Understanding the Pittsburgh Synagogue Massacre

[1]2,119 words

Here we go again. It happens now with depressing regularity: a white man who is alarmed at white ethnic displacement goes to a place of worship used by non-whites and starts shooting. 

And now it has happened again:

Because these shootings all follow the same basic pattern, I have created a boilerplate article responding to them:

The basic argument is always the same. I just need to change a few of the particulars.

As a white person, I look down upon the criminals among us. I do not reflexively defend and glorify them. This was a terrible act: immoral, illegal, and politically damaging to white interests. I hope Bowers receives a fair trial and just punishment, but that seems unlikely given the racially charged atmosphere in America today.

We obviously don’t know all the facts yet, but apparently the killings were racially motivated. Bowers believed that the organized Jewish community is promoting white genocide through anti-white cultural and political warfare, including replacement immigration. In his last posting on the social media platform Gab, Bowers referred to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS):

[5]

The Jewish reaction to Bowers’ spree is highly instructive. For instance, Peter Beinart writes in The Forward [6]:

It happened on Parshat Vayera. The worst anti-Semitic attack in American history occurred while Jews around the world were reading the Torah portion that tells the story of Lot, an immigrant.

Lot moves to Sodom, and prospers there. The Midrash says he becomes a judge. His daughters intermarry with the locals. Then one day, while sitting at the gates of the city, the assimilating immigrant sees two strangers approach. He asks them to “spend the night and bathe your feet”— the Midrash says he learned to welcome strangers from his uncle Abraham, the first Jew. Lot “prepares them a feast.”

But in Sodom, the natives hate strangers. “Where are the men who came to you tonight?” they demand. “Bring them out to us.” Lot tries to protect his guests. “I beg you friends,” he implores, “do not commit such a wrong.” For the men of Sodom, however, this just underscores Lot’s foreignness. He hasn’t really assimilated; he isn’t one of them. He’s a threat. “The fellow came here an immigrant and already acts the ruler,” they declare. “Now we will deal worse with you than with them.”

Why did Robert Bowers murder eleven people yesterday at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh? We’re unlikely to ever fully grasp his motives. But he was enraged, it appears [7], by the fact that synagogues were participating in a program run by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society that dedicated special Shabbat services to the plight of refugees. “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in,” Bowers wrote [8] hours before his attack. In another post, he declared, “Open you Eyes! It’s the filthy EVIL jews Bringing the Filthy EVIL Muslims into the Country!!”

Obviously, America is not Sodom. But Bowers tried to harm Jews, at least in part, for the same reason the men of that ancient city tried to harm Lot: Because Jews were welcoming strangers. Instead of assimilating into a culture suffused with anti-immigrant hatred, HIAS — which was founded to help Jewish immigrants to the United States —now assists immigrants and refugees from across the world.

. . . For Jews, the lesson of yesterday’s massacre is very simple and very old: Protecting the strangers among us is not charity. It is self-defense. Every time Jews defend the right of American Muslims to follow sharia, we protect our right to follow halacha. Every time Jews reject politicians who demonize Latinos we make it less likely that those politicians will demonize us. “Hate them, not us” is a losing strategy because once empowered, bigots widen their targets. For people who define America as a white Christian nation, Jews will never be white enough.

Robert Bowers accused Jews of “bringing” Muslims and refugees to the United States. To him and all the other white nationalists Trump has emboldened, our answer should be: Damn right. We will demand a humane policy for people seeking refuge in the United States and defend those immigrants — no matter their race or faith — who are already here.

Will do so not only because we were once strangers but because we know that, at some level, like Lot, we always will be. Rather than seeking a separate peace with Trumpism, we will look for allies among the despised and abused. And in that way, we will defend not only Jewish ethics, but Jewish lives.

There you have it. This is basically a confession that confirms everything Kevin MacDonald has been saying for years: the organized Jewish community is promoting multiculturalism and non-white immigration because Jews are perpetual outsiders who fear and hate white Americans even more than Muslims. The Pittsburgh Synagogue massacre is yet one more reminder that the truth about Jews and white dispossession is so terrible that it drives some unstable people over the edge. But there’s a vast moral and logical gulf between these terrible facts and saying “Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

I am sure many more facts will come to light in the coming months and at Bowers’ trial. But still, I can say three things with confidence.

First, this could not have happened in a homogeneously white society. It could not have happened if the Tree of Life Synagogue were located in Israel, for instance. I have no desire to absolve Robert Bowers, much less blame his victims. But he would not be a killer, and they would not be dead, if America were not a multicultural society, and if Jews had not taken a leading role in promoting multiculturalism and non-white immigration.

When different peoples are forced to live together in the same system, frictions are inevitable. These frictions give rise to misunderstandings, distrust, alienation, and long-simmering resentments, which flare up into hatred, violence, and social upheaval. Bowers’ actions are predictable consequences of multiculturalism. Thus the New Right stands for the principle of racial divorce [9]. It is time for whites and non-whites to go our separate ways and pursue our own destinies. We stand for the creation of separate racially homogeneous societies, through the peaceful and humane process [10] of redrawing borders and shifting populations.

In the case of recent immigrant populations, the best solution is for them to return to their homelands. I also think that is the best solution for groups like Jews, Japanese, and Chinese who have been in America for a long time but still maintain strong ties to their homelands. In the case of indigenous peoples and some older immigrant populations (including the descendants of African slaves), territorial partition would seem to be in order.

Second, we should resist dismissing Bowers with the all-too-easy claim that he was “crazy.” Yes, Bowers did something evil and stupid. But Bowers’ underlying motive — fear of white race replacement — is not irrational or insane. It is a healthy reaction to objective facts. All white people have innate ethnocentric tendencies, wired deep in our brains. We love our own and we fear strangers. As diversity increases, all of us will bear increased psychic costs, even those who pursue wealth and status by selling out their own people in favor of foreigners.

Bowers and people like him may be nothing more than canaries in a coal mine: the first to sense the presence of a threat to the survival of us all. Bowers may have just been abnormally sensitive to the terrible psychic consequences of losing control of our society to aliens: stress, alienation, anger, hatred, rage, etc. This heightened sensitivity might also go along with a whole suite of other abnormal traits. But we dismiss people like Bowers at our own risk. For in the end, all of us will feel the same effects — unless we heed the warning signs and turn back the rising tide of color.

Third, Bowers’ “solution” to his rage and alienation — killing innocent people — just makes the racial situation worse rather than better. We will surely learn a lot more about Bowers’ ideas and affiliations in the coming months. But based on what we know now, we can say that his actions certainly resemble those of racially-motivated spree killers like Dylann Roof [11]Anders Behring Breivik [12]Wade Michael Page [4], and Frazier Glenn Miller [13], all of whom are products of what I call “Old Right” thinking.

By the “Old Right,” I mean classical Fascism and National Socialism and their contemporary imitators who believe that White Nationalism can be advanced through such means as one party-politics, terrorism, totalitarianism, imperialism, and genocide. Today’s Old Right scene is rife with fantasies of race war, lone wolf attacks on non-whites, and heroic last stands that end in a hail of police bullets. Intelligent and honorable people have emerged from this milieu. But there have been more than a few spree-killers as well.

This kind of violence is worse than a crime. It is a mistake. It does nothing to advance our cause and much to set us back.

Given that reason, science, and history are all on our side, and the greatest apparatus of coercion and brainwashing in human history is on the enemy’s side, doesn’t it make sense to attack the enemy at his weakest point rather than at his strongest? This is why the North American New Right pursues White Nationalism through intellectual and cultural means: we critique the hegemony [14] of anti-white ideas and seek to establish a counter-hegemony of pro-white ideas.

Only a fool picks a battle he cannot win, and we cannot win with violence [15]. Fortunately, we don’t have to. The Left lost the Cold War but won the peace through the establishment of intellectual and cultural hegemony. We can beat them the same way.

Furthermore, the only form of violence that even has a chance to be productive in halting multiculturalism and non-white immigration would target the people responsible for these policies, not random innocents.

Moreover, killing innocent people (at a place of worship!) has entirely predictable results. First, such violence creates sympathy for the victims. (Even I feel sympathy for them, and I would send them all to Israel tomorrow if I had the power.) Second, it plays into the establishment narrative of evil, crazy, intolerant whites whose First and Second Amendment rights must be taken away.

So Bowers’ choice of targets was superficial and frankly stupid. Was he even thinking about the greater good of our people? Or was he merely indulging in blind, self-destructive spite? And how exactly does praising repugnant killers help White Nationalists establish ourselves as representatives of the long-term best interests of our people?

I wish I could erect a wall between myself and the kind of unstable, undisciplined people who go on killing sprees, but you can’t change the world from a bunker. Thus responsible white advocates need to adopt the next best course of action: (1) we must be alert to the signs of mental instability and inclinations toward violence and rigorously screen out such people, (2) we need draw clear, unambiguous intellectual lines between New Right and Old Right approaches [16], and (3) if anyone talks about committing such acts in our circles, we need to be the ones to call the police.

Did anyone who read Bowers’ “Screw your optics, I’m going in” post do anything at all to stop him? Of course not.

Too bad. If the deplatforming of Twitter’s rival Gab on this flimsy pretext is any indication, I am afraid “optics” is going to be screwing us for quite some time because of this attack.

The goal is to persuade our people that White Nationalism is the solution to ethnic conflict not the cause of it. Spree killers and the people who high-five them are part of the problem, not part of the solution.