ALT-RIGHT NEO-NAZISM IS SLAVE MORALITY

by Utter Contempt 

 

“A word in the ear of the psychologists, assuming they are inclined to study ressentiment close up for once: this plant thrives best amongst anarchists and anti-Semites today…” Nietzsche, Genealogy (1887)

Nearly everyone speaking out against Israel on TV and social media right now is an insufferable megalomaniac. Watching John Oliver give his “Israeli war crimes” monologue as it made the rounds I wondered, who the fuck is this guy? What qualifies him to moralize about anything? And what qualifies him to speak with any expertise about Gaza? You could ask such questions about nearly anyone on social media. Political discourse there is totally solipsistic, because the average adult nowadays is a mental adolescent, the average adolescent is mentally ill, and 98% of the goings-on that social media users deign to hold forth upon are basically none of their fucking business.

And you can spare me your oh-the-humanity. There is one fact and one fact alone that anyone who lives in reality needs to know about civilian casualties in Gaza, and it is this: the democratically elected rulers of Gaza maintain a substantial, reenforced concrete tunnel network beneath the territory, and while Israel was carrying out its airstrikes last week it was their fighters, not women and children, who were utilizing the tunnels and hiding out in them. Women are chattel in orthodox Sunnism, and children are conscripts in the struggle of believers against non-believers. There is no chivalry or sacred mother in Islam. The whole family caters to the older brother; the whole society exists to propitiate the vanity of pot-bellied men. To the extent this is not the case it’s because only swivel-eyed mafiosi and shrewd priests can be entirely Muslim.

I was in the IDF. Accordingly, I hope the IDF defeats its enemies, as any normal man would hope his compatriots do. I make no apologies for this. I freely concede that the Palestine Arabs have good reason to feel that the land is theirs and was unfairly taken from them; I just don’t care. The dar el-Islam is vast and rich, and rests over a thick layer of conquered peoples’ shattered bones. The local culture of Arab Palestine persists just fine under Israeli auspices, and to the extent that it doesn’t, this is a negligible loss comparable in importance to the Yiddish language. Far more dear to me is the dignified life and political independence of my father’s people in their ancestral fatherland. It’s that simple. I don’t say that this is my personal top priority, my ultimate moral framework of the universe, or that there is no cost in the pursuit of this goal that would be too high, but I’m also not going to be morally lectured on the topic by self-important masturbators who are able to drearily exist for decades at a stretch without sacrificing anything, are all too happy to eat without wondering how the meat gets to their plate, and who are no less disproportionally concerned with the welfare of their own nearest and dearest than I am with mine.

This puts me quite out in the cold nowadays—thankfully, I’m a born contrarian and am used to it. Those who side with the Palestinians peremptorily reject any military action by Israel whatsoever, so that what they are essentially saying is that Israel has no right to use force to protect its citizens and must eventually capitulate to the sword of Islam. (Palestinian Christians, who overwhelmingly support the jihadis, really ought to better consider this position.) Even the more moderate consensus of the liberal intelligentsia appears now to be one of moral equivalence between the sides, but this is only one symptom of moral exhaustion among many. In other words, the slant of media coverage is not at all dissimilar to the way interracial and sectarian violence is treated in Europe and America, i.e., an almost painful latitude afforded to the lower orders, and a prim puritanism reserved for the upper ones. Just this week, a former Israeli defense minister was asked point-blank by a CNN presenter why Israel is "targeting innocent children"; and like so much of what we see in the media, the questions later put to the same Israeli official on NBC (by an admittedly very pleasant and reasonable Arab journalist) might as well have been scripted in a faculty break room at San Francisco State.

In light of this, it is unsurprising that the Gaza concern coalition is such a rainbow:

My apologies to the Irish; as you can see, I was trolling an Irishman

Perhaps more ironic (if not totally unsurprising as well) is the passion neo-Nazis bring to the cause, considering how highly it is cherished by the Frantz Fanon set. Though they were always anti-Israel, the whole alt-right universe on Twitter and Telegram has never been more emphatically pro-Palestine than it became over the course of this latest Gaza conflagration. Palestine sympathy is of course a long-running predilection of the left, among trade unionists and old school Marxists no less than latté radlibs, perverts and libertines. In the end, Nazism is just one more flavor of weak-chinned, vindictive slave morality, but the TRS crew and other Telegram Nazis try to excuse themselves and play down this association by making the circuitous assertion that intersectional Palestine sympathy is a psyop designed to ward off radcons from becoming Nazis.

Neither does the alt-right’s signature meme—that the Jews are having it both ways with liberalism and Zionism—really hold up to scrutiny. The whole reason the Palestine Arabs are able to persist in giving Israel a headache is because, time after time, the Jews have been merciful with them to a degree they never would be with us; and what this tells you is that Israel is hamstrung by liberalism no less than any country where wishful egalitarianism and liberal restraint prevail over the judiciary. In every western country, moreover, Jews are no less vulnerable to terrorism and violent crime, and no more given to espousing humanitarianism while winnowing themselves away in exclusive areas, than whites are.

Gaza, moreover, is a meme that allows lumpy consumerist Muslims—awash in every haram temptation of the kuffar world they simultaneously disdain, and are happy to see undermined—to pretend they are all united and pious. If they really have convinced themselves that God doesn’t know the difference, then they should thank the Jews for this golden opportunity.

Particularly empty-headed among this species of shallow theatrics is the copious assertion that Israel is genocidal or engaged in ethnic cleansing. If Israel wanted to depopulate Gaza, this could be accomplished in under 72 hours. What Israel is doing in the West Bank, meanwhile, is rather a kind of piecemeal shell-game of slow-drip and admittedly chickenshit land confiscation, in the face both of withering opposition from international public opinion, and the increasing discomfort of the liberal intelligentsia in the West. If this is ethnic cleansing, they’re doing a poor job of it: the Arab population west of the river Jordan has a higher annual growth rate than the Jewish one. It also has one of the highest rates of obesity of any population in the world. If the Palestinians were facing anything like genocide, then as Colin Liddell has pointed out, one would expect to see a lot more of them fleeing.

The issue of American complicity with Israel is also one that animates many in the anglosphere, and leads them to believe they have a stake in the conflict and must make their voices heard. While this is typical of the inflated and vicarious self-importance I referenced above, I’ll admit there’s something to it. But here’s the thing: I don’t care whether America supports Israel or not. I don’t care if anyone does. That’s not my department, and Israeli taxpayers (who shell out far more to America every year than the U.S. provides to them, both total and per capita) have little to do with it either.

Neither does the fact that there are deplorable Jewish pimps, pushers and plutocrats abroad in the world (some of them prominent Israel supporters) alter my view of this issue. I have never spoken nor acted in their behalf and I don’t have to answer for them. However, there are those who feel that I should have to answer for them; that every Jew is essentially an accomplice and operative of a collective menace, and that each and every Zionist is equally responsible for every act of the Israeli government. On account of its garish allure and the expanding ranks of those it pleases, I should like to forcefully and finally answer this abysmally stupid charge, in the form of a tidy thesis statement from one of its leading proponents. If you’re familiar with the alt-right, you probably know of Mike Peinovich, impresario of neo-Nazi The Right Stuff podcast network and now doyen of the sad, glowy "National Justice Party"—evidently, a man of considerable yikhus. Here is a tweet he disagrees with, and his response to it on Telegram:

The surest way one can see that Peinovich’s “empirical” approach to the JQ is bogus is by asking whether it takes in any data that might weigh against its conclusions. Do Peinovich and his colleagues ever concede that Jews have good qualities whatsoever? Do they ever mention positive contributions by Jews to society? Of course not.

With this in mind, let’s try a little thought experiment that will illustrate how insidious Nazi “empiricism” really is. National Justice is a webzine produced by Peinovich’s shrill, obstreperous half-wit straight-man Joseph Jordan, nom de bottom “Eric Striker.” Here is a National Justice article of Jordan’s from March 17 of this year:

The article waxes approvingly of this professor’s stand against anti-white university policies (I also happen to approve) and states that his name is Aaron Kindsvatter. I can’t be sure that Professor Kindsvatter is Jewish, but he certainly looks like it, and has a very Jewish name.

Now, if you peruse National Justice, or listen for no more than ten minutes to any one of the thousands of hours of podcasts available on The Right Stuff, you’ll find that this cohort is eager to inform the public of the ethnic identity of any Jew who may be involved in public corruption or mismanagement. Do you imagine that if Aaron Kindsvatter was a pornographer or a lobbyist, Joseph Jordan and Mike Peinovich would have any trouble labelling him a Jew, based on no additional information and with no more certainty than you or I have right now? If you’re familiar with these characters, you know that of course they wouldn’t. And yet, if you read the National Justice article screen-capped above, as it is worded at the time of this writing you won’t find any mention of Aaron Kindsvatter’s probable Jewish ethnicity.

Here is a better example:

Seth Rich apparently gave his life to expose public corruption at the highest levels of U.S. electoral politics. It is well known that he was Jewish. As of this writing (and I have timestamped screenshots), the National Justice article linked above fails to include this information, which would of course be included if the article was alleging that Rich had done something wrong.

With that out of the way, let’s return to Peinovich’s thesis statement, above. To paraphrase: the inherent interests of Jews necessitate a certain type of behavior to maintain their power.

Well, the inherent interests of the powerful necessitate certain behaviors to maintain power everywhere. Of exactly 2755 billionaires worldwide, a high estimate would yield a headcount of 690 Jews. Out of approximately 52,000,000 millionaires in the world, no more than 300,000 are Jews. This leaves well over 12 million Jews unaccounted for. Certainly, the wealthy have less in common than wealthy Jews do, but the multiplicity of the Jews’ factions and trends is proverbial, so that if we were to say that the Jews as a whole are a power elite, this could only be in the same sense that boomers or people who have post-graduate degrees are. And there is much else that must be willfully ignored to arrive at Peinovich’s position, such as the high prevalence of dysgenic traits related to lifestyle among American Jews; their high rate of intermarriage, their high prevalence of commitment (no less than other ethnicities) to trends and ideologies that are inherently nihilistic, demoralizing and spiritually deleterious. And it ignores the fact that most Israelis work blue collar jobs, that their country is a perennial cash cow and testing lab for American ordnance, and that nearly half the Jewish population of the world just spent the week in bomb shelters.

For those willing to entertain the alt-right case for its theory of power, I realize that this all sounds a bit glib, as if I must be oversimplifying the alt-right’s position. But if you peruse Nazi Telegram, read National Justice, or listen to TRS, you’ll see there is literally no social evil in the world that this cohort does not ultimately blame on Jews. What becomes clear from all they willfully ignore is that they have given themselves utterly to tenebrous fear and loathing of millions of strangers, without respect of individual guilt or innocence of any act or omission; and in fact, they absolve Jews of any possible individual guilt by ascribing the misdeeds of any one of them to the collective whole and its putatively malevolent spirit. This is pure, unqualified biological determinism, tinged with what Evola would call a metaphysics of quantity, which ascribes an essential purity to an in-group and insists that this pure quality can manifest only absent the corrupting influence of the other. With this template in hand there is literally no fault among the in-group (and ultimately, the ego of its self-styled forward-operative) that cannot be fobbed-off on the other. To demur predictably that social evil is being exacerbated, not caused by Jews (because of course to explicitly ascribe all of it to the Jews would be ridiculous) is just post hoc rationalization, because in this eschatology it is the Jew who is being made the essential handiworker of corruption, such that the dark side of one’s own nature and that of the in-group is fundamentally inconsequential or merely latent. This is a profoundly life-disaffirming outlook.

Peinovich and his colleagues like to gloat whenever conservatives are smeared or “cancelled” by the left. Week after week on their podcasts, they assure listeners that the lesson to be drawn from this is that if irrational randos on the internet are going to call you a Nazi, you ought to have been one already. Their position is not simply that Nazism is acceptable, misunderstood, or that it is a partially worthwhile ideology among several. Rather, they’re saying that in order to liberate yourself from all corrupting and deleterious influences, you must first become a Nazi; that Nazism is the one true terminus of all inquiry and that to refrain from taking it up is to leave oneself defenseless.

As we have seen, Peinovich insists that his worldview is empirical. Admittedly, it is the simplicity of his schtick that accounts for its protean character and remarkable shelf life—because of course it isn’t original to him. As Hitler put it in Mein Kampf: 

"Gradually, I came to hate them." In other words, these people’s loathsomeness—and their centrality to human corruption—simply revealed itself to me over time; I have merely observed reality and, unlike you bourgeois and leftists, refuse to refrain from drawing the inevitable conclusion." 

This is a classic selective attention fallacy, and tellingly, the alt-right is not really comfortable with the elegance they credit their theory with, because their logic must constantly redouble itself to the point that their foremost theorist, Dr. MacDonald, is an evolutionary psychologist who felt the need to recapitulate Hitler in a series of wheezy and extensively footnoted tomes, whose life work it is to promote. Likewise, Peinovich’s total podcast output alone runs into the many thousands of hours. One would think such putatively tidy conclusions could be wrapped up a little tighter.

If xenophobia is normal and natural and arises, to a degree, from simple lived experience because it relates to certain averages and tendencies among groups (and I agree that this is the case) then what need is there for all this absolutism, this finely-wrought theory and pretend metaphysics? It is capricious, not empirical—Nazis must always play with an extra deck of cards. They can never finally decide between Odin and Christ, empiricism and intuition, populism and elitism, between the Bill of Rights and its hoped-for abrogation, revulsion with modern whites and passion for their genealogy. They simply have no affirmative idea in their heads. Their sine qua non, the whole load their little edifice is bearing, is fear and loathing of Jews, and nothing more. This victimology, with its heady fantasies of omnipotence and revenge, is textbook sadomasochism. Its vision of a spiritual zero-sum game between meat-puppet proxies gives way to a patently nihilistic lust for conflagration and apocalypse, and the self-important melodrama it inspires is symptomatic of a narcissism no better than blue checkmarks, Antifa psych-outpatients, and TikTok exhibitionists. If you think this sounds uncharitable, head over to Nazi Telegram and see what I see.

Also published at Utter Contempt