By Ian Jobling • 10/22/08
A discontented former Little Green Footballs fan recently discussed a purge of so-called “fascists” and “racists” at that website that began after one commenter defended my work and Lawrence Auster’s. I left a comment linking to my blog post on the incident and explaining why I’m not a fascist, hoping I might get a decent discussion of race realism going with the moderates who traffic the site. However, it was not to be: I was immediately set upon by a couple of professional anti-Semites named tanstaafl, who runs the blog Age of Treason, and Greg Polden. Due to my history of criticizing their crude, distorted worldview, such people seem to lie in wait to pounce on me wherever I turn. Tanstaafl and Polden’s comments were based on the usual Kevin MacDonald view of Jews as a conniving, “hyperethnocentric” lot working for the downfall of white Gentiles. The owner of the site dissociated himself from the discussion in disgust after reading their stuff. I responded to this pair of gremlins that MacDonald’s theory of Jewish society had recently been discredited by David I. Lieberman. Lieberman’s article is no emotional denunciation, but a review of academic studies that finds that Jews are far from the clannish, authoritarian, hypocritical monsters of MacDonald’s fancy, as I have myself argued. Indeed, Lieberman proves that the grounding principles of MacDonald’s work have no basis in the relevant scholarly literature at all. Lieberman has shown elsewhere that MacDonald distorts the meaning of the sources that he uses.
Anti-Semitism is, however, like Freudianism, an obsessive interpretative system whose proponents see all criticism directed against them as proof that they are right. Thus, for Polden, the very fact that Lieberman and I had challenged MacDonald’s theory was further evidence that it was true. If you admit that you want to kill your father, then you’ve proven the existence of the Oedipus Complex, but if you deny you want to kill him, you’ve proven the complex is so terrifyingly potent that it needs to be repressed. Anti-Semitism works according to the same sort of logic.
Indeed, the analogies between anti-Semitism and Freudianism don’t end there. Both are early 20th century ideologies that have since been so effectively discredited that they are no longer able to do serious harm. (At least, in the West. Anti-Semitism in the Islamic world is a serious matter.) However, both of them have left behind pernicious stereotypes that discredit the work of legitimate intellectuals: serious psychologists, on the one hand, are plagued by the perception that their work is ridiculous Freudian psychobabble, and race realists are all supposed to be Nazis. Both ideologies also seem to inspire a madness for typing, resulting in floods of repetitive and mind-numbing verbiage. Speaking of that, see Tanstaafl’s post about the incident on his blog. You won’t read any commentary about Lieberman’s article, but you will find out what a duplicitous, cowardly, boot-licking traitor I am.
Reasoned criticism of obsessive interpretative systems has little impact on its champions. Consequently, they must be ignored, ridiculed, even purged. Though I don’t like the Little Green Footballs purge, I’m a big fan of purges whose victims are clearly idiots. Consequently, I will continue to purge my comment queue of all dire ruminations sent in by tanstaafl and his like. I might let one or two comment every once in a while just so my readers and I can slap them around a bit. It’s a shame though that other websites let anti-Semites stink up discussion threads, as this lazy tolerance prevents serious communication from taking place.