Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Antisemitism and Antijaphetism - Two Sides of the Same Coin



This is a cartoon comparing antisemitism and antijaphetism. Antijaphetism refers to a prejudice against European Gentiles (white Gentiles). I am not the first to use the term. The etymology basically parallels that of antisemitism - whereas biblically, Jews are the sons of Shem (Semites), Europeans are the sons of Japheth (Japhetites or Japhites).

The man on the left is a white Gentile, accusing Jews of assaulting white women, general greed and avarice, and of controlling the U.S. government. He denies the Holocaust, using the term "Holohoax" and "Z.O.G. (Zionist Occupied Government). The man on the right is Jewish, and is accusing white Gentiles of oppressing non-whites (a Latino, a black, and an Asian), and of general cruelty.

I do think that one of the major problems in our current society is antijaphetism, and that there is a lot of antijaphetism in the Jewish community - at least among the elite, those who have influence in our society. On the other hand, I think that responding to this with a general anger at Jews is counterproductive. The fact that Chuck Schumer or Sheldon Adelson often conform to antisemitic stereotypes ought not be held against Ben Stein, Don Feder, or Nicholas Stix.

That is all.

2 comments:

Art Deco said...

I do think that one of the major problems in our current society is antijaphetism, and that there is a lot of antijaphetism in the Jewish community

C'mon Glaivester, you don't need to drink the Unz Kool-Aid. Leave to Sailer his obsessions with movie producers, country clubs, and bond traders and leave to Unz his imaginary conspiracies.

Rank and file Jews may be clueless about and alienated from large swaths of the population (e.g. Southern evangelicals), but that level of alienation is about what you get in a society which has certain cultural fissures. It tends to distort political competition to some degree in so far as large blocs of the Jewish electorate are voting according to ethno-cultural affiliations, but Jews are such a small population outside of metropolitan New York that the effect of that is negligible. It's not that important.

The assumptions people in word-merchant occupations make about social life and the status games they play are a severe political problem in this country and have damaged institutional life, but It's difficult to argue that Jews in those positions differ significantly from anyone else in those positions. The legal profession is a problem. Academe is a problem. The mental health trade is a problem. That Jews in those professions are damaging their society more than are gentiles in those professions is a dubious proposition. The bad subculture is class-delimited, not ethnically delimited.

SFG said...

I appreciate this, BTW, whatever it's worth to hear approbation from anonymous Internet people. ;)

There are real problems that I think are really hard to get around, though.

Principally, the problem is that if you discriminate against Jews, they become successful and wind up assimilating and disappearing in time--look at Kaifeng. So the members of Jewish organizations have to put up barriers to this to assure the survival of the group (I'm not going to say 'race' or 'religion' because it's actually a strange mix of both). So they have to keep up the memory of persecution, etc. Since there's never been a Holocaust on American soil, they wind up dragging up stuff like exclusion from hotels and clubs.

Also, from the WN point of view, liberal Jews are much more powerful than whites in modern American society. In most of European history, the reverse has been the case. (Even now I'd argue Stewart, Adelson, et al. do what they do with the aid of numerous liberal WASPs who believe it's the right thing to do.) So you actually have a case where both groups have some belief in oppression.

Historically, there's also a long perception that the enemy is on the right, basically culminating with Hitler. And if it's Nazis against Commies, every Jew has to go with the Commies even if he doesn't actually like Communism. I don't think this is the case in the modern USA. Still, the Christian Right is going to marginalize Jews, because whatever else happens, Judaism and Christianity are two separate religions. You can't be both at once. So some antipathy is inevitable. The country's large enough to contain both Alabama and New York City, but national media makes this harder.

The one thing I do see is some rapprochement between nationalists and Jews in Europe. I imagine PEGIDA and the NF are mostly doing it to put some air between them and the Nazis who basically almost destroyed Western Civ between 1933 and 1945, but every little bit helps. Maybe there's hope.

I grew up in NYC pre-Giuliani, I knew who wanted to kill me because of my skin shade, and it's not too hard to see that the paler the city, the better it does. So I'll support FAIR and the rest of them. Just my thoughts on why your attempts at rapprochement are likely to bear little fruit. But then, what is more Christian than the pursuit of the good in the absence of any guarantee of success? Good luck, and God be with you.