the following exchange with Vdare and TAC contributor and VFR reader Howard Sutherland about my blog entry,
HRS to LA:
You are right, but I’m not sure you go far enough, unless by traditional morality you mean Jewish religion. I presume it would have to be orthodox Judaism, although I’m no expert in Jewish sectarianism. Conservative and Reform Judaism don’t strike me as sufficiently fighting faiths to help Israelis gird their loins for what is a twilight struggle against implacable enemies. Israel, in being so generally secular a society (despite the state rabbinate), is at a tremendous disadvantage vis-à-vis her believing Moslem foes, as is secularized Christendom.
I know many of the old Zionists were secular socialists—even if ethnocentric. But look at Israel’s claim on the land and the Jewish right of return (I’ll concede that Palestine had far fewer Arabs living in it when the return of Jews began in earnest than Israel/Palestine does today, but the land was not empty, pace claims about “a land without people for a people without land”). I don’t see how such a claim can be sustained in today’s climate except as a religiously derived truth claim. What if—hypotheticals, I concede—all people of English descent started to feel that they all had a right to return to live in England? Would received opinion today accept that the Moslems, East Indians, West Indians, Irishmen, Welshmen, Scots and other non-English now living there should accommodate them? Or all Afrikaners decided it was time to go home to Holland? Would all of The Netherlands’ Moslem guests and non-Dutch residents have to move over to give them room?
I think we know how such claims would fare. Ethnicity-based claims are reflexively condemned as racist. While it is true that the displacement of Arabs from what is now Israel owes more to the chicanery of Arab potentates than to the Israeli army, displacement there was and Israel is blamed.
The Jewish distinction is that being Jewish is both ethnic and religious. Forgive me if that sounds presumptuous—from your history you know that better than I. The Jewish claim to Israel, to stand up ultimately, must be both ethnic and religious. To be credible to a skeptical world as well as to fortify their own belief in the justice of Israel’s claim, it seems to me that Israelis must be Jewish—in faith as well as blood.
LA to HRS:
Well, when I spoke of the need for a return to traditional morality to save Israel, I wasn’t thinking of Israel and the Jews, but of all of us, our civilization. I believe the horrible Israel-Palestine situation has been fostered and fed by the West’s LEFT-LIBERALISM.
One of my mantras at VFR has been that in any previous, non-liberal period of human civilization, a nation facing what the Israelis face in the Palestinians would have expelled them long ago and everyone would have accepted this. I believe the moral approval given to the Arab rejectionists and terrorists by American liberals and by virtually ALL of Europe is the key factor that has allowed this hideous situation to grow and fester.
Of course, the Israelis are a big part of the problem as well. The great irony is that Zionism (except for Zionist Revisionism) was a LEFTIST movement, and the Israelis remain largely a leftist people today. So of course, my call for a return to traditional outlook and a rejection of liberalism takes in the Israelis as well.
HRS to LA:
We agree, I think. Another remarkable aspect of this bizarre situation, and evidence of the corrosiveness of modern liberalism is this: By the mid-20th century, despite the Nazis, Jews had achieved two remarkable things. In Israel, Jews had a national state for the first time since the First Century (and this time it wasn’t subject to the Romans). In the United States, Jews had achieved an unprecedented degree of wealth and influence in the world’s most prosperous and powerful nation. Despite this extraordinary conjunction (and despite the not inconsiderable influence that many Jews retained in Europe), Israel became a hate-fetish for “progressives.” Even odder, many of the most vehemently Israel-hating Leftists and apologists for Moslem atrocities are Jews.
One doesn’t have to be Kevin MacDonald to observe that there has been a strong cohesiveness and sense of distinctiveness among diaspora Jews.
At least in terms of attitudes about Israel, that united front is breaking down. Is it because, living in a time of greater prosperity and security for Jews, the old defensiveness is fading, because no longer necessary? Or is liberalism such a powerful solvent that it can dissolve even the very strong historic Jewish sense of identity? I’m inclined to think it is the latter. Look at the short work liberalism has made of what used to hold western civilization together.
Whether for Jews or the rest of us, you are right to say that there is no salvation from liberalism in mere contemporary conservatism. No movement with so many liberal assumptions in its basic premises (to the extent conservatism still has them) can withstand liberalism. Isn’t that what the Hegelian Mambo proves? The tactical problem with fighting liberalism with traditionalism is that tradition is by its nature particular. How does one get, e.g., traditional Catholics, Bible Protestants, Eastern Orthodox Christians and orthodox Jews to see past their very real differences long enough to unite against the liberals who threaten them all? If, for example, I were to tell an orthodox Jew what a threat I think Reform Judaism is, would he agree with me or think I’m an anti-Semite? To turn it around, how would I react to a vehement attack on the Pope by a Protestant or a Jew, even though I have grave reservations about him? How do we get unity in the face of a civilizational threat without descending into a treacly ecumenism? And those questions don’t begin to address ethnic particularisms—which a traditionalist should be inclined to respect.
LA to HRS:
Great e-mail, Howard. I’ll have to post it at VFR.
With regard to your specific point about why Jews have seemingly lost their cohesiveness in terms of defending Israel, my first thought is that this is just a manifestation of the mixed nature of Zionism from the start: the Zionists were ethnic nationalists, AND utopian international socialists! So we could understand what’s happening now as a return to the liberalism underlying the nationalism. The other factors you mention, like modernity and prosperity, also unquestionably play a role.
The larger question you ask—what is the common basis for traditionalists?—is no small problem. In 1999, as I’ve discussed before, I was at Paul Weyrich’s “cultural separation” conference. It was mostly evangelicals. When, in the last session of the conference, I proposed the idea of a coalition of various types of conservatives who all share the opposition to the dominant culture, and included in this coalition those who are concerned about the ethno-cultural effects of mass immigration on America, the room went wild. People would have none of this—not even as part of a coalition that did not require their actual agreement with that position.
I was attempting to find a common basis on which traditionalist groups could work together. It’s very very difficult. Conservatives all come from different places.
Hell—even with respect to a single issue—immigration—it’s almost impossible.
Someone I know wants to organize a national march on Washington on immigration for November 2008. I told him, fine. But what’s going to be the common theme? Illegal immigration? For many people, that’s not enough to make it worth the while. But if it’s a larger agenda, reduction of legal immigration, then other people won’t want to participate.
But getting back to the attempt to find a common basis for traditionalism—a universal basis for particularism, if you will—that in a sense is what I’ve been trying to articulate at VFR.
But it must be based ultimately on universalism. The intellectual/moral suicide of many people on the paleo right has been their rejection of objective moral truth in the name of pure particularism, which is really just another way of saying barbarism. But, once again, as you have pointed out, what would be the common element joining these groups together that wasn’t a meaningless ecumenism? It’s a real problem.