Look at the picture above. It’s from the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, in August of 2017, after which a Nazi terrorist by the name of James Fields ran over and murdered anti-racist activist Heather Heyer.
And please note, I said Nazi terrorist. Not neo-Nazi, as is often bandied about by some, but Nazi. Because none of the racist losers at that rally have had an original thought — the kind that might make them neo — in their entire lives. Everything they stand for, everything they believe is borrowed, cribbed, indeed straight plagiarized from the Hitlerism of the 1930s.
Paleolithic Nazi, maybe. Jurassic Nazi, sure. But Neo? Nah.
Although there is no swastika in this photo, others were brandishing them that day and the night before at the tiki torch riot on the UVA campus. And it is worth noting, especially as the president continues to insist that there were “good people” amid that bunch, that not one of these supposedly fine souls ever responded in horror to the presence of such symbolism.
Not one among them asked the Nazis to leave, or thought to tell them, “Oh my goodness no, you must have misunderstood our purpose today, we don’t believe in that!” Not one of the “good people” on that side of the aisle has mentioned leaving in protest or shame or disgust at those blatant symbols of Nazism, like the ones against which their own grandfathers likely went to war.
Not one.
And the reason is simple: it’s because not even one of them objected.
Although most of them might prefer different symbols — for reasons of image if nothing else — their updated iconography doesn’t make the Nazism itself new.
So, for instance, in the picture above we have the cos-playing warrior brandishing the flag and trying desperately to affect a level of bad-assness he sorely lacks, wearing a helmet with the numbers 1488 on them.
The first two numbers stand for the “14 words” — a white supremacist mantra crafted by David Lane, who was a member of the Nazi terrorist group, The Order. Lane, who died twelve years ago in prison, drove the getaway car after another Order member murdered a Jewish radio host in Denver in 1984, but his words live on in the hearts of white supremacists everywhere, unbothered by the pile of human excrement whence they originated.
And of course, the second two numbers — 88 — stand for Heil Hitler. Because H is the 8th letter of the alphabet, and Nazis think that’s clever.
It’s the Jews…You either know about them, or you don’t.
With these words to a reporter in 1989, David Duke, perhaps the nation’s most prominent white supremacist of the past half-century, encapsulated the crux of his beliefs and the beliefs of the movement to which he belongs.
Duke — who came to Charlottesville and claimed he and his compatriots had done so to “fulfill the agenda of Donald Trump” — though undoubtedly racist in his view of blacks and Latinx folks, has, like all Nazis, principally been obsessed with Jews.
Jews, according to modern-day Nazis like Duke are behind every social ill, in their minds, which has befallen the United States: integration, immigration, the women’s movement, abortion, pornography, the LGBTQ liberation struggle — all of it. And again, this serves as still more evidence that modern-day Nazis haven’t really had an original thought, but instead recycle the malodorous ones made famous by their spiritual leader, Adolf Hitler: a man for whom Duke used to throw birthday parties every April 20th until at least the late 1980s.
It’s always the Jews, they say. Whether the ones who “control the media,” or just the ones who comprise a disproportionate share of antiracist commentators. And why? Because we are genetically or culturally predisposed, they say, to destroy white people and white society.
Whenever I post anything on social media, the most common kind of reply I receive is never a type that seeks to refute the arguments I’ve made. Instead, it’s the kind that sounds like this: “You’re a Jew!” Or, “You’re not white, you’re Jewish!” Or most recently, “Happy Hanukkah,” because apparently, that’s a subtle Nazi way of saying “Hey, we know you’re Jewish,” and that fact is considered a significant revelation by the research team at Nazis R Us. This, even though I’ve been writing and speaking about my Jewishness and its relationship to whiteness for nearly 30 years.
The whole “you’re not white, you’re a Jew” thing might seem confusing if you aren’t familiar with Nazi race theory. But according to Hitlerites, Judaism is not merely a religious, cultural, or even ethnic heritage. Instead, Jews are a distinct Asiatic race of evildoers, programmed to subvert others so as to maintain Jewish power.
There is no science behind any of this, of course. No “Jew genes” have been identified as related to behavioral or ideological predilections. But just as Mengele didn’t let a little thing like science get in the way of his sick and demented experiments, neither do the modern admirers of such monsters feel much need to be bothered with facts.
Rather than root their theories in actual science, they turn to the decidedly pseudo-scientific opinions of academics like retired professor of psychology, Kevin MacDonald, who argues that Jews developed a group evolutionary strategy that inbred traits of tribalism, a desire to subvert non-Jewish cultures, and ultimately caused (and justified) anti-Semitism.
MacDonald’s theories have been utterly dissected, especially at the link below, so I won’t bother rebutting them in this piece. Let it suffice to say, they are rejected overwhelmingly by experts in the field of evolutionary psychology and amount to little more than a faux-scholarly cover for MacDonald’s own admitted antipathy for Jews. This antipathy, to be clear, has led him to associate with white nationalists and admitted fascists, all of whom consider him one of their leading intellectual lights.
Anyway, the point is, to folks like MacDonald and his followers, Jewishness is ultimately both the explanation for antiracist belief and the reason why those beliefs should be dismissed — because it’s a Jewish “trick” to harm white people.
And as regards me personally, these same critics use my Jewishness to “prove” I’m not white and to discredit my standing even to discuss an issue like whiteness or white privilege, since, if I’m not white, what would I know about it? And of course, my memoir White Like Me is therefore invalid because if I’m not white, I have no right to pen such a book in the first place. According to them, any privilege I have enjoyed is Jewish privilege, rather than the white kind. Whites, on this account, enjoy no such advantages, and are indeed subordinated to “Jewish power.” This too is something about which I have already written, and if interested you can find that piece here:
Ultimately the problems with the Nazi argument are multifold.
First, the way I use the term “white” has nothing to do with genetics or biology. I do not believe whiteness, blackness, Asian-ness or Jewishness, however defined, to be scientific concepts, encoded at the genomic level.
But even if I did view these things — and the concept of race itself — as scientific, it wouldn’t matter given the way I am using the concept.
When I say “white” or speak of white people or white privilege, I mean white in the social sense of being seen as such, treated as white by employers, teachers, cops and others, and thereby reaping certain advantages vis-a-vis people of color. To the extent I am using the term in this way, the whole issue of “are Jews white?” becomes an irrelevance.
Even if we accept the argument that race is real, scientifically — an idea most biologists and geneticists reject — and even if we allow that Jews are a distinct race and that Jews are not white in some genomic sense, most Jews could still access whiteness socially. Because the phenotypic differences between most Jews of recent European derivation and gentiles of the same are relatively small, Jews could “pass” as white pretty easily and reap the benefits of whiteness, just as many blacks who were light-skinned enough were able to pass during the days of segregation.
That said, let me now briefly address the scientific research being used by anti-Semites to demonstrate “racial” Jewishness, because those using it for that purpose are either lying about it for political effect or are too scientifically illiterate to understand what the research says.
As for the science, there has been some research into the genetic profile of Ashkenazi Jews — the bulk of Jews today, whose ancestors settled originally in northwestern Europe in the Middle Ages and were then pushed eastward. And yes, that research has found genetic clusters among Ashkenazim, which make them more similar to other Jews, anywhere in the world, than they are to non-Jews living in the same areas.
To Nazis and others looking for evidence to render Jews a biological “other,” this research is proof: Jews are a separate race, much as Hitler insisted.
But in truth, the genetic research proves no such thing.
Although several studies of Y-chromosomal DNA (patrilineal descent) have found that the majority of Y-DNA among Ashkenazim comes from what we would now call the Middle East, other research has shown that mitochondrial DNA among the same Jews (passed down through maternal lineage), is overwhelmingly connected to ancient European gene frequencies dating back as many as 10,000 years.
But the more significant point is, no matter the study, none of the identified genetic clusters are so utterly different from those of non-Jews as to constitute a separate race of humanity. They can tell you a lot about a population’s different ancestral and geographic origin, but none of the studies’ authors have suggested that the differences they observe mark Jews as a separate race. The genetic distance they have found comes nowhere near the level of sub-speciation, which is a standard way of delineating “races” within a species.
Additionally, the research on Jewish gene frequencies does not give much insight into the genetic contributions of persons across the larger genome.
In other words, while y- and mtDNA lines provide some real insights into the origins of modern Jews, those same modern Jews have substantial genetic contributions from persons who married into and/or reproduced with those sex-exclusive lines. To look only at the y- or mtDNA of any person and then draw conclusions about that person or the group they belong to would be absurd. It would be like taking an ancestry test and only considering the backgrounds of your mother’s mother’s mother, and so on, down through the ages, or father’s father’s father, and so on, without considering one’s mother’s father’s mother’s father, and other permutations, all of which complicate the genetic picture of any actual living person.
Now, to be sure, if one goes back several generations there was not a lot of intermarriage among Jews — endogamy became the norm after the initial conversion of European women by the first generation or so of diasporic Jewish men who came there from the Levant. But over the last several generations it has become far more common.
So, for instance, probably half of American Jews have at least one non-Jewish grandparent, and significant numbers have two or more. My own family is a good example here: three of four grandparents gentile and “white” enough to satisfy even the most Nazified of race fetishists. Although my paternal DNA is consistent with Jewish ancestry from the Fertile Crescent, literally all of the rest is Northern European. So much so that I would have qualified for German citizenship even under the draconian race laws of the Nazis, as evil and absurd as those were.
For Jews like myself, with significant intermarriage in our families going back several generations, the admixture of genes from throughout Europe renders whatever “genetic Jewishness” might have at one time existed, an increasingly fading scientific memory.
Not to mention, even if Jewish endogamy had remained as consistent as in past eras, the differences passed down among Jews would not rise to the level of a separate race, any more than mostly white Mormons — a highly endogamous group — will one day branch off from the rest of “white” people should their faith last several thousand more years.
. . .
The folks who have made a fetish of finely slicing and dicing racial categories, based on genetic information they do not understand and have never studied, would be funny were the consequences not so dangerous. Their obsession with racial purity, their single-minded and fanatical anti-Semitism, and their dedication to a fascist politic can only lead to one place. It is a place we have seen before, and in which place millions have previously perished.
And unless we defeat those who would take us back — defeat them utterly, completely, without the least bit of hesitation, remorse, pity or mercy — it is an open question as to where the nation and world will head in years to come. Just because their ideas are often the feverish and paranoid stuff of psychological derangement doesn’t mean we can afford to take them un-seriously.
Their ideology may be a joke. They, however, are anything but. They must suffer the same fate as the Nazis who came before them. And quickly.
I’m an antiracism educator/author. I Facebook & tweet @timjacobwise, podcast at Speak Out With Tim Wise & post bonus content at patreon.com/speakoutwithtimwise
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This post was previously published on Medium and is republished here with permission from the author.
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