The Peculiar Institution / Antisemitism Crossover

Did Jews control the transatlantic slave trade?

There’s a question that wasn’t asked in the recent Q&A, but comes up often enough and will serve as a good opening for this post. The question is: “Why does Darryl talk about the Jews so much?” It’s a fair question, because I do talk about them a lot, and most people who talk about Jews a lot do it for less-than-admirable reasons.

The first reason is simply that Fear & Loathing In the New Jerusalem immersed me in Jewish history for several years, much more deeply than any other topic I’ve studied. I read something like 80 whole books, countless sections and chapters from other books, and over a thousand, probably closer to two thousand papers, articles, essays, diaries, etc on topics often tangentially related to Zionism and the Israel-Palestine story. I often worked in Israel during my time with the Department of Defense, and I’ve got friends over there who are current or former Israeli service members. I’ve also got Palestinian friends, both in America and in the West Bank, and since publishing the podcast I have received countless emails and letters from people on both sides of the conflict, telling me their stories and sharing their appreciation for the series. It’s been many years since I wrapped it up, and I still get these emails. So to one extent or another, sometimes more, sometimes less, Zionism, Israel, and Jewish history have been a theme I rarely go long without recalling.

The other reason is just that Jews are the most interesting people to read about and study. They’ve been a diaspora people for 2,500 years - a literate, commercial, urban people who appear in just about every important episode in modern European history. Modernity has been defined by the shift from countryside to city, from land wealth to money wealth, from farming to urban trades, from local, tributary economies to long-distance trade networks requiring credit, insurance, and other complex financial instruments. As the European peasantry made its trek into the cities and tried to adapt to this rapidly-changing world, the Jews were already there, waiting, with skills and experience that put them way ahead of the game. That didn’t just apply to the professions, but to intellectual, social, and political movements as well. You can’t discuss the history of anarchism, socialism, communism or nationalism without talking about Jews. You’ll find them hanging around, playing more or less important roles, during the French Revolution, the 1848 revolutions, the American progressive movement, the Russian revolutions, and both world wars. They were as important as the Italians in the early history of American organized crime, they played a leading role in the Civil Rights movement and were the most important leaders of the campus radical movements in 1960s Europe and America. From Marx and Freud, to Strauss and Adorno, from Einstein to Oppenheimer to Feynman, from Bellow, Roth, and Asimov to Spielberg, Kubrick, Allen, and both the Wachowski and the Coen brothers, Jews played a decisive and disproportionate role in shaping the culture of the 20th and early 21st century. Today, of course, you can’t get through the first ten minutes of a discussion about US foreign policy without discussing Israel, neoconservatives, and the shaping of US policy in the Middle East. No matter where you look, there they are, and not just in the background, but right out front.

The unfortunate fact that these topics cannot be discussed without incurring at least a suspicion of antisemitism discourages serious people of goodwill from engaging with them, and instead yields the floor to people who are often neither serious nor of good will. The frequent result is something I’ve seen happen a hundred times. It goes something like this. A nice, normal conservative college student (there are left wing versions of this pipeline as well, but I’ll stick with what I know), is perusing the comments section of a Daily Wire article on why communism is the worst thing since New Coke, when someone with the handle Uncle_Adolf1488 pipes in, “Most of the early Bolshevik leaders were Jews. No surprise an article on (((Daily Wire))) wouldn’t mention that.” “Ridiculous,” replies our nice, normal conservative college student, “everyone knows the Soviets were Russian.” No seriously, says Uncle Adolf, you can read about it right here in this Times of Israel article. Hm. Interesting, thinks our student friend, I’ll have to ask Professor Bernstein about this in History tomorrow. Bad idea. He is dressed down in front of the class for bringing up conspiracy theories and antisemitic talking points, as his classmates pile on with dirty looks. Shaken, he goes home and jumps on Google to find out that Uncle_Adolf was right about the Bolsheviks. When our guy goes back to the Daily Wire comments section to ask Uncle_Adolf some follow-up questions, he finds that his would-be mentor has been banned and can no longer be reached. So he pokes around, and ends up in corners of the internet he should probably avoid - because those are the only places his questions are addressed, though he had to resort to non-corporate off-brand search engines to even locate them - and encounters all of Uncle_Adolf’s friends. And have they got a story for him.

“You ever read 200 Years Together, by Solzhenitsyn?”

“No, never heard of it. I’ve heard of Solzhenitsyn from Jordan Peterson though.”

“Of course you haven’t. Solzhenitsyn wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, his speeches and even his minor unimportant works are available in 80 languages, but somehow an English translation of just that one book has never been published. Weird, right?”

“I guess so.”

“Well, it’s your lucky day, because I happen to have right here a PDF of a translation a few of Our Guys did.”

“Our Guys?”

“I’ll tell you later. Read the book. And it’s not just the communists, either. You’ll see.”

So off he goes down that rabbit hole, and, sure enough, most of what they’re telling him checks out. They’re telling him half the story, but he doesn’t know that, all he knows is that Uncle_Adolf and his friends are the only ones answering questions that his professors, Google, and Daily Wire (which he, too, has been banned from by now) apparently don’t want him to ask. Instead of coming back home from school on Thanksgiving with long hair and a yin-yang tattoo, he comes back with a shaved head and a tattoo his mom thinks are two innocent lightning bolts (though dad knows better). At Thanksgiving dinner, instead of haranguing his family about their support for Trump, he’s letting them have it about the International Jew, about America’s Zionist Occupied Government, and “turn off that sportsball crap so I can show you this ten-part documentary called Europa: The Last Battle. No, it’s not on (((Amazon))) mom, and you won’t find it on (((Netflix))) either.” Grandpa was a flight mechanic in World War 2 and doesn’t like this kind of talk one bit, and mom is afraid that her boy has fallen under the spell of Kanye West, who, she vaguely remembers from an episode of The View, got in trouble for something like this. It’s the same story at Christmas, and by summer break they’re actually relieved to hear he’ll be staying in his college town rather than coming home. It’s become awkward to bring him anywhere because he can’t go five minutes without bringing up the JQ, even in mixed company. He becomes obsessed, and finds a way to bring any discussion to his topic of choice.

“Sweetie, let’s just go church,” says mom.

“OK, but have you read John 8:44?”

“Forget church, let’s watch some TV.”

“Have you ever looked into who owns the media corporations?”

“Sigh… read any good books lately?”

“They own the publishing companies, too, but yes, I have… you ever heard of Kevin MacDonald?”

“Can we talk about something else?”

“…”