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Walter Yannis [OP]

2003-02-19 12:26 | User Profile

This appeared on [url=http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=6172]Front Page Magazine[/url]

February 19, 2003

One of the great mysteries of modern American history is why the old White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) establishment abdicated its traditional rule in the late 1960’s. This was one of the key events that caused the 60’s to get out of hand. Nobody living in the politically-correct atmosphere of today can be unaware of this establishment’s faults, but as conservatives we can’t help being aware of its virtues, either.

Despite the nonsense said about it by the Left, it was the most enlightened ruling class in the world in its day. America in its final heyday, the 1950’s, had less economic inequality by standard measures than it has today and was a far more contented and morally confident society. This was an elite that sent its own sons, like George Bush Sr., to fight its wars, not somebody else’s. And many of its faults were being remedied at the time it died, anyway – it was still alive and kicking when the 1964-5 civil rights bills, which were opposed by the South, not the establishment as such, were passed.

For those of you whose sense of American social history is blurry, the WASP establishment was the world of the Ivy League, Fifth Avenue, gentlemen’s clubs, the Social Register, elite country clubs, top New York law firms and investment banks, Boston Brahmins, Main Line Philadelphia, the upper management of great corporations like the Pennsylvania Railroad, certain parts of the military, the OSS and its successor the CIA, the Episcopal Church, New England boarding schools, and the old diplomatic corps. It ruled America from Plymouth Rock until the late 1960’s.

The WASP establishment is truly dead and gone a generation ago now[1], so please let no-one imagine that anyone, least of all me, is advocating its return. But the fact is that this country hasn’t had a coherent ruling elite since. Human societies are inevitably hierarchical; the question is whether those at the top take seriously the obligation to govern that their social position imposes on them or whether they merely feather their own nests. In older nations with feudal roots, this function has traditionally been taken by an aristocracy with a sense of noblesse oblige. The WASP establishment was a kind of quasi-aristocracy for democratic America.

Bill Clinton’s crowd were, as David Brooks has accurately diagnosed, essentially bobos (bourgeois bohemians) and their ridiculous anti-establishment counter-culture posturing made clear that they refused to admit that they were the establishment. Except, of course, when the time came to exercise power; hypocrisy came as naturally to them as it does to all liberals. They thus lacked the crucial sense of responsibility for the nation that is at the core of any decent ruling class.

Bush’s crowd, while led by a member of a genuinely patrician old-American family, have at best a pale shadow of this sense of inherited duty. Bush’s desire to identify as a Texan, rather than with his Andover, Yale and Harvard heritage, is a sign that he is running away from something that is no longer accorded the respect it once was. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld probably comes closest to the old ideal in terms of his sense of duty, though it is interesting to note that although educated at ultra-establishmentarian Princeton, he is actually German-American by heritage, a reminder that “WASP” in the American context included a lot of people who are not actually Anglo-Saxon. And Rumsfeld is so blunt compared to the famously understated old establishment.

So how did this establishment, which no-one thought was on the verge of collapse, collapse? Some thoughts:

1. An ethnarchy like WASP-dom in a free society depends on WASPs being richer, better educated, and more powerful than everybody else. This is not sustainable in a dynamic economy where Irishmen and Jews and all sorts of people end up being rich. The WASPs may have been willing to maintain a Jewish quota at Yale (a private institution in all conscience) but they were not willing to repress non-WASPs hard enough to keep them down forever. In fact, they created an economy more open to the advancement of ethnic outsiders than any the world had yet seen. In 1920, they can rely on these people being fresh off the boat and uneducated, but they will not stay that way after a few generations. So this ethnarchy depended upon a basic social inequality that they weren't prepared to defend. Unlike, say, many Latin American countries, which are still run today by the descendants of the conquistadors because they really are willing to keep their countrymen poor and uneducated. Mexico, for example, is a nation of mostly Indian blood run by Iberian-descended white people who maintain a national myth of “we are all mestizos.”

2. The WASP establishment made a great wrong turn after immigration surged in the 1880’s by defining itself as Anglo-Saxon rather than native American. This had enormous consequences. If they are in essence Anglo-Saxon, it logically follows that they should rule England, not America. They defined themselves as foreigners in their own country for the sake of establishing an unsustainable title to social superiority. It caused them to shrivel into a narrow caste[2] rather than absorbing rising ethnics and defining a distinctively American upper class. (This did happen somewhat, by default, but it lacked this needed ideological underpinning and didn’t happen enough.)

If they had contested the definition of what a "real, indigenous, non-foreign, native American" is, they could have won it, which would have carried the logical consequence that if they were the real Americans and therefore had a title to govern. But they didn't, either out of snobbery – which is perverse, given that defining oneself against the British is something that George Washington's generation and the one after would have understood and respected perfectly well – or out of the fact that America lacks enough of a long history and volkish culture for self-definition as an ethnic American to be emotionally satisfying to anyone in a way that it is in other nations.

This ultimately leaves the definition of what is a real American in the ethnic sense unclaimed, producing the void in our self-conception as a people that is later filled with “propositional nation” sophistry. (You can say America is not an ethnically-defined nation, but then what is its boundary? Question: whose well-being should it maximize? Answer: it should conquer the world and give the world what's good for it.)

1. The spiritual basis of WASP society, the Episcopal Church, was corrupted from within. Religious modernists started taking over the seminaries in the 1930's, resulting today in the terror-apologizing near-atheist Episcopal Bishop John Spong today and anti-Christian, anti-American Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold. Even among Episcopal bishops who do not express disdain for traditional Christian beliefs, there is a cold, alienated, intellectualized approach to central matters of faith.

2. WASP culture, particularly of the upper-class variety, is dependent upon a sense of superiority over other ethnic groups that is a lot easier to maintain when Britain is ruling 1/4 of the world. This goes away because of the collapse of the British Empire after WW II. And their instinctive sense of the legitimacy of racial and ethnic superiority was shaken by the Nazis.

3. There is great laziness in the generation that grew up in the 1920's, which is the cohort that abdicated in the 1960's. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about this in his short stories like "Six of One." A bourgeois class can only really sustain itself if it has a quasi-aristocratic ethos of imposing a duty on itself to rule, which is entirely different from just making money and playing golf. (The biggest myth of the Left is that bourgeois society possesses the will to power.) The 1920's were similar to the 1990's in that a stock-market boom caused a lot of people to forget about their values and think making money is enough.

4. There are internal weaknesses in WASP culture, like an emotional coldness that produces alienation between generations with predictable consequences. And there is liquor; this is a stereotype but like all stereotypes it has significant truth.

5. The United States had to become a technocracy after WWII. Technocracy destroys aristocratic and quasi-aristocratic social orders because it requires society to give power to people with the wrong social backgrounds because there aren't enough trained people with the right ones. If a society has to hire and promote on brains rather than inherited status, inherited status ceases to be inherited. Technocracy becomes mandatory when economic progress and the democratic demand for efficient maximization of the economy produces the need for a huge administrative class. Clearly big government is the enemy of anything quasi-aristocratic. Technology just makes this worse. This is the story of how Pres. Connant of Harvard brought in the SAT. He was very conscious of the caste-destroying effects of what he was doing.

6. The decline of the WASP ascendancy resembles Plato's hierarchy of regimes and their cycle of decay in book VIII of The Republic. Plato’s analysis is an abstract formulation of the intrinsic truth that all ruling elites constantly face the temptation to cannibalize existing social capital. Why not just enjoy your rule, rather than working to maintain it for the next generation? Why maintain social structure rather than letting it run down? Frankly, this is a profound argument against democracy, i.e. the absolute sovereignty of any one generation. It is an argument for the Burkean sense of traditionalism as our duty to those who came before us and gave us what we have and to those who will come after us whose nation we are borrowing for a time. But this only works if one has a coherent sense of nationhood and peoplehood and we do not. Having a hereditary core to the ruling class can clearly help maintain this sense. Unless, of course, this core decays for the aforementioned reasons.

One of the great virtues of the WASP ascendancy is that it provided, in a nation made ethnically fluid by immigration, a concrete core towards which other groups should assimilate. Those of you who don’t like this, sorry, but they were here first[3]. To have a nation with open boundaries, one needs a solid core, not the “anyone can be an American the instant they sign their passport” chaos we have today. The WASPs played this role despite, as I noted above, failing to define themselves as real Americans rather than Anglo-Saxons as they should have.

The WASP ascendancy also contained, because the WASPs staged the American Revolution and wrote the Constitution, an emotional attachment to this country’s early history and founding that has either dissipated or become abstract, i.e. “propositional nation” sophistry. A nation must revere its history if it is to sustain its identity, and obviously people whose own ancestors were involved in that history have a more concrete relation to it than those of us who came later.

One of America's big problems as an historical nation has been its lack of interest in culture – Camille Paglia calls America “this masculine pioneer country that has never taken the arts seriously”[4] – and failure to see the need to impose a national culture of real quality as an emotional and intellectual focus of its sense of nationhood. We used to have some of this prior to the 1960’s, but it didn’t really stick and has since been drowned by commercial pop culture and delegitimated by multiculturalism, which denies that we even should have a common culture. One can still see remnants of it here and there, like the architecture of our better old universities. A nation's sense of identity should be organized around its history and its peoplehood but you need culture to make this pretty so people will like it and feel it as well as think it. It is clearly against our grain to have an Academie Americain to distill our culture for us, but we have various vested interests, like the universities, doing this de facto anyway.

One conclusion one could draw from this is that an artificially-created nation is a rationalist mistake, but I think not, particularly given the ambiguous balance between conscious self-creation and unconscious emergence that exists in the history of many superficially "organic" nations. (Don't tell me Germany is not a conscious creation! But then of course look what a mess they made; this is clearly a partial, if not a whole, truth.) There is also a degree to which America is not even artificial, i.e. not identical with its state and founded in 1776 but organically growing from 1620, but consciousness of this is undermined by changes in our ethnic makeup due to immigration. An explicitly founded nation merely has to be aware of the temptations to which it is uniquely suspect – like propositionism – and avoid them. Unfortunately, this requires a degree of self-restraint which is against the grain of current American culture.

Though I cannot help noticing that it is a WASP characteristic.

[1] The novelist Louis Auchincloss, a descendant of it, has been elegantly sweeping up the rubble ever since [2] This is the essential point of E. Digby Baltzell in his fine book The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy & Caste in America. [3] My own people were actually Scots, which makes them Celtic rather than Anglo-Saxon, and respectable though not upper-class. [4] Sex, Art & American Culture.

Robert Locke is an associate editor of www.frontpagemag.com. He can be contacted at robertlocke@cspc.org.

NeoNietzsche

2003-02-19 14:06 | User Profile

Originally posted by Walter Yannis@Feb 19 2003, 06:26 Despite the nonsense said about it by the Left, it was the most enlightened ruling class in the world in its day.  America in its final heyday, the 1950’s, had less economic inequality by standard measures than it has today and was a far more contented and morally confident society.  This was an elite that sent its own sons, like George Bush Sr., to fight its wars, not somebody else’s.  And many of  its faults were being remedied at the time it died, anyway – it was still alive and kicking when the 1964-5 civil rights bills, which were opposed by the South, not the establishment as such, were passed.

Despite the nonsense said about it by the Left, it was the most enlightened ruling class in the world in its day.

Substitute "fatuous".

America in its final heyday, the 1950’s, had less economic inequality by standard measures than it has today and was a far more contented and morally confident society.

After having engaged in a suicide pact with a mortal enemy while stabbing would-be allies in the back.

This was an elite that sent its own sons, like George Bush Sr., to fight its wars, not somebody else’s.

Hearing that we had and have a Marrano President of the United States comes as a bit of a shock,....

And many of its faults were being remedied at the time it died, anyway – it was still alive and kicking when the 1964-5 civil rights bills, which were opposed by the South, not the establishment as such, were passed.

...but then hearing of such treasonous abdication does not.

PENN

2003-02-19 15:57 | User Profile

(Don't tell me Germany is not a conscious creation! But then of course look what a mess they made; this is clearly a partial, if not a whole, truth.) There is also a degree to which America is not even artificial, i.e. not identical with its state and founded in 1776 but organically growing from 1620...

The Germans made the mistake of losing the war. We made the mistake of "winning" it.

Good point about 1620 though; once the king's plantation now his financiers'...

If we can't call it progress we might as well call it a spade.

Okiereddust

2003-02-19 16:12 | User Profile

Originally posted by Walter Yannis@Feb 19 2003, 12:26 **One of the great mysteries of modern American history is why the old White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) establishment abdicated its traditional rule in the late 1960’s.  This was one of the key events that caused the 60’s to get out of hand. Nobody living in the politically-correct atmosphere of today can be unaware of this establishment’s faults, but as conservatives we can’t help being aware of its virtues, either.

**

Its a question they raise, just like Kevin MacDonald.

**  Today..the immigrants-above all the Jewish immigrants-seem more American than the [WASP] does They are the voices and inflections of thought that seem most familiar to us, literally second nature. [The WASP] is the odd ball, the fossil, the stranger.  We glance at him, a bit startled and say to ourselves, "Where did he go?"  We remember him: pale, posed, neatly dressed, sure of himself.  And we see him as an outsider, an outlander, a reasonably noble breed in the act of vanishing.  He has stopped being representative, and we didn't notice it until this minute.  Not so emphatically.

What has happened since WWII is that the American sensibility has become part Jewish, perhaps as much Jewish as anything else...The literate American mind has come in some measure to think Jewishly.  It has been taught to, and it was ready to.  After the entertainers and the novelists came the Jewish critics, politicians, theologians.  Critics and politicians and theologians are by profession molders; they form ways of seeing.

(Kerr 1968, New York Times)**

Unlike them, MacDonald at least puts forth some answers.

Hugh Lincoln

2003-02-19 20:59 | User Profile

Originally posted by Walter Yannis@Feb 19 2003, 06:26 ** The WASPs may have been willing to maintain a Jewish quota at Yale (a private institution in all conscience) but they were not willing to repress non-WASPs hard enough to keep them down forever. In fact, they created an economy more open to the advancement of ethnic outsiders than any the world had yet seen. In 1920, they can rely on these people being fresh off the boat and uneducated, but they will not stay that way after a few generations. So this ethnarchy depended upon a basic social inequality that they weren't prepared to defend. **

Robert "Defender of the Jews" Locke is right about this one. I'm not so sure "the economy" is the best explanation for the infiltration, but as for lacking the stomach to hang on to power, it's true. Ancestors and relatives, many of whom held positions in half the bastions of WASPdom Locke lists, would rather walk naked into the University Club than bespeak, less ban, the Jew. Today's WASP is but a wisp.

edward gibbon

2003-02-19 21:54 | User Profile

The decline of the WASP is overstated. They may have run this country, but relied on the British to run the world. Our ruling class has been cowardly since the Civil War. Harvard and Yale provided refuge for Northern males who ducked the war. Both fathers of Teddy and FDR sat out the war. Please see what I wrote for Occidental Quarterly - Remembering American Wars – Occidental Quarterly Summer 2002 [url=http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/vol2no2/re-wars.html]http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/vol2no2/re-wars.html[/url] As Mencken pointed out, the only aristocracy this country ever had was in the South. The Northern elites had the stench of the pawn shop about them. J.P. Morgan profitted from the sales of defective rifles to the Union Army. Ezra Pound found Morgan to be typical of the American wealthy who had little character, courage or other manly attributes.

When things have gotten tough, these gutless creeps have turned and ducked.

** The attack on the presidency caused by the Watergate scandal had much to do with the abandonment by the American right, but even that did not excuse their hesitant and often cowardly actions.  French political philosopher, Raymond Aron, accused the Eastern elite of committing suicide.  These effete few bore responsibility for the war in Vietnam, but managed to blame Richard Nixon for not ending it quickly. **

Presently these thugs have all but abandoned the United States. Their wealth is overseas, or soon to be. They care little for the common white man. They have made common cause with Jews for years, but soon will abandon them. They have adroitly sanctioned and prompted Black unrest to their financial advantage. But I suspect this has ended.

Ragnar

2003-02-20 01:42 | User Profile

Originally posted by Walter Yannis@Feb 19 2003, 12:26 ** One conclusion one could draw from this is that an artificially-created nation is a rationalist mistake, but (...) **

But nothing. This is precisely the conclusion lots of my Brit friends have been drawing for quite some time.

An elite does not just abdicate, which is what this artilcle indicates. The article also points out that the elite also refers to itself as "WASP" and then points out that WASP is a foreign designation... without for a moment noting that using this term can only mean that the elite does not think of itself as American.

So an "artificially-created nation is a rationalist mistake" becomes the only logical conclusion.

This whole "America as blunder/conspiracy" train of thought has been picked up by New Age guru David Icke in England; his book The Greatest Secret creates some fine conspiracies about America's founding and growth.

Nor is Icke alone. A modest bit of research shows a very real and strange set of circumstances at America's discovery:

The Templar Knights were the mysterious moneylenders cum military elite that were declared heretical and banned, then tortured and killed, around a century before Columbus' voyages.

One nation did not persecute the Templars, and took them (and their money) in: Portugal. Columbus shows up in a generation or so, and sails to an allegedly New World in three ships festooned with the Templar's famous emblem: Red Cross on a White Field.

In 1966, former OSS man Charles Hapgood discovers many "portolan" maps from Portugal and elsewhere that show Columbus had maps of the New World before he set sail. These secret Templar maps were more accurate than anything the rest of the world had till the 18th Century.

Dan Dare

2003-02-20 03:59 | User Profile

Most interesting and stimulating article.

**One of the great mysteries of modern American history is why the old White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) establishment abdicated its traditional rule in the late 1960’s. **

But isn't the date a little off? Surely the stake through the heart of the WASP establishment was the election of John Kennedy, the first Catholic president, in 1961?

Okiereddust

2003-02-20 10:08 | User Profile

Originally posted by Dan Dare@Feb 20 2003, 03:59 **Most interesting and stimulating article.

**One of the great mysteries of modern American history is why the old White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) establishment abdicated its traditional rule in the late 1960’s. **

But isn't the date a little off? Surely the stake through the heart of the WASP establishment was the election of John Kennedy, the first Catholic president, in 1961?**

Here's the definitive account of the decline of the WASP establishment from the master of the subject, Kevin MacDonald. I don't think anyone can really understand this subject without a good understanding of MacDonald

[url=http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/Preface.htm]Preface to the First Paperback Edition of Culture of Critique[/url]

** Developing theories of why Western cultures provide such fertile ground for the theories and movements discussed in CofC is a very useful area for research. It is instructive to look at the way Europeans in the U.S. saw themselves a century ago.6 Americans of European descent thought of themselves as part of a cultural and ethnic heritage extending backward in time to the founding of the country. The Anglo-Saxon heritage of the British Isles was at the center of this self-conception, but Americans of German and Scandinavian descent also viewed themselves as part of this ethnic and cultural heritage. They had a great deal of pride in their accomplishments. They had conquered a vast territory and had achieved a high degree of economic progress. They saw themselves as having created a civilization with a strong moral fabric—a country of farmers and small businessmen who had developed into a world economic power. They believed that their civilization was a product of their own unique ingenuity and skills, and they believed that it would not survive if other peoples were allowed to play too large a role in it. They saw themselves as exhibiting positive personality traits such as courage in the face of adversity, self-reliance, inventiveness, originality, and fair play —the very virtues that allowed them to conquer the wilderness and turn it into an advanced civilization........

  That world has vanished. The rise of Jewish power and the disestablishment of the specifically European nature of the U.S. are the real topics of CofC. The war to disestablish the specifically European nature of the U.S. was fought on several fronts. The main thrusts of Jewish activism against European ethnic and cultural hegemony have focused on three critical power centers in the United States: The academic world of information in the social sciences and humanities, the political world where public policy on immigration and other ethnic issues is decided, and the mass media where “ways of seeing” are presented to the public. The first two are the focus of CofC.

  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........

  This “hostile elite” is fundamentally a Jewish-dominated elite whose origins and main lines of influence are described in CofC. The emergence of this hostile elite is an aspect of ethnic competition between Jews and non-Jews and its effect will be a long-term decline in the hegemony of European peoples in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world.

  Although European peoples are less prone to ethnocentrism and more prone to moral universalism and individualism (see below), they did not surrender their impending cultural and demographic eclipse without a fight. There is no evidence for internal WASP self-destruction, but a great deal of evidence that their active resistance was overcome by the movements I discuss in CofC. For example, Bendersky’s (2000) recent The “Jewish Threat” shows strong resistance to the decline of European hegemony among U.S. Army officers in the period from World War I to well into the Cold War era and shows that similar attitudes were widespread among the public at that time. But their resistance was nullified by the decline of the intellectual basis of European ethnic hegemony and by political events, such as the immigration law of 1965, which they were unable to control.In the end, the 1965 law passed because it was advertised as nothing more than a moral gesture that would have no long-term impact on the ethnic balance of the U.S. However, to its activist supporters, including the Jewish organizations who were critical to its passage, immigration reform was what it had always been: a mechanism to alter the ethnic balance of the United States (see Ch. 7).

  The fact that the Jewish intellectuals and political operatives described in CofC did not lose their national/ethnic loyalties shows that there was no general trend to de-ethnicization. The broad trends toward de-ethnicization somehow occurred among the Europeans but spared the Jews who by all accounts continue to strongly support their ethnic homeland, Israel, and continue to have a strong sense of peoplehood—propped up now by high-profile programs encouraging Jews to marry other Jews. My account would benefit from discussing the acceptance of Jews by the Protestant establishment after World War II. However, what I have seen thus far suggests Jewish involvement in the dramatic changes in Protestant sensibilities as well. Recently I have become aware of John Murray Cuddihy’s (1978) book, No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste. The chapter on Reinhold Niebuhr is particularly interesting in thinking about how to account for the acceptance of Jews and Judaism by the WASP establishment after W.W.II. Cuddihy focuses on the elevation of Judaism to the status of one of the “big three” U.S. religions, to the point that a rabbi officiates at the presidential inauguration even though Jews constitute approximately 2–3% of the population. Cuddihy argues that this religious surface served as a protective coloring and led to a sort of crypto- Judaism in which Jewish ethnic identities were submerged in order to make them appear civilized to the goyim. As part of this contract, Niebuhr acknowledged “the stubborn will of the Jews to live as a peculiar people”—an acknowledgement by an important Protestant leader that the Jews could remain a people with a surface veneer of religion.....................................................................................

  I suppose that Niebuhr thought that he was only giving up the prospect of converting Jews, but the implicit downgrading of the ethnic character of Judaism provided an invaluable tool in furthering Jewish ethnic aims in the U.S. The downgrading of the ethnic aspect of Judaism essentially allowed Jews to win the ethnic war without anyone even being able to acknowledge that it was an ethnic war. For example, during the immigration debates of the 1940s–1960s Jews were described by themselves and others as “people of the Jewish faith.” They were simply another religion in an officially pluralistic religious society, and part of Jewish posturing was a claim to a unique universalistic moral-religious vision that could only be achieved by enacting legislation that in fact furthered their particularist ethnic aims. The universalistic moral-religious vision promoted by Jewish activists really amounted to taking the Protestants at their own word—by insisting that every last shred of ethnic identity among Protestants be given up while Jews were implicitly allowed to keep theirs if they only promised to behave civilly.

  The evidence provided by Cuddihy suggests that Niebuhr was socialized by the Jewish milieu of New York into taking the positions that he did—that his position as a major Protestant spokesperson was facilitated by alliances he formed with Jews and because his writings fit well with the Jewish milieu of New York intellectual circles. Niebuhr’s behavior is therefore more an indication of Jewish power and the ability of Jews to recruit non-Jews sympathetic to their causes than an indication of Protestant self-destruction. One cannot underestimate the importance of Jewish power in intellectual circles in New York at the time of Niebuhr’s pronouncements (see CofC, passim). For example, Leslie Fiedler (1948, 873) noted that “the writer drawn to New York from the provinces feels . . . the Rube, attempts to conform; and the almost parody of Jewishness achieved by the gentile writer in New York is a strange and crucial testimony of our time.”8**

il ragno

2003-02-20 14:14 | User Profile

**The downgrading of the ethnic aspect of Judaism essentially allowed Jews to win the ethnic war without anyone even being able to acknowledge that it was an ethnic war. **

BAM!! Dead center.

That Locke even toyed with the idea that he could write honestly about this subject and never even whisper the word "Jew" shows he's either a fool or a tool.

Everybody wants to be paid for their work, and everybody wants the highest profile for their labors. But writers (in a marketplace where Jewish oligarchy calls the tune) have it especially bad at the moment: you labor in Semitic vineyards as work for hire, or sweat at thankless but honest toil for honest toil's sake. You can't do both.

NeoNietzsche

2003-02-20 14:29 | User Profile

"But their resistance was nullified by the decline of the intellectual basis of European ethnic hegemony..."

"They saw themselves as exhibiting positive personality traits such as courage in the face of adversity, self-reliance, inventiveness, originality, and fair play —the very virtues that allowed them to conquer the wilderness and turn it into an advanced civilization........"

But the closing of the frontier which had made laissez-faire work temporarily also ended the applicability of the pioneer virtues. The maintenance of advanced civilization is intrinsically a coercive and conspiratorial enterprise. The WASP oligarchy was doomed to displacement by Jewry.

Until the Morons and AIDS cases, respectively, grow up and evolve, there is no hope of displacing the Jews.

Hugh Lincoln

2003-02-20 17:51 | User Profile

Originally posted by il ragno@Feb 20 2003, 08:14 ** [QUOTE]Everybody wants to be paid for their work, and everybody wants the highest profile for their labors. But writers (in a marketplace where Jewish oligarchy calls the tune) have it especially bad at the moment: you labor in Semitic vineyards as work for hire, or sweat at thankless but honest toil for honest toil's sake. You can't do both. **

Robert Locke would like you to know that he is paid very little for his Davey Horowitz articles. And that he makes astronomical amounts as a Wall Streeter, and does not need to be paid for his writing. From what I've read by Mr. Locke, he's likely more tool than fool.

edward gibbon

2003-02-20 21:31 | User Profile

The emergence of Jews as the dominant influence on the American political climate came during the 1960 election. The newer medium of television controlled by Jews prevailed over newspapers, then owned largely by WASP's. From my book War, Money and American Memory> After being elected President, John Kennedy told David Ben-Gurion, the Prime Minister of Israel, that he owed his being elected to the Jews of New York.   In this interview with the New York Times the culturally assured Ben-Gurion pronounced the United States a greedy self-centered nation while his nation of Israel was not.  Israel would flower and benefit all of mankind.  There was no meaning in life in the United States, but in Israel the true significance of human life was demonstrated every day.  Jews like Ben-Gurion have long believed in the moral superiority and absolute uniqueness of Jews.  They have long felt they do not offend, but render great eternal truths for which the rest of humankind should be grateful.  Sigmund Freud speculated this may be a reason Jews have been so disliked by others.

A great cause of much of today's political problems was the decision by JFK to turn a blind eye to Israel's development of a nuclear bomb. Seldom is this discussed in public, but is widely known to those who follow such affairs.

The American establishment has always recognized war was a great opportunity to make money and nothing, particularly service to the country, was to take precedence.> Eisenhower was aware of the American tendency to talk loudly, but to balk when asked to put up.  He only had to look at his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles.  Mr. Dulles, born in 1888, had been assigned to the General Staff in Washington in World War I.  Then he had gone to the peace conference at Versailles where he negotiated reparations.  In 1927 he became the managing partner of Sullivan and Cromwell, the archetypal Wall Street law firm.  So devoted to the firm and aware that war was the time to make money, Mr. Dulles after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had sent a memorandum to other members of the firm that a return to their jobs could not be guaranteed if they enlisted or served the country.   The placing of the law firm above service to the country during war was not an uncommon sentiment among the great law partnerships of New York City.  John J. McCloy after serving during World War II directly under Secretary of War Henry Stimson had trouble claiming his old job on Wall Street.  The senior partner in his law firm was disturbed by his leaving the firm for wartime service and felt the firm should have had first loyalty of his services.  He made sure McCloy did not return.   However, McCloy did go on to become the unofficial chairman of the American Establishment.

Dulles as a buffoon desiring to set the British straight.> **During World War II Mr. Dulles, after arriving in Britain in June of 1942, was irritated by the British refusal to meet with him to discuss plans for the post-war world.  Even the high clergy of the Anglican Church could not find time.  Their lack of interest was taken as a personal insult.  Foreign Minister, Anthony Eden, eventually did find time to meet, but in a report to the Federal Council of Churches, Mr. Dulles could only write that Mr. Eden only listened.  In his memoirs Harold MacMillan took care to include a copy of a talk between Dulles and the Colonial Secretary in July 1942.  After complimenting the British for their superlative work among backward people, Mr. Dulles had warned him that Americans were fundamentally hostile to imperialism.  If there was to be cooperation between the United States and Britain in post-war world, it could not be done on the basis of sentiment.  It could only be on the basis of the task to be done.  Then Mr. Dulles affirmed that no idea had more appeal to the American people than the advancement of backward people.   In a crowning insult Sir Alexander Cadogan of the Foreign Office wrote of Mr. Dulles as the "woolliest type of useless pontificating American ... Heaven help us".   Later during the crisis in the Middle East Mr. Dulles repaid the British by telling the Senate that if he were in the area, he would not want a British or French soldier on either side of him.   As a judge of character and brains Mr. Dulles referred to Molotov, the Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union, as the ablest foreign statesman he had ever met.  Many others regarded Molotov as a prize dolt.   Lenin once described Molotov as an "incurable dumbbell". **

It must be obvious that America never had the political caste or establishment with justified self-confidentce to rule the world. Presently we have as president a man who though smarter than he appears lacks the capacity to recognize the limits of our power or true American national interest.

Exelsis_Deo

2003-02-20 22:51 | User Profile

That is so true. That is why I wish to lay scrutiny upon the "interests" of GWB as compared to those of America. As our military orders body bags by the thousands, our homeland is paranoid. What kind of a leader do we have ? Why has Congress given him the rubber stamp and the Patriot Act ? Here's an idea.. Bush Jr. will invade Iraq, occupy it at all costs, let's just let him be the new President Of Iraq .. with Sharon as the VP. The mysteries of the powderkeg are also unknown. Saudi Arabia has already stated that after this they will not let us have any presence there. Germany,France, Russia,China, who else could we possibly add to our list of non-fans except for the British street ? oh yea they hate us too. GWB - wake up and smell the coffee pal. Not only is your stance unpopular, it's unconstitutional and downright disgusting. Take your hatred and impatience to another outlet, not innocent peoples lives. Put your ass on the line not my best friend's. Cabeesh ?

Okiereddust

2003-02-20 23:52 | User Profile

Originally posted by Hugh Lincoln@Feb 20 2003, 17:51 > Originally posted by il ragno@Feb 20 2003, 08:14 ** Everybody wants to be paid for their work, and everybody wants the highest profile for their labors. But writers (in a marketplace where Jewish oligarchy calls the tune) have it especially bad at the moment: you labor in Semitic vineyards as work for hire, or sweat at thankless but honest toil for honest toil's sake. You can't do both. **

Robert Locke would like you to know that he is paid very little for his Davey Horowitz articles. And that he makes astronomical amounts as a Wall Streeter, and does not need to be paid for his writing. From what I've read by Mr. Locke, he's likely more tool than fool.**

How do you know he'd have us to think that? Just curious. In any sense whether he needs the money from FrontPage or any other magazine isn't terribly important. The main point is if he didn't have these views, he wouldn't be writing for them. (although I'm sure having these views doesn't hurt his business at all on Wall Street). The FrontPage editors would recruit some other Robert Locke to write for them. And possibly put in a word for them with Goldman-Sach's or whoever which wouldn't hurt. Read MacDonald again.

** The evidence provided by Cuddihy suggests that Niebuhr was socialized by the Jewish milieu of New York into taking the positions that he did—that his position as a major Protestant spokesperson was facilitated by alliances he formed with Jews and because his writings fit well with the Jewish milieu of New York intellectual circles. Niebuhr’s behavior is therefore more an indication of Jewish power and the ability of Jews to recruit non-Jews sympathetic to their causes than an indication of Protestant self-destruction. One cannot underestimate the importance of Jewish power in intellectual circles in New York at the time of Niebuhr’s pronouncements (see CofC, passim). For example, Leslie Fiedler (1948, 873) noted that “the writer drawn to New York from the provinces feels . . . the Rube, attempts to conform; and the almost parody of Jewishness achieved by the gentile writer in New York is a strange and crucial testimony of our time.”**

Roger Bannister

2003-02-21 01:45 | User Profile

Originally posted by Ragnar@Feb 19 2003, 19:42 ** > Originally posted by Walter Yannis@Feb 19 2003, 12:26 ** One conclusion one could draw from this is that an artificially-created nation is a rationalist mistake, but (...) **

But nothing. This is precisely the conclusion lots of my Brit friends have been drawing for quite some time.

An elite does not just abdicate, which is what this artilcle indicates. The article also points out that the elite also refers to itself as "WASP" and then points out that WASP is a foreign designation... without for a moment noting that using this term can only mean that the elite does not think of itself as American.

So an "artificially-created nation is a rationalist mistake" becomes the only logical conclusion.

This whole "America as blunder/conspiracy" train of thought has been picked up by New Age guru David Icke in England; his book The Greatest Secret creates some fine conspiracies about America's founding and growth.

Nor is Icke alone. A modest bit of research shows a very real and strange set of circumstances at America's discovery:

The Templar Knights were the mysterious moneylenders cum military elite that were declared heretical and banned, then tortured and killed, around a century before Columbus' voyages.

One nation did not persecute the Templars, and took them (and their money) in: Portugal. Columbus shows up in a generation or so, and sails to an allegedly New World in three ships festooned with the Templar's famous emblem: Red Cross on a White Field.

In 1966, former OSS man Charles Hapgood discovers many "portolan" maps from Portugal and elsewhere that show Columbus had maps of the New World before he set sail. These secret Templar maps were more accurate than anything the rest of the world had till the 18th Century. **

Icke, Marrs and others have some very interesting info that is generally ridiculed, but upon further investigation, proves to be true much of the time. Just ignore the "reptile" stuff from Icke and you can get through the valid info he has throughout his books. Interestingly enough, a few months back, B'nai B'rith was doing their level best to sink him when he visited Canada, having his appearances cancelled, etc. His info on the banking "families" and folks like Kissinger and his tribal friends were the straw that broke the rabbi's back. The info on the Templars, De Molay and others is actually quite accurate.

Ragnar

2003-02-21 04:13 | User Profile

Originally posted by Roger Bannister@Feb 21 2003, 01:45 **

Just ignore the "reptile" stuff from Icke and you can get through the valid info he has throughout his books. Interestingly enough, a few months back, B'nai B'rith was doing their level best to sink him when he visited Canada, having his appearances cancelled, etc. **

Right, Roger! I've even heard talk that Icke's whole "lizard" thing is just window dressing... who knows? By pasting New Age twaddle in his books, he gets them sold at major chain stores, which might be a lesson for us all.

Faust

2003-03-26 05:16 | User Profile

"The Decline of the WASPs Revisited" By Robert Locke More Neocon trash

**The Decline of the WASPs Revisited By Robert Locke FrontPageMagazine.com | February 19, 2003

One of the great mysteries of modern American history is why the old White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) establishment abdicated its traditional rule in the late 1960’s.  This was one of the key events that caused the 60’s to get out of hand. Nobody living in the politically-correct atmosphere of today can be unaware of this establishment’s faults, but as conservatives we can’t help being aware of its virtues, either.

Despite the nonsense said about it by the Left, it was the most enlightened ruling class in the world in its day.  America in its final heyday, the 1950’s, had less economic inequality by standard measures than it has today and was a far more contented and morally confident society.  This was an elite that sent its own sons, like George Bush Sr., to fight its wars, not somebody else’s.  And many of  its faults were being remedied at the time it died, anyway – it was still alive and kicking when the 1964-5 civil rights bills, which were opposed by the South, not the establishment as such, were passed.

For those of you whose sense of American social history is blurry, the WASP establishment was the world of the Ivy League, Fifth Avenue, gentlemen’s clubs, the Social Register, elite country clubs, top New York law firms and investment banks, Boston Brahmins,  Main Line Philadelphia, the upper management of great corporations like the Pennsylvania Railroad, certain parts of the military, the OSS and its successor the CIA, the Episcopal Church, New England boarding schools, and the old diplomatic corps.  It ruled America from Plymouth Rock until the late 1960’s.

The WASP establishment is truly dead and gone a generation ago now[1], so please let no-one imagine that anyone, least of all me, is advocating its return.  But the fact is that this country hasn’t had a coherent ruling elite since.  Human societies are inevitably hierarchical; the question is whether those at the top take seriously the obligation to govern that their social position imposes on them or whether they merely feather their own nests.  In older nations with feudal roots, this function has traditionally been taken by an aristocracy with a sense of noblesse oblige. The WASP establishment was a kind of quasi-aristocracy for democratic America.

Bill Clinton’s crowd were, as David Brooks has accurately diagnosed, essentially bobos (bourgeois bohemians) and their ridiculous anti-establishment counter-culture posturing made clear that they refused to admit that they were the establishment.  Except, of course, when the time came to exercise power; hypocrisy came as naturally to them as it does to all liberals.  They thus lacked the crucial sense of responsibility for the nation that is at the core of any decent ruling class.

Bush’s crowd, while led by a member of a genuinely patrician old-American family, have at best a pale shadow of this sense of inherited duty. Bush’s desire to identify as a Texan, rather than with his Andover, Yale and Harvard heritage, is a sign that he is running away from something that is no longer accorded the respect it once was.  Defense Secretary Rumsfeld probably comes closest to the old ideal in terms of his sense of duty, though it is interesting to note that although educated at ultra-establishmentarian Princeton, he is actually German-American by heritage, a reminder that “WASP” in the American context included a lot of people who are not actually Anglo-Saxon.  And Rumsfeld is so blunt compared to the famously understated old establishment.

So how did this establishment, which no-one thought was on the verge of collapse, collapse? Some thoughts:

1. An ethnarchy like WASP-dom in a free society depends on WASPs being richer, better educated, and more powerful than everybody else.  This is not sustainable in a dynamic economy  where Irishmen and Jews and all sorts of people end up being rich.  The WASPs may have been willing to maintain a Jewish quota at Yale (a private institution in all conscience) but they were not willing to repress non-WASPs hard enough to keep them down forever.  In fact, they created an economy more open to the advancement of ethnic outsiders than any the world had yet seen.  In 1920, they can rely on these people being fresh off the boat and uneducated, but they will not stay that way after a few generations.  So this ethnarchy depended upon a basic social inequality that they weren't prepared to defend.  Unlike, say, many Latin American countries, which are still run today by the descendants of the conquistadors because they really are willing to keep their countrymen poor and uneducated.  Mexico, for example, is a nation of mostly Indian blood run by Iberian-descended white people who maintain a national myth of “we are all mestizos.”

2. The WASP establishment made a great wrong turn after immigration surged in the 1880’s by defining itself as Anglo-Saxon rather than native American.  This had enormous consequences.  If they are in essence Anglo-Saxon, it logically follows that they should rule England, not America.  They defined themselves as foreigners in their own country for the sake of establishing an unsustainable title to social superiority.  It caused them to shrivel into a narrow caste [2] rather than absorbing rising ethnics and defining a distinctively American upper class. (This did happen somewhat, by default, but it lacked this needed ideological underpinning and didn’t happen enough.)

If they had contested the definition of what a "real, indigenous, non-foreign, native American" is, they could have won it, which would have carried the logical consequence that if they were the real Americans and therefore had a title to govern.  But they didn't, either out of snobbery – which is perverse, given that defining oneself against the British is something that George Washington's generation and the one after would have understood and respected perfectly well – or out of the fact that America lacks enough of a long history and volkish culture for self-definition as an ethnic American to be emotionally satisfying to anyone in a way that it is in other nations.

This ultimately leaves the definition of what is a real American in the ethnic sense unclaimed, producing the void in our self-conception as a people that is later filled with “propositional nation” sophistry.  (You can say America is not an ethnically-defined nation, but then what is its boundary?  Question: whose well-being should it maximize?  Answer: it should conquer the world and give the world what's good for it.)

1. The spiritual basis of WASP society, the Episcopal Church, was corrupted from within.  Religious modernists started taking over the seminaries in the 1930's, resulting today in the terror-apologizing near-atheist Episcopal Bishop John Spong today and anti-Christian, anti-American  Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold.  Even among Episcopal bishops who do not express disdain for traditional Christian beliefs, there is a cold, alienated, intellectualized approach to central matters of faith.

2. WASP culture, particularly of the upper-class variety, is dependent upon a sense of superiority over other ethnic groups that is a lot easier to maintain when Britain is ruling 1/4 of the world.  This goes away because of the collapse of the British Empire after WW II.  And their instinctive sense of the legitimacy of racial and ethnic superiority was shaken by the Nazis.

3. There is great laziness in the generation that grew up in the 1920's, which is the cohort that abdicated in the 1960's.  F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about this in his short stories like "Six of One." A bourgeois class can only really sustain itself if it has a quasi-aristocratic ethos of imposing a duty on itself to rule, which is entirely different from just making money and playing golf. (The biggest myth of the Left is that bourgeois society possesses the will to power.) The 1920's were similar to the 1990's in that a stock-market boom caused a lot of people to forget about their values and think making money is enough.

4. There are internal weaknesses in WASP culture, like an emotional coldness that produces alienation between generations with predictable consequences.  And there is liquor; this is a stereotype but like all stereotypes it has significant truth.

5. The United States had to become a technocracy after WWII. Technocracy destroys aristocratic and quasi-aristocratic social orders because it requires society to give power to people with the wrong social backgrounds because there aren't enough trained people with the right ones.  If a society has to hire and promote on brains rather than inherited status, inherited status ceases to be inherited. Technocracy becomes mandatory when economic progress and the democratic demand for efficient maximization of the economy produces the need for a huge administrative class. Clearly big government is the enemy of anything quasi-aristocratic. Technology just makes this worse. This is the story of how Pres. Connant of Harvard brought in the SAT. He was very conscious of the caste-destroying effects of what he was doing.

6. The decline of the WASP ascendancy resembles  Plato's hierarchy of regimes and their cycle of decay in book VIII of The Republic.  Plato’s analysis is an abstract formulation of the intrinsic truth that all ruling elites constantly face the temptation to cannibalize existing social capital.  Why not just enjoy your rule, rather than working to maintain it for the next generation? Why maintain social structure rather than letting it run down?  Frankly, this is a profound argument against democracy, i.e. the absolute sovereignty of any one generation. It is an argument for the Burkean sense of traditionalism as our duty to those who came before us and gave us what we have and to those who will come after us whose nation we are borrowing for a time.  But this only works if one has a coherent sense of nationhood and peoplehood and we do not.  Having a hereditary core to the ruling class can clearly help maintain this sense.  Unless, of course, this core decays for the aforementioned reasons.

One of the great virtues of the WASP ascendancy is that it provided, in a nation made ethnically fluid by immigration, a concrete core towards which other groups should assimilate.  Those of you who don’t like this, sorry, but they were here first.[3]  To have a nation with open boundaries, one needs a solid core, not the “anyone can be an American the instant they sign their passport” chaos we have today.  The WASPs played this role despite, as I noted above, failing to define themselves as real Americans rather than Anglo-Saxons as they should have.

The WASP ascendancy also contained, because the WASPs staged the American Revolution and wrote the Constitution, an emotional attachment to this country’s early history and founding that has either dissipated or become abstract, i.e. “propositional nation” sophistry.  A nation must revere its history if it is to sustain its identity, and obviously people whose own ancestors were involved in that history have a more concrete relation to it than those of us who came later.

One of America's big problems as an historical nation has been its lack of interest in culture – Camille Paglia calls America “this masculine pioneer country that has never taken the arts seriously”[4] – and failure to see the need to impose a national culture of real quality as an emotional and intellectual focus of its sense of nationhood.  We used to have some of this prior to the 1960’s, but it didn’t really stick and has since been drowned by commercial pop culture and delegitimated by multiculturalism, which denies that we even should have a common culture.  One can still see remnants of it here and there, like the architecture of our better old universities. A nation's sense of identity should be organized around its history and its peoplehood but you need culture to make this pretty so people will like it and feel it as well as think it.  It is clearly against our grain to have an Academie Americain to distill our culture for us, but we have various vested interests, like the universities, doing this de facto anyway.

One conclusion one could draw from this is that an artificially-created nation is a rationalist mistake, but I think not, particularly given the ambiguous balance between conscious self-creation and unconscious emergence that exists in the history of many superficially "organic" nations.  (Don't tell me Germany is not a conscious creation! But then of course look what a mess they made; this is clearly a partial, if not a whole, truth.) There is also a degree to which America is not even artificial, i.e. not identical with its state and founded in 1776 but organically growing from 1620, but consciousness of this is undermined by changes in our ethnic makeup due to immigration. An explicitly founded nation merely has to be aware of the temptations to which it is uniquely suspect – like propositionism – and avoid them. Unfortunately, this requires a degree of self-restraint which is against the grain of current American culture.

Though I cannot help noticing that it is a WASP characteristic.

url: [url=http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=6172]http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArtic...cle.asp?ID=6172[/url] **