Syria – Hama

(Continued from “My Journey Through Syria in 2011 – Aleppo“)

I spent a few nights in Hama, arriving from Damascus by bus. Again the time period was May of 2011. I intended to stop here to take a day trip to the well-known Crac des Chevaliers castle just west of Hama. At the hotel there was just one other tourist, a young man from Japan. The hotel owner spoke fluent English and was really helpful in pointing out places of interest in the area. There were curfews after about 9 PM due to rising tensions. This was around the beginning of the disaster that would soon unfold over Syria. There were no violence, protests, or rallies in Hama at the time – just an atmosphere of concern. There had been skirmishes in Daraa, which is in the southwestern portion of the country, that had killed scores of people. The owner was more cautious about the events going on unlike the owner of the hotel in Aleppo where I stayed previously. The Aleppo hotel owner had little concern about rising tensions and just brushed it off as something temporary.

The town of Hama had a sad history. Back in 1982 the elder Assad, Hafez, ordered the army to come into Hama and take on the Muslim Brotherhood which was opposed to the government. It was a bloody battle that killed thousands of citizens and destroyed much of the historic city center. Some remnants still remain however:

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Palmyra Syria in 2011

Palmyra has (had) among the world’s greatest ruins of the Roman Empire. I stayed in Palmyra for three nights. This was in mid-May of 2011. I arrived from Hama. During my entire stay, I saw just one other foreign tourist, who was from Germany. I basically had Palmyra for myself. There was a lot of hiking as Palmyra was a large site. Most shots below were taken with a Nikon D300. I used a Bogen tripod for a lot of evening shots.

I stayed in this hotel while visiting Palmyra. It was right next to the sights. The town was small and seemed to be built specifically for the tourist industry, which had suffered since 9/11. Sadly, much of Palmyra now lies in ruins.

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May 14th, 2011 (images are clickable)

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Syria – The Dead Cities

I took a day trip to the “Dead Cities” just outside of Aleppo. I had wanted to go to the Dead Cities, but it would have been expensive for me to go alone with a tour guide. In Aleppo I met a couple from Seattle when I was at the Citadel. We chatted and got to know each other a bit. We decided to go together on the tour and split the fare. The Dead Cities are ancient abandoned villages west of Aleppo that was inhabited from the 1st to 7th Centuries. They are mainly from the Byzantine Period.

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(each of the photos are clickable)

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Church of Saint Simeon built in the 5th Century

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Ruins of Ain Dara Temple dating between 8th – 10th century BC

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Farm just outside the temple

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Afterwards our guide invited us to his home. He lived between the Dead Cities and Aleppo

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(Coming Up: Hama, Palmyra, and Damascus)

 

Nathan Abrams on Jews in the American porn industry

The following is a copy of an article that appeared in Jewish Quarterly. The site being frequently down, is the reason why I’m posting it here. Bolded text and photos are mine.


Nathan Abrams  |  Winter 2004  –  Number 196

A story little told is that of Jews in Hollywood’s seedier cousin, the adult film industry. Perhaps we’d prefer to pretend that the ‘triple-exthnics’ didn’t exist, but there’s no getting away from the fact that secular Jews have played (and still continue to play) a disproportionate role throughout the adult film industry in America. Jewish involvement in pornography has a long history in the United States, as Jews have helped to transform a fringe subculture into what has become a primary constituent of Americana. These are the ‘true blue Jews’.

Smut peddlers

Jewish activity in the porn industry divides into two (sometimes overlapping) groups: pornographers and performers. Though Jews make up only two per cent of the American population, they have been prominent in pornography. Many erotica dealers in the book trade between 1890 and 1940 were immigrant Jews of German origin. According to Jay A. Gertzman, author of Bookleggers and Smuthounds:The Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), ‘Jews were prominent in the distribution of gallantiana [fiction on erotic themes and books of dirty jokes and ballads], avant-garde sexually explicit novels, sex pulps, sexology, and flagitious materials’.

In the postwar era, America’s most notorious pornographer was Reuben Sturman, the ‘Walt Disney of Porn’. According to the US Department of Justice, throughout the 1970s Sturman controlled most of the pornography circulating in the country. Born in 1924, Sturman grew up in Cleveland’s East Side. Initially, he sold comics and magazines, but when he realized sex magazines produced twenty times the revenue of comic books, he moved exclusively into porn, eventually producing his own titles and setting up retail stores. By the end of the 1960s, Sturman ranked at the top of adult magazine distributors and by the mid-70s he owned over 200 adult bookstores. Sturman also introduced updated versions of the traditional peepshow booth (typically a dark room with a small colour TV on which the viewer can view X-rated videos). It was said that Sturman did not simply control the adult-entertainment industry; he was the industry. Eventually he was convicted of tax evasion and other crimes and died, disgraced, in prison in 1997. His son, David, continued running the family business.

The contemporary incarnation of Sturman is 43-year-old Jewish Clevelander Steven Hirsch, who has been described as ‘the Donald Trump of porno’. The link between the two is Steve’s father, Fred, who was a stockbroker-cum-lieutenant to Sturman. Today Hirsch runs the Vivid Entertainment Group, which has been called the Microsoft of the porn world, the top producer of ‘adult’ films in the US. His specialty was to import mainstream marketing techniques into the porn business. Indeed, Vivid parallels the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly in its exclusive contracts to porn stars who are hired and moulded by Hirsch. Vivid was the subject of a behind-the-scenes reality TV show recently broadcast on Channel 4.

Nice Jewish girls and boys

Jews accounted for most of the leading male performers as well as a sizeable number of female stars in porn movies of the 1970s and ‘80s. The doyen of the Hebrew studs is Ron Jeremy. Known in the trade as ‘the Hedgehog’, Jeremy is one of America’s biggest porn stars. The 51-year-old Jeremy was raised in an upper-middle-class Jewish family in Flushing, Queens, and has since appeared in more than 1,600 adult movies, as well as directing over 100. Jeremy has achieved iconic status in America, a hero to males of all ages, Jewish and gentile alike – he’s the nebbischy, fat, hairy, ugly guy who gets to bed dozens of beautiful women. He presents an image of a modern-day King David, a Jewish superstud who supersedes the traditional heroes of Jewish lore. No sallow Talmud scholar he. His stature was recently cemented with the release of a pornomentary about his life, Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy. As probably the most famous Jewish male porn star, Jeremy has done wonders for the psyche of Jewish men in America. Jeremy has also just released a compilation CD, Bang-A-Long-With Ron Jeremy.For £7.99 (including delivery), the lucky listener gets to enjoy Jeremy’s hand-picked favourite porno grooves along with narration by ‘the legend’ himself. As the publicity blurb gushes, ‘Out of the brown paper wrappings and into the mainstream’.

Seymore Butts, aka Adam Glasser, is everything that Jeremy is not: young, handsome and toned. Glasser, a 39-year-old New York Jew, opened a gym in 1991 in Los Angeles. When no one joined, he borrowed a video camera for 24 hours, went to a nearby strip club, recruited a woman, then headed back to his gym and started shooting. Although the movie stank, with a bit of chutzpah and a few business cards he wangled a deal with a manufacturer and started cranking out films. Within a few years, ‘Seymore Butts’ – his nom de porn which is simultaneously his sales pitch – became one of the largest franchises in the adult-film business. As the king of the gonzo genre (marked by handheld cameras, the illusion of spontaneity and a low-tech aesthetic meant to suggest reality), he is today probably the most famous Jewish porn mogul. Seymore Inc., his production company, releases about 36 films annually, most of them shot for less than $15,000, each of them grossing more than 10 times that sum. Glasser employs 12 people, including his mother and cousin Stevie as respectively genial company accountant (and matchmaker for her single son) and lovable but roguish general gopher. Glasser currently even has his own reality TV show (also broadcast on Channel 4), a ten-episode docu-soap called Family Business, whose opening credits show Glasser’s barmitzvah photo.

In search of a buck

Jews became involved in the porn industry for much the same reasons that their co-religionists became involved in Hollywood. They were attracted to an industry primarily because it admitted them. Its newness meant that restrictive barriers had not yet been erected, as they had in so many other areas of American life. In porn, there was no discrimination against Jews. During the early part of the twentieth century, an entrepreneur did not require large sums of money to make a start in the film business; cinema was considered a passing fad. In the porn business, it was similarly straightforward to get going. To show ‘stag’ movies or loops, as they were known, all one needed was a projector, screen and a few chairs. Not tied up with the status quo and with nothing to lose by innovation, Jews were open to new ways of doing business. Gertzman explains that

“Jews, when they found themselves excluded from a field of endeavour, turned to a profession in which they sensed they could eventually thrive by cooperating with colleagues in a community of effort . . . Jews have for a very long time cultivated the temperament and talents of middlemen, and they are proud of these abilities”.

The adult entertainment business required something that Jews possessed in abundance:chutzpah. Early Jewish pornographers were marketing geniuses and ambitious entrepreneurs whose toughness, intelligence and boundless self-confidence were responsible for their successes.

Of course, the large number of Jews in porn were mainly motivated by the desire to make profits. Just as their counterparts in Hollywood provided a dream factory for Americans, a blank screen upon which the Jewish moguls’ visions of America could be created and projected, so the porn-moguls displayed a talent for understanding public tastes. What better way to provide the stuff of dreams and fantasies than through the adult-entertainment industry? Performers did porn for the money. As ADL National Director Abraham H. Foxman commented, ‘Those Jews who enter the pornography industry have done so as individuals pursuing the American dream.’

Secular sex

Like their mainstream counterparts, Jews who enter porn do not usually do so as representatives of their religious group. Most of the performers and pornographers are Jewish culturally but not religiously. Many are entirely secular, Jews in name only. Sturman, however, identified as a Jew – he was a generous donator to Jewish charities – and performer Richard Pacheco once interviewed to be a rabbinical student.

Very few, if any, porn films have overtly Jewish themes, although Jeremy once tried to get several Jewish porn stars together to make a kosher porn film. The exception is Debbie Duz Dishes, in which Nina Hartley plays a sexually insatiable Jewish housewife who enjoys sex with anyone who rings the doorbell. It has sold very well, spawned a couple of sequels and is currently very hard to buy – perhaps indicating a new niche to exploit. Indeed, according to an editorial on the World Union of Jewish Students website,

“there are thousands of people searching for Jewish porn. After things like Jewish calendar, Jewish singles, Jewish dating, and Jewish festivals comes ‘Jewish porn’ in the list of top search keywords that GoTo.com provide”.

Sexual rebels

Is there a deeper reason, beyond the mere financial, as to why Jews in particular have become involved in porn? There is surely an element of rebellion in Jewish X-rated involvement. Its very taboo and forbidden nature serves to make it attractive. As I written in these pages before, treyf signifies ‘the whole world of forbidden sexuality, the sexuality of the goyim, and there all the delights are imagined to lie . . .’ (‘Reel Kashrut: Jewish food in film’, JQ 189 [Spring 2003]).

According to one anonymous industry insider quoted by E. Michael Jones in the magazineCulture Wars (May 2003), ‘the leading male performers through the 1980s came from secular Jewish upbringings and the females from Roman Catholic day schools’. The standard porn scenario became as a result a Jewish fantasy of schtupping the Catholic shiksa.

Furthermore, as Orthodox Jew and porn gossipmonger Luke Ford explains on his website (lukeford.net): ‘Porn is just one expression of [the] rebellion against standards, against the disciplined life of obedience to Torah that marks a Jew living Judaism.’ It is also a revolt against (often middle-class) parents who wish their children to be lawyers, doctors and accountants. As performer Bobby Astyr put it on the same website, ‘It’s an “up yours” to the uncles with the pinky rings who got down on me as a kid for wanting to be musician.’

As religious influences waned and were replaced by secular ones, free-thinking Jews, especially those from California’s Bay Area, viewed sex as a means of personal and political liberation. America provided the freest society Jews have ever known, as manifested by the growth of the adult industry. Those Jewish women who have sex onscreen certainly stand in sharp contradiction to the stereotype of the ‘Jewish American Princess’. They (and I’m speculating here) may have seen themselves as fulfilling the promise of liberation, emancipating themselves from what feminist Betty Friedan in 1963 called the ‘comfortable concentration camp’ of the household as they set out into the Promised Land of the porno sets of Southern California. It signified their economic and social freedom: they were free to choose to enter, rather than coerced into it by economic and other circumstances. Once they had lain down, they could stand on their own two feet, particularly as female performers typically earn twice as much as their male counterparts.

Sexual revolutionaries

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Extending the subversive thesis, Jewish involvement in the X-rated industry can be seen as a proverbial two fingers to the entire WASP establishment in America. Some porn stars viewed themselves as frontline fighters in the spiritual battle between Christian America and secular humanism. According to Ford, Jewish X-rated actors often brag about their ‘joy in being anarchic, sexual gadflies to the puritanical beast’. Jewish involvement in porn, by this argument, is the result of an atavistic hatred of Christian authority: they are trying to weaken the dominant culture in America by moral subversion. Astyr remembers having ‘to run or fight for it in grammar school because I was a Jew. It could very well be that part of my porn career is an “up yours” to these people’. Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw, said (on lukeford.net), ‘The only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks. We don’t believe in authoritarianism.’ Pornography thus becomes a way of defiling Christian culture and, as it penetrates to the very heart of the American mainstream (and is no doubt consumed by those very same WASPs), its subversive character becomes more charged. Porn is no longer of the ‘what the Butler saw’ voyeuristic type; instead, it is driven to new extremes of portrayal that stretch the boundaries of the porn aesthetic. As new sexual positions are portrayed, the desire to shock (as well as entertain) seems clear.

It is a case of the traditional revolutionary/radical drive of immigrant Jews in America being channelled into sexual rather than leftist politics. Just as Jews have been disproportionately represented in radical movements over the years, so they are also disproportionately represented in the porn industry. Jews in America have been sexual revolutionaries. A large amount of the material on sexual liberation was written by Jews. Those at the forefront of the movement which forced America to adopt a more liberal view of sex were Jewish. Jews were also at the vanguard of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse and Paul Goodman replaced Marx, Trotsky and Lenin as required revolutionary reading. Reich’s central preoccupations were work, love and sex, while Marcuse prophesied that a socialist utopia would free individuals to achieve sexual satisfaction. Goodman wrote of the ‘beautiful cultural consequences’ that would follow from legalizing pornography: it would ‘ennoble all our art’ and ‘humanize sexuality’. Pacheco was one Jewish porn star who read Reich’s intellectual marriage of Freud and Marx (lukeford.net):

“Before I got my first part in an adult film, I went down to an audition for an X-rated film with my hair down to my ass, a copy of Wilhelm Reich’s Sexual Revolution under my arm and yelling about work, ‘love and sex’.”

As Rabbi Samuel H. Dresner put it (E. Michael Jones, ‘Rabbi Dresner’s Dilemma: Torah v. Ethnos’ Culture Wars, May 2003), ‘Jewish rebellion has broken out on several levels’, one being ‘the prominent role of Jews as advocates to sexual experimentation’. Overall, then, porn performers are a group of people who praise rebellion, self-fulfilment and promiscuity.

What are we ashamed of?

This brief overview and analysis of the role and motivations behind pornographers and performers is intended to shed light on a neglected topic in American Jewish popular culture. Little has been written about it. Books such as Howard M. Sachar’s A History of the Jews in America (New York: Knopf, 1992) simply ignore the topic. And you can bet that the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the Jews in the United States did not include any celebrations of Jewish innovation in this field. Even the usually tolerant Time Out New York has been too prim to deal with it, although the more iconoclastic Heeb plans an issue on it. In light of the relatively tolerant Jewish view of sex, why are we ashamed of the Jewish role in the porn industry? We might not like it, but the Jewish role in this field has been significant and it is about time it was written about seriously.

Nathan Abrams is a Lecturer in Modern American History at the University of Aberdeen. He has just completed a book on neo-conservatism in the United States.

Freud, Jews, and the Sexual Revolution

The following primarily comes from Chapter 4 of Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique Jewish Involvement in the Psychoanalytic Movement.

Cultural Subversion Through Sex

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Jewish organizations like the AJ Congress, and Jewish-dominated organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union have ridiculed Christian religious beliefs, attempted to undermine the public strength of Christianity, and have led the fight for unrestricted pornography. (MacDonald, 148)

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is considered the father of psychoanalysis and is certainly among the most recognized names in the social sciences. He was born in the Austrian empire in what is now the Czech Republic. Freud grew up in an upper class Jewish family and was strongly attracted to Zionism. In one letter he even described himself as a “fanatical Jew” and believed that Jews were superior to Gentiles in terms of manners, intellect, morality, and family life.

[Freud] was convinced that it was in the very nature of psychoanalytic doctrine to appear shocking and subversive. On board ship to America he did not feel that he was bringing that country a new panacea. With his typically dry wit he told his traveling companions, ‘We are bringing them the plague.’” Freud like many Jewish intellectuals believed that it was their duty and mission to lead the world on a moral mission to cure society of it’s ills. (MacDonald, 106)

The field of psychoanalysis, which was founded by Freud, has been a mission of Gentile subversion through sex. In Freud’s upside down world good was bad and bad was good. The goals of psychoanalysis has been to thoroughly debunk traditional Gentile values and culture. Traditional moral values such as strong child-parents relations, high investment parenting, and delay of sex until marriage were derided as psychopathic behaviors while promiscuity, having children out of wedlock, single parenting, and general immorality were considered normal and healthy. Freud considered sexual morality as pathological and something to be destroyed. He propagated the idea that aggression in humans was a result of sexual suppression and that by overcoming this “suppression”, man can be led to an era of universal love and peace. During the first half of the 20th century Freud was frequently referred to as the father of sexual liberation and came under heavy criticisms from conservatives and the religious right.

(A) small, active minority can set the spiral of silence in motion. They become spokespeople to confuse and disorient the majority, make their own ideology mainstream, and ultimately start peddling what used to be bad as something good. – Gabrielle Kuby in The Global Sexual Revolution

Just as with multiculturalism and mass immigration, the goals of psychoanalysis has been that of breaking apart solidarity by inciting rebelliousness in children, eradicating religion, encouraging instant gratification, and fostering “radical” individualism. Though Freud, like many prominent Jews, advocated multiculturalism for the gentiles, they at the same time were against assimilation and mixed marriages for the Jewish people. None of Freud’s children married a gentile and none converted to Christianity.

Attack on the Church

Freud believed that the church got in the way of “rational” living. His attitude towards the Church is illustrated in Moses and Monotheism published in 1939:

(Anti-Semitism) is said to result from the fact that many Christians have become Christians only recently as the result of forced conversion from even more barbarically polytheistic folk religions than Christianity itself is. Because of the violence of their forced conversions, these barbarians “have not yet overcome their grudge against the new religion which was forced upon them, and they have projected it on to the source from which Christianity came to them [i.e., the Jews]

Freud’s theory of anti-Semitism in Moses and Monotheism (Freud 1939, 114-117) contains several assertions that anti-Semitism is fundamentally a pathological gentile reaction to Jewish ethical superiority. (MacDonald, 117)

Rothman and Isenberg (1974) convincingly argued that Freud viewed Interpretation of Dreams as a victory against the Catholic Church and that he saw Totem and Taboo as a successful attempt to analyze the Christian religion in terms of defense mechanisms and primitive drives. Regarding Totem and Taboo, Freud told a colleague that it would “serve to make a sharp division between us and all Aryan religiosity.” (MacDonald, 115)

Finding Sex Everywhere

Freud had the obsession of finding sex everywhere and attempted to argue that the emotions of parental affection and love was an unhealthy desire. He equated those feelings with sexual desires being denied. Freud even goes as far as equating high sexual morality among Gentiles as anti-semitic behavior:

Within this perspective, anti-Semitism results from the denial of sexuality, and the role of the Jewish mission of psychoanalysis was to end anti-Semitism by freeing humanity of its sexual repressions. (MacDonald, 113)

Through his twisted logic, neoconservative Jew, Norman Podheretz, stated that the road to Auschwitz would result if Westerners stopped accepting mass immigration. Wilhelm Reich propagated the same for those wanting to “repress” sexuality. “For (Wilhelm) Reich, the character armor that results ultimately from repressing sexual orgasms begins in civil discourse and ends at Auschwitz.” (MacDonald, 142)

In the Theory of the Oedipal complex, Freud advanced the idea that children are sexually attracted to their opposite sex parents, such as sons having fantasies about their mothers or daughters having fantasies of their fathers. However, incestuous relations seldom happen in the real world of human and animal behavior because those types of activities would eventually destroy the species through the introduction of genetic defects in offsprings. The theory also promoted the idea of sons desiring to kill their fathers, with the consequences being children without important father figures.

War on Gentiles

This conflation between sexual desire and love is also apparent in many of Freud’s psychoanalytic successors, including Norman O. Brown, Wilhelm Reich, and Herbert Marcuse. The common thread of these writings is that if society could somehow rid itself of sexual repressions, human relations could be based on love and affection. This is an extremely naive and socially destructive viewpoint, given the current research in the field. Psychoanalytic assertions to the contrary were never any more than speculations in the service of waging a war on gentile culture. (MacDonald, 123)

The deferring of gratification actually has a powerful evolutionary basis and has helped make the achievements of mankind possible. Responsibility, discipline, careful planning, and the delay of gratification are essential elements of human development. The goals of Jewish led movements in social sciences has been to condition Gentiles into being “subservient slaves”. Interestingly, the promotion of debauchery has mainly affected the lower class of people while the upper class has been relatively immune to it. The upper class and those with high IQ’s, which Jews mainly belong to, have been little affected.

(The War on Gentiles is) a war that has resulted in a society increasingly split between a disproportionately Jewish “cognitive elite” and a growing mass of individuals who are intellectually incompetent, irresponsible as parents, prone to requiring public assistance, and prone to criminal behavior, psychiatric disorders, and substance abuse. (MacDonald, 151) Studies have also found that Caucasians with poor parent-child relations have lower ethnocentricism scores than those with tight relations, exactly the results that was to be expected.

In The Function of the Orgasm: Sex-Economic Problems of Biological Energy, Wilhelm Reich (1961, 206-207; italics in text), a Jew, wrote, “the forces which had been kept in check for so long by the superficial veneer of good breeding and artificial self-control now borne by the very multitudes that were striving for freedom, broke through into action: In concentration camps, in the persecution of the Jews… In Fascism, the psychic mass disease revealed itself in an undisguised form.”

The apex of the association between Marxism and psychoanalysis came in the 1920s in the Soviet Union, where all the top psychoanalysts were Bolsheviks, Trotsky supporters, and among the most powerful political figures in the country. (Trotsky himself was an ardent enthusiast of psychoanalysis.) This group organized a government-sponsored State Psychoanalytical Institute and developed a program of “pedology” aimed at producing the “new Soviet man” on the basis of psychoanalytic principles applied to the education of children. The program, which encouraged sexual precocity in children, was put into practice in state-run schools. (MacDonald, 114)

The Jewish Domination of the Psychoanalytic Movement

History made psychoanalysis a “Jewish science.” It continued to be attacked as such. It was destroyed in Germany, Italy, and Austria and exiled to the four winds, as such. It continues even now to be perceived as such by enemies and friends alike. Of course there are by now distinguished analysts who are not Jews… But the vanguard of the movement over the last fifty years has remained predominantly Jewish as it was from the beginning. (Yerushalmi 1991, 98)

In 1906 all 17 members of the (psychoanalysis) movement were Jewish, and they strongly identified as Jews (Klein 1981). In a 1971 study, Henry, Sims and Spray found that 62.1 percent of their sample of American psychoanalysts identified themselves as having a Jewish cultural affinity, compared with only 16.7 percent indicating a Protestant affinity and 2.6 percent a Catholic affinity. An additional 18.6 percent indicated no cultural affinity, a percentage considerably higher than the other categories of mental health professional and suggesting that the percentage of psychoanalysts with a Jewish background was even higher than 62 percent (MacDonald, 106).

Freud’s estrangement from gentiles also involved positive views of Judaism and negative views of gentile culture, the latter viewed as something to be conquered in the interest of leading humanity to a higher moral level and ending anti-Semitism. Freud had a sense of “Jewish moral superiority to the injustices of an intolerant, inhumane—indeed, anti-Semitic—society.” (Klein 1981, 86)

Freud often made Gentiles highly visible in the movement, so that the disproportionately high numbers of Jews in the movement would not be as salient, especially if the goal was to subvert gentile culture and create a pacified population. Gentile colleagues who worked under Freud, some for many years, however often complained about their subservient status within the organizations.

No Scientific Basis For Psychoanalysis

The development of consensual theories consistent with observable reality but without any scientific content is a hallmark of twentieth-century Jewish intellectual movements. (MacDonald, 123)

Psychoanalysis is regarded as a pseudo science with little scientific basis. MacDonald argues that the teachings of social “sciences” over the past century are not real sciences but Judaized political movements made to resemble science. Real science demands independence and objectivity with no attachments to ideology or strong authoritative “father” figures. Real science demands that previous theories and ideas be modified or abandoned when new data comes along to challenge it. Oddly, Freud’s works such as Studies of Hysteria and The Interpretation of Dreams are over a 100 years old, yet are still treated as standard references in the field of social sciences:

The continued use of Freud’s texts in instruction and the continuing references to Freud’s work are simply not conceivable in a real science. In this regard, although Darwin is venerated for his scientific work as the founder of the modern science of evolutionary biology, studies in evolutionary biology only infrequently refer to Darwin’s writings because the field has moved so far beyond his work. On the Origin of Species and Darwin’s other works are important texts in the history of science, but they are not used for current instruction. Moreover, central features of Darwin’s account, such as his views on inheritance, have been completely rejected by modern workers. With Freud, however, there is continuing fealty to the master, at least within an important subset of the movement. (MacDonald, 130)

What passes today for Freud bashing is simply the long-postponed exposure of Freudian ideas to the same standards of noncontradiction, clarity, testability, cogency, and parsimonious explanatory power that prevail in empirical discourse at large. Step by step, we are learning that Freud has been the most overrated figure in the entire history of science and medicine— one who wrought immense harm through the propagation of false etiologies, mistaken diagnoses, and fruitless lines of inquiry. Still the legend dies hard, and those who challenge it continue to be greeted like rabid dogs. (Crews et al. 1995, 298-299)

Whereas real science is individualistic at its core, psychoanalysis in all its manifestations is fundamentally a set of cohesive, authoritarian groups centered around a charismatic leader. (MacDonald, 132)

The workings of the (Psychoanalytic) Committee have been extensively documented by Grosskurth (1991, 15; italics in text) who notes that “By insisting the Committee must be absolutely secret, Freud enshrined the principle of confidentiality. The various psychoanalytic societies that emerged from the Committee were like Communist cells, in which the members vowed eternal obedience to their leader. Psychoanalysis became institutionalized by the founding of journals and the training of candidates; in short an extraordinarily effective political entity.” (MacDonald, 128)

There were repeated admonitions for the Committee to present a “united front” against all opposition, for “maintaining control over the whole organization,” for “keeping the troops in line,” and for “reporting to the commander” (Grosskurth 1991, 97). This is not the workings of a scientific organization, but rather of an authoritarian religious-political and quasi-military movement—something resembling the Spanish Inquisition or Stalinism far more than anything resembling what we usually think of as science. (MacDonald, 128)

The continued life of these notions within the psychoanalytic community testifies to the vitality of psychoanalysis as a political movement. The continued self-imposed separation of psychoanalysis from the mainstream science of developmental psychology, as indicated by separate organizations, separate journals, and a largely non-overlapping membership, is a further indication that the fundamental structure of psychoanalysis as a closed intellectual movement continues into the present era. Indeed, the self-segregation of psychoanalysis conforms well to the traditional structure of Judaism vis-à-vis gentile society: There is the development of parallel universes of discourse on human psychology—two incompatible worldviews quite analogous to the differences in religious discourse that have separated Jews from their gentile neighbors over the ages. (MacDonald, 124)

In the world of science, controversy leads to experimentation and rational argumentation. In the world of psychoanalysis, it leads to expulsion of the nonorthodox and to splendid isolation from scientific psychology. (MacDonald, 130)

Despite the paper thin arguments put out by Freud and the lack of scientific evidence, he continues to be treated with cult-like status among his peers.

Conclusion

Psychoanalysis, like many movements that are Jewish-dominated, is that of intentional Gentile cultural debasement. As part of a group evolutionary strategy, while Jews themselves engage in high-investment parenting and group cohesion, they have been engaged in promoting the opposite for Gentiles. It represents yet another battle in the Jew vs Gentile war that has been ongoing since at least biblical times.

Aleppo

I did a big Middle East tour back in the spring of 2011. I was traveling solo. This was near the beginning of the Mideast uprising. The reason I went was to see some of the historic sites before it was no longer possible to do so. It was timely because Syria was being devastated not long after I left. It was right in the beginning of the Arab Spring. There were curfews in Hama and Damascus on some of the days I was there, but overall things went very smoothly. Safety wasn’t an issue and I did my research before I left. I had read up on travel guides and forum posts prior to my travel. At the time it was a decent country. Crime was practically non-existent. Everybody had enough to eat and somewhere to live. What is portrayed in the media about the country is about the exact opposite of reality. I was in Syria for four weeks. Tourism not surprisingly was almost non-existent. I didn’t write about my travels at the time. Wish I had jotted a few things down, but I had planned to rely on my photos which I took hundreds during the trip.

Before Syria, I had spent three weeks in Turkey – mainly in Istanbul and Cappadocia. And before that I was in Egypt, where I had started my trip. I spent a night in Antakya, Turkey the day before I left for Syria. In May I crossed the border from Turkey into Aleppo. I had gotten my Visa several months ago back in the States. You could not do it at the border. I actually went to the Syrian embassy in DC to pick up the Visa. At the time I lived just across the Potomac River.

Upon crossing the border I noticed a big change in the living standards. Turkey was solidly a second world country, but Syria was more upper third world. The standard of living there was similar to Mexico. The immigration’s building in Syria was pretty shabby and deteriorated. Turkey’s building was a lot more modern (below):

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ALEPPO

It took about an hour to get from the border to Aleppo city center. I had a some difficulty finding my “hotel”. Of course a hotel here is not like a hotel in the states. The place was recommended by Lonely Planet Middle East travel Guide. I didn’t know any Arabic except for a few simple words and numbers. I asked somebody in a shop for directions. He knew some English and gladly helped me out.

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I eventually found my hotel. The place was clean and comfortable. The man who worked in the hotel spoke good English.

When I was in Syria I realized my ATM card wasn’t working. In fact it had never worked. I shouldn’t have checked the card before leaving home. I was running low on cash which I originally had $3000 on me. It had carried me through Egypt and Turkey. Few places during my trip accepted anything but cash. I was getting a little worried. Fortunately I was able to get my dad to wire me money through Western Union. The money would last me several more weeks.

My Hotel (Each of the photos are clickable):

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Jews and the Leftwing Movement

Note: Kevin MacDonald is controlled-opposition and could very well be a Jew in disguise. Nonetheless, he presents some interesting information. They have to do this in order to build their audience. I did this write-up before I was aware of that fact.

In Culture of Critique, Kevin MacDonald explains that the programs of multiculturalism, mass immigration, and political correctness are not something that happened by accident but has long been part of Jewish led movements. Jews have historically taken part in movements that have undermined cohesion, religion, tradition, and national identity. MacDonald is a retired professor of psychology at California State University-Long Beach. He has written several books on Jewish anthropology but C of C is considered his most important work.

At the intellectual level, Jewish intellectuals led the battle against the idea that races even exist and against the idea that there are differences in intelligence or cultural level between the races that are rooted in biology. They also spearheaded defining America as a set of abstract principles rather than an ethnocultural civilization. At the level of politics, Jewish organizations spearheaded the drive to open up immigration to all of the peoples of the world. Jewish organizations also played a key role in furthering the interests of other racial and ethnic minorities, and they led the legal and legislative effort to remove Christianity from public places. (MacDonald, C of C, page xx)

Ethnic and religious pluralism serves external Jewish interests because Jews become one of many ethnic groups. This results in the diffusion of political and cultural influence among the various ethnic and religious groups, and it becomes difficult or impossible to develop unified, cohesive groups of gentiles united in their opposition to Judaism. We have seen that historically, major anti-Semitic movements have tended to erupt in societies that have been, apart from the Jews, religiously or ethnically homogeneous. Ethnically and religiously pluralistic societies are thus more likely to satisfy Jewish interests than are societies characterized by ethnic and religious homogeneity among gentiles. (MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents, p332)

American Jews are committed to cultural tolerance because of their belief—one firmly rooted in history—that Jews are safe only in a society acceptant of a wide range of attitudes and behaviors, as well as a diversity of religious and ethnic groups. It is this belief, for example, not approval of homosexuality, that leads an overwhelming majority of U.S. Jews to endorse ‘gay rights’ and to take a liberal stance on most other so-called ‘social’ issues.” (MacDonald, C of C, pg 85)

The results of these movements have been:

  1. A reduction in discrimination and anti-semitism
  2. A society that has made it easier for minority groups to thrive and prosper without fear of backlash
  3. A society that mainly views offending behaviors as individual characteristics rather than a characteristic of the entire group.
  4. A society that sees criticisms of groups being based on prejudice and hate rather than as caused by behavioral characteristics of that group.

MacDonald considers Judaism as a “group evolutionary strategy”. The group that possesses the most intelligence, the most in-group cooperation, the best strategy for eliminating competition, a high amount of motivation, and a long-term vision eventually wins out. What the West has been caught up in is essentially an ethnic war invisible to most. MacDonald describes an elite “that almost instinctively loathes the traditional institutions of European-American culture: its religion, its customs, its manners, and its sexual attitudes”, thus the title of the book.

ETHNOCENTRISM

Jews have high ethnocentricity. Ethnocentric people are cohesive and have strong ties to family and community. Group goals are emphasized over individual goals. Ethnocentric people are very protective of their own kind and view criticisms of individuals or their leaders as an attack on their entire race. Ethnocentric societies are typically collectivist and strong authoritarian leadership is valued. Ethnocentricity likely evolved as a defense mechanism against invasion from enemy groups over territory and resources. They evolved where conflicts with neighbors and other tribal groups were common. Cooperation among peers was of prime importance as peers joined together to fight for a common cause. Endogamous marriages tightened bonds and cohesiveness. The ingroup-outgroup barrier among is strong and difficult to penetrate. Blacks and Arabs have relatively high degrees of ethnocentricity as well.

On the other hand Caucasians, particularly those of northern European decent, have relatively low levels of ethnocentricity. They tend to be individualistic, independent, self-reliant, and have little in the way of “brotherly” attachment to people of their own kind. They have more positive attitudes to outsiders. Caucasians highly value strong individual rights and egalitarian forms of government. Ingroup-outgroup barriers among Caucasians are weak and permeable. Individual, not group goals, are paramount. It is theorized that Caucasians evolved as hunters in the cold harsh north with relatively little contact with others. Dealing with the physical environment was more of a concern than dealing with rival enemy groups. MacDonald discloses that the Caucasian features of “individualism, relative lack of ethnocentrism, and concomitant moral universalism” are all features that are “entirely foreign to Judaism”.

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European groups are highly vulnerable to invasion by strongly collectivist, ethnocentric groups because individualists have less powerful defenses against such groups.(MacDonald, C of C, pg xxiii)

While strong collectivist groups tend to thrive in highly individualistic societies, they have difficulty penetrating societies that have strong ingroup-outgroup barriers such as Islamic societies. Short of military invasion, cohesive societies have been much more successful in keeping predatory groups on the outside looking in.

Collectivist cultures [like Judaism]… place a much greater emphasis on the goals and needs of the ingroup rather than on individual rights and interests. Collectivist cultures develop an “unquestioned attachment” to the ingroup, including “the perception that ingroup norms are universally valid (a form of ethnocentrism), automatic obedience to ingroup authorities, and willingness to fight and die for the ingroup. These characteristics are usually associated with distrust of and unwillingness to cooperate with outgroups.” In collectivist cultures morality is conceptualized as that which benefits the group, and aggression and exploitation of outgroups are acceptable. (MacDonald, C of C, pg 165)

Europeans are groups with high levels of cooperation with strangers rather than with extended family members, and are prone to market relations and individualism. This suggests the fascinating possibility that the key for a group intending to turn Europeans against themselves is to trigger their strong tendency toward altruistic punishment by convincing them of the evil of their own people. Because Europeans are individualists at heart, they readily rise up in moral anger against their own people once they are seen as free riders and therefore morally blameworthy—a manifestation of their much stronger tendency toward altruistic punishment deriving from their evolutionary past as hunter gatherers. (MacDonald, C of C, pg Xxviii)

Democracy is conceptualized as guaranteeing that majorities will not resist the expansion of power of minorities even if that means a decline in their own power. Viewed at its most abstract level, a fundamental agenda is thus to influence the European-derived peoples of the United States to view concern about their own demographic and cultural eclipse as irrational and as an indication of psychopathology. (MacDonald, C of C, pg 196)

IMMIGRATION

 Jews have been “the single most persistent pressure group favoring a liberal immigration policy” in the United States in the entire immigration debate beginning in 1881. (Neuringer 1971, 392-393)

Attitudes about race have changed tremendously over the years. What was considered normal discussion in the past is completely taboo today. A century ago people believed that there were inherent differences in intelligence and morality among the races. Some even believed that certain races were intent on dominating others. Early Americans, whom were largely WASPs (white anglo-saxon protestants), felt it was a God given right for homogeneity in America to be maintained. Since they made the largest contribution to the development of the country, they believed they had every right to determine the direction of it. They believed things were fine the way they were and saw no need for radical changes. The sort of immigration that was to be permitted should only be limited to those of their own kind. Even immigration of Italians, Irish, and Eastern Europeans, though white, were looked upon with suspicion as they could be a threat to the general order of things. Protecting one’s kind is actually a fundamental part of evolution to avoiding extinction.

Immigration policy is a paradigmatic example of conflicts of interest between ethnic groups because immigration policy determines the future demographic composition of the nation. Ethnic groups unable to influence immigration policy in their own interests will eventually be displaced by groups able to accomplish this goal. Immigration policy is thus of fundamental interest to an evolutionist. (MacDonald, C of C, pg 240)

Jewish groups were virtually alone in it’s support of the 1924 immigration bill (failed) and 1965 immigration bill (passed). The 1965 bill essentially gave the green light for mass immigration to America that continues to this day. Groups such as the American Jewish Committee, placed emphasis that immigration was to be based not on needed skill or talent but on family reunion. Immigration was to be opened up to all peoples of the world on a first-come first-served basis. Milton Konwitz of Cornell – “To place so much emphasis on technological and vocational qualifications is to remove every vestige of humanitarianism from our immigration policy.”

The Census Bureau has just reported that about half of the American population will soon be non-white or non-European. And they will all be American citizens. We have tipped beyond the point where a Nazi-Aryan party will be able to prevail in this country. We [Jews] have been nourishing the American climate of opposition to bigotry for about half a century. That climate has not yet been perfected, but the heterogeneous nature of our population tends to make it irreversible—and makes our constitutional constraints against bigotry more practical than ever. (Raab 1993b, 23)

What is interesting is that Jews tend to have double standards when it comes to these programs. While prominent Jews like George Soros, David Horowitz, and Ayn Rand supported liberal immigration policies and multiculturalism for America and Europe, they were staunchly against those same programs for Israel. Dedicated Jews are generally against assimilation and mixed marriages for their people. Kaufman Kohler, a Reform intellectual, remarked that “Israel must remain separate and avoid intermarriage until it leads humankind to an era of universal peace and brotherhood among the races.

 Jews have consistently advocated an internationalist foreign policy because “an internationally-minded America was likely to be more sensitive to the problems of foreign Jewries” (MacDonald, C of C, pg 241)

Equating immigration restriction with genocide

 Walter Benjamin (1968, 262) notes, “Hatred and [the] spirit of sacrifice . . . are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.” This is important because whatever one’s attitudes about the costs and benefits of immigration, a principal motivation for encouraging massive non-European immigration on the part of the organized Jewish community has involved a deeply felt animosity toward the people and culture responsible for the immigration restriction of 1924–1965. (MacDonald, C of C, pg x).

The plight of Jews in Europe during WWII has at least in part been blamed on the failed 1924 immigration act. Norman Podhoretz, an editor for Commentary magazine, is an example of the type of logic that many Jews employ to justify the programs they promote. The following two passages are from Understanding Jewish Influences also by the same author:

“My own view is that what had befallen the Jews of Europe inculcated a subliminal lesson…. The lesson was that anti-Semitism, even the relatively harmless genteel variety that enforced quotas against Jewish students or kept their parents from joining fashionable clubs or getting jobs in prestigious Wall Street law firms, could end in mass murder.”

And Jewish conservative, Lawrence Auster: “Now when Jews put together the idea that “all social prejudice and exclusion leads potentially to Auschwitz” with the idea that “all bigotry is indivisible,” they must reach the conclusion that any exclusion of any group, no matter how alien it may be to the host society, is a potential Auschwitz. So there it is. We have identified the core Jewish conviction that makes Jews keep pushing relentlessly for mass immigration, even the mass immigration of their deadliest enemies. In the thought-process of Jews, to keep Jew-hating Muslims out of America would be tantamount to preparing the way to another Jewish Holocaust.”

CIVIL RIGHTS

Jews have heavily influenced civil rights organizations such as the NAACP, SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center), ADL, ACLU, SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), and LCCR (Leadership Conference on Civil Rights). Howard Sachar writes in A History of Jews in America that “In 1914, Professor Emeritus Joel Spingarn of Columbia University became chairman of the NAACP and recruited for its board such Jewish leaders as Jacob Schiff, Jacob Billikopf, and Rabbi Stephen Wise.”Additional Jewish-American founding members included Julius Rosenwald, Lillian Wald, and Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch. Wikipedia states that every president of the NAACP from 1915 to 1975 was Jewish. It is notable that Marcus Garvey, who is black, quit the NAACP in 1917 calling it a “white organization.” Between two-thirds and three-quarters of the funding for civil rights groups during the 1960s, the height of the civil rights movement, were by Jews.

 Jewish organizations view Anglo-Saxon (read Caucasian) nationalism as their greatest potential threat and they have tended to support pro-black integration (i.e., assimilationist, individualist) policies for blacks in America, presumably because such policies dilute Caucasian power and lessen the possibility of a cohesive, nationalist anti-Semitic Caucasian majority. (Harold Wright Cruse, black intellectual and author of The Crisis of the Negro Intellect)

Cruse notes that while Jews have been active in black civil rights organizations, the other way around has not been true. Blacks have been completely excluded from the inner workings and policy making of Jewish organizations.

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Kiwi Kaplan – Martin Luther King   Nelson Mandela – Joe Slovo

 

SOCIAL IDENTITY THEORY

As part of an evolutionary strategy, the successful advancement of your kind requires your kind to be portrayed in a positive light and outsiders in a less than positive light. This is not something exclusive to Jews but Jews have been the most successful with this. Hitler attempted to practice this for the German people.

Levinson views ethnocentrism as fundamentally concerned with ingroup-outgroup perceptions, a perspective that is congruent with social identity theory that I have proposed as the best candidate for developing a theory of anti-Semitism. Levinson concludes, “Ethnocentrism is based on a pervasive and rigid ingroup-outgroup distinction; it involves stereotyped negative imagery and hostile attitudes regarding outgroups, stereotyped positive imagery and submissive attitudes regarding ingroups, and a hierarchical, authoritarian view of group interaction in which ingroups are rightly dominant, outgroups subordinate” (MacDonald, C of C, pg 171)

What organized Jewry has accomplished is something that shouldn’t necessarily be viewed as out of the ordinary. They are simply looking out for themselves. This has helped Judaism survive for 2000 plus years despite Jews being almost always a diaspora group among gentiles. Besides battling anti-semitism, the author provides extensive evidence that multiculturalism is of intentional gentile cultural subversion.

Jewish moral particularism combined with a profound sense of historical grievancehatred by any other name—against European civilization and a desire for the end of Europe as a Christian civilization with its traditional ethnic base. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the menaces of “extremism, hate and fundamentalism”—prototypically against Jews—can only be repaired by jettisoning the traditional cultural and ethnic basis of European civilization. Events that happened five hundred years ago are still fresh in the minds of Jewish activists. (MacDonald, Understanding Jewish Influences, p10).

CONCLUSION

Jews know how to play the evolutionary game. Gentiles, particularly Caucasians, do not. The group that is the smartest, the most cunning, and the most patient eventually wins out. Multiculturalism is yet another battle of the many battles fought between Jews and Gentiles that date back to at least biblical times and has continued up into the present day.

(I will do a writeup of Chapters 2, 3, and 4 in the near future. There is too much information to put in one article)

 – Alex Gore


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8SwLm6YG64

Highlights:

9:30 – If you don’t play the evolutionary game and decide to sit out, you will lose
28:00 – Taboo of C of C
44:30 – Ford’s conversion from Christianity to orthodox Judaism and what he discovered

The Untold Story of White Slavery in America

 

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by Alex

White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America, New York University Press, 2008.

I picked up White Cargo from an estate sale a couple months ago. I noted it in my post titled “Conspiracy Library”. I actually sat down and read it. White Cargo discusses white slavery of the time period from Britain’s first settlement in Jamestown during the early 17th century to America’s war with Britain during the late 18th century. The focus is mainly on Virginia and Maryland, where that form of slavery was the most pervasive.

Though what we were taught in school about the harsh treatment of black slaves was largely true, what was not mentioned were the many whites who were subject to the same treatment as well. This was totally omitted from our textbooks. White slaves (mainly British and Irish) were crammed on ships during transports, were auctioned off upon arrival, were subject to constant beatings and whipping while on the plantations, were malnourished, had few rights, and had their children taken away. Does this not sound similar to what we were taught about black slavery? Euphemistically white slavery was referred to as `indentured servitude’. Indentured servitude was in fact slavery. Many never lived to see freedom as they died either of disease or exhaustion before their time was up.

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