On Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing – Gottfried

Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing

By Paul Gottfried

 

The death of Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing on January 25, 2009, brought an end to the career of one of the most insightful German political thinkers of his generation. Although perhaps not as well known as other figures associated with the postwar intellectual Right, Schrenck-Notzing displayed a critical honesty, combined with an elegant prose style, which made him stand out among his contemporaries. A descendant of Bavarian Protestant nobility who had been knights of the Holy Roman Empire, Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing was preceded by an illustrious grandfather, Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, who had been a close friend of the author Thomas Mann. While that grandfather became famous as an exponent of parapsychology, and the other grandfather, Ludwig Ganghofer, as a novelist, Caspar turned his inherited flair for language toward political analysis.

Perhaps he will best be remembered as the editor of the journal Criticón, which he founded in 1970, and which was destined to become the most widely read and respected theoretical organ of the German Right in the 1970s and 1980s. In the pages of Criticón an entire generation of non-leftist German intellectuals found an outlet for their ideas; and such academic figures as Robert Spämann, Günter Rohrmöser, and Odo Marquard became public voices beyond the closed world of philosophical theory. In his signature editorials, Criticón‘s editor raked over the coals the center-conservative coalition of the Christian Democratic (CDU) and the Christian Social (CSU) parties, which for long periods formed the postwar governments of West Germany.

Despite the CDU/CSU promise of a “turn toward the traditional Right,” the hoped-for “Wende nach rechts” never seemed to occur, and Helmut Kohl’s ascent to power in the 1980s convinced Schrenck-Notzing that not much good could come from the party governments of the Federal Republic for those with his own political leanings. In 1998 the aging theorist gave up the editorship of Criticón, and he handed over the helm of the publication to advocates of a market economy. Although Schrenck-Notzing did not entirely oppose this new direction, as a German traditionalist he was certainly less hostile to the state as an institution than were Criticón‘s new editors.

But clearly, during the last ten years of his life, Schrenck-Notzing had lost a sense of urgency about the need for a magazine stressing current events. He decided to devote his remaining energy to a more theoretical task—that of understanding the defective nature of postwar German conservatism. The title of an anthology to which he contributed his own study and also edited, Die kupierte Alternative (The Truncated Alternative), indicated where Schrenck-Notzing saw the deficiencies of the postwar German Right. As a younger German conservative historian, Karl- Heinz Weissmann, echoing Schrenck-Notzing, has observed, one cannot create a sustainable and authentic Right on the basis of “democratic values.” One needs a living past to do so. An encyclopedia of conservatism edited by Schrenck-Notzing that appeared in 1996 provides portraits of German statesmen and thinkers whom the editor clearly admired. Needless to say, not even one of those subjects was alive at the time of the encyclopedia’s publication.

What allows a significant force against the Left to become effective, according to Schrenck-Notzing, is the continuity of nations and inherited social authorities. In the German case, devotion to a Basic Law promulgated in 1947 and really imposed on a defeated and demoralized country by its conquerors could not replace historical structures and national cohesion. Although Schrenck-Notzing published opinions in his journal that were more enthusiastic than his own about the reconstructed Germany of the postwar years, he never shared such “constitutional patriotism.” He never deviated from his understanding of why the post-war German Right had become an increasingly empty opposition to the German Left: it had arisen in a confused and humiliated society, and it drew its strength from the values that its occupiers had given it and from its prolonged submission to American political interests. Schrenck-Notzing continually called attention to the need for respect for one’s own nation as the necessary basis for a viable traditionalism. Long before it was evident to most, he predicted that the worship of the postwar German Basic Law and its “democratic” values would not only fail to produce a “conservative” philosophy in Germany; he also fully grasped that this orientation would be a mere transition to an anti-national, leftist political culture. What happened to Germany after 1968 was for him already implicit in the “constitutional patriotism” that treated German history as an unrelieved horror up until the moment of the Allied occupation.

For many years Schrenck-Notzing had published books highlighting the special problems of post-war German society and its inability to configure a Right that could contain these problems. In 2000 he added to his already daunting publishing tasks the creation and maintenance of an institute, the Förderstiftung Konservative Bildung und Forschung, which was established to examine theoretical conservative themes. With his able assistant Dr. Harald Bergbauer and the promotional work of the chairman of the institute’s board, Dieter Stein, who also edits the German weekly, Junge Freiheit, Schrenck-Notzing applied himself to studies that neither here nor in Germany have elicited much support. As Schrenck-Notzing pointed out, the study of the opposite of whatever the Left mutates into is never particularly profitable, because those whom he called “the future-makers” are invariably in seats of power. And nowhere was this truer than in Germany, whose postwar government was imposed precisely to dismantle the traditional Right, understood as the “source” of Nazism and “Prussianism.” The Allies not only demonized the Third Reich, according to Schrenck-Notzing, but went out of their way, until the onset of the Cold War, to marginalize anything in German history and culture that was not associated with the Left, if not with outright communism.

This was the theme of Schrenck-Notzing’s most famous book, Charakterwäsche: Die Politik der amerikanischen Umerziehung in Deutschland, a study of the intent and effects of American re-education policies during the occupation of Germany. This provocative book appeared in three separate editions. While the first edition, in 1965, was widely reviewed and critically acclaimed, by the time the third edition was released by Leopold Stocker Verlag in 2004, its author seemed to be tilting at windmills. Everything he castigated in his book had come to pass in the current German society—and in such a repressive, anti-German form that it is doubtful that the author thirty years earlier would have been able to conceive of his worst nightmares coming to life to such a degree. In his book, Schrenck-Notzing documents the mixture of spiteful vengeance and leftist utopianism that had shaped the Allies’ forced re-education of the Germans, and he makes it clear that the only things that slowed down this experiment were the victories of the anticommunist Republicans in U.S. elections and the necessities of the Cold War. Neither development had been foreseen when the plan was put into operation immediately after the war.

Charakterwäsche documents the degree to which social psychologists and “antifascist” social engineers were given a free hand in reconstructing postwar German “political culture.” Although the first edition was published before the anti-national and anti-anticommunist German Left had taken full power, the book shows the likelihood that such elements would soon rise to political power, seeing that they had already ensconced themselves in the media and the university. For anyone but a hardened German-hater, it is hard to finish this book without snorting in disgust at any attempt to portray Germany’s re-education as a “necessary precondition” for a free society.

What might have happened without such a drastic, punitive intervention? It is highly doubtful that the postwar Germans would have placed rabid Nazis back in power. The country had had a parliamentary tradition and a large, prosperous bourgeoisie since the early nineteenth century, and the leaders of the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, who took over after the occupation, all had ties to the pre-Nazi German state. To the extent that postwar Germany did not look like its present leftist version, it was only because it took about a generation before the work of the re-educators could bear its full fruit. In due course, their efforts did accomplish what Schrenck-Notzing claimed they would—turning the Germans into a masochistic, self-hating people who would lose any capacity for collective self-respect. Germany’s present pampering of Muslim terrorists, its utter lack of what we in the U.S. until recently would have recognized as academic freedom, the compulsion felt by German leaders to denigrate all of German history before 1945, and the freedom with which “antifascist” mobs close down insufficiently leftist or anti-national lectures and discussions are all directly related to the process of German re-education under Allied control.

Exposure to Schrenck-Notzing’s magnum opus was, for me, a defining moment in understanding the present age. By the time I wrote The Strange Death of Marxism in 2005, his image of postwar Germany had become my image of the post-Marxist Left. The brain-snatchers we had set loose on a hated former enemy had come back to subdue the entire Western world. The battle waged by American re-educators against “the surreptitious traces” of fascist ideology among the German Christian bourgeoisie had become the opening shots in the crusade for political correctness. Except for the detention camps and the beating of prisoners that were part of the occupation scene, the attempt to create a “prejudice-free” society by laundering brains has continued down to the present. Schrenck-Notzing revealed the model that therapeutic liberators would apply at home, once they had fi nished with Central Europeans. Significantly, their achievement in Germany was so great that it continues to gain momentum in Western Europe (and not only in Germany) with each passing generation.

The publication Unsere Agenda, which Schrenck-Notzing’s institute published (on a shoestring) between 2004 and 2008, devoted considerable space to the American Old Right and especially to the paleoconservatives. One drew the sense from reading it that Schrenck-Notzing and his colleague Bergbauer felt an affinity for American critics of late modernity, an admiration that vastly exceeded the political and media significance of the groups they examined. At our meetings he spoke favorably about the young thinkers from ISI whom he had met in Europe and at a particular gathering of the Philadelphia Society. These were the Americans with whom he resonated and with whom he was hoping to establish a long-term relationship. It is therefore fitting that his accomplishments be noted in the pages of Modern Age. Unfortunately, it is by no means clear that the critical analysis he provided will have any effect in today’s German society. The reasons are the ones that Schrenck-Notzing gave in his monumental work on German re-education. The postwar re-educators did their work too well to allow the Germans to become a normal nation again.

 

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Gottfried, Paul. “Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing, RIP.” Modern Age, Vol. 51, No. 3 & 4 (Summer/Fall 2009), pp. 326-329. Retrieved from: <http://www.mmisi.org/ma/51_3&4/gottfried.pdf >.

 

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Otto Strasser & National Socialism – Gottfried

“Otto Strasser and National Socialism” by Paul Gottfried (PDF – 714 KB):

Otto Strasser and National Socialism

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Gottfried, Paul. “Otto Strasser and National Socialism.” Modern Age, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Spring 1969), pp. 142-151. Retrieved from:  <http://www.mmisi.org/ma/13_02/gottfried.pdf >.

 

Hofmannsthal & the Interwar European Right – Gottfried

“Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Interwar European Right” by Paul Gottfried (PDF – 119 KB):

Hugo von Hofmannsthal & the Interwar European Right

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Gottfried, Paul. “Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Interwar European Right.” Modern Age, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Fall 2007), pp. 508-519.

 

Identity vs. Globalism – Morgan

Identity vs. Globalism in Stockholm: The 2013 “Identitarian Ideas” Conference

By John Morgan

No American of European descent who sets foot on the sacred soil of Europe can help but feel a powerful connection back to his European heritage, no matter how far in the past it might be, nor can any such person who is not deluded escape the feeling of urgency that grips those who experience first-hand the death spiral in which this continent is currently locked. Such have been my feelings over the past several weeks, after I arrived for the first time on the European continent, specifically in Sweden.

The purpose of my trip here was to assist with Identitarian Ideas V, the fifth in a series of conferences in Stockholm sponsored by the Swedish identitarian organization, Motpol, which shares personnel with Arktos, the publishing venture of which I am a part.

Although I do not have a drop of Scandinavian blood in my veins (my background consists of various Germanic and British ethnicities), I cannot help but be impressed by what I have witnessed since coming here. Despite decades of radical liberalism, the Swedish people remain a proud, beautiful people, and when walking down the street in a Swedish city it is as if one is walking among Nordic gods and goddesses. The Swedes still have a sense of their own identity, even if time is drawing short for a real reawakening, if present trends continue: out of a total population of 9 million, 2 million are already immigrants, with more arriving by the boatload ever year, eager to benefit from the Swedes’ generous social programs.

As a European-American, I share the same feeling being in Sweden that Philippe Vardon spoke about at the conference – namely, that I feel at home anywhere on the continent of Europe, as it is my ancestral homeland, and is therefore a part of my own identity that can never be lost.

The theme of Identitarian Ideas V was “Identity vs. Globalization,” and the venue, as several of our Swedish hosts pointed out to me with a smile, was a place typically used by Swedish artists of a Leftist persuasion. It thus gave them great pleasure for us to occupy the space, even for a brief time. The event took place on Saturday, June 29.

The program began with Professor Paul Gottfried of Elizabethtown College, doubtless the most prominent paleoconservative intellectual in America today, who spoke on “‘Cultural Marxism’ and the Frankfurt School.” Prof. Gottfried began by contrasting the various branches of Marxism that have emerged over the last century. He pointed out that Communism as it was realized in the Soviet Union and by those governments which followed in its Marxist-Leninist footsteps tended to be quite socially conservative, by today’s standards, and that orthodox Leninists would no doubt have treated cultural Marxists in their own societies as dangerous subversives. Ironically, cultural Marxism can only thrive in a bourgeois-democratic society of the very type that Marx sought to overthrow.

The bridge from Marx to cultural Marxism was the Frankfurt School of Weimar Germany, which later migrated to the United States to escape the clutches of the National Socialists. The Frankfurt School promoted a form of Marxism very different from Bolshevism, and which was intended to take root specifically in the nations of Western Europe and North America. Prof. Gottfried pointed out that all of the major thinkers of the Frankfurt School were Jews, and indicated his belief that their efforts to attack the very foundations of Western civilization – the family, sexuality and gender roles, hierarchy, and so forth – was at least partially due to their conviction that Western bourgeois civilization is inherently anti-Semitic and must be destroyed in order to make the world safe for Jewry.

Interestingly, however, Prof. Gottfried believes that the founders of the School eventually came to regret the outcomes of their own efforts. He briefly recounted his experiences in studying with one of the Frankfurt School’s luminaries, Herbert Marcuse, while a graduate student at Yale in 1964. He recounted an anecdote in which Marcuse was derisively dismissive of a feminist rally that occurred on campus; those who laid the groundwork for cultural Marxism, he maintains, were repelled by the very social trends that they helped to initiate. But Prof. Gottfried’s view of the Frankfurt School was not entirely negative, and he claimed that the critical tools that they helped to fashion can be just as useful in the hands of the Right as of the Left; he pointed out that some of his own critics have referred to him as a Right-wing exponent of their doctrines.

The next speaker was the Swedish lawyer and Arktos staff member Tobias Ridderstråle, who spoke on “The Facts in the Julian Assange Case.” Julian Assange is the founder of WikiLeaks, the organization which has caused great embarrassment to the American government in recent years with its release of large amounts of classified U.S. documents. Assange has been taking asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for more than a year now to escape extradition to Sweden to face two accusations of sexual misconduct by Swedish women. Mr. Ridderstråle, with great humor, detailed the flimsiness of the evidence that has been brought against Assange and the strangeness of the charges that have been made in the Swedish courts, pointing out that there is most likely an ulterior motivation behind them. Although Mr. Ridderstråle did not specify what this motivation might be, it is clear that the American government is most likely the one pulling the strings behind these developments in an attempt to discredit and retaliate against him. While Assange did not come across as a saint in this talk, it was clear that there is more to his case than meets the eye.

Following this was the 20-year-old Austrian student Markus Willinger, who is currently studying at the University of Stuttgart. Willinger is the author of the recent Arktos publication, Generation Identity: A Declaration of War Against the ’68ers. Willinger gave a rousing call to action, telling the audience that his generation has been victimized by the extreme liberal policies that were enacted by the earlier generation that had come of age during the student revolts of the late 1960s (their counterparts in America are known as the “baby boomers”). If these trends do not change soon, Willinger explained ominously, his may be the last truly European generation to inhabit this continent. He detailed how the policies of the ‘68ers were a reaction against the fear of another fratricidal war breaking out on another European continent, which was not a bad notion in itself, but the ‘68ers completely misdiagnosed the problem by believing that the blame for the world wars lay with Europe’s own traditional values and culture. In order to regenerate Europe, its youth must take to the streets in the same way that the ‘68ers did, only this time in defense of traditional Europe rather than in opposition to it. He also said that this time the revolutionaries must fight for the right of all peoples to their unique identity, and not only the European identity, since the problem of identity is a universal one today, when every part of the world is confronted with globalization. His talk was extremely well-received by the audience, which consisted largely of young people, and we can hope that many of them were stirred to action by his words.

Next was another speaker on the theme of identity, Philippe Vardon, who is one of the leaders of the Bloc Identitaire of France, a youth movement which was one of the first identitarian groups. It stands for the right of the French to their traditional identity in the face of mass immigration and globalization – neither the USA or Allah, as Vardon said. Generation Identitaire gained international notoriety in November last year for their occupation of the mosque at Poiters, at the site where Charles Martel had turned back the Muslim invaders in 732. After showing some video of this, as well as his group’s storming of the headquarters of the Socialist Party in Paris last May, Vardon expressed appreciation at being able to address the conference at all, explaining that he had recently been turned back at the airport during an attempted trip to Canada by the police.

Vardon pointed out that, although his group stands opposed to the liberal policies of the ’68ers that Willinger had spoken about, they also have other concerns, such as opposition to the phenomenon of the commercialization of women’s bodies found in surrogate motherhood. Vardon explained that while the 20th century was that of ideology, the theme of the 21st would be identity, and those efforts which attempt to preserve it in the face of the new global consumer-culture. There is not an obsession with the past, he said, quoting Dominique Venner, but rather with that which never passes away. He also explained that the identitarians are opposed to totalitarianism, favoring direct democracy, since they believe that if the people are consulted, they will naturally choose the course of protecting their traditional identity. Vardon referred to his people as “alter-Europeans” who favor a new political order in Europe based on local communities rather than on international blocs. But the most important element, he said, and the most important training that must be given to the youth is action, on both the political and grassroots levels. He called for nothing less than the establishment of a counter-society, proclaiming that “the streets are our headquarters.” (The text of Vardon’s talk has been made available at Alternative Right, alternativeright.com/blog/the-streets-are-our-headquarters.)

The conference next moved to the geopolitical level with Manuel Ochsenreiter, who is the Editor-in-Chief of Zuerst!, a Right-wing news magazine in Germany which has a circulation of 70,000. Ochsenreiter has garnered attention in recent years for his coverage of the ongoing war in Syria, a country with which he has been intimately familiar through his many visits there, which began prior to the outbreak of the conflict. Ochsenreiter has been one of the few Western journalists to report from the Assad regime’s side. Using many of the photos that he has taken there to illustrate his points, Ochsenreiter pointed out the many falsehoods that have been reported by the Western media, such as when it was reported that fierce fighting was taking place in the streets of Aleppo: according to Ochsenreiter, who was there, life was going on as usual in the capital on that day, with only the sounds of fighting being audible from the outskirts of the city. He also recounted the story of a hospital he had visited which had been attacked by rebel artillery, but which other Western journalists had completely ignored in their reporting. The same has been true for many of the other atrocities committed by the rebel forces, such as the ongoing executions of Syrians and foreign journalists, not for the “crime” of supporting Assad (since many of those murdered do not support him), but rather for failing to support the rebels. For the Syrian people, Ochsenreiter explained, this war is not a civil war, but rather a war of the Syrian people against Islamist extremists, most of whom have come to Syria from elsewhere (many of the rebels do not speak Arabic, he said). Prior to the conflict, Ochsenreiter says, many of the Syrians were either ambivalent about or even negative towards Assad’s regime, but when faced with the brutality and extremism of the rebels, most have realized that they are much better off than they will be if the regime is toppled.

Next on the agenda was yours truly, who spoke on “The Past, Present and Future of Arktos.” I described the birth of Arktos in 2010 out of our previous company, Integral Tradition Publishing, and how we ended up establishing our office in India in order to keep our overhead costs low. We have managed to publish nearly 60 unique books in four languages since that time, and have established ourselves as the home of the European New Right in English (although we are not limited to that, of course). I also described how our books have attracted attention from across the political spectrum, from the pages of The American Conservative (which reviewed Paul Gottfried’s War and Democracy in April) to the liberal countercultural magazine AdBusters, which ran excerpts from our edition of the Finnish radical ecologist Pentti Linkola’s book, Can Life Prevail?, in their May/June 2011 issue, simultaneous with their calls for what later became the Occupy Wall Street movement. This means that Arktos has been enjoying some success in attaining its goal of reaching readers outside of the usual crowd who would normally never pick up a “radical Right-wing” text, which has always been part of our intention in doing Arktos. I also described a few of our upcoming projects.

The last speaker of the day was the Swedish author Lars Holger Holm, who was introduced as a “Renaissance man,” with his extensive knowledge across a wide range of subjects. Holm spoke about and read from his new book, Gotisk, co-authored with the Dane, Kenneth Maximilian Geneser, which was recently published in Swedish by Arktos. The book describes the ancient Gothic past of Scandinavia, in particular their leader chieftain Theodoric, and his words, which evoked the age of their ancestors, seemed to have a hypnotic effect on the largely Scandinavian audience. As the conference came to an end, the Norwegian neofolk group Solstrom gave a live performance, providing the perfect musical accompaniment to our verbal efforts to define the essence of the European identity.

After the end of the conference proper came my favorite part of any such event, which was the opportunity to meet and speak with the members of the audience, many of whom number among Arktos’ clientele and with whom I usually only have contact through the Internet. I am always impressed by the many intelligent people from a wide diversity of backgrounds who appreciate what Arktos and our colleagues on the “alternative Right” such as Counter-Currents are doing. For me, meeting our audience on this occasion was even more exciting, as I would estimate that at least 90% of those in attendance were under the age of 40, which is in sharp contrast to similar events I have attended in the United States. This is not to criticize the efforts of our wise elders, but it was refreshing to see so many of those who will help to shape the future of Europe who were willing to sacrifice a beautiful summer Saturday in Stockholm to hear what we had to say.

In conclusion, I can only say that my experiences here in Sweden have given me great cause for hope, but also a great deal of envy in regard to what we are lacking in America. The efforts of the European identitarians, by overcoming the baggage of the “old Right” and by offering fresh perspectives and a genuine identity rooted in traditional values to the youth of this continent, are beginning to bear fruit, and I believe they will shake European civilization to its foundations in the coming years. On the other side of the Atlantic, while there have been many promising developments in the United States in recent years, we have yet to see anything approaching a real alternative culture or community based on these principles arise, nor have we seen much street-level action. But I believe this has to be the way forward throughout the Western world. Publishing books, running Websites and holding conferences are indeed important, but if this doesn’t eventually lead to activity in the real world, we will remain nothing more than a cult on the margins of society. As a traditionalist, I naturally believe that riding the tiger of modernity is important, but I also don’t think it’s time to withdraw from the battlefield just yet. Let us draw inspiration from our European brothers and sisters who are still in the trenches, undergo an inner transformation in how we conduct and understand our lives, and set about the task of reordering the world around us.

Videos of all the talks from the conference are now available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtCUj4nkms1FOFZYEFwCyogAeYHkiISE8

 

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Morgan, John. “Identity vs. Globalism in Stockholm: The 2013 “Identitarian Ideas” Conference.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 5 July 2013. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/07/identity-vs-globalism-in-stockholm-identitarian-ideas-5/ >.

 

In Search of Anti-Semitism – Gottfried

In Search of Anti-Semitism

By Paul Gottfried

Among those authors considered politically incorrect, and even those considered really politically incorrect, Kevin MacDonald holds a special place of honor or shame. A feature story in the May 9 (Los Angeles) Jewish Journal describes this small-boned, soft-spoken 64-year-old professor of psychology at California State University at Long Beach as “the professors anti-Semites love.” Alluding to the fact that university authorities have been trying to force the outspoken MacDonald out of his tenured position, the article complains about “the downside of academic freedom.” We also learn that this clinical psychologist is “considered the foremost anti-Semitic thinker by civil rights experts.”

It would be ridiculous to imagine the same ignominy would be visited on MacDonald if he were a black sociologist making critical remarks about white people. Assuming that he were a designated victim, he would be allowed to compose for profit and prestige diatribes against white Christian males, possibly from a cushy university post at whatever salary illustrious defamers of Euro-Americans are now earning. And if he were a Jew or Christian attacking Christians as the agents of human evil, the now browbeaten MacDonald could make a king’s ransom at some well-heeled institute or as a feature writer for The New Republic or New York Times.

Readers of this website are aware of the lunatic double standard that has been imposed on intellectuals throughout the Western world, almost always by Westerners themselves, for the purpose of determining who can criticize whom. (By now this has become a permanent aspect of “democratic” regimes.)

Plainly MacDonald is not playing by the establishment rules when he observes that Jews have worked at weakening those non-Jewish societies in which they have lived. Although this thesis seems to me to be a bit too generalized, I have no objection to letting MacDonald go on trying to prove it.

In his recently published anthology of essays, Cultural Insurrections, it would be proper to note that MacDonald makes assumptions here that I have questioned in my review of his three-volume, monumental work on the Jews since Moses. I continue to find some of the cognitive disparities he stresses between Ashkenazi Jews and Euro-Americans to be overstated or at least under-demonstrated. If they were in fact as stark as MacDonald insists they are, I would believe that Jews have a right to treat Euro-Americans as natural inferiors or as people probably unfit to sustain their civilization (or what remains of it) without a Jewish master class. I am also skeptical about the possibility of extrapolating from the way a particular Jewish subculture has behaved in the U.S., Canada, and parts of Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to how Jews have conducted themselves everywhere at all times.

It also seems that certain Jewish behavioral patterns MacDonald outlines are not uniquely Jewish. Other minorities such as Protestant non-conformists and later Irish Catholics in England (and in the U.S.), Huguenots in France, and Old Believers in Tsarist Russia, have shown exactly the same propensity for radical social causes, partly as acts of defiance against what they viewed as regimes that had failed to accord them full legal and/or social recognition.

Sephardic and German Jews who came to America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seemed hell-bent on joining upper-class Protestants and they usually disappeared into the dominant gene pool within a few generations. I am not convinced that Jewish behavior toward Christians follows a biologically determined strategy aimed at the control of resources. My lifelong impression from being around them is that Jews don’t like Christians because of historical grievances, just the way Irish Catholics continue to rage against Protestant Yankees for real amd imaginary offenses inflicted on their ancestors.

Although friend-enemy distinctions are evident here, it is doubtful that these dividing lines operate strictly according to biological conditioning. And it seems even less likely that they are shaped by the natural desire to control resources, in competition against other groups. Much of what MacDonald cites as Jewish behavior is hostility, mixed with anxiety, rather than competitiveness. MacDonald is illustrating culturally subversive activities that go well beyond any attempt to achieve group competitive advantage measured by socio-economic success. Assailing the moral foundations of a Christian middle-class society as pathological and anti-Semitic, a tendency MacDonald proves Jewish intellectuals have repeatedly engaged in, is not simply an attack on the material resources of the dominant society. What MacDonald highlights looks like unfriendly behavior; and one may certainly question the biological reductionism used to explain it.

Having raised these critical points, I should also mention that MacDonald builds a thoroughly cogent case that the creation of “modernity” and the launching of a succession of indignant social crusades against bourgeois Christian civilization by Jewish intellectuals and political activists has usually betokened some degree of malice. But as I mentioned above, and as MacDonald is well aware, Jews are not the only minority that has attempted to subvert dominant outside cultures. They’re just better at doing this than any other group. Jewish intellectuals and activists excel at agitating in the name of some presumed moral high ground, acting like the cunning or resentful priestly class, to which Nietzsche compared the Jews in Genealogy of Morals. In Nietzsche’s analysis, Jews are good at transmitting “slave morality,” without being (immediately) infected themselves.

MacDonald’s newest anthology offers further evidence of what he understands as the Jewish practice of burrowing from within to weaken the cultural coherence of gentile societies. And he offers abundant proof that this burrowing has and is continuing to occur. Whether he is dealing with the predominantly Jewish Frankfurt School and its cultural influences, the role played by Jewish activists in opposing controls on immigration throughout the last hundred years, the penetration and takeover of the American Right by the neoconservatives, or the pressures placed on politicians and political parties by Zionist organizations, MacDonald creates the impression that Jews have worked collectively toward two ends: lessening the cohesion of gentile society and promoting specifically Jewish national ends.

An argument I have used in the past to counter his generalizations is that “not every Jewish community at all times and in all places have acted in this way”; nonetheless, MacDonald could respond to my objections by pointing out that his analysis applies to American Jews for at least the last several generations. And he offers evidence that the same behavioral patterns as the one he discerns among the predominantly Eastern European Jews in the U.S. could already be seen among the relatively assimilated German Jews since their emancipation in Europe.

The same radicalization could be perceived among German Jewish intellectuals going back to the beginnings of Marxian socialism. And the cultural Marxism that has now taken off in a big way had its origin among alienated or embittered German Jews of the interwar period, who later emigrated to the U.S. The present multicultural fixation that has taken Western Europe, Canada and the U.S. by storm was largely the creation of German Jews.

But the group MacDonald’s brief leaves me wondering about most is the white Christian majority: They are jerked around because they have accepted this role for themselves. My own works on the politics of guilt underlines this tendency: Euro-Americans have become emotionally and sociologically predisposed toward aggrieved minorities that condemn them for politically incorrect attitudes. But have Jewish priests been necessary to get the Christian majority to practice slave morality? My answer is that “it helps but isn’t absolutely necessary.”

The institution of learning at which I work and the German Anabaptist denomination to which it was long connected are paradigmatically PC. Furthermore, Lancaster County, where our college is located, registered the largest vote for Obama in the Democratic primary of any county in Pennsylvania that’s not predominantly black. This result was owed much to Church of the Brethren, whose members in their zany anti-racism and open-borders postures make Abe Foxman sound relatively sane. The chance that such radicalized Protestants, who live in their own social bubble, would have picked up their lunacies from any Jew (me perhaps?) is next to nil. They came by their madness on their own, as a “peace church,” and as late entrees into the modern age after having spent an eternity on isolated farms in the Pennsylvania countryside. Like Jimmy Carter, Jim Wallis, Bill Moyers, and most of the Catholic hierarchy on the question of immigration, these Anabaptists exemplify aspects of Christianity that are totally compatible with cultural Marxism and the politics of Western suicide. They do not need Jews, blacks, or North African Muslims to teach them self-destructive behavior, any more than Swedes or Spaniards need the villains in MacDonald’s script to hand over their countries to hostile Muslims from North Africa.

The most interesting point for me in MacDonald’s volume is his presentation of movement conservative goyim. He is absolutely on the money in documenting their servility in relation to their neoconservative puppet-masters. The most startling aspect of this relation is the degree to which the servile class allows itself to be instructed. Irving Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Douglas Feith, and other neoconservative spokesmen have indeed convinced their pliant enablers that Israel is to be defended as an “ethno-cultural creation,” while the American nation is to be seen as possessing an “ideological identity,” founded on global human rights principles and on an expansionist foreign policy. MacDonald cites the remarkable tribute produced for neocon guru Leo Strauss by his admiring disciple Werner Dannhauser, a tribute that extols Strauss, the famous mentor to global democrats, as “a good Jew. He knew the dignity and worth of love of one’s own. Love of the good is higher than love of one’s own, but there is only one road to truth and it leads through love of one’s own.” MacDonald asks rhetorically whether Anglo-Saxon Protestant “conservatives” could express such sentiments about their own group without Jewish liberals or neocons attacking them as nativists or incipient Nazis.

McDonald cites the public letter drafted by William Kristol’s Project for the New American Century in 2002, calling for a “move against Saddam Hussein,” on the grounds that “Israel’s fight against terrorism is ours.” MacDonald calls special attention to the prominent Jewish neoconservatives who appended their signatures to this call for a war of aggression on behalf of Israel. But what is perhaps even more striking are the non-Jewish signatories, such as William J. Bennett, Frank Gaffney, Ellen Bork, and the professionally insecure, very young editor of National Review, Rich Lowry. In most of these cases one encounters demonstrations of fealty paid to the neoconservative barons who run FOX News, Wall Street Journal, Heritage Foundation, ISI, and the minds of a majority of Republican voters.

But pace MacDonald, these neocon lords and their servants are not the voices of the entire Likud coalition in Israel. They speak for Natan Sharansky, Benjamin Netanyahu, and others even further on the Israeli nationalist right, many of whom have been taught to mumble neocon gibberish about how “democracies have never fought wars” and about how “only democracies are legitimate governments.” A point Israeli political analysts Leon Hadar (see especially his book Sandstorm) and Martin van Creveld have argued for several years now is that neoconservatives and their gentile policy-think-tank hangers-on do not speak for the majority of Israelis, who certainly did not favor the American invasion of Iraq. (Iran might well be a different matter.) It was American neoconservatives, supported by the Christian Right and their Israeli contacts, who planned Bush’s Middle Eastern policy. In the end, MacDonald demonstrates the same when he investigates the Israeli associations of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith.

The Evangelical Cal Thomas and the “conservative Catholic” “theologian” Michael Novak invariably cite in their columns and speeches the alleged return of anti-Semitism on the antiwar left. When Novak came to speak at my college six years ago, he attacked movie producers in Hollywood—Jewish leftists to a man—as “anti-Semites.” The audience listened to him in understandable astonishment, for it could not escape even our news-averse trustees that Novak was saying something glaringly ridiculous.

Moreover, in their invectives against Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright, FOX News analysts and announcers played on Wright’s association with the “anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan.” That Wright and Farrakhan don’t much like Jews and Judaism seemed to matter more than the more obvious fact that the pair hate the Jews specifically as subgroup of Whitey.

Such pandering may result from the fact that movement conservative gentiles are almost as infected as other gentiles by the politics of white Christian guilt. They can only embrace their country to the extent that it renounces an “ethnic-cultural” identity, a character that they happily concede to Jews and others, but which they have collectively renounced for the dubious honor of being a “propositional nation.” Naturally (what else?) the assumption of this contrived identity sets the stage for their country being overwhelmed by legal and illegal Third World immigrants. It also means waging whatever wars the neocon master race tells their gentile collaborators is “good for Israel” and/or helps to spread “democracy.” Unlike MacDonald, I see no compelling reason to blame this lunacy exclusively or even predominantly on the two percent of the population which is Jewish, without noticing that the majority group, including those who describe themselves as “conservatives,” have lost their cotton-picking minds.

 

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Gottfried, Paul. “In Search of Anti-Semitism.” Taki’s Magazine, 6 April 2009. <http://takimag.com/article/in_search_of_anti-semitism/print#axzz3AaGCfxJN >.

Commentary: A point that could be added to Gottfried’s critique is that the notion that many Jews support anti-Conservative and “Left-wing” causes (liberalism, communism, multiculturalism, etc.) because they believe these are helpful for the Jewish ethnicity is incorrect. On the contrary, much evidence shows that most Jews were involved in political movements and in the support of certain ideas because they truly believe in them, not because they simply believe it is in Jewish interests. For example, Yuri Slezkine has pointed out in his The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004, p. 152) that “most Jewish rebels [Bolsheviks] did not fight the state in order to become free Jews; they fought the state in order to become free from Jewishness – and thus Free. Their radicalism was not strengthened by their nationality; it was strengthened by their struggle against nationality… For many Jewish socialists, being an internationalist meant not being Jewish at all.”

Concerning the issue of Zionism, it is true that many Jews who advocate liberalism and multiculturalism in America or Europe hypocritically support the exact opposite, Jewish nationalism, for the state of Israel. However, there is in fact even infighting between different political and ideological stances among the Jews. It should be remembered that there are many liberal Jews in diaspora who would still advocate liberal and multicultural policies in Israel and many conservative and nationalistic Jews in Israel who would support ethnic nationalism or separatism in Christian nations (as long as they are not anti-Semitic, of course). The latter type of Zionist does not appear to be the majority at the moment, but it shows an alternative and more desirable standpoint for Jews which may become more common in the future. In this sense, to refuse to recognise that many Jews – at least those who are already highly conservative – can change their attitude towards European identitarianism seems rather misguided.

For a critique of the concept of a large-scale Jewish conspiracy, see also Alain de Benoist’s “Psychologie du Conspirationnisme,” in Critiques: Théoriques (Lausanne, Suisse: Editions L’Age d’Homme), pp. 89-103; available online here: <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/psychologie_du_conspirationnisme.pdf >.

 

Dancing on a Hero’s Grave – Gottfried

Dancing on a Hero’s Grave

By Paul Gottfried

As a college student I would buy copies of The New Yorker to sample the sparkling prose of James Thurber and S. J. Perelman and to appreciate the clever cartoons that graced each issue. Despite the magazine’s veering toward the trendy left thereafter, I could still find material in it worth reading well into the 1980s, such as John Updike’s elegantly phrased erotica or the occasional vignettes of interwar Hungary by John Lukacs. Then The New Yorker took a further slide into sheer madness, and the results are visible in a libelous obit that came out last Wednesday by a certain Judith Thurman. Seething with rage syndrome, Thurman announced the “Final Solution” of my onetime correspondent and one of France’s most illustrious historians of the last century, Dominique Venner (1935-2013).

On May 21, Venner, acting desperately in the face of events he could no longer control, committed suicide by shooting himself in the mouth in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Venner left behind a suicide note explaining his horror at the gay-marriage law that French President Francois Hollande had just pushed through the National Assembly. Venner further lamented the self-destruction of his country and of European civilization that he ascribed to gay marriage and to Western Europeans’ unwillingness to keep Muslims from resettling their countries.

It continues to be disputed whether Venner was a believing Catholic, although the “Catholic traditionalists” in whose company Thurman places Venner admired his cultural stands and continue to hope that he’ll make it into heaven despite the mortal sin he committed by hastening his departure from this world.

Venner was also a hero to the neo-pagan European right, and since the 1960s he was active in laying and extending the foundations of the emphatically anti-Christian French new right, together with his frequent collaborator Alain de Benoist. Venner had a clear record of standing defiantly in the face of the French Communist Party. Unlike the communists and other French leftists who supported the Algerian rebels, Venner fought gallantly and was decorated as a sergeant in the French forces in Algeria.

Contrary to what Thurman tells us, Venner did not get his political start as a fan of the Nazis and their French collaborators (although his parents had once rallied to Jacques Doriot’s French fascist party). He rose to fame as a fervent anti-communist and European nationalist. The young Venner risked his life as a volunteer in the Algerian War, went to Budapest in 1956 to stand with the outnumbered Hungarian rebels against the Soviet occupational forces, and later was caught sacking the premises of the French Communist Party, whose allegiance to the Soviets he detested.

In the last twenty years of his life, this “unapologetic Islamophobe,” to use Thurman’s phrase, showed the audacity to characterize both the takeover of European inner cities by a hostile Muslim population and “the declining white birthrate in France and Europe” as “a catastrophic peril for the future.” Several blog respondents to this screed noted the embarrassing coincidence that Thurman’s expression of rage against the “Islamophobe” Venner appeared at the very time that predominantly Muslim riots had broken out in Sweden and a Muslim convert cut off the head of a hapless off-duty soldier in London.

In a final nod to PC, Thurman tells us that Venner’s commentaries “evoked the racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic rhetoric of the Fascist European right between the two World Wars, which has been moderated, though not abolished, by postwar hate-speech laws.” Thurman does not offer even a sliver of proof that Venner imitated the style of Hitler’s Mein Kampf; having read both Venner and Hitler, I would have no trouble distinguishing between the two, even if I’m not a certified “antifascist.” But we should be grateful for small improvements: Now we have the enforcement of “hate-speech laws” in Europe to protect us from what Ms. Thurman doesn’t care to hear. As one of her respondents asks very much to the point: Is Ms. Thurman out to ban as reminiscent of fascism any oral or written communication that doesn’t meet her criteria of sensitive speech?

Thurman’s treatment of Venner as a trained historian specializing in military affairs is almost as perplexing as it is glaringly biased. Thurman tells us that Venner wrote a work “admiring of the Vichy collaboration with Hitler” and other presumably pro-Nazi polemics, but she then identifies the dead author with “a history of the Red Army that received a prize from the Académie Française.” Venner was widely respected for his objective two-volume Histoire de L’Armeé Rouge, which starts with the creation of the Soviet army during the Russian Civil War and then examines the further development of Soviet military forces through World War II. Venner also compiled an eleven-volume encyclopedia on firearms that continues to enjoy academic favor. The works that obviously irk Thurman, however, are Venner’s sympathetic studies of the white forces that combated the Red Armies and his work on French divisions that fought alongside the Wehrmacht in Russia during World War II.*

Perhaps most inexcusably for his leftist critics, Venner published a critical work on the French Resistance in 2000, presenting its shadow side in a way that the French left or its American journalistic appendix do not care to hear about. Venner reminded us of the frequency with which communists in the Resistance carried out assassinations against political enemies, a tendency that became pandemic after the Liberation. He also dwells on isolated terrorist acts by the Résistants that did little to advance the cause of freeing France from a foreign occupation.**

I knew Venner best for having edited two stimulating journals that I would devour whenever I could get my hands on them: Enquête sur l’histoire (in the 1990s) and its recent successor La Nouvelle Revue d’Histoire, a publication that displays the same willingness to defy leftist taboos as everything else Venner wrote.

A kindly leftist historian Benoît Rayski wrote after he heard of Venner’s death:

I rarely agreed with his ideas, but he was a man who escaped with his courage and nobility from the usual ideological trappings and he wore his independence as a badge of honor.

Too bad our leftist hacks in Midtown can’t show a similar generosity toward a dead, non-conformist scholar.

————

Added Notes:

* Gottfried is referring here to Venner’s Les Blancs et les Rouges: histoire de la guerre civile russe, 1917-1921 (Paris: Pygmalion Gérard watelet, 1997.).

** Gottfried appears to be referring here to Venner’s Histoire critique de la Résistance (Paris: Pygmalion/G. Watelet, 1995).

 

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Gottfried, Paul. “Dancing on a Hero’s Grave.” Taki’s Magazine, 29 May 2013. <http://takimag.com/article/dancing_on_a_heros_grave_paul_gottfried/print#ixzz2UnYjBhkH >.

 

Review of Gottfried’s Strange Death of Marxism – Wegierski

Book Review of The Strange Death of Marxism by Paul Gottfried

By Mark Wegierski

The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium
by Paul Edward Gottfried
Columbia, MO and London University of Missouri Press
154 pages, $31.00

 

Professor Paul Edward Gottfried, who teaches at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania, is one of the leading American “paleoconservative” theorists and, indeed, has been credited with coining the term. The central idea of most of his earlier books, such as After Liberalism Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (Princeton University Press, 1999) and Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt (University of Missouri Press, 2002), is that there has now arisen in Western societies, a “managerial-therapeutic regime” which combines the soulless economic conservatism of big business with the distribution of resources to “politically-correct” interest groups, with coercive “therapy” for recalcitrants. Gottfried has argued that “the regime” has subverted the more authentic meanings of both the Left and the Right.

In The Strange Death of Marxism, he examines the political transformation from old-style Communist Parties to the “post-Marxist” Left. He offers critical summaries of the thought of such figures as Louis Althusser and the various members of the Frankfurt School, such as Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas. Looking at the French and Italian Communist parties, Gottfried notes that while their political rhetoric often embraced questionable notions about the Soviet Union, the social profile of their membership was extremely conservative. As far as the Frankfurt School, Prof. Gottfried does note the unusual interpretation which Paul Piccone, the editor of Telos, a scholarly journal of eclectic social and cultural philosophy, gives to those theorists, as actually being critics of the managerial-therapeutic regime. However, Gottfried tends to see them as originators of some of the most pernicious ideas underlying the current-day system, especially the theory of the so-called “authoritarian personality.” At its sharpest, Gottfried argues, this theory endeavors to categorize social outlooks deemed politically incorrect as “psychological aberrations” requiring semi-coercive “therapy” if it is discovered in an individual and of the mass indoctrination of society through mass media and mass education to combat them at the collective level. It lays the groundwork for “soft totalitarianism.”

Where Gottfried significantly differs from most conventional current-day conservatives is his identification of America as the main originator of this “soft totalitarianism.” According to Gottfried, it initially got underway in Europe with the “re-education” of Germany in the aftermath of World War II where, he argues, traditionalist conservatism and nationalism was just as severely dealt with as Nazism. Indeed, conservative anti-Nazis were seen as suspect by the American authorities, whereas many former Nazis who eagerly adopted “liberal democracy” were embraced by the Americans. Gottfried points out the surprising Nazi past of some of today’s leading theorists of the politically-correct German Left.

Gottfried argues that trends such as multiculturalism, feminism, and gay rights, had indeed emerged in the United States earlier than in Europe, and that today, the differences between the American and EU “regimes” are minimal. He also points to the largely similar, globalization visions of both American democracy-boosters such as Francis Fukuyama, and of the typical left-wingers in Europe, who claim to be critics of globalization.

Following the arguments of Christopher Lasch, Gottfried expresses praise for the old-style socialist working-class-based parties. “The working class consciousness that had marked the socialist past, and was connected sociologically to profoundly conservative attitudes, has ceased to count” (144).

However, it may be possible that Prof. Gottfried’s picture of the Left is overdrawn in the case of some European countries. Is the entire Left today really so abjectly self-hating in regard to their own nationality, and so contemptuous of family life and religion? Does a belief in social justice for working people necessarily entail the adoption of the current-day agenda of multiculturalism and “alternative lifestyles”?

Prof. Gottfried argues that the pre-1960s Left in such countries as Canada, Britain, and the United States, would have found most of the concerns of the post-Sixties’ Left of little importance or in fact repugnant. Indeed, while ferociously fighting for its vision of social justice and equality for the working majority, it usually considered notions of family, nation, and religion as a “pre-political” part of human existence, which it had no desire to alter. Some of the leading figures of this patriotic, pro-family Left may include William Morris, Jack London, George Orwell, Christopher Lasch, and the Canadian political theorist Eugene Forsey.

It may be noted that the trend in many current-day Western societies is to adopt both social liberalism and economic conservatism (the latter usually called “neo-liberalism” in Europe). For example, the Liberal government in Canada in the 1990s carried out such austerity measures against the broad mass of the Canadian public as not rescinding the Goods and Services Tax (the Canadian equivalent of a VAT), as they had explicitly promised to do; massively cutting the benefits available under Unemployment Insurance; massively increasing the contributions required for the Canada Pension Plan; and introducing drawbacks on the Old Age Pension and Old Age tax-exemption. The Liberal government has tended to cut those benefits available to the broad mass of the population as a whole while at the same, increasing funding to special-interest groups whether business cronies or “rainbow-coalition” members. At the same time, it has maintained one of the highest levels of immigration of any country today.

Prof. Gottfried unfortunately does not devote too much attention to the role of technology, mass-media, consumerism, and pop-culture in ushering in our near-dystopic age. Indeed, the “lived cultural reality” for many people in Western societies is American pop-culture, which tends to amplify socially-liberal, consumerist/consumptionist, and antinomian attitudes, especially among the young. Gottfried could have identified some of the varied resistance to hypermodernity not only in old-fashioned social democracy, but also in such tendencies as ecology and neo-mysticism (typified by such figures as C.G. Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Ken Wilber).

It is also important to consider that for most people in Western societies today, the mark of the regime’s success is that it offers very high levels of affluence and prosperity. This is far different from the situation in East-Central Europe, where it could be argued that the post-Communist transition has engendered widespread and deepening pauperization of large sectors of the populace. It is not often considered that it is only in a very homogenous society that such huge disparities of wealth and poverty can be maintained without some kind of violent situation arising. One dreads to imagine what would happen in Canada were there to be a major economic downturn. All the heterogeneous groups that have arrived in Canada in the last thirty years or so, would be at each other’s and the fading majority’s throats. It could easily develop into events similar to those seen in France recently.

The central point to be made is that Soviet Communism, despite its various radical and murderous elements, may have indeed been surpassed by today’s post-Western left-liberalism in its sheer destructive-ness and antinomianism toward more traditional societies. It could be argued that, in the end, it is hard to imagine anything more corrosive and destructive to Western society than policies of aggressive multiculturalism and mass, dissimilar immigration; and of antinomian and deconstructive art, ideas, attitudes and lifestyles. It is the abject, self-hating extremes of white Westerners, and the extreme social liberalism of current-day society as well as the triumph of economic conservatism which many of the old-fashioned social democrats would find repugnant.

 

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Wegierski, Mark. “Book Review of ‘The Strange D-eath of Marxism’ by Paul Gottfried.” The Social Contract, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Spring 2006), pp. 218-220. <http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc1603/article_1403.shtml >.

Note: This book by Paul Gottfried is also available in Spanish translation as La Extrana Muerte Del Marxismo: La Izquierda Europea en el Nuevo Milenio (Madrid: Ciudadela Libros, 2007).

 

Review of Gottfried’s Multiculturalism & Politics of Guilt – Wegierski

Book Review of Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt by Paul Gottfried

By Mark Wegierski

Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy
by Paul Edward Gottfried
Columbia (MO) and London: University of Missouri Press
158 pages, $29.95

 

Professor Paul Edward Gottfried, who teaches at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania, here continues his critical and forthright analysis of “the managerial-therapeutic regime” which he began decades ago, but which was recently most trenchantly expressed in After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (Princeton University Press, 1999) (reviewed in The Social Contract, Vol. IX, No. 4 (Summer 1999), pp. 274-276). The title of Gottfried’s new book is an ironic reference to Multiculturalism and The Politics of Recognition (an essay by Charles Taylor, with commentary by Amy Gutmann, Editor; Steven C. Rockefeller; Michael Walzer; Susan Wolf) (Princeton University Press, 1992). This work by Charles Taylor, et al., which represents the “official” view of multiculturalism at the very heights of current-day political theory, was brought out in a revised edition by Princeton University Press in 1994, with new commentary by K. Anthony Appiah, and Jurgen Habermas (edited and introduced by Amy Gutmann). (It is possible that there have been newer and expanded editions of the collection in the interval.) Professor Gottfried may be signaling by the choice of his title that his work offers a sharp critique of multiculturalism — and careful explication of what it “really” represents, beyond all the hazy rhetoric and abstract theorizing of “official” political theory and “official” political discourse.

Other books by Gottfried include: Conservative Millenarians: The Romantic Experience in Bavaria (1979); The Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right (1986); the two editions of The Conservative Movement (1988 and 1993, the former co-written with Thomas Fleming, editor of Chronicles magazine), on postwar American conservatism; as well as Carl Schmitt Politics and Theory, a highly nuanced work about the controversial yet often acute German right-wing theorist.

Today Paul Gottfried is probably the leading political theorist of the American “paleo-conservative” grouping (in fact, he is credited with coining that term). He has been a senior editor of The World & I, and is currently a senior editor at Telos, a journal of eclectic political criticism, and a contributing editor to Humanitas and Chronicles.

Prof. Gottfried has also paid a real price for his forthright political views, most notably being rejected from a major appointment to the Catholic University of America (Washington, D.C.). Ironically, this appointment was opposed more strenuously by neoconservatives (who often complain about this kind of academic exclusion), than by left-liberals. Considering that Gottfried may have supervised dozens of Ph.D. and M.A. students at Catholic University (as opposed to Elizabethtown, which lacks a significant graduate program), his deselection from CUA could be seen not only as an attack on him, but as an attempt to crush an entire intellectual tendency.

Reading Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, one has the feeling that the author is writing what he wants to write, leaving aside excessively tactical considerations. In an age in which many so-called conservatives are deathly afraid of stating their views openly, or of going beyond any but the mildest critiques of current-day society, Gottfried’s book is highly refreshing.

The work is high-level political theory, grounded in an intimate knowledge of both the classics and new currents of political philosophy, as well as an acute understanding of the long history and evolution of political practice. Gottfried has a command of numerous languages, including Ancient Greek, Latin, German, French, Italian and Polish. This is something which is especially rare among most North American scholars and policy “experts” — the former who often deliberately misportray the classics and most of history, and the latter who often give ignorant lectures to countries abroad as to the internal politics and arrangements they should follow.

The book includes Acknowledgments (pp. ix-x), sometimes extensive footnotes, and an index (pp. 151-158). It begins with an excellent Introduction, “From the Managerial to the Therapeutic State” (pp. 1-16). Contrasting Europe and America, Gottfried says that while America may seem economically freer (with significantly lower taxes), its therapeutic regime is in many ways as advanced as that in Europe.

We are expected to take for granted, and view as beyond critical discussion, ‘universal nations,’ ‘open communities,’ ‘homosexual family units,’ and ‘pluralistic cultures.’… These things thrive because of government agencies, the judiciary, and ‘public’ education. They represent what democracy as public administration holds up as the happy alternative to how things used to be. And if the state moves boldly to ban insensitivity, that may be necessary to avoid mass backsliding into life ‘before the Sixties’ (pp. 4-5).

His first chapter, “The Death of Socialism?” (pp. 17-38), is a brilliant dissection of the politics and economics of the current-day period. Gottfried argues that old-fashioned social democracy, and even the Communist parties (for example, in Italy) and regimes, were, to a large extent, socially-conservative. The embrace by left-wing parties of current-day capitalism (along with multiculturalism, of course) has made them objectively “less” rather than “more” conservative. Gottfried also skewers capitalism as espoused by, for example, Virginia Postrel

Postrel’s eagerness to eradicate tradition and established community is so extreme that even a center-left reviewer writing in the New Republic finds her neophilia to be one of the ‘best arguments for conservatism with which I am familiar.’… Postrel’s enthusiasms are a perfect example of democratic capitalist boosterism, characterized by support for open borders, the mixing of peoples and races, and a continuing redefinition of nations and cultures… Postrel’s vision does not conflict with the consuming quest to change society in a progressive way pursued by social democrats, save for her difference with them over the degree of government intervention useful for the economy… Their quarrel with the other side is not about abolishing the past but about the best means to bring that about. (pp. 27-28)

Professor Gottfried is clearly impressed with certain aspects of the Left tradition of the West. Some of the most prominent of these social conservatives of the Left include William Morris, George Orwell, Jack London, and Christopher Lasch (who considered himself a social democrat). Gottfried has also closely studied the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, a curiously bivalent tradition which gave rise to both the theory of “the authoritarian personality” (which is one of the main props of the managerial-therapeutic regime), as well as some of the most cutting-edge critiques of the system.

Chapter 2, “Religious Foundations of the Managerial Therapeutic State” (pp. 39-70) looks at some possible origins of the seemingly all-pervasive current-day viewpoints. It would be too simple to say that it is all the result of current-day conditioning and propaganda. Gottfried locates one of the major sources of these outlooks in James Kurth’s view of the so-called “Protestant deformation” (p. 10). Gottfried cites Kurth:

All religions are unique, but Protestantism is more unique than all others. No other is so critical of hierarchy and community, or of traditions and customs that go with them. At its doctrinal base Protestantism is anti-hierarchy and anti-community. (p. 10)

Gottfried would argue that, although there may be many traditionalist and conservative Protestants, the so-called “mainline” Protestant denominations in the United States tend very heavily in directions supportive of the regime. Gottfried writes “Basic for American religious life is the fusion of a victim-centered feminism with the Protestant framework of sin and redemption” (p. 56). According to Gottfried, it is the broad mass of self-hating, guilt-driven WASPs in America who tend to valorize all the accredited minority claims, and promote mass, dissimilar immigration, as well as neutralize and suppress the resistance to the managerial-therapeutic regime from more conservative WASPs and many Catholic and Orthodox Christian white ethnics.

These American liberal Protestant outlooks have spread into Europe, where the more Protestant countries, such as Germany, tend to be further along the road of coercive political-correctness. Gottfried reveals the startling fact that “…[m]ore Germans are now languishing in prison for expressing (unprogressive or insensitive) opinions than there were in East Germany before the fall of the Communist regime” (p. 44).

Chapter 3, “The Managerial as Therapeutic State” (pp. 71-100), is a very sharp analysis of the various control-mechanisms of the current-day regime. In Gottfried’s analysis, it looks like an ultra-totalitarian system (in the normative rather than openly-violent sense), intimately concerned with the innermost thoughts of its “subject-citizens,” and consigning particularly troublesome dissenters to coercive “therapy.” Gottfried argues that many high-ranking political, legal, and feminist theorists, such as Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, and Jurgen Habermas, have summarily dispensed with freedom of speech, the right to free association, religious freedom (for Christians), and freedom of conscience, as even purely theoretical requirements for their vision of “liberal” polity.

“A Sensitized World” (chapter four, pp. 101-117) points to the fact that the Western managerial-therapeutic regimes are now embarking upon global, “missionizing” projects. Professor Gottfried leaves it an open question whether non-Western societies, which are often filled with a highly ferocious traditionalism, are now going to be increasingly subject to such projects, or if Third World traditionalism will by some strange process continue to be valorized by self-hating Westerners. The heavily pervasive pop-culture of America is already functioning as an icebreaker for various aspects of current-day Western ideas, far ahead of possible political realignments in non-Western traditional societies.

Chapter 5, “Whither the Populist Right” (pp. 118-130) does not hold out much hope for these tendencies of resistance to the managerial-therapeutic regime. Gottfried decisively refutes the notion that these tendencies can be considered “far right” or “neo-fascist”:

It must…be asked if what European populist leaders famously demand — referenda, an end to welfare burdens, and more government accountability over immigration — are intrinsically ‘illiberal.’ However offensive they may be to the journalistic Left, these stands do invoke a recognizably liberal principle, the consent of citizens… The confrontation that has erupted is not between liberals and antiliberals but between two postliberal concepts of democracy, one, managerial-multicultural, and the other, plebiscitary national or regional. (p.122)

In the Conclusion, “A Secular Theocracy” (pp. 131-149), Gottfried reiterates the point about the all-pervasiveness of this current-day “soft totalitarianism” (p. 138). He foresees as main challenges to the regime either economic difficulties, or the frictions arising out of excessive, mass, dissimilar immigration. The managerial-therapeutic regime has enjoyed great support because economic prosperity (and the cornucopia of government benefits for large sectors of society), as well as what seems like a highly attractive cult of sexual and personal pleasure, are seen as the regime’s successes, in most people’s minds. However, it is possible that an over-extended welfare state will, at some point, have to significantly reduce benefits, and those to whom it reduces benefits first are highly likely to be those who lack the status of current-day victim groups (or those groupings who are considered decidedly less victimized than others). At the same time, the current-day New Class elites grossly underestimate the transformative and revolutionary potential of a dissimilar immigration so huge that it threatens to displace the native-born majority. What will happen if former majorities become ever-smaller minorities, while the new majorities will ever more insistently press their claims? Presumably, the regime will try to maintain prosperity by the upholding, as far as possible, of current-day capitalism (probably tactically accepting much of what is called “fiscal conservatism” today), combined with even more thoroughgoing efforts at conditioning and suppression of dissent.

Gottfried’s book is rather terse, and could have devoted more attention to an analysis of current-day capitalism, consumptionism, and a closer look at how the mass media works upon the average person (in its main self-designated functions of advertising, entertainment, and information). It is also possible that some of the ultimate roots of the evolution of the managerial-therapeutic regime lie in the very fact of the ever-accelerating advance of capitalism and technology. For many people today, that life of comfort, pleasure, and lifestyle freedoms apparently assured by the regime is more germane in their assent to it, than the strictures of political-correctness. Indeed, the broad masses are clearly far less interested in political-correctness than the New Class cadres, although the latter, of course, usually live lives of comparatively even greater material comfort. (One is reminded of that socio-economic category identified by David Brooks: “bobos” or “bourgeois bohemians.”)

Given the intertwining of the regime with capitalist growth — which is clearly ecologically unsustainable over the long term — more attention should have been paid in the book to possible resistance to the regime from such tendencies as ecology/environmentalism, neo-mysticism (such as that represented by Joseph Campbell and C.G. Jung), and the anti-globalization movements. There could have been more space given to such diverse figures as Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, the Mexico-based ecological critic Ivan Illich, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, J.R.R. Tolkien, Peter Augustine Lawler (author of Postmodernism Rightly Understood The Return to Realism in American Thought, among other works), agrarian philosopher Wendell Berry, Camille Paglia, and Canadian traditionalist philosopher George Parkin Grant. There could have been some attempt to engage with the more positive aspects of communitarian political theory, and to look at such thinkers as, for example, British political theorist (formerly at Oxford, now at the London School of Economics) John Gray, and Jean Bethke Elshtain. Giving the work a more broadly cultural, ecological, technoskeptical, and communitarian focus might have helpfully increased its possible appeal without diluting its central message.

As it stands, the book is brilliantly and acutely political, but perhaps lacks a certain cultural depth. In a way it mirrors the writing of Hobbes (who is clearly one of the main inspirations of Carl Schmitt, Paul Gottfried, and James Burnham(1) — a thinker who has also clearly inspired Gottfried). Hobbes brought a very sharp precision to political philosophy, but the mechanistic qualities of his view of human nature had deconstructive effects. Professor Gottfried has given us the razor-sharp theory; the “poetry” of resistance to the managerial-therapeutic regime (unless one semi-anachronistically chooses to consider as such some of the prescient forebodings of Nietzsche) has yet to be written.

NOTE

1. James Burnham’s seminal work is The Managerial Revolution (1941). Burnham’s Suicide of the West (1964) describes various aspects of self-hatred and guilt massively undermining Western elites and societies. Burnham began his writing career on the Left, and was considered “Trotsky’s most brilliant disciple.” Much of Burnham’s writing is focused on an analysis of power and its exercise in inter- and intra-societal relations. George Orwell paid Burnham a curiously ironic compliment by apparently basing on Burnham his character “O’Brien,” the Grand Inquisitor-like figure, in 1984.

 

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Wegierski, Mark. “Book Review of ‘Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt’ by Paul Gottfried.” The Social Contract, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Winter 2002-2003), pp. 144-147. < http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc1302/article_1136.shtml >.

Note: This book by Paul Gottfried is also available in German translation as Multikulturalismus und die Politik der Schuld: Unterwegs zum Manipulativen Staat? (Graz: Ares-Verlag, 2004).

 

Review of Gottfried’s After Liberalism – Wegierski

Book Review of After Liberalism by Paul Gottfried

By By Mark Wegierski

After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State
by Paul Edward Gottfried
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
200 pages, $27.95

 

Professor Paul Edward Gottfried, who teaches at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania, is a longstanding veteran of the raging political and culture wars in America. His other books include, Conservative Millenarians The Romantic Experience in Bavaria (1979), a work which attests to his early-found miter in complex intellectual history; The Search for Historical Meaning Hegel and the Postwar American Right (1986), a work which combines his interests in Continental European political theory and American right-wing politics; the two editions of The Conservative Movement (1988 and 1993) on postwar American conservatism; as well as Carl Schmitt Politics and Theory (1990), a highly nuanced work about the controversial yet often acute German right-wing theorist. Paul Gottfried is today probably the leading political theorist of the so-called “paleoconservative” grouping (in fact, he is credited with coining that term), and could be called one of the leading “white generals” in the American “counterrevolution.” He has been a senior editor of The World & I, and is currently a senior editor at Telos, a scholarly journal of eclectic political criticism, and a contri-buting editor to Humanitas as well as Chronicles. He is also editor-in-chief of This World. After Liberalism, which has been published by Princeton University Press as the lead title in a major new series, “New Forum Books,” presenting original scholarship focusing on the juncture of culture, law and politics.

Referencing the 1996 American election, the author relates it to the main concepts discussed in the work notably the high degree of success and seeming inevitability of managerial ideology today. As long as the current-day regime is able to guarantee material prosperity and all the attractions of consumerism, “caring,” and sexual “free expression,” it will be largely unchallengeable. Gottfried notes that capitalist economic expansion and the expansion of the welfare state have, for the last few decades, occurred at the same time.

The main idea of this book is that current-day Western societies (and especially America) have moved in a postliberal and postdemocratic direction. They have moved in the direction of a “regime” of public administration that has little in common with nineteenth-century liberalism.

Chapter One, “In Search of a Liberal Essence” moves through various historical and contemporary definitions of “liberalism,” looking at the “semantic problem” of liberalism, and examining its “continuities and discontinuities.” The conclusion is that the term “liberalism” cannot be truly applied to most current-day thinking claiming that term.

Professor Gottfried then sets out to disentangle the meanings of “Liberalism vs. Democracy.” Anti-democratic liberals (such as the nineteenth-century French statesman Francois Guizot), liberals who wished to cooperate with nationalist democracy (such as the early-twentieth-century Vilfredo Pareto), and those liberals who advanced along the main lines of progress (such as John Stuart Mill) are looked at. What emerged in the twentieth century is characterized as “the intertwining of mass democracy and public administration.”

In “Public Administration and Liberal Demo-cracy” Gottfried looks at the processes of “building the welfare state” through “the politics of socialization,” leading to the “liberal democratic model” – which is neither truly liberal nor democratic.

The author then examines the administrative “new class” and its values. “Pluralism” – as defined by the New Class – is one of the central values of the late modern regime. It is the justification for the “war against dissent” – the categorizing of persons who think differently from the New Class as bigots or hatemongers, who have to receive either “sensitivity-training” or be silenced by social ostracism, professional marginalization, substantial fines, or even jail-terms. “Pluralism” and other approaches (such as the pretense to “scientific objectivity” and the deriding of metaphysics and religion) are simply seen as tropes for the attempt to exclude and eradicate “illiberal” views in society. In the process of its triumph in most Western societies, the managerial-therapeutic regime is tending in the direction of “a world democratic empire” – since the very existence of “illiberal” regimes is seen as a challenge to the proclaimed “universality” of “liberal democratic values.”

He considers “the populist alternative” to the managerial-therapeutic regime, which ironically arises partly as a result of the dynamics of mass-democracy. This is probably the best brief analysis available in English of such tendencies as Le Pen’s Front National, the Italian Lega Nord, and the Continental European “postmodern Right” (including the Nouvelle Ecole led by Alain de Benoist).

Gottfried argues that immigration policy is a major instrument, being used to expand the power of the managerial state. Massive, dissimilar immigration is one of the most salient aspects of the managerial regime. Traditional identities are broken down even further, and enthusiastic supporters and clients of the welfare-state are gained. However, excessive immigration creates frictions that may challenge the regime. The majority population is alienated from offering benefits to those with whom they have nothing in common; Gottfried rightly notes that some sense of commonality is highly important to the welfare state. It is only natural to resist offering outright “gifts” to those with whom we have nothing in common – the notion of “universal humanity” is not satisfactory enough for most people. Perhaps there is some hope that opposition to immigration may serve as a wedge to undermine the managerial regime. On the other hand, the inflow of immigration may be massive enough that groups from outside the West with “illiberal” outlooks may come to be a majority, and at some point put an end to managerial “pluralism” and “relativism.” However, this would almost certainly mean the relegation of white Westerners to the status of pariahs in what were once their own societies.

Gottfried perhaps underplays what is likely to be the most tragic aspect of the managerial regime, and the greatest danger to the life and future of European societies – this mass, dissimilar immigration. First of all, European-descended Americans (and Canadians) are robbed of their traditional identities, so they see nothing worthwhile to preserve and fight for in terms of the continued existence of their own societies. Indeed, the managerial view seems to be that European nation-states are worthwhile mostly as receptacles for the continued existence and flourishing of those various precious minority cultures. (The visible minority population of Toronto, Canada’s largest city, has gone from less than 3 percent in 1961, to over 50 percent today. Predictably, in public one is only allowed to celebrate this shift to diversity, and to deliberate on how the needs of minorities can be better addressed by government and society.) These demographic shifts are perhaps the most radical, indelible kinds of change that can be experienced by any society.

Theoretically speaking, there could always be the chance of a cultural, intellectual, moral, or religious restoration of a society after the collapse of the ruling managerial ideology (if that society had retained its native majority), but these drastic kinds of population changes become, after a certain point, utterly irreversible. Ironically, the effects of old-fashioned social democracy on society (concerned with waging the class-struggle on behalf of the native working classes), are comparatively trivial. The managerial regime appears to be in the process of practically destroying most Western societies, in the space of no more than a century (beginning with the 1950s). What is especially frightening today is how utterly beholden most Western societies are to the values of the New Class, and how very little real opposition is actually being raised. On virtually every important front one can think of – demographic, as well as cultural, intellectual, moral, and religious – Western traditionalism has been in pell-mell retreat for decades. Indeed, Western societies might be described as in the process of being progressively accelerated to oblivion.

After Liberalism ends on a rather somber note, where the varieties of opposition to the managerial-therapeutic regime are not given much hope. The religious Right and the “archaic Right” are seen as incapable of mounting a challenge the former is seen as largely embracing the administrative state in the forlorn hope it will promote “family values” – while the latter is seen as having simply abandoned politics in favor of theological or literary forms of argument. Indeed, among the strengths of Gottfried’s book is the fact that it does not fall into archaic modes of argumentation. The intellectual Left is also seen as not offering much hope. “Any serious appraisal of the managerial regime must consider first and foremost the extent of its control – and the relative powerlessness of its critics” (p. 141).

One major criticism of the book could be that it unduly narrows the conservative and traditionalist critique of late modernity by focusing too much on early liberalism and the bourgeois spirit, thus largely excluding such tendencies as traditionalist Catholicism, organic nationalism, and such figures as Nietzsche and the anticapitalist “politics of cultural despair.” While the defense of classical liberalism and the bourgeois spirit might appear especially congenial in an Anglo-American context, organic and Nietzschean outlooks might be more evocative in Continental Europe, and might also constitute far deeper and more thoroughgoing types of critique. Indeed, perhaps all that can be achieved in late modernity is the maintenance of small but powerful niches of sharp political criticism – although one could also legitimately ask, to what final end? Some might argue that the conservative critique in late modernity should be as cultural, “fanciful,” creative-nihilist, and “utopian” as possible, dreaming of “new modes and new orders” – and focusing around Romanticism and Romantic nationalism.

After Liberalism is a very fine work, and it may indeed be the kind of book of analysis that George Orwell would have written, had he lived longer. As one reads the book, one can imagine one is reading our own world’s equivalent of Emmanuel Goldstein’s Theory and Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism. Gottfried’s highly theoretical and often sharply-phrased book could also be described as having a “right-wing Marxist” flavor to it. Indeed, it is the kind of critical book around which many future debates and discussions might well be structured.

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Wegierski, Mark. “Book Review of ‘After Liberalism’ by Paul Gottfried.” The Social Contract, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Summer 1999), pp. 274-276. Retrieved from: <http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc0904/article_830.shtml >.

 

Review of Sunic’s Homo Americanus – Gottfried

Review of Tomislav Sunic’s Homo Americanus

By Paul Gottfried

A polyglot Croatian scholar, Tomislav Sunic, provides in his newest book, Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age, reasons that a good European should distrust the US. These reasons are significantly different from those that one might encounter in the Euro-American leftist and mainstream press, e.g., that President Bush is a Christian maniac who is unleashing an anti-Muslim crusade against a Middle Eastern people or that Americans have taken an inexcusably long time to introduce homosexual marriage or, most ominously, that we treat illegals from across our Southern border with xenophobic brutality. Sunic gives the proper reasons that Europeans should despise us, namely, because we are hostile to European national identities, because we have contributed to bringing to Central Europe Frankfurt School brain-laundering and last but not least, because we try to substitute for concrete historical traditions such notions as propositional nationhood and the ideology of human rights. In his elaboration of these grievances Sunic is entirely on target, and the fact that he has had to publish his manuscript (as far as I can determine) with his own funds speaks volumes for the difficulty of publicizing non-orthodox views on certain subjects.

I also think that Sunic strikes the proper balance, and indeed far better than most of the European New Right, by stressing both the newness and antiquity of the American policies and attitudes under discussion. Instead of dumping on the Protestant, moralistic culture out of which America grew as a nation, Sunic believes that culture had its strengths before it became secularized and corrupted. It is what American religious culture became by the beginning of the last century which concerns him, as does the obvious contradiction between a territorially defined Europe of nations and a righteous global empire seeking to implement its conception of rights everywhere.

Contrary to the postwar conservative illusion that the US, unlike revolutionary France, embraced historic rights while rejecting the “rights of man,” Sunic shows Americans being as obsessed with universal rights as they are with consumer products. It is the combination of consumption and rights talk which has produced “homo americanus,” a constantly reproduced American prototype that by now, according to Sunic, is as easily identified as “homo sovieticus.” During the Cold War, Sunic and others living in the communist bloc began to think of the products of party indoctrination as having a recognizable character and appearance. It was postmodern and post-bourgeois, but for all of its ritualized revolutionary discourse this human type was profoundly conformist. Its presence, according to some critics, precluded the possibility of restoring human character as it had existed before, in pre-Marxist societies: as a result of longtime Communist control, one had to deal with flat, standardized personalities that might have been the worst byproduct of “scientific socialism.”

Sunic, who received his doctorate at University of California, Santa Barbara, and then taught at Juniata College in Pennsylvania before returning to Europe, believes that Americans fall into a similar pattern. As the creations of a self-proclaimed political experiment, whose subjects generally frown on the European past, Americans, and especially the younger generation, show a depressing sameness. But they mask this defect as individual self-discovery. They confuse the dreary recitation of politically correct gibberish with sensitivity that they think they have arrived at through their own value-clarification. A combination of materialism, superficiality and misplaced moral concern is the American gestalt that Sunic keeps coming back to. And he seems bothered by the fact that Europeans have begun to imitate this gestalt even while bewailing American influence.

A foreword by Kevin MacDonald, known for his controversial arguments about the destructiveness of the Jewish impact on gentile society and culture, may unfairly bring Sunic flak. His own critique stays clear of anti-Jewish tirades and of the tasteless flattery of American Jews heard among some Christian Philosemites. Sunic properly focuses on why Europeans should deplore American conversionary politics, whose effects he carefully outlines. And with due respect to MacDonald, whose work I continue to find stimulating, he zeros in on the Protestant deformation, which may be far more important as an explanation for what Sunic criticizes than the Jewish war against gentile national identities. There is, by the way, one point raised in the introduction, and then in the text itself, which commands particular attention. In both places the observation is made that the politics of guilt may be imperialistic righteousness that the moral fanatic turns against himself, when he is not venting it on others. The point is well taken, and besides, it sounds like something the Frankfurt School and its American imitators might say about bourgeois Christians.

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Gottfried, Paul. “Homo Americanus.” Taki’s Magazine, 22 August 2007. <http://takimag.com/article/homo_americanus#axzz2HIndVAyg >.

Note: Tomislav Sunic’s book has also been published in a Spanish translation as Homo americanus: hijo de la posmoderna (Barcelona: Ediciones Nueva Republica, 2008) and in a French translation as Homo americanus: rejeton de l’ère postmoderne (Saint-Genis-Laval: Akribeia, 2010).

On the issue of the Jews, see also Tomislav Sunic’s “American Neurosis: Love and Hate for the Jews” and Paul Gottfried’s “In Search of Anti-Semitism.”