Joshua Blakeney Interviews Greg Johnson, Part 4

Alfonso Simonetti, Ancor non torna (Still not Returning) [1]

Alfonso Simonetti, Ancor non torna (Still not Returning)

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Part 4 of 4

Editor’s Note:

This is a transcript by V.S. of Joshua Blakeney’s interview with Greg Johnson, which you can listen to here [2]. The topics discussed in this segment are: the possibilities of white alliances with Muslims against Zionism, Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, satire, inequality, justice, populism, and elitism. 

Joshua Blakeney: Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters! Welcome back to the fourth and final segment of this episode of The Real Deal. I’m still your host, Joshua Blakeney, and I’m very pleased to still be here with Dr. Greg Johnson. Prior to the break, Greg was providing his analysis of the Israel-Palestine quagmire. He did suggest that he supports the existence of Israel, but only out of a sort of Realpolitik, tactical perspective putting white interests first.

I still come back to this point, Greg, that although as you’ve suggested the idea of a white European alliance with Jews against Muslims is a bad idea, is inorganic, is inauthentic, that there is surely room for a white-Arab alliance. We see the black French comedian Dieudonné, he’s been criminalized and persecuted in France for cracking jokes about the Zionists, which is not allowed in French society. But we see white people, many of which are perhaps interested in historical revisionism — Dieudonné of course is friends with Dr. Robert Faurisson — linking arms with dispossessed blacks and Muslims, many of whom come from the former French colonies, places like Algeria. Recently, I saw even in the Front National in France there was a member who had converted to Islam.

So, isn’t there certainly room for some kind of Arab-white alliance? Is there any room for that in your analysis?

GJ: In the short run, tactically speaking, yes, I think so. And in the long run, globally speaking, yes. But in the sense that what I would like to see is the European world and the Muslim world living at peace with one another without populations transferring, without Islamic colonization of Europe, without American bombers dropping bombs in the Muslim world, and so forth. I would like to see those two civilizational blocs exist, with neatly delineated boundaries, living at peace with one another.

So, in the short run, let’s talk about people like Dieudonné and people like that. I am totally in favor of people like him. I totally understand why people whose primary concern is calling out Zionist power, Jewish power, are willing to make alliances with people all over the world, non-whites and whites alike, in order to do that. I think that’s logical. I think, though, that we have to in the long run recognize that the best interests of all of our peoples is to have our own separate spheres. That’s the only caveat that I want. I will engage in this kind of tactical alliance as long as everybody understands that, in my view, it’s best for our peoples to have their own separate civilizational spheres.

I tremendously admire Dieudonné. I think he’s incredibly funny, obviously extremely intelligent. I think it’s very important to mock the enemy. Jews have been very, very effective at mocking us, mocking Muslims, mocking whites, and so forth, especially mocking WASPs, which sort of hits me close to home, and I think it’s great to mock them back, because they are certainly a soft target for mockery, and their hypocrisy is legendary. Dieudonné is great. I love his Mahmoud sketches [3] that are on YouTube. I think those are brilliant, where he goes to Iran and he’s talking about Ahmadinejad and his experience with him, where he goes and he visits Faurisson. He’s acting like a scared little bourgeois mouse in the presence of somebody who’s a radical. When he does that it’s brilliant, because it really makes the people in the audience aware of how they are controlled by ignoble forms of fear. So, I think he’s a genius. I think he’s brilliant. I love it when people like Soral and others stand with him. I think that they might have different visions of what the ideal society is, and so down the road we might have a parting of ways and a settling of accounts, but in the present state I am all for them. I want to encourage them.

There’s this Talmudic saying, or it’s been attributed to the Talmud. One of the things I’ve learned is that practically everything that I’ve heard in sort of White Nationalist movement circles needs to be checked before I quote it, so I probably shouldn’t be quoting it actually, because especially stuff that deals with the Jewish Question there are a lot of people like Eustace Mullins who had no qualms about just making stuff up, and I think that’s very bad for our cause, because I think the truth is on our side, and the truth is definitely enough. But anyway, I was told by somebody that the Talmud says that even more than the farmer needs the milk, the cow needs to be milked. And that’s true of cows, right? Even if you don’t need the milk, if you have a milk cow; it’s got to be milked.

But the sinister reading that was given this was basically that even if it’s not in the interest of Jews in any definable way to be besetting the goyim with radical movements and causes and controversies and the like, even if these things don’t really redound to Jewish interests in any immediately understandable, definable way, it still has to be done. Why? Just to keep them on the ropes, just to keep their heads spinning, just to keep them constantly fighting for air. It’s the idea that one of the ways that they control us is by just constantly keeping us distracted, keeping us bothered, keeping us up in arms.

And I have the same attitude about Jews. I think that even though in the long term I want Zionism to triumph in the sense that I specifically defined it, namely I want all the Jews to be in Israel and for Israel to be a little Jewish Switzerland at peace with its neighbors and unable to make the United States fight its battles, even though I want that, I want the cost of Zionism to be very, very high to them. Why? Because the more energy that they’re putting into maintaining that, the less money and energy they’re spending on suppressing my people and my interests.

So, even if somebody like Dieudonné might not be on board with my White Nationalist agenda or something, more power to him. I want him out there. I want him bedeviling these people because they’re my enemy right now, and the more bedeviled they are from all sides, the weaker they are in bedeviling us and bedeviling me. I look at it in just that way. The more mischief the merrier in this kind of setting.

Jews are a very powerful people, they’re a very wealthy people, but they are a very small people in terms of absolute numbers. I used to think that they were hyper-paranoid and that basically, in the United States for instance, practically everybody was on their side. Then I came to think that I was mistaken on that matter. I was living in Berkeley, California at the run up to and the opening couple years of the Iraq War, the 2003 and on war, and I was surrounded by a lot of Gentile Leftists, people who were white Left-wingers who were opposed to this war, and they were puzzled. “Where was the Left-wing media?” They felt that the peace movement was not given the kind of respectful treatment that, say, it was given during the Vietnam War. There were people who were very frank about this. I was frank about this to some of my students who asked me this question.

But I encountered Gentile Leftists, people in their 50s and 60s, who had been involved in the Left for their entire adult lives who would basically say, “What’s going on here is that Jews want this war.” They were totally aware of how Jewish power works and how Jewish power in the peace movement and in the media was basically causing the anti-war movement and the Left to pull their punches, because Jews wanted this war to happen. I was astonished at the number of people who were aware of this. Astonished. I was not the one who was bringing it up oftentimes. It was other people who would bring it up, who had no idea that I’d even be sympathetic to it, except that I sort of seemed like a sympathetic and open-minded guy.

So, I came to believe that Jewish power even on the Left is very, very thin. I think their power is worldwide, it’s an ocean wide, but it’s only a few millimeters deep, and that a hot sunny day can dawn, and it will dry up very quickly. Therefore, Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, which in the past I thought were sort of massively overfunded and comically hysterical about the threat of anti-Semitism, I came to believe that no, these people know how thin their power is, and they are working at 99% capacity to maintain it.

JB: Yeah, Gilad Atzmon, the Israeli-born saxophonist and philosopher, defines Jewish power as the capacity to stop us talking about Jewish power.

GJ: Exactly! That’s good!

JB: And if we just talk about it, like Dieudonné . . . The beauty of Dieudonné is that the more he talks about them and the more he gets persecuted, the more his claims about the organized Jewish community are vindicated, because he basically violates Jewish exceptionalism and questions Jewish victimhood and Jewish victimology and says, “You’ve projected this image of Jews as the underdogs, but really you’re not the underdogs. You’re the most successful ethnic group in French society!” Then the more he gets persecuted, the more he’s proven right, and it just becomes all the funnier, right?

GJ: Right.

JB: I think there’s a lot of truth to what you say, and I think it’s a problem on the Left that you can meet people who are aware of this stuff in private, and it strikes me that if you’re a Leftist, the raison d’être of the Left is to be against ethnic nationalism and ethnic parochialism, and I don’t understand what’s inconsistent with the Leftist analysis with calling out Zionism and calling out Jewish power in America. If the media in the United States has become ethnicized, why is criticizing that taboo and incompatible with being a good Leftist? I mean, surely that would be your bread and butter if you are a Leftist, but there seems to be this unwarranted philosemitism on the Left. I think that if Jews do good things, if individual Jews do exemplary things that better humanity, then they should be commended, but I also believe that when Jews do bad things then they should be condemned. It seems like the Left is only willing to do the former and not the latter, which is why the Left is so irrelevant and is why I found myself sort of coming as a refugee to your website where you actually have original thinkers and you’re coming up with critiques which are actually relevant. I think what’s happened with the Marxist Left is they’ve basically become irrelevant.

One of the things you have here in Canada especially is these anti-racist groups which go around and try to enforce anti-hate speech laws or expose so-called haters and they seem as Leftists to be working with the authorities to root out “white supremacists” and other people who question Jewish exceptionalism. So, the Left has just become really degraded and has dropped the ball on so many issues that people like myself have looked for genuine thinkers like yourself and that’s why I’m grateful for all the work you do.

I was going to ask you now, could you just sort of discuss your ideal society in terms of its structure? Because I know you’ve said that the defining characteristic of the Right is support for inegalitarianism whereas the Left supports egalitarianism, and I’ve heard you quote Aristotle’s idea of proportionate equality. To defend unequalness or inegalitarian social dispensations is controversial, is not the norm these days. It seems that if you’re going to be against war and against injustice you have to be an egalitarian, but that’s not the case with you, is it, Greg?

GJ: No, no. I am not an egalitarian. However, I do believe that it’s not really wise to lead with anti-egalitarianism or elitism for the simple reason that there’s nothing necessarily good about inequality. There’s nothing necessarily good about elitism. But there is something necessarily good about justice. Justice by definition is a good thing. However, I do believe that justice leads to inegalitarian outcomes, and so what I am primarily for is justice, and I think that a consequence of treating people justly is that there will be unequal outcomes.

Why? Because people are not equal. People are dramatically different in terms of their innate abilities, their gifts, and they’re dramatically unequal in terms of their hard work and enterprise and things like that. I think that because of that, if you treat unequal people equally, if you try to force equal outcomes on unequal people, you’re doing violence to them.

William Blake said, “One law for the ox and the lion is oppression.” I agree with that, if you’re trying to create same outcomes for different peoples. However, I don’t believe that inequality should be disproportionate to real merit, and this is Aristotle’s view. Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics has a discussion of distributive justice where he’s talking about the criteria for justly distributing society’s rewards. He says that since people are unequal they should be treated unequally. Merit should be rewarded more than lack of merit, obviously. However, when you have a situation where the rewards are wildly disproportional to the difference between people then you have disproportionate inequality. If somebody is 10 times better and has 100 times more money than the lowest paid employee in his company or whatever, then that is unjust. So, Aristotle believed in treating unequal people unequally but in proportion to their inequality, in proportion to their real merit.

I think that if you had that notion of justice, you would have a society where there is definitely inequality, and there’s definitely a hierarchy in society. And yet it would be a just inequality, and it would be a just hierarchy. There are lots of hierarchies that are unjust and totally arbitrary in society today and in societies in the past. I am not defending that. I’m not defending unjust forms of inequality. But I do believe that if you hold to an idea of justice that recognizes that people are unequal, and that does not try to basically in some kind of procrustean way force the same outcomes upon them, then you are going to have a society where there are going to be just hierarchies and just inequalities.

I think that the thing that really separates the Left and the Right as I define the Right is that the Left is de facto extremely elitist and extremely inegalitarian. The biggest snobs I’ve ever known have been Leftists, and some of the most hateful people I’ve known are Leftists, for that matter. And yet they are dishonest about it.

JB: Yes, the Left is very elitist these days. One characteristic of postmodernism, which is the sort of ideology du jour in the academy on the Left at least, is that it has all these sort of jargon phrases which are completely unfathomable to the layman. One thing you find with neo-Marxism is that it’s extremely elitist and it almost has this Jewish chosenness that’s established itself in dominant Leftist ideas. The idea of the Marxist was, “We have this vanguard who are enlightened, and we’re going to enlighten the masses to our worldview.” It has this very elitist, very God’s-chosen-people-esque characteristic.

It seems to me that a lot boils down to the mindset of the ruling class in a society. You see in many feudal systems there’s an idea of noblesse oblige, the idea that the nobility have some obligation to those lower down in society and it boils down to organic elites versus parasitic elites. We live in a society where the elite is here to rip us off, to send us to fight their wars, and they only feel obligation to their in-group and not to the body politic. So, surely it pretty much boils down to yes, hierarchical society is kind of inevitable. There’s always going to be a division of labor in a society, but if the ruling class has benevolence and has a benevolent mindset then things will go in the right direction, and justice will be realized. But if you have a ruling class that is parasitic and which is a hostile elite group then you’re going to end up in the situation we’re in today.

GJ: Exactly. I think that one of the things that mutes exploitative elites is kinship between the elites and the masses. If you have an elite that is organically connected to the masses, if they are one people, and they have a sense of peoplehood, there is a sense of obligation there.

I think another thing that is necessary to make sure that the elites are responsive to the interests of the whole body politic is a certain democratic or popular element to government. Aristotle made this argument very effectively, I think, in his Politics, that the common good is really the law of society. You can have all kinds of constitutional arrangements that aim at the common good. You can have a single man who rules for the common good, or you can have a populace ruling for the common good, or you can have them ruling for their private interests.

The best society is a society that has a ruling elite where you have people who are more public spirited than average running things. We want our doctors to be better versed in medicine than us; we want our lawyers to know the law better than us; we want our auto mechanics to know more about cars than us. We recognize that expertise confers authority, and there is expertise in politics. There is expertise in rule, and along with that expertise should come a desire to serve the public good, to have a broader notion of one’s interests, to identify one’s self with the whole. Those sorts of people are rare, and they should be valued, and they should be in positions of power.

However, it often comes the case when a ruler loves his son more than he loves his people. The only bad thing that I can think of about the Emperor Marcus Aurelius is that he loved his son Commodus more than he loved Rome, and he ended up leaving Rome in the hands of a bad emperor, the first bad emperor in a very long time.

So, you have to have a popular element to government to basically counter-balance the tendencies of ruling elites to think about their own interests more than the body politic. So, Aristotle posits really the idea of checks and balances, a divided regime where you have monarchical, aristocratic, and popular elements and where they are empowered to do different functions within the political system that allow them to check and balance one another, so that the net outcome of their activity is a regime where the laws serve the common good rather than just the factional interests of one particular group within the society.

The common good is a great idea. That notion was integral in Medieval Christian political philosophy. It’s something that we need to get back to. And it is something that was really very much a part of classical Fascism and National Socialism. It’s the idea of creating an organic, hierarchical society where there is a sense of obligation to the common good and where the different levels in society are bound by mutual obligations to one another and therefore you have a hierarchy, but the potentiality for exploitation and injustice within a hierarchy is controlled by, again, being organically related, being part of one people, but also there are certain mechanisms that could be put in place to check and balance the abuses of either popular power or elite power.

JB: Yeah. So, we’re at the end of the show, Dr. Greg Johnson. Thanks so much for laying out your perspective on a whole range of issues in this show. I’m sure most of the listenership will find it highly thought-provoking and recognize that people like you in the Western world are thrown in jail for having perspectives like this. We have state-enforced philosemitism, state-enforced political correctness in the West. Luckily, you’re in the United States which just about has the First Amendment still.

Would you like to be able to tell the listeners how they might be able to contact you, a little about the website in about 30 seconds for us, Greg?

GJ: Yes, thank you. Thank you for having me on, first of all. This has been a real pleasure.

JB: Likewise.

GJ: If you want to get in touch with me, go to counter-currents.com. My email address is [email protected] [4]. I urge you to check out Counter-Currents. We have new material online five days a week and I also would encourage you to check out my book. I have two books, the most recent being Old Right vs. New Right and the earlier one being Confessions of a Reluctant Hater.

Again, Joshua, thank you so much for the opportunity to reach your audience and I hope that I hear back from some of them.

JB: Yes, thanks so much, Greg, for coming on the show.

So, that’s this week’s show, ladies and gentlemen: Dr. Greg Johnson of Counter-Currents Publishing. I’d like to thank you, Greg. I’d like to thank the listenership for tuning in to yet another educative episode of The Real Deal. Thank you!