as the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School.

My purpose here is not to determine whether libertarianism is, like the Frankfurt School, a Jewish intellectual movement. Here I will examine, firstly, why free-market libertarian ideas have held a strong attraction to a prominent subset of Jewish intellectuals; and secondly, the practical effect of libertarian economic and social policies on European-derived populations.

Jews and Libertarianism

In a speech to the Mont Pelerin Society in 1972 entitled Capitalism and the Jews, Milton Friedman explored the seeming paradox that, despite the Jews having thrived under capitalism, they had played a central role in the formulation and advocacy of leftist political ideologies. He observed that, despite the Jews as a people having done very well under capitalist societies,

for the past century, the Jews have been a stronghold of anti-capitalist sentiment. From Karl Marx through Leon Trotsky to Herbert Marcuse, a sizable fraction of the revolutionary anti-capitalist literature has been authored by Jews. Communist parties in all countries, including the party that achieved revolution in Russia but also present-day Communist parties in Western countries, and especially in the U.S., have been run and manned to a disproportionate extent by Jews – though I hasten to add that only a tiny fraction of Jews have ever been members of the Communist party. Jews have been equally active in the less-revolutionary socialist movements in all countries, as intellectuals generating socialist literature, as active participants in leadership, and as members. ⁶

Friedman finds this somewhat difficult to reconcile with the fact that “Jews owe an enormous debt to capitalism.” It is obvious that, as an intelligent and capable people, Jews are always likely to thrive in the competitive context of the unfettered market. Accordingly, for Friedman, the real enemy to Jewish interests (and the interests of other able minority groups) are the barriers to entry and anti-competitive practices that, in various historical instances, have restricted their full participation in the economic affairs of a nation. For Friedman, it is axiomatic that

the feature of capitalism that has benefited the Jews has, of course, been competition. Wherever there is a monopoly, whether it be private or governmental, there is room for the application of arbitrary criteria in the selection of the beneficiaries of the monopoly – whether these criteria be color of skin, religion, national origin or what not. Where there is free competition, only performance counts. The market is color blind. No one who goes to the market to buy bread knows or cares whether the wheat was grown by a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, or atheist; by whites or blacks. Any miller who wishes to express his personal prejudices by buying only from preferred groups is at a competitive disadvantage, since he is keeping himself from buying from the cheapest source. He can express his prejudice, but he will have to do so at his own expense, accepting a lower monetary income than he could otherwise earn. ⁷

Friedman was influenced by the ideas of Ludwig von Mises, who expressed a similar view in 1944. Identifying why free-market capitalism is good for Jews and other ethnic minorities, he writes:

In an unhampered market society there is no legal discrimination against anybody. Everyone has the right to obtain the place within the social system in which he can successfully work and make a living. The consumer is free to discriminate, provided that he is ready to pay the cost. A Czech or a Pole may prefer to buy at higher cost in a shop owned by a Slav instead of buying cheaper and better in a shop owned by a German. An anti-Semite may forego being cured of an ugly disease by the employment of the “Jewish” drug Salvarsan and have recourse to a less efficacious remedy. In this arbitrary power consists what economists call consumer’s sovereignty. ⁸

Another celebrated Jewish libertarian, who nevertheless rejected the label, was Ayn Rand (born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum). While Rand and her theory of Objectivism have never been much respected in academia, she exerted enormous popular influence through her writings. In her book The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) she also made the link between the extent of free markets and the relative absence of discrimination against minorities in a society. She writes that:

no political system can establish universal rationality by law (or by force). But capitalism is the only system that functions in a way which rewards rationality and penalizes all forms of irrationality, including racism. A fully free, capitalist system has not yet existed anywhere. But what is enormously significant is the correlation of racism and political controls in the semi-free economies of the 19th century. Racial and/or religious persecutions of minorities stood in inverse ratio to the degree of a country’s freedom. Racism was strongest in the more controlled economies, such as Russia and Germany – and weakest in England, the then freest country of Europe. ⁹

The foregoing statements, each framed in the language of ethical universalism, clearly disclose the chief attraction of free-market libertarianism to Jews like Friedman, von Mises and Rand. Free markets, they affirm, advance the interests of Jews through imposing an impersonal economic discipline on non-Jews through which their ethnocentricity and anti-Semitic prejudice can be circumvented. That this proposition contains a great deal of truth is confirmed by the historical record: Jews have indeed prospered under the conditions of free-market capitalism among often hostile majority European-derived populations.

It may have occurred to the reader, however, that while Friedman, von Mises and Rand opposed the existence of monopolies that provided “room for the application of arbitrary criteria in the selection of the beneficiaries of the monopoly,” in reality Jews, even in the freest of markets, are notorious for developing and using ethnic monopolies in precisely this fashion. Indeed this is a major theme of MacDonald’s A People That Shall Dwell Alone where he observes that from “the standpoint of the group, it was always more important to maximize the resource flow from the non-Jewish community to the Jewish community, rather than to allow individual Jews to maximize their interests at the expense of the Jewish community.” ¹⁰

The massive extent of Jewish nepotism in their business dealings is so exhaustively documented (very frequently by Jews themselves) as to be beyond dispute. Such is the rarity of instances where Jews use other Jews in a purely instrumental manner, they are cause for shock and trauma within the Jewish community (witness the Bernie Madoff affair). Given this, while, as Friedman, von Mises and Rand assert, the free market may hinder ethnocentric discrimination among Whites (a group which, owing to its evolutionary history, is strongly predisposed to individualism), the hyper-ethnocentrism of the Jews (and the Chinese) predispose them to transcend this “rational” discipline imposed by the free market. MacDonald notes the propensity of these groups to engage in “tribal economics” involving high levels of within-group economic cooperation and patronage, which confers on them “an extraordinarily powerful competitive advantage against individual strategies.” ¹¹

Accordingly, the free-market libertarian agenda, when promoted in the context of a society that is multi-racial, and where some racial groups exceed Whites in their ethnocentricity, may not promote the group evolutionary interests of Whites in enhancing their access to resources and reproductive success. The truth of this proposition is confirmed by the tendency of European governments through history to impose laws barring Jews from many industries and professions. That such laws were so widespread, and deemed so necessary, is indicative of an awareness, borne of experience, of the tendency of Jews to adopt a racial collectivist strategy in competition to the individualistic strategies of the majority Europeans – and that this would invariably result in Jewish market dominance, and concomitant outbreaks of anti-Semitism. That such restrictions were rendered less effective by their inconsistent application across the political patchwork of European jurisdictions through history was regarded by Friedman as a saving grace for Jewish populations:

Throughout the nearly two thousand years of the Diaspora, Jews were repeatedly discriminated against, restricted in the activities they could undertake, on occasion expelled en masse , as in 1492 from Spain, and often the object of the extreme hostility of the peoples among whom they lived. They were able nonetheless to exist because of the absence of a totalitarian state, so that there were always some market elements, some activities open to them to enter. In particular, the fragmented political structure and the numerous separate sovereignties meant that international trade and finance in particular escaped close control, which is why Jews were so prominent in this area.

It is no accident that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, the two most totalitarian societies in the past two thousand years (modern China perhaps excepted), also offer the most extreme examples of official and effective anti-Semitism. … If we come to more recent times, Jews have flourished most in those countries in which competitive capitalism had the greatest scope: Holland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Britain and the U.S. in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – a case that is particularly pertinent when that period is compared with the Hitler period. ¹²

Agreeing with the thesis that free markets have been good for Jews, Jerry Muller, in his Capitalism and the Jews (2010), observes that when Jews have been allowed to compete with non-Jews on equal terms, they have always done disproportionately well. ¹³ Nevertheless, this economic success has been a source of both pride and embarrassment to Jews. It has prompted some anti-Semites to (erroneously) condemn capitalism as inherently Jewish. For the left, meanwhile, the reality of differential group achievement under conditions of legal (and assumed biological) equality is an embarrassment and a disgrace. They have hidden their discomfiture under the intellectual fig leaf of “systemic racism.”

Whites and Libertarianism

It should be evident from the foregoing that the only time that Whites will be acting in their evolutionary self-interest in embracing free-market libertarianism is when they live in a racially homogeneous society where their group interests are not imperiled by the utility-maximizing behavior of individuals; or in a multi-racial society where competing racial groups do not exceed Whites in their ethnocentrism, or exceed Whites in their ethnocentrism, but lack the intellect to capitalize on this by employing altruistic group strategies in competition with individualistic Whites.

The upshot of this is that the free-market libertarian agenda is likely to disadvantage Whites in societies with significant Ashkenazi Jewish and East-Asian populations. Such societies certainly include the contemporary United States and most other Western nations. In contrast, experience has shown that other racial groups, with their relatively lower mean IQs, despite their comparatively higher levels of ethnocentrism, are unlikely to out-compete Whites in the context of a free-market economy. ¹⁴ These groups, however, represent an evolutionary threat to Whites of an entirely different order: with their comparatively high birth rates, crime rates, and levels of welfare-dependency involving the large-scale transfer of resources away from White communities.

If White ethnocentrism could be enhanced sufficiently to prompt Whites to adopt cohesive group strategies on a large scale (i.e., strategies that involve some controls on individual behavior – a form of altruism), then the economic playing field could be levelled to allow more effective competition with Jews. However, given that Ashkenazi Jews have higher mean IQs than Whites (particularly with regard to verbal IQ, which is a strong predictor of commercial aptitude), they are probably still likely to out-compete Whites in such a hypothetical conflict of racial group altruistic strategies. ¹⁵ Nevertheless, the large-scale adoption of altruistic group strategies, even if offering only a partial improvement in the relative economic welfare of Whites compared to other racial groups, would be beneficial.

A major barrier to Whites adopting such strategies are the ideologies that dominate the climate of opinion (especially in the education system) in Western nations today, some of which are explored by MacDonald in Culture of Critique , and which are calculated to thwart the emergence of manifestations of White ethnocentrism. A century ago the social sciences were effectively divorced from the biological sciences. While a reconciliation of sorts began in the 1970s, the humanities and social sciences remain intellectual closed-shops, estranged from the contradictory findings of the biological sciences.

It has undoubtedly been one of the chief attractions of leftist collectivism for Jews that free-market libertarianism – through the theoretical removal of the possibility of state coercion of individuals – effectively protects non-Jews in the expression of their anti-Semitism in their personal behavior. Friedman concedes the point, noting that

competitive capitalism has permitted Jews to flourish economically and culturally because it has prevented anti-Semites from imposing their values on others, and from discriminating against Jews at other people’s expense. But the other side of that coin is that it protects anti-Semit...

Table of contents

• Half-Title
• Full-Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword By Dr. Kevin Macdonald
• Introduction
• 1 - Free To Lose: Jews, Whites And Libertarianism
• 2 - Why Mahler? Norman Lebrecht And The Construction Of Jewish Genius
• 3 - Thomas Huxley On Group Competition And Ethics
• 4 - Revolutionary Yiddishland
• 5 - Jenji Kohan And The Jewish Hypersexualization Of Western Culture
• 6 - Evil Genius: Constructing Wagner As Moral Pariah
• 7 - Jewcentricity
• 8 - The Pathetic Apologetics Of Caroline Glick
• 9 - Mark Rothko, Abstract Expressionism And The Decline Of Western Art
• 10 - The Devil That Never Dies
• 11 - The Indoctrination Game: Alan Turing As Jewish Proxy
• 12 - Why The Germans? Why The Jews?
• 13 - Balzac And The Jews
• 14 - Jews And Race: A Pre-Boasian Perspective
• 15 - Jill Soloway And The Jewish Transgender Agenda
• 16 - Jews And The Left
• 17 - Leonard Bernstein And The Jewish Cultural Ascendency
• 18 - The Pathetic Apologetics Of Jonathan Sacks
• 19 - Tristan Tzara And The Jewish Roots Of Dada
• 20 - Wagner Reclaimed
• Notes