The Jews as Planetary Cultists:
Hervé Ryssen’s Les espérances planétariennes

3,269 words

Editor’s Note:

If you find Michael O’Meara’s reviews of Hervé Ryssen’s books interesting and informative and you would like O’Meara to review Ryssen’s four subsequent books — Le Fanatisme juif (Levallois-Perret: Éditions Baskerville, 2007), 395 pp; La Mafia juive (Levallois-Perret: Éditions Baskerville, 2008), 395 pp; Le Miroir du judaïsme (Levallois-Perret: Éditions Baskerville, 2009, 400 pp; and Histoire de l’antisémitisme (Levallois-Perret: Éditions Baskerville, 2010), 432 pp — please make a special donation to that project. If you value his work, please become a patron today.

J’aime l’humanité, cela me permet de haïr mon voisin.
– Montesquieu

Hervé Ryssen
Les espérances planétariennes
Levallois: Éds. Baskerville, 2005

Hervé Ryssen has written five books on the Jews in the past five years.

“Planetary Expectations” — what he calls the Jews’ messianic faith in a coming world order subordinated to their will and their interest — is the first of the five and the first that I read.

It’s not a completely “successful” book.  Its 430 pages present an immense documentation illustrating Ryssen’s argument, but the argument itself is made mostly in passing, as if the depressing, mind-numbing, and undeniable evidence of the Jews’ planetary expectations suffices in explaining everything else.

Les espérances planétariennes is nevertheless an important work and its reliance on exclusively French sources makes it an interesting counterpoint to English-language works on the subject.

Ryssen’s approach proceeds, of course, from his specific understanding of the Jews.  This is owed, at least in part, to Hitler’s notion (Table Talk, February 23, 1945) that the Jews are not like other races (if they are a race at all), but rather a people defined by their mentality.

Judaism, as such, is an ideology as much as a religion — especially for its secular intellectuals, who are its most devout militants.

Given this, Ryssen sees Jews in terms of their ideology — the Jewish ideology — whose messianic mission is to bring about a reign of “world peace,” in which all peoples, except themselves, abandon all that is theirs in order to realize the Biblical notion of a unified humanity.

1. A Planetary, Not a Globalist or Liberal Project

The idea of a unified humanity, undivided by frontiers, national antagonisms, or racial ascriptions, is not new.  What’s new, Ryssen claims, is the belief among Western peoples that “humanity” today aspires to a world in which commerce and consumerism supplant imperialism and nationalism, as different historically-separated peoples fuse into a single undifferentiated human mass under the auspices of a borderless world empire, whose governing ethos is to be the pure humanity of the Jews’ messianic faith in themselves as a chosen people.

If messianism, generally, is the expectation of the Messiah who will establish the kingdom of God on earth, Jewish messianism anticipates the Savior who will come once the Tower of Babel collapses (the Twin Towers?), once the earth is unified, and once the Jews are universally recognized as God’s people.

Basic to Ryssen’s argument is the contention that “globalism” is not an ideological extension of economic globalization, but a secularization of the Jews’ messianic belief that humanity is realizable only at the planetary level.

Globalization, he contends, refers to that economic process by which the multiplication of international exchanges, the development of world capitalism, the outsourcing of local enterprises, and the availability of new communication technologies foster the economic interdependence of the world’s peoples.  In this sense, globalization extends those developments that began in the late 15th century, when the intrepid Portuguese, in their tiny caravels, set out to conquer the world’s oceans.

Globalist ideology for Ryssen is not the organic offshoot of a continuous, inescapable process of economic development.  Indeed, in terms of trade, the world today is not more open than it was in 1914 — a fact he considers as important as the fact that most multinationals remain nationally based and that the overwhelming majority of the world’s nonwhite peoples still live in ways distinct to who they are.

The edification and establishment of the racially pluralist societies that globalization brings has been limited to Western peoples, who, for the past two decades, have been subject to a system whose heights are commanded by the Jews’ planetary expectations.

Japan, in this view, is as economically globalized as Europe, but it gives no truck to globalist ideologies favoring the breakdown of its national identity. Planetary expectations are specific to Western thought.

These expectations, he adds, are independent not just of globalist economic imperatives, but of the universalism implicit in Western liberal thought.

Liberalism’s universalist impetus was, historically, an offshoot of Enlightenment rationalism (which itself was an offshoot of an earlier European history), as it sought to universalize English principles of parliamentary government and market society.

This made it anti-traditional. But however critical Enlightenment thinkers may have been of existing states and societies (supposedly steeped in feudalism), these thinkers shared the racial, nationalist sentiments common to all healthy peoples uncontaminated by the ideological expectations of the planetary cultists.

The classic example is Voltaire, who — despite his merciless attack on everything associated with the ancien régime — abhorred the Jews, whom he saw as an affront to the world he hoped to enlighten.

Indeed, “humanity” in the 18th century was not quite what it is today. Then it referred to les gens (i.e., to “people” in the English sense or “Leute” in the German sense, as a collection of multiple individuals, not an abstract noun referring to human beings as a whole). Whenever Enlightenment thinkers invoked humanity, they spoke to different Europeans, not the métissage universel of our global villagers. Their principal motivation (at least on the surface) was to overthrow “irrational,” hence unjust tyrants, not to fuse nations or races.

The European Enlightenment, in a word, assumed a world of white people. To the degree non-Europeans were considered at all, they were thought of in anthropological rather than philosophical terms.

Ryssen also refers to certain contemporary liberals, like the former State Department employee, Francis Fukuyama, whose The End of History and the Last Man celebrated the triumph of democratic market societies.

Fukuyama may have trumpeted the emergence of a single integrated world market based on democratic governance that would come with the end of bipolarity, but he did not advocate — or anticipate — that such a history-ending world order entailed the destruction of states and nations. Only “aggressive nationalism” was explicitly excluded from his vision.

This is not to say that liberalism hasn’t since succumbed to planetary expectations, but only that they weren’t native to it — that an ideological need for them had first to be created.

The ideological need to turn world commerce into a campaign to create a world state in which all frontiers are eliminated comes, unsurprisingly, from the Jewish ideology. It was not a “natural” outgrowth of historical developments, but one of Spengler’s “pseudomorphoses.”

This idea — that neither liberal ideology nor liberal economics is the primary source of planetary expectations — is, I think, central not just to Ryssen’s argument, but to the entire tradition of modern anti-Jewish thought.

Whatever criticism is to be made of his argument would consequently begin here, for the idea is asserted and illustrated rather than demonstrated.

For the Jews may be the principal instrument of the reigning subversion, but whether or not they alone are responsible for the conditions presently destroying the European race — whether or not the reign of planetary expectations would even be conceivable without all that came with the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the French Revolution, not to speak of industrial and then post-industrial capitalism — this supposition — needs to be proved, not simply postulated.

2. Marxism as the Secularization of Jewish Messianism

According to Ryssen, the planetary expectations of our age started with Marx.

Before him, the most immediate concern of left-wing radicals was to oppose capitalism’s economization of European life, especially its assault on the traditional “moral community.” A great many 19th-century socialists were consequently ardent critics not just of capitalist oligarchy and exploitation, but of cosmopolitanism and especially Judaism (which they saw as the quintessence of capitalism’s blood-betraying spirit).

By contrast, Marxian socialism was self-consciously universalist, being in some ways a secular repackaging of the Jews’ messianic faith in a world founded on “the dissolution of borders, the unification of the earth’s people, and the instauration of a world of ‘peace’.”

In this context, Ryssen suggests that Marx’s proletarian was not actually the French or English worker ground down by French or English capitalism, but rather an “abstract individual,” without roots or national distinction — the abstract subject of the abstract forces of capitalism’s faceless, capricious marketplace, which Marx conceived of in terms he took from Classical English economics, German, specifically Hegelian, idealism, and the socialist distillation of French positivism.

In calling the “workers of the world [to] unite!,” Marx imbued socialism with an international (hence anti-national) orientation, premised on the notion that the state and the nation were historically contingent phenomena fated to disappear once the proletariat overthrew class society.

Without roots in modern nationality, the proletariat for him was a sort of universal “nation,” rising from the yoke of past particularisms to privilege fraternity and equality.

Marxism and liberalism may have shared the same Enlightenment heritage, but, as Ryssen stresses, it was Marxism, not liberalism, that was the original progenitor of the planetary expectations.

As such, numerous secular Jewish intellectuals flocked to its cause in the 19th century, as God’s Chosen morphed into socialism’s vanguard.

It was the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, however, that gave world form to Judaism’s planetary expectations. For it was not just Jewish led, it was internationalist in its commitment to a world revolution favoring the Biblical prophecy of a unified humanity.

Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) then replaced Marx’s Manifesto of 1848 as the principal Marxist text.

At the same time, the planetary struggle became less a class struggle than an anti-imperialist struggle against the West — and, implicitly, against the white men of the West.

Ryssen devotes nearly a hundred pages to the Jewish character of Bolshevik Russia and to international Jewry’s relationship to the new Communist regime.

In outline, he examines the Jewish role in Lenin’s party and the role Jews assumed in the new Soviet state. He then looks at the struggle between proponents of Trotsky’s World Revolution and Stalin’s Socialism in One Country, a struggle which eliminated many prominent Jewish Communists, but which was not specifically anti-Jewish. He makes a similar argument about the purges of the Thirties. Even the relocation of Jews behind the Urals during the Great Patriotic War was not intended to marginalize Jews, though it had something of that effect. The real downfall of Soviet Jewry in his account begins with the creation of the Zionist state in 1948.

Though the Soviet Union promptly recognized Israel and sought its alliance, world Jewry at this point had begun to see Stalinist Russia as a hindrance to its expectations, for its “closed” society was thought to be increasingly hostile to “Jews and other minorities.” The “open society” of liberal democracy, by contrast, was henceforth taken as the more effective way of dissolving national identities and constructing the global empire dear to Israel.

Stalin’s postwar resistance to American hegemony and his ensuing “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign against Russian Jews (1949-53) simply exacerbated the rift opened by the Jews’ new found anti-Communism and the Soviet’s ensuing anti-Zionism.

In such a situation, the red-diaper babies of former Communist zealots would discover the virtues of liberal democracy, becoming ardent champions of the “American Creed.”

3. America as the Foremost Jewish Power

In reference to Solzhenitsyn, Ryssen claims that neither the murderous famine in the Ukraine nor the Siberian Gulag alienated “progressive” Western intellectuals from the Soviet Union. It was only after the defeat of National Socialist Germany and the subsequent Russian alliance with the Arabs that they started turning against it.  As they switched camps, Russian-Jewish “refusniks” then emerged as a planetary cause and the United States, land of uprooted immigrants and multiple races, replaced the Soviet Union as the exemplar of their planetary expectations.

Ryssen contends that the US, not Israel, is now the real homeland of world Jewry.

Marxism nevertheless continued as an ideological force in the West (though in its New Left distillation, or what Perry Anderson called “Western Marxism”). This was especially evident in the Cultural Revolution of 1968, as Trotskyists, Maoists, anarchists, and Third Worldists rallied to the cause of planetary revolution.

Post-industrial society also affected the character of Jewish expectations, as “oppressed” minorities replaced the “proletariat” (i.e., white,  “embourgeoised” workers) as the chief vehicle of the planetary cause. Homosexual and feminist struggles, along with immigrationist ones, were then associated with the anti-colonial struggle against the old European empires, just as the vices of capitalism were identified with arrogant, imperialist whites, responsible for the world’s ills. So armed, planetary intellectuals launched a campaign of blame against European-descended peoples, who were chastised for crimes they had allegedly committed against the Jews (during the war and historically) and for their on-going resistance to the anti-white requirements of world peace.

In effect, planetary intellectuals embraced positions that either implicitly or explicitly prescribed the extinction of the white race.

Then, following the Soviet collapse, planetary expectations shed their lingering Marxist trappings and became forthrightly liberal.

The struggle for a unified world now centers on the United States, which has come to embody the cosmopolitan ideal of a deracinated and multiracial society. The US crusade for democracy and open markets in the last two decades is thus seen as preparing the foundations of a global empire, which will at last realize the Jews’ planetary expectations.

As American liberal democracy becomes the planetary vanguard and imposes it hegemony wherever it goes, traditional European culture and values are denigrated; the white man is portrayed as an affront to humanity; white homelands are deemed the patrimony of all humankind, as they are inundated with alien peoples, whose corrosive effect on European life is already beginning to prefigure the planetary quest for world peace.

4. Planetary Discourse

The cosmopolitanism of the planetary cultists has come to dominate the West. It presently frames the way the world is seen and understood, doing so in terms alien to European peoples — in terms propounding the Biblical doctrine of human unity, which neglects the significance of family, language, religion, nation, or race.

It assumes, as such, that all peoples have a common origin and that man’s vocation is to embody the planetary expectations of humanity as a whole — the expectations of the Jews, whose spirit is the imputed apotheosis of human being.

Non-Jewish origins and identities, on the other hand, are rendered arbitrary, just as existing linguistic, religious, racial, and historical differences become obstacles to the formation of a peaceful world order based on multicultural practices and egalitarian principles.

Whoever opposes this campaign for a unified humanity, as the Nobel-prize humanitarian Elie Wiesel says, opposes humanity.

Most of Ryssen’s book examines the nature of planetary thought, as it appears in the work of France’s foremost Jewish thinkers. These figures — Jacques Attali, Edgar Morin, Alain Finkielkraut, Guy Sorman, Marek Halter, Bernard-Henri Lévy, André Glucksmann, Jacques Derrida, et al. — may or may not be known to American readers, but they mirror the same planetary expectations of their American-Jewish counterparts

Given their devaluation of human differences, the cosmopolitan ideology these thinkers propound insists on viewing humanity, quite literally, from the planetary perspective of outer space, emphasizing the things that bind rather than separate the earth’s different peoples.

With its sci-fi films of intergalactic encounters, Hollywood is especially active in working this theme. For example, think of Robert Emmerich’s Independence Day, in which alien invaders threaten the earth, only to be saved by a concerted, multicultural effort led by a Negro and a Jew (Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum).

The insinuation here is that only by overcoming human differences, breaking nations, and shedding divisive particularisms will the world be spared the wars, injustices, and rivalries that presently obstruct the harmony, equality, and prosperity that are possible once these differences are eradicated and man’s common humanity is privileged.

To this end, a grand métissage universel to eliminate the biological basis of what makes these differences so meaningful is publicly proclaimed. Nations, as such, will have to be dissolved, historic traditions destroyed, churches razed, families and communities split apart, the old books re-written.

Once everyone is a métis, the divisiveness will end. People will then be able to divorce at will, have sex with the exotic Other, no matter their gender, migrate wherever they wish, change jobs or locales if they choose, as the universal quest for human development supersedes the search for a misguided non-planetary identity.

Such a unified world intends to turn everyone into an atomized nomad, without attachments, without roots, without particularisms, as the abstract welfare of humanity prevails over all. At that point, the world itself will become a promised land.

The sense of election that comes with their planetary expectations, the Jews like to think, has nothing to do with their overweening self-pride, but rather comes from the duties bequeathed by their messianic faith. (Ryssen suggests that Jewish identity is actually more a matter of memory and messianic aspiration than of racial or religious ascription).

The Jews’ planetary ideology is obviously loaded with numerous contradictions, for it’s their identification with their remembered past, their deep roots in their tradition and religion, and their affiliation to an Israel that exists beyond time and being — that instills in them the faith to strive for their particular vision of world “peace.” The roots, memories, and bonds that make them special may be key to their planetary expectations, but the roots, memories, and bonds of others, especially whites, are considered harmful to the planetary cause — harmful because no other people possesses the high humanity of the Jews.

Untroubled by their inconsistencies, Jews think nothing of denigrating or ridiculing European tradition and revering their own, of criticizing Christianity but continuing to await their own Messiah, of supporting immigration everywhere but not for Israel, of exulting the métissage of the gentiles but considering it a horror for their own community.

The double standards at the heart of the Jewish ideology reflect, relatedly, characteristics that have long been associated with the Jews — these people who never tire of glorifying who they are, of giving others moral lessons, of militating against ascribed identities, of expressing their select indignation with existing injustices, and of believing that they can do no wrong. It goes without saying that they think anti-Semitism is the greatest of pathologies and that the final exaltation of the Jews is the most natural and ultimate goal of humanity.

Because gentiles persist in their identitarian attachments, the realization of the Jews’ planetary expectations demands eternal vigilance and on-going education. Different peoples, whites preeminently, must therefore be constantly taught the virtues of human equality and planetary solidarity. Whenever resistance surfaces, it is to be condemned as a retrograde tribalism, for world unity (the condition necessary for Jewish world domination) is possible only once the old “prejudices” are dethroned. Whites, therefore, are to have it constantly drilled into them that they are responsible for humanity’s misfortunes — from the Inquisition to Auschwitz’s alleged homicidal gas chambers. Those who reject their guilt or oppose the miscegenating policies inherent in the expectations are singled out for the most crushing forms of chastisement.

***

However the advent of our emerging planetarized world is understood, the struggle to preserve white life cannot, it would seem, but culminate in a clash with its anti-white expectations — whether these stem from Jewish messianism, as Ryssen holds, or from those larger historical developments which have empowered them.

TOQ Online, November 15, 2009