Israel/Gaza: The Masks Come Off in American Society • 54m ▶

Ron Unz on

I think the striking events we have witnessed in American society over the last few months—and especially the last few days—are best understood if we consider a shrewd observation widely misattributed to Voltaire:

To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.

From the years of my childhood I’d always been aware that political activism and protests were a regular feature of college life, with the 1960s movement against our Vietnam War representing one of its peaks, an effort widely lauded in our later textbooks and media accounts for its heroic idealism.

During the 1980s I remember seeing a long line of crudely constructed shanties protesting South African Apartheid that spent weeks occupying the edges of the Harvard Yard or perhaps it was the Stanford Quad, and I think around the same time other shanties and protesters at UCLA maintained a long vigil in support of the Jewish Refuseniks of the USSR. Political protests seemed as much a normal part of college years as final exams and had largely replaced the hazing rituals and wild pranks of traditional fraternities, which were increasingly vilified as politically incorrect by hostile social censors among the students and faculty.

Over the last decade or so, the Black Lives Matter movement raised such nationwide protests by college students to new heights, both on and off campus, often involving large marches, sit-ins, or vandalism, and this may have been propelled by the increasing influence of smartphones and social media. Meanwhile, the mainstream media regularly praised and promoted this “racial justice movement,” which reached its sharp peak following the death of George Floyd in the summer of 2020.

That incident triggered a massive wave of generally youthful political protests, riots, and looting that engulfed some 200 cities across America, the worst urban unrest since the late 1960s. But unlike that earlier era, most of our establishment media and political class fiercely denounced any suggestions that the police be deployed to quell the violence. Indeed, in many or most cases local law enforcement stood down and did nothing, even as some of their political masters loudly raised the outcry “Defund the Police!”

During those years many universities became heavily caught up in such controversies. Yale renamed its Calhoun residential college in early 2017 and the list of name changes due to the 2020 George Floyd protests is so long that it has its own Wikipedia page, a list that included some of our most storied military bases such as Ft. Bragg and Ft. Hood.

Verbal or even physical attacks against the symbols and statues of America’s most famous presidents and national heroes became quite common and were often favorably reported in the media, with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Christopher Columbus all being vilified and denounced, sometimes with elite endorsement.

A lead opinion piece in the New York Times called for the Jefferson Memorial to be replaced with a towering statue of a black woman while one of the regular Times columnists repeatedly demanded that all monuments honoring George Washington should suffer a similar fate. Many observers argued that America almost seemed to be undergoing its own version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution amid widespread claims that much of our entire historical past was irretrievably tainted and therefore had to be expunged from the public square.

Most of these political protests, especially those on college campuses, were widely hailed by those holding the media megaphones as signifying one of the greatest virtues of American democracy. The many elite defenders of such social and cultural upheavals argued that these events demonstrated the great strength of our society, which freely allowed the fiercest public attacks against our most sacred national icons and heroes. Americans accepted the sort of searing self-criticism that would surely be permitted almost nowhere else in the world.

That long history of permitting or even glorifying public protests against perceived injustices had naturally been absorbed and taken to heart by the young college students who began their classes in September 2023. Then within weeks, a remarkably daring surprise raid by the Hamas militants of long-besieged Gaza caught the Israelis napping and surmounted the high-tech defenses that had cost perhaps a half-billion dollars to construct.

Many hundreds of Israeli soldiers and security officers were killed along with similar numbers of civilians, with most of the latter probably dying from the friendly-fire of Israel’s own panic-stricken and trigger-happy military units. Some 240 Israeli soldiers and civilians were captured and taken back to Gaza as prisoners, with Hamas hoping to exchange them for the freedom of the many thousands of Palestinian civilians who had been held for years in Israeli prisons, often under brutal conditions.

As usual, our overwhelmingly pro-Israel mainstream media portrayed the attack in extremely one-sided fashion, devoid of any historical context, a pattern that had been followed for three generations.

As a result, Israel received an enormous outpouring of public and elite sympathy as it mobilized for a retaliatory attack against Gaza. Within days, our own Secretary of State Antony Blinken flew to Israel declaring that he came “as a Jew” and pledging America’s unwavering support in that moment of crisis, sentiments completely echoed by President Joseph Biden and his entire administration. But the Hamas fighters and their Israeli captives were hidden in a network of fortified tunnels and rooting them out might produce heavy casualties, so Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his advisors decided upon a different strategy.

Instead of attacking Hamas, Netanyahu took advantage of the wave of global sympathy by unleashing an unprecedented military assault against Gaza’s more than two million civilians, apparently intending to kill huge numbers of them and drive the remainder into Egypt’s Sinai desert, allowing Israel to annex their territory and resettle it with Jews.

Soon afterward, the Israeli government began distributing assault rifles to the Jewish Settlers of the West Bank, ordering some 24,000 of those automatic weapons for that purpose. Putting such armaments into the hands of religious fanatics would surely lead to local massacres and these might provide an excuse for driving all those millions of Palestinians over the border into Jordan.

The ultimate result would be the creation of a racially-pure Greater Israel stretching “From the River to the Sea,” the longstanding dream of the Zionist movement. So if he were successful, Netanyahu’s place in Jewish history might become a glorious one, with his many venal sins and blunders easily overlooked.

As American airlifts supplied an unending flood of the necessary munitions, the Israelis began a massive aerial bombardment campaign against densely-populated Gaza and its helpless residents. Secure in their underground tunnels, relatively few Hamas fighters were killed, but Gaza’s civilians suffered devastating losses, much of it inflicted by two thousand pound bombs, almost never previously deployed against urban targets.

Large portions of Gaza were soon transformed into moonscapes, with some 100,000 buildings destroyed, including hospitals, churches, mosques, schools, universities, government offices, bakeries, and all the other infrastructure necessary for maintaining civilian life. After just a few weeks, the Financial Times reported that the destruction inflicted upon much of Gaza was already worse than had been suffered by German cities after years of Allied bombing attacks during World War II.

Although Netanyahu was strictly secular, he played to his religious base by publicly declaring the Palestinians to be the tribe of Amalek, whom the Hebrew God had commanded be exterminated down to the last newborn baby. Many other top Israeli leaders voiced very similar genocidal sentiments, and some of the more zealously religious Israeli soldiers and commanders probably took those statements quite literally.

This gigantic bloodlust was further inflamed as the Israeli government and its supportive propagandists began promoting outrageous Hamas atrocity-hoaxes such as beheaded or roasted Israeli babies, sexual mutilations, and gang-rapes. The notoriously pro-Israel global media credulously reported these stories, using them to deflect attention from the enormous ongoing slaughter of Palestinian civilians.

To ensure that the coverage remained one-sided, the Israelis targeted independent journalists in Gaza for death, killing some 140 of them over the last few months, a figure as large as the combined total in all the world’s other wars over the last several years.

With Israel’s leaders publicly declaring their genocidal plans for their Palestinian enemies and Israeli troops committing the greatest televised massacre of helpless civilians in the history of the world, international organizations gradually came under strong pressure to involve themselves in the ongoing conflict. In late December, South Africa filed a 91-page legal brief with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of committing genocide.

Within a few weeks the ICJ jurists issued a series of near-unanimous rulings supporting those charges and declaring that the Gazans were at serious risk of suffering a potential genocide at Israel’s hands, with Israel’s own appointed judge, a former Chief Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court, concurring in most of those verdicts.

But instead of backing off, Netanyahu’s government merely redoubled its attacks against Gaza, tightening the blockade of food shipments by banning the UN organization responsible for distributing them. The Israelis apparently believed that the combination of starvation, bombs, and missiles would be the most effective means of killing or driving out all the Palestinians.

Over the last few months I discussed these unfortunate developments in a long series of articles and most of this material was also summarized in a couple of interviews with Mike Whitney:

In past decades, these horrifying events might have gone relatively unnoticed, with the overwhelmingly pro-Israel gatekeepers of our mainstream media ensuring that little if any of this distressing information reached the eyes or ears of ordinary Americans. But technological developments had changed this media landscape since video clips on relatively uncensored social platforms such as TikTok and Elon Musk’s Twitter now easily circumvented that blockade.

Despite their decades of suffering and oppression, Gaza’s Palestinians were a fully modern people, well-equipped with smartphones, and the scenes they filmed were shared worldwide, quickly attracting huge audiences among the younger Americans who relied upon social media as their primary source of news.

For generations, college students had been heavily indoctrinated with the horrors of the Holocaust, endlessly told that they must never remain silent while helpless men, women, and children were brutally attacked and slaughtered. The images they now saw of devastated cities and dead or dying children seemed exactly like something out of the movies, but they were instead happening in real-time in the physical world.

A couple of years earlier, the Trump and the Biden Administrations had both jointly proclaimed that the Chinese government was guilty of “genocide” against its Uighur minority despite lack of any evidence that significant numbers of Uighurs had been harmed let alone killed.

So by that standard, the total destruction of Gaza and the massive slaughter or deliberate starvation of millions of its people obviously constituted an enormous “genocide,” and within weeks student activists all across college campuses had taken up that cry and begun organizing public protests against the horrendous massacre that Israel was committing.

 

Three years earlier, a lifelong career criminal named George Floyd had died of a drug overdose while in police custody, and a single, highly-misleading video of his last moments had provoked the greatest wave of American public protests since the late 1960s.

So it was hardly surprising that the widespread dissemination of hundreds or thousands of videos showing dead and mutilated Gazan children inspired a powerful protest movement. But this time, instead of being praised for their humanitarian commitment, those students—and the university administrators who allowed their protests—were ferociously attacked and punished as I described at the time:

With graphic images of devastated Gaza neighborhoods and dead Palestinian children so widespread on Twitter and other social media outlets, polls have revealed that a majority of younger Americans now favor Hamas and the Palestinians in their ongoing struggle with Israel. This is a shocking reversal from the views of their parents, which had been shaped by generations of overwhelmingly pro-Israel material across broadcast television, films, and print publications, and such trends are only likely to continue now that Israel is being prosecuted in the International Court of Justice by South Africa and 22 other nations, accused of committing genocide in Gaza.As a consequence of these strong youthful sentiments, anti-Israel demonstrations have erupted at many of our universities, outraging numerous pro-Israel billionaire donors. Almost immediately, some of the latter launched a harsh retaliatory campaign, with many corporate leaders declaring that they would permanently blacklist from future employment opportunities any college students publicly supporting the Palestinian cause, underscoring these threats with a widespread “doxxing” campaign at Harvard and other elite colleges. A few weeks ago, our uniformly pro-Israel elected officials entered the fray, calling the presidents of several of our most elite colleges—Harvard, Penn, and MIT—to testify before them regarding alleged “antisemitism” on their campuses. Members of Congress severely brow-beat these officials for permitting anti-Israel activities, even ignorantly and absurdly accusing them of allowing public calls for “Jewish genocide” on their campuses. The responses of these college leaders emphasized their support for freedom of political speech but were deemed so unsatisfactory by pro-Israel donors and their mainstream media allies that enormous pressure was exerted to remove them. Within days, the Penn president and her supportive Board chairman had been forced to resign, and soon afterward Harvard’s first black president suffered the same fate, as pro-Israel groups released evidence of her widespread academic plagiarism to drive her from office. I am unaware of any previous case in which the president of an elite American college had been so rapidly removed from office for ideological reasons and two successive examples within just a few weeks seems an absolutely unprecedented development, having enormous implications for academic freedom.

I’d think that most of these students were absolutely stunned at such reactions. For decades, they and their predecessors had freely protested on a wide range of political causes without ever encountering even a sliver of such vicious retaliation, let alone an organized campaign that quickly forced the resignation of two of the Ivy League presidents who had allowed their protests.

Some of their student organizations were immediately banned and the future careers of the protesters were harshly threatened, but the horrifying images from Gaza continued to reach their smartphones. As Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL had previously explained in a leaked phone call, “We have a major TikTok problem.”

Indeed, the Israelis continued to generate an avalanche of gripping content for those videos. Mobs of Israeli activists regularly blocked the passage of food-trucks, and within a few weeks, senior UN officials declared that more than a million Gazans were on the verge of a deadly famine. When the desperate, starving Gazans swarmed one of those few food delivery convoys allowed through, the Israeli military shot and killed more than 100 of them in the “Flour Massacre” and this was later repeated.

All these horrific scenes of death and deliberate starvation were broadcast worldwide on social media, with some of the worst examples coming from the accounts of gleeful Israeli soldiers, such as their video of the corpse of a Palestinian child being eaten by a starving dog. Another image showed the remains of a bound Palestinian prisoner who had been crushed flat while still alive by an Israeli tank.

According to a European human rights organization, the Israelis had regularly used bulldozers to bury alive large numbers of Palestinians. UN officials reported finding mass graves near several hospitals, with the victims found bound and stripped, shot execution-style. As Internet provocateur Andrew Anglin has pointed out, the behavior of the Israeli Jews does not seem merely evil but “cartoonishly evil,” with all their blatant crimes seeming to be based upon the script of some over-the-top propaganda-film but instead actually taking place in real life.

Although the official Gazan death-toll reported in our media has remained relatively constant in recent weeks, this is almost certainly an illusion. During the first month or two of the massive Israeli attack, the Gazan Public Health Ministry had maintained very detailed rosters of the dead, including the names, ages, and ID codes of the victims, and regularly released updates of the total, so those numbers seemed absolutely solid.

But the Israeli assault soon targeted all of Gaza’s government offices and hospitals, and by early December, the Gazan officials responsible for tabulating the dead had themselves been killed or gone missing, so the count naturally tended to stagnate, even as conditions horrifically worsened for the surviving Gazans.

After less than three months of the Israeli slaughter, some 22,000 Gazans had officially been reported dead, but now after more than seven months of starvation and continuing attacks, including the destruction of all of Gaza’s hospitals and medical facilities, the official body-count reported in our media has only increased to around 34,000, which seems highly implausible.

In early March, progressive icon Ralph Nader focused attention on that point, noting that Gazan fatalities must surely be massively under-reported, and he speculated that the true number of fatalities might have already reached 200,000. Although that total seemed quite high to me at the time, Nader’s figure usefully emphasized the absurdly low numbers regularly quoted in the media.

A recent front-page story in the New York Times reported the tragic case of a particular Palestinian-American pharmacist living in New Jersey, who had personally lost 200 relatives killed in Gaza, including his parents and siblings. That single datapoint indicated the magnitude of the possible media under-count after seven months of horror, and Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia suggested something similar in a recent interview.

Although solid estimates are impossible, I’d think a civilian death toll of 100,000 or even something considerably higher seems perfectly plausible at this date.

These grim developments have naturally sparked a continuing wave of student protests condemning Israel for committing these monstrous crimes and our own Biden Administration for enabling them with money and munitions.

Prof. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago is one of our highest-ranking mainstream academics, a very sober-minded scholar of the Realist School, and in an interview last week he expressed little surprise at these matters. After all, he pointed out, Israel was obviously an Apartheid-state currently committing a genocide before the eyes of the entire world so political protests on college campuses were only to be expected.

 

Throughout these last few months, pro-Israel partisans have regularly denounced the the anti-Zionism of their opponents as antisemitic and insisted that it be suppressed. Back in February I had noted the ironic implications of their position:

This is certainly an odd situation, warranting careful analysis and explanation. The word “antisemitism” merely means criticizing or disliking Jews, and in recent years, Israel’s partisans have demanded with some success that the term should be extended to encompass anti-Zionism as well, namely hostility to the Jewish state.But let us suppose that we concede the latter point and agree with pro-Israel activists that “anti-Zionism” is indeed a form of “antisemitism.” Over the last few months, the Israeli government has brutally slaughtered tens of thousands of helpless civilians in Gaza, committing the greatest televised massacre in the history of the world, with its top leaders using explicitly genocidal language to describe their plans for the Palestinians. Indeed, the South African government submitted a 91 page legal brief to the International Court of Justice cataloging those Israeli statements, prompting a near-unanimous ruling by the jurists that millions of Palestinians faced the prospect of genocide at Israeli hands. These days most Westerners claim to regard genocide in a decidedly negative light. So does this not syllogistically require them to embrace and endorse “antisemitism”? Surely a visitor from Mars would be very puzzled by this strange dilemma and the philosophical and psychological contortions it seems to require. It is rather surprising that the extremely “politically correct” ruling elites of America and the rest of the Western world are loudly cheering on the racially-exclusivist State of Israel even as it kills enormous numbers of women and children and works very hard to starve to death some two million civilians in its unprecedented genocidal rampage. After all, the far milder and more circumspect regime of Apartheid South Africa was universally condemned, boycotted, and sanctioned for merely the tiniest sliver of such misdeeds.

An important turning point may have come on April 17th when Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, herself of Egyptian origins, was raked over the coals by a Congressional Committee for permitting anti-Israel protests on her campus. Her interrogators claimed that these were “antisemitic” acts and caused some of Columbia’s Jewish students to “feel unsafe,” a dire situation that seemingly trumped both freedom of speech and academic freedom.

Shafik may or may not have agreed with those arguments, but she surely remembered that just a few months earlier her counterparts at Harvard and Penn had both been summarily purged for giving the wrong answers, and she hardly wished to share their fate. So she firmly promised to root out all such public antisemitism at her university and soon afterward 100 helmeted NYC riot police were invited onto the campus to crush the demonstrations and arrest the protesters, mostly charging the latter with “trespassing,” a rather strange accusation given that they were enrolled students on the grounds of their own campus.

This sort of harsh and immediate police crackdown seems almost unprecedented in the modern history of college political protests. Back in the 1960s, there were a few scattered cases of police being called in to arrest militant protesters who had seized and occupied administrative offices at Harvard, paraded around with firearms at Cornell, or burned down a campus building at Stanford. But I have never heard of peaceful political protesters being arrested on the grounds of their own college merely for the content of their political speech.

Although the crackdown at Columbia demanded by those members of Congress was obviously intended to quell American campus protests, it predictably had the opposite effect. Scenes of burly, helmeted riot police arresting peaceful college students on their own campus went viral on social media, inspiring a wave of similar protests at numerous other colleges across the nation, with police arrests quickly following in most locations. By latest count, some 2,300 students have now been arrested at dozens of universities.

The actions by the Georgia State Police at Emory University seemed particularly outrageous, and a Tweet containing a clip of one of those incidents has already been viewed some 1.5 million times. A 57-year-old tenured professor of Economics named Carolyn Frohlin was concerned at seeing one of her own students being wrestled to the pavement and walked towards him only to find herself brutally thrown to the ground, hogtied, and arrested by a couple of hulking officers led by a sergeant. CNN anchor Jim Acosta was utterly shocked when he reported this story.

Even worse scenes took place at UCLA as an encampment of peaceful protesters was violently attacked and beaten by a mob of pro-Israel thugs having no university connection but armed with bars, clubs, and fireworks, resulting in some serious injuries. A professor of History described her outrage as the nearby police stood aside and did nothing while UCLA students were attacked by outsiders, then arrested some 200 of the former. According to local journalists, the violent mob had been organized and paid by pro-Israel billionaire Bill Ackman.

I have never previously heard of organized mobs of outside thugs being allowed to violently assault peaceful American student protesters on their own campus, something that seems far more reminiscent of turbulent Latin American dictatorships. The closest example that comes to mind might be the notorious 1970 “Hard Hat Riot” in New York City in which hundreds of pro-Nixon construction workers battled similar numbers of anti-war protesters on the streets of lower Manhattan, an incident so infamous that it has an extensive Wikipedia page of its own.

However, a somewhat different but much closer and more recent analogy may exist. After Donald Trump launched his unexpectedly successful presidential campaign, right-wing, pro-Trump speakers invited to college campuses were regularly harassed and assaulted along with their audiences by mobs of violent antifa, with many of the latter apparently recruited and paid for the purpose.

This sort of very physical “deplatforming” was intended to ensure that their threatening ideas never reached impressionable college students and led conservatives to begin organizing their own groups such as the Proud Boys to provide physical protection. Violent clashes occurred at Berkeley and some other colleges, while similar antifa riots in DC disrupted Trump’s inauguration. From what I remember, most of the organizers and financial backers of these violent antifa groups seemed to be Jewish, so perhaps it’s not surprising that other Jewish leaders have now begun employing very similar tactics to suppress different political movements that they regard as distasteful.

Some years ago a former senior AIPAC official once boasted to a friendly journalist that if he wrote anything on a simple napkin, within 24 hours he could get signatures of 70 Senators to endorse it, and the political power of the ADL is equally formidable. Therefore it was hardly surprising that last week an overwhelming bipartisan 320-91 majority in the House passed a bill broadening the meaning of anti-Zionism and antisemitism in the anti-discrimination policies of the Department of Education by codifying the definitions used in our Civil Rights laws to classify those ideas as discriminatory.

Although I haven’t tried to read the text, the obvious intent is to force colleges to expunge such noxious activities as anti-Israel protests from their campus community or face loss of federal funds. This represents a striking attack against academic freedom as well as America’s traditional freedom of speech and thought, and may also pressure other private organizations to adopt similar policies.

In a particularly ironic twist, the definition of antisemitism used in the bill clearly covers portions of the Christian Bible, so the ignorant and compromised Republican legislators have now wholeheartedly endorsed banning the Bible in a country in which 95% of the population has Christian roots.

While I doubt that we will see any arrests that would survive legal challenge, once controversial ideas are increasingly banned from all respectable venues, much of the public, perhaps even including some confused law enforcement officers, may vaguely begin to assume that they have actually become illegal.

Although it received very little media coverage, the implications of this proposed legislation are certainly dramatic. Put simply, “antisemitism” is the dislike or criticism of Jews and “Anti-Zionism” is the same thing with regard to the State of Israel. So potentially banning any criticism of Jews or Israel would certainly represent a remarkable legal development in our society.

This massive suppression of all political opposition to Zionism through a mixture of legal, quasi-legal, and illegal means has hardly escaped the notice of various outraged critics. Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate are young Jewish progressives very sharply critical of Israel and its current attack on Gaza, and in their most recent livestream video a day or two before that Congressional vote, they agreed that Zionists were the greatest threat to American freedom and that our country was “under political occupation” by the Israel Lobby.”

They may or may not have been aware that their angry denunciation closely paralleled one of the most notorious Far Right phrases of the last half-century, which condemned America’s existing political system as nothing more than ZOG, a “Zionist Occupation Government.” Over time, obvious factual reality gradually becomes apparent regardless of ideological predispositions.

Although it’s difficult to be sure, I personally think that passage of that controversial House bill may have been a major strategic blunder for the pro-Israel forces, the ADL, and the other Jewish groups behind it. Jews only constitute about 2% of American population and over the last several generations many of their organizations seem to have waged a highly successful campaign to gain control over the key nodes of our society, but this has always required that their growing strength and influence remain invisible.

However, the absolutely lock-step and uniform American political support for Israel’s ongoing massacre of the Palestinians has raised the awareness of some elements of our population and this legislative attempt to essentially outlaw criticism of Jews and Israel may have a similar impact. Views that had previously only circulated in extreme fringe circles may now begin to gain much greater traction.

For example, cartoonist Scott Adams has become a popular commentator in conservative, anti-Woke circles and he just released a blistering denunciation of the proposed legislation, sounding much like far more extreme figures.

During the early decades of the Twentieth Century the enormous Russian Empire was only about 4% Jewish, but after the heavily Jewish Bolsheviks seized power, the top political leadership of that country became overwhelmingly of that one ethnicity. This enormous, blatant mismatch between ruled and rulers naturally provoked a great deal of hostility in the broader public, and the Bolsheviks responded to this problem by outlawing antisemitism, with the penalty sometimes even including summary execution.

Since America’s Jewish groups do not possess such extreme administrative power, they have been forced to rely upon concealment and political manipulation to achieve their ends, and they may now have severely over-reached themselves with this latest legislative effort to outlaw criticism. More and more people may start to pay closer attention to the seemingly inexplicable political decisions taken by so many of our elected officials while also noticing the unusual composition of the top ranks of our government. On that last point, one of my 2023 articles pointed out the obvious:

Consider, for example, the leading figures in our current Biden Administration, who are playing a crucial role in determining the future of our own country and the rest of the world. The list of Cabinet departments has wildly proliferated since Washington’s day, but suppose we confine our attention to the half-dozen most important, led by the individuals who control national security and the economy, and then also add the names of the President, Vice President, Chief of Staff, and National Security Advisor. Although “Diversity” may have become the sacred motto of the Democratic Party, the background of the handful of individuals running our country appears strikingly non-diverse, especially if we exclude the two political figureheads at the very top.

  • President Joe Biden (Jewish in-laws)
  • Vice-President Kamala Harris (Jewish spouse)
  • Chief of Staff Jeff Zients (Jewish), replacing Ron Klain (Jewish, Harvard)
  • Secretary of State Antony Blinken (Jewish, Harvard)
  • Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen (Jewish, Yale)
  • Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III (Black)
  • Attorney General Merrick Garland (Jewish, Harvard)
  • National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan (White Gentile, Yale)
  • Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines (Jewish)
  • Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas (Jewish)

Oddly enough, although America’s current political predicament might have alarmed some knowledgeable individuals from the first half of the last century, it probably would not have surprised them. Five or six years ago I read a fascinating book by Prof. Joseph Bendersky, an academic historian specializing in Holocaust Studies and the history of Nazi Germany. As I wrote at the time:

Bendersky devoted ten full years of research to his book, exhaustively mining the archives of American Military Intelligence as well as the personal papers and correspondence of more than 100 senior military figures and intelligence officers. The “Jewish Threat” runs over 500 pages, including some 1350 footnotes, with the listed archival sources alone occupying seven full pages. His subtitle is “Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army” and he makes an extremely compelling case that during the first half of the twentieth century and even afterward, the top ranks of the U.S. military and especially Military Intelligence heavily subscribed to notions that today would be universally dismissed as “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.”Put simply, U.S. military leaders in those decades widely believed that the world faced a direct threat from organized Jewry, which had seized control of Russia and similarly sought to subvert and gain mastery over America and the rest of Western civilization.In these military circles, there was an overwhelming belief that powerful Jewish elements had financed and led Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, and were organizing similar Communist movements elsewhere aimed at destroying all existing Gentile elites and imposing Jewish supremacy throughout America and the rest of the Western world. While some of these Communist leaders were “idealists,” many of the Jewish participants were cynical opportunists, seeking to use their gullible followers to destroy their ethnic rivals and thereby gain wealth and supreme power. Although Intelligence officers gradually came to doubt that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an authentic document, most believed that the notorious work provided a reasonably accurate description of the strategic plans of the Jewish leadership for subverting America and the rest of the world and establishing Jewish rule.Although Bendersky’s claims are certainly extraordinary ones, he provides an enormous wealth of compelling evidence to support them, quoting or summarizing thousands of declassified Intelligence files, and further supporting his case by drawing from the personal correspondence of many of the officers involved. He conclusively demonstrates that during the very same years that Henry Ford was publishing his controversial series The International Jew, similar ideas, but with a much sharper edge, were ubiquitous within our own Intelligence community. Indeed, whereas Ford mostly focused upon Jewish dishonesty, malfeasance, and corruption, our Military Intelligence professionals viewed organized Jewry as a deadly threat to American society and Western civilization in general. Hence the title of Bendersky’s book.

Let us take a step back and place Bendersky’s findings in their proper context. We must recognize that during much of the era covered by his research, U.S. Military Intelligence constituted nearly the entirety of America’s national security apparatus—being the equivalent of a combined CIA, NSA, and FBI—and was responsible for both international and domestic security, although the latter portfolio had gradually been assumed by J. Edgar Hoover’s own expanding organization by the end of the 1920s.Bendersky’s years of diligent research demonstrate that for decades these experienced professionals—and many of their top commanding generals—were firmly convinced that major elements of the organized Jewish community were ruthlessly plotting to seize power in America, destroy all our traditional Constitutional liberties, and ultimately gain mastery over the entire world.I have never believed in the existence of UFOs as alien spacecraft, always dismissing such notions as ridiculous nonsense. But suppose declassified government documents revealed that for decades nearly all of our top Air Force officers had been absolutely convinced of the reality of UFOs. Could I continue my insouciant refusal to even consider such possibilities? At the very least, those revelations would force me to sharply reassess the likely credibility of other individuals who had made similar claims during that same period.

These views were also fully articulated in the later books and memoirs of prominent former Military Intelligence officers such as Prof. John Beaty and Prof. Revilo Oliver.

When we are faced with a government run by individuals who seem to have little political independence, it is worth speculating upon the means by which such nominal rulers are controlled. Several years ago I discussed some strong indications of those possible methods, perhaps explaining some of the strange political decisions or bizarre reversals that otherwise may seem so puzzling.

Today when we consider the major countries of the world we see that in many cases the official leaders are also the leaders in actuality: Vladimir Putin calls the shots in Russia, Xi Jinping and his top Politburo colleagues do the same in China, and so forth. However, in America and in some other Western countries, this seems to be less and less the case, with top national figures merely being attractive front-men selected for their popular appeal and their political malleability, a development that may eventually have dire consequences for the nations they lead. As an extreme example, a drunken Boris Yeltsin freely allowed the looting of Russia’s entire national wealth by the handful of oligarchs who pulled his strings, and the result was the total impoverishment of the Russian people and a demographic collapse almost unprecedented in modern peacetime history.An obvious problem with installing puppet rulers is the risk that they will attempt to cut their strings, much like Putin soon outmaneuvered and exiled his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky. One means of minimizing such risk is to select puppets who are so deeply compromised that they can never break free, knowing that the political self-destruct charges buried deep within their pasts could easily be triggered if they sought independence. I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise.

More and more thoughtful Americans are becoming aware that on so many important matters our two major political parties often seem more like separate wings of a single political entity, sometimes labeled the “uniparty.” I discussed this disturbing phenomenon in the closing paragraphs of my original American Pravda article:

Most of the Americans who elected Barack Obama in 2008 intended their vote as a total repudiation of the policies and personnel of the preceding George W. Bush administration. Yet once in office, Obama’s crucial selections—Robert Gates at Defense, Timothy Geither at Treasury, and Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve—were all top Bush officials, and they seamlessly continued the unpopular financial bailouts and foreign wars begun by his predecessor, producing what amounted to a third Bush term.Consider the fascinating perspective of the recently deceased Boris Berezovsky, once the most powerful of the Russian oligarchs and the puppet master behind President Boris Yeltsin during the late 1990s. After looting billions in national wealth and elevating Vladimir Putin to the presidency, he overreached himself and eventually went into exile. According to the New York Times, he had planned to transform Russia into a fake two-party state—one social-democratic and one neoconservative—in which heated public battles would be fought on divisive, symbolic issues, while behind the scenes both parties would actually be controlled by the same ruling elites. With the citizenry thus permanently divided and popular dissatisfaction safely channeled into meaningless dead-ends, Russia’s rulers could maintain unlimited wealth and power for themselves, with little threat to their reign. Given America’s history over the last couple of decades, perhaps we can guess where Berezovsky got his idea for such a clever political scheme.

Several months ago a young military serviceman named Aaron Bushnell from a strongly Christian background became so distraught at his country’s active involvement in what he regarded as the supreme crime of genocide that he set himself on fire and died in an act of protest, an event certainly without precedent in American history and extraordinarily rare elsewhere in the world. Although the story quickly vanished from our own media, the coverage on global social media was enormous, and may have lasting consequences.

After discussing that tragic incident, I went on to suggest that the dire fate of Gaza’s Palestinians might ultimately be seen as having played a similar role. Their deaths may have now suddenly revealed America’s long-concealed rulers both to our own people and to the rest of the world.

For similar reasons, I think that the tens of thousands of dead Gazans did not lose their lives in vain. Instead, their martyrdom has dominated the global media for the last five months, conclusively revealing to the entire world the moral bankruptcy of the international system that had condemned them to their fate.Probably hundreds of millions of people worldwide have now begun asking themselves questions that they never would have previously considered. I suspect that those responsible for the destruction of Gaza may come to rue the day when they helped open doors that they may eventually wish had been kept tightly shut.

 

 

By Ron Unz

Published by Unz.com

 

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Republished by The 21st Century

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of 21cir.com

 

 

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