Auster’s Self-Contradiction
Jun 25th, 2009 by Prozium
Lawrence Auster (Jew) is once again fretting about, what else … ”anti-Semitism.” This time his complaint is that Tanstaafl and other vicious “Darwinian anti-Semites” refuse to hang on his every word and take each of his utterances at face value. Instead, these malicious bloggers and commentators continue to assign insidious motives to his selfless crusade to save Western civilization.
Auster is always at his best when he is testifying against himself. For years now, Larry has insisted that destructive Jewish behavior in the West is motivated by the same suicidal embrace of liberalism that plagues white gentiles. In a recent exchange with Paul Gottfried (Jew) though, Auster drew a clear and useful distinction between Jewish and Protestant liberalism. In fact, he goes on to say that Jews are not really liberals at all.
What distinguishes Jewish liberalism from Protestant liberalism is the following.
Jewish liberals see white Christians as guilty. The Jews feel ok about themselves, they think the white gentile majority is the problem.
By contrast, white Protestant liberals feel guilty about themselves. This leaves them without a confident group selfhood. They believe only in equality, only in their own guilt for somehow standing in the way of equality. It is this lack of collective and even individual selfhood, this inner nothingness, this willingness to be destroyed, that makes the white Protestants the true liberals. The Jews, whose collective and individual psyche is not guilty under liberalism (since in the liberal world view Jews are victims and the champions of victims), have psychological power and self-confidence and thus are not true liberals.
A true liberal is a person who is willing to accept his group’s extinction. Protestants are willing to accept their group’s extinction. Jews are not. Therefore Protestants are closer to the true liberal essence than the Jews are.
This is a very good analysis. It raises many questions. If Jews are not true liberals (having failed the litmus test of wishing dissolution upon their ancestral group), then what are they? If Jewish liberalism is insincere, then why are Jews so committed to pushing liberalism in the West?
The answer, of course, is that Jews are a self-interested ethnic group who cynically promote liberalism (and communism, neoconservatism, postmodernism, libertarianism, feminism, anarchism, etc.) to weaken other groups while empowering and enriching themselves. Similarly, Auster’s role as a Jewish activist on the “far right” seems to be to “fight anti-Semitism” and “advance the cause of Israel.”
As for Gintas’ “brilliant critique of the Darwinian anti-Semites,” it is nothing of the sort. The phenomena of parasitism is ubiquitous in nature. Parasites can modify the behavior of their hosts, induce non-adaptive behavior in their hosts, reduce the fitness of their hosts in all sorts of ways. A good example of this is the lancet fluke which commandeers the brains of ants and gets them to commit suicide by climbing up blades of grass where they can be eaten by cows or sheep. No benefit accrues to the ants from this. It goes exclusively to the lancet flukes and their progeny.
Auster himself has acknowledged the problem :
When Americans opened the Golden Door to millions of Jewish immigrants (from several of whom I myself am descended) in the late 19th century, if they had known that many of the grandchildren of those immigrants would be a bunch of permanent cultural subversives against this country, would they have let them in?
… but his concern is not the “bunch of permanent cultural subversives” (the parasites) nesting in this country. Rather, in his eyes the menace is the “anti-Semites” (the host) who would react by excluding them.
This duplicity crops up time and again in Auster’s writings. He complains endlessly about the ideal of non-discrimination, but he doesn’t advocate getting rid of the civil rights laws. He exorciates liberalism, but would retain liberal democracy as America’s form of government. He writes about black-on-white crime, but supports integration of which it is a product. He attacks multiculturalism, but would not force minorities to assimilate.
There is some nagging concern always at the back of his mind. It runs through the entire gamut of his writing. It causes him to qualify his position on countless issues. Tellingly, it does not seem to be shared by other racialists, which suggests it is some unique quality about Auster.
Auster’s self-contradiction is his own Jewishness. He can’t fully embrace white racialism because of his Jewish heritage. He can’t break completely with liberalism out of fear of what would happen to the Jews. At the same time, he can’t fully embrace his Jewishness because of his ideological commitment to racialism and conservatism.
In the end, Auster sounds like neither a Jew or a racialist. His own self-contradiction (his identity crisis) makes him a poor advocate for both sides.
