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Alex Fox's avatar

Wow, there's quite a lot to digest here! As a Jew, I don't feel comfortable "liking" the post, per se, but I do think you're confronting some important issues that really should be discussed more openly than they are.

I hesitate to argue the established facts of the Holocaust, as I'm well aware that most such conversations turn into an endless rabbit hole. Nevertheless, I will point out that the assertion that a European population of ten million Jews would dwindle to less than two million by 1938 largely as a result of outmigration utterly fails to take into account the strict restrictions that virtually all countries had on Jewish immigration. As an example, in 1939, the MS St. Louis, with its 900 Jewish passengers seeking refuge from Europe, was turned away by multiple countries, including the USA. If 900 Jews couldn't find safe harbor anywhere in the world in 1939, it's absurd to suggest that millions of them would have been absorbed without comment by the nations of the world in the preceding years.

Setting that aside, I find your doctrinal exploration quite fascinating. I think it's worth noting that BOTH mainstream Christianity and Judaism have been largely hijacked by what you call Spiritual Bolshevists. Regrettably, the message that the Left is the ideology of caring, intelligent people has been effectively marketed to American Jewry, which - quite contrary to its own interests - supports exactly the policies that have led to a skyrocketing incidents of virulent anti-Semitism, particularly on college campuses. While there are plenty of anti-Communist Jews (former Libertarian Party vice presidential candidate Spike Cohen is a good example), we are, at least for now, in the minority.

Along the same lines, it's relatively easy to cherry-pick statements, such as the one you found, that reflect a somewhat aggressive approach to ethnic separatism from the Jewish perspective. To me, this smacks of "reactive abuse," which is a phenomenon in which an abuser finally provokes a violent reaction from the person they've been abusing, and then use that reaction as "evidence" that their victim is crazy and/or the perpetrator in the situation. In this case, following the collective trauma of the Holocaust, it might be understandable why some Jewish thinkers would feel that assimilation was a mistake, and that perhaps it would be best to acknowledge deep-seated cultural differences that might cause tension in future.

By and large, I think you and I have a lot of common ground regarding the symptoms of our very sick and dysfunctional culture. I don't know if we would ever agree on what the underlying diseases are, but I look forward to reading more of your work.

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Oregonian's avatar

Brilliant and fantastic essay in its thought provoking course through 2,000 years of human history in Europe. A basic mathematic reality: exceptional human beings, by definition, are always outnumbered by un-exceptional human beings. Therefore any “democratic” institution- markets, education systems, political systems will inevitably tend to level toward an outcome that is minimally acceptable to the larger mass of humans. Valuing human life equally sets the stage for this philosophy to wind its way into every collective endeavor. And the exceptional human beings will always be outnumbered. I’m not sure how any minority can come to have cultural influence except by wrestling with these basic imbalances of numbers.

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